Margot had lived at home until she finished college, then married the boy she'd dated since junior high. The sisters had stayed in touch over the years, but had not seen much of one another. Betsy's first marriage hadn't lasted long. She had moved around a lot, and then wrote of belated plans to get a degree. The Christmas after that she announced her marriage to a college professor. Letters were fewer after that, and less exciting. Margot had thought Betsy settled at last.
Then, just a few weeks ago, Betsy had written a long letter. Her college-professor husband had fallen in love with one of his students and was divorcing Betsy. Apparently there had been a pattern of affairs with students, so Betsy was letting him go. The tone of this letter was very unlike Betsy's normal cheery exuberance. She sounded sad and tired. Margot, worried, wrote back at once and, after an exchange of letters, invited her sister to come for an extended visit. Betsy's reply:
Keep a light on for me, I'll be there in a week or ten days
. That had been just over a week earlier.
“... funny that,” Shelly was saying.
“Funny what?”
Shelly's voice thinned as she strained to put a clear suction cup with a hook on it way up near the top of the window. “It's usually the oldest child who's conservative, more grown-up, the one who helps parent the younger ones.”
“You think so? But there was just the two of us, and I'm only twenty-seven months younger. ...” Her needles slowed as she thought that over. Betsy had been the voice of enthusiasm, the “what if” and “wouldn't it be fun to” child; Margot had been the cautionary, worried “we could get hurt” or “Mama will be mad” child. Each had brought some balance to the tendencies of the other; perhaps that's why they had been so happy together growing up. Perhaps they could recapture some of that balance.
Her musings were interrupted again by the electric
bing
of the door opening. An older woman, tall and very slim, came in. She was wearing a beautiful linen suit in a warm gray a shade darker than her hair.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Lundgren,” said Margot, putting down her knitting.
Mrs. Lundgren loved needlework, but was too busy to do her own. She frequented craft fairs and often came to Margot for bonnets and booties for her granddaughters and needlepoint pictures and pillows for her several homes. Margot rose and went behind the big desk that served as a checkout counter.
“Margot, I've been thinking some more about that Tâang horse,” said Mrs. Lundgren.
“It's not for sale, Mrs. Lundgren,” said Margot, politely but firmly.
“So you keep telling me.” Mrs. Lundgren got just the right light and rueful tone in her voice; Margot relaxed into a smile. “But as I said, I've been thinking. Would it be all right to ask you to make a copy of it for me? It won't be displayed here, but in our winter home.”
Margot turned and looked at the wall behind her, where a framed needlepoint picture of a midnight-blue horse hung. The animal had his short tail closely braided, his feet well under him and his neck in a high arch, the head somewhat offset, as if he were looking backward, around his shoulder. He had a white saddle, white stockings, and a golden mane combed flat against his neck. The original was a pottery Tâang Dynasty horse in the Minneapolis art museum.
“Do you know, I should have thought of that,” Margot said, surprised at herself. She frowned. “But I threw my old sketches away, so I'd have to start over, take a piece of graph paper, go to the museum and plot the horse on it, and then needlepoint over that.”
“I understand. And then could the background be a different color?”
“Of course. Do you know what color?”
Mrs. Lundgren reached into her purse and produced a fabric swatch. “Can you match this?” The color was a faded, dusty red. A trip to the silks rack produced a sample nearly the same color.
“But not quite,” said Margot with regret.
“Yes, and not quite won't do. How about this pale olive?” Mrs. Lundgren lifted a skein off its hook.
“Are you sure? I mean, it will look very good as a background color, but you don't want to offend your decor.”
“There is a dark olive in the drapes,” said Mrs. Lundgren.
“Very well.” Margot took the silk from Mrs. Lundgren and the two walked back to her desk.
“How much for the entire project?” asked Mrs. Lundgren.
Margot went to the big desk that was her checkout counter and got out her calculator. “Do you want yours the same size?”
“What is that, fourteen by fourteen?”
“Yes, plus the mat and frame, of course.”
