BUMBLEBUNCHING
That annoying tangled loop of stitching on the
bobbin side of the fabric that is a result of
improper tension applied to the sewing machine.
I spin my button necklace, the blue one, my mother’s favorite color.
There are thirty buttons in varying shades of blue on this simple necklace. Same number of days as this month of April. I know every button on it. I can shut my eyes and see them, just as clearly as I can picture my mom the last time I saw her healthy, waving goodbye to me from the cabin on the water.
I shut my eyes.
Midnight blue, I think.
I open my eyes and smile.
The seventeenth button going clockwise from the clasp is midnight blue, the color of Lake Michigan at dawn.
Counting these buttons is the only way I can keep track of the days anymore. The nightmare started April 1st. I used to believe that if she could just make it to the end of the necklace, I could put on a new one and never have to count the buttons again.
Now, I know, it’s just a matter of time.
I take a deep breath to steel myself and begin to open my car door. I stop. I’m not ready yet. I scan the parking lot, ensuring no one is around, and reach into my bag and retrieve an airline-sized bottle of vodka. I pour it into my coffee.
Coffee is a generous noun. There is no Starbucks for hundreds of miles. Not even a Dunkin’ Donuts. I am drinking something resembling coffee from a gas station whose name itself warns you not to purchase anything to consume.
The Guzzle-N-Go.
I put the lid back on and give the Styrofoam cup a swish.
It actually tastes better.
I’m not a big drinker. I just don’t know how to get through another day here without blurring the edges just a bit.
I put on my mask, then pull it back down and take another sip.
I lock my car and walk through the parking lot to the little courtyard outside the long-term care facility. The courtyard is lined with tulips, and little fountains featuring happy cherubs burbling. It’s all a lie, a make-believe world to make me believe that the nightmare happening isn’t real.
I walk up to the window and check my cell.
Ten a.m. sharp.
I sip my coffee and wait, until she appears in the window. I pull down my mask.
“Hi, Mom!”
I wave.
The sun glints through the window, and in the light, my mother looks as small and fragile as the Hummel figurines she used to buy at yard sales for a quarter and line up on the shelves in her sewing room.
There is a bruise on her forehead. A scrape on her cheek. A sling still on her arm.
And yet it’s the invisible that’s killing her.
I try to focus on her eyes in the light. The gold.
I used to joke to my mom that there must be a pot of riches inside her head, like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
“Ain’t nothin’ in there but memories,” she’d say. “And they ain’t worth much punk, save for the ones a’you.”
My mother waves with her good arm. She is wearing one of the loose blouses I made for her. It’s a simple top for a simple woman who loved to make clothes for anyone but herself and who rarely wore much color. But the light blue top has one ostentatious feature: a heart made of vintage moonglow glass buttons from the 1950s, all in shades of blue. My mom had a fancy dress made with these buttons that she kept in her closet and never wore.
Another mystery of my mother.
These were supposed to be my mother’s “get-well” tops. She was only supposed to be here for two weeks, max. Miss Mabel tripped getting out of her sewing chair, fell right onto her sewing table and broke her shoulder. Surgery went fine. She was sent here for rehab.
Now it will be her graveyard. Covid came as quietly and furiously as that fire so long ago that took my family’s lives, and now it rages through her body.
My mother is on oxygen. She doesn’t want to eat.
I can still remember the call from the home’s administrator. “Your sweet momma tested positive for Covid.”
“How are you feeling, Mom?” I yell through the window.
She gives a weak thumbs-up.
“Keep fighting!”
She nods if you can even call it that. Her head slumps as she grows sleepy in the sun.
Why do the healthy tell the dying to keep fighting? For them, or for us? Are we more scared than they are? I actually feel selfish saying this to her any longer.
I look at my mother through the window.
Mysterious Miss Mabel.
