CHAPTER 12
February 1984
Donny was a good provider, and that was fortunate because he had very definite ideas about who should and shouldn’t play the role of family breadwinner.
Not long after they married, Mary Dell had put out the idea of her getting a job in town, but Donny was absolutely against it. Since Mary Dell figured she’d soon be too busy raising children to work outside the home, she had not fought him on it. However, when a third miscarriage made it apparent that motherhood was not going to be her full-time career anytime soon, she decided it was time to think about resurrecting her childhood dream of becoming a dress designer.
Though his position on the roles of men and women hadn’t altered, Donny could see that Mary Dell was unhappy, so he withdrew his earlier objections to the idea of her working, if she could figure out a way to work from home and if it didn’t interfere with her taking care of him and their home. At the end of a long day of work, he wanted to see his wife’s pretty face. That was the best part of his day.
Mary Dell agreed to this. Using the $350 seed money he gave her, she purchased fabric, notions, a not-too-used used sewing machine, and booth space at the annual Methodist Women’s Christmas Craft Show. This, Mary Dell decided, would be the perfect venue to launch her new clothing business.
She stitched up twenty dresses, all beautifully constructed and sewn from a collection of fabrics in colors, patterns, and textures that only Mary Dell could love, hung them up on a rack at the craft show, and waited for customers. None came. She didn’t sell a single dress.
Mary Dell was heartbroken. But she was never one to wallow in self-pity, or waste expensive fabric, so she ripped out the seams (which she’d sewn in sizes that fit a more standard figure, in other words, one smaller and less voluptuous than her own), trimmed off the raveled edges, salvaged the yards of rickrack, lace, buttons, and froufrou trimmings, and spent the whole winter, spring, and summer turning the unwanted dresses into scrap quilts, with surprising results.
Those garish, gaudy, overtrimmed creations that no one besides Mary Dell would consider wearing didn’t work as dresses, but when patched into crazy quilts and decorated with bits of beading, and ribbons, and lace, then further embellished with all the fancy hand embroidery Mary Dell had learned at Grandma Silky’s knee—blanket stitches, bird tracks, back stitches, French knots, and whatnot—the results were charming and feminine, the kind of quilts a Victorian lady might lay at the foot of her brass bed or drape over the back of her red velvet sofa.
When the holidays rolled around, she carted her pile of quilts back to the craft fair, hoping to sell at least one or two. By lunchtime, every quilt was gone. Mary Dell was surprised and delighted by her success. Several ladies who arrived too late to buy a quilt tried to commission her to stitch up more in time for Christmas gift-giving, offering to pay in advance. She was flattered by the offers, but considering the pittance she earned per hour of effort and the tight schedule, Mary Dell declined.
But when two ladies, sisters, begged Mary Dell to give them a class in quilt making, Mary Dell agreed to give it a try. She’d been teaching quilting ever since.
Because it was impossible to accommodate more than three students at a time in the living room of Mary Dell and Donny’s trailer and she only taught classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Mary Dell never made much from her classes. However, she did earn enough to support her fabric habit, make payments on a fancy made-in-Switzerland sewing machine, and take Donny out for a round of beers and an evening of line dancing at the Ice House every other Saturday. Teaching quilting was more of a hobby than a business, but Mary Dell enjoyed it.
Of course, she had her fits and starts. It took time for her to appreciate that what seemed obvious to her was not always obvious to others and to understand how to explain things in clear and simple language. The most important quality in a good teacher, she realized, was the ability to instill confidence in her students, to give them permission to experiment and help them realize that mistakes aren’t really “mistakes” as such, but an opportunity to learn something new or rethink your original idea and come up with a different one, sometimes a better one. Her biggest and best tools for communicating that were her sense of humor, her ability to laugh at herself, and her insistence that quilting was supposed to be fun. If it wasn’t fun, Mary Dell often told her students, then it was time to take a break.
