Project Mulberry (8 page)

At least I was really and truly interested in the sewing part.

So we agreed that while we were waiting for the eggs, Patrick would do more research on silkworms, and I'd practice my embroidery.

My mom taught me two more stitches: outline stitch and satin stitch.

Outline stitch was exactly that—you used it to make outlines. Outline stitch was
hard.
It was hard to get the stitches to come out as a nice line on both sides. It looked best if I took little tiny stitches, but that was frustrating: I'd work and work for, like, half an hour, until my neck was all cramped from being bent over, and I'd end up with a line that wasn't even an inch long.

Satin stitch was the most important of all the stitches, because you used it to fill in spaces. Which meant that
most
of the stitches you put in to make a picture were satin stitches. Satin stitch was more fun in one way because you got to take bigger stitches. But it also had its bad side: I had to be sure to pull the thread through
exactly
right. Too tight and the fabric would bunch up underneath. Too loose and the stitch would sag.

At the beginning I'd ask my mom to check my work. She thought I was doing pretty well, but she always pointed out little mistakes—my stitches weren't exactly the same size, or I hadn't lined them up perfectly. "Anyone can stick a needle in and out," she said. "If you want to get really good at embroidery, it's the little things that count. Because all those little things go together, to make the big picture."

Embroidering for me was mostly un-embroidering. I'd take five stitches, look at my work, turn it over, and look at the other side—and I'd have to pick out the last two and do them over. But the funny thing was, I didn't really mind.

It was weird, because normally I hated having to do things over. I hated having to rewrite a homework assignment. Or when I was younger and the Snotbrain-Maelstrom trashed something I'd built and I had to make it again.

It was different with embroidery. I got so it would bug me when a stitch wasn't just right, and I was
glad
to take it out and fix it.

When I wasn't embroidering, I was drawing little sketches. I was trying to decide what my embroidery project would be—what I would stitch once I had our very own homemade silk thread.

I was in my room before bed one night sketching. My mom's embroidered flowers were so pretty—maybe I should do flowers. I drew a flower, five petals on top of a stem.

Bo-o-o-ring.

I tried drawing more flowers—rose, daffodil, tulip. Still boring. I went back to the five-petaled flower and drew it a few more times, making the petals different shapes. Round in one sketch, then oval, then long and skinny, then triangles ... That one looked sort of like a star.

I guess thinking about the star distracted me, because then I started drawing stars. The kind where your pencil never leaves the paper.

Then I tried drawing just the outline, without any of those inside lines. Much harder. I drew four of them in a row, all lopsided.

I started to draw another one, and for some reason—maybe because I'd drawn them all in a row—I wondered how many stars were in each row on the American flag. Not something I was going to look up, but maybe the next time I saw a flag...

Flag?

Flag!

That was how I could make the project more American! I could use the thread we made to embroider an American flag!

I jumped off my bed and ran to find my mom. She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth.

"Mom, after we make the thread, could we dye it? I need three colors—wait, the thread will already be white, right? So really I only need two—red and blue. I want to embroider an American flag—do they sell the kind of dye we'd need? Like, the stuff you use for tie-dyeing? I don't think it would be that hard—"

Sheesh. I sounded like Patrick when he gets excited. I saw my mom's face in the mirror, her mouth full of white foam.

"Jush a minute," she said. She spat and rinsed and put her toothbrush away. Then she turned to face me. "I'm sure dyeing the thread is possible, but I don't have any experience with that. My grandmother just made the thread, then she sent it off somewhere to get dyed and made into cloth, so we never did that part."

"Oh." I thought for a second. "But that doesn't mean we couldn't try."

"No, but there's something else. An American flag would be really difficult to embroider, especially if you want to make it a good size."

"I was thinking, like half a piece of paper, that size?" I said.

"Okay. The stripes are basically long skinny rectangles, right?" My mom drew stripes in the air with her fingers. "That's one of the most difficult shapes to embroider well." She shook her head. "Definitely not something I'd recommend for beginners."

Dang it!

"I'll practice a lot," I said.

"Julia, please. You need to consider something smaller. That's why flowers look nice in embroidery—the petals are small, the leaves are small. Satin stitches look much better when they don't have to cover so much space."

Double dang it!

My mom picked up a sponge and started wiping down the sink. "Don't worry, sweetheart. I'm sure you'll think of something clever."

I went back to my room a little discouraged. But not
too
discouraged, because I still thought I was onto something. It didn't have to be the flag, but the embroidery part could be really American, and that would balance out the Koreanness of the silkworm part.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe the flag wasn't such a great idea after all. Because it wasn't very ... creative. I mean, it wasn't something I'd designed by myself. If I embroidered the flag, I'd be sewing a design that someone else had made up.

Sigh. I had more thinking to do.

 

Meanwhile, Patrick was
full
of ideas. On the way to and from school he hardly ever stopped talking.

"Jules, listen to this. We could borrow a video camera. And once the eggs come, we'll set everything up and film them every day—for, like, thirty seconds or a minute or so. And we'll have everything on tape, from the time they're tiny eggs all the way to the end, but it will be like time-lapse photography, in one film."

"Wow," I said. "That's a
great
idea."

"We can take still photographs, too. And put them together into, like, an album. So we can show people what we did even if there isn't a TV handy."

Things really started to move after that. Mr. Maxwell arranged for us to borrow one of the community center's camcorders. Patrick got permission to use his dad's regular camera. My dad moved our barbecue down to the basement so we'd have room to keep the silkworms on the back porch. He also brought up an old aquarium—he'd kept tropical fish for a hobby when he was a bachelor—which was where the worms would live.

Mr. Maxwell gave us some scraps of lumber from his farm, and Patrick's parents donated an old bent window screen. I spent the next Wiggle meeting making a frame out of the wood and stapling the screen in place to make a lid for the aquarium, so the worms would have plenty of air but not be able to escape.

Mr. Dixon's phone number was pinned to my bulletin board, but Patrick said we wouldn't need it; he had the number memorized.

"It's 555-5088," he'd told me. (A whole bunch of times.) "Fifty for the number of states—states-and-eights, it all rhymes, get it?"

We were ready. The only thing we needed was the eggs.

 

Me:
I'm feeling a little better.

Ms. Park:
Glad to hear it.

Me:
Told you I could fix things.

Ms. Park:
But now you have to do the project.

Me:
I know, I know. And I still think it's too Korean. But I'm getting some ideas on how I can fix that, too.

Ms. Park:
So I noticed. In fact, that whole flag thing was
your
idea. What I mean is, while I was working on that scene when you were drawing and doodling, I tried my very hardest to be you. I even took a pencil and started drawing flowers, and then stars. I don't know if the flag idea would have come up if I hadn't been imagining I was you.

Me:
So it's like even though I'm part of your Imagination, I'm my own person, too?

Ms. Park:
Yes. That's for sure. You think
I'd deliberately Invent a character who was
as much trouble as you are?

Me:
Me, trouble? Oh, please. Kenny, now,
he's trouble.

Ms. Park:
Kenny does not keep me awake at night talking my
ear off.

Me:
Yeah, well, at least I leave you alone in the
bathroom now.

Patrick figured that our order would take two or three days to get to the company, and their website said they shipped in a week to ten days. So it would be around two weeks before we'd get the eggs.

It was
exactly
two weeks.

Kenny was waiting on the front walk when we got back from another Wiggle meeting. He started yelling as soon as he saw us turn the corner onto our street.

"Julia! The worms came today! The worms are here!"

Patrick beat me to the door by two steps. We charged into the house with the Snotbrain right behind us.

"Let me see! I wanna see!" Kenny yelled.

The package was on the kitchen table. It was a square cardboard box about the size of a cantaloupe.

My mom came over to watch. I let Patrick open the parcel while I stood guard between him and Kenny. The Snotbrain could destroy the eggs in a split second if I wasn't careful.

Inside the box were a million of those foam peanuts. Patrick dug through them very, very carefully. He pulled out a little square foam block taped across the middle.

"Here," he said as he held it out to me. He was using his fingertips, like it was really fragile. "You open it."

That was nice of him, I thought. I pulled off the tape; now I could separate the foam square into two halves. Snuggled in between was a clear plastic tube—sort of like a tiny test tube. It had a cap on it.

I held the tube so Patrick could see it. The eggs inside looked like tiny dark seeds.

"None of them have hatched yet," Patrick said, sounding relieved.

Kenny pulled on my arm. "Julia, Julia, lemme see!"

"Kenny! Quit it!" I jerked my arm away from him.

"Kenny, here," Patrick said. "I'll show you, but you have to promise not to touch."

Not possible,
I thought, and I was about to say so, but just then Kenny put his hands behind his back. "I won't. I won't touch, I just wanna see."

Patrick took the tube from me and held it lower so Kenny could see it. Kenny frowned. "Those aren't worms," he said.

What a dope. "Duh," I said. "They're
eggs.
They have to hatch into worms."

Patrick put the tube back into the box. "We have to keep them in the refrigerator for now," he said. "We can't take them out until we have food for them."

The first thing Patrick did after we stored the eggs safely in the fridge was to read the brochure that came with the package. It said that you could pick the mulberry leaves and store them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for up to five days. "So we won't need to go over to Mr. Dixon's every day," he said. "We can get five days' worth at a time."

"How many leaves is that?" I asked.

"It changes," he said. "When they're first hatched, they're so tiny they hardly eat anything. The bigger they get, the more they eat. We'll just have to figure it out as we go along."

It was time to call Mr. Dixon.

"States-and-eights," Patrick said with a grin.

 

Mr. Dixon said to come over anytime. He also said we didn't have to ring the bell; we could just walk through the back gate and get the leaves whenever we needed them. He said it was okay even if he wasn't home.

My mom talked to me after I hung up the phone. I explained the arrangement to her.

"Good," she said. "Just get what you need without a fuss, okay? I don't want you bothering him."

Her perfect face.

Maybe she really did want to make sure we didn't disturb Mr. Dixon.

Or maybe she just didn't want us spending much time with him.

I hoped it was the first reason, but because of her perfect face, I wasn't sure.

I hated not being sure.

 

We decided to take fifteen leaves the first time—three leaves a day for five days. "After five days, the leaves won't be fresh anymore," Patrick said. "The caterpillars don't drink, they get water by eating the leaves, so dried-up leaves aren't any good."

Everything went fine at Mr. Dixon's house. We made sure to take only a few leaves from any one branch, and we were out the gate again in a few minutes. We didn't see Mr. Dixon. I was a little disappointed. I liked his accent.

Back home, we took out three leaves and stored the rest in the lettuce drawer of the fridge. The brochure that came with the worms said to use petri dishes, but we didn't have any. My mom gave us a shallow glass bowl that she didn't use much anymore.

I sprayed water on a coffee filter with my mom's plant mister. I put the damp paper in the bowl, then put the three leaves on top of the paper. That was what the instructions in the brochure said to do, even though the leaves wouldn't get eaten until the eggs hatched. Maybe putting the eggs on the leaves made them feel more like they were out in nature.

Patrick took out the tube that held the eggs. He uncapped the tube and poured the eggs onto the leaves. They were too tiny to count, but there were definitely more than twenty-five.

"I guess they give you extra," Patrick said.

We put the bowl into the aquarium, and I lowered its screen lid. "They won't be able to crawl for a while after they hatch," Patrick said. "They'll be too weak at first. But we might as well get into the habit of using the screen, because sooner or later they
might
be able to crawl out."