“That's what I want, even the same narrow wood frame, please.”
Margot began to punch numbers. “I'll have to charge you one hundred and fifty dollars to paint it,” she began. That was a very fair price; painting a needlepoint canvas was harder than it looked; not only did the picture have to be artistically done, the curves and lines and color changes had to be worked in a pattern of tiny squares. “Then two dollars a square inch for the stitching, that comes to four hundred dollars; and another hundred and fifty for stretching and framing.” Margot punched the total button. “That would be seven hundred dollars.”
“How long will it take?”
“I could have it for you by Christmas.”
“I'm sure that's a reasonable time allowance, but could it just possibly be sooner than that? We're spending Thanksgiving at our winter home in Honolulu, and I'd like to take it with me.”
Margot closed her eyes and thought. As the Christmas season began to loom, her finishers wanted more and more lead time. On the other hand, the bolero jacket was all but done and she had nothing else urgent on her own horizon. If she started right away ...
“I'll pay you a thousand,” coaxed Mrs. Lundgren.
“Yes,” Margot said. “Yes, I can do it that quickly for a thousand dollars.”
“Oh, wonderful, I'm so pleased! Do you want something down on it?”
“No, but payment in full on delivery.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you.”
“You're welcome, Mrs. Lundgren.”
When the door closed on Mrs. Lundgren, Shelly said, “You were waiting for her to up the offer.”
“No, but I should use that tactic more often.” Margot touched the frame of the horse, adjusting its position very slightly. It had come back from the framer only four months ago, and was Margot's finest effort at an original needlepoint to date. “Mrs. Lundgren knows a lot of women with time on their hands and money to pay for ways to fill it. She may not hang that picture in her Edina house, but she'll show it around before she takes it to Honolulu. A thousand-dollar price makes the artwork more attractive to some people, who may come in looking for something to hang on their own walls. But it might also bring customers wanting to save money by doing the needlework themselves.” Margot smiled and Shelly laughed out loud. There were women, wealthy women, who shorted their families on groceries in order to buy more canvases, more silk floss, more gold thread, more real garnet beads for the endless stream of needlepoint and counted cross-stitch work that had become an obsession. Margot sometimes felt like a dope peddler.
When Shelly finished the window, she started dusting. She paused when she came to an old rocking chair with a cushion on it, the cushion almost hidden under an enormous, fluffy white cat with tan and gray patches along its spine, sleeping on the cushion.
“Is Sophie nice and comfy?” cooed Shelly, stroking the animal. Sophie lifted her head to yawn, displaying teeth absurdly small in a cat her size. Then she put her head back down as if to sleep again, but a loud purr could be heard.
Margot had found the cat bedraggled and hungry in her shop doorway one morning and took her in. She had meant for her to live in the apartment over the store, but Sophie had followed her down one morning and been so quietly ornamentalâand friendly to anyone who stopped to stroke herâthat Margot had allowed her to stay.
Margot picked up her knitting and made an exclamation. She'd done two rows instead of one.
Shelly said, “Do you think Betsy will like it here in Excelsior? This is kind of a quiet place.”
“Excelsior has plenty of things going on.” People who lived in the small town were gratefully aware of its charms and Margot was among those who worked hard to preserve them. “Anyway, I have a feeling that she was looking for a refuge. Though, of course, how she'll like actually living in one we'll have to see.”
Margot began pulling out the extra row. She had carved a safe niche in this small Minnesota town and stayed there content even after her husband died three years earlier.
Now Betsy was seeking a place to be safe in for a while. Apparently she had lost that zest for adventure, perhaps even grown a little afraid. Margot hoped she could give her sister what she needed. She picked up her knitting and began binding off.
Betsy wasn't scared, not really, just ... nervous. It was one thing to be twenty-five and newly divorced, and not own a home or have a job with medical insurance or a retirement account whose deposits are matched by your employer. It's quite another to be fifty-five and be once again in that same boat.
