Crewel World Read online

  “Yes,” Margot said. “Yes, I can do it that quickly for a thousand dollars.”

  “Oh, wonderful, I’m so pleased! Do you want something down on it?”

  “No, but payment in full on delivery.”

  “Yes, of course. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Mrs. Lundgren.”

  When the door closed on Mrs. Lundgren, Shelly said, “You were waiting for her to up the offer.”

  “No, but I should use that tactic more often.” Margot touched the frame of the horse, adjusting its position very slightly. It had come back from the framer only four months ago, and was Margot’s finest effort at an original needlepoint to date. “Mrs. Lundgren knows a lot of women with time on their hands and money to pay for ways to fill it. She may not hang that picture in her Edina house, but she’ll show it around before she takes it to Honolulu. A thousand-dollar price makes the artwork more attractive to some people, who may come in looking for something to hang on their own walls. But it might also bring customers wanting to save money by doing the needlework themselves.” Margot smiled and Shelly laughed out loud. There were women, wealthy women, who shorted their families on groceries in order to buy more canvases, more silk floss, more gold thread, more real garnet beads for the endless stream of needlepoint and counted cross-stitch work that had become an obsession. Margot sometimes felt like a dope peddler.

  When Shelly finished the window, she started dusting. She paused when she came to an old rocking chair with a cushion on it, the cushion almost hidden under an enormous, fluffy white cat with tan and gray patches along its spine, sleeping on the cushion.

  “Is Sophie nice and comfy?” cooed Shelly, stroking the animal. Sophie lifted her head to yawn, displaying teeth absurdly small in a cat her size. Then she put her head back down as if to sleep again, but a loud purr could be heard.

  Margot had found the cat bedraggled and hungry in her shop doorway one morning and took her in. She had meant for her to live in the apartment over the store, but Sophie had followed her down one morning and been so quietly ornamental—and friendly to anyone who stopped to stroke her—that Margot had allowed her to stay.

  Margot picked up her knitting and made an exclamation. She’d done two rows instead of one.

  Shelly said, “Do you think Betsy will like it here in Excelsior? This is kind of a quiet place.”

  “Excelsior has plenty of things going on.” People who lived in the small town were gratefully aware of its charms and Margot was among those who worked hard to preserve them. “Anyway, I have a feeling that she was looking for a refuge. Though, of course, how she’ll like actually living in one we’ll have to see.”

  Margot began pulling out the extra row. She had carved a safe niche in this small Minnesota town and stayed there content even after her husband died three years earlier.

  Now Betsy was seeking a place to be safe in for a while. Apparently she had lost that zest for adventure, perhaps even grown a little afraid. Margot hoped she could give her sister what she needed. She picked up her knitting and began binding off.

  Betsy wasn’t scared, not really, just ... nervous. It was one thing to be twenty-five and newly divorced, and not own a home or have a job with medical insurance or a retirement account whose deposits are matched by your employer. It’s quite another to be fifty-five and be once again in that same boat.

  Betsy wasn’t averse to adventure. Crossing the mountains alone in an old car had brought moments that sent the blood rushing along with its old verve.

  On the other hand, she’d spent her one night in Las Vegas at the Fremont Street light-and-sound show and having a drink in a beautiful old bar, followed by a phone call to her sister and then turning in early.

  When she saw an exit sign pointing to the Grand Canyon, she did give a moment’s thought to giving the Japanese tourists a thrill by throwing herself off the rim. But she didn’t. In her experience such low thoughts, if not yielded to, tended to be brief and followed by something more interesting.

  Later, crossing Iowa, Betsy remembered reading somewhere that while men are scared of birthdays ending in zero, women are frightened by birthdays ending in five. Certainly Betsy was. Fifty-five is no longer young, even when considered while you were in good spirits. Fifty-five can see old age rushing toward it like a mighty tree axed at the root. All too soon it would be crash: sixty! And if she reached retirement age with no savings to speak of, she might live out the last years of her life in one small room, fighting off the roaches for her supper of canned cat food.

