Carol Shields

Happenstance

World Editions

breda 2016

Published in Great Britain in 2016 by World Editions Ltd., London. Happenstance, The Husband’s Story first published as Happenstance
in Canada by McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1980. Happenstance, The Wife’s Story first published as A Fairly Conventional Woman in Canada by
McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1982.

www.worldeditions.org

Happenstance © Carol Shields 1994

Published with the permission of Carol Shields Literary Trust

www.carol-shields.com

Cover design Multitude

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-088-2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Phone: +31 (0)76 523 3533. Email: info@worldeditions.org.

Happenstance - The Wife’s Story

The Wife’s Story

For Catherine Mary Shields

Chapter One

Every morning Brenda wakes up, slips into her belted robe, and glides—glides—down the wide oak stairs to make breakfast for her husband and children. The descent down the broad, uncarpeted stairs has something of ceremony about it, it has gone on so long. She and Jack have lived in the Elm Park house for thirteen years now; Rob was a baby when they moved in; Laurie, twelve last October, has never lived anywhere else.

In the kitchen she reaches for the wall switch. It’s seven-thirty, a January morning, and the overhead fixture blinks once, twice, then pours steady, lurid light down onto the blue countertops, causing her to reel slightly. Her hands set out plates, reach into the refrigerator for frozen orange juice and milk, into the cupboards for Raisin Bran and coffee beans. Her husband, Jack, has given her a new coffee-grinder for Christmas, a small Swedish toy of a machine which is still a little unfamiliar to the touch. A button on its smooth side sets a tiny motor whirring, a brief zzzz which releases a pleasing instantaneous cloud of coffee smells. ‘Philadelphia,’ Brenda murmurs into the coffee-softened air of the kitchen.

She boils water, pours it carefully. ‘Philadelphia.’ Her voice is low and so secretive she might be addressing a priest or a lover.

For a month now, ever since she decided to go to Philadelphia, she has had her flight schedule thumbtacked in the lower right-hand corner of the kitchen bulletin board. Departure time, arrival time, flight number—all printed in her own hand on one of Jack’s three-by-five index cards.

Above where the card is pinned there are a number of other items. It seems to Brenda, yawning and retying the belt of her robe, that some of them have been there for weeks. Months. She tells herself she could get busy and weed out a few, but the confusion of notices and messages mainly pleases her. She likes to think of herself as a busy person. Brenda Bowman—what a busy person!

The clutter on the brown corkboard speaks to her, a font of possibility, firmly securing her, for the moment at least, against inactivity. On the other hand, she sometimes feels when she glances at it a stab of impatience; is there no end to the nagging of details? Appointments. Bills. Lists. Announcements. Furthermore, these small reminders of events past and present carry with them a suggestion of disappointment or risk. That old theatre program, for instance, the one from the Little Theatre production they’d gone to—when was that? last November? The Duchess of Malfi. She had hated The Duchess of Malfi. So, surprisingly, had Jack.

Someone—Jack, of course, who else?—had pinned up a newspaper cartoon about the School Board scandal, two pears-shaped men balancing on penny-farthing bicycles and grappling over a sack labeled $$$. The point of the bicycles, though Brenda has been following the scandal with some interest, escapes her.

And there, snuggled cleanly in the corner—she has cleared a small area around it—is her flight schedule. It looks purposeful and bright, winning from the welter of other items its small claim to priority. Brenda glances at it every morning when she comes downstairs to make breakfast. It is the first thing to catch her eye, and even before she plugs in the coffee-grinder and starts the eggs, she examines and is reassured by her own meticulous printing, Flight 452, United Airlines, departing Chicago at 8:35. Tomorrow morning, Saturday. Arrival at Philadelphia at 1:33.

There are two short stops, Fort Wayne and Cleveland. The round-trip ticket—she will be gone only five days and so cannot qualify for the one-week excursion rate—comes to $218. Her tickets lie in an envelope on the hall table under a piece of pink quartz someone once brought them from Greece. The thought of the tickets touches her with a wingbeat of happiness which is both absurd and childish and which makes her for a moment the object of her own pity. Ridiculous. As though her life at forty was so impoverished that the thought of spending five days in Philadelphia could stir her to exaltation. Pathetic!

Not only pathetic, but unrealistic. She and Jack have been to New York a number of times. Once, when she was a child, she went for a trip to the Smoky Mountains with her mother. Later there was her honeymoon in Williamsburg; to Denver and to San Francisco with Jack for a meeting of the National Historical Society; twice to Bermuda; and four years ago to France. Philadelphia wasn’t even supposed to be a particularly attractive city. Someone—she’s forgotten who, someone at a party recently—referred to Philadelphia as the anus of the east coast, one of those cities that suffers from being too close to New York, nothing but highways and hotels and factories and an inferiority complex. Nevertheless, when she murmurs the word ‘Philadelphia’ into the rising coffee fumes, she feels engorged with anticipation, a rich, pink strangeness jiggling round her heart that interferes with her concentration.

In recent days she has felt impelled to disguise her excitement, to affect calm. A hand on her shoulder seems to warn her to be careful, to practice sanity and steadiness. (A false steadiness that has nevertheless yielded a real calm, for she has succeeded in making lists, she has been orderly.) She even managed a shrug of nonchalance when the printed program from the Philadelphia Exhibition arrived in the mail a week ago with her name listed on the back: Brenda Bowman, Quilter, Chicago Craft Guild.

Admittedly she was one of hundreds listed; the print was the size of telephone-book type, all the quilters crowded together with the spinners, the weavers, even the tapestry-makers and macramé people. Yes, Brenda has told Hap Lewis, herself a macramé person, yes, she’s glad she decided to go. Why not? It would be interesting (and there she had shrugged, lightly, dismissively) to see what quilters from other parts of the country were doing. It might even be (another shrug) inspiring. She had held herself in check, even with Hap, whom she regarded as one of her closest friends, projecting a half-grimace over the cost of domestic flights, passing off the trip to Philadelphia as a mere whim—though a whim which required a certain amount of preparation. Jack and the children weren’t used to having her gone. There were the meals. There was the laundry. ‘Fuck the meals, fuck the damn laundry,’ Hap had encouraged her.

Leaving 8:35, arriving 1:33. Brenda has taken this information over the phone asking the United reservation clerk to repeat the times and the flight number. She loves the busyness of facts, but distrusts them, and today, after breakfast, after everyone has left for the day, she plans to phone United again for a confirmation.

In the frying pan she melts a minute quantity of butter and cracks in four eggs, two for Jack, one for each of the children, none for herself. She is watching her weight, not dieting, just watching. Maintaining. And keeping a restive eye on her daughter Laurie, who in the last year has gone from a child’s size twelve to a fourteen Chubette. Laurie’s brand-new Big Sister jeans hardly fit as it is, but when she finishes her egg this morning she will be sure to reach for a second piece of toast. Only the stuffing of carbohydrates keeps her civil these days. Puberty is the worst of diseases, worse in its way that disease of withering appetites and painful restrictions. Brenda stares at the shiny side of the percolator and sees beyond it the tender beginnings of Laurie’s breasts, melting and disappearing under new layers of fat. She imagines returning home in a week’s time and finding her daughter obscenely bloated with food and maddened by sugary cravings. Poor Laurie. ‘It looks like we’re going to have a baby elephant on our hands,’ Jack had remarked to Brenda only a week earlier. Brenda had reacted with fury. ‘It’s only baby fat. All girls go through a period of baby fat.’

She should, though, sit down with Laurie today; have a little talk, just the two of them.

But there is so much still to do, and she hasn’t started packing. Two of her blouses need pressing: the green one, the one that goes with her suit and with the pants outfit as well, and the printed one, which she plans to wear to the final banquet. At 3:15 she is having her hair cut, tinted, and blown dry at a new place over on Lake Street which has wicker baskets and geraniums in the window and scarlet and silver wallpaper inside. And if there’s time, she wants to make a casserole or two to leave for Jack and the children—lasagna maybe, they love lasagna. Not that they aren’t capable of looking after themselves; even Rob can cook easy things—scrambled eggs, hamburgers—and Laurie’s learned to make a fairly good Caesar salad. They’re not babies anymore, Brenda says to herself, either of them.

