Grandma Irene taught Lucy how to sew pockets at the same time she taught her how to make a skirt. Skirts with pockets are much more complicated than skirts without, of course, but Grandma Irene was firm on her point—the one could not be made without the other.

“You always have to have a place to escape to,” Grandma Irene told Lucy, who was twelve and still thought sewing machines could smell fear. “Listen, Lucy, it’s important. You have to have pockets. You have to have something for yourself.” She said something else, too, after that, but that was what Lucy held onto.

Lucy’s grandma understood having things for herself. When she was alive, she lived in a first-floor, one-bedroom apartment with a tiny courtyard garden where she grew flowers in pots nestled between piles of round decorative pebbles. Lucy would stay with her on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school until her mom could come pick her up, or whenever she drove her parents crazy in the summers. She would draw pictures of dolphins and octopuses and sort through the pebbles in Grandma Irene’s garden, which was the best place on earth. There was always something fresh to the air, like a rainstorm had just come and gone, and the flowers, which faced a brick wall and must have had to fight for light, were always bright, always beautiful.

Grandma Irene leaves Lucy her sewing machine and half a yard of fabric embroidered with flowers. There’s no note, no message. Lucy wishes, desperately, that there was. She knows she wasn’t listening hard enough.

Lucy is seventeen. She is standing in her mother’s living room, holding beautiful fabric, thick with stitches, with time, with love, and she does not know what to do with it. Lucy has not touched her grandmother’s sewing machine in the last three years, since it was bundled up with the things from the first-floor apartment and the courtyard garden was traded for plastic flowers in a room with a curtain.

That night, Lucy takes the fabric with her into bed and strokes the stitches of the flowers. She wonders when her grandmother started working on the embroidery, when she finished it. She wonders, and between one touch to the fabric and another, she is somewhere else.

For a moment, her thumb on an embroidered poppy, Lucy is in her grandma’s living room. Grandma Irene is sitting in her big red chair in front of the TV, listening to an audiobook—one of her romance novels, probably—embroidering red petals.

She doesn’t see Lucy, or hear her when Lucy makes a pained noise—half sob, half wail. But she’s there, and Lucy can touch her bony shoulder, can smell the mix of laundry detergent and rose perfume that has always been Grandma, can have back what she’s lost.

Lucy hasn’t sewn in a long time, but she remembers the skirt she made when she was twelve, bright pink with an elastic waist and smooth pockets big enough to put rocks and shells in when she got to go to the beach.

She goes to a fabric shop and runs her hands over bolt after bolt of cloth until she finds a green fabric thick enough to hang well. The green is somewhere between the color of bright leaves in the swell of summer and a fresh-cut Christmas tree. Lucy also buys pins and elastic and ribbon, and she brings her haul back to her bedroom, where Grandma Irene’s sewing machine is on a table pushed up against the far corner. She sits on the corner of her bed and brushes her fingers against the purple of an embroidered tulip, and thinks about the pink skirt, about learning how to sew a pocket, and then she’s there.

Lucy, seventeen, looks at Lucy, twelve, where she sits at the kitchen table with an unwieldy pair of scissors, watching Grandma Irene. At first, Lucy, seventeen, just stands back and listens as Grandma Irene explains about pattern pieces, how the shape of the skirt will depend on the choices they make now.

Grandma Irene starts saying something about pockets, about what they hold, and Lucy can’t listen to it, won’t listen to it, not when it feels like everything she’s wanted to hold has slipped away from her. She clenches her fist, losing the touch of the embroidered flower in her fingers, and she’s gone again, back on her bed, chest pounding, clutching at the flowers her grandma left her.

Lucy makes a skirt out of the green fabric. She makes it a little too big and adds a tie at the waist instead of elastic, so she has room to grow into it. When she sews the side seams, she adds big pockets in carefully cut out halves of the embroidered fabric, with the nice side of the embroidery on the inside, easy to twist between her fingers.

Lucy goes back to that sewing lesson a lot. It’s easier than the unending pressures of homework and college and carrying the hopes of her parents on her back. Lucy, twelve, sits at the kitchen table with a pile of pins, and Lucy, seventeen, grows brave, grows greedy. She sees the way Grandma Irene looks at the young Lucy in front of her—fond, delighted, always loving—and she wants that for herself again.

So she steps up close to her younger self and leans forward, intending to rest her chin on the top of her own head. But when she tries, Lucy’s chin keeps sinking, and something fuzzy and unreal in the air starts to clear.

