“And you think that their marriage could end in divorce?”
“Well, heck, Margot.
Any
marriage could end in divorce! Did you hear about Wendy Perkins’s daughter, Sheila?
“After ten years and three kids, she and her husband are getting divorced. They were here in the shop just last summer. Sheila was picking out fabric for a quilt and Bill was with her. They looked so happy together. He opened the door for her when they came in, was completely patient while she was picking out her fabric, even carried the bolts over to the counter for her. He was so sweet! They seemed to have everything in common. They loved golfing and swing dancing. They were both active in their church. And now they’re getting a divorce.”
Margot nodded knowingly. “And did you hear about my cousin Louise? She’s eight years older than Ted. When they got married, everybody said it would never work, that it was one thing to have the husband be that much older than the wife, but that the second Louise started getting a few miles on her, Ted would drop her like a hot potato.”
“And?”
“And, after five kids, six grandkids, and almost forty years of marriage, this summer they renewed their vows prior to sailing off for a honeymoon cruise around the world.”
Margot crossed her arms and tilted her chin down and her eyes up in a perfect “so there” pose.
“All right. Good point. You can’t predict which marriages will fail and which will succeed just by measuring the odds. But,” I puffed as I carried the unwanted bolts to a table near the staircase so I’d remember to take them back downstairs later, “you’d be stupid not to at least consider the odds. And with a girl like Liza, a girl who’s carrying around so much baggage, I can’t help but think the odds aren’t so good.”
“Not to mention a boy like Garrett, coming from a broken home and all.”
Ouch. That one stung.
“Fair enough. Garrett’s got issues of his own. He was out of the house by the time Rob filed for divorce, but he still had to endure his share of the fallout. I hear there are people who manage to get ‘amicable’ divorces, whatever that means”—I shrugged—“but Rob and I sure weren’t among them.
“Margot, I know I’m being unfair, but I can’t help it. I know too much! About Liza. About marriage. About how uncertain life can be! I just wish I had a crystal ball to see into their future, some kind of guarantee that they won’t get hurt.”
Margot opened her mouth to speak, but I lifted up my hand to stop her.
“There are no guarantees. Believe me, I know that. But you can’t blame me for wishing. If I just knew…”
Margot put her hands on her hips. “Your problem is that you know too much. Evelyn, let’s think this out. What if Garrett had never moved out here? What if he’d stayed at his old job in Seattle and then one day, out of the blue, he’d called you and said, ‘Mom, I’ve got some news. I’m in love with a wonderful girl and we’re getting married’? What would you have said then?”
“Congratulations?”
“Right! Because even though you didn’t know the girl, you’d trust that Garrett is a good man and a good judge of character. But,” Margot said, tipping her head to the side, “what’s to say that that girl wouldn’t have had just as much baggage as Liza does?”
“She could,” I admitted. “It’s just that I wouldn’t know about it. You know what they say, ‘ignorance is bliss.’”
“They also say, ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.’ As long as we’re trading proverbs, how about this one? This train is about to leave the station, Evelyn. Garrett and Liza are getting married, and you really don’t have any say in the matter. If you don’t get on board, you’ll be left standing all alone on the platform, chasing after the caboose and—”
“Margot? Enough with the train analogies. I get it.”
“Sorry.”
I did get it. I had for a while. Garrett and Liza were adults. They were engaged and soon they’d be married. If I didn’t patch up my relationship with Liza, I could end up being shut out of her life and Garrett’s forever. I understood the progression of thought here; it was all very logical.
What wasn’t logical was the cold lump of anxiety that had formed in the pit of my stomach when Garrett called to announce the engagement and that had been there ever since. Probably I did know too much about Liza, and that helped fuel my anxiety. But if he’d called up from Seattle and told me he was engaged to some faceless Becka, or Jackie, or Charlotte, would I have congratulated him? I wasn’t so sure.
Maybe I did know too much about Liza, but the bigger truth was that I knew too much about life, about the gaping wounds that are left open when that which God hath joined together was torn asunder.
I never want to feel that kind of pain again. And I don’t want Garrett to feel it, either. Or Liza. But I know it could happen. Life is risky. And I suddenly know, as I pull out my emotions one by one, untying that knot of anxiety within myself and examining every kink and twist in the cord, that I’ve made this about me and it isn’t.