Today, even near death, my mother looks decades younger than the other residents I’ve seen in the windows. Her skin is deeply creased but still taut. The skin on her arms still has elasticity; it is not the onion paper covering the skeletons like so many others. Her eyes are still bright. Her hair full.
Her appearance doesn’t seem to match her age. She used to seem like such an old woman. Here, she seems like such a young one.
A few folks down here used to tell me my mom was still a baby when she arrived in Nevermore with one.
“A baby with a baby,” Mrs. Dimmons, my favorite teacher, told me in grade school. I’d often sit alone at recess, ostracized by my schoolmates, and my fourth-grade teacher would join me, put her arm around me and tell me to never stop being myself.
“Being unique is all we’ve got in this world.” She’d nod at the kids in their cliques jumping rope, playing dodgeball or telling secrets. “And we try our whole lives to fit in and be just like everyone else. But what do we have when we do that, Sutton?”
I’d look at her and shrug.
“Nothing,” she’d say. “Because you’ll lose what makes you you.”
And then she’d give me a little hug, and I would melt at the affection from an adult, but it would give me the strength to finish the day.
No one thought much about that, though, down here. Babies had babies in the Ozarks. Some grandmas were in their thirties. That’s why I used to snoop. Sneak into her purse while she was sewing and look at her driver’s license, or try to find her birth certificate, anything. But a puzzle makes no sense when you don’t have a picture to follow. I figured my mom was like an optical illusion, like the one from the game book I bought her one year for Christmas. It was filled with little riddles and fun picture puzzles, and we played them constantly. “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law” was a drawing of a woman that looked entirely different depending on how someone viewed it. When my mom would hold up the photo to me, I would always see a young woman with black hair and a long eyelash, bedecked in a white feathered cap and black shawl, looking over her right shoulder. When I held up the photo for my mom, she always saw an old woman, wrinkled and pale, looking off to the left.
This not only described how my mother and I viewed life but also how I saw my mother: a mystery of varying age I could never figure out no matter how long I stared at her.
I walk up to the window and tap on it, hard. “I love you, Mom!”
She is asleep, her head lolled to one side, the tube from the tank cutting right through the middle of her button heart, like the arrows I used to draw on Valentine’s Day.
The aide nods at me and wheels my mother away.
I take a sip of my “coffee” and wait. A nurse will reappear in a moment with my mother’s vitals. I keep track of them. They hold up handwritten signs in the window, like I’m in the movie Love, Actually, or I call and wait until someone in the home loses a game of rock, paper, scissors and is forced to talk to Mabel’s “crazy daughter.” I’ve heard them call me that when their hand isn’t firmly placed over the receiver. I guess I’m a bit too much like Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment. I would do anything to protect my mother, and I feel like I let her down.
A nurse appears and holds up a piece of paper with my mom’s vitals written in Magic Marker:
BLOOD OXYGEN LEVEL = 77 PERCENT
TEMPERATURE = 100.1
BLOOD PRESSURE = 155/98
I check the notes on my cell. Every vital sign is getting worse, not better. I nod, and the nurse disappears. My instinct is to mask up, storm into the administrator’s office and demand that my mother be taken to the ER. But I know it won’t do any good. She has been in and out of the hospital twice. She won’t be returning. There are too many other sick people now, too many others with longer lives and better chances. There are no beds remaining.
Only a coffin.
I know this. Everyone does. We all play pretend just like the cherubs are doing in the courtyard.
Her vitals signal the game is almost over.
I turn, my anguish building, and I put on my mask to cover my quivering chin. Suddenly, I lift my foot back to kick a tulip. I stop mid motion, bending to study its sunny happiness.
Remember this, Sutton, I tell myself. Remember the beauty.
I pluck the tulip and then sprint to my car with my coffee like an escaped prisoner. I dump out the remains of my now cold drink and place the tulip in the cup as if it were a prized vase.
“Are you Kristen Bell?”
A voice startles me. I look out the door and into the parking lot. A woman in scrubs is standing next to her car, looking at me.
“You look just like her!”
