How to Make an American Quilt (28 page)

A
S
A
NNA GREW OLDER
, it became increasingly difficult for Pauline to enter her room, with its cut-out photographs and drawings of stars and planets pinned to the walls.

Pauline went to the mrs. and asked for $25 for the quilt. The mrs., whose husband was not involved in the stock market and was left relatively untouched by the recent crash, said, “Pauline, given current events, you can certainly understand that I don’t have twenty-five dollars.”

Pauline started from the room. The mrs. said, “I’ll give you fifteen dollars.”

Fifteen
, thought Pauline.
Why, that is nothing! How can I release my quilt to someone who does not know its value, in any sense?
But Anna was more important. She was now thirteen; she was sheltered, clothed, and fed, but she needed things in this life beyond that. She should understand luxury, even small, inconsequential luxury. (Education is a luxury. Pauline scowls.) Everyone should have
something
beyond simply being alive. Besides, Anna was becoming an accomplished quilter in her own right and perhaps she could make something as beautiful as
The Life Before
.

“Twenty,” said Pauline.

The mrs. turned up her palms. “What do you want me to say? Fifteen is the best I can do.”

Pauline took in the mrs.’s new dress of lavender silk; her wrist bright with a ruby-and-pearl bracelet, a recent gift from her husband.

T
HE SALE MADE
, Anna in tears, Pauline silent. Pauline again told the mrs. the stories represented on the quilt until the mrs. listened without listening and Pauline gave up. Anna refused any thought of a telescope now, leaving Pauline to ask the mrs. if she could buy back her quilt.

“Oh, no,” said the mrs. “I couldn’t. It is too much too part with. I’m sure you understand.”

The mrs. hung it on the walls of her sitting room, where Pauline could see it as she cleaned the room. She would visit it and wonder how she ever grew to be so foolish, so miscalculating. How could she ever have thought that material things didn’t really matter, that they were all equal and interchangeable and that you still could not take them with you when you died. Pauline was ashamed to admit how much she loved the quilt.
The Life Before
. As time passed, she would still visit the quilt, but she would not touch it. She
no longer told the quilt’s stories to anyone, not even to Anna, realizing that now Anna might not remember them to tell to her children. But without the quilt as illustration, it was probably better to lose them altogether. To Pauline’s relief and dismay, the mrs. never repeated the stories to her friends, who often admired her purchase and asked if the mrs. thought Pauline could be persuaded to make one for them.

Pauline wants to laugh at them, call them stupid, and say, Don’t you know that only you can tell your story? You can’t buy someone else’s life. Then she stops. Hears her own words.
Well
, she will say if the mrs.’s friends ask her,
the quilt isn’t by my hand, in any case
. That is what she’ll say to shut them up.

A
NNA AT SIXTEEN
shows no interest in the stars. Not for years now. Nor does she freely converse with the man regarding his hobby. She does not look at the books in his study. She has removed the makeshift solar system from her walls. “I prefer them unadorned,” she says to Pauline.

She knows that Pauline misses her quilt, mourns it in silence because a Christian woman is not supposed to feel longing or regret for worldly things. Being that things of the spirit will sustain us over things of the flesh. But Pauline is lost, distracted, and distanced by the theft of her history, appropriated by someone for whom the quilt is an ornamental object and nothing more. Anna knows that Pauline only offered it up to the mrs. to gain something else for her—only to realize too late that some things cannot not be bartered. And that it was with clenched fists that Pauline conducted the sale. Knows that she parted with the wrong thing and that it cannot be undone.

Why couldn’t Anna have both things? The quilt and the telescope;
her history and her future? Why were their lives always a series of choices that seemed to cancel each other out?

As for the mrs., Anna can scarcely stand to be in the same room with her, let alone the same house; is disturbed from being that close to anyone who could buy something like the quilt; who could be that unabashedly immoral.

A
NNA DID NOT
even say good-bye when, at the age of sixteen, she left San Francisco. Left without warning. Hit the road. The night before she said to Pauline, “It grieves me to see you like this.”

“It grieves me, too,” said Pauline.

Then Anna was gone.

And
The Life Before
was gone with her.

And it was with great pleasure that Pauline approached the mrs. that day, all comfort and humility, took her hand, and placed $15 in its palm. She closed the mrs.’s fist around it and said, “I’ll make you another one.”

But the mrs. shook her head and wailed, “I wanted
that
one.”

It was with lightness of heart and step that Pauline went from the room. “Too bad,” she said softly in the hall, out of the mrs.’s earshot. “I just feel
so
sorry for you.”

A
NNA
N
EALE WENT SOUTH
to the outskirts of Bakersfield, where she became the maid of a rancher’s wife. The ranch had two business partners: one in Texas (who also had another ranch) and one in Chicago (who thought of his investment as romantic, a boyhood fantasy of the Old West). Anna’s employers had inherited their capital, then built upon it. Because they grew up privileged, they were accustomed to having servants and therefore treated them in
the old-money style, that is, neither cruel nor kind, intimate nor distant. The servants were simply invisible.

New money sometimes exercises its social muscle on hired help, reminding the servants of what they are in order to reaffirm what the employers have risen to. (Years later, during the early fifties, Anna will see the movie
Beauty and the Beast
, by Cocteau. In this film, the invisible servants of the Beast’s castle are portrayed by human arms holding candelabras or receiving garments, as well as eyes that see, carved into ornate fireplaces and chairs. Anna will say to her daughter, Marianna, “See, baby—that was my life on the ranch.” When Beauty cried, as she sat perched on the edge of the Beast’s deathbed, her tears transformed into diamonds, falling into her hands, dropping onto the Beast’s inanimate form. This will be the most memorable part of the movie for Marianna, not the invisible servants.)