The Sewing Room

by Liz Zuercher

My fondest childhood memories are the times I spent alone with my mother at the fabric store and in her sewing room.  To most kids that would be the most boring thing on earth.  They’d choose the trip to Disneyland or the first time they hit a home run in Little League or when they won the spelling bee and got all the way to State.  Those would indeed be fond memories, but none of them is mine.

My mother was an artist with fabric.  She made breathtaking original quilts and fabric mosaics that were meant to hang in a window where the light shone through the material like it was a stained glass window.  She didn’t sell any of these creations, but she did give some as gifts.  Mostly, though, she kept the quilts folded and stacked ceiling high in the closet of her sewing room, while the mosaic hangings decorated windows all around our house.  Every room you went into was a kaleidoscope of color.

My mother took refuge in her sewing room, and we kids were not allowed in there – except for me on the days we came back from the fabric store.

My mother wasn’t one to show her emotions and there were times when I wondered if she loved any of us.  But when I saw her in the fabric store, fingering a swatch of chintz or a bolt of striped denim, I caught a rare glimpse of who she was inside.  She had a look of rapture on her face when she held a piece of dull red cotton up to the store window and it transformed into a glowing Christmas tree light.

“Look at this, Emma,” she’d say.  “Isn’t this bee-you-tee-ful?”  She’d string out the syllables just like that, as if that would prolong the joy she felt in her heart at the sight of that light.

I loved seeing her so happy, so alive.  And on those days I felt like I was basking in that glow, too.  I felt like she loved me so much she wanted to share her joy with me.

Together we would choose the fabric for her next project and together we would carry the soft bags home.  Together we would arrange the swatches on the special shelves my father had made for her.  All the colors of the rainbow were there on those shelves, ordered by hue so that the shelves themselves looked like they made up a quilt. 

The shelves took up one whole wall.  Another wall held a corkboard where my mother pinned the paper patterns she drew up.  The pins had balls of color on the ends that my mother placed in the spot those colors would go on her quilt. A third wall was home to the Singer sewing machine where all the work was done, and in the middle of the room was a bare table where she laid out her fabrics to cut and arrange.  She had it in the middle so she could walk all the way around it and look at the design from every angle.

On the fourth side of the room was a big window that looked out onto Grove Street and the jacaranda trees that lined it.  Beneath the window was an upholstered bench where sometimes my mother would sit and stare out at the world beyond her house.  If I caught her doing that before she heard me come in, I thought she seemed like a prisoner dreaming of freedom.  But the sewing room was cheerful and bright and full of the fabrics she loved, so I could never understand why I felt so sad when I saw her there looking out.  When she heard me and turned her eyes away from the window, they brightened when she saw me standing at the edge of her fabric world.  So, when she let me enter that world, I felt close to her, part of what she loved.

I was fourteen when she got sick and almost sixteen by the time she could no longer find the strength to leave the bedroom.  Propped up by pillows in her bed, she’d say,  “Emma, bring me some fabric.”

I’d go to the fabric shelves and fan through the swatches, picking out a few I especially liked.  I carried them to her and laid them out on the bed.

“Make a pretty design,” she’d say.

I’d arrange and re-arrange the swatches until I was satisfied.  Then I’d look up at her for approval.  She’d think a while, biting her lower lip and tilting her head, and then she’d say, “That blue one in the corner – change it with the purple one in the middle.”  I’d make the switch and she’d smile and nod.

“That’s better,” she’d say.  And when I looked at it, I could see that making that one little change had made the design so much more pleasing.  It was magical.  How did she do that?

After she died it took me a long time to go back in the sewing room.  It was just as she’d left it the year before.  Someone besides me had been in there, though, because no dust had gathered.  Every surface was clean and tidy.  The shelves of fabric still formed a beautiful rainbow and when I opened the closet, all the folded quilts were in perfect order.  A life’s work, I thought, as I ran my fingers over them.

I picked up one of the fabric mosaics, took it over to the window and held it up to the light.  A prism of color exploded in the room and I felt my mother’s spirit there, joyful, just as she’d been in the fabric store.  

Not Sausalito

I watch my beautiful wife glide gracefully over our boat's deck and think for the thousandth time how much she looks like a puma -- golden tan skin, golden brown hair, small lean muscles flexing as she tightens a turnbuckle, inspects the rigging.  Nine months at sea have polished her body like golden teak.  The dawn light spills over my wife like God's benediction.  She's poised on the bow, checking the roller furling, and I'm sprawled belly-down in the stern, watching her glowing in the early light through the one eye I can still open.

The boat heels to port, and my stomach heels sympathetically.  I manage to turn around in time to vomit over the stern.  I had no idea there was anything left in there to heave, but life is full of surprises.  Tequila and beer and flank steak and bile dribble down the boat's transom, fouling her gold-leafed name, "Siren's Song." I hang my head over the stern, repulsed by my own breath.