Betsy wasn't averse to adventure. Crossing the mountains alone in an old car had brought moments that sent the blood rushing along with its old verve.
On the other hand, she'd spent her one night in Las Vegas at the Fremont Street light-and-sound show and having a drink in a beautiful old bar, followed by a phone call to her sister and then turning in early.
When she saw an exit sign pointing to the Grand Canyon, she did give a moment's thought to giving the Japanese tourists a thrill by throwing herself off the rim. But she didn't. In her experience such low thoughts, if not yielded to, tended to be brief and followed by something more interesting.
Later, crossing Iowa, Betsy remembered reading somewhere that while men are scared of birthdays ending in zero, women are frightened by birthdays ending in five. Certainly Betsy was. Fifty-five is no longer young, even when considered while you were in good spirits. Fifty-five can see old age rushing toward it like a mighty tree axed at the root. All too soon it would be crash: sixty! And if she reached retirement age with no savings to speak of, she might live out the last years of her life in one small room, fighting off the roaches for her supper of canned cat food.
But Betsy had also read somewhere that there were good jobs going begging in the upper Midwest, and she had her sister who had kindly offered to put her up until she got her feet under her again. Okay, so her sister lived in a small town; that small town was near the Twin Cities. That meant two newspapers, two job markets, right next door to one another. Twice the number of chances to start over.
And a ferocious Minnesota winter might be interesting, another adventure. After all, Betsy had grown up in Milwaukee, where the winters could also be hard.
Betsy pushed the accelerator down a little, and the car responded. Good little car, acting as if it didn't already have a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it. Ahead was the road sign saying WELCOME TO MINNESOTA. She hoped it didn't smell of pig, like Iowa.
Sometime later the freeway forked. Thirty-five-E went to St. Paul, 35W came into Minneapolis. Margot hadn't mentioned this; her directions said to take I-35 into the Cities, and Highway 7 to Excelsior. Betsy chose Minneapolis; she had a notion that Excelsior was west of the Twin Cities and Minneapolis was the western twin. Right? She was pretty sure she hadn't already missed an exit onto Highway 7; certainly she hadn't missed an exit sign saying EXCELSIOR. A pity she had left the road atlas behind in an Omaha motel. She would stop at the next exit and buy a map.
She saw a little strip mall just this side of an exit, featuring a store whose sign advertised GUNS LIQUOR PAWN. Despite this warning that the owner liked to live dangerously, she got off and made her way back to it on a frontage road. She didn't go in; a store next door to it added to the explosive mixture by selling used snowmobiles and those noisy adult tricycles with puffy tires. But people who bought vehicles might also want maps.
They did, and the store sold them. The man behind the counter helped her plan a route to Highway 7. “Thirty-five don't cross 7,” he said. “So what you do, you stay on 35W till you get to 494, take 494 west to 100, which only goes north from there, and it'll give you an exit onto 7. Go west and look for a sign.” He moved a grubby finger along the map as she watched. It seemed clear enough.
“Thanks,” she said, taking the map and folding it on the first tryâBetsy was a traveler.
“You bet.”
Amazing, they really did say “you bet” in Minnesota, just like in that book on how to speak Minnesotan Margot had sent her one Christmas.
Back on the highway, Betsy drove ten miles over the speed limitâshe had to, if she didn't want to be rear endedâand was so excited at the approach of the end of her journey that she didn't really notice that though it was not yet September, the ivy climbing the wooden sound barriers on 35W was turning an autumnal red.
2
Margot was selecting colored silks for the Tâang horse. She had her original needlepoint of it on the table, still in the frame, which had no glass in it. “I remember it was ten-oh-seven,” she murmured to herself.
“What?” asked Shelly.
“The blue color of the horse, I remember it was ten-oh-seven, ten-oh-five, and ten-oh-three.” She tried a skein of 1007 Madeira silk, which was a midnight-blue shade, against the neck and shoulder of the horse. “Still is, it seems.”
“You have the most amazing memory,” remarked Shelly, coming to look.