The Art of Mending

  My relatives still make fun of me for my love of things domestic, especially my Aunt Fran, who, whenever we visit, always tells me she’s saved her ironing and mending for me. Actually, I wouldn’t mind doing it. I like ironing. It’s the physical equivalent of staring into middle space. I think it waters the mind, if you know what I mean. As for mending, I think it’s good to take the time to fix something rather than throw it away. It’s an antidote to wastefulness and to the need for immediate gratification. You get to see a whole process through, beginning to end, nothing abstract about it. You’ll always notice the fabric scar, of course, but there’s an art to mending: If you’re careful, the repair can actually add to the beauty of the thing, because it is testimony to its worth.

  My sister, Caroline, got married early, at barely twenty years old. She’d stayed the weird one, the one we all thought would never find anyone. But she married another architecture student she met when she was a freshman at the University of Minnesota. She’s been married for thirty-one years now and lives in a house an hour away from my parents. Her daughter, Eva, is grown and gone, a public relations consultant living in Los Angeles.

  My brother, Steve, got married before me, too. He’s gotten married a lot. He’s on number four, a sweet woman called Tessa—I hope this one will last. No kids for him. His children are his boat and his airplane, the new car he buys every year, and the bar that he owns, called Pud’s. It’s located on Rush Street in Chicago, and according to him it’s the hippest place in the city.

  But I waited a long time to get married. I was forty when I finally fell in love with a man who was a widower. He’d been married exactly one week when his wife died. Car accident—she’d gone out for butterscotch topping for the sundaes they were going to have after they finished wallpapering their bathroom. He didn’t date for five years after her death, and he didn’t think about marrying again until fifteen years after that, when he met me. Her name was Kate. She was a lovely black-haired woman who taught nursery school and wrote exquisite poetry. I know Pete is devoted to me, but I also know that a corner of his soul is reserved for her. I don’t mind. She deserves it. And so does he.

  Pete comes from a big Italian family. His parents, Rosa and Subby (for Sabastiano) Bartone, visit us at least twice a year, making the voyage by RV from their retirement village in Arizona to our ramshackle house in North Dakota. I can honestly say I’m always sorry when they leave. I put flowers in their room before they come; they leave homemade pasta sauces in my freezer before they go.

  Pete and I have a daily routine, which started when we were dating. Every night, sometime after dinner, we tell each other about an incident that occurred that day, and then we share a memory from the past. It began as a corny but extremely effective way for us to get to know each other. Now it’s part of the way we stayed grounded and entwined. My neighbor and best friend, Maggie, says you have to have a lot of sex in your marriage because it works like glue. So does this.

  Many of the memories Pete has shared have had to do with his parents. He’s told me about vacations to Alaska and about smaller moments spent sitting at the kitchen table. One of my favorite memories has to do with a time he sat with his three sisters and his little brother, eating biscotti dipped in cocoa for an afternoon snack while they watched his mother make dinner. She spoke softly in Italian to the red sauce she simmered in the Dutch oven, to the gigantic meatballs she rolled, to the gold-colored rosemary-scented focaccia she put on a TV tray out on the front porch to cool. She went out to the garden and made a bowl of her apron, and Pete filled it with lettuce and peppers and white-freckled tomatoes.

  He’s told me about his father sitting on the edge of the bathtub, playing his banjo and singing songs from the old country for his wife, who soaked in her milk bath. And about the time his father was instructed by Rosa to harshly discipline Pete and his brother, Danny, for the crime of stealing a pair of their neighbor’s gargantuan underpants off her clothesline and using it to wax their bicycles. Subby took the boys into his bedroom, shut the door, and whispered to them to howl while he struck the mattress repeatedly with his belt. They were a little too convincing; when they all filed back into the kitchen, Rosa planted her fists on her hips and said, “You think you make a fool of me?”

