A Thread So Thin (6 page)

“Not that kind of massage, Charlie. I was thinking about something more in the way of a rubdown with some Bengay.”

“Bengay? That sticky goo that smells like horse liniment?”

I nodded. Charlie walked over to me and put his arm around my waist.

“Oh well. It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but I guess a fellow has to settle for what he can get. Come, my little snow bunny. Let’s hit the slopes.”

I
rested my chin in my hand and stared, unseeing, at the faux woodgrain wall of the library study carrel, thinking, hitting the mental replay button on Zoe’s tirade yet again.

“OMG, Liza! Are you kidding? You just turned twenty-two! Why would you want to tie yourself down like that now? Or ever? Marriage is a trap! A lure and snare instituted by men to ensure themselves a lifetime supply of sex! All men are misogynists, bent on forcing women into narrow roles of gender and…”

But what does Zoe know about it? She’s had six boyfriends in the last two years. She’s no expert on love and marriage. Why did I even bother to ask her?

I was so absorbed in my thoughts that at first, I didn’t hear the soft tap-tapping of knuckles on the laminate wall.

“Liza?” I felt the gentle pressure of a hand on my shoulder. “Liza, are you all right?”

I looked up, startled to see Professor Williams standing over me. The fluorescent library light beamed through the unkempt tendrils of her brown curls, framing her face like a halo.

“Oh! Hi, Professor. I’m just trying to finish up the last of the research so you can have it before classes start.”

She nodded. “I wondered. I walked by here a half hour ago and you were sitting in that exact same position, reading that exact same article.” She leaned down to take a closer look at the magazine. “You’re still on the same page. It’s either so interesting you wanted to read it again, or so complicated you
have
to read it again, or you’re distracted and thinking about something else. I’m putting my money on door number three.”

“Guess I’ve got some things on my mind. Sorry. I’ll get back to work.” I turned to the next page of the article, but Professor Williams reached down and picked up the magazine before I could begin.

She laughed. “Liza, don’t bother with it. Not right now. You’ve been working day and night on this. I think you need a break. Besides,” she said, squinting as she scanned the page, “we won’t need this one anyway. The Katzenburg essay makes the same point…” She paused to read a bit more. “And much more succinctly.”

She made a disgusted face and mumbled to herself as she continued reading, “What a pompous blowhard this guy is.

“No,” she said with a definitive shake of the head that set her curls bouncing, “we can do without this article. The Katzenburg is far superior. Not to
mention
that file of
personal
correspondence between Greenberg and Pollock you found in the museum archives.
That
was an incredible find, Liza! It’s absolutely going to make this paper come to
life!
”

Professor Williams had a way of speaking, emphasizing certain words so that it was impossible to miss her meaning, like an anchor-woman reading the day’s headlines. She was smart, thoughtful, and wildly enthusiastic about art history. And her enthusiasm was contagious. I’d taken other art history classes in the past and could take it or leave it, but Professor Williams’s course had really piqued my interest in the subject.

When she asked if I wanted to be her research assistant, I didn’t need to think two seconds before saying yes. The idea that I might actually be able to help her with something as important as researching a paper for publication was incredibly exciting. The more I study art history and the struggles of other artists, people whose work was never appreciated in their own lifetimes, the more I’m aware that I could spend my whole life painting and not know even the barest glint of success. I guess that’s part of why I was so charged about the idea of researching for Professor Williams. Maybe I’ll never be a well-known artist, but if I help her with this paper, at least I’ll have accomplished something in the world of art.

“Really, Liza. Put away your work. It’s so beautiful outside—cold and clear, and the sun is beating down on the snow so it glitters. You shouldn’t be cooped up in the library on a day like this. That’s the realm of dusty, musty old art historians, like me, not vibrant, young artists like yourself. You should be outside, seeking inspiration, searching for the muse. If you’re going to be cooped up somewhere, it should be in an art studio,
doing
art, not reading about it. This is in my best interest as well as yours. After all, if young, creative people like you don’t go out and
make
art, then what will dusty, musty old art historians like me have to write
about
art? Hmm? I’d be out of a job in five minutes.”

I grinned and reached for the magazine. “All right,” I conceded. “Let me just finish the notes on this article. I know it’s not as good as the Katzenburg, but you might want it as backup later. Then I’ll knock off for the day. I promise.”

