Round Robin

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Judy arrived as the workshop was ending, and she helped them straighten up the room for the next morning’s class.

  “How was your trip?” Diane asked. Carol wished she had thought of it first.

  “I expected more cows,” Judy said, trying to grin. “I didn’t see a single one.”

  Gwen put an arm around her shoulders. “How was it really?”

  Judy told them. Carol’s heart went out to her as she spoke of her elder half sister’s anger and her father’s confusion. Carol didn’t know how Judy could bear such disappointment after the hopes raised by Kirsten’s invitation.

  “What are you going to do now?” Gwen asked after Judy finished.

  “I don’t know.” Judy sat down on the edge of the dais and rested her chin in her hands. “Part of me thinks I should wait for Kirsten to make the next move. Another part of me wants to block out every memory of last weekend and never think of them again.”

  “I can understand that,” Diane said.

  Judy gave her a wry half smile. Carol wished she could think of something comforting to say, but she couldn’t. She settled for giving Judy a hug. Judy held on to her so tightly that Carol knew it had been the right thing to do.

  Then Judy sighed and reached into her sewing bag. “The trip wasn’t a complete waste,” she said, producing a folded bundle of cloth. “I finished my border.”

  “Let’s see,” Gwen said, helping her unfold the quilt top. Judy had set the quilt on point as Diane had done, but not with solid triangles. Instead, a design resembling a compass or a sun radiated from each side, the longest, central points nearly reaching the corners. All of the points were split down the middle lengthwise, with dark fabric on one side and light on the other, giving the design a three-dimensional, shaded appearance. The tips were perfectly sharp, and the border lay smooth and flat.

  “Your piecing is amazing,” Diane said, echoing Carol’s own thoughts. “Maybe this will finally convince these machine people to switch to hand work.”

  Gwen looked ready to retort, but before she could speak, they heard the door open on the other side of the room. It was Sylvia, carrying a purse and wearing a light blue dress and a white hat.

  “Quick,” Diane whispered, but Judy was already bundling up the quilt top. There wasn’t enough time to return it to the bag, so she held it behind her back. They nailed nonchalant expressions to their faces and greeted Sylvia as she approached.

  “You four are obviously up to something,” she said, her eyes narrowing as she inspected them. “Are you going to tell me what it is, or will I have to guess?”

  “We’re not up to anything,” Diane said. “We’re just cleaning up after Gwen’s workshop.”

  “Hmph.” Sylvia looked around at the clean tables and the carefully swept floor. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  Carol fidgeted beneath the woman’s scrutiny. “It’s—well, it’s a surprise—”

  “For Summer’s graduation party,” Gwen interrupted.

  “I see. Very well, then, what is it?”

  Judy gave her an apologetic look. “If we told you—”

  “It wouldn’t be a surprise. Yes, yes, of course. I understand.” Sylvia adjusted her hat. “As a matter of fact, I have business of my own for Summer’s party. That’s what I stopped by to tell you. Andrew and I are driving in to town to fetch some decorations. We’ll be back before supper.”

  Diane’s eyebrows shot up. “You and Andrew, huh? Is this your official first date?”

  “It is most certainly not a date. It’s an errand.”

  “It sounds like a date to me,” Gwen said.

  “Why do I even bother?” Sylvia wondered aloud. “It’s not you four troublemakers I wanted to talk to, anyway. I’m looking for Sarah. If I’m going to be driving downtown, I’d prefer to borrow her truck rather than ride in that enormous contraption of Andrew’s.”

  “You can take my car,” Carol offered, returning to the back table, where she had left her purse.

  “Are you sure it’s no trouble?”

  “It’s my pleasure,” Carol said as she handed Sylvia her keys. The Elm Creek Quilters were always helping each other, and lending her car to Sylvia made her feel more like one of them. So did the way Sylvia went out of her way to include her. She could have said, “You three troublemakers—and Carol.” Carol didn’t mind being considered a troublemaker the way Sylvia had said it, especially if that meant she was part of the group.