  But Betsy had also read somewhere that there were good jobs going begging in the upper Midwest, and she had her sister who had kindly offered to put her up until she got her feet under her again. Okay, so her sister lived in a small town; that small town was near the Twin Cities. That meant two newspapers, two job markets, right next door to one another. Twice the number of chances to start over.

  And a ferocious Minnesota winter might be interesting, another adventure. After all, Betsy had grown up in Milwaukee, where the winters could also be hard.

  Betsy pushed the accelerator down a little, and the car responded. Good little car, acting as if it didn’t already have a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it. Ahead was the road sign saying WELCOME TO MINNESOTA. She hoped it didn’t smell of pig, like Iowa.

  Sometime later the freeway forked. Thirty-five-E went to St. Paul, 35W came into Minneapolis. Margot hadn’t mentioned this; her directions said to take I-35 into the Cities, and Highway 7 to Excelsior. Betsy chose Minneapolis; she had a notion that Excelsior was west of the Twin Cities and Minneapolis was the western twin. Right? She was pretty sure she hadn’t already missed an exit onto Highway 7; certainly she hadn’t missed an exit sign saying EXCELSIOR. A pity she had left the road atlas behind in an Omaha motel. She would stop at the next exit and buy a map.

  She saw a little strip mall just this side of an exit, featuring a store whose sign advertised GUNS LIQUOR PAWN. Despite this warning that the owner liked to live dangerously, she got off and made her way back to it on a frontage road. She didn’t go in; a store next door to it added to the explosive mixture by selling used snowmobiles and those noisy adult tricycles with puffy tires. But people who bought vehicles might also want maps.

  They did, and the store sold them. The man behind the counter helped her plan a route to Highway 7. “Thirty-five don’t cross 7,” he said. “So what you do, you stay on 35W till you get to 494, take 494 west to 100, which only goes north from there, and it’ll give you an exit onto 7. Go west and look for a sign.” He moved a grubby finger along the map as she watched. It seemed clear enough.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the map and folding it on the first try—Betsy was a traveler.

  “You bet.”

  Amazing, they really did say “you bet” in Minnesota, just like in that book on how to speak Minnesotan Margot had sent her one Christmas.

  Back on the highway, Betsy drove ten miles over the speed limit—she had to, if she didn’t want to be rear ended—and was so excited at the approach of the end of her journey that she didn’t really notice that though it was not yet September, the ivy climbing the wooden sound barriers on 35W was turning an autumnal red.

  2

  Margot was selecting colored silks for the T‘ang horse. She had her original needlepoint of it on the table, still in the frame, which had no glass in it. “I remember it was ten-oh-seven,” she murmured to herself.

  “What?” asked Shelly.

  “The blue color of the horse, I remember it was ten-oh-seven, ten-oh-five, and ten-oh-three.” She tried a skein of 1007 Madeira silk, which was a midnight-blue shade, against the neck and shoulder of the horse. “Still is, it seems.”

  “You have the most amazing memory,” remarked Shelly, coming to look.

  Margot smiled and preened a little, but said nothing. She had cut a blank canvas to the right size; it was on the table beside the horse, the olive-green skein on it. She put the blue silks beside the green. />
  But the creamy gold of the mane was harder to match. It was an odd color, not cream, not yellow, not gold. Nothing on her racks came close enough. She closed her eyes, thinking, then said, “I’m going upstairs for a minute.”

  Shelly waved assent and noticed that Sophie raised her head at the sound of the back door opening. Was it suppertime already? Shelly chuckled; Sophie was fat and cosseted now, but she had a long memory and was determined never to miss a meal again.

  Margot was back in three minutes, holding one partly used and two whole skeins of pale gold silk aloft. “I knew I had some left over!” she cheered. She gave Sophie a brisk rub just to share the joy. Sophie raised her rump and her bushy, tan-and-gray tail and purred ecstatically.

  Shelly laughed. “You and Sophie are so easy to make happy!” she said.

  “If I had gone up there and not found this, we’d all be singing another song,” said Margot, but pleasantly, because she had gone up and found it. She put the golden skeins beside the blue on the canvas. “Now we need chalk white for the legs and saddle.” She went to the silk rack and began examining the whites.

