How to Make an American Quilt

by Whitney Otto

  She went alone to his grave (no tears), her arms loaded down with roses: peach, yellow, pink, apricot, salmon, and pale orange. She laid them across the freshly turned earth.

  Afterward, as she sat in the booth of a coffee shop, she heard a man ask, “May I sit with you?” It was Dean Reed, Em’s husband. “Jesus,” he said, sliding across from her, “I’m sorry about Howell.”

  Constance drank her coffee and thanked him.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Constance smiled. “You can take me dancing.”

  Dean looked horrified.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pushing her saucer away from her slightly. “Howell was a good man and I loved him. But he’s gone now.” She paused. “I don’t believe in grief.”

  “How can you not ‘believe in grief’?” Dean asked. “Either you grieve or you don’t.”

  Constance shrugged her shoulders, snapped open her handbag, and paid the check. It was getting dark outside. Dean offered to drive her home, but she told him, “I feel like walking.”

  “Look,” he said, standing beside her on the sidewalk outside, “I know how things can be around the house. Give me a call if you ever need anything, like painting or the plumbing fixed.”

  Constance put on her sunglasses (though it was dusk). “Thanks—I’ll keep that in mind.” It had not occurred to her until this moment that she might move somewhere else, another state or country. Without Howell, she really did not belong anywhere. But as she headed home, her pace picked up as the tears began creeping down below her sunglasses, she realized that this place, with its quilters and hot summers and Dean and her friendship with Marianna (the first real woman friend she ever had, who gardened by her side or she by Marianna’s side), had now changed for her. Now, with Howell buried here, it had become someplace else, someplace she could not leave.

  DEAN BEGAN DROPPING by Constance’s to see if she “needed anything.” Often she did not, though occasionally there would be something that required attention; something to be moved or tightened or discarded or stowed. More often, Dean simply sat with Constance and reminisced about the East Coast, having been born and raised in Morristown, New Jersey.

  He relaxed on her sofa or in the surreal disappearing light of the autumn afternoon (the time of day professional photographers call “magic hour” for its sensationally flattering light), and said, “Of course, when it was springtime I would say that was my favorite season; in the fall I would say, ‘No, this is the best time of year.’ I have an affection for those transitional seasons, the way they take the edge off the intense cold of winter or heat of summer. But I often think that spring and autumn would completely lose their charm without those extremes of weather in winter and summer.”

  “I know,” Constance agreed, “but I have to say spring is my favorite, with dogwood, foxglove, columbine, corn salad, Victoria blues coming up and my roses. Daffodils, fuchsia, and honeysuckle. What could be better?”

  “Which brings me to this god-awful place virtually without seasons.” He leaned forward on the couch, pushing his glass toward Constance across the coffee table, indicating that it needed “freshening.” “How do these Californians stand it? It makes one lazy as hell. With so much of the year like summer, who rushes out to do any sort of summertime things? I mean, what is the hurry—the sun will be back tomorrow. And the next day and the next.”

  Constance poured out martinis for each of them, Howell’s enormous watch sliding down her wrist as she held back the ice with her two fingers (“I’ll bring you a strainer for the next time I come,” he said). “I don’t know. It would almost seem that a life without seasons would make you tense, as if you need the change of weather just to ease the pressure.” She took a sip of her drink. “But I suppose you don’t miss what you never had.”

  She sat back in her chair. Constance knew she should switch on the lights; soon it would be too dark to make out Dean’s face, which was already fading in the shadows. Except that she liked the shadows, and since Howell’s death she had had to sleep with a light or two on, which denied her the pleasure of sleeping in a blackened room. As a child she’d liked sleeping in the dark, and as an adult slept fitfully if too much light leaked in; even a particularly bright moon kept her in a state of half slumber, half wakefulness. When Howell was away she would sit up long into the night, engrossed in a project or a book, still rising at daybreak, when the house filled with sunlight. And for the rest of the day she would drag around in a stupor of fatigue because she was incapable of sleeping late or taking a nap.

  When Howell was alive and traveling, she could still remain in the dark and take pleasure in it; perhaps because she knew that he would be returning to her. But all she had left to her now was his watch and his pajama tops, which she wore at night, his rose gold cuff links, transformed into earrings (a gold so soft and pale it looked as if it would take the image of a fingerprint if pinched with the slightest pressure), his great coat warming her in the garden on cold days, hitting her mid-calf where it had once grazed Howell’s knees. Wearing his things as if she could absorb him, truly blur the line between her life and his death, intersect the planes of existence. She shook her head, causing Dean to interrupt himself and ask, “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said, embarrassed, bringing her drink to her lips, as he went on saying, “It’s more than seasonal with these people in Grasse—there is something so, so monochromatic about who they are as well. As if the weather goes deeper into who they are.”

  Constance smiled in the darkness, listened to Dean ramble on and on about the citizens of Grasse and their shortcomings. “Gee, I didn’t realize how late it was,” he said as Constance enjoyed these moments of darkness, felt secure and happy and relieved, as if some enormous weight had been lifted. Something she could not indulge in when alone in the house, now with Howell really and truly gone from her.