  “Have a nice time,” Judy said as Sylvia turned to go.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Diane added.

  Sylvia gave them a sharp look. “It’s not a date.” Before they could disagree, she left the room, more briskly than she had arrived.

  Their mirth turned to relief as Judy brought out the quilt from behind her back.

  “I swear that woman has quilt radar,” Diane said. “She can sense a quilt within a hundred paces.”

  Gwen took the quilt from Judy. “We won’t have to hide this much longer. I’ll add my border, Agnes will finish the center, and we’ll be ready to quilt.”

  Carol hoped that they would let her help.

  The other women left, and as Carol went upstairs to her room near the library, she thought about Summer’s party and tried to remember when she had last hosted one for Sarah. The wedding didn’t count; Sarah and Matt had planned and paid for everything on their own. When Sarah graduated from Penn State, she might have had a party with her friends, but if she had, she hadn’t invited Carol. Carol felt a twinge of guilt until she remembered Sarah’s high school graduation. Carol had held an elaborate open house in Sarah’s honor, even though Sarah had not been valedictorian or even salutatorian or even in the top tenth in her class. Carol had been disappointed. Sarah was such a bright girl; she could have been at the top of her class if she had spent as much time on her studies as she had her social life. She could have earned a full scholarship anywhere—Harvard, Yale, one of the Seven Sisters—if only she had been more industrious. But Sarah settled for the state school as indifferently as she had settled for B’s when she could have earned A’s, with no idea how much Carol envied her the opportunities she squandered.

  No one had thrown Carol a graduation party, not her parents, who were still upset at her for wanting to go to college in the fall, and not her friends, since she had none. Her graduation from high school would have passed unnoticed if not for the ceremony itself, which her parents did attend, and her English teacher’s kindness. On the last day of school he gave her three books: a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a leather-bound volume of the complete works of Shakespeare. Her heart leapt as she held the last and turned the gilt-edged pages to read the inscription. “These will take you anywhere,” her teacher had written. “Congratulations, and may this be the first of many successes for you.”

  His kindness brought tears to her eyes. He alone knew how much it pained her to sacrifice one part of her dream so that she would not lose the whole. If only she were brave enough to defy her parents—but she was not. She would become a nurse rather than stay home until the unlikely arrival of a suitable young man bearing a marriage proposal. She would show her father that she was neither as stupid nor as useless as he thought. She would become the best nursing student in her class if it killed her.

  And she did, but her father never knew it. He died of heart failure during her last semester, so he didn’t see her graduate. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have known how her joy was tempered as she accepted her degree; he would not have been able to detect a single regret, for life in his house had taught her how to hide her feelings. But beneath the placid surface, emotions churned. She never wished for him to die, not even when he beat her, but since it had happened, why then and not years earlier, so that she would have been free to choose her own path?

  The thoughts shamed her, but she could not silence them.

  She found a job in a hospital in Lansing, where almost by accident she made the first friends of her lif
e. She and two other new nurses banded together for mutual support as they struggled with the nearly overwhelming demands of the hospital, and their need soon blossomed into friendship. At least once a week they went out in the evening together, to see a movie or to shop. Once, when they went bowling, a group of three men invited them out for a drink. After a quick whispered conference, they agreed. Boldly, Carol drank as much as the other girls and laughed nearly as loudly. It was the most fun she had ever had, and the next day, her friends insisted that one of the men had hardly been able to keep his eyes off her all night. She was pleased, but she didn’t believe them. She didn’t even remember Kevin’s last name. She had preferred one of the others, a dark-haired lawyer who had put his arm around her as the men walked the nurses to their bus stop. He was well-read and charming, and she wished that it was he, not Kevin Mallory, who stopped by the hospital later that week and asked her out to lunch.

  She accepted the invitation, and when he asked her out again, she agreed. With more surprised fascination than desire, she realized he was courting her. A year later, when he asked her to marry him, she would have laughed except he was so earnest.

