Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters (30 page)

At eighteen, Gretchen graduated from high school and won a partial scholarship to college, where she intended to major in elementary education. This news astounded Mrs. Albrecht, who sat her mother down for a serious chat about Gretchen’s future. In a conversation Gretchen overheard from another room, she explained how Gretchen’s parents would be far wiser to direct her down a more practical path than to indulge an imprudent dream. “You want to be kind, I understand that,” said Mrs. Albrecht sympathetically. “But you must think of how much more hurtful it will be later, when she discovers that one cannot rise above one’s station in life.”

Gretchen’s mother thanked Mrs. Albrecht for the advice, and
on the bus home that evening, she tentatively suggested that Gretchen reconsider. Gretchen adamantly refused, but over the next few days, her mother’s worried expressions and tearful arguments wore her down. She agreed to compromise: She would major in elementary education and home economics. Her mother’s thankful relief at this promise filled her with a cold, angry helplessness that worsened when Mrs. Albrecht congratulated her for making such a sensible decision.

Two years into her program, she still would not admit aloud that her home economics courses were among her favorites. She learned to sew and design garments even better than her mother, and she especially enjoyed the creative outlet her quilting class provided. The instructor, a graduate of the college’s art education program named Sylvia Compson, spiced her lectures about patterns and stitches with stories of the etymology of quilt block names, the role of the quilting bee in the lives of early American women, and commemorative quilts that promoted justice and social change. Gretchen took to quilting as if she had learned at her grandmother’s knee, as most of the other students in the class had done. The small class size fostered the creation of deep friendships, strengthened by the teasing they endured from their fellow coeds who thought both home economics and quilting trivial subjects, pursuits in which no woman who wanted to be taken seriously would engage.

Perhaps that was why Gretchen rarely spoke of her inspirational teacher or home economics program to anyone but Joe, the handsome young man she had met at church and the one person with whom she felt she could be completely honest and free with her opinions. He was a wonderful dancer, a machinist at one of the steel mills, polite and respectful to her parents. He wanted to marry her right away but agreed to wait until she had taught for a few years, although sometimes after a date, when they had to tear themselves away from each other, breathless
and dizzy from fervent kisses in the shadows of the pine trees obscuring her parents’ view from the house, Gretchen considered abandoning her education and marrying him soon, tomorrow, that very night, because the wait seemed unbearable when he held her in his arms.

Even in those days, Joe did not like the Albrechts. He called Heidi’s parents rich snobs who took advantage of Gretchen’s mother, and his mouth turned in a skeptical frown whenever Gretchen had to cancel a weekend date to help Heidi with one crisis or another. He said nothing when Heidi went off to an exclusive New England college with plans to earn a teaching degree. His raised eyebrows and knowing look conveyed his meaning with perfect clarity, as it had when Mrs. Albrecht remarked that she and her husband could not be prouder of their daughter, for didn’t it reveal Heidi’s tremendous strength of character that she was so passionate about educating the less fortunate?

Joe had plenty to say, however, a few years after he and Gretchen married. As Heidi’s own wedding approached, she asked Gretchen to make her a nearly identical gown, but of silk instead of cotton brocade and with lovely seed pearl accents. When Gretchen stayed up past midnight for the third night in a row in order to finish the gown in time, he folded his newspaper, flung it on the table, and said, “You be sure to keep track of your hours and charge her a living wage. No more favors for Princess Heidi.” Then he stormed upstairs to bed.

Joe was not a temperamental man. Gretchen knew he wished the beautiful silk gown was for her, and that he could have afforded to buy it for her.

He hated that she needed to pick up occasional work from the Albrechts to supplement his wages from the plant and the small salary she received for teaching at a Catholic primary school. He did not want her to have to work, period, but he knew she enjoyed teaching, even on days when her more outspoken girls rolled their eyes when
she assigned a sewing project and declared that they ought to be allowed to take metal shop with the boys instead. He took as much overtime as he could, but every time they saved up a promising sum, the car broke down or the furnace went out or the roof needed to be repaired. But they were frugal and found their happiness within each other, and as they slowly built up a nest egg, they were hopeful that more prosperous times would come their way.