When students saw that even the teacher had her “uh-oh” moments and could chuckle about them, they didn’t feel so self-conscious about their failures. As the years passed and Mary Dell honed her communication skills and added to her own knowledge about the history, art, and techniques of quilting, she became a very good teacher.
About five years after she began teaching quilting, Mary Dell was flipping through the glossy pages of Quilt Treasures, her favorite quilting magazine, when she came upon a set of instructions explaining how readers could submit designs to the magazine. Mary Dell was excited right down to the tips of her pink cowboy boots. Until then, she’d never stopped to consider that the quilts shown in magazines might come from the imaginations of ordinary people—people like her!
Without telling anyone what she was doing, Mary Dell took and printed several photos of a quilt she’d designed using a Churn Dash block, wrote a pattern and cover letter, and sent everything off to C. J. Evard, editor-in-chief of Quilt Treasures magazine, Dallas, Texas.
Then she waited.
While she waited, she conjured up mental images of what C. J. Evard, who she’d decided must be named Claudia Jean but went by her initials because it sounded more genteel, was like. Mary Dell spent a lot of time thinking about C. J. Evard, coloring in the outline she’d created in her own imagination, until the name C. J. Evard summoned up a three-dimensional image in Mary Dell’s mind, an independent and glamorous woman who lived the sort of life others could only dream of.
She was, Mary Dell decided, a tall and willowy natural blonde with hazel-green eyes. Being a businesswoman, C. J. Evard dressed in suits with big shoulder pads made of satin or shantung, maybe even silk brocade. She read a lot, being an editor and all, so Mary Dell figured she wore glasses, but very elegant ones that made her look wise and serious but stylish. She owned a pair of diamond earrings the size of dimes and always kept a thin gold pen tucked behind her ear. She was, of course, a brilliant quilter. She could join the points of an eight-pointed star in her sleep and could hand-quilt fourteen stitches to the inch. She was a master of every technique—piecing, appliqué, reverse appliqué, trapunto, foundation piecing, English paper piecing, and a bunch of other styles and techniques that Mary Dell had probably never even heard of.
Miss Evard (Mary Dell had decided that she must be single. How would a married woman have had time to develop all these accomplishments and run a whole magazine?) was well traveled. She had gone to college. And Paris and Rome. She had a big office with an enormous white French Provincial desk and a secretary who hung on her every word, following her down the hall taking notes on everything Miss Evard said.
Mary Dell was sure that Miss Evard was always on the lookout for new talent. And that when she saw the photos of Mary Dell’s quilt and read the pattern, she would be so overcome that her knees would actually go weak. She would have to sit down for a moment to collect herself, her heart palpitating beneath the lapels of her silk brocade suit. Then she would press a button that would sound a buzzer to bring her secretary, who Mary Dell had decided was named Mrs. Frost, to her desk, pen and pad in hand.
C. J. Evard would look up at Mrs. Frost with tears of joy in her eyes and say, “Mrs. Frost, take a letter. . . .”
A letter. The letter! The letter that would change Mary Dell’s life! But not more than she wanted it to. Not in any way that might upset Donny or mean she had to leave Too Much. Well, not very often. Maybe just once or twice a year. Maybe to Houston? Or Paris? No. That would be too far. Houston, then.
After three months, a letter in a creamy envelope with a Quilt Treasures logo bearing a Dallas postmark did arrive. Mary Dell took a deep breath, opened the envelope, and pulled out a letter that said:
Dear Quilter,
Thank you very much for your recent submission to Quilt Treasures magazine. While your work is interesting, it does not meet our needs at this time.
Cordially,
C. J. Evard
Editor-in-Chief
It would be the first of many such letters she would receive. Mary Dell refused to give up.
Her Wednesday class was her favorite because it was composed of her three original students, women who had signed up for her very first class and become friends. Pearl and Pauline Dingus were the eldest and youngest of the six daughters of Marvel Anne Dingus and the Reverend Charles Dingus, retired former minister of the First Baptist Church. Susan Satterfield, known as Sweetums, was their cousin.
