She supposes her mother would be horrified. Disappointed, at the very least. The work is neither what she would consider beautiful nor useful. It would kill her to see what Penelope is doing — if she hadn’t been dead for ten years already. She has never forgiven Thora for that, for leaving her so soon. It was one thing to joke about her allotted three score and ten, but something else altogether to adhere so literally to it. But that was Thora. She could accomplish anything she set her mind to. If she told her heart to stop, it would stop. No doubt there was supposed to be a lesson in it somewhere for Penelope about willpower and control and self-reliance. It seemed a cruel but certain way of keeping her memory fresh.
She smooths the panel of embroidered felt with the palms of her hands, reading the scene like Braille. Stupid to be flattening it, knowing what she will do next. Force of habit. Muscle memory. Perhaps a gesture of love — at least tenderness — for the wrinkled flesh, sutured with embroidery floss.
Bernadette is burning with curiosity about the new project. Her fault. She should never have banned Bernie from the workroom. It wasn’t as though she ever really came in anyway, but the interdict has awakened her nosey nature. Eventually Penelope will show her. If the experiments work out. Eventually, Matt will see them too, everyone will. There will be a show, with an opening, and people will come and look and ponder and make positive noises or none at all. It is what she has thought she has wanted for twenty years — an exhibition. She wants to show something that will make people talk and wonder. Who knows whether there will be any money in it? That’s less important, although God knows the shop is struggling and Matt’s tuition is certainly not paying itself.
She uses paper to mock up each piece, although you can’t get the proper drape, obviously. The folds are too crisp, certain angles are impossible, and it won’t lie the right way over the armature. But paper is useful for conceptualizing, and there is a lot of that needed for this work. Too much, her mother would say, and You’re overthinking. She sketches the scenes on a strip of paper and then bends and folds it to explore the potential for obscuring details. Because what is hidden is what gives the piece its energy. She imagines viewers craning their necks, crouching, even turning upside down, to try to see what lurks in the crevices and canyons, the sulci — she likes that word she read the other day — that she will create with the draped felt.
She has learned that an armature is essential. While the finished piece must look as though it simply happened, that effect can’t be achieved by just letting things look after themselves. You have to head off a viewer who says it just looks like the artist dropped it. Dowelling and clips and tacks can do a certain amount, but it has been most satisfying working with steel pipes. She loves to browse in the hardware store, examining the fittings and dreaming of what she can do with the tees and elbows and crosses. At first, Bernadette thought there must be something wrong with the plumbing in the house.
Her early attempts were too rigid. She sees that so easily now that it makes her wonder why she couldn’t then. One of the first looked like an elaborate table napkin in a fine restaurant. Its folds were so tight there was no way they would invite you to try to see into them. Another, as she tried to open up the view, ended up looking like the top of a pair of overalls, or the bandolier waistband on some skirt she remembers seeing somewhere. The felt needs to drape — to swoop — for the work to be effective.
The piece she is working on will hang on two sets of transverse crossbars branching off from either side of a central stem. A single shorter pipe thrusts out to the front from a tee midway between the crossbars. Naked, it could be an eccentric display rack for the shop. Draped, it will evoke a human form, with the fabric suggesting the ridges of delicate collarbones and the swell of breasts flanked by the secret caves of armpits. The deep, secret folds created by the way the felt flows over the shorter pipe will suggest something that reminds her of Georgia O’Keeffe. And the furrows in the brain. Sulci.
For all of this, she has her mother to thank. She knows this in the same way as she knows her mother would disapprove of the direction she has taken. From the beginning of Handworks, Thora insisted that the hooked rugs and the decorations on her precious handbags reflect what their maker saw, how they lived. In the fifties and again toward the end of her life, she carried the principle to an extreme, producing those intensely personal essays in rag and felt — mats and bags that spoke about her own very particular tortured inner landscape. At the time, Penelope dismissed that work as self-indulgent, impenetrable. Now, in her sixties herself, she thinks she has begun to understand. She has certainly begun to emulate. And so, she has embroidered on the felt some of the stories of her life, of her mother’s life, of Matt’s. And she has plotted carefully which elements of which stories will be exposed and which obscured — knowing, too, that a slightly different draping of the felt could change the understanding of the entire saga. She runs her fingers over Jonathan and Robin, picks at a stray thread coming off what she has imagined of Mr. McCann, and about her father, wonders about ripping out scenes from each of the wars and replacing them with something more hopeful, though she is not sure what. Finally, however, she decides it is as finished as it will ever be and she sets to work shaping the soft cloth over the cold steel pipes, flesh on bones.
“Boss? Can I come in?”
Bernadette should know by now she is not welcome in the workroom. But how to tell her no directly again? She has been such a devoted worker, such a faithful companion. Penelope looks into the face of the old woman in the doorway and is relieved. This hag is not Bernadette. And then she sees that, of course, it is. She looks down at the wool in her lap. Knitted, not felted; an old lady’s lap rug, not an exhibition piece, not even her work. And not the workroom. Somewhere else.
“I hate it here,” she says to the crone-Bernadette.
“I know, boss. It’s not home, but it is a good place, the best place for you.”
“Not here.” She gestures to the sterile room that is — unaccountably — decorated with some fragments recognizable from her life. “Here.” She rests the heels of her hands on her temples. “Here. Here.”
“I know, boss.”
But she really doesn’t. Nobody can.