Lucy jerks her head back. She takes a deep breath, unnoticed by her past self or her grandmother, and then she sits on the chair her past self is sitting on. She arranges her hands to match Lucy, twelve, still putting pins along the seams of the bright pink fabric and chattering on about her article for the school newspaper, and lets her grandmother’s eyes rest on her. When she decides to stop pinning one-handed, to touch the tabletop instead, Lucy, twelve, follows her lead. Grandma Irene asks if she wants to take a break. This time, Lucy says yes, rewrites history, just for a moment.

The skirt takes Lucy anywhere she’s been. It takes her to the park by the apartment complex she lived in until she was nine, where the swings went so, so high; to the silent stillness of her bedroom before she painted it ocean green; to the Grand Canyon, where they went when she was thirteen and didn’t appreciate it enough.

When she doesn’t get into the college with the marine biology partnership program, she takes herself back to the tour, walks alongside her younger, more hopeful self, and wonders if she’s a ghostly presence there, haunting herself, trying to tell herself that potential can just as easily be nothing as something.

Lucy wears her skirt to the first day of intro biology, where she meets Jillian, who wears her brown hair in a French braid with cloth flowers woven in and invites Lucy along to a stand-up comedy meeting when Lucy asks what she’s writing in the margins of her notes. Lucy hates stand-up, but she goes. And when Jillian asks her out for milkshakes after, Lucy does that too. She sits in a booth across from Jillian and listens to her story about blackmailing her brother and thinks that maybe college won’t be so bad.

After Jillian breaks up with her a year and three months later, Lucy goes back to that night a lot. She sits in her old self again, nineteen inhabited by twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. She smiles differently. She leans in. She keeps a hand in her pocket and kisses Jillian at the end of the night, and nothing ever changes.

When Lucy is alone in her apartment on a Saturday night senior year, another email rejecting her from an internship with an aquarium added to her Don’t Look Gmail folder, she puts on her skirt and goes home, five years ago. High school Lucy is absorbed in homework in the dining room, but college Lucy wanders to the kitchen and watches her parents make dinner. Her dad chops onions, her mom sautés, and when the onions make her dad’s eyes water her mom laughs at him and kisses his cheek, and Lucy is there and not there.

After she graduates, Lucy moves in with Hannah, who was a biology tutor with her their junior year, and Hannah’s friends. Another month of rejection emails and no emails leads to a shitty job at a dying suburban mall. Lucy wears the skirt on days the manager with a purple streak in her hair is scheduled. She takes her ten-minute breaks and thrusts her hands into her pockets and goes anywhere else—the lake from the summer she was fifteen, the classrooms they practiced in for speech and debate, the board game nights she suffered through in college and misses now.

When she gets home, her roommates invite her out, ask if she wants to make dinner with them, and Lucy smiles and thanks them and goes back to her room to lean across a sticky table toward Jillian or to sit in front of the TV with Grandma Irene. All the people she’s loved who’ve left her are anchors.

These things are hers, she tells herself in the small hours of the morning, when her thumb has slipped and she’s staring at the smooth pale ceiling of her bedroom again.

Lucy’s roommates learn to stop asking if she wants to come out with them, to a movie, to a pretentious brewery, to the hot-air balloon festival. Lucy does and doesn’t visit home. When her mom calls, all she can hear is echoes of past conversations, snippets of wisdom she’s heard dozens of times before. If her mom starts a lecture on the phone, Lucy can go back and hear it the first time, over and over and over. Eventually, the phone calls seem superfluous, and she mostly stops picking up.

Lucy believes in moderation. Though she wishes she could wear the skirt everywhere, could always have the past at her fingertips, she doesn’t. She thinks about taking out one of the pockets and sewing individual flowers from it into the pockets of other pieces of clothing, but she doesn’t do that either. She’s a little afraid the magic would run out or dilute, that she wouldn’t be able to figure out how to untangle the roots and grass between each bloom, that something would snap with the slice of her scissors and leave her cut off from her past.

But even when she doesn’t have the skirt, she spends a lot of time staring into space, poking at the crevices in her memory, waiting to be back where she remembers how loved she was. She can feel herself reaching, reaching, reaching for something, and when she reaches, she feels thread at the tip of her fingers, tumbles back into what she knows.

It’s so much easier to comb through what she’s had and take what she can get than it is to try to shape the vast, undefinable ocean of her need into something small enough to ask for.