  “I miss home sometimes,” said Dean. “It’s different out here—maybe I’m too hard on the place, but it isn’t my landscape, if you know what I mean. Em and I only moved here to please her. I was so cynical I thought all places would be the same to me; I thought it was a weakness to love something as much as I loved the greenery of home. All that lawn. All that lush foliage.”

  “Sometimes I wake up at night and think to myself, ‘Now exactly how did I get here?’ But I know I won’t leave,” said Constance.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do.”

  “Why not?” asked Dean, shifting forward, stirring his olive around in his glass. “I mean, why not just go?” Then softer, “Why don’t I just go?”

  Constance reluctantly turned on a lamp, felt sadness as the night was forced from the room. “Because we can’t. Because we have things that keep us here now.”

  “But why should that be?” insisted Dean. “We’re not dead yet.”

  “Oh, Dean,” said Constance, “only someone very young can do that—move without hesitation—because the older you are, whether you intend it or not, you get attached. You lay down roots, feel an uncomfortable kinship with the soil beneath your feet. Certain things become meaningful and irreplaceable and no matter how much you like to travel or adore your destinations, you will always return to that thing that only exists for you here.” She drained her glass. “And that, Dean, is the only difference I can see between youth and old age. Really. When you get down to it. I mean, nothing else changes, not the capacity to love or experience sexual jealousy or desire; or ambition in business or to be athletic or create art or parent a child—all that remains intact, despite our outer selves. It is the difference between digging in or moving on.” She laughed nervously. Said, “Listen to me.”

  “Did you like the snow?” he asked.

  “Very much so.”

  “Difficult weather, those gray-and-white winters. Hard on the body. Good way not to brood, I think.”

  EVERYONE IS AWARE that Dean is stopping by Constance’s house in the evening
s, and this causes discomfort and dissension among the quilters; especially since Constance is a bit younger than the rest of them (certainly younger than Em). Closer to Marianna’s age, mid-fifties. And Constance is an outsider as well. No one in the circle had grown up with her; shared her secrets.

  Finn notices that some of the women side with Em, but one or two are noncommittal on the matter. They seem to believe that Constance and Dean are “just friends”; still, all this tension remains vague and free-floating, as if no one will allow it to find its proper focus.

  It is Marianna who comes to Constance’s rescue, defends her to the other women, including her mother, Anna, who says, “I only know what I see because I’ve seen it before.” It is Marianna who sets free the collective rumor that lodges doubt in their collective judgment. She says, Look, nothing is going on. The quilters pay attention because Marianna is the closest thing Constance Saunders has to a friend, unless you count Dean, and there are clear problems in that regard. Of course.

  CONSTANCE SAYS, “Marianna, don’t you get lonely?” as she prunes back a rosebush. As she and Marianna work in her garden.

  “Didn’t you get lonely when Howell was gone so much?” Marianna asks, her hands moving gracefully from stem to stalk, encased in their bulky gardening gloves. (“Clown’s hands,” she calls them.)

  “No,” says Constance. “Which I don’t exactly understand unless I was lonely all those years and didn’t know it. Maybe I was always isolated—my whole life—until Howell came home for good.” She leans back on her heels, her own clownish hands resting on her thighs. “Do you suppose that’s possible? To feel something so essentially human and not know it at all?” Constance shakes her head. “I just never thought that I made very good company.”

  Marianna concentrates on her task, her mouth curving up at the corners, but she does not take her eyes from her work. “I know what you mean,” she says.

  But as to the question of loneliness or willful isolation or the difficulty in connecting properly with other people, Marianna wants to say: Try being black in Grasse—or Bakersfield, for that matter—growing up with your mother a housekeeper and your father—well, he never knew you. Then make the mistake of getting a college degree—before civil rights—and then you are really persona non grata around these parts so you have to run so far away to another country because you are a stranger in your own land. And because you remain outside any sort of mainstream life you become an anomaly, frightening even to yourself, when you discover that you can only relate to men and not to women because women demand too much talk, too much conversation, and confidences from you and you’ve reached the point in your life (oh, too long ago to remember) where you are too angry for “polite” conversation; you don’t want to nurture or have your hand held in sympathy; why you even surprise yourself with wanting to rip the world from its axis. You want to stop it from rotating one more frustrating day. And you suppose all this makes you not quite a woman and certainly not a man, but a complete outsider. And there you are.

  Marianna has lived such a private, interior life that, as much as she likes Constance, she still cannot reveal herself. It is not her way, and she senses that Constance is the only woman in the quilting circle who would understand that because Constance is like her in that respect.

  “What I like about you, Marianna,” says Constance, “is that you remind me of Howell. You let me be.” She stops and stares at Marianna. “Why is it that you don’t ask me about Dean?”

  Marianna sighs and turns toward her friend. “Now, don’t take this wrong, Constance, but I guess I just don’t care.” She rubs the tip of her nose with her bulky glove. “God, I know that sounds terrible.”

  Constance considers this and says, “No. It is what I expected.” She pats the earth firmly around the base of an iris stalk. “Look,” she says, “I miss Howell, but you and Dean are the reasons I am not completely lonely.” She places her hand over her heart, without awareness, leaving smudges of dirt on her shirt. Lightly thumps her chest, once, twice: “Most of the time, anyway.”

