There was a knock on the door that I knew was Ellen—five soft knocks, the way she always does. When I opened the door, though, it was everybody.
“Oh!” I said. “You’re all here,” which sounded as if I didn’t want them all to be there, as if they weren’t welcome. So then I said, “Ellen, this is Robin. Robin, this is—”
“Tom,” Ellen interrupted. “We’ve met. Many times.”
“Oh, that’s right. Of course. And do you know all the kids?”
“Elise, Mike, Maddy, and Ray,” she said. The expert.
“Oh. Wow,” I said. “That’s impressive.”
“Not very.” she said. “Are you going to let us in?”
Everyone laughed, as though this were funny.
“Come in,” I said, backing up to give them room.
Ellen was carrying a big plastic bag stuffed with things. At first I thought she had brought a lot of food. “What’s in there?” I said, preparing to be insulted that she hadn’t had faith in my ability to provide dinner.
“The quilt,” she said. “Remember?”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. The quilt.”
“Let’s see!” Robin said.
Ellen opened the bag and pulled out a huge thing with blue and yellow squares all over it. It had grown since I first saw it.
“Oooh!” Robin said, picking up the cloth. “It’s gorgeous!”
The kids gathered around and took a look. Elise tentatively traced a seam with one finger.
“It’s not done yet,” Ellen said. “I still have to put the borders on and, you know, quilt it and everything. But it’s gone faster than I thought it would, that’s for sure.”
I said, “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“I’m just learning,” Ellen said to Robin. “I’m taking a class.”
“Still,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s—that’s a lot of… of work.”
Robin and Ellen laughed, as if I were one of the kids saying something incredibly innocent.
Then they started talking about quilts, fabric, different classes you could take. What was this? They hardly knew each other. How did they have so much to say?
I went into the kitchen. I had actually made dinner. I didn’t choose a very complex menu—spaghetti with sauce from a jar, premade salad that came in a bag, bottled dressing, and heat-up garlic bread. Unfortunately, the fact that they had arrived all at once had thrown off my timing. Now I got flustered trying to get everything ready at the same time.
I had never had this many people in my place at one time. My table was too small. Robin went home and got a beach towel and put it on the floor for the kids to sit on. I had a new rug, which had scared them all into taking their shoes off. “It’s just a rug,” I kept telling them. “Whatever gets on it, it’s just a rug.”
I had rented a movie, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, that I slid into my new DVD player for the kids. They had already seen it, of course, but that didn’t seem to matter. As soon as Robin handed them their paper plates and pressed PLAY, they sat there silently chewing their pizza and staring at the tube. I felt guilty that they were so easily absorbed, as if I had drugged them to get them out of the way.
I managed to overcook the spaghetti until it was a gluey mass, but Ellen and Robin ate it anyway.
The two of them had hit it off immediately, almost too well, as I was completely out of the conversation.
“So is this your first quilt?” Robin wanted to know.
“I made one in college,” Ellen said. “And I loved it. I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. Then I never made one again, until now.”
“If you liked it so much, why did you stop?”
“Stupid, I know,” Ellen said. “At the time, I was trying to get a high-enough GPA to get into law school. I thought if I made quilts it would entirely take me over, and I would be a failure. So I stopped.”
“That’s too bad. But you did get into law school,” Robin said. “Right?”
“Yes,” Ellen said. “And I hated it. I still hate law. Anyway, there’s a flying geese class next month that I’m going to take. I can’t wait.”
“Aren’t triangles hard to work with?”
They went on and on like this. You’d think we’d spend some time on the most recent developments in the unfolding horror story, but maybe because the kids were there, everyone decided to stay off that. Or maybe we all needed to be off that topic for now. The sadness and tension and worry were still there, sitting right at the table with us, but for the moment, the two women were looking in another direction, to something that attracted them and absorbed them, made them happy. Robin went home a couple of times to get books to show Ellen. Quilt books. She had a whole library of quilt books, it turned out. She used to make quilts, too, before she had kids, but since then she hadn’t had time. Who knew?
They were talking so much, and I had so little to contribute, that I finally Joined the kids on the towel. How could I mind? I hadn’t seen my sister so enthusiastic about anything in a long time. And the movie was pretty good. But Ray fell asleep on the towel, and Maddy was curled up on my bed with a distant look in her eye. I could have closed my eyes and drifted off myself, but Robin stood up and said it was time for them to go.
“Oh,” I groaned, as if I were one of the kids. “Now?” Immediately, I felt sadness and loneliness pinching at my chest.
Ellen and Robin looked at me.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” they said together quickly, as if over the past couple of hours they had become a unit.
I knew what they meant. I never used to want people around, and now I did. I was different, and they noticed. After years of being alone and stuck, something had finally shifted inside me. Did you ever see one of those time-lapse movies about changes in landmasses? Subtle, imperceptible shifts in the earth push two plates together. Rain and wind wear away rocks, softening the shape of coasts and mountain ranges. Occasional strong earthquakes create surfaces that weren’t there before. At the end of a few thousand centuries, you wouldn’t recognize the place. I was like that. For years, I had seemed inert and immutable, but underneath, there had been the minute shifts going on. I’d had the occasional momentous event that shook my whole structure. Taken together, these experiences had been gradually edging me toward this moment in which I was finally different. I had changed, and change was good. Change was Good.
One thing about big transformations is that when they happened, it is hard to remember how different things were and what they were like before.