My hands are rough and chapped, as they have been for years, but now, as I sit with the dress, I’m surprised to realize they’re not callused. Not in the places they used to be.
Baba Rose never let me use thimbles. She said that they dulled precision and that detailed embroidery couldn’t be accomplished with a thimble. Under her supervision, I let my index finger get raw and bloody and then get strong enough that I barely felt the throb of pushing a needle through even the thickest wools. But now I no longer have a seamstress’s hands; my index finger is no more or less battered than any other part of me.
“Breine said you needed a pair of scissors?”
I look up. Josef, standing a few feet away.
Shirt open at the throat, the hollow in his neck drawing my attention in a way I wish it wouldn’t. Now that he’s standing in front of me, I realize I wouldn’t have known what to say to him, anyway, even if he had been around these past few weeks. I don’t know why he keeps pulling away, but I know it exhausts me and makes me feel embarrassed.
“Scissors?” he says again, and now I see he’s holding a pair in his hand.
“You’re back,” I say.
“Just this morning.”
“I hope you had a nice trip,” I say stiffly, not allowing myself to say anything else, especially anything that would reveal how much I’d noticed his absence. “And I already have regular scissors. I was looking for pinking shears.”
“What are those?”
“They have a serrated edge that keeps the silk from fraying.”
“Ah,” he says. “She didn’t specify that.” Now I look closer at the ones he’s holding: silver-colored with narrow, tapered blades. “These are for the horses’ manes when they get burrs or tangles. I washed them,” he adds. “But it doesn’t sound like they’re what you’re looking for.”
“Let me see.” I take the scissors from him, run my finger along the blade, test the weight in my hand. “These are actually sharper than the ones I have. I’ll use them if you don’t mind.”
“Of course. I brought them for you.”
But then he doesn’t leave. He sits down at the table. A respectful distance but the seat next to me, just the same, which I try to ignore as I begin my work. First, I use a small, borrowed paring knife to pick loose the stitching on the bottom hem. It’s a tedious, delicate motion that I’m terrified to mess up, so I do it slowly, my nose only a few centimeters from the material. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Josef get up but return a few minutes later. He’s fetched a lamp to give me more light.
And then I can feel him looking at me. Not at my face, but at my hands, which somehow feels more personal.
The grooming shears he’s lent me are unwieldy at first. The blades don’t have an angle to them, so I can’t cut the fabric directly along the table as I normally would, which makes it harder to create a straight line. If I’d realized Josef was going to watch me, I would have used a ruler and penciled in where I planned to cut. But I make it around the circumference of the dress anyway, cutting to where I’d earlier marked the dress against Breine’s legs, scavenging fabric for me to fashion the sash I’d envisioned and to patch over any parts of the dress that are stained or threadbare. Now that I’ve shortened the garment, it’s time to rehem it. Before I can look for a pin, Josef has handed me one. And then he hands me another, and another after that. My hands are sure on the silk, and I’m remembering what it feels like to touch something expensive, what it feels like to do something I am skilled at and have done a hundred times.
As I work, the other tables in the dining hall start to fill again—card games and letter writers and other people just trying to get away from their cramped quarters for a little while. The dead-quiet background rises into a low, friendly hum.
The next pin he hands me, our hands brush together. I secret a glance to see if he’s done it on purpose, because I’m doing it on purpose: I reached too wide, so that instead of my fingers closing around the pin, they close around his angular knuckles. But as soon as I do that, Josef jerks his hand away. And then, while I flush in embarrassment, he slides the butter dish over to within my reach so he won’t have to hand me anything anymore.
“Did you hear about Miriam?” he asks quietly.
My face still burning from his subtle rejection, I nod. “I saw her in Mrs. Yost’s office. She found the hospital? It’s wonderful news.”
But Josef is shaking his head, his expression dark. No, he’s saying. No, that’s not what happened.
“Josef, what about Miriam? She didn’t find her sister?”
He swallows. “She found her sister. But it was too late.”
The fabric falters in my hand. “What do you mean, it was too late? Her sister is… dead?”
“She heard this afternoon.”
“But this afternoon is when I saw her. She was about to make a call.” I cut myself off, realizing. When I saw her, she was about to call the right hospital. She was minutes away from receiving the worst news of her life.
Yellow silk swims in front of my eyes, blurry and nonsensical. Miriam and her letters. Her hundreds and hundreds of letters. Miriam and the hope on her face when she peered into Mrs. Yost’s office a few hours ago. Should I have offered to stay with her when she made the call? Instead, she had to receive the news alone.
“But her sister was alive,” I protest. “She was alive after the war. She was taken to a hospital.”
“She was too sick,” Josef says. “It happened just a few weeks after liberation. She couldn’t get better.”
“But still, Miriam could have had a few weeks. A few extra weeks with a person is a lifetime.”
“I know.”
“And the only reason she didn’t get it was because of some, some clerical error that told her the wrong hospital.”
“I know,” Josef repeats.
I’m filled with fury and anguish. She survived the war. Miriam’s sister survived torture, she was alive, she was rescued, and she died anyway. Meanwhile, Miriam sat in our cottage and wrote hundreds of letters.
“Anyway, I didn’t know if anyone had told you,” Josef says. “And I thought you’d want to know. She won’t be back in your cottage for a few days; she asked administrators if she could have a private room in the infirmary so she could grieve alone.”
I nod, unable to find the right words. Instead, I focus on making the pins and then the needle go through the fabric, one stitch at a time. One thing that I know how to fix, one broken thing I can repair. Tiny, even, incremental. I focus on my work and hold my brain in place, something I’ve gotten better at doing these past few weeks, something that sewing helps me do. It’s easier to stay in reality when I’m anchored by the tangibleness of fabric.
“You’re very good at your work,” Josef whispers finally, rising from the table.
“You don’t have to go.”
“I don’t want to disturb you.”
“But I just invited you to stay,” I protest.
“I know you have only until tomorrow to finish Breine’s dress.”
“Josef, that’s bullshit.” Now I lay down my work and glare up at him, fueled by my anger over what happened to Miriam’s sister and the injustices we’re all still feeling every day. “If you want to leave, you should leave. Fine. But you can’t tell me that I need you to leave when I just told you to stay. You can’t hold my hand in the wagon and tell me about your family and then ignore me. It’s not fair. I can’t tell whether you like me at all, or don’t like me, or want to be my friend, or want to be something—I can’t tell how you feel at all.”