                                            *  *  *  *  *

The Hans Christian is a beautiful boat.  Even non-sailors appreciate her graceful lines, her bow swooping up out of the water as if she were taking flight.  They make perfect live-aboards, beamy and comfortable, and the Siren's Song had been set up and used for just that purpose by her previous owner.

I had thought I'd have to work hard to convince Catherine to go on this adventure, but she had embraced my dream with all her heart.

"Your grandmother's smiling now, wherever she is," Catherine had said.  "I'll bet the only thing Georgie regretted was not living long enough to spend all her lottery winnings herself.  She'd want you to buy the boat, and see the world for her.  Can we rename it after her?"

"No, I'm sorry.  Renaming a boat is bad luck, honey," I had told her.

                                              *  *  *  *  *

I push myself to a seated position, take a deep breath and wince.  I lower myself back down on the deck as gently as I can.   I had been an X-ray technician before I inherited a huge chunk of grandma's money, so I've seen people in pain before, but this is my first intimate, personal encounter with it.

My thoughts seem to float a few inches away from my head, trying to escape my body.  I try to focus.  How badly am I hurt?  One eye swollen shut; possible orbital fracture.  Nose most certainly broken.  I move my jaw open and closed, side to side; bruised, but not broken.  The disorientation?  Probably due to hangover and pain; skull fracture possible.

I pause my woozy inventory and watch Catherine go below, my old white T-shirt barely covering the tops of her thighs.  Was it only two days ago she was sunning herself on deck naked, grinning up at me when she caught me staring at her?

She climbs back up the hatch, goddess ascending, arms full of clouds.  No, sheets.  Pillows.  She drops the load next to my face.  I watch her pick up a pillow -- the pillow I'd bled all over, Jesus -- and fling it over the stern into the ocean.  She watches it sink, then flings its mate overboard too.  As she picks up the crumpled bedsheet, the breeze catches it and it opens, fluttering, a white flag waving over my head, and I watch it leave her hands and fly as she turns away.  Catherine stops, strips off my T-shirt, tosses it overboard, and goes below.  I look over the transom and watch it floating in our wake before it sinks into the sea.  I turn my head and shut my eyes.

I can taste blood.  Vomiting opened the cut bottom lip again, and the cuts inside my mouth caused by my teeth, some of which are loose.  My body aches -- cracked ribs?  Many things are unclear, but I do remember that the man who did this to me was big.  He must have weighed two-ten or two-twenty.  Out of all the yachties at the harbor bar last night, he was the biggest.  I remember the icy beer, the warm tequila, the noise, the jukebox blaring, dancing with Catherine, the drunken laughter, the smoke, the need for fresh air.  I remember staring at the big brunette's huge breasts spilling out of her top, her red-lipsticked mouth as she laughed at me -- "They're real, mate.  I can prove it."

I don't remember taking her aboard, taking her below, but I remember the man's hand looming over her head, sinking itself into her hair and hauling her off me.  I remember thinking, "Oh, this is what seeing stars means," when the hand clenched into a fist and slammed into my left eye socket.  My left eye watched hundreds of tiny twinkling stars in a midnight sky while the rest of my body took a beating.

                                         *  *  *  *  *

My eyes are shut, but I hear Catherine walk across the deck toward me.  She puts a plastic bottle of cold water in my left hand.  I open my eyes, open the bottle, and drink, feeling the pain of the plastic against my split lip.  The day is warm, the breeze is light, the sky is clear, and it seems nature itself is mocking my misery.  I look up at Catherine; she cracks open her own water bottle, looking out to sea.  I say the first thing that pops in my head.

"I could die out here."

"Yes.  Yes, you could."  She sips her water.  "But you probably won't.  It seems he knew when to stop.  His buddy at the bar told me later he's had practice."

She looks down at me.  Her hazel eyes are as expressionless as sea glass.  "It's a game they play with the occasional idiot to spice up their marriage."

I flinch, and fight back another wave of nausea.  I'd like to say something, but there is nothing I can say.

"Me?" she says.  "I don't play at all.  And you knew that when you married me."

                                           *  *  *  *  *

I smell food.  I don't know if it's real or not at first, this smell of garlic and onions, but I awaken fully, stiff and aching from a night spent on deck, and the glorious smell drifts out of the open hatch.  My empty stomach growls.  I must be recuperating.  I'm so hungry, so empty.  I want to walk down the hatch, wrap my arms around my wife from behind, kiss her neck.  I want to grab a spoon and slurp the spaghetti sauce.  I want Catherine to shoo me out of the galley, laugh at me, tell me it's not ready yet, send me out with some crusty bread and a glass of wine while I'm waiting.  I want to go down those galley steps.  I want to hold my wife.

But I can't.

I want to so badly, my heart is going to explode.  It's only flesh and blood.  How will it go on?