Tomorrow morning. Saturday. Jack will drive her to the airport. They should plan to leave the house by seven; no, earlier, the car’s been acting up lately, the rear brakes. She’ll have to take it in herself when she gets back from Philadelphia and have it checked over. Jack tends to be vague and overly trusting (or overly distrusting) about mechanical things. What if they get a flat tire on the way to the airport? Unlikely, but still … She should set the alarm for six, have her shower, get dressed and then wake Jack. She will say goodbye to the children tonight. No point hauling them out of their beds on a weekend morning.

Besides, there’s always the danger that Laurie might cling to her. She should be past clinging, but she’s not. Even going off to school in the morning she sometimes stands in the open doorway, letting the heat escape, clinging to Brenda. These embraces are wordless and pressing, and Laurie’s breath seems imprisoned inside her heaving chest. Brenda can feel, or imagines she feels, the desperate, irregular thud of her daughter’s heart through the material of her ski jacket.

And Rob has been so bad-tempered in the morning lately. Loutish, Jack calls it, though Brenda rises to his defense; Rob, or Robbie as she still sometimes thinks of him, is, after all, her firstborn child, and his lowered eyes (sulkiness) and dark, curling hair still make her heart seize with love. ‘It’s only adolescence,’ she tells Jack. ‘It’s hormones. Fourteen’s the worst age. We should be thankful he isn’t on drugs. Or skipping school. Look at Benny Wallberg. Even Billy Lewis …’

She puts forks and knives on the table, checks the eggs. She will have to stock up on eggs today. They could always fall back on eggs. Eggs, the complete food; where had she read that? And she should buy some canned soup. Jack likes chicken and rice, but Rob only likes tomato, and Laurie … and what else?

From upstairs come noises, the familiar early-morning noises coming from different corners, but weaving together into a kind of coarsely made filament of sound from which the house at this hour seems suspended. A radio (Rob’s) playing behind a closed door, and the uneven clumping of Laurie’s Swedish clogs across the bedroom floor. And the endless running of the shower; don’t they realize—even Jack—what hot water costs per month!

In another two minutes they will all be down, hungry, frowning, slouching in their chairs, demanding, accepting, preoccupied, still bound up in sleep and resistant to smiles or greetings. Rob will have sprouted a colony of new pimples on his chin, and last week’s batch, the old ones, will be tipped with scabs—‘never scratch, never squeeze’ the doctor has advised. Poor Rob. Laurie’s blouse will be pulling out of her skirt already, and there will be a dribble of egg, round as a tear, next to her mouth. Jack will come down smelling of talcum, smelling of a male sort of privacy, as though his body has already completed half its daily rituals. He will reach out blindly for the Trib.

Should she perhaps resent the fact that he always helps himself to the front section of the Trib and, like a potentate, hands round to the others the lesser sections, the fashion page, the sports, the business pages? Brenda herself tends to get stuck most mornings with the business section, which she has found over the years to be surprisingly interesting. Not that she studies the graphs or reads the articles about Gross National Products or falling cocoa prices in west Africa; what she likes is to look at the photographs, the column-wide pictures of men—an occasional women too, of course, times are changing—who have achieved some sort of recent executive splendor, who are freshly appointed to some distinguished board of directors, or who have been transformed into vice-presidents of silverware companies or management-consulting firms or fire-and-casualty companies. Or else they are rising through the hierarchies of curious firms which manufacture mysterious products like vacufiles or turfspinners or gyrograters. Their success seems to Brenda to be dazzling but contained; they are poised for action, about to leap off the page, but something restrains them. There’s a withheld muscularity in the pleasant, truncated necks and knotted ties, a darkness at the hairline which gives an air of brisk loyalty and purpose and probably good health. No perilous sodium nitrates or cholesterol-loaded eggs for these chosen stars. So-and-So, a graduate of Northwestern (A.B.), master’s degree in Business Administration from Harvard, long record of service with firm since joining as trainee in 1960. (1960?—that was the year Jack had been taken on part-time at the Institute).

This public recognition, Brenda supposes, is deserved, richly deserved. And where do these rising executives live, she cannot help asking herself. Wilmette? Clarendon Hills? The Near North Side? Here in Elm Park perhaps?—of course; she has several times seen people she and Jack know featured in the business pages. But for the most part these men are strangers, mere names attached to faces. They are married? Divorced? Are there children? Children grown difficult and morose? Never mind, they are the climbers of ladders. Their faces are fleshed out, made smooth and calm and American by success.

It is amazing, Brenda thinks, that every day there can be a new batch of these success stories; it is a wonder that there is room in the world for so much success and money. These photographs and announcements aren’t cheap, she’s been told. Space in the Trib costs money. The Great Lakes Institute where Jack works considers these announcements an unnecessary extravagance.

Otherwise he might have had his picture in the paper when he was made Acting Curator of Explorations. And though he’s never expressed any disappointment about this lack of public recognition, Brenda knows that he would probably like to have had his picture in the paper. He is surprisingly photogenic. That picture of him at the lake last summer in his gold-striped golf shirt—he could pass for thirty-eight, not forty-three. He has a useful, temperate face, and he’s been lucky with his teeth, which are both straight and white. In the summer he tans more easily than many men, and his sandy-colored hair doesn’t show up baldness the way dark hair does. Poor Jack. He would have liked his picture in the paper. He would have bought extra copies: one for his parents, one for his Aunt Ruth in the retirement village near Indianapolis. When he went to Elm Park wine-and-cheese parties or barbecues at the weekend he would have been happy thinking that his friends knew of his promotion, that they had seen his picture alongside those of stockbrokers and equipment salesmen. ‘Well, yes,’ he would have said, ‘there will be a little more responsibility, maybe a little more travelling, but more headaches, too.’

But the Institute where he works is funded by trust money and has a board which examines finances and which has recently suggested that air conditioning be cut back except during July and August. The library budget is under review too, and the decision to upgrade the office equipment has been postponed. Furthermore, Dr. Middleton, who heads the Institute, is attached to the scholarly ideal of anonymity, and so staff promotions are soft-pedaled rather than celebrated and announced in the newspapers for the entertainment of women in the suburbs who sit idling over their black coffee and dry toast.

But tomorrow, Brenda thinks, tomorrow at this time she will be gone. The newspaper, the coffee-grinder, the window over the sink with its red curtain, the morning skin of frost on the backyard grass—all this will remain, but she will be gone. Like the reassembled atoms in Rob’s science-fiction stories, her bones will rise from this room and soar brightly over the city of Chicago. She will give a small salute to the colored roofs below, to the plumes of smoke, neat as a painting. Around the tip of the lake, then Gary with its evil fumes dissolving in blueness, then Fort Wayne—she has never been to Fort Wayne, nor to Cleveland either for that matter. Lunch on the plane, followed by coffee, and then Philadelphia. (She and Jack had talked once about taking the children to visit Independence Hall and to see the Liberty Bell, but they had wanted to go to Washington too, and at that time Jack had only two weeks’ vacation.)

So much to do: the packing, her hair, then the groceries. The backs of her legs ache too; she’s expecting her period. What timing! She will be running furiously all day, a thought that floods her with happiness so that she wants to weep. And tomorrow someone else will be jiggling the coffee-maker; someone else will be slapping the side of the toaster to make it pop. Her eyes won’t be here to seek out the specks of dust on the dining-room rug or light upon the breadcrumbs around the toaster. Tomorrow she will not be standing here in this room chanting into the mild early-morning silence this irrational and unasked-for prayer, her ritual lament of pity and helplessness: poor Laurie, poor Rob, poor Jack.

It is an incantation which she knows is addressed to no one in particular, but which returns often to scrape along the edge of her vision like a piece of pumice. Poor Laurie, poor Rob, poor Jack. She supposes it is a blessing of sorts, but one from which caring has lately been subtracted.

