How to Make an American Quilt (11 page)

O
F COURSE
, Sophia has not yet graduated from high school and Preston needs to complete his degree at the school in Arizona. Though Sophia will miss having him sing to her, she is not altogether unhappy at his departure.

Ever since their visit to the quarry she has stopped going there, preferring to swim in the public pool. She tells herself it is because she likes the crowds; she tells herself that the memory of that day and her longing for Preston becomes more acute at the quarry. Besides, the pool belongs to everybody. But it is more than that. The
quarry was her secret place. Why had she brought him? To allow him to see her in her entirety.

She remembers the way she trembled in his embrace.

More than anything she wanted to tell him that her life wish is to travel the world with him, swimming in the various bodies of water marking the world, floating on her back in the Dead Sea, splashing through the Mediterranean waves. Or chill to the crisp coolness of the northern Pacific; shift for hours in the warm blue of the Hawaiian Pacific. Dive in the South Seas. The aqua Caribbean, Smith River, tributaries, and possibly rinse her face with water from an icy fjord.

She will swim and her husband will study the shifts of the moody earth; he will examine the chalky Dover cliffs, arid redgold mesas, note the striations of sunbaked seaside hills that have been pushed by tectonic plates into powerful arcs of layered rock. He will collect geodes, so ugly from the outside, so gorgeous inside. Granite, schist, gneiss, rose quartz, mica, olivine, bloodstone, obsidian. Volcanic rock. Water wears away stone; earth to ocean. And he will present her with his finds, from his hand to hers (as he had that day at the quarry), showing her what it is that he sees. Sophia will grow stronger and leaner, swimming and diving, with Preston by her side, in this marriage of basic elements found in nature.

But somehow it all backfired on her, leaving her with a feeling of having muddied something that was once clear and pure inside her. She wanted him to see her dive from sheer rock face; she wanted to show him the sort of possibilities she embodied, but in the process she neglected to tell him this fundamental thing about herself. She allowed him access to her body without revealing what was in her heart.

This is what life is like on Eros, she thinks—never knowing
when you have ventured too close to the edge, lost in a dream of the view of the sparkling heavens and never of the danger.

Does she love Preston? She can barely bring herself to ask.

T
HE WORLD’S FIRST
known irrigation system was around 3000
B.C
. in India and Egypt. And there are various kinds of irrigation, depending on the chosen crop. No knowledgeable farmer would water a rice crop the same way he would a citrus grove: Rice fields are meant to be flooded, whereas the citrus grove has greater success with a sprinkling system. There is the soil-to-water capacity, which must be taken into consideration.

Water is king in the California farmlands.

Some of the produce grown around Grasse includes cotton, grapes, alfalfa, potatoes. But there is another type of field that is equally important to Kern County; the oil field, with its derrick rising from the soil like a shunt to coax the earth’s fossil fuel to the surface.

This watery world, where the oceans cover more of its surface than the landmasses, where, with the exception of the earth’s core, all else is moving, shifting fluids. Even the continents float on currents of liquefied rock.

Sophia and Em are fishing in a subirrigation ditch. It is not the most scenic place in which to spend the better part of the day, yet here they are. They know there are better fishing spots, but they come here on occasion, as they have since they were children. The trees they recline beneath and the hats they wear provide little relief from the sun, and Sophia resists the urge to jump into the water; no sane person would venture into this standing ditch water.

Em is telling Sophia that she is a lucky girl to be going out with Preston Richards, who has two very nice things going for him: He is not away in the Pacific fighting the war, and he is not from around
here. “Do you know what that means, Soph? It means you might actually leave Grasse. You might marry him and leave this place.”

“You and my mother,” says Sophia, “have marriage on the brain.”

“So?”

“I’m not sure it is enough.”

“Enough what?” Em leans her elbows on her knees but looks over at her friend.

“Adventure. Maybe. Or love or happiness or…” She laughs. “Or maybe I just want to take a tramp steamer to Hong Kong and drink Singapore slings.”

Em reels in her line, replaces the bait (“I thought I felt something”), and lifts her sunglasses from the bridge of her small nose to wipe away the perspiration. “Then why take up with him?”

A certain earnest quality enters Sophia’s voice. “Listen, I think he’s different; I think if I could have the life I want I could have it with Preston.” She hesitates. “I don’t really want to marry. Ever. And Preston, well, when I think about him as a husband all I can see is myself as a wife.” She gazes across the water, looks to the endless fields. “I don’t know what I am saying.”

“I think if you let him get away, you’ll be sorry. Be thankful that he’ll get you out of town.”

“Yes,” says Sophia quietly, “I am in need of rescue.” But suddenly Sophia feels a chill and hears an echo of her mother’s voice and she is momentarily afraid that she has just invited her own bad luck and that she will find herself old and unmarried and enormously sad. “I do want to marry,” she finds herself saying. “You get married. You have children.” Her words almost sound like a recitation. They have that quality.

“Children,” says Em, smiling, “lots of kids.”

“Children,” continues Sophia, “and everything is great. Everything will be just great, won’t it?”

“Check your line,” says Em.

“He said I could be Darling.”

“What?”

“When I met Preston he said I could keep my own name.”

“Right,” says Em, “as if you want to.”

Sophia is again overwhelmed by the desire to leap into the water. To submerge herself, to purify herself. She imagines swimming down the irrigation ditch until it merges with a river, then spills into the ocean. Her stroke is even and perfect and strong. “I’m too hot for this,” she sighs, setting the pole in the grass. “Let’s go to the pool.”

“You and that stupid pool,” says Em, reeling in her line. She tears off the bait, then bites the line with her teeth, returning the hook to her small tackle box.

But Sophia is now lying motionless in the grass, her hat over her face.

I
N
A
RIZONA
, Preston recalls the moment he held Sophia in his arms, slippery and almost mythical, finally fulfilling his primary impulse upon seeing her that day at the swimming pool, his willingness complete when he felt her shiver in his arms. It was then that he discovered the imperative of keeping her with him always.

As she stretched between his body and the stone he understood that a life of hunting rocks and minerals would be a cold, unyielding, and literally hard life if he did not have Sophia there to remain between himself and his vocation. A life without her would mean a life of falling into the bleak solitude of being a man with only his work to keep him company. Sophia would deliver him from this fate.

S
OPHIA IMAGINES
that she could have told Em, as their fishing lines floated in that brackish water, that she is pregnant. It will be a scandal and her mother will cry and Em will stand by her, yet she says nothing. It is something she cannot discuss with anyone until she comes to grips with it herself. It means her transformation into somebody’s wife (Preston’s wife); it means settling down. It means trusting that Preston will come back to her once he, too, is told.

Her father’s ghost looms up before her like a character in a German opera, his words resonant, beautiful, and dark. And she a child once again, hearing the Italian music of his voice, not understanding the language, though the meaning is implicit: All the words string together to let her know that he is leaving.