After so many years together, the Wednesday classes were more like open sewing sessions than formal quilting lessons. She felt funny about taking money from the Wednesday group, but the ladies insisted on continuing to pay the five-dollar-a-week class fee, so Mary Dell worked hard to make sure they got their money’s worth, continually searching out new techniques and projects to challenge them.
This week, because Valentine’s Day would soon be upon them, the ladies were working on wall hangings with a hearts-and-flowers motif. The design was Mary Dell’s own, but her students had realized long ago that Mary Dell’s success in fabric selection was limited to crazy quilts. Pearl, Pauline, and Sweetums always picked out their own fabric. While the three women worked on their wall hangings, Mary Dell hand-stitched the binding on a crib quilt for Lydia Dale’s baby.
“I thought you already made a baby quilt for Lydia Dale,” Pearl commented when Mary Dell explained what she was working on.
“Lydia Dale didn’t like it. She didn’t come right out and say so, but she said that she wasn’t sure that orange, pomegranate, and lime would go in a nursery with yellow-striped wallpaper. Momma said it looked more like a fruit salad than a baby quilt.”
Pearl chuckled. “Orange, pomegranate, and lime? That sounds like how one of my migraines looks.”
Mary Dell tied off a stitch and shrugged. She was used to their teasing and tried not to take it personally. She liked what she liked and didn’t care, not much anyway, that the rest of the world preferred to wear a different shade of rose-colored glasses.
“Well, I thought it was nice, so I kept it for Howard and made another quilt for Lydia Dale’s baby. Good thing she’s overdue, or I never would have finished in time. The doctor says if the baby doesn’t come on its own by tomorrow, they’re going to have to induce.”
She snipped off the tail of the thread, flipped the now-finished quilt to the front, and asked, “What do you think?”
The women gasped.
“Gosh-all hemlock! Will you look at that?”
“Isn’t it just the sweetest thing you ever saw?”
“Well, I never did! It’s beautiful!”
The baby quilt, composed of six-inch Grandmother’s Fan blocks, was intricately and precisely stitched with a skill few quilters could hope to match. Knowing Mary Dell, the perfection of the stitching didn’t surprise the women, but the color composition did.
The “slats” of the fan, radiating like pointy-edged flower petals surrounding a center circle of deep yellow the color of egg yolks laid in winter, were made up of small-scale prints of jade, emerald, sapphire, cobalt, azure, and amethyst, rich colors, exotic colors, radiant colors, like gemstones lying at the bottom of a tropical lagoon or orchids growing wild behind crumbling walls of a secret garden, colors that none of the women would have thought to put into a baby quilt but, especially when set against a background of egg yolk yellow that matched the block centers, which looked exactly right together, surprising but not jarring, harmonious but not dull. It was a stunning quilt.
Pauline, who was a little bit nearsighted, which probably explained why the points of her quilts never quite matched, put her hand against her cheek and leaned down to get a closer look at the quilt.
“Mary Dell, you’ve made some awful nice quilts in your time, but this is the best ever. So pretty! Honey, if I didn’t know you were the only woman in three counties who could stitch six-inch Grandmother’s Fan blocks and have every one of them come out perfect, I’d have said somebody else made this quilt. Or at least chose the colors.”
Mary Dell’s skin was thick but not impermeable, and she frowned, annoyed by the backhanded nature of Pauline’s compliment.
“Lydia Dale picked out the fabric,” she admitted.
The women exchanged knowing glances. It all made sense now. Lydia Dale didn’t quilt but she had beautiful taste. When Sweetums decided to redecorate her family room, she’d asked Lydia Dale to help her pick out wallpaper and paint.
Pauline didn’t want to hurt Mary Dell’s feelings, but felt compelled to point out what she was sure everybody else was thinking. “Mary Dell, honey, have you ever thought about asking your sister to help pick out your quilt fabric? Because I’ll tell you . . .” She sighed and clasped her hands to her breast, seemingly enraptured as she gazed at the beautiful baby quilt. “If she did, I think the fair judges would have awarded your quilts a pile of blue ribbons by now, instead of all those honorable mentions.”