Ah well, she brightens, turning over the eggs and pouring herself some coffee. Ah well. And then she begins to hum, as she often does in the morning: Amazing grace! how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

Chapter Two

Eleven o’clock in the morning and Hap Lewis stood at Brenda’s back door, her arms clutched in a fit of shivering and a smile breaking across her long face.

‘Come on in,’ Brenda cried through the storm door.

It was cold outside, less than twenty degrees according to the radio, and getting colder. Snow was forecast. Brenda, wearing an old brown sweater and a new pair of jeans, could feel the damp outside air reaching her ankles.

Hap’s voice came buzzing through the glass. ‘You sure you’ve got a sec, Brenda? Jesus, you must be up to your neck.’

‘Sure I’ve got a sec. Come on in. It’s freezing out there and you don’t even have a coat.’

‘But God, you must have a million and a half things—’

‘I’m getting there,’ Brenda said, waving one hand over her shoulder and shutting the door with the other. Already she’d made the beds, done a load of laundry, and put together a casserole of Spanish rice with cheese topping which she’d covered with foil and placed in the refrigerator ready to be heated up. Her suitcase—a good thing she owned one decent suitcase—lay open on the bed; her blouses, carefully pressed, were on hangers waiting to be folded; she could put them in at the last minute.

‘Look Bren, the reason I dashed over—I wanted to pop in to see if I could give you a hand or anything.’

‘I don’t think there’s a thing, Hap. But thanks anyway. I appreciate it. For once, everything’s more or less organized.’

‘Honest? You sure?’

‘I think so. Really. Unless you’re going out to the A & P—’

‘The A & P? Oh, Jesus, of all days. The trouble is the car isn’t here. Bud took it downtown, he had a special meeting or something. A sales meeting. I hate those lousy sales meetings. Otherwise—’

‘It doesn’t matter—’

‘Look, just tell me what it is you need. Maybe I’ve got—’

‘No, really, Hap. I’ve got to go out anyway. My hair. I’ll just stop at Vogel’s and pick up a few things when I’m out.’

‘Look, you know how I’ve always got the goddamned freezer full of food, if it’s food you need. Corn, zucchini, gobs of hamburgers, just let me know—’

‘No, really—’

‘If there’s anything else. Christ, what are neighbors for? Anything at all—’

She was a good-hearted woman; even Jack admitted she was good-hearted. At times she seemed to Brenda to be almost lopsided with good will, as though an excess of kindness had somehow deformed her. And her energy was prodigious. It made Brenda feel weak looking out the back window at the Lewis’ house and seeing Hap scramble up ladders, scraping off chipped paint with a wire brush, getting ready to paint the house in the spring. She and Bud and the boys were going to tackle it themselves. Last year they’d put on a new roof; Hap had seemed right at home perched over the gables, her hammer flying. She also made lemon layer-cakes to present to new neighbors on the block, a gesture which Brenda could only think sprang from Hap’s Danville, Illinois, upbringing. (Brenda had never been to Danville, Illinois; she had rarely been downstate at all, in fact, and imagined it as a simple oblong, pleasantly populated neighborly-minded souls waving to one another from porches of trim wooden houses.) She and Jack thirteen years ago, moving into the house in Elm Park, had been recipients of one of Hap Lewis’s lemon layer-cakes. It had come on a pale blue Fostoria plate, accompanied by a breezy note: ‘Hi folks. Welcome to the ol’ neighborhood.’

Brenda had been amazed, she who had grown up in Cicero in a three-room apartment over a dry cleaner’s; such a gesture had seemed a leftover from another age. It made her think of Broadway musicals like Oklahoma! or The Music Man. Returning the plate a day or two later, she had brimmed with gratitude. This stranger, this Hap Lewis, was happy to have her as a neighbor; this wonderful warm-hearted woman wanted to be her friend.

Hap Lewis did other things besides bake cakes. She played tournament bridge, good, consistent tournament bridge; she and a woman called Ruby Bellamy twice won the West Suburban Champion Playoff. Hap was chairperson of a book group that was presently tackling Solzhenitsyn and thinking about Flaubert for spring. She ran a Girl Scout troop, old Troop Twelve, the oldest troop in Elm Park, and still found time to knit sweaters for her husband Bud and for her two teen-aged sons—beautiful sweaters, with raglan sleeves and intricate animal patterns worked into the backs. She froze vegetables from her own yard—string beans artfully concealed behind the peonies, a border of cauliflower running inside the petunias—and made pickled zucchini from a secret family recipe, a recipe which she had nevertheless passed on to Brenda—and to Leah Wallberg and Ruby Bellamy and one or two others in the neighborhood.

And in the last few years she had started to make, and occasionally sell, large wall-hangings composed of unbleached wool and tree bark and other natural materials. These wall-hangings, with their swags and knots, reminded Jack of certain dark portions of the human digestive tract which had been flayed open with a knife and left to rot. ‘They’re considered very good,’ Brenda told him. ‘Would you want one on your wall?’ Jack demanded. ‘You have to think of them as a form of sculpture,’ Brenda told him. ‘I’d rather not think of them at all,’ Jack said.

She was Brenda’s age, but taller and heavier. Her hips swelled downward in a savage double roll, and to conceal these haunches she wore over her jeans long, loose-fitting tunics which she designed and made herself. Her face poking through the tops of these tunics, was surprisingly angular, and seemed to contain more than the usual amount of bone. It was a longer, nervous, mobile face; behind her glasses her eyes shone bright, inquiring, naïve, and hopeful. A large, homely woman with a lumbering body. She had been, Brenda imagined, an even homelier girl; a long history of homeliness could be read in all those wild, random acts of kindness.

‘Will you look at you, Brenda,’ she raved, grinning. ‘You’re all organized, for crissake. If it were me going away tomorrow, there’d be bedlam, pure unadulterated bedlam.’

‘Believe me, it has be—’

‘And will you look at this goddamn kitchen. Floor wax! My God, I haven’t had a whiff of floor wax for years—’

‘It isn’t really—’

‘Listen, Brenda, I promise you, on my word of honor, my Girl Scout honor—ha—that I’m not staying. I know you’ve got a million and one things to do, but I just thought, I got to thinking—have you packed the quilts yet? Or not?

‘Jack said he’d give me a hand tonight when—’

‘I just had to come over and say bon voyage to The Second Coming. Did you get it finished?’

‘Just about. All but a little handwork on one corner. And the quilting part’s done.’

‘That’s terrific. I never thought you’d—’

‘I took it off the frame yesterday. At, let’s see, four-thirty-five, I think it was.’

‘Bren, you’re fabulous. You should have called me up. We could have celebrated. I don’t know how you do it.’

‘Come on upstairs. I was just getting started on it. You can give it your good-luck pat.’

Brenda’s quilt room—sometimes she called it her workroom—was in the southeast corner of the house. Only four years ago it had been the guest room, containing not much more than a chintz-covered studio couch, which they opened up for the occasional overnight guest. The studio couch was still there, but Brenda had moved it into a corner and upholstered it with one of her early quilts, a staggered-circle design in several shades of blue; the three black cushions were covered with a reduced version of the same pattern. She liked to sit here late in the afternoon, sipping coffee and running her fingers over the raised squares, testing the springiness between the rows of stitching, thinking: I made this.

Her quilting frame filled all of one wall. It was so large that it had to be angled slightly at one end to make it fit, an arrangement which made the room look cheerful and slightly off-balance, reminding Brenda of the matted print they once had of Van Gogh’s bedroom, a golden cube of a room which tilted and swayed under the weight of thick, straw-colored fairytale furniture. It may have been with this particular print in mind that Brenda decided on the colors for the quilt room. She had painted the walls herself—three of them white, the fourth a brilliant yellow.

