How to Make an American Quilt (34 page)

T
HEN CAME
that nasty business when James Dodd was dying and Glady Joe nearly destroyed every fragile object in the house. Certainly, it was no secret to Anna, who kept the house (the same way she kept books at the five-and-dime), that Arthur and Glady Joe Cleary maintained separate bedrooms. (“Why, if I had a man of my own,” mused Anna one afternoon, “I’d hold him close to me at all times, revel in his warm breath, thrill to his touch. We would exchange love; even if miles apart, we would exchange love. He would walk the world and still know that we belong to each other.” Glady
Joe did not look up from her embroidery. “Yes, one would think that, I suppose.”)

There is the night, with James laid up in the hospital and Hy over to the house, when the three of them decide to watch slides. As Arthur sets up the slide projector, Anna hears, “Goddamn bulb.” (To Glady Joe:) “Did you think to buy some extra?”

Hy swings by Anna, through the dining room and into the kitchen, to pour something to drink while Glady Joe searches for a good light bulb and Arthur tinkers with the projector.

“I know about you and Arthur,” hisses Anna.

And Hy is not stupid enough to say something like
Whatever do you mean?
like some wronged, simpering belle. Instead she meets Anna’s look head-on and says, “Actually, I don’t believe you do.”

“No one expects you to live an exemplary life, only a truthful one.”

“Anna,” says Hy, “I’ve known you most of my life and I love you like family but this is none of your business.”

“I can see how you love your family,” says Anna.

“
If
you were married,” says Hy, “you’d understand.
If
your husband were dying.”

“You mean I’d understand loss? About wanting something for yourself? For someone who has known me practically her entire life, I am surprised at how little
you
understand. Do you really think you are the only person ever told, No, you can’t have this thing? The only one set aside by God?” Anna trembles. “Just don’t love me like family. Will you do that for me?”

G
LADY
J
OE AND
H
Y
sit side by side on the sofa, with Arthur behind them working the projector and Anna secreted in the shadows of the dining room. Tonight they are searching out photographs of James, who lies in the hospital, close to death.

There is Hy on the screen, just after Will was born; he stares uninterestedly at his mother. Hy’s attention is focused on Will, though James is by her side. She is wearing a sophisticated black suit with gold hoops in her pierced ears and a custom-made gold choker about her throat. Her hair is pulled back with a black velvet cord and her eyes are hidden behind cats’-eye sunglasses. James looks more like Grasse in his white dress shirt, jeans, and work boots. “God, look at us,” says Hy, laughing. “I can’t believe I dressed like that around here.”

“Yes,” says Glady Joe, “but you looked like somebody. You really did.”

“And James,” says Hy, “like he can’t seem to make up his mind as to being a farmer or a businessman. Poor James.”

“Wait, wait,” says Arthur, holding a slide close to the light before slipping it into the projector. “This one you’ll remember.” And suddenly all four of them are seated at a dime-sized table, at the Coconut Grove in Hollywood sometime in 1963. They are drinking martinis and sweet Manhattans, unaware these cocktails are out of vogue. Both Hy and Glady Joe, easily in their mid-forties, look ageless; they could be just that much younger or slightly older, each at a point where she has a certain glow or grace, which comes for the first time in a woman’s life when she is very young, then visits a second, final time, in middle age.

Glady Joe’s black dress is cut straight across her bosom with a jade-and-ruby broach affixed to one of the spaghetti straps. Her hair is done up in a French twist. Hy, on the other hand, glitters in green velvet with beading. Around her neck, again, is the gold choker, and in her ears antique emerald earrings—a gift from James for their wedding anniversary, which they are all celebrating this night. James’s forearm lies across the table, his other arm rests on Hy’s bare shoulder. He smiles for the camera, but one can imagine him turning all his attention back to his sparkling wife as soon as
the shutter clicks. Glady Joe and Arthur are not touching, but smiling over at Hy and James, both looking in the same direction without crossing their lines of vision.

“God, that was fun,” says Hy, “to be out of Grasse for the weekend.”

“And remember the Ambassador?” asks Arthur.

“I remember,” says Glady Joe, as she fights with the anger that wells up inside her, looking at this record of their lives, now made so false by her husband and sister. She does not want to give herself away. She sits quietly, as if she feels nothing.

