I watch her whisk through the revolving door. She spins out ten minutes later with a dress pattern and three squares of fabric. “Thanks to rationing, no silk,” she says. “But I found some decent options.” She hands me the squares: a sky-blue dotted Swiss, a floral rayon, and light pink cotton broadcloth. I choose the pink, of course.
At home, in the dining room, I spread the fabric across the table and study the picture on the cover of the pattern: a thin, elegant woman who looks nothing like me in a dress with a fitted bodice and a long paneled skirt. I take the flimsy folded pattern out of its envelope and lay it over the cloth, find the pincushion in my sewing basket, and attempt to secure it. I’m startled to find that my fingers are shaking badly. Only with laborious effort do I manage to pin a section of the pattern to the cloth. I slice into it with my heavy silver scissors, but the line is jagged. When I open the sewing machine, I sit at it for a few minutes, running my hand over its curves, touching the still-sharp needle with my finger.
All at once I’m afraid. Afraid I’ll ruin the dress.
I sit back in my chair. It’s not just the dress, or my wretched hands; it’s all of it. I’m afraid for my future—a future of inevitable debilitation. Of increasing reliance on others. Of spending the rest of my years in this broken shell of a house.
When Sadie stops by a few days later, she runs her finger along the erratic line of the pins. Inspects the ragged cut. “You made a start,” she says gently. “Shall I take it over to Catherine Bailey in Maple Juice Cove to finish it up?” She doesn’t look in my eyes; I can tell she doesn’t want to embarrass me. When I nod, she says, “Right, then,” and carefully folds the pattern with the fabric, gathers the spools of pink thread and the instructions. Unfurling the yellow measuring tape from my sewing box, she encircles my waist, my hips, my bodice, scratches the numbers on a scrap of paper, and tucks it all into a bag.
SEVERAL WEEKS LATER I’m sitting in the kitchen, wearing my new dress, about to leave for the wedding, when Andy shows up, unannounced as usual, at the door.
Stopping abruptly in the doorway, he says, “My God, Christina.” He strides over and runs his hand down my sleeve, whispering to himself, “Magnificent. Like a faded lobster shell.”
1922–1938
In the summers, now, I make my way to the Grange Hall in Cushing most Fridays, but instead of swaying with the music and chatting with friends as they jostle on and off the dance floor, joking and laughing and carrying on, the bolder ones smoking cigarettes outside and tippling from a flask, I am consigned to the role of fruit-punch server, pound-cake cutter, molasses-cookie arranger. I pick up soiled napkins and wash dirty glasses in the sink behind a partition. Most of the women who play this role are older than I am and married. Only a few are my age: the unchosen and childless.
I have not gotten used to it. I’m not sure I ever will. For a while I continue to bring my dress shoes in a bag, as I always have, and put them on as soon as I arrive. But one evening when the hall is particularly hot, I excuse myself from the serving table, go outside, roll my stockings down, slip them off my feet, and put my flat-heeled walking shoes back on. What does it matter?
It’s a damp Friday in August and I’m walking to the Grange Hall with Fred and his fiancée, Lora, wearing a white dress I finished sewing hours earlier from a new McCall’s pattern, when I slip in a rut in the road. I put my hands out to stop my fall, but my arms aren’t stable enough to support my weight. I drop heavily into the muck and gravel, tearing my sleeves, scraping my chin.
“Oh!” Fred shouts, leaping toward me, “Are you all right?”
My chin drips blood, my wrists throb, I am facedown in the wet, soiled dress it took me weeks to sew. The skirt is bunched up round my hips, my bloomers and misshapen legs exposed. Lifting myself slowly on my elbows, I survey my torn bodice. All at once I am so tired of this—of the constant threat of humiliation and pain, the fear of exposure, of trying to act like I’m normal when I’m not—that I burst into tears. No, I am not all right, I want to say. I am fouled, degraded, ashamed. A burden and an embarrassment.
“Can you get up?” Lora asks kindly, standing over me. She crouches down. “Let me help you.”
I turn my face away.
“Doesn’t seem to be a break,” Fred murmurs, running his expert farmer’s hands over my wrists and ankles. “But you’ll have some bruises and swelling, I’m afraid. Poor thing.” He tells me to flex my hands, not the easiest maneuver even when I’m not in pain. When I grimace, he says, “Probably a nasty sprain. No fun at all, but it could be worse.”
Lora waits with me while Fred jogs back to the house to get the car. At home the two of them carry me through the front door and upstairs to my room, where Lora finds my nightgown on a peg and discreetly helps me undress and Fred gently washes my face and arms. Once they’ve shut the door behind them, I burrow into my blankets and turn toward the wall.
How did I go from being the maiden in a fairy tale to a wretched old maid so quickly? It happened almost without my realizing it, the transition to spinsterhood. Mamey said that in her day a woman who had not married by the age of thirty was called a thornback, named after a flat, spiny, prehistoric-looking fish. It’s what they called Bridget Bishop, she said. Thornback. That’s what I have become.
WHEN MOTHER’S HEALTH becomes so precarious that she and Papa need separate bedrooms, I offer to give up mine. She’s in pain; her kidney issues are worse, her legs puffed with fluid. She has started sleeping upright in a parlor chair. I move downstairs, where my bed is a pallet on the dining room floor that I roll up each morning and tuck in the closet. It’s not so bad; I’m closer to the kitchen and the privy, secretly relieved not to have to navigate the stairs.