How to Make an American Quilt (22 page)

She wonders how Inez will take the news; her daughter, who seems to love both Em and Dean equally, adores them both. Dean proved to be a good father with an instinct for how much to give their child and what to withhold, so that she didn’t go tearing out of their home like a bat out of hell as soon as she was old enough, like so many of the Grasse children.

Em tries Inez again—but still no answer. “I wish I smoked,” she says aloud. Instead, she marches downstairs to pour herself a glass of white wine.

She remembers that she wants to take her silver Tiffany heart with her. Dean bought it for her on a trip they took to New York together, many years ago, a gift that came at the end of a great day of wandering around the city, going to the Frick and the Whitney and the Guggenheim. When they had lunch at the Café des Artistes and stood awestruck at the base of the Statue of Liberty. She has not worn it in years; and cannot now, with Constance in his life. Such a lie it would be. (She does not want to leave it here.) Dean lies.

But she cannot find it and, having exhausted the places where she thinks it will be, decides to check his studio.

Dean and Em have an express agreement that she not enter his studio when he is not there (“You can be so silly,” she said), but today, with her impending hegira, she does not care. She feels she is not obligated to honor any agreements they have made; all between them is null and void. This is good-bye.

As she pushes the door open and walks straight over to the spindly bookcase that holds boxes, smooth stones, and bric-a-brac,
as she goes to retrieve her heart, she stops for a final look around. It feels so decadent and rebellious being in Dean’s place without Dean. It feels terrific and unfettered, like a lightness of spirit.

Dean’s ideal project would be to paint someone’s life from the cradle to the grave. And so he had begun with Em from the time right before they were married. Over against the wall, Em can see her engaged nineteen-year-old self with one of those funny perms from the forties, with only the bangs and tips of her hair curled, the rest left completely straight. Then she is twenty, wearing a white blouse with padded shoulders and an old pair of Dean’s shorts, which fall to her knees, belted and bunched up at her small waist with a hand-tooled cowboy belt they picked up on their honeymoon in New Mexico. She remembers saying to him, “I don’t want to be painted in this ugly old outfit. If you are going to paint me, I want to be beautiful.”

“Exactly,” he told her, then commanded her to stillness.

In another picture, there is strain in her brow: tiny, unhappy lines around her mouth from her discovery of Dean’s infidelity. In another, she is heavy with child, reclining awkwardly on a divan, her skin alive with the glow of pregnancy and the renewal of her marriage
(Now
, thinks Em,
was I ever so radiant or is that just the artist’s enhancement?)
, and, if she’s not mistaken, there is a slight swelling of her legs from water retention. Not long after that, she can be seen with her eyes cast down as she stands in a black cocktail dress and pearls.

There is Em with one-year-old Inez, dressed alike in mother-daughter outfits. Em loving Inez; Em draped in something gauzy, her face clean of makeup as she teeters on thirty; Em in an afternoon dress with hat and sunglasses. Em in the same sunglasses and naked. Em close to forty in a pose patterned after Goya’s nude
maja
(“What was that again?” she asked Dean); Em in the garden; Em asleep; Em at fifty-two, with her hand to her brow.

Sometimes he painted the hollow of her throat; the repose of her hands; the directness of her glance; her hair mussed; her torso, focusing on her breasts and stomach, with a fine shading of hair that ended at her pubic line. She was clothed or naked; often not smiling or smiling small closed-mouthed smiles. He painted her feet; her flexed extended arm, fist closed like Charles Atlas; her sinewy back, with its minor muscle definition; her small waist; her buttocks, a little large, almost like animal haunches, with beginning pockmarks of fat toward the upper thigh; her legs angled so they looked better than they were. All these paintings of her various body parts. As if by dissecting his model, Dean could reconstruct her as he pleased or locate some essential center of her. Em could not decide, seeing these paintings now, as a whole, if this was love or loathing—this piecemeal approach to her person. One could say he dismembered her in this way so better to study, draw attention, or glorify each detail of her; as if his affection for her were so strong he could give it only in small doses to one part of her at a time. As if adoring her would surely overwhelm him.

