Angel in the Parlor by Nancy Willard

Author:Nancy Willard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480481572
Publisher: Open Road Media

7

Becoming a Writer

I have been asked to give advice to young writers, but I can never endure advice unless it comes disguised as entertainment. So let me begin by telling you a story.

First I should explain that I grew up in Ann Arbor. My father taught chemistry at the university for forty-six years. And while I was growing up, ours was the only family I knew that did not buy its clothes in a department store. Spring and fall, an ancient lady would arrive at our house in a car nearly as weathered as herself. Her name was Ella. She came from Owosso, Michigan, and she stayed for a week. She would set up her portable sewing machine in our sun room and plug in her radio and ask us, What clothes did we want her to make us this season?

My mother and my sister prudently chose ready-made patterns from the big pattern books at Muehlig’s. My aunt sent Ella an assortment of dresses she’d bought on sale, with instructions to “fix them so I look like I have a little more on top and a little less in the behind.” I drew pictures of the dresses I wanted, leaning heavily on third-rate Victorian novels illustrated with consumptive young women in long skirts and blouses that ballooned at the shoulder and pinched at the wrist. To my girlfriends, who read Seventeen and wore cashmere sweaters and tailored skirts, I must have looked like the victim of a time warp. But Ella’s business was to sew, not to criticize. She would study my sketch, draw up a pattern, and send me forth to select the material.

Velvet, wool, muslin, corduroy, heaped on tables and folded on chairs, flooded the sun room with promises of better things to come. One by one the fabrics, ample as flags, submitted to Ella’s shears and took shape. She snipped, she basted.

“Try it on,” she said.

Whatever I tried on was always full of pins. Whichever way I turned, the dress hit me, needled me. I stood with my arms straight out, as if directing the invisible traffic of needles and thread, while Ella crept round me on her knees, taking the measure of the hem, her tape measure dangling around her neck like a stole, her mouth so full of pins that she seemed to have grown whiskers. I turned, she pinned, and her radio told us its troubles. We listened to “Portia Faces Life,” “Ma Perkins,” “Stella Dallas, Backstage Wife,” we listened to ads for Oxydol and Rinso, we heard how many boxtops of both you needed to send for your free recipe file and earrings. To this day when I read the story of creation in the book of Genesis, when I hear God commanding the light to come out of hiding and the earth to bring forth grass and creeping things and every beast after its own kind, I see them all falling from Ella’s shears, waking to life under her needle. And behind

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.