Thursday, May 19, 2005
Needlepoint
Of all the people who ride my bus, she may be the quietest: that may be what ultimately brought her to my attention in the first place.
She is always discreetly dressed, wearing cosmetics that enhance her natural beauty, rather than imposing a false face over her true one. Her hair is beautifully glossy black and rail-straight, parted neatly and falling in thick twin cascades past her shoulders. She dresses conservatively, mostly in black, with dark stockings and low shoes of good quality; a capacious purse rests in her lap. Her eyes are large and dark and her skin is sepia-olive, a color that just about demands to be tasted - though samples are distinctly not on offer.
When I see her, if I see her, she’s on an inward-facing seat when I board the bus on my way to work. Her self-containment and self-fulfillment beam out at me on those bleary mornings, as I stumble past her, not even causing a ripple in her concentration. She inspires in me an aspiration of attainable serenity.
Is she young? I think so; I think she’s not yet 35. Is she married? Yes, a thick, simple ring adorns the appropriate digit, from which a heavy stone glints spectra in the gloom of our dawn transit. Is she pretty? Though her gaze is in her lap or on her work, and she never advertises her charms, it’s impossible to overlook her loveliness. Is she Asian, or Pacific Islander? Chicana? South American? She is exotic in appearance – that’s all I can tell from how she looks, tawny and ochre and deep kohl black.
Her gaze is in her lap or on her work. Her work is always, and never, changing: a small stiff white mesh rectangle with a simple abstract pattern of boxes and lines in the middle. It could be a simplified Chinese ideogram, or a Native American icon of some sort, or something else from a culture I haven’t even considered. It looks to me like it should mean something, but I have no idea what. I think that it changes, too, from time to time, as she completes her task: calmly, carefully, steadily pulling a length of yarn through the rigid card, up through one hole, down through the next, stitching a sea of purly white that washes right up against an ambiguous angular geometry woven in bright contrasting red, and then filling in the lakes with white again, leaving only a thick carmine outline.
She stitches from when I board, all the way downtown. When she needs more yarn, she pulls it from her bag and gets it working with graceful efficiency. She works fast, too, filling the space, plugging the holes, turning gaps into links and transforming emptiness into a fabric. At the pace she maintains, she must finish a couple of these pocket-sized patches every week. I’d love to know what she does with them, but for the time being, I’m just taking some vague comfort in knowing that her handiwork – whatever it is – continues.