with being overly sentimental. “That’s because you’re old,” Hannah said, when I told her recently about the qualities I prize most in a man, and she was probably right. That, and I’m pretty sentimental myself.
TODAY I NEEDED TO GO to the fabric store to select the yardage I wanted to use for the border of a quilt I was making with Japanese overtones. It was for a woman who believed she’d lived many times before and that one of those past lives was as a geisha. It’s funny how people reveal themselves in the quilts they commission. One client had a bitter divorce but she wanted me to use her wedding dress to make a quilt that honored marriage. A truck driver commissioned a wildly feminine floral design to sleep under when he was on the road. A woman alienated from both her children had saved every item of clothing they’d ever worn as babies and toddlers, and she had me use them along with items of her own clothing to create a pattern of interlocking circles. She wept when I delivered the quilt to her and then hid it away in a box she’d bought especially for it.
After I came home from the store, I needed to pack for our annual drive to Minnesota the next day. It was state fair time again. Everyone in my family went, every end of August. Our annual family get-togethers, like most people’s, were a mix of great fun and misery. They were what I did precisely one year after I’d said I’d never do them again. And each time, I could hardly wait to get there.
3
IT WAS UNUSUALLY QUIET AT FABRIC WORLD. I LINGERED at the shelves of blues for longer than I might have ordinarily, knowing I wouldn’t have to wait a long time to get my selection cut. Two store employees, Joanne and Ellen, stood leaning against the cutting table chatting and laughing quietly, their arms crossed. I’d been coming to Fabric World for years—Hannah actually took her first steps here—and until recently you never saw the employees relaxed like this. They’d always been told that if there were no customers, they should straighten bolts of fabric, cut up remnants for quilt packs, even dust shelves. Now there was a new manager, a flamboyantly gay man named Gregory, who had made everyone’s life better. He designed wedding dresses in addition to working at the store, and he gossiped viciously about all his clients, much to the guilty enjoyment of everyone around. He answered the store phone saying, “Fabric World, what now?” I still didn’t quite understand how he was hired, never mind made manager; the owners of the store were rumored to be quite conservative. I thought it was because Gregory couldn’t help being charming, even when he was insulting you. And people trusted his taste—they bought anything he told them to.
“This is beautiful,” Joanne said, when I brought the cobalt-blue fabric I finally settled on over to the table to be measured and cut. There were black cranes printed on it, some standing on one leg, some flying, their wings thrillingly outstretched.
“It’s for a border,” I told her. “I need a yard and a half.”
She began cutting and we stopped talking, both of us listening, I think, to the sound of the scissors. For those of us enamored of the world of textiles, this sound is a little symphony. It conjures an image of a head bent over a machine, the feel of fabric slipping through fingers, a small light focused on a field of intimate labor.
I saw Gregory on the other side of the store, stopping to straighten some of the colorful bolts in the juvenile section. When he noticed me, he came over to the cutting table. “Help,” he said. “I’ve dreamed about seed pearls for the last three nights.”
Seed pearls! I thought. Maybe a few scattered across this quilt I was making. And binding made of a fabric that suggested water—some wavy, indistinct lines of blue on white.
“What are you working on?” he asked.
“Something sort of Japanese, this time. A lot of circles mixed with squares.”
“Sounds divine. Anything but a wedding dress sounds divine. I want to make my niece some very cool pants, but instead I have to labor on a dress for a whale. I mean, why doesn’t she just wrap up in a lace-patterned shower curtain and call it a day?”
“Great attitude.”
“The truth hurts. Hey, have you got time for a cup of