More slides of Will as an infant/toddler/child/teenager/college student. Slides of Gina. Of Francie and Kayo. Slides of Finn, Will’s daughter by a girl named Sally, who believed in free love and no ties that bind. (“But you have a
baby
,” insisted James when they announced they would not marry in any case. “What stronger tie is there in nature? Why not give her your name? Tell me that. Make me understand, Will.” Hy winces at the memory of Will storming from the house with Sally and little Finn, saying, “Just kiss your granddaughter good-bye,
James
.” Which broke James’s heart—to have his grandchild taken from him and to hear his own son call him “James,” never again to call him Dad. And the way he spat out his father’s name, with such naked disregard. Crazy to think that Will and Sally ended up married after all, only to divorce a short time later.)

Birthday parties with James dressed like Zorro; Christmas with Arthur decked out as Santa Claus (“Of course I’m not the
real
Santa Claus,” he told Will and Gina and Francie and Kayo, who always spent Christmas Eve together; “I’m only one of his helpers”).

Photographs of James’s new office or Arthur’s new building; pictures of investments like an oil well or a citrus grove.

There were Easter Bunny suits, Halloween face makeup when James took the kids out, leaving Hy at home to dole out candy to the trick-or-treaters. Anniversaries, birthdays, holiday meals. And the
changing furniture of their respective houses, as Early American gave way to Danish Modern, which eventually made room for some low-slung Japanese items; the best of each era always remaining to be blended with the new arrivals. Always upscale; never looking back. Their houses eventually reflecting the many tastes and stages of their lives, the embarrassingly tacky juxtaposed with the refined.

Anna stands behind all of them as she watches the screen from the dining room. She sees herself serving cake or posing with Marianna in the garden. Marianna older than the other children by a good ten years. She looks solemn and smart and gorgeous. Anna shy to stand beside her.

Marianna’s high school graduation goes up on the screen along with the celebration dinner at the Clearys’ house; Marianna’s excitement at being accepted to an agricultural college up north (not knowing immediately that her tuition was being paid by Anna and Glady Joe together).

Anna watches this summary of their lives, feeling just the smallest regret that she did not allow herself to be photographed more often—as if by hiding from the camera she could somehow deny just how inextricably bound her life was to the people in the pictures.
Why, there is no simple way to show either of our personal histories without including the other’s
.

Mostly she thinks,
My Marianna was a beautiful child
, and the pump of adoration into her heart almost feels as if it could knock her over.
My Marianna
.

T
ake a variety of fabrics: velvet, satin, silk, cotton, muslin, linen, tweed, men’s shirting; mix with a variety of notions: buttons, lace, grosgrain, or thick silk ribbon lithographed with city scenes, bits of drapery, appliqués of flora and fauna, honeymoon cottages, and clouds. Puff them up with: down, kapok, soft cotton, foam, old stockings. Lay between the back cloth a large expanse of cotton batting; stitch it all together with silk thread, embroidery thread, nylon thread. The stitches must be small, consistent, and reflect a design of their own.

The inexperienced eye will be impressed by the use of color, design, appliqué, and pattern, but the quilter will hold the work between her fingers and examine the stitches. Or she will lay out the quilt and analyze the overall pattern the stitches follow. The quilting can resemble birds and flowers and hearts afire and fleurs de lys. It can look like anything. While the nonquilter will recognize the craftsmanship of this quilt, she will not be “consciously” aware of it; she will only sense that she is viewing a superior work and mistakenly attribute it to a clever use of fabric contrast and color.

Consider the fact that some roses cannot survive the environment into which they are born. Consider the fact that grafting a more delicate plant onto a hardier stock will probably make for a superior rosebush—one that can not only withstand the hostile environment, but thrive within it.

English walnut grafted to black walnut results in a less greasy nut meat. The sour orange used as a base for the Mars orange is virtually uneatable, while the fruit of the Mars is very sweet.

If the Brazilian nut will accept the soybean graft the product will be nutritionally superior, one rich in protein.

A budding knife resembles a fish-boning knife with its sharp blade and curved tip.

A seam ripper is a curve of sharp metal at the end of a long handle.

Here are your tools: A budding knife and a flat board with four wheels and gloves and thin white rubber bands. That is all. Your needs for the graft procedure are simple, unadorned, well defined. There is no question unanswered.

Except why would a rose geminate in unfriendly soil; why does it seek its life only to find it cannot survive it? Do not think about it now.

The almond trees of the San Joaquin Valley look like dark trunks attached to white bases. They are painted white. This is better to see them in the shadows of the grove and has nothing, really nothing, to do with grafting, though it would appear that it does. This demarcation of base root to upper trunk.

You understand these divisions, this fusion of two distinct elements.