“Nope,” she said and folded the magazine in half before tucking it under her arm. “I mean it. No more research today. In fact, no more research for the rest of the weekend. Go do something fun. You should get some rest and relaxation before classes start again.”

“Are you sure?” I asked doubtfully.

“Yes. I am
sure
. In fact, I’ve rented a car and am heading out for the weekend myself, off to the Berkshires. I’m going to work on the outline for the paper and get in a little skiing while I’m at it. There’s a lovely B and B in Lenox that I like to stay in for a few days every January. The eggs Benedict
alone
is worth the drive. That’s what I came to talk to you about. You’re from New Bern, aren’t you? If you’d like to go home for the weekend, I can give you a lift. It’s right on my way.”

“Really? That would be great! I’ll need a little time to get my things together. When are you leaving?”

“Not until one. Can you be ready by then?”

“Absolutely.”

I
clutched the armrest so hard that my knuckles literally went white.

Keeping a car in Manhattan is expensive. People pay hundreds of dollars to rent a monthly parking space. But public transportation is cheap and convenient, so a lot of New Yorkers don’t own a car, they just rent them occasionally. Because of that, sometimes their driving skills get a little rusty. Professor Williams’s certainly were.

As we headed north on the interstate toward Connecticut at a whopping thirty-nine miles an hour, blocking the way of every road-raging, horn-honking tailgater on the island of Manhattan, Professor Williams informed me she’d been so immersed in writing her paper that she hadn’t been out of the city since October. My guess is that was also the last time she’d been behind a wheel. I glanced in the rearview mirror to see yet another driver barreling toward us, laying on the horn and making emphatic and meaningful gestures. Professor Williams seemed completely oblivious to the havoc she was causing and marched along to the funereal beat of her own drummer.

At that speed, the trip to New Bern would likely take two hours longer than it would have by train. But at that point, I was just hoping we’d get there in one piece. I mentally murmured a prayer, requesting the presence of a few guardian angels, and forced myself to look away from the mirror.

“I
wish
I could get out of town more often,” the professor said as the blue Prius that had been tailgating us a moment before found an opening and sped around us, horn blasting. “You go to New Bern almost every weekend, don’t you? To see your aunt?”

“And my boyfriend,” I said, consciously loosening my grip on the armrest. “And my quilt circle.”

“Oh, that’s
right!
I remember that wonderful textile piece you had hanging in the student gallery. The quilted jellyfish. Beautiful piece, Liza.
Inspired
. Were you always a quilter?”

“Well, yes and no. I was always interested in textile as a medium, but I didn’t really learn to quilt until a couple of years ago, when I moved in with my aunt. That’s when I started to understand why textiles had such appeal to me. I mean, as far as color, you can do things with fabrics that you really can’t do with paint—you can arrange and rearrange the fabrics and colors so easily. For me, it’s like the difference between editing a paper on a typewriter versus a computer. It makes everything simpler. And in the process, you can experiment with subtle shifts in mood and voice. Changing even one color can alter the whole mood and composition of a quilt. And then there’s the quilting itself. The threads you use, the direction and length and frequency of the stitches, make an enormous difference in the finished piece. It’s subtle, you know? Kind of like the difference that various brushes or strokes have on the texture of an oil painting. But,” I said with a shrug, suddenly conscious of how long I’d been talking, “like I said, it’s subtle.”

Professor Williams nodded intently as I spoke. That’s one of the things I like about her: She has a way of making you feel that she’s really interested in you. Or, as she would put it,
deeply
interested.

“So you took up quilting as a means of
informing
your art, bringing your work onto a wider plain.”

“No.” I laughed. “I started quilting out of revenge. Well, not completely but mostly.”

Professor Williams glanced at me, clearly confused, which was understandable.

When I showed up at Cobbled Court Quilts for the first time—to make a block during a Quilt Pink event to benefit breast cancer research, the disease that took my mother’s life—my motivation was almost entirely centered on vengeance, on humiliating Aunt Abigail and punishing her for neglecting my mother even when she lay in the hospital dying. I wasn’t interested in quilting. I wasn’t even that interested in helping raise money for breast cancer research. I was interested in forcing Abigail to face up to what she’d done—and not done—so much so that I blackmailed her. I gave her a choice: Either come to the Quilt Pink event with me, or I’d tattoo our shared last name on my neck in huge gothic letters and parade around New Bern letting everyone know we were related.

