When she sewed, she lost herself amidst the folds of the fabric, the whirr of the machine, and the sight of the needle plunging in and out of the grain of the fabric, disappearing for a split second that infinite number of times it needed to connect with the bobbin thread, to produce a strong seam. Her favorite moment was always the plunge of the steel scissors for the first cut, when her hand stood poised above the wholecloth which lay like a sea of color against the pads protecting the dining room table. She always smoothed out the tissue of the pattern pieces one final time, when a fingerwould inevitably be snagged on a straight pin and she woud reflexively stick it into her mouth before a drop of blood could mar the surface of the expensive goods.
Then, despite the stinging in her hand, she held the scissors firmly and with all her faith allowed the tip of the scissor to penetrate the cloth with surgical precision until the full length of the blade disappeared under the material and she could slip it around the pattern piece like a knife through butter. The scissors were as sharp as a surgeon's and they were kept in the cloth bag that her grandmother had fashioned from some scraps of heavily quilted fabric. The blades had been sharpened so many times that they were as thin as the edge of a razor strop and she kept them in the bag always, hiding it in various places around her sewing room so that her mother couldn't find it when she needed to open a package or cut a length of clothesline.
Nothing satisfied her more than looking up after an hour and seeing all her pattern pieces cut out and lying like pieces of a jigsaw atop the sewing table. Here hands would be sore from the scissors and her back hurt from bending over the table, but she could not take a rest until she read through the sewing directions one more time and matched up the first two pieces with point A to point B and secured them with a long straight pin and placed the sewing machine needle directly through the center like X marks the spot. Then she could relax and tidy up, clearing the table of all the excess fabric, sweeping the caterpillars of selvage from the floor, and lining up her pattern pieces in order of construction on the table behind the sewing machine.
In the moments between the fininshed cutting out of the pattern and the beginning of the piecing, all was still promise and the dream of the garment was as beautiful as she envisioned, an innocent beauty shorn of lumpy darts and twisted seams and ill-fitting bustlines. For that space of time, the red velvet or the champagne damask or the robin's egg peau de soie was a mystery hidden under the oddly shaped pattern pieces and only she could see the wizardry of the assemblage in her mind.
She always began her projects in the morning when the strong light flooded the dining room and she could pin and tuck and baste and cut and see the faint chalk line that guided her sewing. A morning could flash by counted in beats of the treadle beneath her feet and if the old machine was behaving because she had properly cleaned the lint from under the feed dogs and oiled the straps, it sewed a beautiful seam unrivaled by any expensive new machine. She could feel feel the fingerprints of her grandmother's hand beneath her own and sense the rhythmn of her guiding foot as she did the first time she sat at the machine and her grandmother showed her how to use it. Her mother had offered many times to get her a used machine, a later model with and electric foot and buttonhole attachment, but although she lived in fear that a part would break and she couldn't find a replacement, she had no desire to get rid of the beautiful black machine with its red and gold decorative paint and the sturdy oak table in which it sat.
When she sewed, her heart seemed to beat in unison with the treadle under her feet. She held the fabric with just enough tension to keep the seam allowance
true and as she guided it over the throat place with her right hand,
her left hand was flat against the piece to steady it as it came out of
the other side. The machine made quite a racket and the noise blocked out the sound of her mother's soaps on the TV and drowned out the
interference in her own head that woke her at 4:00 every morning. She thought of nothing and everything, her mind skimming from thought to thought until it settled into the clacking of the machine as it worked its way through the lengths and widths of the material, building a garment fold by fold, a construction geometric in its growth.
The problem was in the finishing. As the garment grew and she walked back and forth countless times from machine to ironing board to press a seam flat and steam a dart and turn a sleeve, she began to see her mistakes. There was the slip of shimmery satin which resulted in an uneven seam, and here the bunching of the collar, or the inexpert insertion of the zipper which would never let the waistband lie flat. All of them were mistakes only she could see but would result in her mind's eye in a garment that shouted homemade and her desire was for couture quality, a piece of bespoke from an atelier in Paris, or at least from the dress salon at Bergdorf's. She began to hate her design, wondering how she ever thought she would pull it off, and she ripped open seams and repressed and refaced and soon the sun was down and her mother called her to quit sewing and come eat supper and another day had passed without her accomplishing anything more than a tangle of sweaty material held together with lethal pins.
She left more pieces unfinished in the basket on the floor of her closet than she had clothes hanging on the pole. And that, her mother always told her, was her problem She couldn't finish anything, she'd never seen through anything from start to finish in her life. Which was why she worked all day with heavy headphones on her ears, listening to drone of doctor's voices dictating medical reports and her fingers transcribing it onto a keyboard. It was a steady stream of information that made no sense to her but that she absorbed in syllables and translated into keystrokes, a job with no beginning or end, just more voices speaking in her ears and an endless loop of transcription. And while she typed, it reminded her of sewing, of the feeling of being disconnected from her body and watching herself perform a task that she wasn't quite sure she understood. But at the end of the day she could walk away from it and it never ended up tangled in her feet on the floor.