How to Make an American Quilt (14 page)

A
ROUND THE TIME
of Edie’s sixteenth birthday, Sophia takes a long look at her as her daughter leans on the open refrigerator door, orange-juice bottle tilted to her lips, head thrown back. Sophia can see Edie’s throat muscles working, taking the liquid, and she is about to say,
Honey, why must you always wear that awful windbreaker
, when something else catches her eye. Edie’s slender frame has gone broad around the middle, down a little low, the curve of the belly unmistakable. “Oh!” exclaims Sophia, which causes Edie to turn toward her, red-faced, clumsily shoving the bottle back into the fridge, adjusting her windbreaker. Hastening her retreat.

“Look, Mom,” she begins, “I didn’t mean to drink from the bottle,” while Sophia can barely speak.
How is Edie these days?

She is trembling. Sophia says, “Edie,” and cannot finish her sentence, to which her daughter screams, I said I was sorry, and rushes from the room.

Sophia slowly rises from the table, smooths back her hair with both hands, her hair that was once dark and shining but is now shot with coarse gray. She tugs at her dress and clips the tip of her nose. She ascends the stairs.

A
S
S
OPHIA LOOKS IN
on Edie, who sits on her bed, she says, “How could you let this happen?” She does not say, Why didn’t you tell me sooner?

“It wasn’t only me,” says Edie.

Sophia sighs, edges toward her youngest child, her slim figure so like Sophia’s at that age. “Let me break it to your father, in my own way. I guess the boy will have to marry you.”

Edie, sad-eyed, looks away. “I don’t know about that.”

“Of course he’ll marry you, honey,” she says quietly, comfortingly. “It’s not so bad. You’ll see.” She cannot be truly happy about this turn of events, yet she can find a way to accept them as inevitable. Her daughter will get married sooner or later and, after all, Sophia was only seventeen when she met Preston. Sophia runs her finger along the bedspread, sketching out the design for the beautiful crib quilt she will put together with the other quilters. Something with lambs and bunnies.

“That is not what I meant,” says the girl. “I mean, I don’t think I want him for a husband.”

She cannot answer. She cannot make a crib quilt for a child without a proper name.

W
HEN
E
M WHISPERS
to Sophia one night at the quilting circle, “Surely you could reconsider the adoption,” Sophia responds loudly by saying, “This is not your business, Em.”

Then looks across the unfinished quilt they are working on to see Anna Neale coldly watching her.

P
RESTON SITS
with Sophia out by the little pond that she never uses. She is saying that they should send Edie to a home in Colorado to have her baby, then bring her back to finish school.

But Preston only says, “How could you give away a child of ours?”

“Pres, it’s not our child. It is Edie’s child.”

“But Edie’s our child,” he insists.

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand you, Sophia.”

“What don’t you understand? I’ll tell you what: If she would marry the boy, I would feel differently, but she refuses. I won’t have a child in my house raising her child without the
sanctity
of marriage. Yes, marriage. Grown-up responsibilities. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just follow our heart’s desires?”

Preston has remained silent. “She’s our daughter. I will miss her.”

“And I won’t?” Sophia splashes her hand roughly in the pond’s dark water. “Why is it always that everyone else is supposed to get what they want?” It almost shocks her, this mother’s role, her mother’s voice emerging from her mouth with such conviction. This role she essentially mistrusts; the role she cannot quite abandon.

“Why don’t you ever use this pool?” asks Preston.

“I’m busy. You know that.”

He nods his head. “Remember when you took me to the quarry? I’ve never known why we stopped. Why you stopped.”

Sophia shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know. When I became a wife and mother, I guess.”

The picture of Sophia leaping from the quarry rocks slices through his memory, and he wants to cry out, to tell her he loves her and has missed that about her. Instead he agrees to investigate sending Edie to Colorado for the duration of her pregnancy. He rises. He passes his wife without touching her and goes to find Edie.

I
T IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE
for a mother to separate the reality of her child from the abstract idea of her child, and some women never do this at all. When Duff was an abstract idea, Sophia’s first thought
was that she wished her gone; her impulse was to erase the pregnancy. It was not a matter of wanting to “get rid” of it as much as wanting it to have never happened.

Then there was this child after nine long months and, suddenly, Duff was no longer an idea but a fact. There was no question of loving that girl. None at all. And, because of her circumstances prior to having her (that is, lusting after water and seeing in Preston someone who would take her to that water—or, less dreamily and more pragmatically, the fact of impending motherhood when she was unprepared for it), it was as if the pregnancy and the birth were truly two separate things that each had the power to open and close Sophia’s world.

And it seemed to Sophia that the woman who cannot happily greet her baby from the very moment she becomes aware of its existence is a woman who will live in secrecy, hoping that no one (least of all the child, least of all Duff) ever suspects that she once wished it gone.