Then came the dark morning when the principal came to Gretchen’s classroom and in a hushed voice informed her that the plant foreman had called. Joe had been taken to Allegheny General Hospital after a support beam fell and pinned him to the floor. His back was broken and he was not expected to live.

When he survived that first night and regained consciousness the next morning, Gretchen seized that faint glimmer of hope and would not allow the doctors’ grim predictions to dispel it. Stubborn to a fault and determined to prove his doctors wrong, Joe lived when they said he would die and fought to learn to walk again after they concluded he never would. They urged Gretchen to convince him to accept their diagnosis, to encourage him to let go of false hope, but Gretchen refused. Let the rest of the world condemn him to a wheelchair; someone had to believe in him. Joe needed her to believe in him.

Bedridden for months and in almost constant pain, Joe struggled to regain use of his legs—and to accept that for the time being, he must allow his wife to do things for him that a grown man ought to do for himself. Gretchen quit her job to care for him. Their modest savings quickly disappeared, but Gretchen made ends meet on a small monthly stipend from Joe’s union. When that proved insufficient, she paid a call on Heidi and asked for work. Heidi grandly offered her a job cleaning her house on Saturday mornings, when Gretchen could arrange for a neighbor to check in on Joe.

She knew from his silence that he hated to see her going hat in
hand to the Albrecht family, but he did not lash out at her as some husbands might have done. He redoubled his efforts to recuperate, and within months he could sit up in bed unassisted. Soon he could move from the bed to the chair on his own, and within a year, he could stand. From the kitchen below she would hear him attempting slow, shuffling steps across the bedroom floor, but she resisted the temptation to dash upstairs to watch, knowing his pride would suffer. For Joe, it was bad enough that she had to work to support them, a fact of their married life they both accepted but did not discuss. If he did not want her to watch him struggle to walk, she would leave him alone until he was ready.

There were no more Saturday night dances or Sunday matinees with friends. Instead, they entertained themselves in the evenings by listening to the radio or reading aloud to each other. Most often, Joe would read aloud while Gretchen quilted. His voice, as strong and deep as before the accident, comforted her, and the piecework drew her attention from the shabby furniture, her made-over dresses, the diminishment of their expectations, the loneliness and isolation of their lives. Gretchen’s scrap quilts brought warmth and beauty into their home, allowing them to turn the thermostat a little lower or to conceal a sagging mattress and threadbare sofa cushions. Gretchen knew Joe appreciated the softness and bright colors, since he rarely left the house except to go to church.

Gretchen was glad that Joe admired her quilts, for it seemed that no one else did. No one she knew quilted anymore. Her women friends were taking on jobs outside the home, enrolling in community college, competing in local elections, and declaring that women could do anything men could do. Gretchen had known that for a long time, but it was quite another thing to watch from the sidelines as other women her age and younger broke into realms from which they had traditionally been excluded. Even Heidi, who had given up teaching after one unfortunate semester,
had worked her way onto boards and committees that a generation ago would have pleasantly but firmly steered her toward a woman’s auxiliary instead of allowing her to be a part of the decision making. Gretchen watched with awe and admiration as other women’s lives became busier and fuller, and she nodded vigorously when former coworkers talked about equal pay for equal work and valuing woman’s contributions. It took her time to realize that they were not referring to many of the contributions she valued most.

Other women had abandoned quilting, but not because they were too busy. Quilts had become old-fashioned, the craft of the poor and the unsophisticated, an unwelcome reminder of the limitations of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ lives. Quilting, with its inherent association with the domestic sphere and the traditional “woman’s work” of housekeeping and family tending, was something for women to avoid tripping over as they strode into the male world of work that mattered.

