THREAD
By Stella Ruggiero
I wouldn’t call my parents musicians, since I don’t think anyone ever paid them as such, but they were musical. My father played just about anything with strings, but favored guitar or banjo. For mom, it was the piano. And even though she had the sweeter, clearer voice, dad always sang lead.
Their big act was our Christmas party. Mom never looked prettier than on that night. Imagine the darkest chocolate – one hundred percent cacao – now give it a brilliant shine. That was mom’s hair. Now imagine the same chocolate for her eyes, but triple the shine. Her coloring complemented her red ribbon. Don’t think red like cherry. Think a rich, velvety merlot. It looked pretty in autumn, and at Christmastime, but stuck out in spring, when everyone wants Easter egg colors. She tried to wear beige and pale blue that time of year, shades that went well with the wine-colored choker.
At the Christmas party, with the candlelight gold on her skin, she achieved peak loveliness. Her soprano was like snowflakes, falling soft and delicate on the windowpanes. A pleasant dusting in the background for party guests.
I joined the family band not long after I could talk. At first, I sang along with dad, but my tiny voice was swallowed up by his. He’d smile down at me and gently touch my hair. That was my cue to drop back with mom on the harmonies.
That was when I was wee tot, however. With each passing year, my desire to perform – at center stage, thank you – grew stronger. Eventually, my ambition outgrew dad’s tenor, and I started headlining the family Christmas party. I was ten, adorable, and belted a damn good alto, plus I picked up the guitar to solidify my act.
At fourteen, I won the local talent show. It was held in the town square gazebo. My voice had every little spider’s web just a shaking in those gazebo spindles. I wore a dress to match my ribbon and eyes, blue as a sunny September sky in the afternoon.
*
In junior year of high school, I met Katie and Sarah at summer drama camp. They were already friends, and went to a different school, but we swiftly melded into a trio. Sarah played stand-up bass. Katie and I were on guitar. Out of necessity, I took up harmonica. We could all sing, and took turns on lead. We had a stripped down, acoustic sound much older than our years.
Katie’s ribbon was red. Cherry red, not merlot like mom’s. Sarah’s was canary yellow. And since mine was blue, we called ourselves Primary Colors.
College was out of the question for all three of us. It wasn’t a matter of grades or money. We had a good thing going, and we knew it. We left home and went West, busking at farmers markets and couch surfing our way up and down the coast. We were close as sisters.
We gained a real following, playing festivals and putting out self-recorded demos. If we were booked, it promised to be a good party.
Katie and Sarah were already edgy when I met them, and they honed it along the coast, assimilating fully into bohemian life. Katie was political, and favored T-shirts with messages ranging from clever to incendiary. She inched us closer to the edge when it came to lyrics and stage personas. She also dealt with severe stage fright, some nights literally choking on her fear.
Sarah was gentle with a quick mind. She wore her black hair natural, and it took up nearly twice as much space as her small shoulders.
She liked to do puzzles in the van on the way to gigs. A puzzle with Sarah was a discouraging endeavor. She could carry on a relaxed conversation with you, or anyone else in the room, all the while clicking the cardboard cutouts together in a flurry. If you lingered too long, gazing in thought at the developing image, she’d snatch a piece right from your fingers and stab it in place. She could easily split her mind and carry out multiple functions at once. Of the three of us, she was the smartest.
While I lacked Katie’s convictions about how the world ought to be, and Sarah’s brilliance, I at least held my own on guitar and added some pretty fine finger picking to our sound. I also established myself as chief songwriter.
Eventually, we started opening for the all-guy groups on the West Coast leg of their tours. When the front man of a major band took a shine to Sarah, she was love drunk overnight. (I won’t share his name here for legal purposes.)
He was the coolest guy we’d ever met, and we’d been playing in the coolest cities in the coolest clubs with the coolest people (yes, Katie and I were jealous). At six foot three, his lean and muscular frame towered over every stage. He had a face that was more unique than handsome, but that only added to his appeal.
Sarah and the Front Man fast became inseparable. The first time he knocked a drink out of her hand in front of everybody, she froze in mortified silence. The rest of us tried to pretend we didn’t have little splashes of Sarah’s tequila on our arms.
When he came around in the still-dark morning, I tried to send him away, but turned with a start at the touch of a hand on my elbow. Sarah motioned me away from the door and slipped out. Before I went back to my place on the futon in the living room, I watched from the window as they slipped into the night, his long arm tight around her shoulders.
