WITH WALTON AND the Carles around all summer I don’t need anyone else; my brothers and I buzz around them, moths to their vivid flame. But after they leave, I am lonely. When Gertrude Gibbons, a girl I never particularly liked at school who has grown into a mildly tolerable adult, invites me to a Wednesday night sewing circle run by a professional seamstress, Catherine Bailey, I reluctantly agree. Gertrude, too, makes her own dresses, and between sessions of the group we start sewing together in the evenings sometimes, when the chores are done. It’s a way to pass the time.
On a cool November evening, I take my sewing to Gertrude’s house in a sack slung over my shoulder, a two-mile walk. All day it’s been raining; the road is damp, and I have to walk slowly and carefully to avoid muddy puddles.
“Finally!” Gertrude exclaims when she answers my knock. Round faced and ruddy, with an ample bosom that strains the buttons on her dress, she’s chewing a molasses cookie. Her large black dog barks and leaps. “Down, Oscar, down!” she scolds. “Come in, for mercy’s sake.”
A cat is curled on an upholstered chair. “Shoo, Tom,” Gertrude says, flapping her hands, and the cat reluctantly obliges. “Sit here,” she tells me. “Cookie? Fresh baked.”
“I’m fine for now, thanks.”
“That’s how you stay so thin!” she says. “You’re abstemious like my sister. I try, honestly I do, but I don’t know how anyone can resist a warm molasses cookie.”
The house is snug; embers glow in the fireplace. Gertrude tosses on another log while I get settled. Her parents are away, visiting relatives in Thomaston, she says; her brother is out with friends. Oscar sprawls in front of the hearth, his eggplant stomach soon rising up and down in contented sleep.
We chat about the large yield this season of potatoes and turnips; I tell her about the fox that stole three hens out of our coop, and how Al trapped and killed it. She wants to know my famous fried apple cake recipe and I explain it step-by-step: how you peel and thinly slice the apples, fry the slices over a low flame in a heavy black skillet, adding a stream of molasses until the apples are soft in the middle and crispy on the edges, then turn the skillet over onto a platter. (I don’t tell her that I can no longer turn the skillet on my own and have to ask one of my brothers to do it.)
The skirt I’m working on is beige cotton, with pleats and pockets. Before I came to Gertrude’s I pressed the fabric with a hot iron, one inch all the way around, and now I’m using a slip stitch to hem it. My stitches are small and neat, partly because I have to concentrate so hard to get them right. Gertrude’s are sloppy. She is easily distracted, full of gossip she’s been waiting to share. Emily Jones had a stillborn baby early in the summer and she still hasn’t left the house, poor girl. Earl Standin has a drinking problem. His pregnant wife showed up at Fales with a shiner last week, claiming she walked into a pole. Sarah Stewart married a blacksmith from Rockland she met at a social, but rumor has it she’s in love with his brother.
“So what do you hear?” she asks.
I hold up the fabric and frown, pretending to be vexed by a missed stitch. The more she natters on, the less I want to say. I know she is eager for details about Walton, but I hold them close, not trusting that she won’t chew them into cud. She waits patiently, her sewing in her lap.
“You are a sphinx, Christina Olson,” she says finally.
“I’m just a bore,” I say. “Nobody tells me anything.”
“What about that Ramona Carle and that Harland Woodbury? I hear he’s sweet on her.”
A man named Harland Woodbury did, in fact, travel up from Boston to visit Ramona this summer in Cushing. But after he left, Ramona made fun of his chubby cheeks and porkpie hat. “Don’t know a thing about it,” I tell Gertrude.
She gives me a sly look. “Well, I heard something you might be able to shed light on.” She licks her index finger and rubs the frayed edge of her thread into a point. “I heard,” she says, threading her needle, “that a certain young man from Harvard can’t make up his mind.”
A flush moves through me, starting at the top of my head, like heatstroke. My fingers tremble. I put down the cloth so Gertrude won’t see.
“Surely you’re aware that a man like that . . .” she says gently, as if to a child. She sighs.
“Like what?” I ask sharply, and immediately regret engaging her at all.
“You know. Educated, from away.” She reaches over and pats my leg. “So just—what’s the saying—don’t put all your goods on one ship.”
“Okay, Gertrude.”
“I know you’re private, Christina. And you don’t want to talk about this. But I could not, in good conscience, let the moment pass without telling you what I think.”
I nod and keep my mouth shut. If I don’t speak, she can’t answer.
MAKING MY WAY home from Gertrude’s house I am distracted, lost in thought, when my foot sinks into a rut in the road and I tumble forward. As I fall I try to pivot sideways to protect the parcel I’m carrying containing my half-finished dress, landing with a thud on my right side. I feel a searing jolt of pain in my right leg. Both of my forearms are skinned. As soon as I brush the gravelly dirt off, blood springs to the surface. My leg is twisted under me, my foot splayed in an unnatural direction. The parcel is torn and muddied.
It’s no use calling for help; no one will hear. If my leg is broken, if I can’t get up, it will probably be morning before anyone finds me. How stupid was I to venture out like this on a cold night by myself—and for what?
I moan, feeling sorry for myself. People make dumb mistakes all the time, and that’s the end of them. A man in Thomaston was found frozen to death last winter in the woods, either because he was disoriented or had a heart attack. People go out in skiffs in cloudy weather, swim in the ocean when there’s an undertow, fall asleep with candles burning. Go out alone and break a leg in the middle of nowhere on a frigid November night.
I reach down to touch my right thigh. The kneecap. I bend my leg and feel a sharp jab. Ah, there. The ankle.
Papa urged me to take his walking stick when I left the house, but I refused.
I’m so tired of this mutinous body that doesn’t move the way it should. Or the low thrumming ache that’s never entirely absent. Of having to concentrate on my steps so I don’t fall, of my ever-present scabs and bruises. I’m tired of pretending that I’m the same as everyone else. But to admit what it’s really like to live in this skin would mean giving up, and I’m not ready to do that.