Many people have said I look like Kristen Bell, the actress. I’ve always considered it the highest compliment—as I’ve always considered myself more pedestrian than pretty—and even more so now, exhausted, hair a tangled mess, no makeup, a mask covering half my face.
“I wish,” I manage to say. “You can only see my eyes, which is a good thing today.”
She laughs. “People say I look just like my daddy. His nickname’s ‘Bulldog.’ That should tell you everything you need to know.”
I laugh.
“You have a good day,” she says. “Or at least a better one if possible.”
She heads inside the long-term care facility, which is tucked into a hill just outside downtown Nevermore. It sits on a busy road that leads to the big box store and row of fast-food restaurants that sprouted shortly after it did. Nevermore was once known as the “The Jewel Box City,” due to the gorgeous, flower-filled window boxes that lined the storefronts around the historic square. My mom and I used to walk from store to store when I was a girl, admiring the geraniums, begonias and petunias. The square was the center of my universe growing up. My mom and I spent countless hours at the Ben Franklin on the corner. I couldn’t wait to scan the sweet treats and eye the new toys—I got my first Slinky, Silly Putty and Rubik’s Cube there—while my mom could spend just as much time in the craft aisle perusing needles, thread, yarn and, of course, buttons. Many days, we’d cozy up to the counter and have lunch—cheeseburgers, fries and a milkshake, sometimes hot dogs and cherry colas, other days onion rings and phosphates. It seemed like such a glorious luxury.
“A penny saved is a penny earned,” my mom would often say, reciting Ben Franklin himself. “But, mark my words, Sutton, one day these ol’ five-and-dimes will be gone, like the dinosaurs. We’re already beginnin’ to forget the value of simple things.”
I earned my driver’s license parallel parking on that busy square, got my first bra from Doris Brazile—“Mrs. Brassiere,” everyone in town called her—on that square, and learned to patch a roof and fix a sink from Mr. Sharperson, the man who owned the hardware store.
I head past the big box store. People are flocking inside.
The Ben Franklin was the first to go, and the other stores soon followed.
Now, the square is gone, the windows boarded, the window boxes rotted. This big box—which ran the little business owners out of town—remains solid, but it has no character.
Nevermore has finally lived up to its name and destiny.
About ten minutes outside of town, I turn left, and the highway becomes a two-lane road, which becomes a poorly paved road and finally a dirt one. My SUV bumps and jumps over the potholes, and when I turn down our long driveway, past the dilapidated mailbox that says 366 Hickory Crick, Mabel Douglas, in little, reflective, peel-and-stick numbers and letters, the coffee cup turned makeshift vase tips over, and the tulip sails to the floorboard.
I park in the little turnaround area, gather the tulip and head down ten narrow, unsteady stone steps to my mom’s cabin. Its ancient logs are painted white, brown trim framing old wavy windows, a bright red door and bell beside it the only pops of color. I ring the bell, and a crystal clear echo chimes through the surrounding bluffs. My mom used this to call me in for dinner when I was playing on the rocky beach or swimming in the creek. I had sixty seconds to hightail it back, or I knew I was in trouble. My mom would be there waiting, counting, “Fifty-seven, fifty-eight...dinner’s on the table.”
I head inside. I didn’t bother to lock the door, despite the fact my mother always did. All of the doors have locks and dead bolts, the windows, too. My mom cut thick yard sticks she’d get for free from the local paint store to fit the track of every sliding patio door, and they had to be in place before we went to bed.
I always wondered, after surviving a fire, why she’d want to trap herself inside?
There’s no one around here for at least a mile, as the crow flies, and there weren’t even that many around when I was growing up, save for the townies who had little cabins by the water to escape the blistering Ozarks summer humidity.
I flip on the lights in the tiny kitchen. I glance into the refrigerator.
Out of wine.
Idiot. You should have stopped.
