The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (5 page)

Sometimes I walked back home, seven miles off the two county roads. There I saw Mama and Mae and Viola, though in truth I felt little tie to them. The one I needed to talk to was Pa, but he was out in the daytime, riding fence and overseeing the single hand he'd been able to hire that year, swearing regularly that he would have an easier time running the livestock by himself than trying to keep an eye on this no-account runaway from McKinley's army. Whenever I came to the door, Mama looked at me with her vague face, and I wasn't always sure that she remembered I had married and gone off. One day she didn't even come to the door, just looked up from the splintery kitchen table, a potato in one hand and knife in the other.

"Can I help?" I said. I couldn't cook, but I could peel a potato.

"I dreamed about you last night. There was a pan with a bitty bit of water in it, but you were afraid you'd drown. You don't go near water, do you?"

Whatever half-plan I'd had of telling her about the new baby died in my mouth. "Where could I go to drown, Mama? Short of jumping down a well, and I don't care to do that."

"You were afraid," she insisted. "You must be feeling a shadow."

"It was a dream, that's all. I'm not feeling anything."

"You asked me to save you. Didn't sound like you," she said.

"Everybody gets a shiver now and again. A person would have to be a regular fool not to have some bad moments." As a matter of fact, I was shivering as I spoke, her words giving me a chill despite the heat drumming through the sod roof. Pa hadn't made the roof thick enough to begin with, and every year the snow's runoff thinned it a little.

"There was a pony in the dream, too. Little thing. You were wearing it on your neck."

"I reckon those hooves would hurt."

"It was sleeping. No matter what you said, it kept sleeping. Babies don't fear things," Mama said placidly. This was her idea of normal conversation. Her mind darted like a damselfly over weeds. "They do just fine until folks teach them to be afraid."

"I don't think that's anything we need to teach them, Mama."

"How could they know? They come into the world and haven't seen a thing."

"Birthing Lucille was no picnic."

"That was you was scared, not the baby." She scraped away at her potato, her face untroubled. It was something to hear this vaguely contented woman talk about fear as if she had personal acquaintance. "Just look at her. She cries because she's mad or tetchy. If you walked out the door she wouldn't cry because she was afraid. Because she got hungry, maybe."

"She's probably doing that right this minute," I said.

"Probably is," Mama said.

I took the knife and the potato out of her hands. "Did you go off when we were babies?" I said. "Did you head out just to be by yourself a little?"

"Walk too far from the house, it's snakes," she said. "Every time you girls went out, I worried."

"A house gets small, with everybody underfoot. And a child is loud. Sometimes you want to clear your head." I worked the paring knife into a deep, stubborn eye, the kind I ignored when I was in a hurry. "You're better off after a walk."

"It's a big house over there," she said. "Big enough for several. I noted it when you and Jack married."

"Not so big," I said grimly. I was late to catch her meaning and let an embarrassed moment pass before I said, "Would you like to come over for supper on Sunday? There's plenty."

"That would be fine," she said, then went on to remark about the black-eyed Susans at the door looking puny this year. I peeled every potato she had while she talked in her drifting way, and when it was time to leave, she patted my wrist as if she saw me every day. I commenced the seven-mile walk to my marriage house more nettled than when I'd left, thinking about a baby who would be cross whether I was home for her or not.

Other babies smiled, or let their heads loll atop slack necks. Other babies didn't make people laugh nervously and say, "Why, I'd love to hold her, but I've got this cough." Or this sneeze. Or this rash. All I had to do was carry Lucille into a room to make it bloom with ailments. At those moments, watching neighbors race to get away, I would reach down to reassure my forbidding child and felt briefly like a good mother. But Lucille's wrathful roar kept me from murmuring to her or burying my face in her silky belly. Anyone raised on a farm knows that you don't get too close to a snarling animal. I toted Lucille from room to room, which she tolerated. I presented her with my breast, although as often as not she squalled and turned her face away.