With its paint, with its hooked rug on the polished floorboards, it was the brightest room in the house. It seemed to have sprung of its own accord out of the cluster of duller rooms: the living room with its pale-green walls and toneless carpet (stick with neutral, the decorating magazines had advised); the dining room with the gold Bigelow (not bad) and the Italian provincial table and chairs and buffet (a mistake, all of it); and their bedroom—beige walls, a scatter rug that was too small, a chest of drawers that had seen better days. The quilt room, on the other hand, though it was the most recently decorated room in the house, seemed to Brenda to be the room of a much younger family, belonging to more cheerful, more energetic people, people who knew the kind of thing they liked. There was a white cutting-table of shiny plastic, picked up at Sears sale, but looking smartly Scandinavian. Across from it was a pine dresser, where Brenda stored her patterns and sewing things. Above it, Rob, newly competent after a single semester of woodworking, had installed a shelf that held wicker baskets in which Brenda stored her material. (She had started with blues, then gone into greens. Now she was working into the yellow family.) ‘Brenda Bowman, local quiltmaker, is not afraid to confront the simplicities of primary color,’ said a September article in the Elm Leaves Weekly. In a corner of the room stood a low table made of bricks and boards, rather like the brick-and-board table of their long-ago student apartment, only somehow more stylish, where Brenda kept a small electric coffee-maker and a tray of earthenware mugs. Lately she had taken to bringing her friends up here when they dropped in.

There was only one window, but it was large and square and on good days filled with sun. She had decided, finally, against curtains. Instead there were hanging plants: a spider plant, an asparagus fern, and a new one in a plastic pot called string-of-pearls. There were elm trees outside in the backyard, and Japanese cherries, and a small scrub oak which was gnarled and scabrous but healthy—when the children were young they used to spend hours perched in its branches. There was, in addition, a view of the new cedar deck next door, which Larry and Janey Carpenter had put in. Across the alley was Bud and Hap Lewis’s house, a large Victorian three-story clapboard which, now that it was winter, could be seen through the bare branches. In summer it was almost completely obscured by foliage.

Brenda loved her house, a two-storey red brick dating from the twenties; she had loved it on sight. Most of all she loved the oak hall and stairs, which for some reason had been built on a grander scale than the rest of the house. The broad stairs had a kind of power over her; to descend them each morning was to launch her day with calmness. It was the stairs that commanded her to glide. The wall paneling was solid and heavy; the banister had a satiny coolness that imparted serenity.

After the hall, Brenda liked the backyard best, especially the trees. Some of the elms had died, of course, and the three that remained were undergoing a radical new treatment which involved injections of serum. Expensive, but worth it in the long run, Jack had decided. And she loved the Japanese cherry trees that they had planted in front of the garage the summer they moved in.

Jack had been nervous; he had never planted a tree in his life, and the occasion had seemed to him, and to Brenda too, to be serious, almost a test that they were forced to undergo. They had both grown up in city apartments and feared they might harbor certain city-bred deficiencies. They had bought—recklessly, Jack’s father maintained—a house in one of the oldest, most established suburbs. Perhaps they overreached themselves, acquiring, along with this solid brick structure, a garage, a toolshed, soil and grass, flower beds and shrubbery. Mysteries.

They bought the two young Japanese cherries at the nearby Westgate Nursery, where the manager was happy to dispense advice. Jack, listening politely, wrote the instructions down on a small pad of paper: the depth of the holes to be dug, the distance the trees should be planted from the garage; tree roots can interfere with foundations, they were told. And they were also told that late fall was the best time for planting trees. It was only July; it might be risky putting in trees in the middle of the summer. ‘Well …’ Jack said, rubbing his chin with the back of his hand.

Together he and Brenda regarded the tree roots, bundled blindly in sacking; how would a tree know which month it was, they seemed to ask each other. They decided to take a chance. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ the man from Westgate Nursery threatened.

At first one of the trees showed signs of withering, and Jack went back to the nursery and bought a recommended brand of insect spray. Every evening, arriving home from the Institute and setting his briefcase down on the grass, he checked the undersides of the leaves for mites. Brenda, often carrying Rob in her arms, came out of the house to watch. ‘It looks okay to me,’ she always told him.

‘I should have bought a hardier strain,’ Jack grieved. They both recalled that Bud and Hap Lewis across the alley had suggested a certain kind of flowering plum, which was just as decorative but stood up better to the cold winds. They dreaded the first frost.

But the fall has been unexpectedly moderate that year, and that winter one of the mildest on record. By mid-March the two fledgling trees were in bud. The second summer they grew a spectacular two feet, and the stucco garage behind the rosy branches seemed softened by their presence. Jack talked about planting asparagus. He still mentioned it, twelve years later, from time to time, how it might be a good idea to try asparagus.

‘I’m sure this view from your studio is an inspiration in your work,’ the reporter from the Elm Leaves Weekly said. She was a young girl wearing an embroidered blouse, a journalism student hired for the summer, and she had come to the house one afternoon to interview Brenda.

‘Well yes,’ Brenda replied in a voice weighted with doubt. ‘I supposed you could say that.’

Perhaps it was even true. Certainly her first real quilt—the first one she actually sold—had contained the natural green harmonies of shadow and light. She had called it Spruce Forest. ‘Why Spruce Forest?’ Jack had asked. ‘Why not oak or something?’

‘Because I had to call it something,’ she said. ‘I was filling out the entry form, and Spruce Forest just popped into my head.’

‘You’d have to go up to Wisconsin to see a spruce forest,’ Jack said in a nagging tone, unusual for him.

In fact, the quilt had looked more like an expanse of grass cooling off late in the day, a suburban lawn overlaid with the darkened, simplified shapes of spirea and mock orange and grape leaves. She had cut long spears of dark linen (grass? spruce boughs? waves perhaps? knives?) and had arranged them so that they swept and curved the length of the quilt. The forms advanced and overlapped, and the green, drenching effect of color was carried right to the borders, and even beyond, for Brenda, in a sudden awakening of inspiration, decided to make the border of the quilt irregular. (Later the use of the irregular border became something of a trademark for her.)

Spruce Forest: it won first prize in the Chicago Craft Show four years ago. There was a ceremony; the mayor was in attendance; there was a medal and a bouquet of roses. ‘How did you feel at that moment, Mrs. Bowman?’ the girl reporter from the Elm Leaves Weekly asked. ‘Did you feel you were standing at the gateway to a new career?’

She hadn’t. She’d felt only that she had had an extraordinary piece of beginner’s luck. Someone had paid money for something she had dreamed into existence. It was days before she could bring herself to deposit the cheque in the bank.

The quilt had been bought by a flamboyant-looking middle-aged couple, Sy Adelman and his wife, Slim Morgan. They came to the craft-show reception, saw Spruce Forest, and on the spot wrote Brenda a cheque for six hundred dollars. ‘It’ll be incredible in our living room,’ Sy Adelman said. ‘We live down in Oldtown, a little gem of a house, high ceilings, skylights, you know the type.’

‘Your living room?’

‘He means on the wall,’ Slim Morgan said in a red-plum voice. ‘Over the piano. It’s just what we’ve been looking high and low for.’

‘High and low,’ Sy Adelman said.

‘Who’s Sy Adelman?’ Brenda asked Jack later. ‘Who’s Slim Morgan?’

‘You remember Sy Adelman. That nightclub act? The old Chicago Review group. And Slim Morgan’s practically a classic now. Someone was telling me the other day that her early records are almost priceless.’

‘Imagine that,’ Brenda said.

When she was working on a quilt, she seldom looked out of the window, or anywhere else for that matter. Occasionally she made a small sketch, very rough, just a few lines on a sheet of paper, but the patterns seemed to come from some more simplified root of memory; sometimes they arrived as a pulsating rush when she was pulling weeds in the yard or shoveling snow off the front walk, but more often they appeared to her early in the morning before she opened her eyes, an entire design project on the interior screen of her eyelids. She could see the smallest details, the individual stitches. All the pieces were there, the colors and shapes and proportions selected and arranged. When she opened her eyes to the light, she always expected the image to dissolve, but it remained intact, printed on an imaginary wall or beating slowly at the back of her head. She had no idea where the ideas came from.

There must be, she assumed, some interior reservoir, and she wondered what this might be. She imagined a vibrating organ, half-heart, half-placenta. She thought of patterns stacked up like china plates on a neat shelf, and it puzzled her to think that she could extract these complicated images from the same section of her head where she stored simple recipes and kept track of the birthdays of friends. She had never considered herself introspective or original. (‘Brenda is such an open person,’ Hap Lewis has said several times in Brenda’s hearing.)