More than three years after my divorce, after pulling up stakes and my socks and resurrecting my forgotten dreams, after getting knocked off my feet by breast cancer and pulling myself back up by reaching out to grasp the outstretched hands of my friends, after opening my heart to Charlie and the possibility of love, and even after refusing Rob’s tearful plea to take him back, why am I still nursing this hurt?
I thought I was over this. I thought I’d left my fears behind me, but the truth is they’re still tied to my bumper, trailing along in my wake, weighing me down like a renegade rudder, threatening to steer me back into my old fears and resentments, ground I’ve already paid for.
I have to put a stop to this.
Margot looked sheepish after I’d cut her off, but because she’s a good friend and a good friend tells what you need to hear even when you’re in no mood to hear it, she went on. “Evelyn, you’ve just got to figure out a way to patch things up with Liza.”
“I know. I’ve tried. But she won’t answer the phone and she won’t respond to my messages. I’ve tried making Garrett my mule, sending messages through him, but that hasn’t worked, either.”
“Well, what if you went to New York? Just showed up on her doorstep? Virginia is going into the city with Garrett tomorrow. Why don’t you tag along?”
I shook my head. “Uh-uh. I know Liza. She’s like a turtle. If I sneak up on her uninvited, she’ll just draw back into her shell.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
I reached out and ran my hand over the bolt of beautiful turquoise fabric, smooth and slippery, the thin threads so tightly woven they felt like silk under my fingers.
“I don’t know. Something.”
I
was in the bathroom, putting on lip gloss, when the doorbell rang. I ran to open it, expecting to see Garrett.
What I saw instead was a tiny, elderly woman with hair so white and shiny it looked like that fiberglass stuff I used as snow in the window display I’d made for the quilt shop last Christmas. She had a huge black patent leather purse looped over her arm, and eyes that sparkled like bright blue pebbles at the bottom of a stream, eyes like Evelyn’s.
“Disappointed?” the old woman asked with a grin. “Don’t be. Garrett’s downstairs looking for a parking space. He dropped me off first so I wouldn’t have too far to walk. He’ll be up in a minute.”
“Grandma Virginia?”
“I know you weren’t expecting me. Don’t worry, I won’t hang around all day and spoil your date. At my age, a few hours in the big city is probably all I can handle. And at my age,” she said, peering up at me through the thick lenses of wire-rimmed glasses that made her big blue eyes look even bigger, “I also can’t afford to waste time sitting around waiting for my future granddaughter-in-law to find a spare moment to come out to New Bern and meet me. I could kick the bucket at any moment. Why, when I was born, people still got around by horse and buggy!”
Obviously Grandma Virginia shared more with her grandson than the Dixon good looks. She had his goofy sense of humor too.
“Really?” I said. “Ford started making Model Ts in about 1908, didn’t they? Wow! You look pretty good, considering you’re over one hundred.”
She laughed. “Well, maybe I’m not quite
that
old, but at my age every morning you wake up on the top side of the dirt is a gift. I didn’t want to die before meeting you, so here I am. Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
I opened the door and Grandma Virginia came in, looking around the apartment as I hung up her coat.
“Garrett said you have roommates. Where are they?”
“Out. At the gym, running errands, getting a manicure.”
She poked her head into our tiny living room and even tinier galley kitchen. “Is this all there is to it?”
“That and a bathroom and the two bedrooms.”
She clucked her tongue, amazed that four women could share this matchbox-sized apartment. “How much is your rent?”
“Twenty-four hundred a month,” I said.
She gasped. “Dollars!”
“Well, it’s not yen.” I laughed.
She made a tsking sound with her tongue. “Twenty-four hundred dollars a month for an apartment too small to change your mind in. Back in Wisconsin, you could get yourself a nice three-or four-bedroom home on a big lot for that kind of money.”
“You think this is bad, wait until you see the bedrooms. They’re about the size of my closet back in New Bern, but with worse ventilation. Would you like to see?”
She followed me down the narrow hallway to my room. “It’s tiny, all right,” she said. “Good thing you’re so organized.”
“We kind of have to be. But the light is good,” I said, nodding toward the easel I had set up in the corner.