“They weren’t all honorable mentions,” Mary Dell mumbled as she heaved her pregnant body out of the chair she’d been sitting in. “I got a third place once.”
“I know,” Pauline replied. “I’m just saying you deserve better. If your sister were helping you, maybe you’d finally get the credit you deserve. Who knows? You might even get a design accepted by that quilting magazine you’re always writing to.”
Two months previously, Mary Dell had received yet another “thanks but no thanks” form letter from C. J. Evard. Disappointed again but still undaunted, she had submitted still another design and sent it to Dallas via registered mail earlier that week.
She was certain that this quilt, utilizing an original block she called Tricky Tumblers, would be the one that would finally get C. J. Evard’s attention. The “trick” of Mary Dell’s design was that the central block, which was based on the classic Tumbling Block pattern, required none of the Y-seams that even accomplished quilters dreaded. All modesty aside, it was a clever, even ingenious design, and she was certain Miss Evard would agree. However, Mary Dell didn’t mention this to her students. They’d see soon enough that her quilt designs could stand on their own without anyone’s help—even her sister’s.
Mary Dell turned her back to the women and started folding up the baby quilt.
Sweetums, who came by her nickname honestly, said in a gentle but hesitant voice, “Nobody is trying to hurt your feelings, Mary Dell. Everybody in this room knows you’re the best quilter in this whole part of the state, maybe in all of Texas. But . . .”
Pearl, the oldest and bossiest of the Dingus sisters, a preacher’s child and a big proponent of “speaking the truth in love,” became impatient with all this pussyfooting.
“Mary Dell, it’s time you faced facts. When it comes to quilting, you’ve got all the talent in the world but no more taste than a hothouse tomato. However, Providence has paired you with a loving sister who can’t sew a stitch but is amply supplied with the color sense you so sorely lack.
“Don’t you see? You and Lydia Dale are like biscuits and gravy; one is too dry and the other too wet, but put them together and you’ve got yourself a meal! And if you’d just put aside your stubborn, sinful pride and admit that, you might finally be able to make use of the gifts and talents the good Lord has granted you!”
Mary Dell was still standing with her back to the others, trying to toss their comments into the trash can of her mind, the same way she tossed all those cheap rayon honorable mention ribbons into the actual trash every August after fair week. But when she heard Pearl accuse her of pride, she winced.
Mary Dell could never be jealous of her sister personally, but Pearl’s blunt assessment forced her to admit that she was still jealous of her sister’s accomplishments—specifically of the glass display case filled with pageant sashes and tiaras that still held center stage in her parents’ living room. Actually, not that the pageant memorabilia itself made her jealous, but the fact that, after all this time, Taffy still insisted on showing these relics off to every person who visited the house, from the minister’s wife to the man who delivered their propane.
How silly.
Silly of Taffy to still try to bask in her daughter’s glow and silly of Mary Dell to still be trying so hard to secure a spot in Taffy’s display cabinet, believing that winning a blue ribbon would also win her mother’s approval. What an idea.
It wasn’t wrong for a child to desire her mother’s admiration, but Mary Dell wasn’t a child anymore. Nor was it wrong for her now, as a woman, to have dreams and ambition, or to desire a little recognition for her talents. That was natural enough, wasn’t it? Where would the world be if people hadn’t been created with the longing to lean into life, to push the boundaries inch by inch, to do things that were hard simply because they were hard?
As a girl, in Sunday school, Mary Dell had been taught that work, the absolute necessity to scratch out a living, was part of the curse of original sin, and she believed it. But wasn’t it also a kind of salvation? No one had told her so, but Mary Dell thought it must be true.
As a true daughter of Texas and a Tudmore to boot, Mary Dell knew in her bones that her town, her state, her world, the harsh, hot, dry, and vast land she sprang from, stark and starkly beautiful, could never have been peopled or planted without the stubborn ambition of her ancestors, those women of strong conviction from whom she had inherited her desire to leave an imprint on the world, some mark, however small, even if she had to patch it together from imagination and scraps of cloth.