It’s a gray Saturday morning when Lucy turns twenty-four, a rare weekend day off. She wakes up late wondering if Jillian will send a passing “happy bday” text, if a butterfly or even a moth will land on her finger and she can pretend it’s a sign, if her roommates will offer to take her out to brunch. She puts on a nice top with her skirt, puts on a sweater instead of her usual hoodie.

But she comes out into the kitchen to find that her roommates have gone to the farmer’s market without her.

Lucy can feel it again, the reaching. It takes her breath away; she reels with it until she puts a hand on the counter. If she doesn’t find something to grab onto, she’s afraid she’ll snap the thin rod in the center of her torso that’s holding her upright. That she’ll break into soft pieces, nothing to hold her together and prop her up into the shape of a human woman.

Lucy puts her hand in her pocket.

She runs the tip of her index finger along the broad petals of a poppy and thinks of the first time her grandmother showed her how to make pockets.

Lucy has been here many times. She knows just when to sit, where to move her hands to be part of the moment. But this time, Lucy doesn’t follow along, just sits, half in and half out of her own body, and keeps a tight grip on the cloth in her pocket. She stays in the moment.

“You always have to have a place to escape to,” Grandma Irene is telling her. “Listen, Lucy, it’s important. You have to have pockets. You have to have something for yourself. But,” and here her eyes soften. She looks up, makes eye contact with the space six inches above twelve-year-old Lucy’s eyes, which happens to be right at eye level for Lucy, twenty-four and losing it. “Pockets are also for holding things. Things you’ll need later, and things you need right now, and things for other people. You can’t keep everything to yourself, either.”

“What if I want to,” Lucy says with her younger body’s mouth. “What if it’s easier?”

Grandma Irene shrugs. She always had an expansive, expressive shrug—palms up, eyebrows rising with her shoulders. “People want to give you something of themselves. You don’t have to take it. But you do have to give them something back, if you want them to know you. You have to do that for yourself, too. You have to figure out what you want to keep.”

Lucy frowns. She can feel the frown separating herself and her past self, and when she says, “I love you, Grandma,” she can feel the moment slipping in and out of focus when Grandma Irene looks at her.

“I love you too, honey.”

Lucy doesn’t wait for her roommates to come back from the farmer’s market. Instead, she slips her shoes on and grabs her purse and gets in her car and drives an hour and a half to the beach. It starts to rain just as she’s finding free parking, and everyone she sees is heading back to their own cars.

The wind and rain have picked up by the time Lucy has made her way down the stairs and across the sand to the edge of the water. She takes off her shoes and sets them and her purse next to a little hill of sand.

Then she walks. The water blends in with the sky on the horizon, monochrome gray, and Lucy stops to pick up the occasional shell. The sand eventually gives way to rocks and tide pools. The rocks are slippery from the rain and sharp on the soft pads of her feet, but she steps over them carefully to crouch at the edge of one of the pools. Lucy wanted to be a marine biologist from the time she was seven to the time she received her eighth grad school rejection; she knows the rain is going to drive any creatures into shelter and away from the visible center of the pool. Still, she can’t help sitting and looking into the area under the surface of the water. The rock is variegated and dark, and it takes her eyes time to adjust, but she spies half a crab shell, red and purple, the remnants of some seagull’s meal.

She trails her fingers in the water, then submerges her arm up to her elbow, until she’s touching the sandy rock and closing her fingers around a beautiful, rounded pebble that sits perfectly in her palm. It’s not the kind of rock that should be in a pool like this, too smooth. It must have been dropped by someone, or something. She stays crouched there for a long moment, holding the stone. The wind whips rain against her arms and legs, tiny pinpricks, and they remind her of where she is. Here. Still in the pain of the moment. Then she shrugs and thinks finders keepers to herself and puts the stone in the pocket with the shells.

When she stands up and keeps walking, Lucy wonders if she’ll come back to this moment, if she’ll want to live in it later.

Lucy gets back to her apartment late in the afternoon. She’s still damp and cold, but she’s shaking with something else, a kind of perilous excitement. She’s broken something after all—broken through. Gone and done something for herself and made it back alive.

There’s a trio of cupcakes on the kitchen counter and an index card that says “Happy birthday Lucy!!” All three of her roommates have signed it.

Lucy slips a hand into her pocket—pure habit, the response she’s had to almost any emotion for over six years now—and her fingers fumble through the thin edges of shells until she finds the pebble. It’s just a stone, smooth and round and perfectly ordinary, but she wraps her fingers around it anyway and goes to ask her roommates if any of them are free for a birthday dinner.

(Editors’ Note: AnaMaria Curtis is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2024 AnaMaria Curtis