How to Make an American Quilt by Whitney Otto Read Free Book Online Page B

figure of a woman poised to dive from a small cliff fringed by a rain forest. The palm frond made from embroidery silk, the water of satin. Yours and your lover’s skin brown from the sun. The scenic, pictorial quilt is finite, contained.
    You prefer it.
    Contemplate crumpling the paper pattern of the pictorial quilt. A pattern, by its very nature, should repeat. It is your nature as well. To do as your mother did. As much as you hate it, as much as it grieves you.
    The scenic pattern is the great dream; the repeating pattern a nod to reality. Your life. Everyone’s life. Which brings you to the
Crazy Quilt
and its lack of order, its randomness, its shrouded personal meanings. Differentiated from a quilt with one theme; this other quilt that requires many hands, many meanings juxtaposed with each other.
    Experience discomfort at the thought.
    Consider the
Crazy Quilt
. Deplore its lack of skill and finesse.Express this idea to the women in your quilting circle. Say those words: lack of skill and finesse. Explain that this nineteenth-century fad is not translatable to the twentieth century. Insist that you are all modern women who control their lives and are not, in turn, controlled by them. Glower from your chair when someone laughs at what you have just said. Calls you silly; even though the tone is affectionate, you still feel put out. Concede the project.
    Hold your secret regarding this quilt. What upsets you. What puts you out. Your inner conflict regarding the vagaries of control.
    Read
The Story of O
. Convince yourself that it was, in fact, written by a woman or someone who thinks like a woman. Feel shame and pleasure at being forced to read it in the utmost privacy of your life. Wish you could talk to one of the other women about it. But you cannot. Dare not mention it; deny all knowledge of it should anyone else bring it up, even in a casual way. It is a novel of choices in a world of limited choices. On one level. You understand that concept. Remind yourself that, of course, her story is pure pornography.
    The cradle quilt is a quilt reduced to infant or child proportions. The theme should reflect the child’s immediate world: bow ties, balloons, trucks, buttons, lambs, and shoes. Incorporate an image a child can unconsciously think about; influence your child’s dream state. Design a body of water. Surround it with rocks and trees. A bird or two would add “movement.” Clouds fill the sky in great white billows. Again, puff them up with extra stuffing lodged between the appliqué and quilt top. Give them dimension. Get across an idea of summer.
    Follow your parents’ footsteps. This is what quilting is about: something handed down—skill, the work itself. Hold it in your hand. Fondle it. Know in your heart that you long to rebel; look for ways in which you are different from your mother; know that you seeher in yourself at your worst times. Laugh as you contemplate the concept of free will, individuality.
    Now think about the perfect marriage or the ideal lover union. It is as uncommon as any wondrous thing. Yet everyone
expects
to find it in her life, thinks it will happen (just a matter of time), feels entitled. Sit with the other women and express confusion as to why a mutual friend, so deserving of love, is living without it. Think of a million reasons as to why this is so, except the true reason, which is that it is an unusual and singular thing, having nothing to do with personality or worth. If it was so commonplace why would artists find themselves obsessed by it, churning out sad paintings and torch songs?
    As the twentieth century draws to a close, heads shake at the high divorce rate, the brutalization of the love affair, left in neglect or disarray. Leave that old lover. Move on. Take the A train. But in the dark of your room you may be moved to admit to yourself that you only
thought
you fell out of love or grew tired of it (grew tired of a small miracle of the heart?), when in reality you may