My mom was a teetotaler. That’s what they called it in these parts. Sweet way to say she didn’t drink. People ’round here thought it was because she was a woman of God, but I had my doubts.
“Loose lips sink ships, Sutton,” she told me one night after I’d sneaked out to a hootenanny by the crick and returned home a little buzzed. Locals called them “hooch-enannies” because the music was really just an excuse to drink and dance in the dark. In my stupor, I’d ripped a button off one of my summer dresses, and when I woke up the next morning she’d sewn a mismatched button onto it.
“Just so you won’t forget,” she said.
I didn’t.
I worked as hard as my mom did. I got straight A’s. I played volleyball. I attended junior college for free on a sports scholarship and then worked two jobs to get my degree at a nearby state college. I used my story of hardship and humble upbringing to land internships, and I inched my way up over the years.
“My mom taught me to sew.”
“I grew up making dresses with my mom from McCall’s patterns.”
“My designs are inspired by my family’s history.”
Now, I am the ready-to-wear fashion director for all women’s apparel at Lindy’s, one of the nation’s oldest department stores. I have helped make the old new again, the unfashionable hip, 1940s fashion trendy.
Sutton’s Buttons is the line that defined my career.
I meander into my mother’s sewing room and take a seat in her sewing chair.
Every day after visiting with her, I come in here and sit in her chair. It’s the only place I can truly feel her presence.
My mother loved going to church. She took it as seriously as she did everything in her life. She shook hands but never hugged. She sang the hymns quietly but never full-throated. She prayed without looking around to see if anyone was watching.
But I always believed she was closest to God here in her sewing room.
It was just the two of them the last few years. I stopped going to church. I got put off by the folks who gossiped or who used their faith as a way to justify their ungodly actions.
“You have to believe in somethin’ to get you through this life,” my mom used to tell me. “Life’s too pretty and ugly, too happy and sad, too complicated to be happenstance. There has to be a reason for all this, don’t there?”
Everything remains as she left it: button jars, spools of thread, a blouse in Ol’ Betsy ready to be completed. On a shelf alongside her Hummel figurines is a framed piece of art we did together when we were young. I painted the trunk and limbs of an old oak in watercolor on a scrap of old fabric, and then my mom and I glued buttons as leaves on the branches.
It’s actually quite beautiful. The buttons are small and colorful in myriad reds, browns, greens and oranges.
“You can make the world look any way you want,” my mom had said when we were creating it. “Change it to fit what suits you. Even a damaged tree can put down roots and grow in ways you can’t imagine.”
“Who wants to play Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?”
Children scream. Some jump up and down. Some yank on my mother’s skirt.
“I do!”
“Me!”
“Yeah!”
I am not used to having other people, much less other children, in my house, and I am certainly not used to seeing my mother interact with anyone besides me, except on church Sundays. A piece of me feels tremendously jealous that other kids like my mom, and another piece of me is thrilled to have the company of people my own age, especially kids who wouldn’t otherwise choose to play with me.
My mom has taken up babysitting on occasion to earn a few extra dollars. Her days off aren’t really off days: we need every penny.
The kids my mom is babysitting are schoolmates, but that does not mean they are in my “class.” We are poor and live on the outskirts. They are decidedly middle-class with homes in town. They wear store-bought clothes and silk hair ribbons and shiny, new shoes. Once a week my mom picks them up, watches them for a few hours and a few bucks while their parents go to summer parties, BBQs at the club, or Chamber of Commerce dinners.
These are the same kids who make fun of me for wearing Christmas ribbon in my hair. Not only does my mother scrimp for buttons and attempt to remake Goodwill hand-me-downs, but she saves and irons all the ribbons from our Christmas gifts so that I can wear them in my hair. All the kids tug them, pull them from my hair, racing around the playground yelling and laughing, “Christmas ribbon! Not a hair ribbon!”
But they don’t make fun of me in front of my mom. No one challenges Miss Mabel. And my mom doesn’t coddle the children either. Instead, she keeps them busy. We search for arrowheads on the rocky beach. We pick wildflowers in the field. She teaches the difference between stalagmites and stalactites in the cool of the bluffs.