Grandma Virginia approached the easel slowly, looking my painting up and down. “You painted this? It’s very good. Not that I know much about modern art, but I like the colors. It’s got a real energetic feeling to it. Seems like it reminds me of something.”
“Chagall.” I sighed. “Marc Chagall. That’s the problem with it. And with me. I love art, and now that I’m studying it more, it turns out I love art history too. But I’m not a fabulous painter….”
“What are you talking about?” Grandma Virginia protested. “This is a beautiful painting! You’re a wonderful artist.”
“Mmm. It’s nice of you to say so, but trust me, compared to a lot of painters, I’m not that good.” I stood next to her in front of the canvas and crossed my arms over my chest. “I mean, the technique is good. Very good, in fact, but it’s not very original. Lately, when it comes to painting, I’m like tofu. I tend to absorb the flavors of whatever is nearby. For my art history seminar, I just finished a paper on Chagall. So guess what the painting I’ve been working on for the last month, the one I’d planned on using as my senior project, comes out looking like?”
“Chagall?”
“Yeah,” I said and sat down on my bed. “Chagall. And if I’d written my paper on Pollock, or Matisse, or Hopper, or Lam, it probably would have turned out looking like one of them. The way things are going, the only way I’ll be able to make a living as an artist is by painting copies of other people’s work—those horrible, mass-produced knockoffs that they sell at cheesy auctions in the ballrooms of crummy hotels that smell like stale cigarettes and swimming-pool chlorine.”
Grandma Virginia sat down next to me on the edge of the bed and patted my shoulder. “There, there. It can’t be as bad as all that. I’m sure that lots of young artists are influenced by the work of other artists.”
“Yes, but it’s usually the kind of thing that happens early on, when you first begin studying. And it was never a problem for me until now. I always had plenty of ideas, but lately…” I threw up my hands. “Nothing. I haven’t come within two hundred miles of an original thought all semester. And the thing is, I didn’t even see it until my oils instructor pointed it out to me.
“It was so embarrassing. He pulled out my portfolio, laid out my paintings and, one after another, ticked off the names of the artists who had influenced my work—all artists whose work I’d been studying in my art history seminar. The instructor wasn’t mean about it or anything. This is the second course I’ve taken from him, so he knows I’m capable of producing original work. He just wanted me to realize what I’d been doing. It was so awful. I just wanted the floor to open and swallow me up.”
“Poor Liza.” Virginia pulled her big black purse onto her lap, snapped it open, reached into its depths, and pulled out a piece of candy wrapped in shiny yellow cellophane—a butterscotch.
“Here,” she said. “This will help.”
And strangely, it did. A little.
“The worst part is that even though it will be completely humiliating and absolutely everyone will think I’m copying Chagall, I’m going to have to enter this in the senior exhibition. I don’t have time to paint something else. Even if I did, I still don’t have any ideas. No original ones.”
“Don’t give up yet,” Grandma Virginia said. “Something may come to you.”
“Doubtful.”
“Oh, don’t be so negative. Here. Have another butterscotch.” She handed me the candy and then squinted, looking at the quilt that hung over my bed.
“That’s very interesting, Liza. Is that one of your designs?”
“Yes. Just something I was playing around with, but it turned out all right.”
“Well, it’s a lot more than all right,” she said. “I love your color combinations, and those big bold stars scattered around in different sizes really draw your eye across the piece. Such an unusual arrangement, almost like a stream of stars…”
“I like stars,” I said, pleased and a little surprised that she seemed to genuinely like my wall hanging. I wouldn’t have figured that someone her age, who has been quilting for about three times my lifetime, would have liked the design.
She leaned closer and laughed. “Are those fish?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I was walking outside one night and the sky was so cold and clear, and the stars were just scattered across the sky like diamonds. I like to use bright colors against dark backgrounds. It gives the colors such deeper dimension. Anyway, looking up at the sky, I kept thinking it looked like a midnight ocean. So”—I shrugged, thinking how silly this must sound to her—“I came home and added some fish.”
“And what did you make them out of? Is that plastic wrap?”
“Not quite. I actually tried that at first, but it didn’t work. Too flimsy. So I used designer cellophane, the stuff that quilters draw stitching patterns on and lay over their quilt tops to see how the different patterns will look.”