At a party after one of the Front Man’s shows, he and Sarah got into another public row. When she stormed out, he tore after her. I caught up to them on the landing. He had her wrists in one massive, vice hand and was working his fingers, toned from all those years of pressing down steel strings, under her yellow ribbon. My screams summoned two strangers from the floor below and the pounding of their feet startled the Front Man into submission. He didn’t manage to snap her ribbon off, but it was always rippled in one spot. In time, Sarah started nervously fingering the ribbon herself, fraying the edges.
After the best show of my life, at Berkley’s Freight and Salvage, there was a text from my aunt, telling me to call.
“Honey, your mom. Something happened, maybe a heart attack. She didn’t make it.”
Dad didn’t know my cell. It was always mom who handled the technology.
The funeral director back home had buried the dead since I was a kid. Everybody in town passed through this funeral home at some point, either to pay their respects or collect them.
When I stepped through the front door of the funeral home, knowing my mother’s body was inside somewhere, but not sure where, the funeral director said he was sorry for my loss. Then, he tilted his head and stared at my hair in a state of puzzlement.
“Did you dye your hair?” he asked.
When I mumbled no, he continued to stare and said he remembered it being blonder. My eyes darted from door to door, wondering where she was. I wanted her.
In the funeral director’s office, over Kleenex, bad coffee, and final wishes, talk turned to her ribbon.
“Do you want it?” he asked my father.
My lips parted at the question, and my gaze clicked to my father, who stared at the floor, unable to speak.
“Dad, it’s mom’s ribbon,” I said.
“Oh, yes, of course. Yes, please,” he said softly, and the funeral director scratched a little note.
My father had misunderstood me. I hadn’t meant he should take it. But both men seemed relieved to move on from the question and continue to decisions about the casket.
After the service, the funeral director handed dad a tiny satin pouch. My father pulled the itty-bitty draw string and slid out the merlot strip. I felt like I was going to be sick.
After mom died, my guilt over leaving dad alone kept me up at night. I left tear stains on couches all over the Pacific Northwest. He never once asked me to come home. But I knew.
Parting from Kate and Sarah would have seemed insane if I hadn’t already known Kate was thinking about ditching the trio to join a political campaign, and Sarah was mulling moving to New York with her new boyfriend.
On a gray October morning, after saying goodbye over coffee and bagels, Primary Colors ran down the storm drain with the rain.
After a few months back home, I missed playing and started gigs on Saturday nights at a coffee shop sandwiched by insurance agencies and law offices.
The same two guys started showing up, but I wasn’t sure which one had a thing for me. I hoped it was the dark-haired one. When he arrived alone one evening, his wingman apparently weary of my Saturday-night crooning, I could feel my heart thrumming like a hummingbird as I played every song a little too fast.
We spent our first date at a Greek festival, eating gyros and meats on sticks. Because of his choice for our first outing, and his near-black hair, I operated, for a brief time, under the false assumption he was Greek or part Greek. (Half Lebanese, half origins unknown.) This, and other matters, were quickly settled.
I found a dress for ninety-nine dollars, and sky-blue slippers, to match my ribbon, for the reception. He loved them.
We honeymooned in Greece. Everything was an inside joke, and this is why I knew it would be a good marriage. When we boarded the plane, we were ignorant of the churches of Santorini. Wandering the streets of Oia, in awe of our new status as husband and wife, he cupped my elbow and pointed up to the white-washed walls of Panagia Platsani, capped with its brilliant blue dome.
“It’s the color of your eyes,” he gushed. He touched my throat. “The color of your ribbon.”
*
When we finally scraped together a down payment for a little house, we painted the walls of the south-facing sunroom sky blue. When sunlight filled the space, it reminded us of Oia.
We waited on kids. I went to school to teach music. When my degree was finally in my hand, the reality that a position may not open up for a long time sunk in, and we decided to commence with the baby making.
I had absolutely brutal morning sickness. In trying to read my way out of that hell, I stumbled on an article examining the frightening notion of “maternal-fetal competition.” The researcher presented the earliest stages of life as a biological war, with a battle line first drawn around the inside of the woman’s womb, in the endometrium. Contrary to what I was taught, this lining is not a welcoming place for an embryo. It’s armored with lethal immune cells, and while the mother’s cells fight to hold the line, the embryos seek to invade. If the womb finally falls to an embryo, it’s a ruthless occupier, pillaging the mother’s resources, and sabotaging her blood pressure and insulin, all so it can feast. I tried to forget that article.
