How to Make an American Quilt (12 page)

S
OPHIA DOES NOT
grow leaner and stronger (as she once thought she would, swimming the world over); she grows heavy. All this weight for that little Duff, their first daughter. Sophia watches the dream of her swimming moving away from her, never to be retrieved. She thinks for a moment of leaving both Preston and Duff, consoling herself that, no matter what happens, they will have each other. “Why,” she says to herself, “I am no better than my father.” She sits down, her hand resting lightly on sleeping Duff’s head.

She is angry, too, and tells Preston that if she has to stay home with the child, so does he. She will not have him wandering the world, only to bring back his found treasures heaved up from the earth, to give to her as pale souvenirs. He will not travel the world and examine its faults.

“Sophia,” he says, “are you trying to kill my research? My career?”

“Of course not,” she tells him. “I’m only saying that if I have to stay, so do you.”

“But it isn’t as if you’ll be alone. Your mother lives here. Be fair.”

“Oh, please,” says Sophia, “let’s talk about something else.”

“Honey,” he says gently, “it isn’t as if I am never coming back. I’m your husband. That means something, doesn’t it? We have a child, we have a life.” He holds both her hands in his.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” she says, “that because we are married you’ll come back. Not a damn thing.” He throws her hands back to her in disgust. “Ask my mother,” she says as he leaves the room. “Ask me.”

I
T IS EXPECTED
that Sophia will do as her mother did; this is the legacy of the time into which they are born. Sophia lives with the inheritance of her mother, who lived with the inheritance of her mother. She is not expected to attend to her own intrepid journeys or follow her own desires. Her time does not encourage it.

Sophia can gaze out her bedroom window and wonder what it was that prevented her from seeing the world, until her revelry is broken by the sound of her child calling out to her. Certainly she is aware of aviatrices and actresses, but she cannot count herself among their group; she is so much more ordinary than they even if her drive is similar.

How free she felt that day at the quarry with Preston! How so “like herself.” In that one moment of physical, sexual freedom, where she gave herself over to him, she remembers feeling as if she were silencing the voice of her mother, putting to rest all the social expectations of a girl in her place. She laughs now (as she reluctantly moves from that bedroom window to see after her child), recalling the consequence of her actions—falling into the dark water, falling into Preston’s embrace, inadvertently falling into the life she had been raised to live.

There was a day when Preston was back in Arizona mailing her letters of love, when she believed that their marriage would, in fact, be a wondrous thing—before she knew she was going to have Duff and still thought that she would not be a woman of her day, that she would join ranks with women who saw things and did things. And she would be with Preston.

But that turned out to be over before it began.

Because: This was not a time when women could swim freely, unfettered by waiting domesticity; this was not their time.

She was only Sophia Darling. Sometimes she said that to herself as she enrolled the kids in special activities after school or involved herself with PTA fund-raisers or amassed the neglected possessions from neighbors for white-elephant sales. Or when she sat mute, quilting; she said to herself,
I am Sophia Darling. That is all
.

To be known as Mrs. Preston Richards was to exact a certain amount of social respect. She had gained entry into the ranks of motherhood with the birth of Duff. Even “the daughter of that poor Mrs. Darling,” her mother’s daughter, lent her a modest measure of communal visibility. These were all Sophia’s identities and parts, the parts she grew to mistrust for her duplicitous feeling when she played them.

So to say
I am Sophia Darling; that is all
was, in this time and place, this homemaker era, to admit she was nobody.

P
RESTON AND
S
OPHIA
have two more children after Duff, a son, Pres junior, and a daughter named Edie. Once a week, Em comes by and together she and Sophia walk over to Glady Joe Cleary’s, where they quilt with six other women. It fills an evening normally spent not talking to Preston or talking to him through the children. Sophia waits for him to complain, to register some dissatisfaction with her, because she is ready to point out all the ways in which she is very
nearly the perfect wife. Sometimes she thinks she only strives for this perfection so she can toss it up to him one night when he tries to engage her in one of his discussions about the State of Their Lives. When he tells her how unhappy he is doing soil samples for landowners around Grasse.

Occasionally, she can imagine him pushing down the desire inside himself to leave and see all those places they talked about so many years ago.

But if she makes herself so perfect, so unimpeachable in her behavior, he will be forced to stay, will have no legitimate reason to leave. It occurs to her that Preston is like her father in many ways.

T
HERE ARE TIMES
when Sophia wants to throw it all over, pack the kids in the car, and take off with Preston to all those places. See all those things she longs to see and fall in love all over again, as if love is not a finite thing but something fluid and changing, something that can ebb or surge like an ocean tide. Sophia wants to tell Preston that she loves him, wants to be less rule bound with her children; but instead she spends one night a week piecing together bits of fabric with a group of women. As if she could piece together all the things she feels inside, stitch them together and make everything seem whole and right.