  “I’ll be a good husband to you,” he promised. “I’ll take care of you. You won’t have to work anymore. I love you and I want us to be together.”

  She stared at him, astounded. He loved her? He hardly knew her. She searched her heart and wondered if she had fallen in love with him without realizing it. She was almost certain she had not. He was a good, kind man, and she liked him, but passion didn’t sweep over her when she looked at him. When he fumbled to kiss her good-night, she felt the pressure of his mouth but none of the electric warmth her friends described when confiding about their own trysts.

  Still, she did like him, and she knew he would never hurt her. And a woman could not go through life alone.

  “I’ll need to think about it,” she told him. He nodded reluctantly and told her to take all the time she needed; he would wait for her forever if he had to. Carol knew hyperbole when she heard it but decided to kiss him rather than scoff. He responded eagerly, relieved that she had not refused him outright.

  Her girlfriends thought Kevin too dull for a boyfriend but perhaps just right for a husband, since he wasn’t bad-looking and he earned a good living. Her mother, who had never met him, was his strongest advocate. “Say yes,” she urged over the telephone from the town in northern Michigan Carol had successfully escaped. “You might never get a better offer.”

  Carol couldn’t ignore the truth in her words. The next time she saw Kevin, she told him she would marry him. And later, when his insurance company transferred him to Pennsylvania, she gave up her job and the only friends she’d ever had and made a home for him in a three-bedroom house in Pittsburgh.

  Sarah was born a few months after the move. Carol’s mother stayed with them during the difficult months before the birth, when the dangerous pregnancy forced Carol to remain in bed, and afterward, when a thick cloud of despair inexplicably came over her. The bright new baby in her arms brought her little joy, and she did not know why. Sometimes she woke in the middle of the night to find she had been weeping. Other times she could not sleep at all, but paced around the living room of the darkened house, smoking one cigarette after another. She did not know why she wasn’t happy, and she hated herself for it. She had all she had ever wanted—an education, a pleasant house, an adoring husband, a beautiful child who would have everything, everything that she herself had been denied. What was preventing her from enjoying such blessings?

  Her beloved books were forgotten. If not for her mother, meals, laundry, housekeeping, and even Sarah herself would have been neglected, too. Carol nursed Sarah when her mother brought her the child, but otherwise she lay in bed sleeping or sat outside in a chair, alone with her thoughts. After a few weeks of this, her mother taught her how to bathe the baby, change her, dress her, care for her. Gradually, her mother’s quiet but firm insistence helped her develop an interest in the child, and a thin shaft of light began to pierce the heavy fog surrounding her. Carol could not find the words to voice her gratitude, but for the first time, she realized how deeply she loved her mother.

  For his part, Kevin left for the office soon after breakfast, and Carol did not see him again until evening. He would ask her about her day, although there was never anything to tell him. He would nod and kiss her gently, then talk quietly with his mother-in-law before going off to play with Sarah until suppertime. Carol considered telling her husband and mother that she didn’t like them talking about her behind her back, but she couldn’t summon up the energy to complain.

  Then one day, when Sarah was three months old, Carol had a dream. She was sitting at the kitchen table of her father’s house, unable to touch the plate her mother had set before her. It was raining outside, and thunder crashed until the walls shook. Her father scowled and said, “You don’t deserve that baby. You can’t even take care of her.”

  Suddenly, Carol heard a faint wail coming from outside. Sarah was out there in the storm, alone and frightened. Carol ran outside to find her daughter, but the wind drove rain into her eyes until she couldn’t see. She tried to follow the thin cry to its source, but every time she thought she was nearly there, the cry withdrew into the distance. Frantic, she ran faster and faster, but always the sobbing child remained just out of reach, lost and helpless, dependent and abandoned.

