How to Make an American Quilt (13 page)

W
HEN
D
UFF IS SIXTEEN
she tells Sophia she wants to go to college.

“Honey,” says Sophia, “we cannot afford to send all of you and, besides, it is more important for Pres to go than you or Edie. When you are married you’ll see what I mean.”

(It is unusual for girls like Sophia’s daughters to dream of college, given their isolation in Grasse and their era, which is 1950. But they are modern girls, despite their mother.)

Duff wishes she could tell her mother about her teenage years, but Sophia only sits with Duff and Edie, dreamy-eyed, wistful about the grandchildren they will give her. Duff says, “Mom, I’m not so sure that is what I want. I think there may be something else.”

Which causes Sophia to freeze and say, “There is nothing else.” Sophia, who has grown so skilled at heading off words she does not care to hear.

D
UFF
, thinks Preston of his daughter,
Duff is great
. A little too serious and tense at times, but there is a quick intelligence there as well. He takes her to collect specimens, walks by her side. He gives Duff her own hand lens ruper to check the angles of various minerals. He instructs her in how to work the scale that assigns values of hardness to each mineral. Explains the difference between rocks and minerals. Illustrates with his palms the action of a lateral or a slip fault. Together they draw topographic maps and talk about half-lives and continental drift.

She can be very funny—not that Preston often laughs at her jokes; he does not know why this is except that it seems to be beyond him. When did he become a father and no longer Preston Richards? Preston, he thinks, would laugh at his comical daughter, but the Father cannot allow himself the luxury.

Pres, his son, looks so much like Sophia. The same straight, lean figure and deep, gray eyes. He even inherited the space between her front teeth. But water holds no magic for his son; he enjoys swimming as a way of cooling off and nothing more. There is something Preston cannot quite identify in his boy—some independence of spirit that is held in reserve by his duty-bound nature. Pres junior worries about Sophia.

He heard them talking the other night after dinner as Sophia’s hands dipped in and out of the dishwater, soaping the plates, then
rinsing them beneath a steady stream of clean water. She passed them to Pres junior, who stood beside her, almost inarticulate because she was asking him about his college plans.

She said, “You do want to go to college, don’t you?”

“Sure,” he told her.

“Have you thought about where you’d like to go?”

“No. Yes. Maybe”—he appeared to concentrate on the task at hand; appeared to avoid Sophia’s calm gray eyes—“back east or maybe down south. Somewhere, you know, somewhere else.”

Sophia nodded. The front of her shirt was splattered with drops of water, as if she had been lying on her back in a summer shower.

“It isn’t that I won’t miss you,” he said quickly.

“That never crossed my mind, honey.”

“I mean, well, you have Dad. And Edie. And I’ll be home for visits. You will hardly miss me? Right?”

Sophia released the water from the sink, listened to it disappear down the drain. She smiled at her son. “Such a funny boy you are.”

Preston shakes his head at the conversation, for it is the same thing when he and Pres discuss college. His son is eager to go—far away, back east, down south—but he cannot seem to talk about it without asking over and over, “What about Mom? Will she be all right, Dad? If I’m gone will she be okay?”

Preston has to laugh. “Pres, of course she’ll be fine. I’ll still be here. God knows, I’m not going anywhere.” Which seems to reassure Pres, but only until the next bout of worry assails him.

It is Edie who is most like Preston.
What does this mean?
he wonders.
Who am I, what does being like me mean?
He shakes his head: A romantic? A wanderer? Surely he is neither of those, if he examines his life. He was once someone who moved without thought of the consequences, acted on nervy impulse. Like his marriage
to Sophia, his fishgirl, who adapted herself to home and hearth with a vengeance, like someone who has something to prove or a debt to pay back.

It is Edie they should watch, Edie, who appears so guileless and unconcealed. It is Edie who has the potential to surprise.

S
OPHIA DOES NOT ENJOY
the freedom of color and pattern in the
Crazy Quilt
. The circle keeps talking about making one, then rejects it for some other project designed by Anna Neale. Sophia prefers the challenge of a traditional, established pattern. That is the true challenge, she thinks—to work within a narrow confine. To accept what you cannot have; that from which you cannot deviate.

E
M
, now married to Dean Reed and with a daughter of her own, says to Sophia one evening as they walk to Glady Joe’s to quilt, “How is Edie these days?”

“Good. How’s Inez?”

“Inez,” says Em of her own child, “is doing well. But Edie…” Her voice loses volume, deflates before she finishes her sentence.

They arrive at Glady Joe’s and Sophia reminds herself to ask Em later, after the circle breaks, what she is trying to say about Edie.

Of course, Sophia forgets, and as she lies in bed next to Preston, pressing her brain to recall what it was about Em tonight in their conversation during their walk, finds that all she can remember is Em’s breath hung like misty blue clouds in the cold night air.

“F
OR YOU
,” says Preston, pulling Sophia by the hand into their backyard.

“Oh, Pres,” she says. And there, before her, is a small pond that he had dug as a gift for her for their twenty-second anniversary.

“I thought you could wade in it or keep fish or whatever you want. I think it’s deep enough.”

So proud was he of his gift to her, so pleased when she sat by the small bank and cried into the palms of her open hands.