Crônica by Lorena Limongi
Everybody’s got a daydream, and mine was learning how to sew.
Some daydreaming, I found, isn’t meant to leave the realm of the dreamer’s mind.
Alas, what could possibly be bad about it? There is virtue to sewing. To become a seamstress is to disengage from the cycle of blatant consumerism, to reconnect with the past, to become one with the process of creation.
It was a noble pursuit, I’ll give it that. I had the best of intentions. The idea came about sometime early in May, when I decided my shopping habits were unsustainable, and like most women, I made the mistake of thinking I was the problem: “I have the wingspan of a bald eagle,” I’d tell you, “Sara Bellum legs, a torso like an accordion if it had been run over by a four-wheeler.” How kind. But it’s true: when I bought clothes off the internet, their arrival in the mail was usually just a big, sad bag of disappointment. Going shopping in person wasn’t any better. Women’s clothes today don’t fit women’s bodies, point blank period. But my contempt for mass standardization across all aspects of life is a topic for another day: the point is, I was going to learn how to sew.
I began to plan for it thoroughly. I bought a box where I put all my shiny new sewing equipment. I collected yards of beautiful fabric from Joann (rest in peace) and Michaels and the local vintage stores, because all the ladies browsing those same aisles told me that sooner or later I’d become addicted to buying fabric, so might as well start early.
The sewing machine came last, and it came by accident. I got a text from a friend of a friend, word had gotten out of my new future hobby. He had a sewing machine that had been gathering dust in his attic since his divorce. A beautiful Singer 150th Anniversary edition, not that either of us knew what that meant.
“How much?”
“Free to a loving home.” And what a loving home mine will be!
I drove an hour and a half for it, the whole time imagining myself poring over my dining room table, making a pair of pants long enough for my legs and that fit just right at the waist. No more online carts! No more disappointing trips to Goodwill! I would be the most prolific hobbyist seamstress to ever grace my generation…
The Singer 150 had a white plastic covering on. The whole drive home, I hadn’t dared peek under it. Now that we were alone, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I took its cover off in a crazed fit of passion and threw it to the floor. We then looked at each other with suspicious minds. I felt dirty. I felt like a diffident, inexperienced groom facing his unwilling bride.
So I asked, “Can I touch you?”
It said nothing.
I clumsily put the cover back on, and I put it up on the shelf of my office, already cluttered with sewing equipment. It was the least I could do. Anxiety crept into my senses. No more did I feel like a passionate future creator. I wasn’t even a lover. I was something much worse.
I didn’t look at the Singer for days. The tension might’ve killed me, if the guilt didn’t first. Had I made a mistake? I couldn’t sew. I didn’t know how. I thought of asking for help, but that’d be a thorough admittance of defeat. Should I bring another into our broken home, before I’d even had the chance to prove my worth on my own? I knew that was better than letting it gather dust, as it had before. But pride and shame are the greatest of allies to one other, and powerful enemies to the rest of us.
The next week, I tried again. With apologetic hands, I took the Singer off the shelf and took it to my dining room table.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Silence lingered.
I grabbed a piece of cloth, one that came inside the pocket of the Singer’s cover. I attempted one singular straight seam. No disaster ensued, but no triumph either. The needle obeyed the command of my foot on the pedal, and I had some sort of resemblance of control for about half a minute, until I realized that I had not properly fixed the bobbin and I had not actually sewn anything.
I sighed, put the covering back on, and placed it on top of my office’s little closet. Sometime that same week, I went to goodwill and bought myself an ill fitting polka-dot dress. “I can just take it to the seamstress,” I told myself.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.