  HOWEVER, there came a night when Constance and Dean walked out to his car—Howell had been gone close to a year—and Dean got behind the wheel only to turn on the ignition and hear (along with the rev of the engine) the radio playing “String of Pearls.” Constance took a few steps from the car door as Dean, without a word, got back out and took her in his arms, pressing her close as they danced in the road. The car’s headlights stared out ahead of them, illuminating the empty road. There was nothing before them. She sighed as she recalled their coffee-shop conversation the day of Howell’s funeral.

  Dean’s unshaven cheek felt harsh against her skin; her body welcomed his touch and for the first time, after all these months, she saw Dean as a man and not as Em’s husband. Though they did not sleep together, Constance dropped from the quilting circle for a while and kept to herself.

  INSTRUCTIONS NO. 4

  A popular quilt of the 1920s was the appliqué quilt. It is still well thought of and considered a “better quality” quilt among collectors. It was usually favored by a higher economic stratum of women, since one had to be able to afford yards of the same cloth to achieve the proper affect. As opposed to the piece quilt, which was typified by its use of leftover scraps. No one, least of all yourself, really likes anything left over, something that, by its very nature, is shared with someone else. You feel this way about food, antique-clothing stores (used shoes give you a particularly creepy, unwholesome feeling, but then, you are a child of the 1930s), old houses, used cars, and gentlemen on the rebound. You desire your own, brand-new, unused whatever it is; you want it to be exclusively yours, bear your mark.

  You may want to display what is yours; revel in your association with something of value. There are a number of ways to display a quilt upon a wall. One is to sew Velcro along the top edge, in the back, taking care not to pierce the front of the work. Then attach an equal length of Velcro to the wall, using a staple gun. Consider stitching a small square of Velcro to each corner to prevent buckling. Allowing for smoothness.

  Or pretend you are stretching canvas to frame. Build the frame. You have seen this done in your own home, by your own husband; you are no stranger to art or display or the blank canvas. Be extravagant and install small hinges in each corner, in order to fold up the frame should you grow tired of displaying the quilt or should the man you adore grow tired of you, leaving you in need of a new residence; or find another use for the quilt other than display; or simply grow tired of looking at the work of the artist. Apply Velcro to the edge of the frame; likewise to the quilt. Take the exact measurements of the quilt. Remember, measure twice, cut once. Tear the quilt from the frame—as you have been afraid that you will be torn from the fabric of your marriage—for convenient cleaning or storage.

  Bear in mind that storing a quilt may protect it from the elements of heat and dampness and light, but it will not afford anyone, including yourself, any pleasure in its beauty. This is sometimes forgotten by the avid collector who seeks to own but not to enjoy. Can you relax if your husband is not in clear sight? Does it make you anxious to wonder what he is doing without you? Away from you. Picture him flirting with a random girl in town (someone you have not noticed) whom he has found worthy of his attention—no matter how momentarily. Wish for an instant that you could place him somewhere and only take him out for your private viewing pleasure, that he would be grateful for your admiration. Allow yourself to enjoy your quilt.

  The display method most popular with galleries and museums involves a ten-inch piece of muslin, hidden quilt threads, staples, and a wood frame. You could easily discover the more exact way of doing this. It is not an obscure method. Part of your problem is that you discover so many things with great ease and that is often more a curse than a blessing; clearly there are things you’d rather not know. But to hang a quilt this way may be more work than you wish to do.

  Finally, and this is recommended only for the serious, experienced framer
, one who is interested in making both a sizable financial investment, as well as one of time and skill: Buy a large, “quilt-size” piece of Plexiglas. Leave the back open for the work to “breathe.” Nothing, you know, can be kept inviolate, in a box, away from the harm that can be inflicted on a marriage by a wandering husband who has so often told you that he cannot help but wander. He wishes it was not so because he loves you; because, he says, you are his lifeline; because it distresses him to the depths of his spirit to make you cry, to make you suffer. Out in the world, he cannot be trusted.

  Find this sort of quilt preservation a relief when your friends who smoke or who are careless (a careless couple can murder love if left unchecked) come to your house for supper and stop to admire your beautiful quilt. (You like that, their admiration for something you have; yet you cannot help but worry that it will be appropriated by one of them.) Remind yourself that they are your friends and can be trusted. Remind yourself that sometimes accidents happen and it will break your heart to see your quilt damaged.

  It means that much to you.

  You would sometimes rather it did not.

  Drawbacks of this method—quilt in Plexiglas box—include losing a sense of intimacy with the work. The desire to touch the quilt will be harbored within yourself as well as within your guests—and perhaps the girl in town whom he flirted with—but they will simply have to imagine the feel of the small stitches, softness of the material, unevenness of the texture (all of which gives your quilt its look of life), the extra puff of stuffing in selected areas of the top cloth, not to be confused with the layer of cotton batting that lies between the backing and the top work. Do not neglect to note that this sort of display treatment renders the quilt more formidable as a work of art. An ordinary, useful household item transformed. Shake your head at such a transformation.