Susan Wiggs - The Goodbye Quilt

I tease the knot loose and go back to my stitching. The border abuts a trapezoid-shaped swatch of neutral-colored lawn, snipped from the dress she wore to the eighth-grade banquet, the first grown-up dance of her life. At age thirteen she was impossible, taking drama to new heights and sullenness to new depths. I used to try to turn our dirgelike family dinners into something a little more upbeat. “What’s the highlight of your day?” I used to ask my husband and daughter. “What’s the one thing that makes it worth getting up in the morning?”

Dan had been grinding pepper on his salad in that deliberate way of his. Barely looking up, he said, “When Molly smiles at me.”

He startled both Molly and me with that remark. And our sullen, teenage daughter had smiled at him.

Now Molly’s phone rings with a familiar tone—an Eddie Vedder song called “The Face of Love.” It’s Travis’s ringtone.

A heartbreaking softness suffuses her face as she picks up. “Hi,” she says, her voice as intimate as a lover’s. “I’m driving.” She listens for a moment, then ends with a “Yeah, me, too,” and closes the phone.

More silence. The needle darts. The day slides by the car windows. Prairie towns between endless grasslands. We make a pit stop, eat some junk food, talk about nothing. Same as we always do.

Odometer Reading 121,633

… it may have been some unconsciously

craved compensation for the drab

monotony of their days that caused the

women … to evolve quilt patterns

so intricate. Only a soul in desperate

need of nervous outlet could have

conceived and executed, for instance,

the “Full Blown Tulip” …

—Ruth E. Finley,

Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them

“Remember this one?” I ask, angling part of the quilt into Molly’s line of vision.

“I guess.”

“I bet you don’t remember it.”

“Then why did you ask? You always do that, Mom.”

“Do I? I never noticed.”

“You’re always quizzing me about stuff you think should be important to me.”

“Really? Yikes.” I brush my hand over the piece of purple cotton, covered by lace.

“So what about that one?” She is instantly suspicious. All summer long, little “do-you-remembers” and “last times” have sneaked in—the last time we drove to the lake at the county line to set off fireworks, the last time Dan and I attended one of her piano recitals, the last time she went for a haircut at the Twirl & Curl.

“It’s from a dress your father bought you,” I say, needle pushing in and out, running a line of stitches to spell out Daddy’s girl.

“Dad bought me a dress? No way.”

“He did, at the Mexican Marketplace. I can’t believe you forgot.”

“Mom. What was I, three or four years old?”

“Four, I think.”

“I rest my case.”

In my mind’s eye, I can still see her turning in front of the hall mirror, showing off the absurd confection of purple cotton and cheap lace. “It swirls,” Molly had shouted, spinning madly. “It swirls! ” I was less charmed when she insisted on wearing it to church for the next nine weeks. The dress fell apart years ago, but there was enough fabric left to work into the quilt.

Memories flow past in a swift smear of color, like the warehouses and billboards lining the interstate. When I shut my eyes, I can picture so many moments, frozen in time. So many details, sharp as a captured image—the wisp of my newborn baby’s hair, the sweet curve of her cheek as she nurses. I can still imagine the drape of her christening gown, which is wrapped in tissue now, stored in the bottom of the painted cedar chest in the guestroom. I can clearly see myself poking a spoonful of white cereal into a round little birdlike mouth. I see Molly spring forward on chubby legs off the side of the pool, into my outstretched arms.

All those firsts. The first day of kindergarten: Molly wore her hair in two tight pigtails, her plaid jumper ironed in crisp pleats, her backpack filled with waxy-smelling new crayons, sharpened pencils, lined paper, a lunch I’d spent forty-five minutes preparing.

“Do you remember your first day of school?” I ask her now, flourishing the part of the quilt made of the uniform blouse.

“Sure. My teacher was Miss Robinson, and I carried a Mulan lunch box.” Molly changes lanes and eases past a poky hybrid car. “You put a note in my lunch. I always liked it when you did that.”

I don’t recall the teacher or the lunch box, but I definitely remember the note, the first of many I would tuck into Molly’s lunch over the years. I always tried to write a few words on a paper napkin with a little smiling cartoon mommy, with squiggles to represent my hair, and the message “I LOVE.png U. Love, Mommy.”

I tried to upgrade my wardrobe for the occasion, wearing slacks, Weejuns and coral lip gloss from a department store counter. I felt important, compelled by mission and duty, as Molly chattered gleefully in the back of my station wagon.

Stopping at the tree-shaded curb of the school, I pretended to be calm and cheerful as I kissed Molly’s cheek, stroked her head and then smilingly waved goodbye. She met up with her friends Amber and Rani. The girls went inside together, giggling and skipping the whole way, into the redbrick institution that suddenly looked huge and forbidding to me.

There was a New Mothers’ coffee in the library. At the meeting, we moms worked out party plans and carpool arrangements with the sober attention of battle commanders. I felt secretly intimidated—not by the working moms in their power suits and high heels. On some level I understood they were as scared and uncertain as I was, even with their advanced degrees and job titles.

No, I was overawed by the stay-at-home moms. They were the gold standard we all aspired to. They seemed so organized and poised, in khakis with earth-tone sweaters looped negligently over their shoulders, datebooks open in front of them, monogrammed pens poised to make notes. Independent yet obviously supported by the unseen infrastructure of husbands and homeowners’ associations, they were eminently comfortable in their own skin.

To this day, I don’t remember driving home after handing my child over to a new phase of life. All I remember is bursting into the house, sitting down at the breakfast counter with the view of the jungle gym Dan had built in the backyard, and shaking with a sense of emptiness I hadn’t expected to feel. Even Hoover, huddled in confusion at my feet, couldn’t cheer me up. But back then, hope had glimmered at the end of the day. Molly would come home, she’d eat pecan sandies and drink a glass of milk while chattering on about kindergarten, and all would be well.

Although years have passed since that bright August morning, I never quite mastered the put-together look or the air of confidence I observed in my peers. I didn’t really fit in with the stay-at-homes, but I wasn’t a career woman, either. A scattershot woman, you might call me, aiming myself in different directions, my only true calling that of loving my family.

I kept meaning to find something—a vocation, a passion, a marketable way to spend my time. But after Molly was born, the quest simply didn’t seem to matter so much. Unconcerned with a career trajectory, I bounced around to a few different jobs, never quite finding the right fit. This didn’t bother me, because without really planning it, I had lucked into a life I loved so much I never wanted it to change. The quilt shop became my second home. I loved the creative energy of the shop, the dry smell of the fabric, the crisp metallic bite of my super-sharp scissors on the cutting table. Working at Minerva’s shop became more than a part-time job during the school year. It was a place of refuge from the empty hours of the school day.