‘I think there’s a Byzantine or Turkish influence in Brenda’s work,’ said Leah Wallberg, who had studied art history. Brenda, who had been a secretary-typist before she married Jack, knew little—nothing really—about art history. Nevertheless, despite this, it seemed that she did indeed possess an inner pool of color and pattern which was oddly accessible and easily drawn upon. It pumped naturally and steadily and in a form which she was able to translate without serious difficulty. It seemed at times almost ridiculously easy, in fact, and Brenda guarded a belief that this was something anyone could do, anyone at all.

At the same time she recognized the fact that her quilts were changing. The birds and flowers and boats and houses of her earlier designs—what Leah Wallberg called her folky thing—were giving way to something more abstract. The shapes interlocked in different, more complex, ways. A year ago she wouldn’t have risked her new feather-shadowed borders. She was thankful no one asked her anymore what such-and-such a quilt was ‘about’. She wouldn’t have known. And she was thankful, too, that she was seldom pressed about the reasons behind the naming of her quilts. Even Jack no longer cocked an eyebrow and said: Why Spruce Forest? Why Buddha’s Chant? Why Rock Splinter? It was assumed that she must have her reasons, and along with her gift for stitchery went a body of belief, an artist’s right to interpret and name.

She might, of course, have called them after colors or numbers—Study in Green, Burnt Yellow #2—but she preferred real names, which tied the design to her, even though she knew the quilts themselves would pass into other hands. She remembered that Rob and Laurie, when they were younger, gave names to the tiny islands near the summer cottage they rented each August. Naming was a form of possession. It was a privilege; there were lots of people who never had a chance to bestow names.

The name of The Second Coming had come to her less than a month ago. She and Jack were driving downtown one night for a reception at the Institute and happened to pass a small, blackened Baptist church on a weedy corner off Madison. The lit-up message on its roof proclaimed: ‘The Second Coming Is at Hand.’ The Second Coming. She said it aloud.

‘What?’ Jack said, braking at a red light.

‘Nothing.’

She said it again, this time to herself. The Second Coming.

It sounded important. It sounded lucky.

‘It’s a great name,’ Hap Lewis was saying, following Brenda upstairs and into the quilt room. ‘I mean, it’s got all kinds of overtones. If you know what I mean.’

Brenda unfolded the quilt briskly, spread it on the cutting-table, and announced with a shaky flourish, ‘Well, here she is.’

‘Jesus!’ Hap’s gravel voice dropped.

‘Well?’ Brenda held her breath. ‘What’s your honest-to-goodness opinion?’

‘My honest opinion, my gut reaction’—Hap paused—‘is that this is the best thing you’ve done. Terrific, in fact. A plus. Better than the Buddha thing. Je–suss! Here, let’s hold it up.’

‘You don’t think that purple is too purple—?’

‘God, no, it’s fucking sensational, that purple. Sort of unexpected, but just right at the same time.’

They lifted the quilt, each taking two corners, and together carried it toward the window. The grey January light fell inward onto a blocked bed of color—greens and yellows mostly—with a kind of frenetic heat rising from one end. And, like a footnote or an inscription, dark-purple stains printed the edges with shapes that resembled mouths.

‘If you don’t come back from Philly with a ribbon or two, I’ll eat my chicken feathers.’

‘I’m not counting on—’

‘Now you’re doing your modesty thing, Bren. Wait’ll the judges see this. You’ve seen the junk some of these gals churn out. I mean, Brenda, you’ve done it. You know what I mean. There’s something so contained about this, not quiet exactly, but you know, slow-moving, like someone trying to say something, but they can’t get the words out. Know what I mean?’

‘Well—’

‘I mean, it’s got the sensual thing all sewn up—pardon the lousy pun—but it’s also got, you know, sex.’

‘Sex?’ Brenda was laughing.

‘Like you want to reach out and touch it. Or hop out of your clothes and roll around in it. I don’t mean just plain old intercourse sex, ugh, not that there’s anything wrong with intercourse. I mean, well, energy. But the kind of energy you keep the lid on. Energy contained—you know what I mean? About to jump out at you if you let it.’

Over the slanting expanse of the quilt, Brenda regarded Hap fondly, gratefully. She felt her throat grow warm with tears.

Hap Lewis is a babbler, Jack always said. And it was true. She did have a tendency to go on and on. Verbal overdrive, Jack called it. She got on his nerves, and he wondered, sometimes aloud, how Brenda could stand her. His heart bled, he said, for Bud Lewis, the poor sap; what kind of sex life could you have with a woman who never shuts up for ten seconds!

‘But she means it,’ Brenda always said. ‘That’s the thing about Hap. She means every word.’

They stood for a minute longer, holding the quilt up to the window. Brenda had the dizzying sensation of something biblical happening: two women at the well, gathering light in a net. Neither of them spoke, and the silence seemed to Brenda to be unbreakable and dipped into earlier memories of happiness. ‘I wish you were coming, Hap,’ she said impulsively. ‘I wish you had decided to come after all.’

Hap, still gripping the quilt, shrugged. ‘How could I? Bud, the boys—’

‘Aha! Remember what you told me when I said I didn’t think I could get away?’

‘What did I say?’

‘You said, and I quote, fuck them all.’

‘Hey,’ Hap shrieked. ‘Hey Brenda. You did it. You said it. The big F. You finally said it. Do you know what I think that means?’

‘What?’ Moving together they began refolding the quilt, first in halves, then in quarters.

‘I think,’ Hap said, ‘that it’s some kind of omen. That something good is going to happen to you.’

Chapter Three

‘Jack?’

No answer.

She tried again, a little louder. ‘Jack.’

‘Yes.’ The voice, husky and toneless, cracked from a deep sleep.

‘It’s six-fifteen.’

He turned over, buried his face in the pillow.

‘It’s time to get up, Jack.’

‘Ten more minutes. It’s still night-time.’

‘I’ve brought you some coffee. Here on the table.’

‘Bribing me,’ he groaned into the feathers.

She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘How’d you sleep?’

‘Fine. While it lasted.’

‘Ask me how I slept.’

‘How’d you sleep?’

‘Terrible.’ She began rubbing his back through the striped pajamas. ‘Terrible.’

‘Don’t stop. That feels good. Ahhhh.’

‘I keep thinking of all the things I’d forgotten. Like the man coming to fix the valve on the furnace. I think he said it was Monday he was going to come.’

‘Hmmmmm.’

‘I just lay there, it seemed like hours. I could hear the clock ticking downstairs, that was how quiet it was. Then I got to worrying about how I was going to get the quilts out of air-freight when I get to Philadelphia. Do they bring the package to the luggage place or do you have to pick it up at the air-freight place?’

‘I think—’

‘I decided I could get my suitcase first, and if the quilt box wasn’t there, I’d get a cab and then get the cab-driver to stop at the air-freight place.’

‘Hmmmm.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said that sounds like a very solid and well-thought-out plan.’

‘You’re falling back to sleep again.’

‘I was having the best dream.’

‘Your coffee’s getting cold.’

‘Oh, that feels good. A little lower.’

‘Here?’

‘We ought to get a new mattress. How about it? A waterbed.’

‘What’s wrong with this mattress? It isn’t even worn out.’

‘After twenty years we deserve a new mattress. They say it does wonders for—’

‘What was the dream about?’

‘I don’t know. I think it was about bouncing on a waterbed. It all disappeared when someone with a loud voice bellowed six-fifteen in my ear.’

‘I don’t want to be late.’

‘Take my word for it, you’ll be early.’

‘Jack?’

‘What?’

‘I forgot to buy the material for Laurie.’

‘What material?’

‘For school, her Home Ec class. They’re making skirts or something, and she was supposed to have her material last week.’

Silence.

‘Do you think,’ Brenda said, ‘you could take her out to get it? This afternoon maybe? Zimmermans or Mary Ann’s or some place like that?’

‘Okay.’

‘And she needs a pattern too. She knows which one. I asked her yesterday.’

‘Okay.’

‘You won’t forget, will you?’

‘On my honor.’

‘And another thing, I was thinking about Rob.’

‘What about him?’

‘I was just thinking about him. Last night when I couldn’t sleep. I mean, maybe you should have a talk with him.’

‘I think he’s fairly well informed—’

‘I think you, or maybe both of us, should have a talk with him about his attitude.’

‘Brenda.’

‘What?’

‘Why don’t you just crawl under the covers for a minute and we could discuss it.’

‘You’re stalling. You just don’t want to get up.’

‘Not true.’

‘Anyway, I’m all dressed. I’ve been up for an hour. Didn’t you hear the shower running?’

‘No. I was having this beautiful dream—’

‘Was it raunchy?’

‘Raunchy?’ He turned over, smiled at her lazily. ‘Now that’s a word I haven’t heard in—what?—twenty years.’

‘Horny then. Was it one of your horny dreams?’

‘You sure you wouldn’t like to crawl under the covers for just two minutes?’

‘I’m sure. It’s six-thirty, almost—’

‘One minute then. I promise to be quick.’

‘Jack—’

‘You smell like toothpaste. I love a woman who reeks of toothpaste. Eau de Crest.’

‘It’s Infini. It’s that perfume your aunt sent. Smell my wrist.’

‘Hmmmm.’

‘Nice?’

‘I won’t ask what I smell like,’ Jack said.

‘It would be better if you didn’t.’ He smelled of sheets, unbrushed teeth, and something vaguely fecal. His body was warm and relaxed under the electric blanket—bonded with the heat of the blanket, in fact—and for an instant she considered slipping off her skirt and getting in beside him. No, there wasn’t time. And she would have to shower again, maybe press her blouse …

‘Spurned,’ Jack said. ‘Spurned and abandoned. That would make a good title for a movie.’

She touched his cheek. ‘Your coffee—’

‘You career women are all alike.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘Always rushing off to catch planes.’

‘How cruel.’

‘You could bring a little joy.’

‘And why didn’t you think of this last night, bringing a little joy?’

‘Because you made me watch that Barbra Streisand thing on TV, you and your children.’

‘I thought you liked Barbra Streisand. You used to love—’

‘Fatigue is what Barbra Streisand gives me. A wracking case of fatigue.’

‘Anyway, you never answered my question, Jack.’

‘What question?’

‘About the man coming to adjust the furnace valve.’

‘He’ll come, Brenda. He’ll ring the bell. No one will answer. So he’ll go away, quietly.’

‘They might charge for making the call.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘But it seems to me I said I’d be here. They phoned last week and asked if the lady of the house would be home on—’

‘The lady of the house?’

‘And I said—’

He squinted at her and said again in a tone of wonderment, ‘The Lady of the House.’

‘What so funny about that?’

‘Like the Lady of the Lake. Are you really,’ he paused, ‘the Lady of the House?’

‘If you aren’t going to drink this coffee, I am.’

‘No, you don’t.’ He propped himself on one elbow and reached for the cup.

‘Maybe you should drink it while you’re getting dressed.’

He took a swallow. ‘Strong.’

‘On purpose. To get you awake.’

‘I always did love cold coffee. It goes with cold toothpaste.’

‘You won’t forget about the material. It’s supposed to be part polyester, she said.’

‘What?’

‘The material for Laurie. I just told you. She—’

‘Oh, that material.’

‘And, Jack, maybe you could let the furnace people know I won’t be here. The number’s in that little book of mine. Under O for oil. Or else it under—’

‘Brenda, lovey.’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me ask you a question. If it’s not too early in the morning that is.’

‘What question?’

‘What is the population of Chicago?’

‘The population of Chicago? How on earth would I know the population of Chicago?’

‘You’ve lived here all your life. You must have some vague idea of—’

‘Three million. It just came to me.’

‘When you were in school it was three million. Or thereabouts. Now it’s more like six.’

‘And?’

‘Well, if you figure four to a household, that makes, let’s see, one and a half million—million—households that manage to get along on a day-to-day basis without the famous lady of the house, Brenda Bowman, steering the ship.’

‘Up!’ she ordered, standing abruptly and with one move stripping the covers down.

‘My God, it’s freezing.’ He made a grab for the blanket and missed.

‘It’s cold because of the valve on the furnace. It cuts the heat back. When the man came to clean the filter he explained—’

‘What a job! I wouldn’t mind having a job like that. Going around all day talking to women about how valves work.’

‘He was really nice. Young and—’

‘Do you know, you look really beautiful this morning.’

‘Do you know what time it is, Jack?’

‘Sort of Olivia de Havillandish.’ He caught her hand. ‘Thank you, Brenda.’

‘For what?’ She sat down on the edge of the bed.

‘For not looking like Barbra Streisand.’

‘If only I did.’

‘And for not sounding like Barbra Streisand. And for not opening your mouth wide wide wide like Barbra Streisand—’

She put her arms around him. The hair at the back of his head stood up in tufts, and she smoothed it with her hand. Soon there would be a completely bare patch; the thought of this vulnerable spot made her throat contract, and she bent over and kissed him on the forehead, where she detected the faint taste of salt.

‘Ah, lovely,’ he murmured and closed his eyes.

‘We really should be getting going,’ she said after a minute.

He opened his eyes. ‘Is this new?’

‘What?’

‘That blouse.’

‘This? I got it last week. At Field’s. I showed it to you, remember?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘I love it.’

He was undoing the buttons. She, half-protesting, uttered a girlish meow, and he reached around and unhooked her bra.

It was an old game of theirs: he the pursuer, the flatterer, the one with all the lines, some of which were both true and untrue. And she: silent, sly, pretending reluctance, pretending to be preoccupied, and then, finally allowing herself to be won. There were other games, other scenes, some sharper and more savage, but this was the one they returned to again and again. It was a way of invoking youth, it seemed to Brenda, a kind of play they put on for the entertainment of their younger selves. He murmured into the long cavity between her breasts the words beautiful beautiful, and she felt herself grow opaque and speechless, making small grasping sounds as his tongue circled her nipples. Slowly.

Her blouse lay under them, and her skirt—wool tweed, black and emerald—was hiked up in a roll around her waist. Far away at a green and more level distance she found herself thinking that the wrinkles would probably fall out. And that the blouse would be under her jacket anyway; who would see it? She might even have a minute to touch up the collar while Jack shaved.

Philadelphia, Philadelphia, she chanted to herself, pushing up against him, and like a mantra the word opened the door into a space wider and warmer than usual. She was assailed by familiarity, cotton, skin, the pressure of Jack’s legs, and her eyes sealed shut to a large, dark corridor lit by small sconces of light, reddish in color and vaguely Victorian in design.

‘I love you,’ she said, as she always did when the lights flared, and then—this morning, because she was going away—she added, ‘I really do.’

‘My lovey,’ he said to her in collapsing hair. ‘My Brenda-Bear, my only only.’

Chapter Four

It was Brenda’s mother, Elsa Pulaski, who taught her to sew in the first place. All the time Brenda was growing up in Cicero, Illinois, her mother’s black sewing machine had stood in a corner of the crowded living room, squeezed in between the radiator and the saggy couch. The machine was a Singer Standard, made of shiny black metal, always a little dusty, with gold scrollwork about its base and a lever which was operated by pressure from the knee. A busy, oily fragrance rose from the region of the motor. Its sound was sweet and rhythmic, almost human. Elsa liked to boast about how little she had paid for it; with only a little bit of finagling she had got it for thirty dollars wholesale, which was almost half-price. It was a cabinet-style machine and could be folded away into a little walnut-veneer table—though, in fact, it seldom was.

For what was the use of putting it away, she used to say, with a rising intonation she had; what was the sense of it when she was always working away on something—In the evenings, at weekends, whenever she had a minute. Elsa’s knee resting on the pedal, so delicate for a heavy woman, had constituted for Brenda an education in lightheartedness. She made all her own clothes, the size twenty-two dresses—long sleeves for winter, short for summer—that she needed for work. (For thirty years, until she died, she sold men’s socks and underpants at Wards—five days a week, nine to five, and on alternate Saturday mornings until the unions came in and a put a stop to that.) She made her skirts and blouses and even her own winter coats: ‘Just try and find decent ready-to-wear for a gal my size.’ She made herself nightgowns out of remnants—some of them were of strange non-nightgown materials, moiré or taffeta, that were more suitable for evening wear—and she would have made her own underwear, too, if Wards hadn’t allowed their saleswomen fifteen per cent off. She sewed nylon curtains for the front windows of the apartment on 26th Street and the stretch slipcovers for the two armchairs and for the couch which she opened up at night for her bed. She hemmed her own dish towels and sheets. ‘Better goods,’ she explained to Brenda. ‘One hundred per cent better, and they don’t ravel out their first time in the wash.’

Brenda can remember the tone of her mother’s voice when she said this, but can’t recall whether she spoke in English or Polish. Elsa alternated easily between the two, and Brenda, in childhood, was accustomed to the rapid movement between the two languages; not just the shifting vocabularies but the towering structures of consciousness and mood. When Elsa was happiest she spouted a loud, comic, Cicero-flavored English.

Brenda grew up wearing beautiful clothes. At Wilmot Public Grammar School in Cicero, when other girls wore dresses of faded rayon passed on to them by their older sisters, Brenda Pulaski wore fresh cotton dresses—Egyptian cotton; ‘Irons like a hanky,’ Elsa said—made from the latest back-to-school Butterick and Simplicity patterns. There was hand-embroidery or white pique trim on the sleeves and the collars. In fourth grade Brenda was the first in school to have a New Look ballerina skirt, the first to have a blouse with a Barrymore collar. Never once in all the years she was growing up did she reach into her closet in the jumbled back bedroom and find she had nothing to wear; never once did she wear a dress or a jumper or a blouse that had not been finished with French seams and bound buttonholes; never was she embarrassed to find her hem coming down or a button missing or a blouse opening up under the arm when she raised her hand in class. At the age of nine or ten she went to neighborhood birthday parties wearing royal blue or wine-colored velvet dresses with bows at the back and lace at the yoke; when she twirled around, the skirts of these dresses spread out in a full circle. At Morton High School, where she was Senior Class Secretary, she had a wardrobe of coordinated corduroy skirts and weskits and wool dresses with the plaids matching at the back and the sides as well, and white, handmade Peter Pan collars to pin to the necks of her sweaters. For her first school dance when she was fifteen, Elsa made her a ‘formal’ of nylon net, boned and strapless, with a matching circle of tulle for her ponytail. There is a picture of her wearing this dress in one of her old yearbooks. She is standing beneath a basketball hoop which is draped with paper streamers, looking popeyed and happy on the arm of a slim boy, Randy Saroka, with short, curly hair and a striped necktie, and at the waist of her full-skirted dress is a corsage of two gardenias.

When it came to Brenda’s clothes, Elsa had done most of the actual sewing, and she had done all the cutting. ‘Cutting tells,’ she liked to say, emphatically and mysteriously. She had insisted, too, on putting in the zippers and setting the sleeves. ‘When you’re older you can set a sleeve,’ she promised Brenda. ‘Plenty of time for that later on.’ (Brenda at age thirteen or fourteen ran up side seams, basted, and did hems.) In the evenings while Brenda did her homework, or later, when she was in bed, Elsa sat under the lamp with the radio playing and worked on inverted pleats or handmade eyelets. ‘Sewing’s damn hard work,’ she used to say with just a hint of Slavic inflection, ‘so it’s just plain stupid to use cheap yard goods.’ Thus, for her daughter, Brenda, there were no bargain blends and no remnants; even during the war, Elsa managed to find one hundred per cent virgin wool for Brenda’s school clothes. For a yard of real English jersey she once paid six-fifty. ‘Just look at the way it hangs,’ she exclaimed, holding the material up to the light, stretching it between her fingers and giving it a sharp sideways tug. ‘I always say, don’t skimp when you sew. Quality shows; it shows every time.’ (The wool jersey, Brenda still remembered years later, had been made into something called a tube dress. She had been one of the first to have a tube dress.)

She felt certain that, had her mother been alive, she would have admired the new red raincoat she’d bought for the trip to Philadelphia. Elsa would have turned it inside out and laid it flat on a table; she would have examined the seams and the lining and pronounced it, at last, a well-made garment, a quality garment. She would have read the label, nodding, approving, blowing through her teeth: ‘Cheap at the price.’

The thought of her mother’s posthumous approval—Elsa died four years ago at age fifty-six from complications following a routine gall-bladder operation—comforted Brenda, sitting in the car, wearing her new coat over her suit. Jack was silent now, driving to the airport, his teeth set in an attitude of grim dutifulness.

‘Damn window-washers.’ He leaned forward, peering through the smeared windshield. ‘Cheap window-washers they put in these cars.’

His earlier good humor had evaporated, dispelled by the small mechanical failings of the car, and possibly by the cold wind blowing across the highway and the early-morning darkness, purplish with arc lights. A truck-driver passed them, swerving suddenly, causing Jack to curse violently. ‘Fuck.’ All these things seemed to Brenda to be inexplicably her fault, tied up in some way with her decision to go to Philadelphia.

No, that was absurd. Ridiculous. She recalled that it had been Jack’s idea in the first place that she go. He had been the one to suggest it, and it was he who finally persuaded her that it would be a valuable experience. He had used those very words: ‘A valuable experience.’ She was about to mention this to him when he braked suddenly, pitching the two of them forward. ‘Did you see that? Christ! He didn’t even signal. We could have ploughed right into him.’

Brenda said nothing, concentrating instead on her hands, which rested on the smooth fabric of her new raincoat. She had bought it a week ago at Carsons for $250.

Peering at the price tag under the subdued store lights, she had felt panic. It was unbelievable. Two hundred and fifty dollars! And tax on top of that! She had been aghast. (‘I was aghast,’ she imagined herself saying to someone—anyone—later.) She had no idea coats had gone up so much. When did it happen? Inflation? It seemed not all that long ago that she had paid eighty dollars for a warm winter coat with a chamois lining and a real fur collar on it—no, that had been ages ago, the year Jack got his first promotion at the Institute—her blue tweed coat; she had worn it for eight years.

The red raincoat at Carsons had been reduced from $315. What a laugh, Brenda heard herself saying in some future conversation, her voice rising. A mere raincoat, and they had the nerve to ask $315.

On the other hand, it was a good make, she could say. She had seen those ads in the New Yorker: that long-haired girl standing out there on the rock; that grey-haired man, strongly muscular, finely featured, a few steps behind her, turned to half-profile, his gaze sternly directed at the surf. And it did have a zip-in lining, which meant she would be able to wear it almost year round. She would get all kinds of wear from it. If it faded—reds sometimes did—she could return it. She would put the sales slip away carefully in her dresser drawer …

The tag said size twelve. Perfect. It wasn’t that easy finding size twelves, you had to look and look. (Already she was going to buy it; of course she was; it would be idiotic not to.)

She slipped it off the hanger and tried it on. It fit smoothly across the shoulders—it better fit for that price, she muttered to herself, making a face. She was feeling cheerful now. It made her hips look almost slim—something ingenious about the way it was cut. (‘Cutting tells …’) There was a gathered yoke at the back, and top-stitching on the collar and pockets, the kind of detailing that costs money, that has to be done by hand. (‘You can tell quality by the detailing.’) Still, $250 was an incredible amount of money. Two and a half weeks’ groceries at least. You could buy a man’s suit for $250, a three-piece suit. She could get a new glass-topped coffee table for the living room for $250. They needed a new coffee table; the old one, that scratched, phony Duncan Phyfe, was looking tackier by the day. Two hundred and fifty dollars was a sizeable chunk of money.