Sounds crazy, I know, but I’d have done it. I was that angry with her. Thank heaven Abigail agreed to my demands. If not, I’d have had to go through life with the world’s ugliest tattoo. If Abigail were a little less concerned about her social standing, the whole thing could have gone horribly wrong.

As it was, things worked out pretty well. Not that we just sat down together, made a quilt block, and all was suddenly forgiven. Not even close. It took a lot of time, pain, misjudgments, and misunderstandings on both our parts before Abigail and I were able to mend our broken relationship. It’s a process, one we’re still working through, but it started on that day when Abigail and I first walked into Cobbled Court Quilts.

“It’s a long story,” I said, waving off the questions I could see formulating in Professor Williams’s mind, “and way too complicated to explain but, well…let’s just say that my aunt Abigail and I share a few of the less admirable Burgess family traits, like a tendency toward stubbornness and a deep-seated certainty that we are always right.”

The professor smiled. “You know, I’ve got an aunt Abigail, a great-aunt, on my father’s side, and she’s just the same. Maybe there’s something about the name. But, Liza, you don’t
seem
like that sort of person at all. Not to me.”

“Thanks. I don’t think I’m as bad as I used to be. At least I hope not. I was a pretty angry kid.”

“And now?”

“Not as much. There are still moments. I miss my mom. It makes me mad that she’s not here. Sometimes, when my roommates gripe about their mothers, I just want to smack ’em. They don’t realize what it’s like to have to go through life without one.”

As always happens when I talk about my mother, I felt a catch in my throat. I changed the subject, not wanting to tear up in front of the professor. Why was I telling her all this stuff, anyway? I didn’t want her feeling sorry for me.

“But I’m lucky in lots of ways,” I said breezily. “There are a few advantages to being an orphan. I mean, my girlfriends are stuck with their families, but I got to pick mine.”

“Your quilt circle, yes?” the professor asked, reaching down and flicking on her turn signal a good mile before we had to take the exit to I-84. Unfortunately, her blinker was signaling in the wrong direction.

Glancing up in the mirror again, I saw that there were five cars piled up behind us. The nearest one had pulled so close I could see the outgrowth of gray roots in the female driver’s brown dye job and the infuriated movement of her lips as she told Professor Williams exactly what she thought about her driving skills.

“I find that fascinating,” she continued, ignoring the cacophony of honking horns. “Tell me more about—”

“Um. Professor? The drivers behind us seem a little frustrated. I think they think you’re going to move over to the left. You’ve got the wrong signal on.”

“Do I? Is
that
what all that noise is about?” she asked, making no move to correct her mistake. “People shouldn’t get so worked up about driving. It’s not the
destination
that matters, it’s the
journey
. I know it’s a cliché to say people should stop and smell the roses, but they
should
. Life is
short,
Liza.”

She tapped the brake, decreasing her speed to twenty-six miles per hour as she slowly navigated the exit ramp, smelling every rose along the way. The lady behind us started gesticulating wildly.

I looked away from the mirror and slunk down in my seat.

“Now. Tell me more about your quilt circle. Your aunt Abigail and the others. Do you have much in common? Are there other women near your age?”

“I’m the youngest. Ivy is a few years older than me. Margot is in her late thirties. Evelyn is around fifty. Aunt Abigail is sixty-five, but she looks ten years younger.” I smiled, thinking about what an unlikely group we made. “We’re all women and we all like to quilt. Other than that, we’re about as different as we could possibly be. All you have to do is take one look at our quilts to know that.”

“Really?”

“Really. For example, usually, we each work on our own individual projects, but once, just for fun, we all decided to make a sampler quilt. We picked out nine blocks, the same nine for everyone, but when the quilts were done, they all looked completely different. We chose different colors, fabrics, and bindings, and we set them differently and quilted them differently. The same nine blocks, but they resulted in five totally unique quilts.”

“
Fascinating.”

I looked over at the professor. Her eyes were glittering and her expression was interested,
deeply
interested. I knew that look.

“Professor, are you sitting there thinking up a topic for a new research paper?”

