How to Make an American Quilt (7 page)

“W
HAT
I
DON’T UNDERSTAND
,” says Arthur to Glady Joe as she stands atop a small ladder in the laundry room, “is why you have never blamed Hy.”

“What makes you think I don’t?” She does not look at her husband,
who leans against the wall with crossed arms, watching her painstakingly apply fragments of porcelain to the walls in intricate patterns.

“Because you still talk to her.”

“I still talk to you, too.” Glady Joe, unhappy with the shape of this particular piece, exchanges it in her box for another. Soon she will run out of shards from this broken bowl and will have to find something else—maybe those remnants from the vase she broke the second night of her fury at Arthur.

“This is really creepy, you know,” says Arthur, jerking his chin in the direction of the wall that Glady Joe is decorating. “Couldn’t you just toss that stuff out? Couldn’t you just let Anna get rid of it?”

“Arthur,” sighs Glady Joe, then repeats “Arthur,” but says nothing more to him. She wants to say, Arthur, I am not the kind of person who throws away something because it is broken. I would not waste what could still be of use.
(Quilts are comprised of spare time as well as excess material.)

She applies more glue to the back of a piece of glass, affixes it to the wall. Since she began this project, a week after the throwing frenzy, she has felt a sense of purpose and calm, as if this is the only way she can somehow go on with her life—transforming these pieces of junk, swept up from her bedroom and bathroom floors, into art. Anna whistled at the extent of the damage done over a couple of days. She bent over to clean up the mess that had once been figurines, vases, small dishes and bowls, picture frames, boxes, even the tiny clay animals Francie and Kayo had made in grade school—all of which had been laid to waste—these shattered markers of the Cleary marriage; their life together as one.

T
HE WALLS BEGAN
to look like three-dimensional Persian rugs. It took a good length of time to complete the laundry room, and Glady
Joe ran out of materials. So she turned to bright bits of glass, beads, shells. Pieces of tile. Then made her move to the back den. She had not intended to go this far; actually, she did not know what to expect when she began the project, she only knew that it helped to hold her fractured life together. She was careful to close the door when the quilting circle met at her house. The women of the circle could sense a coolness between Hy and Glady Joe, but they thought it had something to do with James’s illness and his nearness to death. If that can’t affect your personality, they reasoned, nothing can.

When Hy visits, she stands outside the doors of these rooms, usually in a stance of her arms holding each other, in an embrace of self. She rarely says anything directly about the rooms—though Glady Joe occasionally wishes she would so she could lash out something hurtful at her, about her being responsible, and so on—instead, she takes on an air of concession.

Once Hy said, “It’s just that the effect is so—” She searched for the correct word. “So
what
?” demanded Glady Joe. “I don’t know,” said Hy, “busy or aggressive or…I don’t know.” Dropped her eyes to the floor.

Y
EARS LATER
, this is what Glady Joe will tell Finn as she walks beside her on the campus of the midwestern college Finn attends, while Hy naps in the soon-to-be-vacated apartment. Finn had just completed her spring term when her grandmother and great aunt decided to visit. And, of course, there is the little matter of their pot supply.

Glady Joe is explaining what happened, all those years ago, when Finn’s grandfather was dying and Glady Joe was crazy from betrayal and looking for blood.

“I decided,” she says, “to go to the hospital and tell James
about Hy and Arthur. May he rest in peace. I thought, I’ll bring him ice cream—his favorite, pralines and cream, and he will look up, happy to see me, trusting (no one should be so trusting, I thought), and I will sit on the bed, take his still good hand…no, I will stand at the foot and look him in the eye…no, better to pull up a chair and say something like, ‘James, you and I are so much alike. Foolish and trusting. I always liked you tremendously and I think my sister was fortunate to have you for a husband’—I thought, oh, god, what if he whispers in that difficult way of his that he loves Hy too?—‘but here’s the thing—she isn’t worthy of you. She cannot be trusted not to hurt those who trust her. I know she’s a goddamn “people person,” but maybe all that means is that you see them as some sort of highly evolved pets that you can love or abandon as you desire. She abandoned you, James. We are so joined by her; she abandoned us both.’ ”

“Jesus, Aunt Glady,” says Finn.

“I thought, Let the man die enlightened. Let him carry this burden of knowledge beside me. I was crazy, Finn—I would’ve done anything.

“But when I got to the hospital, with the pralines and cream, I looked in to see Hy curled in bed beside James—they really did adore one another, you know, your grandparents—she was stroking his cheek and whispering, ‘You were always so clean-shaven during our marriage, so properly groomed, but I rather like you like this. So bohemian. I always thought you had the itch to be bohemian.’

“James’s words were soft because the disease affected his lung and throat muscles. ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ I heard him say.

“ ‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever be sorry. It is pointless. I don’t want to talk about regret. I want to tell you how I love you.’ And I got to thinking of something I read somewhere which said that, after everything in our lives—after all we do or say or hope for—all that will be left finally, is love.

“There I was, eavesdropping in the hall, only partially recovered from what had happened between Hy and Arthur, still a little crazy—but I knew I could not do it. I could not. I came to hate myself for thinking that I could. I came to understand that betrayal cuts both ways. It would not have changed anything and, besides, I thought of what Hy was going through and the loss she was feeling and how I felt when I found out about her and Arthur and the loss I felt. And then there is the matter of blood.

“I stepped away from the door and walked down the corridor, even though the ice cream was melting. I needed to collect myself. Then I went back to his room, where we all ate from the carton, Hy spooning it into James’s mouth since he could not do it for himself. I thought about family. I thought about forgiveness.”

Glady Joe asks Finn if they can rest for a moment.

Sure, she tells her, knowing that she needs to ask about staying with them for the summer, something that she only this moment decided to do. Finds a bench where they can sit.

A
LL THIS HAPPENED
two weeks before James Dodd passed away. Before Glady Joe came into the room with the melting ice cream, James said to Hy, “Miss me?”

“Terribly,” she answered.

“The hell of it,” he said slowly, with great effort, “is that when you touch me like this, I can’t touch you back. I can feel you but I can’t touch you.” He was exhausted by what he had just said.

Hy wanted to cry because she knew that what he described was how she would feel about him after he died—that she would live the rest of her life able to feel him, his presence in her life, but not touch him.

“Do you want me to adjust your feet?” she asked. James nodded.

“So irritating,” he whispered.

Then she was startled by the sound of Glady Joe entering the room. Hy thought her sister looked like a woman with a purpose, and was suddenly afraid.

She watched Glady Joe lean into James to kiss him and receive a kiss. She saw her settle on the bed beside him. “My favorite,” he said when she handed Hy a spoon for the ice cream. They began to chat easily, and Hy felt, was almost certain, that something had changed within her sister. It was as if something had been resolved or a fight resulted in a draw.

Earlier, when James had asked Hy if she missed him, she wanted to say, I’ve been missing you for months, and christ, life without you is so hard and empty and I have done a terrible thing, which is to take my sister’s husband. I claimed him. I took him because you were being taken and no one asked me, so I took Arthur, unasked, and I know I’ll never recover from the love I feel for you. I wish that I could talk to Glady Joe. I wish I could ask her why our lives are so brief when we still have so much love for each other. Sometimes I envy those old married couples who never talk or touch and really don’t care much for each other’s company, because I know they won’t feel this severing, this unhappiness. It seems that our love should sustain us, instead of killing me, which is all loving you is doing for me now. Glady Joe once told me that we seek people we love in this life so after death we can be transformed into a surge of light and attract to us other particles of light, which are the essence of those people we loved on earth.