Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Nineteen


How to Make an American Quilt





Like Todd, I am a nonviolent person. I come from a nonviolent family. My dad keeps an ax in the barn to kill snakes with, but that’s the only weaponry I know of on the premises.

But when Ty Cobb wakes me up at 6:52 a.m. on Sunday morning, it crosses my mind that if I had a loaded shotgun under my bed, we could be eating rooster for breakfast.

Just a thought.

It doesn’t help that I didn’t fall asleep until after three. Emma dropped me off around eleven thirty last night, but I couldn’t get my brain to settle down. Okay, so maybe drinking four cups of coffee at Sid’s wasn’t the greatest idea in the world, but even if I’d been downing decaf, I still would have had problems dozing off. If you start your day with talk about Freedom Schools and end it with the promise of klezmer music to come, it’s just plain hard to sleep.

I snuggle deeper under my quilt in hopes that there’s a hungry copperhead in the yard that will make Ty Cobb a thing of the past, but no such luck.

“All right, you stupid rooster,” I yell in the direction of the closed window. “I’m up already!”

I struggle out of bed and down the stairs. Avery is at the kitchen table, reading the Sunday comics to my mom, who’s at the stove making spinach and goat cheese frittatas and pretending to pay attention. “Oh, that’s funny!” she says at odd intervals, causing Avery to roll her eyes and say, “Mom, it’s not the funny part yet.”

“Janie!” my mom calls out when she sees me. “I have a great idea for how to spend the afternoon!”

“Mom, it’s not even seven.” I plop into my chair at the table, almost missing it. “Why are we talking about the afternoon?”

“Does the phrase ‘quilting bee’ mean anything to you?” she asks, ignoring my query and crumbling some cheese into the pan of eggs she’s got cooking. “Because they’re having one over at White Pine Methodist Church, just down the road. Everyone’s invited!”

“Mom, you don’t know how to quilt,” I remind her. “You barely know how to sew.”

“I’m getting better,” my mom insists. She points to the apron tied around her waist. “I made this, didn’t I?”

The apron is a hemmed square of pink calico fabric with ties that are barely hanging on. Uneven stitches and loose threads abound. It’s an apron in quotes, a rag in the making.

I nod in agreement. “Yes, you did, Mom. I think that’s my point.”

My mom gives me a hurt look. “Maybe I don’t have your sewing talent, but I’m getting better. It’ll just take practice, that’s all.”

Now I feel guilty. “No, no, you’re right. And I like your apron. The fabric is really nice.”

My mom’s face brightens. “So you’ll go with me? To the quilting bee? Avery’s coming too.”

Avery beams at me from over the newspaper. “Please come, Janie? It’ll be so much fun!”

I sigh. “Do I have a choice?”

And much to my surprise, it’s my dad who says, “No, you don’t.”

“Mike?” My mom looks at my dad, who’s standing in the kitchen doorway. We all do. My dad is a champion of staying out of things, which includes keeping his opinions on mother-daughter conflicts to himself.

“I think it’s time Janie rejoined the family,” my dad says.

“I’m tired of her acting like we’re not good enough for her anymore.”

I feel like I’ve been slapped. “I don’t think I’m too good for you,” I stammer out after a minute. “I just—I—”

“She’s fourteen, for Pete’s sake,” my mom says to my dad. “Don’t you know anything about fourteen-year-old girls?”

“Not much,” my dad admits. “But I don’t think being fourteen excuses you from having a nice word for your mother from time to time.”

My mom laughs and waves a dish towel at him, like he’s a pesky fly she’s trying to get out of her kitchen. “That won’t happen again until she’s fifteen, honey.” Then she turns to me. “You don’t have to come to the quilting bee with us, Janie. I just thought since you’re so interested in sewing, it might be fun for you.”

“I’ll go,” I say in a quiet voice.

“Well, wonderful,” my mom replies. “Now let me get you something to eat.”

After breakfast, I take care of the goats and then go back to bed until eleven. I’ve just gotten out of the shower and am standing in front of my closet wrapped in a towel, wondering what one wears to a quilting bee, when Avery comes to my door carrying my cell.

“I answered it for you,” she tells me, and then, before I have a chance to blow up at her, she says in a loud whisper, “It’s a boy! And when I told Daddy his name is Monster, Daddy said I should stand outside your door and eavesdrop because he didn’t like the sound of that name, but Mommy said I should give you your privacy.”

I take the phone. “Did you hear all of that?” I say into the receiver.

“I’ve got it all written down,” Monster replies. “Your mom sounds cool.”

“How about my dad?”

“He sounds like a dad.”

We share a moment of silence in honor of the uncoolness of overprotective dads everywhere, or maybe because I can’t think of anything else to say. I am suddenly supremely aware of the fact that I’m only wearing a towel, a fact I don’t share with Monster.

“Anyway, I don’t think I ever got a chance to tell you that you played great on Friday. You got a natural sense of rhythm, which is essential if you’re really gonna play bass right. I mean right, like Cliff Burton right or Bootsy Collins right. Even Mike Watt right, if you’re into the L.A. punk thing.”

“I don’t know much about it—the L.A. punk thing, I mean.” I pause. “Or anything else you just said.”

“You want a mix tape?” Monster offers. “I’ll do a showcase mix, introduce you to a wider spectrum of excellent bass playing.”

