How to Make an American Quilt (18 page)

T
HE ONE NIGHT A WEEK
she spent quilting at Glady Joe Cleary’s house became a chore. She had become friendly with Marianna Neale, as they shared an affection for roses; was grateful to have her in the quilting circle with her. (She still had not grown used to groups of women and felt an undefined restlessness around them, making her appreciative of Marianna, with whom she felt a comfortable kinship.) This was in Grasse, where Howell said to her,
Baby, I’m home for good
.

She did not especially enjoy quilting or sewing, brought little imagination to the work, but the repetition functioned as therapy, giving focus to her disjointed and unpeopled life. When she discovered the impulsive, unplanned
Crazy Quilt
, she became more interested and adept at the work. As far as patterns went, her favorite was called
My Grandmother’s Flowers
, which she modified, using only yellow roses, and renamed
Chickie’s Garden
.

Now she had this new feeling regarding her marriage.
Perhaps I had to keep a locked restraint on my affection for Howell, knowing he would always come and go and never stay for good. Is this how I would’ve felt had we always been together?
She thought about their life in Atwater, realizing for the first time that, yes, those were the happiest
years before these and that she refused to see it at the time (refused to surrender to her own happiness), knowing he could again change jobs. But then, if they had spent all those years together in a conventional marriage, maybe they would’ve become like her cynical neighbor—a couple who loved each other but did not like each other—as if love is some sort of virus and marriage the agent that makes one immune to the illness by overexposure. Imagine being immune to married love.

B
UT ONE DAY
, as Howell was getting his hair cut, he quietly slumped in the barber’s chair, and Constance did not cry or have a memorial service. Em Reed and Anna Neale thought she showed disrespect to Howell’s memory, but Constance rarely explained herself to anyone and certainly not to this group of women she quilted with, women who rushed sympathetically to her side, while Constance only wished to be left alone.

Constance ordered a plain pine box, allowed a rabbi to say a prayer as she rent a small piece of her clothing, this nod to her husband’s long-neglected religious beliefs, beliefs she did not share. Then she had Howell quietly buried.

(When someone dies, the funeral is the measure of his life. How many mourners will there be? Will they arrive on time? Will they come to the house later? Bring food? Or, will there be any mourners at all? Howell, with all his traveling, worked alone; all the moving around did not lend itself to long-term friendship. She would not hold a funeral for this wonderful man who had been her husband, with only a few people in attendance. She did not care for herself, but she did not want him to know how lonely an empty chapel can be.)

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.

D
EAN 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?”