University of Northern Iowa

Woman SewingAuthor(s): James DoyleSource: The North American Review, Vol. 290, No. 3/4, Annual Summer Fiction Double Issue(May - Aug., 2005), p. 57Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25127405 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 02:28

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

University of Northern Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The NorthAmerican Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.228 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 02:28:28 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

AMY GUSTINE

Jeffs absence provides. Corinne feels enormously comforted by this loyalty.

When she gets up for a drink Elyse comes out of her

bedroom. "Can't sleep?"

Without any makeup the birthmark is nearly the color of a

plum, but the face remains basically a nectarine, shaded,

changing as it turns. "I'm lonely," Corinne laughs.

After they have?what? Corinne wonders if sex is the word for

it. That seems wrong to her, but what else can it be called??

Corinne washes her hands, which smell like herself, though it is

Elyse, and shudders. She notices the pesky, stiff black hair that

grows at her jaw line, just out of site, and searches furiously in

the medicine cabinet and drawers until she finds some

tweezers, smudged with makeup. She plucks the hair and

enjoys the sting. What else has she missed?

Corinne flushes the toilet and runs the water, though she has

not gone to the bathroom and is done washing up.

Elyse and Corinne fall into the habit of spending every other

weekend together, when the kids go to Jeff's. As spring settles

in, they sit in caf?s drinking mochas and eating pastries, go

shopping on Michigan Avenue. Corinne never buys anything.

Elyse gets her presents from Pottery Barn. Whenever Corinne

dresses for these visits, she stands for an hour in front of the

mirror trying on several outfits?black pants, a red blouse;

jeans, a black turtleneck; a long navy skirt and a tight white

blouse that pulls across her small shoulders. She feels as if she's

trying out for a play. What do lesbians wear?

When they are together in bed Corinne stays above the waist most of the time, concentrating on the face and the neck. Her

arousal is distant, like the movement of waves to passengers on

a large ship. Corinne feels the crests and the swells, but they are

not connected to any narrative of human feelings. A song

without words. When Corinne does touch Elyse she imagines she is touching herself. But she doesn't let this bother her. Isn't sex irrelevant to love anyway?

Elyse asks her if she has ever been attracted to a woman

before. "I fall in love with people," Corinne says, "not bodies." It

sounds so very evolved, and Corinne has no idea if it is true. In March Elyse comes to town to visit her mother and stops

by to see Corinne. In the living room she waves her hand at the

black-and-white photos in collage frames. "So who are all these

people?"

"My grandparents, great-grandparents," Corinne nods at

each photo. "I got into the genealogy thing a while back."

"That's nice," Elyse says, her voice suddenly flat, as if she's

reading lines she thinks are stupid. "I'm not very close to my

family."

"Really? You always seemed to be in high school."

"It's the gay thing," Elyse says. "It distances you from people, you know, if they don't accept it, or they're uncomfortable."

"So your family doesn't approve?"

Elyse shrugs. "Approve. Did you ever feel like you have cancer? They don't disapprove, but they don't know how to

act. The whole time I lived with Rebecca my parents never

came to visit me. They get nervous in hospitals." Elyse

guffaws.

Corinne thinks about the night Jeff told her he was moving out. When they got home she'd had to face his mother, who was

babysitting. Exchanging pleasantries about the restaurant and the children, Corrine felt as though someone had stripped off

her skin, examined her dun-colored lungs, her half-cooked

turkey uterus and charred gall bladder, her bleached, bruise striated brain and wrinkled, jaundiced intestines and

pronounced them all disgusting, abnormal. It was the ice floe

for her.

Instead of telling Elyse this, she puts her arm around her and

says with facile good humor, "Oh, that's not so. Eric was very

proud to tell me you were in investments. They'll get used to it."

Elyse looks at her for a moment, as if she doesn't recognize her. "I've been out for nearly twenty years."

"Well," Corinne shrugs and raises both eyebrows, "what can

you do?"

Corinne leaves Jeff in the dark about her trips to Chicago and

forwards her home phone to her cell, in case of an emergency

JAMES DOYLE

Woman Sewing

The grass around her mimes stitching a quilt of rising breezes into a wind.

The birds dovetail the sky in intricate

patterns, trailing currents of air like thread.

The trees moisten the nearest light, slide it

through the narrow eye of their upper branches.

A marmot draws its streamlined flanks out of its burrow with a quick twist.

A dozen corners of rain fold the picnic into their seams, like spindles or hieroglyphs.

She never looks up. Her fingers gloss the small world between their tips

with a busy silence. Touch itself

polished to the gleam of an epigram.

May-August 2005 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW 57

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.228 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 02:28:28 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions