Housebroken

by Laurie Notaro

  Still, I was terrified. I had visions of myself walking around the mall in a dress that slowly begins to fall apart—first the sleeves, then the skirt, then the bodice. And then I’d be standing outside of American Eagle in a bra and girdle, almost as naked as the mannequins in the window wearing clothes.

  Or what if I made a dress and I thought it was awesome, but everyone else thought it would be a perfect fit for a sister wife? My mother used to sew, and made a lot of our clothes when we were little kids. I decided to get her take on it.

  “Oh god,” she said immediately. “Why? Why? That’s what poor people do!”

  “You used to make our clothes,” I reminded her.

  “Yes!” she said. “Because we were poor! It was the seventies. Gas and sugar were expensive! But TV, that was free then.”

  “I can’t find any clothes I like in my size,” I explained. “All the chubby girl clothes are awful.”

  “Tell me about it,” she complained. “I haven’t touched a button in fifteen years.”

  “Do you think I can do it?” I asked.

  She scoffed. “If a six-year-old in India can do it, so can you!” she asserted with pride. “But I’m telling you right now, if you start making long skirts and sunbonnets, I’m calling your doctor.”

  I was still nervous when I showed up to the first class, and was a little stunned to find out that I was the only person in the class allowed to vote aside from the instructor.

  They were children. Not like the kids making clothes for the Gap, but children by American standards. College freshmen and high school girls.

  I guess I’m just a late-in-life seamstress, I told myself. I’m the only person in this room who has danced to the original version of “You Spin Me Round.” In a gay bar. When I still wore clothes with zippers.

  The first class wasn’t hard. We learned how to thread a machine, practiced sewing a seam, going backward, and how to change a bobbin. All in all, it really wasn’t that difficult, and there wasn’t a lot to remember. If you paid attention to what you were doing, you could hardly go wrong.

  With that obstacle and the basics under my belt, I learned something even more important at the next class. If you make a dress out of a sheet that you got at Goodwill, as all of my classmates did and thought themselves very clever for doing so, you will end up with a dress that looks like it was made out of a sheet from Goodwill.

  Maybe I’m a snob, but if I’m going to spend the time and effort cutting out a pattern, stitching up the pieces, hemming it, and putting buttons/zippers/fasteners on it, it is not going to be with fabric that has even come close to having had contact with the naked flesh of a stranger or any of their body fluids. I looked at the girls wrapping themselves in those disgusting sheets and I wanted to throw up. For all they knew, someone died in them. It happens. My sister sold Nana’s bed at a garage sale for fifty bucks with nary a mention that it was where a little old lady drew her last breath, and the bed could feasibly be haunted by a four-foot, eight-inch Italian woman floating above it demanding that someone turn on Law and Order and get her a Werther’s, immediately. People go to hell for things like that, you know. Those sheets are out there somewhere, too. Someone has them. Someone’s sleeping on them or wearing them as a maxi dress. Not gonna be me.

  I made my dress from silk, bought at Jo-Ann because I had a forty-percent-off coupon, so that makes up for it a little. I figured if this was going to be a dress I would wear, the fabric had to be important. It had to be something that I liked, and not something that I could have gone to the Women’s World section in Target and bought. Because that was the point, wasn’t it, to make things I couldn’t get anywhere else?

  And that’s what I kept in mind when I finished my first dress, with a bodice so big I could have breastfed a preschooler in there, which I wore exactly twice, and wore it proudly. My second dress was a little bit better, straighter seams, a cute vintage pattern from the 1950s that I bought and made out of pink lawn fabric with tiny roses on it. I even got a compliment on it. My third dress was made from a 1960s pattern in a stretch Ralph Lauren wool that I picked up online for just three dollars a yard, and I actually added trim to it and beautiful vintage glass buttons.

  Every time I made another dress, I learned something else. How to sew French seams, how to slash a facing to make it fit a curve, how to not punch the dress form when I kept on insisting that the facing went on backward. Today, I still remain thankful that the dress form doesn’t have hands to call the cops on me.

  The thing is, when you realize you can make pretty much anything you want, in whatever color and with arm holes big enough to fit the giant redwoods that sprout from your shoulders, things can get a little out of hand.

  When I filled up my first cupboard with fabric, I thought, Wow. I’ve got enough here to supply me the rest of my life with incredible dresses. But the problem was that manufacturers didn’t stop making fabric after that. Even though I had enough, they would make a sueded silk I had to have, or a polka-dotted jacquard that would look awesome as a skirt, or a Liberty lawn, that fabric that was so retro forties that I had to have four yards of it to create a dress.

  The overflow from the cupboard went into bins, and it was at this point that I realized that I had a growing problem and a growing collection. The complication is that I’m an expert shopper, I am literally the cheapest person I know, and now that I have figured out where to go and what to buy, you’ll never again see me at Jo-Ann with a forty-percent-off coupon in my hand. Once, on a trip to Los Angeles, I wandered into the garment district and ended up at UPS with a friend who had to help me carry fifty pounds of fabric while I prayed that my husband wasn’t home when it was delivered. But when you’re looking at amazing fabric at three bucks a yard, that’s twelve dollars for a dress. Twelve dollars. That’s cheaper than slave labor, cheaper! When you are the slave, the dress is practically free!

  So then I had to turn my office closet into storage for the new, wonderful fabrics I found and carted home, or bought online, or, once or twice, found at Goodwill. I have even found, several times, the exact fabrics that my favorite designer uses on eight-hundred-dollar dresses that I could never afford. But that I have made.

  And I am not alone. Everyone who has taken up sewing tells the same story. One day, they’re making something out of cotton, and the next, a contractor has drawn up plans for an extra fabric room. ROOM. My friend Marjorie had to add a room to her house, almost like she was adopting another child. And as outlandish as that seems, I understand it, and I am so jealous I could spit. When I think of an entire room full of my favorite fabric, I experience a joy so enormous it’s as if I’m drinking a Coke Icee through a chocolate Twizzler straw. I might even be wearing candy clothes; I don’t know, because the happiness is so completely overwhelming, I am simply dazzled.

  Then, one day, I was in Phoenix at a fabric remnant store that is, by far, my favorite place to feed my addiction. They sell mill ends and buy the returned fabrics from many of the online retailers that carry some pretty high-end stuff. Silk chiffon for ninety-nine cents a pound. Liberty lawn for three dollars a yard. (I bought ten. All they had.) With a blue-checked wool that I had just seen in a Prada ad, several bolts of linen for two dollars a yard, and a heap of gorgeous chocolate cotton-stretch velvet, I found myself holding an entire cowhide and trying to determine how many purses I could make out of it. Not only could I make them, my mind raced, I could sell them! On Etsy! At craft fairs! I could make my own website! I could open a store and sell my purses there! I could make wallets out of the scraps, then belts, and then—oh my god—I could make shoes!

  I COULD MAKE SHOES!

  I think I had stopped breathing for a while because when I came up for air, I looked at the dead cow skin in my hands and tossed it back into the bin with a shudder. The other forty yards of fabric came home, naturally, but I couldn’t believe I had come so close.

  I believed I could make shoes.

  Those are the thoughts of an insan
e person. If any of my friends told me at lunch, “I’m going to make shoes,” I would think, Did God tell you not to take your pills again? Because only wizards can make shoes.

  But there I was, fully believing it for seconds, because once you can make a dress, there really is very little else to conquer on the planet. It’s a very special power, and it tends to make you believe that you can do anything, like jumping a canyon on a motorcycle, or creating a loafer.

  Even though my addiction to fabric has become a serious problem, sewing has taught me some valuable things in addition to enabling me with moments of complete madness. I have learned patience, which means I do not have the right to hit, slap, or pinch my dress form, because my mistakes are not her fault. Most of the time. I have learned to work carefully and go slowly, and I have tried to transfer this practice to applying makeup, although I still look like my face hit an airbag when I try my hand at eye shadow. Most important, if there is one mistake, it will ruin the whole dress, and the flaw needs to come out and be reworked, meaning you cannot sew drunk. So that’s helpful. Now that I have been sewing for several years, and I make most of my own clothes, I want to create something the right way in order to make it last. There are no beneficial shortcuts when you are constructing something, no matter what you see on Project Runway. You don’t use glue on a hem. In 1993, sure, I would staple the hem of my dress up on the parts where it might have fallen, but I spent much of my time under the influence of something, so much that I might have made a dress out of a urine-soaked Goodwill sheet.

