Sylvia presses her finished curtains and lays them aside with the set for the au pair’s room, the one for the kitchen window. The parlor’s wall heater ticks and echoes and ticks. The faucets drip. Apple peelings curl in a pile on the drainboard in the kitchen. Hours evaporate, leaving their crystalline pyres. She changes the bobbin, rethreads the machine, single-mindedness her protection. She takes up the pattern pieces of a tiny nightgown and bloomers in white lawn embroidered with ladybugs. I have my writing, my children, my home. Here elastic gathers a waist. Here is a perfect French seam. Here is eyelet hand stitched to a neckline and hem. Here is the heat and spice of an apple cake baking, its scent rising on the flat’s chill air, subduing the sharp assault of the vinegar in which her tarnished copper steeps. Mastodons, panthers, sulphur-colored bulls, a lyre of pointed horns decorate the flickering passageways. Red ocher horses gallop—black maned, black hooved, muscles tensed, nostrils flaring. Sylvia gathers skirts, bastes crocheted lace for little dresses of Liberty cotton: soft roses, Victorian florals. She cuts the pattern for a miniature red coat of felted wool with black glass buttons dimpled like ripe blackberries.

She leans over her machine, turning the crank clockwise, the muscles aching in her right arm. The pads of her fingers grow tender, threatening to blister. The needle surges, white thread arcing and tightening in an even, decorative stitch along the finished seams. A thin crimson skin against the underlying snow of pale flesh, the peel coming off in a gyre that curled to her elbow before it dropped. She chopped the apples in half; their five-petaled cores mimicked the shape of their blossoms. A seedbed, a star: the orchard flowers in the memory of the apple.

She pins the collar on at intervals, turning the infinitesimal seam allowance under, pressing with the sharp tip of the hot iron. She has nearly a yard of the red wool left over, enough for a play suit for Nick. She sews on the coat collar, easing the material, pulling pins as she goes. She leans over the little coat as she removes it from the machine, trimming the threads, her fingers mirrored in the reflecting nickel of the face plate. She turns the collar to the right side and with her pinking shears grades the seam allowances to make them lie flat, raising her little torch against the vaulting dark, not fearless but hungry and cold, deep in the vast impassive dark, utterly hollow, under everything.

24. “Berck-Plage”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“Berck-Plage”

JULY 12, 1961

LACAN DE LOUBRESSAC, FRANCE