  Highway 7 was a divided highway, mostly under repair. Betsy wove her way among the white and orange pylons, concentrating fiercely in order not to switch lanes in the wrong direction and end up facing an oncoming truck. At the same time she was looking for a sign—and there it was: EXCELSIOR, with a warning that it was a left exit. Betsy followed the lane, which led up and over the highway and a railroad bridge. Then there was a thicket of high bushes, a red apartment building, and she pulled up to a stop sign marking an asterisk of intersections.

  Ahead were a little post office and the tree-shaded clapboard houses of a small town. Atop a steep hill on her left was a multiroofed Victorian house. A sign said it was the Christopher Inn Bed-and-Breakfast.

  On the right was a parking lot with a small carnival Ferns wheel in it, though no other rides were visible.

  A block later, at Water Street, was another stop sign. She was supposed to turn here, but which way? To the left the street was lined with old-fashioned, false-front brick stores; to the right, a block away, was a big blue lake with sailboats on it. Toward the lake, that’s what the directions said. She turned right.

  Just short of the lake was Lake Street—yes, that checked. A bar and grill with a wharf theme marked the comer. HASKELL’S, said the sign, which also checked. Betsy turned right. Two blocks later the lake disappeared behind a sprawling apartment complex of gray and white clapboards. She pulled over across the street from it, in front of an old, two-story, dark redbrick building. The middle one of the three shops had a pastel-colored sign hanging over the door: CREWEL WORLD, the letters done as if cross-stitched in various colors. From the D came an out-sized needle pulling yarn in a matching color. She had arrived.

  Something made Margot glance up as a car pulled to the curb. It was an older white hatchback, thickly layered with road dust, a woman driving. Margot had a feeling the license plates on it would be Californian.

  Shelly said, “Is that her? Is that her?”

  But Margot was on her way to the door, and didn’t answer, because what if it wasn’t? She opened it and watched the woman climb tiredly out on the driver’s side. She was about five-three, plumper than Margot remembered, her brown hair well streaked with gray. She was wearing jeans and an ancient green sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off above the elbow.

  And no glasses.

  “Betsy, how can you drive without your glasses?” she scolded before she could stop herself.

  “Contact lenses, of course,” replied Betsy, defense at hand, as usual. “Oh, Margot, I am so happy to see you!” She came blundering up onto the sidewalk, blinking away tears, to enter her sister’s welcoming embrace.

  An hour later Betsy was in Margot’s apartment. It was a nice place, with proportions at once unfamiliar and cozy. The rooms were small, with low ceilings. In an efficient space were two bedrooms and bath, living room, and kitchen. A dining area off the kitchen was too small to be considered a separate room, but it was lit by a window that overlooked a small parking lot behind the building. If Betsy cared to lean sideways, she could see her weary old car pulled up under a lilac bush. Betsy was weary herself, but at the same time wound up tight, her body still swaying to the remembered movements of her car on the highway, her ears a little stopped up.

  Last night, in a cheap motel in Omaha, she had been thinking of the ancient fable of the grasshopper and the ant. The prudent ant worked all summer, storing up seeds and dried fruit against the coming winter, while the grasshopper played in the sun. Then winter arrived and the grasshopper came knocking on the ant’s door, hoping for shelter. The ant had turned the grasshopper away.

  Margot had invited Betsy to come, but in that motel Betsy had worried that her sister might think of her as a grasshopper. What if Margot was critical, or worse, condescending? Betsy wouldn’t put up with that. Maybe she should just call tomorrow and say she’d changed her mind, she was going to Chicago.

  But Betsy had finished her trip to Minnesota and Margot had indeed seemed very glad to see her. On the other hand, this apartment wasn’t exactly the big fancy house Margot used to live in, back when she was married to Aaron Berglund. Betsy had thought Margot had been left a wealthy widow, but apparently not. Did the shop make enough for Betsy to have a lengthy free ride? Maybe she’d better look for a job pretty soon.

