From Chapter Four, “The French Lady”
Nine-year-old Netta spends her winter afternoons with Madame Odette Fabre, an elderly French seamstress whose lace curtains are the finest things on Annin Street. What begins as a lesson in sewing will become an education in how her family survives.
“But the real sacrament of that house was sewing. It began the first winter, when she saw the hem of my school uniform, bought, you remember, a size and a half big, and taken up by my mother in a hurry with stitches you could read across a room, my poor mother, who could mend anything strongly and nothing invisibly, a battlefield surgeon of cloth. Madame Odette, eighty, went down on one knee like a girl. She took my hem between her fingers, turned it, read it, and stood back up with a face I can only describe as diplomatically shut. Sit, she said. Watch. And she took her needle case, a roll of felt, needles in size order like a little silver keyboard, and she took my hem out and put it back in, and I watched, and I could not see the stitches happen. Her hand moved along the fold like a hand smoothing a cat and left no marks behind, and the hem, when she was done, hung like it had been poured. The blind stitch, she said. The stitch that is there and not there.
She taught me. Winter afternoons, the light going blue in the lace, the clock turning its sunflower one way and the other: the running stitch, the backstitch, the whip, the fell, and at last, at long last, the blind hem, which took my clumsy nine-, then ten-year-old fingers months to learn, and she was patient as stone, and as ruthless. Out it came if it showed, every time, no appeal, Encore, again. Until one afternoon in the spring I turned up a hem on a dish towel and sewed it end to end and turned it back, and there was nothing to see. Nothing. The cloth just ended, as if it had grown that way. Madame Odette took it to the window, into the light, the way a jeweler takes a stone. Then she folded it, put it in my hands, and said the sentence that I have carried through everything that happened afterward, through this story, which was already walking toward us up the block, though neither of us knew it. She said: Voilà. Now you know the most useful thing, and the most dangerous. The best work is the work no one can find. Remember that whatever is hemmed is hidden.
I thought it was a sewing lesson. For a little over a year it was a sewing lesson.”
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