Few words are tangent to the word seamstress. Courtier. Modiste. Needlewoman. Sewer. Two are French and define a woman who makes clothing. Of these, modiste is anachronistic. As is needlewoman. Couturiers are a dying breed.
Gobs of words are tangent to the word ghost. Apparition. Specter. Devil. Wraith. Banshee. Sprite. Ghoul. Imp. Vampire.
Each alive and well.
I do not invite the ghost in. She simply shows up.
How dark, how quick—the slice of the scissors.
More than half of me is damaged. More than enough to kill. It should be easy to spot the hole.
Again and again I spread myself on the sewing table, fingering for the tear to mend as if I am not constructed of loose-weave linen.
Down here there is a book, an updated version of the Sears catalog from my childhood, but instead of ordering the blue and white ruffled gingham sheet and comforter set I selected for my thirteenth birthday, I must choose my work.
Order.
LIST YOUR FATHER’S OCCUPATION
telephone installer, cable splicer, truck driver, mechanic
YOUR PATERNAL GRANDFATHER
machinist
YOUR MATERNAL GRANDFATHER
baker
WHICH ONE SUITS?
Fabrician: a word I whip up.
On the cover of Time magazine in the late 1950s, Christian Dior holds a pair of enormous shears, slightly opened like a forked penis. When a woman is showcased on the cover of anything—magazines, billboards, books—she is stripped of most of her clothes and all of her tools.
Three years pass before I return to paid work. Industry.
Table: to prepare the three layers of drapery for stitching.
New drapery is easy. Place the length of hemmed face fabric on the length of the table, right side up. Lay the sateen lining on top of it face side down. On top of that lay the interlining—bump, a name derived from refuse. A weighty, lightly woven flannel, bump is more than half cotton. The rest of it is comprised of whatever workers bump into on the textile mill floor.
My bump is eggshell colored.
Press the body with a heavy steaming iron. Stitch seams. Thrust your hands up between the layers, gripping the header, and flip the creation right side out. Form pleats. Sew indiscernible stitches. Hang.
To unpick the stitches of damaged drapery is to perform an autopsy. The act of replacing silk that has shredded in the sun, adding strong invisible seams, requires my whole body.
Even if part of it is missing.
In the first house my husband and I owned, I never saw a ghost. I never heard any unexplained noises or came downstairs in the morning to find that a poltergeist had upended all the kitchen chairs.
But here, on our first night in this house, I discover a photo album on a shelf. Photos of the recently deceased wife who lived here. Her life in plastic sheets.
Parting curtains, all is on display. Bending over my children in the kiddie pool at the park a woman holding a crying baby appears at my hip and says,
Looking at you, your life looks perfect. Hey, you’re that woman on the cover of the newspaper. The seamstress—
I shake my head. I’ve never been on the cover of anything. She insists. I leave the pool.
A sewer: one who sews or uses a needle.
A sewer: a passage to convey water underground.
LIST WHAT YOUR WOMENFOLK WERE OCCUPIED BY
pot scouring, bill paying, child raising, semen flushing, blood scrubbing
WHAT DID THEY OWN
Sewing machines
I inherit hundreds of doilies in an oversized thick black garbage bag. I wash and dry them. Iron each one. Stack them alongside lace table runners and bureau protectors and antimacassars in buntings of pale tissue. I inherit sewing machines. And handmade palm-sized books covered in damask with flannel pages for storing needles. Curved ones for mending braided rag rugs. Sliver-thin ones for silk embroidery. Flat pointed ones for working leather. Sailmaker needles resemble butter knives.
Like every ghost I’ve ever seen in a movie, my ghost walks between walls.
It’s a Sunday night, or more accurately, the wee hours of Monday morning. I ascend the basement stairs to the kitchen. My ghost sits at the kitchen table.
Years earlier, my sister and I arrived at the flea market in the late afternoon.
“Pedestal table, two o’clock,” my sister said, pointing to a vendor who decided the rainy day was a waste. He and another man were in the process of piling all their wares into a box truck. The table then, as now, is stained the color of roasted almonds.
Where my ghost sits, the table is black. The white leather parsons chair she sits on is a style I desire but cannot afford. The other three chairs at the table are ladderback. Borrowed and reliably the same form as when I descended to the basement six hours earlier.
She doesn’t acknowledge me. But then, her face is fuzzy. The more intently I look, the more she fades. I sniff the air and smell something singed.
If she were as useful, she would finish my work so I could sleep. In the morning, a long blonde hair curls across my sewing table like a gossamer treat.
The Five Phases of Being Haunted:
- Shock
- Curiosity
- Obsession
- Anger
- Listing Your House For Sale
Smoothing bump, fuzz flies with the cast of my fingers.
I wish I grew flowers. Or even vegetables. I grow callouses.
My orientation radar—unless we are talking fabric—is switched off.
If it wasn’t for the steadiness of the sewing table, I would be under it.
Necropastoral: a landscape of essentially unfinished mess where justifications and resolutions and crimes and absolutions live together before the alchemy is complete.
Drive-in movie theaters where cosmos and garbage bloom through asphalt.
Sanitoriums hosting mold and doves.
My basement. 1960s paneled walls painted the color of bandages with white acoustic tiles on the ceiling and gray linoleum tiles oozing asbestos on the clammy floor.
My mother sewed me a coat when I was three years old. The face is a tweed blend of green threads like old and new grass, the lining the color of honeydew melon. I store the coat in a clear container like Snow White after she took a bite of the evil witch’s apple. The coat is not dead. It’s sleeping.
My mother gifted me a sewing machine at my bridal shower held in the basement of the church she was married in.
Historically, drapery work was done behind the draper showroom. The backroom of the decorator. Backroom: a place where secret work is done.
A basement is a thin place. An exchange zone—damaged. But you have to work with what you have. There is no other path in front of me. All roads lead down. A scalpel, a steak knife, each is a single blade. Scissors are dual. Mine, a pair of opposable knives hinged together like legs.
Half dying is a lightning rod and also a schism. I haunt the places and people I am stuck in.