I put him to bed when we got home and told him that everything would be all right, as if he were my child; that we would talk about it in the morning. He cried a little more, and then I rocked him and he fell asleep, more peacefully, probably, than he had in a long time. I knew I was going to have to carry that orgy around now and keep it quiet, and so I rocked myself for a while, too.

When I went to pick up the kids, my gardening neighbor suggested they just sleep the rest of the night there, undisturbed, in the greenhouse. She handed me a bag of small dwarf apples, perfect and shiny, from her first harvest, and then she pulled something covered up with a sheet out of the greenhouse.

“Here—put this on your porch for me, would you? If it grows, you keep it. I’ll carry it back for you.” And she came home with me, dragging a giant potted begonia that was bigger than Toby’s stroller behind her on a wheeled platform. In the light I could see that the delicate pink petals had been rained into the brown dirt and that bugs had eaten the leaves into lace. And now that I’ve learned that I can eat the blossom of the day lily, it doesn’t mean that I like it any less.

She picked off the browned leaves, using her thumbnail as a snippers, and held up one of the lacy ones. “Do you know that something even this far gone can be planted, and if it’s cared for properly, it’ll grow?”

Suddenly I was afraid I was going to cry. All the time I had just spent with Jack in the car while his tears wet right through my jacket and blouse, and I sat there without crying, and now I thought, I’m going to cry over a little chewed-up leaf. I never cry.

“I’m sorry, Mrs …”

“Flossie—just call me Flossie! No need to be distant now that the Tomato Blight has left the neighborhood. If you get my meaning …”

“Did you know about Maggie leaving?”

“Who doesn’t? Good news travels fast around here. Her neighbors from down the end of the street want to join hands and dance around that house now that it’s going to be sold. Maybe we could all form a bucket brigade and get the place scrubbed before it goes on the market. What a waste. But! Life goes on—just water this and I think it’ll get through the wintertime. The fur on my oak tree is light, and I think we’re going to have an easy dose this winter—but don’t forget the water!”

“I’m sorry,” I began again. “I wasn’t listening closely. Do you want this plant back if it grows?”

“Poor child! Of course you feel bad! The host always feels a little weak when the parasite is pulled off. She was sucking you dry—everyone could see that. You’re lucky to be rid of those people before they did you any real harm—we all are. Why don’t you just go to bed? You look exhausted.”

“Everyone could see?”

“What do you think you are on this corner? Invisible? The walls have ears, you know. By the way, did you ever have any luck with my baby tears?”

This conversation was becoming unreal. “Baby tears? You have a baby? I didn’t know you had a baby …”

“No! No! No! Baby tears—the plantl The little plant I brought over last fall—did it ever grow in your west exposure out there on the porch?”

Of course! It was still where Amanda had thrown it, on the porch, behind the milk box. Dead as a doornail, too, I figured.

“I’ll check on it sometime,” I promised.

“Why not look now, while I’m here—there’s no time like the present.” While she picked around the begonia some more, I went out and got it. I pushed the box aside and there, in the wedge-shaped space between the wall and the box, was a pillowy triangle of green stems and tiny leaves. It was growing out of the pot on all sides—green threads were crowding out the hole in the bottom, and I had to break it away from the back of the milk box where it was growing, nourished all that time in the dark by the milky water that seeped out of the bottom of the container.

When she saw it, Flossie screamed in joy: “This is marvelous! It’s wonderful! Well, you must keep it, because it certainly seems to love conditions here. But, for God’s sake, let’s get it transplanted. Do you have any good dirt?”

“Good dirt?”

“Good dirt—good rotting compost?”

“Well, I have lots of rotting things around here, but I never particularly thought of them as any good.”

“Let me go get some and bring it over,” she said, putting the browned begonia petals in her apron pocket.

“Well. Okay then, I’ll see you tomorrow?” I said as I closed and locked the screen door after she left. She walked across the twelve or so sidewalk squares from my house to her house in quick little steps, and turned and waved. I counted as she went in and out of the light from the street lamp. The plant clung in gentle silk threads around my hand as I watched her go. Ten-eleven-twelve, one-two-three, change partners, and dance. Now it was my turn. I waved back, before going inside.