To dream was not wrong. And ambition was no sin.
But to be so desperate to gain a toehold in the trophy case of a mother’s heart, to be hobbled by childish envies, desiring prizes awarded only for solo performance, so unwilling to share the spotlight and credit that it thwarted the ambitions you were born, equipped, and uniquely placed to fulfill, was wrong. And proud. And pride, they’d told her in Sunday school, wasn’t just wrong; it was a sin. She believed that too.
Mary Dell turned around. Pearl stared at her with arched eyebrows and an expression that dared Mary Dell to refute the facts as she’d laid them out.
“I heard you,” Mary Dell said.
“And?”
“And,” Mary Dell said in an exasperated voice, “although Lydia Dale is due to deliver any second, and I’m about five weeks behind her, and neither of us will be doing anything besides breast-feeding and changing diapers anytime soon, the next time I start a new quilt, I’ll ask her to help me pick out the fabric.”
Pearl smiled and sat back down at her sewing machine.
“How is Lydia Dale anyway?” Sweetums asked. “I haven’t seen her in an age.”
“Better now that the divorce is final.”
Mary Dell squatted down to pick up some stray pins off the carpet and a pair of scissors she’d accidentally knocked off the counter, no easy feat in her swollen condition.
“Sometimes I wish Jack Benny would just leave town and never come back,” she said, grunting as she got to the floor. “That man is so low you can’t put a rug under him.”
“His momma is just as bad,” Pauline said, squinting as she tried to poke a piece of thread through the needle of her machine. “Marlena’s been going around town dropping hints that your sister’s baby isn’t a Benton, that Lydia Dale had been stepping out on Jack Benny and that’s the reason for the divorce.”
“What!” Mary Dell’s face flushed red. “Who’s she been saying that to? That’s a lie! Jack Benny was the one who was cheating, and Marlena knows it! How could she say something so terrible about her own grandchild?”
Looking furious enough to disembowel Marlena with the scissors she held clenched in her fist, Mary Dell tried to push herself up from the carpet, but was impeded by her big belly. Pearl jumped up from her sewing machine to help.
“Pauline,” she scolded, “stop your gossiping. Nobody in town is going to believe that story. Everybody knows what Jack Benny is. Marlena is just mean and bitter. Everybody knows that too. Best thing to do is ignore her.”
“But that’s the problem!” Mary Dell exclaimed. “Everybody does ignore Marlena. It’s about time somebody stood up to her!”
Pearl reached out her hand. Mary Dell grabbed it and tried to get to her feet, unsuccessfully.
“She’s not worth it. You know what they say, ‘Lie down with a dog, and you’ll get up with a flea.’ And Marlena Benton is definitely a dog. Of the female variety. If you take my meaning.”
Pearl smiled momentarily, pleased with her little joke, and then frowned again as she looked down at Mary Dell, who was still struggling to get up.
“Here, honey. Let’s try this.”
Pearl grabbed both of Mary Dell’s hands, braced her feet against the floor, counted off one-two-three, and pulled as hard as she could.
Mary Dell got to her feet with a grunt but immediately doubled over, groaning in pain. Sweetums and Pauline leapt up and scurried to her side.
“Oh, honey! Oh, my!”
“Does it hurt?”
“Is it time? Is it the baby?”
“No!” Mary Dell protested, gripping her stomach. “It can’t be. It’s too soon!”
But another groan, another wave of pain, and a flush of fluid proved her wrong.
Pearl, herself a mother of five, stroked Mary Dell’s back, spoke in a calm and even voice, assured her that it wasn’t so very early, asked her if she’d packed a hospital bag, then looked up and started issuing orders.
“Here, honey. Come sit down in this chair for a minute while I go pack your toothbrush and robe. Sweetums, take my keys out of my purse and pull my car up to the door. Pauline, get on the phone. Call the doctor, Miss Silky and Miss Velvet, Taffy and Dutch, and go find Donny. Tell him the baby is coming.”