  So when a friend asks me across a dinner table, “Did you make that?” and I answer in the affirmative, the second comment is always the same.

  “Can you make me a dress?”

  I try not to burst out laughing, although I did tell one friend that I liked her way too much to make a dress for her.

  “I’ll do you one better,” I’ve learned to reply. “I’ll tell you where you can take sewing lessons. But stay away from the sheets.”

  “Honey,” my husband said, shaking me awake. “Honey, honey. Wake up. The cheese people are on the phone and it’s time for you to go.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said reflexively, waking up from a dream in which, standing in a very long line at a fancy bar, I ordered some liqueur that they were out of. So I ordered some wine—a Barbera. Out. An Abruzzo. Out. A Montepulciano. Out. Then I started yelling in something I didn’t know I could speak, and the volume of it broke the bartender’s head. (He was wearing a gold pumpkin-like mask. Of course.) It fell off in pieces on the bar, and we both started laughing as we tried to put it back on together. “You made me speak my Fury Language!” I said, and then we high-fived.

  “Honey,” my husband said once more after I momentarily fell back asleep, again, and was spooning Brie into the bartender’s mouth. “Wake up. Your cheese class started five minutes ago!”

  Don’t ask me how I forgot. For the past week, butterflies would flutter in my stomach every single time I thought about the cheese class that upcoming Saturday. I was going to learn how to make cheese. In my mind, that’s more pivotal than making a baby or even world peace.

  Cheese. Seriously, cheese. Cheese is the wizardry of the food world. If you can make cheese, there is really not a higher peak you can reach as a mortal. I’m never going to climb Mount Everest because there’s no Cinnabon there; I’m never going to sail around the world because all of the countries are already taken and other discoverers have named them; I’m never going to wingsuit-fly off the Eiger due to fears that Russia might mistake me for a passenger plane and shoot me down; I’m never going to dive into glacial meltwater in Iceland when I can already buy it at the store; and I’m never going to do the Cheryl Strayed thing because I have no current addictions other than toilet paper, and I don’t feel that requires working through.

  I don’t need any of that shit.

  I do, however, need to make cheese.

  I threw on some clothes, passed on brushing my teeth (I was going to be eating cheese. Why waste the time?), and was in the car before I knew it, heading toward the rest of my life.

  Now ten minutes late, I snuck into the class at a local kitchen store and claimed the only seat left—a tight squeeze onto a tall bar chair in between two close flanking neighbors, in the middle of a semicircle that surrounded a large kitchen island with a sink and stovetop. I hate bar chairs, especially the kind that you have to hop onto, because mainly, I’m not a hopper, I’m a plopper. When I see an open seat, the last thing I want to do is to have to take a running start and high-jump into it. I’m not a little person, but I’m not tall, and with the size of my ass, gravity likes to keep me as low to the ground as possible. So it’s the safest method for all those involved. The tipping point is not generous—should I raise that load two inches above its natural perch, I could knock planets out of orbit with the force that I’ll go down with. And I’m not a “lone tree in the forest” sort of toppler—I’ll grasp, reach for, and pull anything I can bring with me: deck chairs, string quartet, and an Astor.

  But the chairs were so tightly nestled together that there was no room to even attempt a hop, let alone a high-jump start. Had the chairs been cars, I wouldn’t have had enough room to open the door to get in. So I did the only thing I could do, which was sandwich in on one side, lift one leg up onto the seat, and sort of scoot onto the chair. I kept bumping into the girl to the left of me, who made no attempt whatsoever to give me any space, so I scooted and scooted and scooted until I was able to get one whole cheek on the seat, and then attempted to scoot and lift the remaining orb onto it as well, just like a dog who was dragging its dirty ass over the carpet. After ten minutes of butt wiggling and three near misses of the chair toppling over backward—and you know I’d grab and snatch, bringing my nearest classmates with me—I just gave up, left one cheek on the stool and stood on the other foot.

