How to Make an American Quilt (9 page)

At other times she said things like:
Sophia sweetheart, marriage is a difficult undertaking at best and the secret is to please your husband and be there for your children. Do not wander from the path you have chosen
.

Or:
Rule the house with a velvet glove that serves to hide your will. Make your husband respect you
.

And:
All else is failure
.

Mrs. Darling’s love-advice often left her daughter ill tempered and suspicious and lusting after rebellion. More often than not, her mother’s words forced Sophia from the house to the quarry reservoir, where she swam with fierce, cutting strokes. How could she make her mother understand that she might not want to “settle down” or that she felt a keen pleasure in the pure and unadorned sense of being alone? Then there were the days, trapped in the house with her mother’s loneliness, that made Sophia wild to be married, to belong to someone. To love and be loved. And so afraid that it might never happen to her at all.

H
ER OWN FATHER
was long gone, having deserted Sophia and her mother during the Great Depression. She wonders what their lives would have been like had he not left. Whenever she asked her mother, “Why isn’t Daddy here with us?” her mother would study her cuticles or brush imaginary wrinkles from her skirt and say, “Because I did not heed my own advice, the advice I give you.” But Sophia remained suspicious, unconvinced that this was the path to being a successful woman—a
wife
—for how could a man desire such behavior from his girl? But then, one could ask, How could he not want someone so compliant? But she does not want to be like her mother, a woman who misplaces men.

She can barely recall the man who fathered her, yet she feels his absence most profoundly. Recalls him tucking her in bed at night and singing to her “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” or “Pennies from Heaven.” Maybe an obscure Italian love song. Mrs. Darling insisted that Sophia was far too young to hold any memories of this man (“This wandering man,” she said), yet she does, and it frightens her to think maybe she is like him in some way; maybe she is a wanderer, too.

She suspects that her mother was at fault in his defection; then again, she wonders if he was simply incapable of supplying the extraordinary amount of love required to nurture a wife and child.

Sophia cannot shake off her mother’s touch, could not say to her mother, No, but that is not the life I want to live. She could not. This was because she was conditioned by a life without her father coupled with the longing she felt for him; not a day passed that did not include a jagged awareness of his memory. It was her pilot and her compass; it broke her young heart—not all at once, in one great
crack!
but, rather, with tiny little fissures and hairline fractures. It chipped away at the perimeter as well, leaving her with a heart that did not have a smooth, voluptuous silhouette but one that was beveled and sharp.

If you took Sophia’s heart and turned it upside down it would resemble nothing so much as a badly made arrowhead, one that lacked the stem to lash it to the arrow, but still had a point capable of piercing flesh.

Poor Sophia. Truly the progeny of her parents: the woman who stayed and the man who walked away. Poor Sophia, who is afraid to become like her mother, who misses a father she barely knew. So she wills herself to fall from great heights in an effort to understand her dangerous heart.

W
HEN
P
RESTON
R
ICHARDS COMES
to pick Sophia Darling up for their date, it is still quite light outside and the summer heat has only slightly subsided. She feels uncomfortable and silly wearing makeup, certain that the perspiration on her face will cause it all to streak unattractively.

Mrs. Darling is simpering and (Sophia is horrified)
flirting
with Preston. He grins and goes along with her mother to the point
that Sophia wants to suggest that the two of them go out on this date. Let her mother look all made up like some strange doll face.

Her dress, too, gives Sophia a trussed-up feeling, cinched about the waist, snug in the bust. Thank god the war doesn’t allow her to be wearing stockings or she’d have even more underwear on in this cruel heat. Inhumane.

After they have left Mrs. Darling smiling in the doorway of the house, it takes Sophia exactly two minutes to say, “Let’s go to the quarry.”

“M
Y FAVORITE SONG
,” says Sophia to Preston as they pick their way along the trail to the quarry, “is ‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.’ I like Frank Sinatra a lot too.”

“I’m a Miller fan myself. He’s the best,” Preston tells her. “Makes me want to dance.” He pushes aside a branch, waits for Sophia to pass safely. “Do you like to dance?”

“I do, but I’m not very graceful.”

Preston remembers her long, muscular thighs, now covered by the skirt of her dress, and cannot imagine Sophia lacking physical grace. He wants very much to hold her in his arms on a crowded dance floor and tells her, “Then you haven’t had the right partner.”

“Is that so?”

“Absolutely.”

As Sophia leads him through a seemingly impenetrable wall of leaves, which opens to reveal the quarry, he says, “Hey, you didn’t tell me this was a swimming place.” The still water is cradled by cliff rocks worn slick and smooth.

“The
best
swimming place,” she corrects him. “As a matter of fact, I seldom go to the pool. You were lucky to catch me there yesterday. I mostly come here.”

“I love it,” he says without facing her. “This place looks like you.”

Sophia openly stares at Preston, marveling at his comment. It is as if she makes some split decision, and says, “Okay, stay there and don’t move.” Preston watches as Sophia strips off her dress, kicks off her shoes, leaving her barefoot and in her underwear. “Don’t follow me,” she says over her shoulder as she begins making her way around the lip of rock surrounding the filled quarry. She moves with an athletic naturalness, surefooted and (he notes) she is smoothing back her hair with both hands, clipping the tip of her nose and tugging at the legs of her panties, as if she has just emerged from the water. He sees her hands go out to her sides like a high-wire walker and he imagines the rock narrowing, then widening, as her arms drop to her sides and her stride becomes more relaxed, less consciously balanced. Now the relatively small creature that is Sophia perches herself on the edge of a cliff about fifteen feet high. The dusk gathers as she ceases all movement, then, click, her arms swing to the side and up and she leaps. Her body knifes into the dark-gray water (the color of her eyes, he notes).

He wants to applaud, she looks so pretty.

Suddenly, he is afraid she won’t surface, that she has met with some freak accident there below in the dark water, and he becomes frantic. Tearing off his shoes, he jumps fully clothed into the water, only to see her shining head bob up. Preston rushes toward her with a great deal of splashing and holds her tightly in his arms. He pushes her back against the rock from which she has only recently dived, supporting her with one arm as he cups her chin with his other hand; but not before she smiles at him, exposing the gap between her front teeth, which he briefly fills with his tongue before kissing her.