Elise and Mike were finishing another music lesson outside. I had given them each three notes to play. My harmonica was around my neck in a holder, and my guitar was in my lap. I had demonstrated each of their parts several times. They had tried to do what I did, but so far made mistakes each time. Progress was slow. Now Elise was hunched over the guitar. I couldn’t see her face, but I would have been willing to bet that her tongue was sticking out, a habit of hers when she was working hard. Mike had his eyes squeezed with the effort of trying to remember the three holes I had told him to blow through in sequence. I was holding my breath.
Then they both played the correct notes in the correct sequence! “You did it!” I said.
Elise jumped, startled out of her concentrated trance.
Mike smiled.
“Can you do it again?”
They both took deep breaths and did it one more time.
“Brilliant!” I said. “Do you want to try it once more, or something else?”
“Something else,” they said together.
“OK,” I said, “let’s try three more notes.”
Behind them, I could see my sister’s car pulling up. What was she doing here? This almost never happened.
As my sister got out of her car, then locked it and walked toward us, I played three notes on the guitar and then on the harmonica.
When she saw me, saw what I was doing, her mouth dropped open. She didn’t call out to me but approached very quietly.
“OK, guys,” I said. “We have a visitor. This is my sister, Ellen.”
The kids turned around.
“Ellen, this is Elise on guitar and Mike on harmonica.”
“It’s nice to meet you both,” she said.
“Nice to meet you,” they muttered. They looked at each other and then at the ground, me, their door.
“Do you guys want to take a break now, while I talk to Ellen?”
They didn’t answer but got up and silently went into their house. It surprised me how dramatically their behavior changed with the addition of just one person.
“What was—are you giving them lessons?” Ellen wanted to know when they were gone.
“Well, yeah.” The way she looked at me made me embarrassed about it, as if I had done something weird like eat a flower off the bushes or something.
“That’s great,” she said, but she was still looking at me funny. “Yeah,” I said. “So what are you doing here?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, remembering. “I bought this sewing machine on eBay, and I wanted you to help me get it home and carry it into my apartment.”
“A sewing machine? Since when do you sew?”
“Well, it’s been quite a few years, but you know awhile back when we were talking?”
“You mean—”
“I was saying that, starting now, you should just start being the person you want to be. So I was thinking about it, and I wondered if there was anything that I wanted to do that I hadn’t been doing.”
“Back in college, I made a quilt. A small one, a really simple one. And it was kind of lousy. It had lumps, and the things that were supposed to be straight were crooked. Nothing lined up or came out anywhere near the right shape, but I’ve always wanted to make another one. Who knows why. I have all these books about quilts and quilt calendars and quilt note cards, and I’m always looking at quilts in stores. So I mean, why always want to do something like that? Why not just do it? What could be stopping me?”
“Uh… The fact that you don’t have a sewing machine?”
“Exactly, So I went on eBay, and I typed in the kind of sewing machine I was looking for—just a really simple one—and I restricted my search to the San Diego area. And guess what! I found one! And it’s in a table! It’s really old! And so I bid, and I won! It’s just the cutest thing! It looks brand-new, and it was made in 1949! All I have to do is get it home. So could you help me with that?”
“Sure,” I said. It was the least I could do. “When do you want to do that?”
“Now.”
“OK, sure,” I said. “I just have to finish the lesson with these guys first. Because we were right in the middle of—”
“Fine, yeah. Go ahead. I’ll just watch.”
I didn’t know how to tell her that this wouldn’t work. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but the kids wouldn’t play in front of her. I was shocked to realize that they felt comfortable with me, while they would be shy and silent around my sister. “No, you know, I think it would be better if you went inside my apartment and just kind of, like, waited, because they don’t know you and—”
“Oh! I’m sorry. God, what am I thinking? They don’t know me from a hole in the wall. I wouldn’t want them to feel uncomfortable! I’m a stranger, and they don’t—”
“Nothing personal, it’s just—”
“Got it!”
Ellen went inside my apartment, and I called the kids, “You guys! Lets finish our lesson, OK?”
Mike came to the door and looked both ways as if he were about to cross the street.
“Ellen’s going to wait for me inside my apartment. You ready? Where’s Elise?”
“Right here,” she said, coming through the kitchen. “Are we going to do more?”
“Yeah, where’s your guitar?”
“I’ll go get it!”
Mike sat down again in his seat and took his harmonica out of his pocket. A few seconds later, Elise joined him.
“Now,” I said, “where were we? OK, Mike, listen to this.”
We finished our lesson. It took only fifteen more minutes. Elise’s hands were still pretty tender, and Mike’s attention span was short. But they were making progress, which I found almost as amazing as the fact that they kept coming back for more.
“OK, you guys are great!” I said, “Now, practice whenever you can, and we’ll have another lesson in a couple of days.”
“Thank you, Good,” they said together.
As soon as they were inside their own house, I could hear them calling, “Mom! Listen to this!”
“Ellen,” I said. “We’re done out here.”
“Tom!” she said. “Your place!”
“Oh, yeah, I got some new—”
“It looks so much better! I love the kitchen table. And you have a working color TV! You’ve come a long way! Do you have cable?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The works. So where’s the sewing machine?”
“It’s in Bonsall,” she said quickly, not making eye contact. “I think it will fit in your car if we put the backseat down.”
“Bonsall! That’s, that’s, like, well, it’s far!” I thought a minute. Dinners Ellen had made me came to mind, time she had spent with me when I was at my worst. I always begged Ellen to ask me to help her do something. I said, “But I’m not doing anything, so what the heck.”
She smiled.
