The ring was so shiny it was meat-like on my finger. Getting married at the registry office with two friends as witnesses was so po-mo I couldn’t stand it. Enshrined in culture but, in 1995, also spectacularly other. We surged up Willis Street afterwards and went to the pub. I loved it. I didn’t mention it to anyone in the family. Mary-France wasn’t a fan of the institution of marriage, Dad was long gone of course, and Lisa would be too stoned to take it in. Anyway, it wasn’t like we getting married married.
I did find though—and it had all happened so fast that I hadn’t anticipated it—that I became a spouse. And because the spouses of students weren’t allowed to work under the terms of their F2 visas, and because it was impossible for two people to survive on a scholarship in New York City, the spouses got jobs under the table. The spice. It was expected. What were these regulations for if not to provide cheap labour for the hardworking taxpayers? From another spouse I inherited a series of gigs cleaning apartments in brownstones on the Upper East Side. I tooled over from Hoboken, and all day I swept parquet floors and dusted surfaces while someone sat in another room listening to the cabaret songs they all seemed to like so much in this part of town. ‘It’s De-Lovely’. I did the toilets and the sinks. Wiped up piss and slime and mould. ‘You Go To My Head’. Crumbs and dust and ash. I had no doubt that Something Would Turn Up.
Sure enough, I got a lead from another spouse that you could get piecework from alterations businesses in the Garment District. I could have the old sewing machine the spouse was giving away because she was going home anyway, as they all did, in the end, urgently, like peristalsis. There wouldn’t be any more money in it than cleaning, but it was cleaner.
•
I took the PATH across to Times Square and walked into the Garment District, found a narrow building on 37th Street squeezed between two bigger blocks. Up three flights, and in the sepia-coloured corridor was a metal door with a framed sign done in ornate red cursive: Rip Burn Snag Clothing Alterations and Repairs. Underneath, in smaller letters, the way a subtitle defines an essay: Specialists in French Re-Weaving and Invisible Mending. There was a piece of paper taped to the door. Help Wanted. I knocked and the door was unlocked noisily from within. As I stepped inside, a woman with a streak of nicotine going up through her greying hair was already walking away from the door, calling over her shoulder, ‘Close the door!’ I closed it.
The tiny workroom was a riot of clothes, spools, bolts of material, and a table so littered with offcuts it was like Jackson Pollock had run his lawnmower over it. Another woman, older, plump, with jowls and short legs tipping her off the edge of her chair, whirred away at a machine by the window. She looked as if she never left her station. The first woman, with the nicotine-stained hair (and you could see how she got it, because she had a fag stuck to her lip), had one of those two-tone New York accents—abrupt and friendly. She was small and wiry. She asked me my name, what experience I had. When I told her I could do embroidery she laughed.
‘Embroidery! Are you kidding? Who sent you?’
I reeled off the name of the spouse.
‘Jesus Christ! Well, whadda we gonna do here? We’re snowed under—yeah, just like the outside. It’s snowing out there, it’s snowing in here.’ She called to the woman by the window. ‘Whadda we gonna do, Nance?’
Nance called back without looking up from her machine. ‘What choice is there? We got no choice. We’re snowed under.’
Snow seemed to be the way they gauged business.
‘You’re right,’ said the nicotine woman. ‘No choice.’ She looked about the room once more, and gave a sigh that at one or two points seemed endless. ‘Okay, I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll try you out. We’ll try you out on this, this, this’—and she yanked a few bits of clothing from a pile like a magician doing the tablecloth trick. The pile stayed put. ‘Simple stuff. Hems, mostly hems. They’re all marked, see?’ She showed me the grainy chalk lines.
Nance called over from the window, ‘Don’t give her that jacket, Rose. Snag on the pocket.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said nicotine woman, and snatched the jacket from the bundle. ‘I’m Rose.’
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Under the table?’ asked Rose. I nodded. She held a few spools up to the light to match with the fabrics. ‘Next Thursday. See you next Thursday. Okay?’
I tried to give her my phone number. Rose waved her hand. ‘Yeah, okay, gimme your number. You can gimme a fake one. If you’re gonna steal them you’re gonna steal them, nothing I can do about it.’ She scribbled down the number madly, saying at the same time, ‘You look trustworthy to me. Been in this business long enough to know an honest face. Been looking at honest faces and dishonest faces since I was knee-high.’ Rose gathered in my mending from the table like a harvest and bundled it into a plastic bag. ‘My mother was a mender, my grandmother was a mender. I know honest, I know dishonest. Dishonest is the ones getting their clothes mended—sometimes, often enough. Got things to hide.’ Rose slid the carry bag across to me. ‘Haven’t got things to hide, have you?’
Nance gave an admonishing click of the tongue—‘Rose!’