  My memories don’t often focus on my parents, and if they do the stories are not like my husband’s. Much of our food, for example, came from cans, and our dinners were mostly silent. Eating was not something to be celebrated. It was done because it had to be, rather like cleaning out your ears. You ate, you bused your dishes, and then, as quickly as possible, you went back to the more interesting and rewarding parts of your life. It took many years for me to understand what people meant when they described the joy of a good olive oil, the perfect balance that comes with mixing goat cheese with fig compote and black-olive tapenade.

  My family did not go on vacations together. Our summers were lazy and unstructured; we kids were left to come up with our own entertainment, and I loved it. There’d been one summer when we were sent to camp, each of us to a different one, but that must have been seen as a failure, at least in my parents’ eyes—we never went again. I’d been glad about that. My camp had a predictable dearth of domestics and what was, in my opinion, an overabundance of physical challenges. In addition, I’d been afraid of Cynthia Mayfield, a hugely overweight girl who constantly threatened to beat me up for no reason I could discern; and I’d been equally afraid, though for another reason, of the raven-haired Jinxie Benson, who sat cross-legged on her bunk every Sunday night making lists of who was cool and who was not—and why. These lists were circulated among the campers and were eagerly—if anxiously—read and taken to heart, even by the counselors, who confiscated and denounced them but also had been known to sit at their table in the back corner of the cafeteria poring over their own personality reviews. I’d been suspicious of the Chapel Under the Pines, thinking it fostered idolatry. And what was one to do with Eyes of God?

  So the stories I told Pete focused less on my parents and more on me and my siblings. There was the time I’d told Caroline I had the ability to turn myself into another person, someone called Kathy, who looked like me but was in fact someone entirely different, and she believed me. “What do you think of Laura?” I’d asked, and then, later, when I’d “turned back” into Laura, I’d punished Caroline for the negative things she’d said about me. “How did you know?” Caroline had asked, massaging her punched arm, and I’d said, “Kathy told me.”

  I told Pete about the time I made my little brother sit in the corner of my basement house for a couple of hours in order to be my husband. “What do I do, though?” he’d asked, and I’d said, “Nothing. You’re at work.” While he sat idly scratching his ankle, humming tunelessly, practicing belches, and then, finally, lightly dozing, I busied myself. I rocked babies, vacuumed (using a discarded canister model I’d found by someone’s garbage, a five-star discovery), and made tissue paper carnations for a window box I planned on making out of the next shoe box that came along. I chatted on my plastic telephone. Finally, I made a chocolate cake in my Easy-Bake oven and awakened my husband to share it with me. “It’s raw,” he complained, which earned him immediate expulsion from the basement. Not that he’d minded.

  It often came to me, telling these stories to Pete, that there’d been a terrible cruelty in me as a child, but then I suppose all children have such moments. A friend of mine told me about the matter-of-fact notation she used to put at the top of her diary page almost every evening: J.C. This was not a religious ritual but acknowledgment of the fact that once again her brother, Jason, had cried that day. She’d never tried to find out why; she hated crybabies. Once when she and her brother were in their forties and having a drink somewhere, laughing and talking about their growing-up times, she apologized in an offhand way for never having made inquiries as to the nature of his despair. She expected him to wonder what she was talking about; instead, he stopped smiling and said, “Well. It’s abo
ut time.”

  Pete and I had children right away, and though I feared the results of the amnios, and then of the births, both our boy, Anthony, and our girl, Hannah, couldn’t be healthier. They’re fourteen and twelve now, respectively, and Pete and I are beginning to realize we’ve gotten our freedom back. We haven’t had a babysitter in two years; and I’m finally able to do my work in a way that allows me to focus for long hours at a time.