But her—and all the kids’—favorite game by far is “Button, Button.”
My mother varies the game.
Sometimes, she takes us out to the stone steps. Since the staircase is so narrow, my mom divides us into two teams. Three kids sit on the bottom row of the steps, and my mom turns her back and pulls a button from her jar. When she turns to face us, she holds out both fists and asks, “Button, button, who’s got the button?”
Each child fields a guess, and whoever guesses correctly advances one step. The first one to reach the top step and then return all the way back down to the first step wins the prize, usually an ice cream sandwich made from my mom’s homemade cookies.
But they never win the button.
“Can I keep it?”
“No,” my mother will say.
“But I won!”
“The game, not the button,” she would say, hand out, unsmiling. “Rules are important to follow in life.”
She would always shoot me a look when she said this. I didn’t particularly care for rules, but I followed them.
Other times, all the kids formed a circle, hands out, palms cupped together. My mom would take a button and go around the circle, placing her hands in all the kids’ hands one by one. In one child’s hand she would drop the button, although all the kids continued to take her hands in theirs so that no one knew where the button was placed save for the giver and receiver. All the children in the circle begin to sing, “Button, button, who’s got the button?” and then each child in the circle would guess.
“Billy’s got the button!”
“Susie’s got the button!”
Once the child with the button was finally guessed, that child would distribute the button and start a new round.
I always knew who had the button. I could tell. All you had to do was watch their little faces, and their expressions would give them away. I could tell just by looking at my mom, too. Even though she wouldn’t smile, I could read her poker face. The corners of her eyes would lift imperceptibly, and her face would always relax just a bit when the button was gone, as if she’d just released a long-held secret.
I pretended not to know, though.
I knew my place amongst the hierarchy.
My mom knew, too. That’s why she never gave me the button. Not once. Not ever.
We both knew a win by me could cause a kid to say I cheated and end up costing my mom a client and a buck.
“Button, button, who’s got the button?”
I stare at the button tree.
The creek sings that childhood song back to me.
I look at Ol’ Betsy.
“Tell me your secrets,” I say to her.
I used to get jealous of my mom’s old sewing machine. It was the one who constantly received her attention and touch. It was the one she talked to every evening in a whisper, and Ol’ Betsy would reply in her magical voice, as if she were channeling God and speaking in tongues so that only my mother could understand.
But I was mostly envious of Ol’ Betsy because she was a miracle worker. She could take my mother’s miscellaneous scraps and turn them into something beautiful and complete. She could make sense of the pieces my mother tossed her way. I could never do that.
“Good job,” my mom would say to Ol’ Betsy, patting her when she had produced a quilt or blouse.
I can only remember my mom telling me once and only once she was proud of me.
Not when I graduated high school, junior college or college. Not when I landed my first job. Not when I was the youngest woman to be hired as Lindy’s Department Store’s ready-to-wear fashion director. It was when I least expected it. When I moved out of her house for good.
“You were never meant to live here,” she said. “You got roots here, but it’s not where you’re meant to grow. Never was. I found my way here. You found your way out. With my buttons. Proud of ya, Sutton.”
The day I moved to Chicago I stopped my truck at the end of our driveway to secure a box that had tumbled forward as I drove over the rocky road. My mom was standing in the window watching me leave.
She was weeping.
A bird lands in the tree outside the sewing room window, knocking me from this memory. I smile.
My mother hated “featherbedders.” That was her term for pretentious folks who felt the need to fluff their own feathers, make themselves seem bigger than they really were.
“People who never had no hardship do that,” she said. “When you have, you’re just thankful to have a bed, feathers or not.”
I shared this story with a friend from work once, and she told me we probably had German or Dutch in us. My heart raced. My only thought was, “Do we? I know nothing about my family history.”