On the other hand, she had been shopping all morning—Field’s, Stevens, Saks—and was beginning to feel discouraged and hot. She pictured herself putting on this coat and walking down a street in Philadelphia, a neutral sky overhead—a narrow street, medieval-looking and chilly, with small shops; a bakeshop flashed into view, fresh buns lined up in a window. She would be warm and courageous, marching past it, swinging her leather shoulder-bag as she went.

She wrote a cheque for the coat instead of putting it on her charge account. When she got home she carried it upstairs to the bedroom, lifted it from its box, and removed the tags. She tried it on again, examining herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. The material felt silky to the touch. Even the hem was perfect, just meeting the top of her boots—at least she wouldn’t need new boots this year. It was worth every penny of two hundred and fifty dollars; her mother’s lightly accented voice reached her through the silvery beveled edge of the mirror—‘Cheap at the price. Quality shows.’ Brenda curled her hands under the lapels and smiled.

‘She and Jack no longer had to watch every penny, she reminded herself. Jack earned a comfortable salary at the Institute; eventually he would move up to Senior Administrator. Dr. Middleton was due to retire in five years. Anything could happen. And there was her quilt money. She was close to being a regular earner now. For the last two years she had even filed her own tax form. (‘Now that’s a milestone and a half, you lucky duck,’ Hap Lewis had raved, ‘when you get your own tax form. You’ve made it, kiddo.’)

She had been lucky. Her first quilt selling for six hundred dollars: A fluke, she’d thought at the time; it was only because it had won the prize and been written up in Chicago Today. ‘Elm Park Housewife Turns Hobby to Profit.’ At the time she’d thought it could never happen again. But it had. People seemed willing to spend exorbitant sums for original handworked articles. The last quilt she’d sold, Michigan Blue, had gone for $800. Some people from Evanston had bought it, a dentist and his wife. They’d paid the price cheerfully, no dickering, no suggestion that she knock off fifty dollars or forgo the sales tax. They had heard about her work from an acquaintance; they had driven down from Evanston one evening, phoning ahead for an appointment. Her signature was embroidered in the right-hand corner, and they had fingered it with satisfaction. (‘I love it,’ the wife had whispered. ‘We’ll take it,’ her husband said.)

She now had printed business cards of her own, Jack’s idea.

BRENDA BOWMAN

-Handmade Quilts-

original and adapted

576 North Franklin Blvd, Elm Park, III

She had a receipt book and a ledger where she kept track of expenses and sales. And this week—today—she was going to the National Handicraft Exhibition, where the top quilters in the country would be showing. Eleanor Parkins, the Eleanor Parkins. Sandra French. Dorothea Thomas. W.B. Marx. Verna of Virginia. These quilters asked a thousand dollars, even fifteen hundred dollars, for a commissioned piece. Verna of Virginia had recently sold a quilt to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art; there had been a write-up in Quilting and Stitchery and a suggestion that the price had been in excess of $4000.

And she was stewing about paying $250 for a coat! A few days’ work—that was all; the thought gave her a glimpse of a dazzling new kind of power.

And Jack had liked the coat too. She modeled it for him when he got home, parading the length of the living room, showing how it looked with her boots and shoulder-bag, pointing out the zip-in lining and the buttonholes which had been worked by hand so that each one looked like a perfect, satiny tear. ‘Nice,’ he had told her. ‘Really nice.’

He appreciated good clothes. And was not above impulsive extravagance himself. Just weeks before he’d bought himself a suede vest, he who had never worn a suede vest before in his life and probably, Brenda suspected, never would. (He had not told her how much it cost; she had resisted asking; meanwhile it hung in their closet, smelling expensive and new.)

‘You really do like it?’ She turned so that the hem of the coat swirled out girlishly. Her hands smoothed the material over her hips and, impulsively, she gave a short, sharp, forward kick—a cancan kick, neatly executed.

‘You’ll be the smash hit of Philly,’ he told her, smiling.

She gave him a long, level look. He was sitting back, relaxed on the brown sofa, sipping a gin and tonic from his favorite frosted glass. One leg was crossed over the other; a year ago he had started wearing executive-length socks at Brenda’s suggestion. In his eyes stood approval. And he was nodding, beautiful, beautiful—but he was reaching sideways for the newspaper; the smile was slipping already from his face. She longed suddenly to restore it, to hold it there an instant longer, and so she announced with a final swirl: ‘And guess what, Jack? It was on sale.’

His eyebrows went up. The smile seemed on the point of resurrection.

‘A special sale. Marked down to a hundred and fifty dollars.’

She had said this, freezing in front of the coffee table, her hands caught voguishly in the side pockets of the red coat.

There was an instant’s pause; then Jack made a gesture of celebration, lifting his glass in her direction. ‘A steal,’ he said.

‘A steal?’ She smiled icily. ‘You call a hundred and fifty dollars a steal?’ Her voice, she knew, sounded shrill. And she felt a shameful expression of foxiness resting on the bones of her face.

‘Well, these days …’ Jack swirled his drink in his glass. ‘Inflation …’

He was a man too easily deceived; there was no resistance in him; she had felt obscurely cheated. And furious with self-loathing. Why, why, why? Later she had torn up the sales slip. What if it did fade? What did it matter? She would never return it now.

This small deception was coupled with another—though in a way that owned nothing to logic; the $218 air fare to Philadelphia.

When she first decided to go to Philadelphia, the air fare had seemed the least of her worries. The real worry was how she could get away for a week.

‘It’s not a week, it’s five days,’ Jack had reminded her …

‘Still …’

It would be different if her mother were still alive and could come and look after things. Jack’s parents, though they lived close by, were too old, too nervous, away from home, even overnight; the children got on their nerves after a few hours.

Jack assured her he could manage. The children were old enough now anyway. They didn’t need looking after. All they needed was food in their stomachs and someone to boot them off to bed at night. He was certainly capable of doing that.

Two days later she got around to phoning United Airlines. The fare was $218. ‘What about an excursion rate?’ she’d asked. Jack had suggested that she inquire about special fares.

‘There’s our night flight,’ the sweet-voiced United girl told her. ‘That’s only $176.’

‘What time does that get into Philadelphia?’ she asked. ‘Three-fifteen. A.M.’

‘Three-fifteen?’

‘It’s very popular with businessmen.’

Brenda hesitated. Three-fifteen in the morning. In the dark. Gary, Fort Wayne, Cleveland would all be traversed in darkness. And in January, when the year seemed at its weakest point. She imagined the plane burrowing through black Appalachian air, eastern air. And over Philadelphia there would be the steepness of descent, and then stepping off into blindness and confusion and the garish lights of an unknown airport. There would be gateways and ramps leading off in unfamiliar directions. The thought made her feel uneasy and faintly sick.

Where could she possibly go at that hour? How? She would require sleep, a bed, a pillow.

$218 take away $176. That was $42 difference; Brenda had always been good at arithmetic, better than Jack at tabulating prices and figuring percentages. It was she who handled their bills and worked over their tax forms in the spring.

$42. It wasn’t even worth considering. She gave her head a violent shake. What was $42 these days? A small price to pay for safety; she had the children to think of, and Jack too. Flying at night was riskier, everyone knew that, although Jack, who flew often, professed that it was safer than driving down the expressway at five o’clock.

Furthermore, in the few days since Jack had suggested she go, she had had time to envision the trip to Philadelphia, and part of the vision had included a morning departure—drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup at the airport while the sun struggled up through the streaky Chicago dawn, and finally, minutes before the actual takeoff, a burst of broad daylight.

‘I think I’ll just stick with the morning flight,’ she said into the phone.

‘Fine. I’ll put you down for Flight 452 then. Bowman, you said. Is that Miss or Mrs.?’

‘Mrs.’ She was brisk now, all business.

‘Thank you, Mrs. Bowman. And thank you for phoning United.’

A few days later the tickets arrived in the mail. She showed them to Jack.

‘Seems reasonable,’ he said. Then, ‘I guess they didn’t have a special fare?’

‘No,’ Brenda said. ‘Not for five days.’

‘Oh well …’ He was preoccupied, busy at the Institute and frustrated because he never seemed to find time to work on his book.

Brenda put the tickets on the hall table under the chunk of pink quartz.