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Ruby Truly: stories and essays and other conceptual explorations in text The Comfort Quilt Mina Bird get out of my way, I'm climbing - six, seven, screaming up the stairs, counting up the stairs. I'm eleven years of mad, twelve, thirteen, so mad I'll show you, fifteen, sixteen, I'm going to see Aunty Tino. Twenty! "Aunty Tino I HATE my mother! She doesn't understand me not like you, I don't know why but she and I can't seem to get along!" Aunty Tino sighs, tears swell to show she cares. "Ho boy, how come you and your mother always fight when I'm sewing?" Aunty Tino makes a joke, sits and listens to me as she jabs the needle into the cloth patches of her current project-blanket. We are up in the island air, upstairs in her high house in Wailuku, right across the street from where I live, and I think to myself that someday I want to live upstairs, let the tropical breeze blow all the hurt from my life. I don't think that I will make project-blankets though, only Aunty does that. "I'm making a quilt." Aunty Tino says, "You know, they call it a comforter, but it takes so long to finish, the comfort part must be when you're finally done...you still mad?" You are my mother's bestest girlfriend, Aunty Tino, and when you talk my mother listens. Maybe that is why I always come to you. She'll listen to you. Tell her I'm right. "You know me, I cannot interfere, even though your mother and I have known each other so long, yeah, some things are for mother and daughter to sort out." We are just-like-family, my aunty who isn't really blood but who took care of me for one whole year, long ago when I was in the second grade, when dad got sick and mommy took him away to Japan. Not blood but just as good as blood. Never mind, I shall always be a special guest in your high house, open the screen door without knocking. You know that this is one of those fights-with-my-mother visits, and you know that in the end I will go home and you will be left alone. But you like it, sitting here in your comfy green chair with the matching footstool, placing small stitches around the cut cloth, pinning it into the quilt in a pattern. Look at that one, orange and black striped lion fish swimming from the sleeve of my old muumuu, swimming against the tiny stitches, telling the story of the thin woman who lives all by herself in the house that is brushed by the palm tree top. How she looks down at the house across the street where her best friend Ruth and her youngest "family-fight", door slam, and as she turns back to her sewing she thinks, "Hoo, hoo, one-by-one they will climb up the twenty stairs to, wadda-you-call, "speak their piece", as if I can make it all better somehow." Those stitches in the cloth are like trails through my time with you, Aunty Tino - how do you know what to do? "I follow the pattern", you say, as if there wasn't any other way to go about it, but see there? That small design, there? I can read those tiny stitches. The needle marks that tell of a son I never met, who never visits, who never runs across the street to my house to spit out, "I hate my mother". Once you told me his name but I forget, when did you write him into your blanket? And where is he now? Those stitches in the cloth are like notes on the old sheet music mommy has tucked into the piano bench. Only a few recognize the melody. "Someday you will be a mother and you will see it's not so easy. You will make mistakes too", you say. And you think I do not understand but I do. I can read the stitches. Now the threads make their way around a field of blue dotted with red bowling pins dancing at odd angles. I recognize them from a team shirt that players wear at ten-pin and I wish that blanket were mine. "I wish you were my mother", I say, and you know I don't really mean it. "You don't mean that", you say and the red bowling pins are fastened down forever. "Go get us some juice, cold drink you like? Make you feel better." I love your small kitchen, separate from the rest of the house, windows open to the sky except for the tallest palm tree, brushing against the screen. We sit in silence and drink our juice and eat the puffed rice cookies you made just for me, "Special you know, because you like them so much." Then I have to wash my hands before I can help you unwrap the small packages of material and spread them out on the floor to choose which one will go where. The bathroom sink is through the bedroom and I stop to see the two old framed photos - me taken at the beach and my big sister Carol's high school grad - next to your bed, the frames crowded on a little wooden side table made nice with one of your crochet white doilies. Your bed is covered perfectly with a mint green cotton tufted bedspread and at the foot of the bed, neatly folded, is a many colored knitted afghan. I don't remember ever seeing you make that one but I know you did, sometime, a long time ago. You told me, "I just choose the colors by how I feel at the time," and I wonder which square you made on the day I was born? I remember you used to live by the sugar cane irrigation canal in Puunene and mommy and I used to go there to visit. But your house was in the dark there, huddled under those big trees lined up along the avenue, their thick arms reaching all the way across the road, holding the air heavy with the sticky smell of the sugar mill molasses and rotting bagasse. I'm glad you moved next-door up here, where the birds can visit and peck at the toast crusts you placed this morning on the railing at the top of the stairs. Their bob-bob dance conducted by your thin silver needle...poking in and out of tiny white hibiscus blossoms, the yellow mouth of a cut squash, three red Japanese fans, and an ocean sunset glistening brightly off a sandy shore. Rest In Peace, Yoshino "Tino" Nagai, February 19, 1906 - October 29, 1990, Maui, Hawai'i. |