I shrugged helplessly.
‘No, you see,’ said Rose to Nance. ‘I know an honest face. You hang around here long enough you’ll see some faces, you’ll see some real doozies, won’t you, Nance?’
‘Say that again,’ said Nance.
‘Okay,’ said Rose, opening the door, ‘see you Wednesday.’
Hadn’t she said Thursday?
‘Did I? Whenever—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Doomsday. These are the Whenevers. They know I do them for cheaper, whenever I got a minute.’ She poked a finger at my bundle. ‘The Next-Weeks. Now those’—she crooked her thumb back into the room, to a long rack of clothes—‘those are the Two-Days and those’—pointing to a smaller rack against the opposite wall—‘are the Same-Days. Never get ’em mixed up, and never—never—put one in front of another within their own category. Wouldn’t believe the trouble you can get into, doing someone a favour.’ Rose laughed her tinselly cigarette laugh and unlocked the door. On the landing, I heard the door lock from the inside.
I carried the bundle of clothes home to mend them under the table, like the girl in ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the girl crouched under the table in her grandfather’s hairdressing salon, the girl who goes on to have the life. I found that the jacket Nance had spied from across the room had been scooped into the pile after all. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I thought of taking it back to the workshop, making a special trip on the PATH so the jacket wouldn’t become overdue, which would mean other garments would be put in front of it. Rose had been so emphatic that should never happen. But when I looked at it, I saw that I could mend it easily. So while the snow fell outside, I pulled a few threads from the inside hem and used them to reattach the ripped pocket.
On the Thursday before Christmas I carried my bundle through the snow to Rip Burn Snag. Rose let me in—‘How ya doing?’ She tipped the garments onto the cutting table and ferreted through them, going, ‘Mm, mm,’ to each one. When she came to the jacket she stopped and screwed up her face. ‘You did this?’
I was going to be fired. I should have just left it. Back to cleaning the stinking bathrooms of the stinking rich.
But Rose was looking at me. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What?’
Rose snapped her fingers, which were tea-coloured from all the ciggies. ‘Nance, we have someone who can actually sew!’
I did that palms-upward thing that I must have learned in America.
Rose put out her hand and we shook. Something swelled up inside me, not connected with my hands. Then Rose brought out a pair of beautifully made suit pants with a puncture in the back of the leg that a nail might have made, and a drag in the material streaming away from the hole like a comet’s tail. ‘Sit down, honey’—now it was honey—‘I’m gonna show you something. I’m gonna show you how to mend this, ’cause I know you can pick it up fast. See this hole here? We’re gonna mend this.’ Rose was investigating the insides of the trousers. ‘God knows how it got here. I mean here. I don’t mind betting this swanky financier or whoever from over on Wall Street who came in this morning, don’t mind betting he’s in trouble. Don’t know how he made this hole in this fine suit of clothes, but it sure looks fishy to me.’ Nance laughed from the window. ‘I mean,’ continued Rose, ‘what’s he doing in the boxroom in his good pants, huh?’ She looked up over her glasses. ‘Ripping and burning and snagging ’em.’ I laughed too. Rose smiled—‘Uh? Uh?’—and tossed the pants onto the table. She angled a strong lamp onto them. ‘You need good light for this. Now this, this is not worth re-weaving. Re-weaving’ll take all afternoon, cost an arm and a leg. Not worth it, not where that hole is, not half hidden down near the ass. And not worth you learning how to do it either, unless you wanna spend a lifetime learnin’. Do ya? I didn’t think so. We’ll do Plan B.’
‘Plan B?’
‘Plan B is piece-weaving. Take an incy little bit of material from the hem and sew it in the hole. Quicker than re-weaving, but still takes a long time. You got anywhere you need to go to?’ Rose perched magnifying-glass plates across her nose, big rectangles like blowtorch glasses. ‘Now watch carefully. I’m gonna show you how to make time go backwards. But be warned’—she looked up between the magnifying plates and her two-tone, Bakelite-looking hair—‘you’re gonna help that man on Wall Street cheat on his wife.’ Rose waited for my surprised expression, then dissolved into laughter and coughing. ‘His wife is never gonna know he’s been in that boxroom once we finished with this. So you’re gonna be complicit. You gotta know that.’
I raised my shoulders. ‘Okay.’
‘Okay,’ said Rose. ‘As long as we’re straight on that one. Now.’
That afternoon I had my first lesson in piece-weaving. We took a swatch from a hidden part of a garment (I was in the Garment District, and I was saying ‘garment’ now. There needed to be a word for clothes without people in them) and wove it into the hole. It was like a skin graft, it was the way a bird makes a nest, the way rescuers hold a net to catch a person jumping from a building. I could go on till the cows come home with the metaphors. As the afternoon closed in, and even the glare of the snow subsided, Nance worked away in her pool of light, and I watched Rose fill in the hole where the nail had been. And then another and another.