We loved sitting on the couch at night, my husband’s head resting lightly on my belly as he called our son by name. We’d gently prod him on one side, and he’d poke back. We’d go back and forth, sometimes teasing him and poking twice on one side and bursting into giggles when he’d poke back on the wrong side.
As they often do, if you’re fortunate, our biological war ended in a draw, with the birth of our perfectly healthy, beautiful baby boy.
Low and behold, when our son was two months old, a teaching job did open up. The chances of another opportunity were slim, so I sat in front of a row of school administrators for my interview with a lump in my throat and milk soaking the little round pads in my bra.
The job started that fall. And after slogging through the newborn months in sweats covered in sick, I found the new routine a welcome change. Real clothes and fixed hair were delightful novelties. And there was a little time to think my own thoughts in the car or when pumping milk in the faculty bathroom.
But in between the honk of plastic brown recorders and picking up little rectangles of carpet off the floor and telling boys to quit touching girls’ ribbons, I found myself aching to hold my baby’s soft, little body, and stroke his fuzzy head and kiss his tiny sea anemone fingers.
I arrived at school with tear-smudged makeup and literally jogged through the parking lot to get to the car in the afternoon and speed to his daycare.
It wasn’t my husband’s idea for me to quit. He never even insinuated it. It was mine, and mine alone.
Three years later, our second son arrived. He came out with dark brown hair, so long and thick it curled around his dainty earlobes. I found myself saying he had hair like my mom’s, even though it probably came from my husband. It was just a way to invoke her name to family and friends and strangers.
In total, I nursed children for almost four-straight years. In the beginning, there were night feedings, and then came wet beds and bad dreams. Our first son didn’t sleep through the night until he was seven. Our second son followed in his big brother’s footsteps. It dawned on me one day that I hadn’t slept through the night in ten years.
My husband never heard the children at night. Sometimes I’d hesitate to pull myself from the warm bed, and I’d watch him for any telltale sign of wakefulness. But his eyes never fluttered and the cavernous breathes of sleep never faltered. I swear I could even hear the sound of pee seeping onto tractor sheets.
In their first year of life, neither boy could leave my ribbon alone. I wondered, how had my mother dealt with my traveling baby fingers? I don’t recall her ever saying, but then I never got the chance to ask her anything about babies. For a time, I wore ridiculous sleeveless shirts with high necks that were misery in the summer heat. Thankfully, some mommy genius out there finally invented Velcro strips to secure around your ribbon. They were stuffy and looked like a seatbelt around your neck but they did the trick.
Would you have guessed that when the boys were small, I wrote more songs than ever? It seems unfathomable to me, too. But for a brief, glorious epoch the boys’ naps overlapped. I’d slog my way through the house chores all morning, like a Himalayan Sherpa, with a toddler grasping my leg, a newborn strapped to my chest, and a laundry basket in my arms. We’d climb our way through nursing, breakfast, dishes, diapers, laundry, dinner prep. Then! We’d reach the summit - naptime! I scribbled lyrics and softly fingerpicked in the laundry room for a whole half hour, masked by the tumbling onesies and cloth diapers in the dryer.
*
Madonna and Child. That is the imagery we’re raised on. A perfect, pure union.
There’s a species of crab spider in Australia. She spends all summer gobbling insects, so when winter comes, she’s a jolly plump thing. All her nutrients are stockpiled in unfertilized eggs that grow too big to exit her body. They liquify and enter her circulatory system, allowing her babies to sip a delicious, nutrient-rich blood smoothie through her leg joints. But it’s not enough. Eventually, she’ll become immobile, and her babies swarm and devour her.
It’s a perfect union, I suppose, depending on who you ask.
*
Over the years, I kept tabs on my old girlfriends with social media. Sarah married and had twin girls. I would squint at her husband’s smile in photos and wonder if he was like the others. Her ribbon grew thin, and I wondered how it stayed on.
Katie went to school for environmental law. When she was hired by a big firm, I checked her bio on their website. I noticed she wore a silk scarf to hide her ribbon in her headshot. Eventually, she became a lobbyist. I wondered if her stage fright had anything to do with giving up practicing law.
As for me, when the boys were both finally in school, I started teaching music lessons. It was my husband’s idea, actually. He was always so supportive. And when I decided to start playing on Saturday mornings at a coffee shop, he was excited for me. In the weeks leading up to my debut, I woke at four in the morning to scribble and strum my new songs on the sunporch (painted taupe now; the blue clashed with everything).
