The machine was small like a toy version of an adult-sized Singer, but the black iron and tarnished steel felt heavy. Its market back in the late 1920s and early ‘30s might have been young girls with little hands who wanted to sew like their mothers, but the machine functioned properly then as it did now, if anyone by chance wanted to sew using a miniature Singer with a hand crank. The base had holes in it, though, so the sewer could bolt the apparatus fast to a wooden tabletop. I imagined my mother as a precocious child leaning over the thing, tongue stuck out the corner of her pursed lips, hair trimmed into a Prince Valiant. She was stitching together small, colored pieces of fabric, expertly crafting outfits for her dolls, the needle head plunging through, down and up, repeatedly and menacingly. The mechanism squeaked slightly with each cycle. Gold letters of the brand and of the official Singer seal proudly said Americana.
It occurred to me that my mother probably enjoyed her sewing machine as an escape from her mother, not to emulate her. “Granny” we called her mother when I was a youth, and I remember visiting her in Charlotte, North Carolina only once or twice. She had treated my mom horribly with a regular stream of admonishments, verbal slaps apparently born from an acute personal bitterness. My mother’s father had been a successful businessman who owned one of the first cars in Charlotte. One night on a business trip he suffered an attack of appendicitis, and a drunk surgeon stitched my grandfather’s innards into his wound after the emergency operation. He died a year later. That was 1926, and my mother was six years old.
My mother attended Queens College in Charlotte when she was of age but dropped out to work full time at The Charlotte News as a feature writer. She took bi-plane rides, gigged at night for frogs, escorted Eleanor Roosevelt twice through the city’s projects, and wrote articles on all of her adventures. She was a hit. Then, the war brought a handsome army officer to town whom she married after a month-long courtship and began her life as an army wife and mother.
Years later, the fifth of five children, I walked alongside my mom through one of those new, gargantuan stores that sold and smelled of everything from shotguns to allergy meds to veggie patties to finely crafted clothes made in China, and she suddenly confessed into a temporary silence as we leisurely walked along, “I always wanted to be a dancer.” To me, she was June Allyson and Claudette Colbert, but a dancer? It never occurred to me. My shoulders slumped forward a little. I felt like an accomplice in the crime of stealing her dream, and I began to wonder how many compromises she had made throughout her life.
I placed the little sewing machine carefully back on the bookshelf, the sturdy tool now relegated to curious bookend. We were gathered, my siblings and I, in the den of our folks’ home after my mother had joined my father in the ground. It was time to see what artifacts of their lives wound up in whose care. I stared at the small machine from my mother’s youthful southern days. I saw a technology that still worked, if anyone took the trouble.