“That’s very ingenious. I’d never have thought of something like that.”
“Thanks, but it’s just something I was fooling around with.”
The doorbell rang.
“Garrett must have found his parking spot,” Grandma Virginia said, following me to the door.
Garrett was holding a pale blue envelope in his hand. “Hi, babe,” he said before giving me a kiss on the cheek.
“You brought me a card?” I reached for the envelope.
“Nope. It’s a note from Mom. She made me promise to deliver it to you personally. Want to read it now?”
“Um. Later,” I said with a pang of guilt. I laid the envelope on our tiny hall table, the place where everybody dumps everything from mail to books to the flyers that pizza places and Chinese restaurants shove under the front door. With any luck, it would be buried under a pile of paper before I returned. Or maybe someone would accidentally throw it out with the junk mail. I couldn’t bring myself to read it any more than I could bring myself to answer Evelyn’s calls. Not yet. I knew I should, but…
“We’d better get to the museum.”
“Okay,” Garrett said. “Sorry I took so long. I almost had to park in the Bronx.”
“That’s all right. I’ve had fun getting to know Grandma Virginia. She gave me some butterscotch.”
“She did? Let me have some.” And, mindless of the fact that his grandmother was watching, he pulled my body tight to his and gave me a long, lingering kiss.
“Mmm.” He grinned, pleased with himself.
“Garrett!” I scolded after he released his grip on me. “Your grandma is standing right here!”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Virginia said. “But if you two are done smooching, let’s get to this museum Garrett was telling me about. What was it again?”
“One of Liza’s favorites,” Garrett said. “The Whitney Museum of American Art.”
“Huh.” Virginia nodded, but looked less than sure about what we were getting her into. “And you say they have quilts there?”
“They do today,” I said. “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. Trust me. You’ll love it.”
Normally, I prefer not to go to museums on weekends because of the crowds, but today, even with a press of people around us, I didn’t mind. The voices, the faces, the sounds of footsteps just melted away as I lingered first in front of one quilt, then another, then another, with my hand clutching my throat because there were simply no words to describe what I was seeing.
No. That’s not true. There was one word.
Honest.
Those quilts were just so honest, so unabashedly true. The bravery of them left me speechless.
I only started quilting a couple of years ago, so I’m certainly no expert on the subject, but it seems to me that a lot of modern quilts and quilters have kind of wandered away from the point of it all.
Quilting is an art form: a means of expressing yourself, of communicating feelings and hopes and observations and beliefs without resorting to anything as pedestrian and inexact as words. Or it should be. But a lot of quilters get so wrapped up in precision and technique that they reduce quilting to something that has about as much to do with individual expression as filling in the spaces on a paint-by-number kit—or laboring for weeks over a canvas that you’d thought was an original only to stand back and realize that you’d just regurgitated something somebody else, say Chagall, had said a long time ago and a whole lot better.
If you don’t produce something honest, something that stands boldly on the mountaintop and shouts, “This is who I am and I won’t apologize for it!”, then what’s the point? Of quilting? Of painting? Of anything?
These quilters didn’t have much in the way of fancy tools: no rulers that mark quarter-inch seam lines with carefully calibrated precision, no computerized sewing machines that can backstitch or appliqué or sew trails of leafy vines and hundreds of other stitches with the touch of a button. They labored over their seams, squinting by the dim light of a silent midnight, cherishing the few quiet moments at the end of a day spent tending to everyone’s needs but their own.
They didn’t have access to thousands upon thousands of bolts of perfectly milled cottons with fifty different shades and nuances of lemon yellow or peachy pink or jade green. Instead they borrowed scraps from each other, or salvaged fabric from worn work shirts with the elbows out, or skirts too short to cover the scabby knees of a growing child, making do, piecing the bits together into odd and arresting patches when there wasn’t enough to go around.
They didn’t have the chance to take classes or workshops from world-famous instructors with twenty pattern books in publication and an interactive website. Instead they learned from each other, lessons that were never printed in books but were handed down, woman to woman, written clearly in their quilts and in their memories.
And so their quilts are raw and real. They are art. And their honesty! Oh! Their unvarnished, unapologetic honesty brings tears to my eyes. They are so brave.
Could I ever dare to be so brave?