It isn’t as if she has never seen these paintings, but somehow, seeing them together this way, in her rather late middle-age, almost carelessly placed about the studio, is sobering. On the one hand, she cannot recognize herself in any of them, cannot fathom that all these poses and pieces of Em are her. On the other hand, she marvels at how well Dean seems to know the many sides of her, taking care to document them all as if one day he will find himself without her, leaving behind only these myriad images.

What strikes her as well is what these perceptions of her reveal about Dean: eroticism, contentment, adoration, anger, possible danger, resentment, coolness. She finds herself saying to no one,
I swear he loves this woman
, as if it is not her, but another of Dean’s Women. She suddenly knows that she cannot leave a man who knows her in this way. Cannot walk the world without him, seeing
that she has to leave so much of herself behind. Sees how married they really are.

E
M WANDERS BACK
to their bedroom to unpack. Dean still has not returned. As she crosses to her closet, she becomes aware of the gentle swaying of a hanging plant, the shiver of the windows. Her bed-table lamp is beginning to jump and the fragile perfume bottles that sit atop her glass-top vanity are beginning to vibrate. She knows it is not a sonic boom but an earthquake. Em stands very still, in the center of the bedroom, contemplating moving to the doorway or curling up under her vanity, but earthquakes seldom frighten her and she always seems to spend the duration of them deciding the safest place to be without ever actually going there.

Then all is silent. It is over.

She feels a curious release after the quake, as if it has acted as some sort of circuit breaker in her psyche and now she can take a deep breath and start anew. It is not that she doesn’t feel that initial sense of anxiety at the onset—she does—it is just that her apprehension seldom stirs her into action. She sometimes thinks she must be either very trusting or very stupid, but she always believes that she will emerge shaken but intact.

Her first thought is,
Where is Dean?

But the rocking of the house ceases and all is quiet. She looks up to see Dean in the doorway, his face ashen and sadly in love.

D
EAN WAS NOT
what the circle called a “decent man.” But he had pockets of goodness as well as anger, and Em finally thought him precious to her. How could she leave a man who knew her so thoroughly? That is what brings on confusion in people: this sense of wandering through the world, accompanied but unknown.

She cannot abide the company he keeps with Constance and she cannot quit him. Em will contribute yellow roses and silver hearts to the upcoming
Crazy Quilt. I call it Chickie’s Garden
, Constance said to Marianna.

She cannot quit him. Will he never cease to be the child who cries to hold the moon?

W
aiting. The worst dream of the night, when you are parted from someone you love and you do not know exactly where he is but you know he is in the presence of danger. You are suspended in a state of ignorance and worry and fear. It can tear you apart like the razor teeth of a sudden beast. You are tormented by a desire to keep the one you love safe. But he may be in a far-off land, fighting a good war like World War II or an undeclared war like the Vietnam War. It makes no difference to you; these conflicts call forth men you have given birth to, men you have married, men who have fathered you. The men fight. The women wait. It takes the patience of Job.

A quilt should be kept clean and properly stored when not on display or in use. Plastic for long periods of storage is discouraged; it is better to use special acid-free wrapping paper. The sort that might hold a wedding gown long after the ceremony. It may be purchased through a firm in New York City.

Watch for water stains or damage due to rodents or moths. The problem is, you may not know when these elements or beasts threaten your quilt. You could be making dinner for your family or straightening up the front room or hosing down the garden or doing your part for the war effort in a munitions factory. You could be buying gasoline with your rationing card. All the while blissfully innocent of the risk to your quilt. You could believe it safe in an upstairs closet, attic, or basement. You have done everything the books say to store it properly, to keep it safe from harm. Yet it may not be safe.

Do not use bleach. The strong chemical will disintegrate your
quilt before your very eyes and you will have to explain to your aunt or mother or friend what happened to the quilt she gave you on the occasion of your birth, wedding, Christmas. But you know how chemicals can destroy things. Mustard gas cut a swath of permanent damage in veterans of the Great War; Agent Orange left its mark on the veterans of Vietnam.

Be gentle in your cleansing regime and keep in mind that it does the quilt no good at all to remain dirty, even slightly. Strike a delicate balance in its care. It is likely that with all your precautions your quilt will still show signs of age. Do not be alarmed. This is part of the life cycle of cloth fibers.