  I make my living as a quilt artist, and for the most part the work I do is commissioned. I charge a hundred and fifty dollars a square foot, not without guilt. But I have whole days when I stand at my design board moving pieces of fabric around, and I don’t sew a stitch. Then something clicks, and I hit the machine. The money I charge pays for the thinking time too; I explain this to my clients. And people do pay it, willingly—I have more clients than I can handle. The wait for a finished quilt is four to six months, but people don’t seem to mind that, either. I think there is a longing for things that reflect a certain kind of slowness; perhaps the pendulum is beginning its inevitable swing back. I’ll be glad if it does—I’m computer phobic and one of the few people left in America who don’t have e-mail. A friend once told me she didn’t want e-mail because she doesn’t understand how it works. Well, I said, you don’t know how a mixer works, either, but you use that. True, she said, and added that it was pretty depressing to realize the only equipment she did understand was what she used for hanging out the wash, and even then she didn’t get the spring-type clothespins, only the little people ones.

  I don’t even have a cell phone, though I am just about ready to get one of those, mostly due to Anthony’s constant reminders that soon he’ll be driving and really has to have one in case of roadway emergencies. I can envision these “emergencies”: Dude! I’ve got the car; want me to come and pick you up?

  Pete keeps saying that if I continue to do this well with my quilting, he’s going to quit his job and live off me. I tell him, Go ahead, but I don’t think he ever will. He owns the hardware store in the center of town, and he loves being there. It’s how I met him. I’d come to town for a quilting convention, and I needed some wooden dowels. For me, it was love at first sight—I asked him out to dinner that night, and by the time we had dessert I was fantasizing our fiftieth-anniversary celebration. Pete’s the kind of guy who doesn’t mind spending fifteen minutes helping old ladies pick out just the right plate hanger from his carefully organized bank of plastic drawers. Oftentimes those ladies come back the next day with a basket of muffins for him and his staff. He’ll give them a kiss on the cheek and they’ll make embarrassed little Aunt Bee clucking sounds and smile, all but waving the hankies they store up their sleeves, in a mix of pleasure and distress. I met Pete at a time when I was ready for a truly nice guy, out from under the wildly erroneous assumptions that dangerous men are fun and inconsistent men are interesting. You can have your pouty-mouthed bad boys; I’ll take the guy most people would fault with being overly sentimental. “That’s because you’re old,” Hannah said, when I told her recently about the qualities I prize most in a man, and she was probably right. That, and I’m pretty sentimental myself.

  TODAY I NEEDED TO GO to the fabric store to select the yardage I wanted to use for the border of a quilt I was making with Japanese overtones. It was for a woman who believed she’d lived many times before and that one of those past lives was as a geisha. It’s funny how people reveal themselves in the quilts they commission. One client had a bitter divorce but she wanted me to use her wedding dress to make a quilt that honored marriage. A truck driver commissioned a wildly feminine floral design to sleep under when he was on the road. A woman alienated from both her children had saved every item of clothing they’d ever worn as babies and toddlers, and she had me use them along with items of her own clothing to create a pattern of interlocking circles. She wept when I delivered the quilt to her and then hid it away in a box she’d bought especially for it.

  After I came home from the store, I needed to pack for our annual drive to Minnesota the next day. It was state fair time again. Everyone in my family went, every end of August. Our annual family get-togethers, like most people’s, were a mix of great fun and misery. They were what I did precisely one year after I’d said I’d never do them again. And each time, I could hardly wait to get there.

  3

  IT WAS UNUSUALLY QUIET AT FABRIC WORLD. I LINGERED at the shelves of blues for longer than I might have ordinarily, knowing I wouldn’t have to wait a long time to get my selection cut. Two store employees, Joanne and Ellen, stood leaning against the cutting table chatting and laughing quietly, their arms crossed. I’d been coming to Fabric World for years—Hannah actually took her first steps here—and until recently you never saw the employees relaxed like this. They’d always been told that if there were no customers, they should straighten bolts of fabric, cut up remnants for quilt packs, even dust shelves. Now there was a new manager, a flamboyantly gay man named Gregory, who had made everyone’s life better. He designed wedding dresses in addition to working at the store, and he gossiped viciously about all his clients, much to the guilty enjoyment of everyone around. He answered the store phone saying, “Fabric World, what now?” I still didn’t quite understand how he was hired, never mind made manager; the owners of the store were rumored to be quite conservative. I thought it was because Gregory couldn’t help being charming, even when he was insulting you. And people trusted his taste—they bought anything he told them to.