Rivulets of cold water are parading down my neck and back. “Sure,” I say, hiking up my towel. “That would be great.”

“Anyway,” Monster says, “I thought you might want to do some practicing this afternoon.”

“I’d like to, but I can’t,” I tell him. “I’m going to a quilting bee with my mom. Don’t ask me why.”

“Over at White Pine?”

I hold the receiver away from my ear and look at it. How does Monster know? Is he a quilting aficionado, or just psychic?

“That’s where my granny goes to church,” he says. “She’s crazy about quilts. Crazy about church. Used to make me go every Sunday. The amazing thing, given the nature of my family, is that she herself ain’t crazy. Well, maybe halfway crazy, but then everybody’s about halfway crazy.”

“Well, I’ll look for her there,” I say, pulling a flannel shirt from my closet in hopes of putting some clothes on soon. “Does she resemble you in any way?”

“She’s the spitting image.”

“Red hair?”

“And six feet tall. She’s a bruiser, Granny.”

“She sounds sort of scary,” I say, plopping down on my bed and pulling the flannel shirt around my shoulders.

“Least scary person in the world, in spite of her girth,” Monster assures me. “Tell her you know me, she’ll give you the shirt off her back.”

Which, thinking about it after we hang up, sounds exactly like Monster Monroe himself. The same Monster Monroe who just called me, I realize. On a Sunday morning. To ask me to do something.

How do you feel about this, Janie Gorman? the interviewer asks, sticking a microphone in my face.

No comment, I reply.

Monster’s grandmother is the first person I see when we walk into the meeting room at White Pine Methodist. You can’t miss her. Most of the women sitting around the huge quilting frame are your typical little old ladies, white haired and shrunken, with Kleenex at the ready. Monster’s grandmother looks like she just wandered in off a football field somewhere.

“Hey, girls!” she calls out in a surprisingly high voice when she sees us standing in the doorway. “Y’all come for the quilting? Just pull up a seat and fit yourselves in.”

“I’ve mostly come to watch and learn,” my mom tells her. “Now, Janie here”—she puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me forward a few feet—“she’s a wonderful seamstress, though she hasn’t done much quilting.”

Monster’s grandmother waves me over. “Well, you come sit right here next to me, honey. My name is Trena. I’ll show you how to use a quilting needle. You just got to learn to rock it like a baby, that’s all.”

“I know Monster,” I say, pulling a chair in next to hers. “He’s a friend of mine at school.”

Trena smiles and pats her heart with a delicate, if rather large, hand. “Oh, my Monster! Well, I call him Monny, don’t you know, because Monster is a ridiculous name, but typical of that mama and daddy of his. His daddy being my son, Emmett, but he’s a long story and not one you can tell right next to a church sanctuary, no sir.”

Then Trena proceeds to tell me everything about Monster’s family, interspersing her tale of woe with quilting hints. “Ed—that’s my dearly departed husband—and me, we done everything we could to raise that boy right (you got to rock that needle, honey, just poke it right through the fabric and then kinda work it back and forth just a little bit—now don’t worry, you ain’t gonna hurt nothing, unless you poke your own finger), and he was fine till he turned sixteen and went girl crazy on us (now pull that thread taut, but don’t pucker up the material, if you know what I mean). Started a-drinking and smoking that pot, oh, Lord, it ’bout nearly killed me.”

“Did he ever get in trouble?” I ask, not wanting to be too nosy, but curious all the same. “Like go to jail?”

“Oh, Lord, no, child, it never got that bad. He’s just no-account is all, and Monny’s mama is the same way. How they brung up a boy as good as Monny, I don’t know. Well, he stayed with me most of the time, but now I’m at the nursing home, due to failing health, and there’s no place for Monny to stay.”

“You look healthy to me,” I say. “Extremely healthy.”

“It’s the diabetes, don’t you know, so now I got kidney damage. They got me on dialysis twice a week.”

Across the table, my mom is quizzing a woman with blue hair on quilting patterns and techniques. Avery is sitting in the lap of a frail-looking octogenarian, who is helping her guide her needle in and out of the fabric.

“You got a nice family, I can tell just by looking at ’em,” Trena says. “It’s no wonder you turned out so nice yourself. It’s folks like Monny who’re the mysteries. I think he just must have been born with a good heart.”

“He’s a very nice person,” I agree.

“He surely is.” Trena glances up from her sewing. “Any girl would be lucky to have him.”

“I hear that a lot,” I tell her, keeping my eyes on my work.

We sew in silence for a few minutes. From across the quilting frame I can sense my mom’s happiness at being part of such a homemade, authentic event. This will be on the blog tomorrow, count on it. In fact, two seconds after I have this thought, my mom whips out her digital camera and asks, “May I?”

“Oh, honey, I look a sight,” someone says, and someone else says, “If I’d known folks were taking pictures, I would’ve worn something other than these rags,” and everyone else says pretty much the same thing, but all over the room hands are patting down hair and lipsticks are being plucked from purses. My mom happily snaps photos of the women demonstrating complicated stitches as they smile big, waxy Ravishing Red smiles.

“I like your mama,” Trena tells me. “She seems like good people.”

“Smile!” my mom calls to me from across the room, and I look at her and smile. Because she is good people. And she means well, even if she does drive me crazy.

Besides, she makes a mean spinach and goat cheese frittata.