Set to dry on a flat surface or shower rack, if space is a problem. Extremes of temperature can affect the improperly stored quilt, specifically, heat. You understand that the jungles of Southeast Asia can be brutally hot and moist. You may notice some discoloration.

An experienced dry cleaner can sometimes help you with the problem of quilt cleaning. Remember, when doing it yourself, always test the cloth first by rubbing a modest amount of cleaning solution on a small bit of the material. Some colors or threads may run. Watch for this.

Always rinse in clear, cool water.

And remember, no matter how careful you are, you might not be able to prevent some damage to your quilt—no matter how attached you are to it, or how much of your skill and time you have invested in it or how carefully you followed all the rules for care, something unforeseen may ruin it beyond repair, leaving only the memory of the quilt behind. Do not castigate yourself; you may not be to blame. You did your best. These are fragile textiles. These things happen.

Waiting. During the forties the women left the sphere of the home to fill in the void left by the men (now soldiers) in munitions
factories or sitting in the lonely booth of a railroad switchyard. For the first time, outside jobs were held by married women, not just the young or single or poor. An increase of 57 percent. Still. There were no women doctors; no women making top-level decisions; no equal pay. And when the men came home, it was back to the house, where you were encouraged to find new dinner recipes, oversee homework of the children you were asked to give birth to—children who needed mothers waiting for them when they came home from school, husbands who expected wives to be standing at the door, martini in hand for them, the smells of supper filling the house. This vigilance of women for their families.

What no one told you about those boy children you bore was that they would one day be taken from you as your husbands once were; these boys were only on loan to you.

The popularity of quilting rises in periods of war: tailored to the Revolutionary War; recording the Civil War with its loss of 600,000 lives; the quilts that bear Victory signs or the names of kin lost in battles, locally or in places far away that you have never seen. When war was declared on December 8, 1941, the sole dissenting vote was cast by Jeanette Rankin (R) Montana (who did the same for World War I). A woman, perhaps, tired of waiting.

The newest quilt is the Names Quilt, representing those Americans who have died youthful deaths from an incurable disease. This quilt is eclectic in its beauty (consider that America is the great melting pot and no two deceased are alike), staggering in its implication of waste. It covers nine acres and bears nine thousand names. Say it slowly: nine thousand. There are towns speckling the United States with populations of a few thousand. Grasse is barely four thousand strong. A farmer can easily make a living off nine thousand acres of cotton or wheat or strawberries or citrus. The quilt weighs tons. Cloth, thread, appliqués individually weigh next to nothing but combined, bearing nine thousand patches, it is a
heavy burden. It has the capacity to crush. It originally began as a 3 × 6-foot patch. Wonder at and decry its weight gain and growth; insist that it should have been stopped at, say, thirty pounds. Express outrage that it ever grew to one hundred pounds. Be grief-stricken that it represents only 20 percent of those deceased, does not even begin to measure those afflicted. It is a waiting disease. But all this may be too sad to contemplate if you are a beginner.

Consider these items:

A quilt overseen by a northern woman called Cornelia Dow, whose husband served in the Union Army, had inked this onto her quilt:
While our fingers guide the needles, our thoughts are intense (in tents)
.

Regarding one of many quilting fairs to raise money for the war effort, Abraham Lincoln said: “I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say, that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war….God bless the women of America.”

Louisa S. McCord wrote to Mary Chestnut at the end of December 1862—Mary Chestnut, whose husband held a prominent place in the Confederate government and could be seen having dinner with Jeff Davis himself—regarding the death of her son, a Confederate soldier:
I cannot write more, but only to thank yourself and Colonel Chestnut for your efforts to help my darling. It is all over now, and it is right perhaps that the country will never know how much it has lost in my glorious boy
. You know both sides, righteous and false, can feel loss at war. And you have no doubt that Mrs. McCord put in her time waiting for him. Busied herself waiting for word of him.

There are quilts that record and pay respect to the battles of a husband or lover or father or son. Battle after battle, across time, recorded, set down for posterity. Because it is immoral to forget.
These things are not glorified, just recorded. Tattooed on the heart; burned into the family’s history. This piecing together of the life of your child; this homage; this attempt to put it all in order; and even though you will one day wish for the heartbreak to leave you, it never will.