My life has been consumed with a question that will never be answered. I am a room filled with scraps. How many days, weeks, months, years have I spent Googling every possible word, name and date regarding my mother? How many calls have I made to people with similar last names? I grew tired of being Nancy Drew, so I stopped.
I think of Mrs. Dimmons.
That’s what people do when they grow up in small towns and feel as if they are “different.” They run.
I grew to believe maybe that’s what my mother did, too. When you experience tragedy in a tiny town, you’re defined by it. Maybe my mother was no longer Mabel Douglas, maybe she was the woman who lost her entire family in that fire. Maybe everywhere she turned—at the grocery, the farm stand, the ice cream shop—she saw someone she lost. Maybe it was better to be alone and in a new place than be the woman everyone whispered about and felt sorry for.
And so she ran, too.
The cabin is so silent, my ears ring. It could be the start of an early hangover, it could be exhaustion, or grief. But in my head, I can hear my mother sing, as she would only to me, making up her own lyrics, “Sutton, Sutton, Who’s Got the Button?”
I know I will take the button tree when...
My stomach lurches.
I hear my mother’s voice again.
“You found your way out.”
But I didn’t just run. I didn’t just leave here. I didn’t simply leave home. I left my mother here.
And then I left my mother there.
You left your mother, Sutton. And she will never come home again.
I stand to escape her sewing room and all the memories, but the world undulates, and I trip over the thick, colorful oval braided rug she’s had here forever.
“Hides every color of thread,” she used to say. “That’s why we have buttons and rugs: to hide the things we don’t want to see.”
I nearly do a header into Ol’ Betsy, just like my mother did, right into the machine where I learned to sew, my mother’s hands on top of mine, teaching me the beauty of her art. I look at the old machine. It, too, is a work of art: black with a beautiful gold inlay pattern atop the original, old treadle oak cabinet, glowing with a rich patina. The top is peeling a bit, but it is a stunning antique.
“Ol’ Betsy,” I say to the Singer. “How’d you get your name?”
The cabinet has five drawers, one in the middle and two with knobs on each side of it.
As if compelled by a force greater than me, I take a seat and begin to sew, starting where my mother left off. My foot moves in a rhythm, as if I am dancing in my socks with my mom on New Year’s Eve to songs from the Rat Pack—the only time of year she’d dance and have music—and the Singer hums as if it were trying to lull me to sleep.
I used to think it took an act of God just to thread the vintage round bobbin until I got the hang of it.
The blouse my mom was making has flouncy shoulders, a surprisingly bold choice for her. I glance at the pattern and look at the size, and I wonder if she was making it as a Christmas gift for me. The buttons she was to use sit in a cut glass bowl before her button jars.
Vintage tortoise Bakelite buttons. So beautiful. I haven’t seen buttons like this in ages.
There are really two types of buttons: Utilitarian, rather plain buttons now made for clothes that are mass-produced. And buttons that are still created by artisans, beautiful, hand-crafted works of art made for one-of-a-kind designs or collectors.
My work bridges the gap: I recreate works of art in bulk.
But these are the real thing.
Am I the real thing anymore? Was my mom real?
The widow always seemed beyond reproach.
Without warning, I begin to cry. My body flails, and my hand jerks.
I stop, but it’s too late.
Bumblebunching.
That’s what sewers call the annoying tangled loop of stitching on the bobbin side of the fabric, the result of improper tension applied to the sewing machine.
I cry even harder.
That word sums up my life right now.
I am bumblebunched.
And I will be forever bumblebunched without you, Mom.
I turn a jar of buttons over on my mother’s sewing desk. I run my hands through them, feeling each one, seeking an answer.
I hear my mom’s voice call to me, or maybe it’s God’s, I don’t know anymore, but I can hear it say very clearly: “Sometimes you have to search for God as long and hard as you search for the right button. You know it’s in there somewhere. You just need to keep believin’ and lookin’ until you find it. You’ll know when you do.”