She was most apt to eat when she was in the bedroom, away from others. While she suckled, I passed the time pondering her cradle, a plain pine box with rough corners on the outside where Jack hadn't seen the need to do any finish work. Crude as it was, without a single attempt at decoration, the cradle could have been anything—a trough for stove kindling, a planter for seedlings. It didn't seem to need a baby in particular.

I had plenty of time to consider these thoughts; Lucille stoked up like a lumberjack once she got started, and I needed a place to set my mind. There were many uses for a cradle that had no baby: a shoe rest, a doorstop, a holder for the Sears catalogue. How helpful the extra storage would have been. I felt flashes of anger that necessary household space was being taken up by an ungrateful baby.

Anger was not the only emotion that came. No one had to tell me that other mothers didn't seize chances to imagine empty cradles. Other mothers, if they found their minds so engaged, would not feel their blood pounding in joy. They would not dwell on the thought of a baby who never occurred, demanding her mother's attention night and day. Heat rose to my face, and still I imagined: knife tray, pencil box, seed box, button box.

Because I was ashamed and because the thoughts were secret, I thought them more often, imagining not just a cradle but a whole house with no baby—no squares of soft cotton cloth to be washed every day, no extra water to be drawn for baby's bath. My very skin seemed to sing with these imaginings, which were worse than sinful. Envisioning the cradle neatly stacked with ribbons and thread, I could not keep myself from smiling. More than once, Lucille squirmed back from my breast, assessed my face, and loosed her imperious cry. My heart fell at those times from the exultant place it had found. The exertion of her screams made her face turn red as a plum. My child made it clear that she would not be overlooked. Why, I wondered, why should her life be any different? Like many of my thoughts that were not quite thoughts, the anger boiled in me at all hours, intolerable.

Now I cut across the corner of Pa's front forty. Clouds banked to the west in a huge purple wall, which might mean rain and might just mean wind. If it came rain, Jack and Lucille and I would have to huddle with Jack's parents in the parlor, under the sheet of tin his father had lashed to the underside of the sod roof to keep the carpet from getting muddy. That thought was intolerable, too.

When I arrived back at the place, still dry, I could hear Lucille all the way from the barn. Every unfinished chore still waited for me: cows to be milked, chard to be gathered, water to be hauled. It was the same life as ever, except that Jack's mother stood at the door with howling Lucille in her arms. "Madame had a nice walk?"

"Quite awfully nice, thank you."

"There's work waiting." She handed off Lucille, wet, and turned away. Maybe she would have been more sympathetic if I had told her that I was toting her next grandbaby, but I wasn't wanting her sympathy. The rough reassurance of her disapproval was as stout as a windbreak, and the work always waited, whether there was sympathy or not.

When Lucille had finally cried herself out after supper, I took a seat behind my new sewing machine, another source of my mother-in-law's disapproval. "Wouldn't your mother give you hers?" she had asked the day Jack brought it back from town in the wagon. She ignored the look Jack and I exchanged, his sly grin and my frown back at him. His mother didn't need to know everything about us.

I said, "Mama uses her machine every day."

"She won't be using it forever," Jack's mother said.

"Her old Singer won't last forever, either. I'll put this machine to good service."

"That was never in question," said my mother-in-law.

Listening to the rainless wind push bugs and grit through the cracks in the walls, I pumped the treadle until my leg grew hot. Jack's father's shirt needed a patch, and while I was at it, I would reinforce the shoulders, where the stitching was starting to pull. If the mending was done perfectly, if I repaired the tears and wear spots on every piece of cloth on the farm, then no one could object if I turned my hand late at night to a dress for Lucille. A good mother wanted to make clothes for her child. The first dress boasted more than a hundred pin tucks across the front. Each tuck was the width of a needle. Children in Mercer County didn't usually have such dresses, Jack's mother remarked. No, they certainly did not, I told her.

