Report from an Independent Chapter of the embroiderers’ guild of america
First, a caveat. For reasons of discretion, our chapter must remain anonymous. Do not confuse ours with the established local chapter, the one that bears the name of our little town, as we are neither an offshoot nor an affiliate. Our chapter shall be independent and our membership consist of only two, my grandmother and myself. For the record, we are neither quilters, cross-stitchers, or aficionados of beadwork or crewel. We favor the simple methods my grandmother learned as a girl: the chain stitch, the running stitch, the stem and satin stitches. The art of needlework is poised to become a lost one, and who can say if the custom will survive? My grandmother sees little use in it and no benefit to me to pass it along. So I glean what I can, knowing there was a time when girls like my grandmother took up embroidery for a purpose. It was a demonstration of sorts, of fitness for marriage.
At my age she was already accomplished. I offer as evidence the objects on the walls of her house: silken panels depicting carriages that run on streets of golden plait-stitches; pillow covers that display skill in the use of metallic thread; a border for a photo-plate of my grandfather done up in bottle green vines and garnet-colored flowers. My grandmother is puzzled by my enthusiasm for these objects and sees no point in explaining how it’s done. What use, she asks, could a girl like me have for embroidery? Girls do other things now, she observes, though what it is they do, neither of us can say.
That said, my first act as founder of our newly formed chapter is to name myself record keeper. Though in truth, at fourteen I seem least qualified for the task. My fingertips are still fleshy and unscarred, there is not one pock mark from a needle’s head. I appoint myself chiefly because of a skill for which I can take no credit: I am the sole individual in our membership who both reads and writes in English.
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We meet each afternoon. Meetings are held at my grandmother’s and run from three to seven in the evening when the non-embroidering faction of the family, my mother, comes for me after work. Please note our meetings are more frequent than those set forth by the guild. Credit for that goes to my mother. To her it makes no difference how I spend these hours, only that I’m here when she phones at three, and waiting on the front steps when she comes for me at seven.
Our independent chapter has only recently formed. For some time I’d been spending afternoons on my own, accustomed to the bus pass and latchkey and the empty apartment where after school, as my mother instructed, I opened the door for no one and took messages on the phone. But I had reached a certain age, aware that beyond the apartment lay the unincorporated, unpeopled streets of our town. That those streets were empty did not matter: I longed to see them. I spent afternoons wandering the sparse commercial strip where tinted windows screened secondhand goods from the sun, and in the German bakery, an ancient styrofoam wedding cake stood crumbling on its piers. Some days I went to the library, the sole user of the Historical Room, where riveted by the must of old artifacts, I’d go looking for mention of my grandparents. Watched by the librarian keeping sentry at her desk, I leafed through little-read periodicals or peer at ephemera in the locked case. My grandparents had come from far away and remained longer than most, yet their arrival seemed to go unannounced and their decades here unnoticed. In the library’s crumbling rail timetables and tattered laundry lists, I couldn’t help but glean that a similar end might befall my own as yet unwritten history.
From the library, I often went to my grandmother’s. I would find her waiting, seated in her chair, a few roses wilting in a shallow bowl beside her. Her sons had left Los Angeles—my father most recently—for the separate places in California, but there were telephone calls and cards like the ones displayed on her sewing cabinet, a crush of Christmas and Easter greetings crowded atop the tatted runner. She still cooked in the morning, as she did when my grandfather was alive, but the kitchen was otherwise dark most of the day. For my grandmother, the house, like her life, had come to a standstill. Nearly all her friends had died and each year more disappeared, the immigrants from Damascus and Beirut who’d flourished in this corner of our town. Their children moved away, the houses were sold, the fig trees uprooted and replaced with aganpathus and azalea—the kinds of familiar shrubs planted along certain boulevards in hopes of bettering our little community. Once, I saw plans for such a project at the library. The exhibit featured timelines and historical sepia plates contrasted with color renderings of the future. The town my grandmother remembers exists somewhere in between, yet goes unmentioned in accounts of local history.
On that same visit to the library I discovered a notice for the Embroiderers’ Guild of America. I read with curiosity its mission to celebrate heritage, its goals to educate, research and preserve—the very goals I’d set for myself in learning my grandmother’s art. I knew the prospect of attending such a meeting would seem odd to my grandmother. What need had she for convening with strangers to discuss embroidery? Yet the excursion had its appeal: it was the nearest thing to the social calls she’d once made, dressed in a good suit and seasonal hat, a sack in hand of fruit picked that morning. For something that resembled those vanished afternoons, I wagered my grandmother was willing to countenance strangers.
And in fact she was, once she learned where we’d be going. Our hostess lives in a large house at the top of a well-known avenue, a majestic, deodar-lined route that runs toward the mountains. Originally that street was the ingress to a five-thousand acre parcel owned by one of our town’s first landowners, a man who envisioned a grand estate along the foothills at the top. The project never saw construction, but one hundred years later, it’s men like him who are remembered—the enterprising forward thinkers for whom the hamlets across Los Angeles are named. This particular lane is one of the most exemplar in our town, sheathed in a nocturnal cover of boughs, lined with houses that stake their claim with silvered redwood and foundations of river rock. And this was where my grandmother and I arrived on the stated afternoon, as interested observers of the local chapter of the Embroiderers Guild of America.