  Still, “I hope you’re planning on a nice, long stay,” Margot had said down in the shop, right in front of a witness, a woman with long hair in a knot. Sally was her name, or was it Shelly? Whoever, she unashamedly eavesdropped on everything the sisters said to one another. Margot had finally noticed it was making Betsy uncomfortable, and all three unloaded the car, carrying mismatched suitcases up the stairs.

  Margot had given her a quick tour of the apartment, told her to help herself to anything in the kitchen, and went back to work. Betsy had tried lying down on the comfortable bed in the guest room to take a nap, but was too wound up to sleep. She had wandered the apartment awhile, then gone to the refrigerator—eating when she couldn’t think of anything else to do was her worst fault—and poured herself a glass of milk, then took a couple of peanut-butter cookies from a cookie jar shaped like a pig—a hint, obviously, but it didn’t stop her.

  Now she sat at the little table in the dining alcove, trying not to think too much about the suitcases waiting to be unpacked.

  The building was only two stories high, so there were no apartments overhead. Margot’s apartment took up one end of the second floor, with a stairwell between it and the other apartments. Between its location and the old-fashioned solidness of the building, it was very quiet up here. Of course, it was a quiet little town, too; no fire and police sirens, no traffic’s roar. Even the lake’s little wavelets could hardly approach the sussurant crash of the Pacific. Oh, dear, she thought as her eyes began to sting, was she going to miss the ocean, too?

  No, no, she’d be just fine. She was here, in Excelsior, Minnesota, a nice little town, and welcome. She finished the milk and put one uneaten cookie back in the jar, put the glass into the sink, and as she did noticed the grubbiness of her hands. She went into the bathroom to wash, but when she looked at herself in the mirror, she changed her mind. Just washing her hands and face wasn’t going to do.

  The tub was a big old-fashioned porcelain one, with claw feet. Real porcelain tubs held the heat much better than fiberglass ones and were therefore great for long soaks. A long soak suddenly seemed very desirable. And here was a jug of bubble bath, herbal-scented, just waiting. So she filled the tub, peeled off her clothes, and sank gratefully into the bubbles. She’d forgotten to go get a paperback, but that was all right; she just closed her eyes and fell into a kind of doze. When she stirred herself half an hour later, and rinsed out her hair, and toweled off with one of the big, thirsty bath towels, she felt a whole lot better.

  She had put on fresh clothes and was halfway unpacked when she heard som
eone come in. “I’m home!” came Margot’s voice.

  Betsy found Margot in the kitchen. “Early closing tonight,” she said. She was measuring out a portion of lams Less Active for Sophie as the cat watched anxiously.

  “Can I help with supper?” asked Betsy.

  “No, the kitchen’s too small, especially with Sophie in it, too. You sit down and we’ll talk.”

  So Betsy sat at the round table in the dining nook and said, “How’s business?”

  “Not bad. Would you like to help out in the shop? With school starting, I’ll need to replace Shelly.”

  “Sure. But—um—I mean—” Because she needed a salary.

  “I pay six-ten an hour for beginners. Plus room and board, special for you.” Margot, gathering things from the refrigerator, chuckled.

  “Can you afford to do that?”

  “Of course I can. You don’t have to worry about that at all.” Margot looked around the door, face as surprised as her voice.

  “I don’t want to be a burden.”

  “You’re not a burden, and even if you were a burden, you wouldn’t be a burden, okay?”

  “Thanks. When do I start?”

  “How about Monday? That will give you tomorrow and the weekend to get settled in.”

  Supper was a tuna salad made with every kind of lettuce but iceberg, a little sweet onion only on Betsy’s salad—“I remember you like onions,” Margot said—a sprinkle of herbs, four large croutons, and a dressing that was mostly a flavored vinegar with just a smidge of olive oil. It came with a hot loaf of crusty bread that would have been even better with butter instead of a “lite” margarine that was mostly air and water.

  Afterward, over an herbal tea that was supposed to encourage the body to shed fat—Betsy was beginning to see how Margot stayed so trim—Margot said, “Would you like to take a walk and get a look at our city?”

  Betsy grinned. “City?”