  “This is beautiful,” Joanne said, when I brought the cobalt-blue fabric I finally settled on over to the table to be measured and cut. There were black cranes printed on it, some standing on one leg, some flying, their wings thrillingly outstretched.

  “It’s for a border,” I told her. “I need a yard and a half.”

  She began cutting and we stopped talking, both of us listening, I think, to the sound of the scissors. For those of us enamored of the world of textiles, this sound is a little symphony. It conjures an image of a head bent over a machine, the feel of fabric slipping through fingers, a small light focused on a field of intimate labor.

  I saw Gregory on the other side of the store, stopping to straighten some of the colorful bolts in the juvenile section. When he noticed me, he came over to the cutting table. “Help,” he said. “I’ve dreamed about seed pearls for the last three nights.”

  Seed pearls! I thought. Maybe a few scattered across this quilt I was making. And binding made of a fabric that suggested water—some wavy, indistinct lines of blue on white.

  “What are you working on?” he asked.

  “Something sort of Japanese, this time. A lot of circles mixed with squares.”

  “Sounds divine. Anything but a wedding dress sounds divine. I want to make my niece some very cool pants, but instead I have to labor on a dress for a whale. I mean, why doesn’t she just wrap up in a lace-patterned shower curtain and call it a day?”

  “Great attitude.”

  “The truth hurts. Hey, have you got time for a cup of coffee? Come in the back with me and I’ll show you some samples of things I just ordered.”

  I looked at my watch. “Can’t. I’ve got to go home and pack—we’re going on vacation tomorrow. I’ll take you up on it when I get back, though.”

  “Ta-ta,” he said, walking away and waving over his shoulder. And then, to Joanne and Ellen, “Which one of you wants to give me a full body massage? No fighting, please.”

  After I got in the car, I took the fabric I’d bought out of the bag and stretched it across my lap so I could sneak looks at it on the way home. Before I’d taken the first cut, I’d already transformed it a thousand times.

  WE ATE PASTA FOR DINNER, with some puttanesca sauce that Pete’s mother, Rosa, had made and I’d defrosted in the microwave. I was amazed at how the flavor held; no one could cook like Rosa did. “Have you packed yet?” I asked Anthony.

  He nodded, his mouth full.

  “Yes?”

  He nodded again
, less emphatically, then shrugged. “Almost.”

  “What does that mean?” Pete asked.

  “It means I know everything I want to bring. I just have to put it in the suitcase.”

  “Right after dinner,” I said. “We’re leaving early.”

  “I know.” He rolled his eyes. Beneath the table, I suspected, his knee was bobbing up and down.

  “How about you, Hannah?” I asked. “Did you lay out what you want to take?”

  “Yes, and I can pack by myself now. I don’t need you to do it.”

  “Well,” I said. Meaning, Yes, you do. If I let Hannah pack by herself, she’d put in books, her Swiss Army knife, art materials—everything but what she needed most.

  “Why are you such a control freak?” she asked.

  I looked quickly at Pete, surprised, although he accused me of the same thing often enough. “Why must you oversee everything?” he once asked. We were in the family room, watching a movie we’d rented that neither of us much liked, but neither of us had the energy or inclination to turn it off. Instead, we talked over it. “I don’t oversee everything!” I’d said. He’d stared at me, a half grin on his face. Then he’d said, “Okay. I just said, ‘I think I’ll get a snack.’ You said, “There’s frozen yogurt or beer pretzels.’ Am I not capable of choosing my own snack?”

  “I’m only suggesting,” I’d said. “I know what’s around because I buy the groceries. I know what’s fresh—I’m actually protecting you. I’m trying to prevent a bad snack experience.”

  He didn’t respond to my attempt at levity. “Stop trying so hard to prevent things from happening,” he’d said. “What are you so afraid of?”