  Carol woke shaking. Kevin slept on as she climbed from bed and stumbled down the hall to Sarah’s room, where she listened to her daughter’s breathing and touched the tiny bundle beneath the quilt to convince herself that Sarah was not lost in a storm. Reassured, she sank to the floor and hugged her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth, weeping softly.

  The next morning Carol told her mother that she thought she could manage just fine now on her own. Her mother brightened, eager to return home to her garden and her friends. Carol saw her husband and mother exchange happy glances, pleased that she had returned to her old self. Carol knew she hadn’t, not yet and perhaps never, but she would be better than she had been. She would be a good mother to Sarah, if only to prove that her father had been wrong about her. She was not a failure, though he had been convinced of it and had nearly convinced her, too.

  After her mother left, she made a schedule for herself just as she had back in college. Every day that she managed to complete the tasks on her list was a subdued triumph. She fought off the old listlessness by throwing herself into her role of mother and wife. This was her new venue, she decided, and she could achieve there as well as any other place.

  In fair weather she took long walks, pushing Sarah in her stroller. They had lived in that town for nearly a year, but in her distraction Carol had not yet learned their neighborhood. With her daughter’s pleasant company, she explored the streets near their home, and one day she chanced upon a sight that sent a stab of longing though her: a used book shop, its front window stacked with books of every size and description.

  She maneuvered the stroller through the store’s narrow aisles, pausing whenever a book caught her eye, hungrily devouring a chapter or more before moving on to the next delight. The hours passed in the luxury of words and the smell of old paper. Eventually, Sarah grew bored and fretful, so Carol found picture books for her, which Sarah gnawed and flung to the floor. When other customers began to stare, Carol blushed and paid for the picture books, then hurried from the store. When she was almost home, she realized that she had forgotten to buy anything for herself.

  Her embarrassment kept her away the next day, but she returned the day after. Soon she began to visit several times a week, sometimes to purchase a book for herself or for Sarah, other times merely to surround herself with so many stories, so many words. The polite hush of the shop was nearly religious in its serenity, and after more than a few days away, she found herself craving it.

  The elderly woman who ran the shop came to know her by name, and Carol began to recognize other frequent customers. The
y would nod politely at each other, but this was not a place to strike up friendships. No one would dare intrude on another visitor’s quiet contemplation of the walls of books.

  Only one person broke this unspoken rule of the bookshop: the owner’s nephew, Jack, who had dark hair and a quick flash of a grin. He was not there every day, but when he was, he would greet Carol with a slight bow as if she were someone of great importance. At first his slightly mocking demeanor embarrassed her, but she got used to it and began to return his bows with a mocking curtsy of her own.

  Sometimes he searched the stacks for children’s books and set them aside for Sarah. When he detected a pattern in Carol’s purchases, he began to point out books he thought she would enjoy, classics in excellent condition. She appreciated his help and often thanked him with a small homemade gift—a slice of cake from yesterday’s baking, a basket of fresh rolls. When she saw the pleasure her gifts brought him, her cheeks grew warm and she hurried deeper into the store, pushing Sarah’s stroller before her.

  One day he left the cash register and followed.

  “Thank you for the cookies,” he said when he caught up to her, keeping his voice low so that he wouldn’t disturb the other customers.

  “Don’t mention it,” she told him. His dark hair was so thick that it always looked tousled. Instinctively she lifted a hand to touch her own hair.

  He misunderstood the gesture and extended his hand. “I’m Jack.”

  “I’m Carol.” She shook his hand and quickly released it. “Carol Mallory. Mrs. Kevin Mallory.”

  He grinned at her, then bent down to look into the stroller. “And who’s this big girl?”

  Sarah squealed with delight, and Carol couldn’t help smiling. “My daughter, Sarah.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Sarah,” he said, extending a finger, which she seized. Laughing, he let her hang on for a moment before he freed himself and stood up. “It’s nice to finally know your name.” Grinning, he turned and walked back to the front of the store.

  Carol watched him go. It was silly that she had not learned his name before then, but names had not seemed necessary in the bookshop.