Swallow the Ocean by Laura Flynn Page B

the same seam.
    The table was covered with her sewing materials: piles of fabric, some with thin patterns pinned to them, bobbins, thimbles, plastic cases of sewing needles, a plump cushion sprouting straight pins, packets of buttons and snaps still on the cardboard, and rolls of fat white elastic that come wound like shoelaces, which my mother sewed into the waists of the pants she made for us.
    She had a large clear plastic box for storing spools of thread. When I was younger I loved to play with the thread, rearranging the spools to make new patterns with the colors, putting them in the order of the rainbow. I’d go through the little compartments and examine the buttons my mother collected: tortoiseshell, bone, metal, gold, brass, and silver. Now the box yawned open on the table. Half the spools of thread were missing from their pegs, buried under the fabric, or fallen under the table, where they would in time unwind and tangle with stray scraps of elastic, or the black cords of zigzag edging my mother sometimes sewed on blouses. Already the thick black basting thread was twined with the yellow measuring tape and lacing its way across the long formal table where we used to eat.
    “It depends,” my mother said, in answer to my question about the Mississippi. She got up heavily from the chair and dug the New York Times Atlas out of a pile of books on the floor in the corner of the dining room. She showed me the fat blue line of the Mississippi River running clear down the middle of the country. She pointed out the town on the banks of the Mississippi in southern Illinois where she was born. I decided that was where we would cross.
    I passed back through the living room, joining Loretta Lynn briefly for the second verse of “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Since my father had left, we’d had this strange new music—Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton, and Glen Campbell—on all the time. Foreign, twangy, alien, mournful, this music was from some part of the country, some way of life I was not familiar with. The singers rolled out their words in a deep, slow complaint, drawing out the vowels as if each one had to be carried up from the coalmine by hand. It was not a happy music. But the lyrics were great, the songs told stories, and it was easy to sing along. You could usually guess what was coming—these singers went for the rhyme, no matter how far the stretch. Only my tongue tangled trying to get “hard” to rhyme with “tired.”
    Since my mother had determined not to leave the house at all that summer, Sara and I did the grocery shopping. Every few days we made a trip to a mom-and-pop store five blocks from our house, bringing home all we could carry in a single trip. Sara was eleven. I was seven. My mother would write out a list for us on adding machine paper while we got dressed to go outside, pulling on our homemade duds, polyester tops, and elastic-waist pants, searching out our tennis shoes from the piles in the living room or bedrooms. If we couldn’t get a brush through our hair, we’d tie a bandana over it.
    In the store Sara would hold the scrolling list in her hand and send me out for two or three items at a time. We’d meet back at the cart to consult the list again. Inevitably, there were things we couldn’t find. Then we’d whisper together in the aisle, weighing whether to ask for help. The owner, the butcher, and the checkout guys all knew us. They knew my mother too, from before when she’d shopped with one or another of us in tow. They were unfailingly nice to us. We found this mortifying.
    Asking for help was dicey because, though the grocer could easily find the items on the list, he did not appreciate the importance of getting the brand my mother asked for. Hunt’s tomato paste was good; Del Monte no good, in a way we could not explain. We found everything on our own and tried to get in and out of the store before anyone could ask if we needed help.
    The vegetable freezer we faced together. The