Over the next two years in New York, I learned about fabric, how a tear will follow the warp or weft of the fabric, or both. Up and down, sideways. It’ll run along the weave like a mouse along a rafter. I learned how to fill in a bigger hole—more of a rip—with new threads carefully matched. I learned not to call it invisible mending, although it was almost invisible and the clients who came and went from the door, which had to be locked and unlocked each time, always wanted invisible. Rose said, ‘I’ll show you invisible’—her fine sift of rewoven threads. ‘But you know what? Almost invisible is usually enough.’
If you went out with Rose at lunchtime, it was like walking along with Mayor Giuliani. Hi Rose, Hiya Rose, all along the street. Everyone knew her. Back in the workshop, Rose had a churning voice and liked to exchange flirtatious jokes with the men. I listened to the talk, to the clients, most of them men, some of them nervous.
One day, after a jumpy man from uptown had left with his almost-invisibly mended jacket, I asked Rose, ‘Is almost invisible really enough?’
‘Why do you ask that, honey?’
‘Well, what say the wife—or the husband, for that matter—looks at the mend carefully? What say they put on their reading glasses and hold it up under a light?’
‘If that’s the case, the marriage is already doomed.’
I nodded sagely, thinking about my own shiny new marriage, my thoroughly nice husband finishing his dissertation on Settler Literary Ephemera.
As the first winter got colder, I snipped and wove. Over the quiet Chinese New Year (the New Year Giuliani banned fireworks), I threaded and trimmed. On into spring. I mended as the year turned into summer. I wove threads through dog days, my fingers sweating next to wool. Through opera in the park. I mended on into autumn. The frayed rents in jackets and skirts disappeared in my hands. And all the way around again, retniW, nmutuA, remmuS, gnirpS—that’s how I thought of it, the seasons topsy-turvy.
That’s how I got into this business; I fell into it by accident, if you can fall up the stairs of Rip Burn Snag. Well, when your world’s been turned upside down you can. That was how invisible mending—which wasn’t really invisible, was Plan B—began.
But as time went on, Art’s dissertation, always a volatile thing, morphed into something that couldn’t be finished in New York, could only be finished, in fact, at the Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, The World, The Universe. And so we came home.
One last observation. Well, not really last, but on the subject of dropping out and getting married, I promise it will be. Looking back, it seemed slightly unfair that there had been only two ways left to go ape-shit. Dropping out for good, and getting married for good.
How good meant forever.
•
The first thing I noticed, back in New Zealand, was that I earned a living, albeit a modest one. I hadn’t set out to do this. I was going to go back to varsity as soon as I’d sorted it out. But I knew a woman who knew a woman who asked if I’d do some alterations for her. She’d been on a dramatic diet and needed everything taken in. Then someone else asked me to do some mending, then more alterations, jeans to take up, hems to let down, and next thing I was buying myself a proper sewing machine and a good light. Well, I needed them anyway, because I liked doing the odd bit of sewing. I’ve never bought a ready-made curtain, for instance. But I think if Mabel (who I’d recently met because Mabel knew everybody) hadn’t rung me to say, You do know it’s the last day to put an ad in the 1997 Yellow Pages, don’t you? it would have all petered out. None of this would’ve happened. None of this. But I did, I phoned in an ad—Megan Sligo Mending and Alterations. I know! The odd client came. I did the work and they paid me. It was a blast, it really was. Such a straightforward transaction, simple but profound. I was in business! In the English department business had been a dirty word. Thinking was enough. The thing about thinking was, you couldn’t really argue with it. Well, you could, but nothing changed. You couldn’t squeeze it, or weigh it, or buy it or sell it. Well, maybe you could, but not easily. It was slippery. A garment (I continued to use that ugly word), on the other hand, came through the door and was an exquisite centrepiece of doing. I took the garment, the client, the light, my hands, I argued with it, and I won.
Within a few months I was earning more than Art—but I have to say, that wasn’t hard—and I never had to leave the house. I didn’t have to slave over a hot computer, listen to a bar-room brawl, or read Writing the New Land: Pakeha and Their Letters 1835–1885. I worked. And thought. I thought. But it was different. I liked my quiet snow of thinking, and underneath it, the grassy kerfuffle of thread, fabric, needles, scissors. After mending a garment I often couldn’t remember my fingers ever coming in contact with it. The dress or jacket would hang on the long clothes rack, mended as if by a miraculous cure. Of trousers I would think, Take up your bed and walk, a line that popped up from a brief childhood phase of Mass-going. These tasks seemed to be done by another self comprised only of bones and nerves and muscles, and muscle memory.