I had one last job to do before this day ended and that was to mend the quilt. I carefully pulled it off the bed, and Jack hardly moved, except to curl tighter around my cold pillow, waiting for me. His breathing was congested now from crying, and little squeaking sounds were scraping hard from his nose as his chest rose and fell. He was singing the real music of the spheres, as the celestial onion skins sadly scrape by one another and our layered universe spins toward the dawn. I rolled him over on his side so he’d be less stuffy by morning, and pulled the rocking chair over to the window. I turned on the floor lamp and watched and waited for Jack to come home from work again so we could do this evening over again, so he could make everything turn out all right. The hidden sensor had tipped the street lamps on, and now they stretched ahead like a long, hopeful rosary into the night. Every time I rocked in this chair, I waited for Jack to come home, and now, finally, here he was, home for good. I knew it—he was going to love me—he had to, now.

I took up the quilt. Watching and waiting, watching and waiting, the rocking forces you to pick up the cadence of the rocking of the cradle and the rhythm of the tides. Everything is beautiful … falling down, picking up …

I will have to work along the same exact stitches that Aunt Ruth drew if I’m to fix her quilt at all. It will mean that I have to pick up the pattern of her stitches, to feel her hand on top of mine.

I hear that car pull up again, and I hear her get out again. She’s still crying. Her face is pale, her red lipstick is all chewed off, and I watch in the deep darkness from her closet as she climbs on her bed and hugs her patent-leather purse, and it is 1953 again, and when she finally falls asleep, I will creep out of the closet and go back to my own bedroom. She is very sick, and now we both know it.

“All those years? Why didn’t you tell me?” I shout to her across the spaces of time, as I stitch.

“What could you do about it?”

“Why did you go on for twenty lousy years with your insides rotting and never say a word to me?” I ask the quilt.

“What would be the point of telling you?” she breathed back through the fabric.

“So I could have helped you,” I beg her to hear.

She had cleaned up most of the mess she’d made from her tantrum before she went back to bed, I suppose. I’d never really know, so it all could have been a dream, all the noise and commotion as I pretended to sleep in my bed, except for my scene of Egypt. It was missing from the kitchen table in the morning, and there was sand crunching under my saddle shoes all over the kitchen floor when I got my breakfast, and there was a Tootsie Roll palm tree outside, in the shadow of the clothes prop.

And I knew that Maggie had called Jack at the motel during the orgy last night, because the Laughing Cow cheese had made a grease mark in the yellow pages next to the phone number of the Holiday Inn where he was staying. When I took the cheese out for Toby this morning, I could see the transparent triangle there, right on top of Jack’s number, so I knew, but didn’t want to look too closely. I wanted to be told, like a child, by either Jack or Maggie, that it was all a bad dream—everything was going to be fine.

And I really could have pretended that there was nothing wrong with Aunt Ruth that night and that nothing really happened, except when I left for school, she was still in bed, asleep in her dress on top of the bedspread, and the red dots on her collar moved lightly with her breath against the white sheets. I covered her up, and when I got home from school, the clothes were picked and folded away, and she had already begun to cover it up herself, so we never brought up the cancer again, while I lived there.

And when I went into the kitchen for more beer for the person from Michigan, Maggie blushed and turned away from me against the angel, cradling the phone against her hand, and when I grabbed the kaleidoscope, of course I knew she had called Jack after hanging up on Chuck. I could sense the storm was coming and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again—that something was horribly wrong. Jacques Brel was sick and dying the whole time they said he was alive and well, but still we sing, we sing.

I took out a stack of Aunt Ruth’s old index-card days and bent them so I could flip through them, making a movie out of the memories, and then, yes, I couLd see now what I couldn’t see day by day: Aunt Ruth was running down, disintegrating, falling apart right before my eyes, while I begged for an Easter hat with hard cherries on it, or a prom dress with embroidered roses, or her pearls to wear with my wedding gown. And she gave me everything but the chance to be close to her. She locked herself away in her own pain, and I stayed outside, wind-whipped, and now I could do the same thing to Jack, if I wanted to.

How could I never have seen what was happening right before my eyes? Is there a mesmerizing motion that exactly mimics the motion of the earth, hypnotizing us into thinking we’re not moving? If I pump the spinning top, there they are, Jack and Maggie, moving together again and kissing, moving together and kissing, while Chuck and I tip and nod our heads, tip and nod, letting them, ignoring them, pretending we don’t see them. Is the earth spinning so fast that we think it’s still? Or is God so big He’s invisible? Or moving so fast we think He doesn’t exist?

