Small Brown Suitcases

I can still see my mother's hands as she pressed and guided fabric under the foot of her sewing machine. Her fingernails were almost perfect ovals and she wore them long and unpolished. She did her sewing in a faded white room that had been added onto the back of the house. There were windows on all four walls but they were high up and all you could see out of them were swaying treetops and the blue southern California sky. That room was a big magic sewing box. All over the walls were pictures of women wearing dresses that my mother wanted to copy or get ideas from. Tumbled together were bolts of fabric in the corners, spools of thread on shelves, patterns, ironing boards, scissors, tailor's chalk, hemmers, sewing machine attachments and pincushions. The acrid smell of fabric dye would shoot up your nose, and the constant purr-purr of the sewing machine could become a roar. But the magic inside that room really came from my mother's hands, the hands I watched from my little girl height, eye level with the machine.
I remember the women who would come and stand in my mother's sewing room while she measured them and made notes on a yellow pad in her large flowing handwriting. She'd have a tape measure around her neck and pins in her teeth and would talk with words pushed through the pins. The women would stand on a little platform while my mother knelt down on one knee and went around the platform, talking with her pins-in-the-teeth voice as she measured and basted their hems. I don't know if it was because she was down on one knee and they were up on a platform, but when the women would come, my mother always seemed to get smaller. She'd tell me to be real good and real quiet because Mrs. So-and-So was a very important person who brought her lots of customers. It scared me when my mother told me to be good. I'd do my own kind of shrinking down on one knee back into the corner, terrified that if I did something wrong I would be bustled back again to the Little Flower Orphanage and left there for another two years until my father could come to get me.
My mother sewed for pale, skinny women with long white faces and dark shiny hair done up in smooth rolls on the tops of their heads. They wore a lot of perfume and they flashed and tinkled with bracelets and earrings. To me, they weren't not nice, but they weren't nice either. I was a little bit afraid of them when they were there and a lot afraid of them for my mother. It seemed to me that they had a power over her that could make her crumble down to the floor right off that carefully planted knee. It also seemed to me that, if they wanted to, it would be much easier for them to make her cry than it would be for me and that unlike me, they wouldn't care much if they did.

I remember one time my mother took me to a department store whose name she spoke barely above a whisper.
"Saks Fifth Avenue," she breathed. We were going there to return Mrs. Moskowitz's dress for her.
"But why'd Mrs. Moskowitz buy a dress she didn't want?" I asked.
"Oh, it's not that she didn't want it. She wanted it all right. She just wanted me to copy it and make it for her at half the price."
I felt ashamed when I heard my mother lying to the sales clerk about how the dress just didn't fit. I could feel that we didn't belong at Saks Fifth Avenue, and I felt that the clerk knew it too. I saw then just how far my mother would go to keep Mrs. Moskowitz happy and I hated everybody in the world for making it so, including my mother.
Later in my life, when I was a grown woman with babies of my own, that same shameful feeling crawled over me one morning when I got a phone call from my mother. I had been surprised to hear from her as she didn't call me often. She had kept on sewing and I had kept on being the fearful, good little girl in the corner - - not a formula for closeness. So when she told me in a shaky voice that she wanted to tell me a secret, it made me uncomfortable. In fact, I didn't want to hear her secret at all. She and my sister had always gotten along better. Why don't you tell her? But I didn't say what I wanted to say and my mother began her story.
When she was first married, my mother had been left alone to make her way with me and my sister.
"You girls were both in diapers and your father was overseas fighting in the war." She got a job in a factory making purses from pieces of scrap velvet.
"It was a sweatshop."
But the shop boss liked her work and slipped her a few extra dollars every now and then. One night, he asked her to stay and have some coffee with him after work.
"You must be lonely. A cup of coffee won't hurt."
But she didn't trust him.
"I was worried about leaving you with grandmom," she said. "You know how she hated to baby-sit. But I was afraid to tell him no, he was my boss. He could've made things hard for me. I stayed late ...several nights."
There was silence on the phone.
"Mom?"
"He raped me."
"Oh God, Mom ..."
"I thought I was pregnant. He gave me some medicine to 'help' with the pregnancy."
She fed some of the medicine to the cat.
"It turned out the medicine wasn't poison. And I wasn't pregnant. I couldn't deal with it, the rape and all. That's why I put you and Loretta in the orphanage."
"But, Mom ..."
" ...If I'd been pregnant, she would have been twenty-six years old."
My stomach lurched. She? What was my mother really saying? I could hear her telling her customers one thing or another to gain their sympathy when she couldn't deliver their orders on time. I saw all the velvet drawstring purses she always had lying around her sewing room. I even had one she'd given me to play with, which I had taken to the orphanage with me. Why had she kept all those reminders around?
My mother's voice broke in. "Orphanages aren't such bad places, are they, Melanie?"
"Well, ....no. Mom." ... not if you don't count being three years old and watching your mother walk away in her pink high heeled shoes, the hem of her blue skirt bouncing, and her never turning around to wave good-bye. Or if you don't count never seeing her again for the entire two years you're there because she never comes to visit. Or if you don't count that you don't know what you did that was so awful that your mother would pack you and your one-year-old sister up, all your clothes fitting into two small brown suitcases, and drop you off at a place filled with women who wore long black skirts with long black veils who could hardly speak English and couldn't speak Italian and who barely spoke to you at all.
I wanted to tell my mother that at an orphanage you learn to take care of your one-year-old sister yourself because nobody else can make her stop crying. And that you figure out how to get people who don't know you and don't care about you to like you. And that you finally pretend that you don't have a mother at all so that you won't keep falling into that hole in your stomach. I wanted to tell my mother that after all the time that I was there I had adapted myself to it and that when I heard I was going home, I didn't want to go home, I wanted to stay. The orphanage had become my home.
One day the nuns dressed me and my sister up and sent us out to the porch to wait.
"Your father's coming for you."
Who was he?
There were no suitcases this time, there was nothing to put in them. We were wearing other little girls' clothes. After two years, the ones we came in didn't fit us.
I saw a man walking across the grass toward us. He was tall and thin and he was taking long, eager steps, to close the gap between how far he had come and this moment. He had a big white smile on his face. His hair was black and he had his arms out.
I wanted to tell my mother that, after all, my father had turned out to be the best mother I ever had.
But that's not what she wanted to hear.
"...no, Mom, orphanages aren't such bad places."
She and I never spoke about the orphanage again, or her secret again, or even that telephone conversation again.

I don't remember that my father was ever in or even around my mother's sewing room. I don't remember that my sister was ever there either. It seemed to be a room separate from the rest of the world, a world of its own, a room that included only my mother, her customers, and me. While I was there I always hoped that my mother would teach me to sew, but she never did.
"Just watch," she'd say.
I never did learn about sewing from sitting inside my mother's sewing room and watching her sew. Instead, looking back on it, I learned about desperation and frustration and despair and fear. I learned about humiliation and class distinctions and depression. I learned that by keeping your head down, close to the needle, you maybe wouldn't see that the rest of your world was not what you wanted at all, that in the rest of your world all the seams were crooked and frayed, that men couldn't keep their zippers up, and that you yourself could be buttonholed into a life not much bigger than four walls because you could sew.
Eventually my mother went to work for a large department store in Scottsdale, Arizona, from which she finally retired as head seamstress. She was almost eighty years old when she died of complications from Alzheimer's disease. I vividly remember the day when I, along with my father, dropped her off at the nursing home from which she would never return. I was pulling out of the parking space to go home when I noticed a small brown suitcase of my mother's that had yet to be carried in. For a moment, I thought I saw a three-year-old little girl standing behind it looking back at me.