| needlepoint | |
| I am needlepointing. I am needlepointing a woman. I am needlepointing a woman from the inside out. Working on a fine mesh canvas. With a slender needle. With a single strand of wool. There are no knots in my work; I know how to hide my stitches. The back is as perfect as the front. The work is too delicate to use a thimble. My finger is bleeding. The blood stains the wool. The wool is from different dye lots. The background doesn’t always match. I know needlepoint. I studied it. I know the difference between tent stitch and basketweave. I use the basketweave stitch; it doesn’t stretch the canvas as much and I don’t have to turn the work. I stitch with the grain. Even so, the canvas gets pulled out of shape. I should block it when I’m done. I decide not to block it. To keep the distortion. I wear small gold scissors. They hang on a grosgrain ribbon around my neck, together with a square of felt to hold my needle and a cloth strawberry filled with sand to clean it. My stitching takes a long time. The light isn’t good. I finish small sections first—an ear, the hollow of a clavicle, an ankle. I think it sad that no one will see her. I wonder how I’ll get out. The wool is in odd colors—eggplant, indigo, copper, clay, cream, turquoise, ochre, rust. Colors I have chosen. No pink. No red. No black. No white. I made my first needlepoint pillow as a Christmas present for my mother-in-law. I made it from a kit. The design was painted on the canvas. All I had to do was fill it in. Later, I painted my own designs. Sometimes I worked from a graph. Those pillows were the most satisfying, requiring a complicated translation of circles and crosses into greens and blues, square by square. I made that first pillow in the fall. I was in law school. I had two babies. I went to school at night. I worked as a law clerk for four hours during the day. I sat up late at night stitching. I did gros point and petit point, tent stitch and bargello, pansies and patchwork. Sometimes I felt that the colors of the wool, the weights of the mesh, the patterns were the only things I could choose or control. I stitched beautifully. Obsessively. Even after I started cheating on my husband. Even after I started cheating on my lover with the lawyer whose office was below mine. Even while I studied for the bar exam. That pillow was the last one I finished. I finished fourteen pillows, all the same size, all corded and backed with velvet. When I finished each pillow I put it on the couch. The green and white Chinese print. The pansies. The pink and green patchwork sampler. The brown bargello. The blue and white flowered cat. I kept buying canvas, books, yarn, but I didn't needlepoint again until the summer I quit my job working for the Indians and I needlepointed doll house rugs, miniature orientals on a mesh as fine as gauze, using a single strand of embroidery thread. I thought I had given away all the wool and the canvas years ago but I have found a large basket, a bushel basket made of straw and full of skeins of wool, all cut into even lengths and bundled together by color. There is a rolled up needlepoint canvas, which, when I unroll it, I see is partially completed. It is a pattern of woven ribbons, plain, plaid, and polka dot, in hot pink, lime green, turquoise, white and yellow. A pillow for a white wicker couch, for a sunporch, for someone wearing a sleeveless cotton dress, flowered in similar colors, to lean against. I don’t have the wicker couch any more, or the sundress, or the sunporch, or the house, or the husband. On that sunporch, if the pillow had been finished, would be my daughters, ages five and six, wearing pastel dresses, pink and blue, with smocking and white collars, and black patent shoes. They would be reading Frog and Toad and playing with legos. My mother would be sitting in one of the wicker chairs smoking a cigarette and drinking a vodka and orange juice. She would be telling you to sit down, that you’d had a hard day, and complementing you on your manners in her Southern accent. On the table would be a silver platter waiting for a roast chicken. The linen napkins would be starched and ironed. I would offer you another glass of wine. I would open the oven and remove a trussed and stitched chicken, made of needlepoint, perfectly browned, and set it before you for you to carve. | |