Gretchen refused to apologize for her love of quilting, but she decided to stop discussing it one Saturday morning at Heidi’s house. Heidi had set Gretchen to work clearing out some old cartons from the basement, where she stumbled across a box of old fabric scraps, half-sewn patchwork blocks, and an envelope stuffed full of brittle, yellowed quilt patterns clipped from the newspaper. The envelope bore Heidi’s great-grandmother’s name and the address of their older, grander house. Gretchen immediately hurried off to report the find to Heidi, who regarded her with bewildered skepticism as she described the treasure trove downstairs.

“Do you think it’s worth anything?” asked Heidi when Gretchen had finished.

“As a memento of your grandmother, of course,” said Gretchen, taken aback. “I don’t think it’s something you could sell. I suppose a historical society might be interested in the donation …”

“I doubt it. Just toss it out.”

“But—” Gretchen hesitated. “The fabric is still usable, and the blocks are charming.”

“What would I do with them? Sew them together? Make a quilt?”

“That’s what I would do.”

Heidi laughed. “You’re still quilting? Honestly, Gretchen, I don’t see how you of all people can afford to waste your time that way. Think of how much you charge an hour and how many hours it takes to make a quilt. You could buy the best comforter at Gimbel’s or Kaufmann’s for less that that. It’s a bad return on your investment.”

“Quilting is not just about saving money.”

“You are so right. It’s also about what we consider truly important. We aren’t chained to the kitchen anymore, and we can’t let anyone forget it. If we women don’t insist upon spending our time as thoughtfully as we spend our money, we’ll never be considered equal to men.”

Stung, Gretchen nevertheless nodded. “What should I do with the box, then?”

Heidi shrugged dismissively. “If you want it so badly, you take it.”

Gretchen did exactly that, but as she pieced a dozen pastel Dresden Plate blocks into a lap quilt, she brooded over Heidi’s words, an echo of a more prevailing message that Gretchen was out of step with her times. She did not understand why. In an era where the work of women was expanding and being recognized and earning greater respect than ever before, why was “women’s work” so denigrated? Gretchen did not want quilting and cooking and caring for children to be respected
despite
the fact that they were tasks traditionally accomplished by women, but
because
of it.

But she knew no one else who shared her opinion, so she kept her quilting to herself. She quilted to add beauty to her life, to give purpose to her hours, to distract her from the unfairness of fate.

Her longtime prayers were answered when Joe began to walk
again; tears came to her eyes whenever she recalled his proud demonstration of his new, halting gait across the kitchen. He had hoped to return to work, but he never fully recovered his old strength, and an accidental jolt could leave him gasping from pain. His dream of returning to his former occupation faded, and with it, his hope.

It broke Gretchen’s heart to see him turning in upon himself, giving up, growing old before his time. Before long, she realized that it was beyond her powers to cheer him up, but she resolved not to sink into despair with him. She found a new job as a substitute teacher, and while it was not steady work, it did help pay off some outstanding debts and it gave her a chance to get out of the house. In the evenings after a day away, she found she could be more cheerful with Joe, and she had more interesting stories to tell him.

Gradually he returned from his melancholy. He resumed seeing old friends, even though they thoughtlessly ribbed him about loafing and living off his wife’s earnings. He planted a garden in the small patch of land behind their house and learned how to preserve the harvest. Then one evening, he paused in the middle of the chapter he was reading aloud and said, “You sure seem to get a lot of pleasure out of your sewing.”

She smiled. “We’ve been married six years and you only just noticed?”

“What is it you like so much? It’s not just having a pretty quilt at the end, is it?”

“I suppose I just like working with my hands. Keeping busy.”

Joe was quiet for a moment. “Maybe I should try that.”

“You want to quilt?”

“No, no, not quilting. Something else.”

The next day he went on his usual slow walk around the neighborhood and returned accompanied by a boy pushing a white wooden rocking chair in a wheelbarrow. It looked to be at least
fifty years old, with a split armrest and a few missing spindles on the back. Gretchen watched from the window as the boy unloaded the chair on the sidewalk. Joe gave the boy a coin from his pocket, sent him on his way, and dragged the chair out of sight into the garage.