  Of my other classmates, I noticed, none were like me. Which is why I suppose they were all on time and had most likely brushed their teeth. But as I looked around, I saw a mother and daughter pair, an older husband and wife, two blond best friends who looked identical, and for a moment I thought the girl to the left of me was a prop, as in a mannequin, completely ignoring my presence and sitting absolutely still. Props like that terrify me, mainly because of an incident at Safeway last summer in which I was walking down the snack aisle with my sister and nephew, who were visiting. At the end of the aisle was a cracker display on a table and a cardboard cutout of a lady smiling, her arms wide open to showcase all of the types of leavened bread. I was happily chatting along with my sister until the cardboard lady came to life and I think asked me if I wanted a cracker. I honestly don’t know what it was she said, mainly because I was too busy shrieking. Now, I am not sure what triggered such a response. It could have been an episode of PTSD, because several times earlier that week, I was gardening in the front yard when a disembodied voice would say, “Hello!” and I’d scream, only to find a friendly passerby dropping their waving hand and looking horrified. So it could have been that. Or perhaps it was just a trigger reaction to an inanimate object coming to life and offering me a snack, I can’t be sure. Even though the cracker did look good, my repeated cries of “I thought you were a dummy! I thought you were a dummy!” caused her to retract her cracker offer and act as if I’d called her a filthy name. I can’t help it if she was very good at staying still and pretending to be unalive, but she should expect some Candid Camera–worthy reactions when she suddenly springs to life and starts passing out Triscuits.

  Regardless, the still life of a girl sitting next to me never expressed any interest in giving me more space or even acknowledging that I was within inches of her. My other neighbor was an old, sagging hippie with a bottom lip hanging so low she could have used it as a drawer. As far as I could tell, from appearances alone, I was clearly the most passionate about the process of cheese making; the second closest was the hippie, though I can guarantee that she’d use dirty pots. I’m sorry, but it
must be said. If you’re willing to encase yourself in the odor of patchouli, it must be assumed that you’re already quite familiar with the stench of mold, decaying earth, and general feculence. If I have to inhale it while I sit next to you for two hours, you bet I’m not going to ignore the fact that you smell like a grave. You do. When you can find your signature scent an aisle away from beets, Rudi’s gluten-free bread, and baba ghanouj, own it and just expect feedback.

  In front of me, Keith, the cheese teacher and expert, was heating up a gallon of milk to make our first cheese, ricotta. Imagine my surprise when he pronounced it phonetically, as in “ree-cott-ah.” I did a double take. Now, of course, I don’t expect non-Italian people like my in-laws to pronounce it with an Italian accent, but a cheese guy who says that when he went to Italy to study Italian cheese making he was taught by Italian masters should try giving it a little oomph. I’m going to make a fair bet that they were pronouncing it a little differently in the motherland, and while I’m trying very hard to not put too fine a point on it, when someone at Chipotle asks you what kind of tortilla you want, does she say “tor-tee-ya” or “tor-till-a”? I know we’re attached to Mexico, and I suppose that I should just be happy that people are saying “ree-cott-ah” and not “cottage cheese,” but if you are teaching people to make something, say it right. If I took a class on how to make duck confit, I’m hoping that when I bragged about it at my husband’s next work party, forty people with subscriptions to Cook’s Illustrated wouldn’t come forward to correct me.

  But I didn’t say anything as Keith repeated it over and over and over again as he heated the milk to 185 degrees, then took the pot off the burner, added one-third cup plus one teaspoon of distilled white vinegar, and stirred it gently for one minute. I didn’t say anything as he scooped out the curds into a strainer and everyone around me cooed, “Ooooh! Ree-cott-ah!” and I was still silent when little plates with ricotta on flatbread were passed around to taste.