Next morning I got up from the narrow bed and explored. Through the curtains I could see that this side of the house faced east. In the early chill, I imagined the cold North Sea, the sun’s rays squinting off it beyond the wintry New Year trees that bounded the bare ornamental garden below. I turned back into the room and noticed it in a corner. Was it? Yes it was, there beneath an old stained cloth. Our mums brand new singer. I saw how my sister as daughter had kept it through all the moves. I thought of when it had turned up. I was five. It was a rosewood cabinet. The polished black machine inscribed in gold folded into it. The two hinged flaps on top met flush in the centre so you wouldn’t know.
Piece work. Afternoons warmed by the electric hum of the machine as I played. The toil, intermittent, of bobbin and thread.’ Autumn leaves ’’sung on CBB radio.
Then she `d show me how to pencil her initials on the labels. The batches of little girl’s dresses were `smocking`, as she called it. She got 25 cents for embroidering each dress from the woman who had a brown spaniel that jumped all over you in the big house in Lansing.
Actual singing? No.not in the house, not then. My mum would let the radio thread most of our afternoon together, right to the seamless gathering in to the window of the darkness outside when the family drama sponsored by the soapflake company would come on .through repetition, I guess I came to love the woman’s slow singing of the names of the months from September. A slow threading. The Autumn leaves song. A threnody. And there was the warmth of Nat King Cole .did he console her? Thinking about her now, I think he did. The sound effects of slamming doors and the raised voices were so real to me in the radio drama. except they didn’t make me jump, or her face change, like when my father came home .and of course, it was later, when I turned seven that I needed to run away. But that was another story I preferred to leave aside.
So, standing in the room this New Year, I thought of the soft features of her face. But the times when they would suddenly grow tense, and her eyes would cloud, crowded in too. as did the thought, like a weather change, that it was much later, when I was fourteen, that the surgeon in new Hampshire had to restore them so skilfully after the first car crash.afterwards,at home, she ,a former nurse told me how he’d taken off-cuts from inside her upper arm, the part soft as velvet. To console me, I guess, with‘plastic surgery’, as she called it.miraculous, how everything folded in so you wouldn’t know. Like assembling an intricate puzzle that he then sewed into position. drawing me close in to her smell of ‘April Violets’, she shared with me the faint scarring, the seams she hid behind her still lustrously dark fringe .but the crash,too,was another story. Like the one about ‘Mother’s little helper’ that the stones sang about a little later.
Looking at the angular from hidden beneath the scrap of cloth, I again went back to when I was five. thought of the day, before I got to be her scribe writing on the labels of the little dresses, when she, as promised, asked me to pull out the square matching stool that stored scissors and thread, sat me down, placed a piece of white paper in front of me .I followed the lines she’d ruled in pencil earnestly with the ballpoint and penned lots of little strokes close together like soldiers in a line. I was writing.
I approached the old singer, touched it, pushed the cloth aside to search for the pen strokes in the rosewood. I’d first uncovered them as I leaned forward on the stool after I’d put down the pen and lifted the paper. To a revelation of pain, for I saw that the marks I’d make had scored clear though into the polished wood. Into a kind of grief, I guess .later I sewed a suit of clothes from cloth that I cut and shaped from off-cuts my mother gave me .they were for my little sister’s new doll.
I put the cloth back in place. I hadn’t found the marks from all those years ago. Were they there? I watched my step as I went down the stairs through the tall old new house toward the good smells of breakfast with my sister and Richard.
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رد: ܓܨܓ PeRfeCt sInGeR ܓܨܓ
Pleased to meet you
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Good one ... though I still didn't get what does this story point out to
رد: ܓܨܓ PeRfeCt sInGeR ܓܨܓ
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