And her clothes. One form of needlework the women around us in Arizona did was sewing. You saved money if you made your own. Some time in the fifties, after we moved from Phoenix to Tucson, my mother began sewing in earnest. She had always darned. I still have her darning “egg,” on whose umbrella-shaped top is etched “Another Darned Hole.” But darning was like ironing, necessary and tedious. In New Jersey, my mother had taken our dirty clothes to Grandma’s live-in housekeeper to be washed and ironed; in Arizona, she was on her own. Yet even with three daughters to care for and a husband needing six pressed white shirts a week, she made all our curtains and most of our dresses. Her designs were so striking she was featured in The Tucson Daily Citizen modeling one of her burlap skirts laden with bright strips of braid. On a revamped treadle machine, she made “squaw dresses” (all the rage, though in colors and designs no Navajo woman would have recognized) for her daughters and her friends. She would have won the grand prize in a state contest if Daddy hadn’t refused to let her accept on the grounds that it might hurt his budding career in banking. He couldn’t have it known that his wife was a seamstress.

The Seamstress, 1916
(Oil on canvas, 92.71 × 71.12 cm)
BY Joseph DeCamp
Corcoran Gallery of Art

She taught me to sew too. By junior high, I was making my own gathered skirts. Mom would interrupt her chores and come sit right beside me on the sofa, show me how to make a tidy placket. And once I was in high school, needlework again became a tribal activity: my girlfriends sewed their own clothes too. At Jacomé’s Department Store, we took summer classes from women sent by Simplicity’s New York headquarters. These missionaries were intent on bringing the world of high fashion to us barbarians in the provinces. But even though their condescension cut sharply as our scissors, we soaked up their wisdom, learned their tricks in adapting patterns. Inserting the zipper was an intricate procedure, yet we doggedly persisted.

Sewing our own clothes meant that we could have a few new dresses for school. The sewing machine, however, was noisy. And a certain tension always infused the construction of these clothes. Once a dress was finished, there was always the chance that I might not like it (and the certainty I’d know its imperfections).

When my mother made me a dress, she would interrupt my reading mid-chapter and insist I come to her while she pinned things to me, pricking. “Stand still, this will just take a minute,” she said, but it always took longer. When I sewed my own clothes, it was my fingers that were pricked by the pins and needles. Sometimes the thread knotted around the bobbin under the old Singer’s needle, and I’d have to use nail scissors to cut away the tangle, pick out the messy threads from the fabric, and start all over again. Tedious work. Often I would rather have been reading.

By the time I was nine, we had lived in nine different apartments or houses. Every year a different neighborhood, and almost every year, another school. Over and over, threads to the past were cut; with each move, last year’s doll disappeared.

During most of the fifties, the whir of my mother’s sewing machine penetrated our walls. That is, when Daddy wasn’t home. Evenings were guarded, kept quiet for him after his long days at the bank. The living room had always been off limits to toys, dolls, coloring, or even board games. No mess, no noise in that room. If I wanted my father’s company, I had to be quiet and still. As much as I loved devouring them, novels were out of the question — I couldn’t follow both my parents’ and the pages’ dialogue.

So I did embroidery in the living room, as my parents sipped their high balls and puffed their Benson and Hedges. Mom had taught me cross stitching the same year she taught me plain knitting, about the time I also learned to read. As a preschooler, I could only make big x’s in uneven rows. X after x, the goal being to make each diagonal stitch identical. Mind-numbing, you might think, for an older girl. But for me, the repetition soothed. By the time I was nine, we had lived in nine different apartments or houses. Every year a different neighborhood, and almost every year, another school. Over and over, threads to the past were cut; with each move, last year’s doll disappeared.