The Summer Without Men

divorce, and the grade school art teacher was born.
    Her mother had taught her to embroider, but it wasn’t until after her marital debacle that she had joined the sewing group, understood that “she needed to do it,” and her double life began. Over the years she had created many works, both conventional and subversive or, as she put it, “the real ones” and the “fakes.” She sold the fakes. One by one, she had been showing me the real ones, and the strangeness of Abigail’s project had become more and more apparent. Not all of them were spiteful or sexual in nature. There was an embroidery of delicate mosquitoes in various sizes, replete with traces of blood; a joyous image of a figure straight out of Gray’s Anatomy, organs exposed but dancing; another of a gargantuan woman taking a bite out of the moon; a large and oddly poignant tablecloth that featured women’s underclothing: a corset, bloomers, a chemise, stockings, panty hose, a thick brassiere of the old style, a girdle with garter belt, and a baby doll nightgown; and there was a remarkable portrait sewn into a pillow in tiny crosshatch stitches she had done years before of herself in a chair weeping. The tears were sequins.
    When she opened the door, my friend looked tiny. The tremor had gone to her head, and her chin wobbled as she stood in front of me. She was beautifully attired in narrow black pants and a black blouse covered with red roses. Her short sparse hair was combed behind her ears, and through the lenses of her narrow glasses her eyes were as intensely focused as I had ever seen them.
    That afternoon, Abigail and I made arrangements. She reclined on her sofa and spoke to me about her death. She had no one but a niece, a dear woman, but she would never understand the amusements. “She’ll get my money, what there is of it.” She then quoted a line from my first book of poems: We were mad for miracles and ships with lace . “That’s us, Mia,” she said. “We’re two peas in a pod.” I was flattered even though I was forced to see us round and green in the pod on a kitchen counter. Then she abruptly shifted metaphors, from the organic to the mechanical: “I’m an alarm clock, Mia, ready to go off, and when I do, there’ll be no going back. I hear myself ticking.” She had made it all legal in her will, she said. I was to have the secret amusements and do with them whatever I wanted. The papers were in the top drawer of her small desk. I should know. The key could be found in the little Limoges egg box, and I was to take it out now and open her drawer; there wasething she had to show me, a photograph slipped inside a manila envelope right on the top.
    Two young women wearing tuxedos are standing with their arms over each other’s shoulders, grinning, one dark, whom I guessed had to be Abigail, and one blond. The blonde has a cigarette in her right hand. They look giddy and jaunty and careless and enviable.
    Abigail lifted her head. Then she nodded. She nodded for several seconds before she spoke. “She had the same name as your mother. Her name was Laura. I loved her. We were in New York. It was nineteen thirty-eight.”
    Abigail smiled. “Hard to believe that whippersnapper is me, huh?”
    “No,” I said, “it’s not hard at all.”
    When I embraced her before I left, I felt her bones under the rose-covered shirt, and they felt no larger than chicken bones, my Abigail, who couldn’t sit up straight anymore, who had the shakes and had once loved a girl named Laura in New York City in 1938, a remarkable woman, an art teacher for children and an artist, an artist who knew her Bible. The last thing she said to me was: “He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth.” Psalm 72:6.
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    Being the other is the dance of the imagination. We are nothing without it. Shout it! Shimmy, kick your heels, and leap. That was my pedagogy, my philosophy, my credo, my slogan, and the girls were trying. I can say that for them. Their “I”s had been scrambled, and they worked to find the meaning that comes with another role, another body, another family, another place. Their success varied, but that was to be expected.
    Jessie as Mia wrote, “I had some kind of feeling about the girls’ problems, but they didn’t tell me. I remembered going into seventh grade and the messy stuff that happened to me, but it was a long, long, long time ago…” (Fair enough.)
    Peyton as Joan