I opened the quilt and spread it across my lap. It darkened any room it was in, like Aunt Ruth herself. She had finished it in the last months before she died, sitting silently in her dingy house and sewing until it got dark, until her eyes burned. She cannibalized every dress in her closet, cutting embroideries from evening gowns, lace from bridesmaids’ dresses, flowers from house dresses. She cut odd shapes and fit them together into whirls and spirals and then embroidered all around the pieces, over and through the silks, the velvets, the cottons. Since she’d gotten fat, most of the clothes she had left were dark—burgundy wines, midnight blues, olive greens. And now I knew she’d meant the quilt for me, and me alone—to tell me not to waste so much time, the way she did. “Don’t do what I do—do what I say,” she always said. And I think I know now what she was trying to say to me.

I looked at the quilt from another angle. It seemed to quicken as my eyes got tired. All the shapes with black in them began to form a pattern, like the lead frame of a stained-glass window, and I could see myself standing with Jack in the dappled flow of the altar light after the ceremony, while she watched, smiling, from the shadows. The red lines of embroidery throbbed like a network of veins, or a labyrinth, or the turnpikes on a road map. I could see Maggie’s little red car driving up and down the neighborhood, back and forth, from one bright square to another. I squinted and thought I saw a small brown bug in one corner, and all the green shapes began to move faintly, like leaves, or dollar bills, or the squares on a felt game board. I felt trapped in the center of a quivering net, fighting again with Aunt Ruth, because we never had any money. Of course she couldn’t get any help; she had to keep quiet and keep on working, so we could eat.

When I closed my eyes, I could feel the patches move closer, and when I opened them, they moved away again. Just like the rocking chair, in the shadows, in the light, dark, light, day, night, day, night … I feel as if I’m on a giant seesaw and on the other end is God. You’re up, alive one day, and then plunged down, gone into the night. Sliding backward on the white ice, down into the cold snow. God is a game player and life is a puzzle, and He has the last piece, so we just have to wait until the end to see the finished picture.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, and now, rising out of the trees on the mirror of dark glass that I rock in front of, I see the full moon of my own face, and what money we did have sent me to the dentist. I have perfect teeth, white in the lamplight, straight and long, and when I dip back, I am gone. And then when I rock forward, I’m back again, with the stars on my face like so many startling thoughts. I was the one who kissed William Wharton while we all stood in line for confession, just to be mean, because he was the smartest kid in the class and I was the second smartest as long as he was there. I confessed it ten minutes later, but I can still see his red face, and the boys hated him more for crying than they ever did for wearing the brown corduroy pants, and I almost did the same thing to Chuck.

If I tell Jack all about the orgy …

“Will you ever learn?” she breathed. “Keep your mouth shut. Embroider. Lie.” But if I tell Jack, maybe he’ll understand. Maybe he’ll hug me and my skin will feel transparent and my soul will show through …

Aunt Ruth said nothing. I think I had her on that one.

I start sewing again.

“It’s worth a try,” she whispers, so faintly I can hardly hear her. The weeping-willow tree is blowing outside the window, tossing its hair in fits, the way she did when I put her head on the pillow.

I pull the thread up, up into the light, and then plunge it into the dark cloth, leaving a new rose behind. My arm is a metronome, a counterpoint to my rocking, keeping time, time, time, in a sort of chronic rhythm. Crosspatch, draw the latch, sit by the fire and spin. Take a cup and drink it up, and call your neighbors in.

“I knew someday you’d know,” she says, when I’ve finished.

I gather up the mended quilt, turn off the light, because the dawn is coloring the window screen now around the edges, with the glowing sparkle, with the finest of silver threads, lighting up. I climb into bed beside Jack, cover both of us up with the quilt, and he turns and curls around me. I bury my face into his shoulder, into the fabric, where I can smell them both—Aunt Ruth’s patches and Jack’s dreams. I feel a wetness near my fingers and I think I must have pricked my finger on the needle, but there is no blood, only tears.

And then I’m finally crying, crying out the glass splinters and silver needles of real tears, rinsing off the window inside; crying because it hurts, and because she has finally come home. 🏠

☜* previous Chapter Thirteen 🏠