People remark on your beauty. You want to say that you are a result of polarities of color and culture; that you are the gorgeous, restless sum of your parts; that you are what people are so afraid of, this rare sort of mix. But the aggregate that is you is so seamless, so smooth, that no one—including yourself—can see where your father’s lines leave off and your mother’s pick up.

T-bud grafting requires a T cut in the primary growth. This should be done on the side of the stalk, just below the node—or eye, as it is commonly called. Be sure the section to be grafted also contains
an eye. All the information the rosebush needs is held in the eye. Now. Toward the base, where the plant meets the soil, slip the eye into the T. Your stalk should look “whole,” not like two separate pieces; the fusion should give the illusion of oneness.

Take a piece of white rubber. Cut a hole in it. Wrap securely around the graft area (a bobby pin will hold it in place). This serves to keep out infection and dirt. Remember: The meeting of the eye to the primary growth must be clean and perfectly fitted. If you do not graft close enough to the base, where the plant meets the soil, it will dry up and the graft will be unsuccessful.

On the matter of a perfect match—this is really more important for tree grafts than for rosebush grafts, but you are a perfectionist by nature and would be loath to perform a sloppy joining in the first place.

Remember the names: primary growth and meristematic growth and the eye. The eye knows everything. The eye serves as biological memory. (
Q:
What has four eyes but cannot see?
A:
Mississippi.) Soon the graft will take and the rubber piece can be removed and discarded.

Grafted roses can be found by the side of municipal highways, in building lobbies, in nurseries, or in the hands of a lover, passed from one to the other.

Fusion, union, grafting, joining, sex, friendship, love: the difficult combination of disparate elements.

Virginia Law, 1753:
A woman servant who begets a bastard child by her master shall be sold by the church wardens for one year after her time is expired. If a free Christian white woman has a child by a Negro or mulatto she shall pay the church warden 15 pounds current money or be sold by them for five years and the child made a servant until thirty-one years of age. Any intermarriage between black and white, free or bound, shall be fined 10 pounds and spend six months in jail without bail.

Virginia Law, 1910:
Any person having one sixteenth or more of Negro blood shall be deemed a “coloured person.”

Virginia Law, 1924:
A white person must marry a white person and that any falsification of birth records regarding race (in order to marry) shall be deemed illegal and punished.

Virginia Law, 1932:
Any intermarriage between white and coloured is illegal and carries a sentence of between one and five years in a penitentiary.

Antebellum American South:
Slaves cannot be manumitted except for special and specific circumstances; cannot be taught to read or write; cannot worship in private; cannot bear firearms; cannot purchase medicine; cannot marry, hence, cannot have “legitimate” children; cannot “own” their children or spouses if not free; cannot control their own points of sale; cannot break a will leaving them as inherited property to a named beneficiary; cannot gather in a group; cannot have relations with white persons, though the white persons may have relations with them; cannot testify in a court of law; cannot bear witness;
can
be “striped,” linked in a coffle, owned, raped, disfigured, and murdered; cannot keep their own earnings when hired out to someone else; and, much later, cannot attend school, ride buses, frequent restaurants, or drink from anything marked
WHITE ONLY
.

Your favorite quilts are those that are abstract. You try to love the more representational styles of quilts, try to warm to the
Honeymoon Cottage
pattern, the
Drunkard’s Progress
, or the
Repeating Fans
, but you cannot. You prefer the quilt that looks like music or dance; the ephemeral arts. You stitch a flurry of magenta and blue crescents and you know
exactly
what you are seeing; you know what they represent. These abstractions look like pictures to you, even if they do not to the other quilters in the circle. They accuse you of rejecting tradition. You counter by saying that you are making your own traditions, that they are correct—
tradition
has little meaning for you.

And you, born in 1935, in college in 1953, feel both affection and disgust for this place in which you were born, this hostile soil. Because nothing has really changed in your lifetime; because you carry more than one sixteenth Negro blood; because you understand the theory and application of separate but equal; because your daily and biological life is so tightly wound into a world that appears to want to forget you exist; because you cannot travel freely in the United States; because you are seen as black; because Rosa Parks has not yet made her famous bus ride; because of all this, because you are educated and black and white and not welcome in this place of your birth; because you understand, historically, where you stand, you will leave this place.

You will relocate elsewhere, to make you strong.

You will one day return and make quilts like your mother before you and her mother before her, and all of the women will be suitably impressed at the expert way in which you join your pieces of cloth. They will think your mother taught you well.