The string Mom used in sewing came in long pieces, cut to just the right length to weave all around the front of the shoe. There was a needle on each end, and she would begin by pushing one into the leather and pulling it through until the two ends were of equal length. She’d push both needles back in, pulling them out on opposite sides, completing the motion with a firm outward tug to secure the stitch. Then her hands would arc in again to puncture the leather, arc out, tug, arc in. Sitting at my desk now, I pantomime this two-handed motion, shown to me by her fellow hand-sewers and friends. It’s like a reverse butterfly stroke, an attempt at flight, at keeping your head above water.
But Mom was known as one of the fastest in the Shop, a naturally skilled sewer who remained dedicated to making the most of a difficult job. She and her friend Penny had benches next to each other, and sometimes they would race, others nearby cheering them on. Penny is a muscular, tough woman, and my slender, smiling mother always kept up with her, beat her half the time. Reasonably talented hand-sewers could do about three cases in a day; Mom usually did four. The annual difference could be up to five thousand dollars.
By a conservative estimate, Mom drew three million arcs through the hot, dusty air over those twelve years, each firm tug spreading tension through her neck and shoulders, each repetition inflaming her wrists. She arrived every weekday at six in the morning and went home at four thirty, starting and ending her day earlier than others so she could be home for me in the evening. She was on her feet all those hours; the Shop provided stools, but almost everyone sewed faster when standing.
To further improve her rate, Mom pre-threaded her needles at home. Each week, she brought home a bag filled with long, white skeins of rough string. The ends were ragged and fuzzy, and each unraveled tip had to be waxed before it could be threaded through the eye of the thick silver needles she used. Sitting on the couch watching TV, or on the porch watching me, she pulled the long tail of each thread across the palm of a hand that held a small cake of soft wax, then pushed the tamed end through a needle. Next she bent the free end back along the string and twisted it into the wax there so the needle was firmly secured. She repeated the process until the bundle was finished, a hundred or more needles clicking together in a sharp bouquet.
Mom could hold a conversation or sing along softly to the radio as she waxed, her hands moving independent of her attention. As I got older, she’d sometimes accept my clumsy help, and I’d sit on the floor chewing my lip, trying to wax with her graceful whipping motion, chunks of wax sticking to the string and impeding my progress or flying off onto the carpet. Another daughter of the Shoe Shop recently told me about waxing with her mother, and I was overwhelmed by a sudden, painful feeling of sisterhood.
For a time, Linda worked at the Shop, too, and Mom must have been happy to have her company. But hand-sewing was too hard for Linda, too painful and tiring, and she soon left. When I knew Linda, she worked for a landscaping company, which tells me something about how hard hand-sewing must have been. She watched helplessly as the Shop wore down Crystal’s body, each year bringing with it new kinds of pain.
One day, Mom pulled a stitch taut and felt a huge snap at the base of her neck. From then on, she saw a chiropractor regularly, a tall, thin, gray-haired man with the aspect of an undertaker. He leaned over her small frame, bending her limbs and audibly cracking her bones while I sat in a chair next to the tall table he laid her out on. I didn’t like how he smelled—like dusty corners and unnameable chemicals—and my mother’s bare skin seemed disturbingly out of place in the brown, closed room, rather than out in the summer sunshine. Near the end of the appointment, he placed two flat plastic pads on her back, then left the room for a while. I sat alone with her for five or ten minutes that felt like an eternity while a rhythmic hum pulsed from a big metal box on the floor, wires leading from it to those plastic pads. I didn’t dare to interrupt her trancelike silence and instead sat there sweating lightly and hoping for the humming to end soon. I always worried that the doctor would forget to come back, that I’d have to pull the pads off before my mother was slowly electrocuted as she slept, like an animal gently boiled alive in an increasingly hot pot. I wasn’t sure how I would know when I should intervene. I felt a flooding relief when the doctor came back and removed the pads, when Mom pulled her shirt back on and stood up to leave.
I always understood that my mother worked very hard. But it is only now that I can appreciate her determination, that to work as quickly and as consistently as she did meant re-dedicating herself each day, each hour, each minute, to pushing through boredom and physical pain and sometimes despair. She didn’t do this for herself; she did it for me. Those years constitute a sacrifice that I could not repay, even if she were still here, but I am bereft that I never got to try. And after she died, the Shop’s profit-sharing plan meant that she would support me for years after her death. The Shop paid us better after she was gone than while she was alive.
The Shoe Shop was razed years ago, and now a chain supermarket stands in its place. My aunts and I have all made the pilgrimage, stood in the cereal aisle and wondered where the ghost of her workbench resides. As a child, I went to the Shoe Shop only a handful of times, and wasn’t permitted very far into the building. I remember it as a loud cavern full of dangerous-looking machinery and sad-looking parents. Despite her skill and speed, Mom always wanted to escape to something else, a job where she could use her brain, or at least sit down. But Bridgton had little to offer, so she was stuck with the tedious days and the grinding years of the Shop. By the end, she was generally healthy but plagued by her chronic back and neck aches, along with carpal tunnel and migraines. Her hands were whittled down by constant work, fingers bone-thin, the knuckles forever swollen—the only part of her that would ever age.
10
* * *
after
Word of the murder spread fast that morning, like poison released on a wind. Sandy, one of Mom’s closest friends from the Shop, was just about ready to leave her house in Casco, two towns to the south, and head to work when her ex-husband, Randy, came walking over from his trailer next door. Randy was a reasonable man, and he and Sandy had remained friends after their divorce, living close to each other so it would be easier on their children—a girl around my age and a younger boy.
When Randy came over that morning, he said a bewildering thing. He said a friend of his, a police officer, had called and told him that Crystal was dead. That she had been killed.
Sandy’s disbelief was so pure that at first she didn’t feel much at all. “Nooo,” she said. “Nah, that can’t be. There’s been some kind of mistake. Our Crystal?”
Randy said there hadn’t been a mistake, but Sandy still didn’t believe him. “There must be some miscommunication,” she said. He kept saying it was true: Crystal Perry was dead.