While my baby slept, I made her dress after dress, teaching myself ways to form tiny cambric rosettes around the neckline or a flounce at the hem. A flounce! For a baby too small to crawl! Jack's mother said that people all the way in Grant Station were talking about Lucille's dresses, an observation that only made me stay up later. Given the chance, I would talk about these dresses, too. "Guess Nell's planning to take that child to a palace," I would say if I were some person who lived in town. "Guess she expects to meet a queen." Squinting in the lamp's poor illumination, more shadow than light, I made a cuff with stitches so minuscule the white band seemed to float at the end of the sleeve, as pretty as something in a magazine. "I don't know what that child's mother is going to do when she wakes up and remembers they're in Kansas," I would say.

"There's something wrong with a mother who sews dresses like that," I would say back to myself. "She's making up for something. You can see it."

"That baby—she's not right." I leaned forward. "The way she carries on. A child doesn't naturally act like that. She's
learned
to act like that."

"Dresses can't cover up. A baby can't lie."

"Those dresses, though—they're pretty things, all the same."

My fingers became extra deft. I embroidered a field of violets, each one eight stitches plus a rolled knot, on a bib for a dress that Lucille would outgrow in six months. By then, the next baby would be along. Another feeling came, harder to name, and from the cradle Lucille murmured and turned her baby glare on me. I held my breath, and she closed her eyes again. I sewed. Then daylight came, and I left the house to walk.

Some weeks passed before Mama and Pa and my sisters joined us for Sunday dinner. Other families came together every Sunday, but Pa was fond of his own table, as wobbly as it was, and I had to invite them three times, until it became an embarrassment not to come. He made Mama bring a crock of her crunchy sweet pickles, as he didn't care for anybody else's.

Lucille had been screaming since dawn, and she kept screaming right through dinner, though I had walked with her and tried to feed her and put her down for a desperate half-hour in the barn, wrapped up too tight to harm herself. By the time I came to look in, her face was soaked in tears, her sweet purple dress and the hay beneath her soaked in urine. Our big old gelding Rufus, normally as gentle as a pup, tossed his head indignantly when I opened the barn door.

It was gone three o'clock before she consented to nurse. Then she fell into sleep like a stone, letting me carry her heavy little body back to the house where my mother-in-law had just cleared the table.

"I left a plate for you on the stove," she said.

"Thank you."

"You might want to go out and talk with your folks. Your pa is needing to get back shortly. The cows."

This meant either that he had let his latest hand go or he wanted to get away from Mrs. Plat and her parlor with a carpet in it. I knew that my mother-in-law understood all of this, and that Pa expected her to. I knew that I would repay her for cooking a pork butt for my parents, and I knew that I would repay Pa for asking him over to eat it. "It looked like a fine supper," I said, in case Pa had not.

"Go, now," she said, dipping her head toward Lucille. "While you can."

Mama and the girls were sitting in Mrs. Plat's parlor, Mae's face placid and poor Vi's a portrait of misery. Like Mama, she didn't like what was new to her, and she sat with only the toes of her shoes touching the carpet. "It looks like we'll have good wheat prices this year," my mother-in-law said, and Mama nodded dumbly.

Outside, Pa was smoking. So were Jack and his father, but you couldn't exactly call them smoking together, with Pa looking off away from the other two as if he might be accused of neighborliness. Lucille frowned in her sleep. Pa gestured at her and said, "Don't you want to set her down?"

"If I set her down she might wake up. I want her to sleep until next week some time."

"Good idea. Walk with me a spell?"

I nodded, unable to talk. For my whole life we'd had chores to do together, morning till midnight. Now my father had to invite me to walk with him. At that instant, even without Pa's sad smile, I would have fled back home to him and Mama if he had said the least word.

We stepped off the porch and dust puffed around our boots. "Need rain," he said.

"Been needing."

"Maybe that child will settle when rain comes. I've seen it happen."

"Then rain better come soon," I said.

"Fussy child means happiness," he said.

"Guess she's going to be ecstatic. Was I fussy?"

"You slept like you meant to get paid for it."

"There's a job I'd take."

"Not you. You like to keep busy," he said, surprising me.

"I'm willing to try leisure. I just don't notice anybody around here offering soft chairs and bonbons."

"Guess you have to go to California," he said.

"I hear the oranges push themselves into your hands."

"Into your mouth, the way I hear it. You just have to open up."