She is a creature of inestimable beauty, I wanted to say. That’s who she is.
“What I want to know,” Nell says, the bucket around her neck half-full of cherries, “is what became of you.” She is wrestling with the knowledge that I’d been given everything she’d ever wanted, and that I’d given it away.
Emily and Maisie look over at their sister, then they look at me.
“What do you mean, what happened to me? I married your father. We came here. We had the three of you.”
“But how? I always thought you and Daddy fell in love at Tom Lake, that you dumped Duke for Dad and then the two of you went from there. But you left Michigan without even calling Dad from the airport. When you went to Los Angeles, did he stay here?”
“He stayed the rest of the summer helping Maisie and Ken, then he went to Chicago to direct a play.” Was it Chicago?
“Did you write to him?” Emily asks.
I shake my head. I didn’t know enough to write to Joe in those days.
“How long was it before he found you?” Maisie asks. Something in the construction of her question touches me, as if Joe had gone door to door, searching for me all that time.
“Three or four years,” I say. New Hampshire was its own eternity, as was New York. I did not tally up those days.
“So tell us about going back to New Hampshire,” Emily says, cheerful at the thought of additional chapters. “Tell us about New York. Tell us about when you met Dad again.”
“No, really, I’m done.” They are reminding me of the years when they were small and it wasjust me in the house beneath all that snow and Joe was in the barn trying to fix a tractor he didn’t know how to fix, and I felt like the children would eat me. Nell was eating me, still at my breast, and the other two rushed to crawl in my lap whenever I sat down. I thought, Joe will come home and find the three of them framing out a playhouse with my bones.
“You said it wasn’t a story about a famous man,” Nell reminds me. “It was supposed to be a story about you.”
“Itwasa story about me, the whole thing. But I can’t tell you every minute of my life. We’ll die of boredom.”
Maisie faces down the long row of trees, every one of them covered in cherries. “We’ll die of boredom anyway.”
I would pull off every last bit of fruit myself rather than go back there.
“A sentence,” Nell says, as if this were an improv class. “Start small. See where it takes you.”
I think about it. Those hard years can, in fact, be distilled to a single sentence, and so I try. “I went back to New Hampshire and stayed with my grandmother until she died.”
I was her favorite and she was my favorite. My grandmother married my grandfather when she was eighteen, and had her first child, my mother, at nineteen. My grandfather worked for the railroad and she could sew and together there was enough to keep them going. They had five children, the fourth of whom was a sleepwalker. Brian got out of bed one night when he was six, went down the hall and down the stairs and out the front door into the snowy night. Even asleep, he knew to close the door. When my grandmother went to get everyone up in the morning, Brian wasn’t in his bed. She looked all over the house and then went outside without her coat. She found him downat the end of the driveway by the mailbox, frozen to death. Her remaining four grew up fine. Over the years they brought fourteen grandchildren home from the hospital. Go look us up—Kenison—we’re everywhere. My parents met in high school and also married young, everybody married young back then. They had their two boys straightaway: Heath, who they called Hardy because he was, and Jake. That was the family. That was what they’d wanted. But when my mother was thirty-five I came along. Thirty-five sounds like nothing now, it sounds young, but being pregnant when she already had two big boys, one of them playing football on the varsity team, mortified her.
I would say nothing against my parents or my brothers. They were good to me, but there was from earliest memory an understanding that I would live mostly at my grandmother’s house six blocks away. My grandfather had died of emphysema and everyone said she needed company, insofar as a very small child can be company. I suppose I didn’t live completely with her but I was mostly with her, playing with fabric remnants and ribbon wound onto spools while she worked. The alterations shop had a small selection of needles and yarn because we didn’t have a knitting shop in town. When I got older, my mother would watch me knitting a sweater at the breakfast table and say she was sorry she hadn’t paid more attention to her own mother’s attempts to teach her things. I tried a hundred times to teach her myself but my mother was like a border collie. She couldn’t sit still for it.