It was a good thing to see my sister smile. About something I’d said. It didn’t happen all that often. I opened the trunk. “OK. Let me see if I have any junk back here.” I took out a denim jacket and some trash. We lowered the backseat. I had never been to Bonsall. I had to dig out a map, which I handed to Ellen.
Ellen was giving me directions as we drove. “OK, get in the right lane. Now turn right. She said to look for a bridge over a—there it is—now turn right. OK, now its, oh, these condos on the right. This driveway. Great. It’s the fifth garage door. There’s a parking spot!”
She opened the door before the car stopped moving. She said, Come on.
I followed her to the front door. She rang the bell.
A woman in her sixties opened the door. She had curly gray hair and wore a jogging suit. “Is this my sewing machine girl?” she said.
“Yes. I’m Ellen. This is my brother, Tom. He has a bigger car than I do, so he drove me.”
“I’m Kathy. Nice to meet you both. Come in.” We followed her into the condo, which was neat enough for a military inspection and contained quite a few old black sewing machines. There were needlepoint pillows here and there with sewing machines, needles and thread, and pincushion designs on them.
“Here’s your baby!” Kathy said.
This ancient black sewing machine was perched on top of a wooden cabinet with three righthand drawers. It reminded me of an old black-and-white textbook photo about the industrial revolution. The cabinet looted like a desk, except for the sewing machine. “Here’s how she folds up,” Kathy said. Gently, she tipped the sewing machine forward into the top of the cabinet. A piece of wood covered the opening. “Pretty neat, huh?”
“Wow,” Ellen said. “Wow! I’ve always wanted one of these!”
This was the first I’d heard of it.
Her hands were pressed to her cheeks and she was shaking her head as though she had just won a million dollars.
“Let me show you some other ones, just for fun. Did you see the one that I listed yesterday?”
“The 401A?”
“Yeah. She’s a beauty. Want to take a look?”
“Of course!” Ellen said.
This could be a while. I looked for a place to sit down without messing anything up. Not finding one, I stood in the middle of the room. I ran my hand over the top of the sewing machine cabinet, as if I were interested in the finish. I tried to picture my sister sitting there, sewing something. The things you don’t know about people!
She had to look at twelve sewing machines that were stationed all over the woman’s house.
“Where do you find them all?” Ellen was asking in awe.
“You have to get up early every Saturday morning and get out to those garage sales! You have to hit those swap meets without fail! But it’s a labor of love, let me tell you!”
“How many sewing machines do you think you’ve sold on eBay?” Ellen wanted to know.
The inside of my head was screaming, “Who cares’?” On the other hand, I hadn’t seen Ellen this happy since—well, I couldn’t remember when.
“About a hundred,” the woman calculated, “maybe more.”
After hearing more information about old sewing machines than I ever imagined existed, my sister and I each took one end of the table, turned it on its side, and loaded it into my car.
Kathy was standing there with a screwdriver. “Sure you don’t want me to take those legs off?”
“Not necessary,” I said. “But thank you.”
On the way home, my sister kept looking fondly back at her sewing machine.
“What’s up with you?” I wanted to know. “Since when did you get so nuts about sewing and sewing machines?”
“It’s just something that I always wanted to do. I mean, I’ve done a little bit of it. In junior high, we had to take home ec. I made this hideous skirt. But quilts are different. I just like everything about them. The way they feel, the way they look. You know how many different patterns you can make with triangles?”
“No idea whatsoever. So why didn’t you get a new sewing machine. Surely, the ones they make these days would be better than that old—”
She gasped. “You mean you don’t just love that sweet little beauty? You don’t just adore the way it looks? You’ll just have to wait to see the way it sews.”
“Honestly, I never—”
“Triangles are really my favorite thing. It’s so amazing! You wouldn’t believe how much you can do with triangles. Flower baskets and pinwheels and Ohio stars.”
She’d lost me. It didn’t matter, though, because she didn’t really care what I had to say on the topic of triangles. She was off in her own little quilt world, and she was so happy there that she didn’t notice she was all alone.
At her place, she’d cleared a space for the sewing machine table. She set it up and plugged it in. “I’m so happy!” she squealed and threw her arms around me.
I drove home thinking about my sisters newfound joy. If everybody had something that made them that happy life would be better all around. Wouldn’t it?
I kept thinking about happiness, where people find it, and how little it has to do with the things you expect it to.
Jeanette was that way about her “projects.” Every year, she would bring me hideous things she’d made as Christmas decorations. I had to display these in plain sight in my house because she would be sure to stop by to check if I was using the thing. Once she made me a Christmas tree entirely out of hard candies. She stopped by three days later on the pretext that she had gotten some of my mail in her box. But I knew she was checking to see what I’d done with the Christmas tree. Fortunately, I hadn’t gotten around to throwing it in the trash. I saw her little gray blue eyes darting around my apartment looking for the thing until she spotted it on my kitchen table. She showed me the directions she’d followed from some magazine. “Easy Christmas Tree Table-Topper!” was what the article was called.
She explained that you had to start with a Styrofoam cone. I wondered where in the hell you would get one of those, but I didn’t ask her, as I was afraid she might actually tell me. It would take a long time. She would give directions and everything, blanking out on street names. She showed me the supply list and the steps numbered one through sixteen. When she paused, I figured she must be done, so I said, “Well, you certainly did a lovely job.” I thought I sounded completely insincere, as if I was just trying to get rid of her, which I was. But somehow this inane comment made her look as happy as she could be. Now that I thought about it, though, I wished I had something like that. I wished I could affix something to a piece of Styrofoam and be satisfied and pleased with myself for days. I really did.