“Well, why not? Quilting
is
an art form, one of the first that was considered acceptable for women. And I find the communal nature of it just fascinating. I can’t think of another studio art form that fosters such community participation in the creative process. Most artists create in solitude. For many, that solitude is an absolute requirement. So what makes quilting
different?
How and why did it evolve to become a communal art?

“But,” she said, “you’re right. I can’t even
think
of tackling new research until I’ve finished this paper. However, I really am interested in knowing more about your relationships with the other women in your quilt circle. You truly think of them as family?”

“I do. They care about me. Watch out for me. Put up with me. And when I need advice, they are the people I ask. Of course,” I laughed, “I usually get four different opinions, but somewhere in there I can usually find something that helps. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come home this weekend.”

“You need advice?” The professor turned her head to look at me.

I hesitated before answering. Professor Williams was my favorite teacher, but we didn’t know each other well. I wasn’t sure it was smart to tell her the truth about Garrett’s proposal. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure it was a smart idea to tell the quilt circle the truth, either. The last thing I wanted was to tip Abigail off about any potential engagement, and I didn’t want Evelyn to know either.

Abigail is family, but when I need good, solid, unbiased advice, Evelyn is the one I turn to. Everybody in the Cobbled Court Quilt Circle is…well, a little frayed at the edges. I mean, nobody’s perfect. But Evelyn is a little more put together than the rest of us. Wiser, I guess. If she weren’t Garrett’s mother, she’d be the first person I’d ask for advice. But she
is
Garrett’s mother. And though we’ve never exactly spelled it out, there are some things Evelyn and I don’t talk about. No. Make that
one
thing. Garrett. We don’t talk about my relationship with Garrett. It would be pretty awkward if we did. There are just some things you don’t discuss with a guy’s mother. You know?

So somehow I had to figure out how to ask Evelyn, Abigail, and the others if I should marry Garrett without
actually
asking if I should marry Garrett. My encounter with Zoe had shown me the hazards of a direct approach. Though I couldn’t imagine the others would be quite so rabid in their responses as Zoe had been.

Maybe if I took a sort of poll of the opinions and experiences of a bunch of different women, I could find some nugget of truth that would tell me for sure if I should marry Garrett or not. But to get accurate, honest opinions I needed to take the emotion out of the equation. Which meant I had to take me out of the equation, look at this thing from a purely logical standpoint.

“Yes,” I said, finally answering her question. “I need advice about a quilt. I’ve been thinking about making a new one, a studio piece, entirely from wrapping materials: tin foil, waxed paper, parchment, cellophane. That kind of thing. I need their advice about the actual sewing. It’ll be tricky.”

This wasn’t a lie. I’d been experimenting, unsuccessfully, with substituting different kinds of papers for fabrics in my art quilts. I hoped Evelyn and the others might be able to give me some tips on how to do so. The professor didn’t have to know that wasn’t the only sort of guidance I was seeking.

“Professor Williams…are you married?”

Her eyebrows arched in surprise as her head swiveled toward me and her frizzy curls jumped, as if they, too, were startled by the question. “Me? No! Why would I want to do that? And why do you ask?”

“Well…I, um…It’s for a painting I’m working on. A mural. Just in the planning stages now. Just an idea I’m exploring. A mural about the evolution of marriage. I mean, is marriage even relevant for women today? Seems to me that opinions about marriage are completely different from how they were a hundred years ago.”

“Oh, more recently than
that
. For my mother, marriage wasn’t a question to be considered. It was just what you
did
. What
everybody
did.” She turned her eyes back toward the road and was quiet for a moment before going on in a softer, more introspective tone, oddly unitalicized.

“I was asked once, when I was an undergrad at Penn State. There was a boy, Drake. He was an engineering major.” She laughed quietly and shook her head. “Imagine. Me being proposed to by an engineer. We met at a peace rally. This was back during the Vietnam War, you know. He was a sweet man. Loved Vivaldi. I’d never thought an engineer would be such a music fan. He was surprising in so many ways….

“Anyway, he asked me out for coffee after the rally, and the next thing I knew, we were dating. I never thought he’d propose. When he asked, I actually thought it was some kind of joke. But after a minute I realized he wasn’t kidding. It was such a shock. I said no right off, almost before he’d finished asking. He got angry, hurt. Understandable, I suppose.” She shrugged. “I never saw him again after. I don’t know what happened to him. Probably he married someone else. He was the marrying kind.”