My grandmother and I though, we were the absolute masters of stillness. She taught me to play honeymoon bridge, how to watch movies while silently keeping up with my stitch count. Those were the days before audiobooks, and she asked me to read to her while she sewed, following my progression fromThe Little House in the Big Woodsall the way throughMoby-Dick, which I never would have finished were it not for her insistent requests to hear another chapter. Every book I had to read for school, along with all the ones I read for pleasure, I read to her. This wasprobably the origin of my acting, as I can remember her telling me to be a little more interesting, and then later on to be a little less interesting. When I played my first Emily in high school, she helped me memorize my lines and I helped her make the costumes. We each had a copy of the play and we read it through breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
“She’s just like you,” my grandmother said. “The smartest girl in the class.”
My grandmother had been the smartest girl in her class as well, everyone said so, but there wasn’t much to do with that distinction once she’d married on the Saturday after graduation. Five children made for a full life, and then four children did the best they could to make life full. Her math was sharp, it had to be to make patterns and run a business. She kept the red leather-bound dictionary her husband had given to her on their first anniversary on the bedside table where another woman might have kept a Bible. She wanted me to go to college, and then she wanted me to go to California and be an actress. She wanted me to have everything I ever thought of wanting. “Look at her getting up on that stage like it was nothing,” she said to her friends. I went off to the University of New Hampshire, and after that I got on a plane to California and checked into a hotel room all by myself. I amazed her.
She never once made me feel bad about leaving. I don’t know that I would have gone if I’d thought she’d be lonely. But she was so cheerful about everything, so happy for me. She had plenty of family around her still, and she knew everyone in town, so off I went. I don’t regret that. She would never have wanted me hanging around for her sake. She meant for me to do something with my life, the kinds of things she hadn’t been able to do herself. But when I think about what those years away added up to, I would rather have spent them with her.
My grandmother closed Stitch-It around the time I moved to Los Angeles. Even when she used her brightest light she hadtrouble with her eyes, which turned out to be the early stages of macular degeneration. She couldn’t do the fine little stitches anymore, though she could manage plenty of other things. Even without the shop, people brought their clothes to her. She kept the yellow tape measure around her neck and did the work as long as she could because she believed that was her role in our town. Neither of my brothers settled in New Hampshire after college, and then my parents moved to Florida because my mother suffered terribly with arthritis in the winter. They invited my grandmother to come with them but that was never going to happen. She had other children, and they had children, and, in a few cases, those children had children. When I came back, my foot still locked in the fiberglass boot just the way it had been on television, it was clear to everyone that I was the person my grandmother wanted. Why not stay? I had money and no plans. I moved back into my room, which now housed two sewing machines and the button-holer and racks of thread and the Juki serger which, after me, was her pride. I helped her with the sewing. She would talk me through whatever needed to be done if she couldn’t quite manage it herself. In the evenings I read aloud. I told Ripley to have his secretary mail me any books he didn’t want to deal with and she shipped them out in boxes. People stopped me on the street to tell me what a good job I’d done in the movie. I was easy to spot: the crutches, the cast. They thought I was famous, and so were amazed that I’d come home at all. The leaves turned red. The cast came off. I was sure there had been some terrible mistake since now I was in excruciating pain all the time. I couldn’t put my foot flat on the ground, but the doctor said it would happen and after a while it did. I started physical therapy and then I finished it. My sweaters came out of the cedar chest. I found my boots. I wondered about Duke and Pallace and Sebastian, sure the three of them had gone their separate ways. More than anything, I wondered if they ever wondered about me. I tried to find Veronica but she was gone.Veronica, her mother, her brothers, all of them. Those were the days when people could move away and not even the post office knew where to find them.
My grandmother said I should open Stitch-It again, there would be plenty of business. I believed the part about the business, I just didn’t know if I was ready to sign off on a life in New Hampshire spent sewing. Then one night a report about breast cancer came on the news, all about mammograms and early detection, women talking about finding a lump in their breast. We were making dinner. We always turned the television off when we sat down to eat but we could watch it while we were cooking. That was the rule.
“I have one of those,” she said to the television set.
“You had a mammogram?”
She shook her head. She wasn’t looking at me. “A lump.”
I had been cutting up a head of broccoli and I put down the knife and washed my hands. “What did you do about it?”