On my first Saturday, I took the boys with me because my husband’s work was sucking up his evenings and weekends. The boys were so good, and they looked so cute sitting at the tiny café table, nibbling scones and sipping hot cocoa and running their little cars over their plates. I only had time for three songs, between getting their next scone, bathroom trips, wet pants, and light bickering. Even so, those three songs were heaven, and when it was over, I slung my guitar over my shoulder and held each boys’ soft, warm, sticky hand for the walk home. It was one of those dry, warm autumn days and the wind whipped the traffic-sign yellow leaves up into the bright blue sky before gently rocking them to earth.
The coffee shop never put me on the schedule again. For a long time, whenever I picked up my guitar, I felt a twinge of humiliation at that thought. But it was just as well. Between the house and the boys and the lessons, there wasn’t time for songwriting and rehearsing. If I’m being honest, I’ll admit that it was a relief to give it up. It’s exhausting, trying to hold onto something you love.
*
One rainy October Friday, my husband took the boys to a haunted house. I loved that kind of thing, but I hadn’t been alone in what felt like months for more than a few minutes at a time. I dried the last supper dish and poured myself a glass of merlot. I retreated to the master bath with a compact, fabric-covered box. Inside, lay the highlight of my month. Sipping wine, I sampled dainty bottles of organic potions. After dabbing on tinted moisturizer, I tested a shade of lip balm in Bloodrose. I put the balm to the test like they do in commercials with a nip of wine. Clearly not a lipstick model, I took a clumsy sip, sputtering and spraying a fine mist on the mirror. The wine seeped into the balm on my lower lip, making the dark scarlet shade glisten. I thought of my mother’s ribbon for the first time in years. When dad died, I searched the house for it, but never found it.
As I stared at my splattered image, I saw it. Fine as a baby’s hair. A thread. Loose on the upper edge of my ribbon.
“Oh god.”
I pressed it with my ring finger, trying to coax it back in place. It refused to fuse back with the others.
I drummed the bathroom counter with my fingers. Glue? Goodness no. I wasn’t a child’s craft project. Hot glue? Slightly better, but still a mess. No, a deft snip. That would be best.
Minutes later, I stood on tiptoe, three inches from the mirror, holding my breath, with my sharpest sewing scissors cold against my neck.
Snip.
I immediately leaned in to inspect my ribbon. The rogue thread’s continuation was clearly visible. It was still woven securely in place, but I didn’t trust it. I fired up my hot glue gun and squeezed a seed pearl of glue on the tip of a sewing needle to cauterize the thread in place.
The crisis over, my gaze dropped to the mutinous thread. It was now soaked a darker blue thanks to a droplet of water on the counter. What to do with it? It was of no more use to me than a lost hair, but I stared at it for thirty seconds before plucking it from the tiny swimming pool and flicking it in the trash can.
The thread rattled me. And there was no one to tell. I didn’t have close friends anymore, and my husband, as sympathetic as he would be, wouldn’t understand. And besides, I couldn’t really articulate it. That’s what friends help you do.
*
A short time later, I read a book about the concept of deep work. The renowned author’s basic definition of this form of work was professional-grade activity conducted in a distraction-free state. If it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me.
One night, I left the dinner table before anyone else. I dropped my dishes in the sink and stated my intentions to go upstairs and work without interruption. I kissed the boys goodnight, and then, to make sure my plans for the evening were not interpreted as hostile, I gently touched my husband’s shoulder. Nevertheless, three pairs of stunned eyes followed my body up the stairs.
I stopped in the bedroom to grab a fresh stack of notebooks, new pens, a capo and my guitar from my closet, then continued up to the third-floor attic, where I cleared myself a phonebooth-sized corner. The house’s heat didn’t reach this far, so I wore gloves in between songs. For a whole year, I completed all good mom and good wife requirements during the day and evening, then, ascended to my attic studio. I’m not sure why I went all the way up to the attic. I guess it felt like the farthest place from daily domesticity.
It was liberating at first. But the longer I listened to family game nights downstairs, and the joyous laughter of my boys and my husband, the more I felt like a fool, huddled in my mittens and layers of sweaters, doing what, exactly?
I put the guitar back in my closet, shoved the notebooks in a drawer, and let the attic junk reclaim my corner, swallowing it up like the whole awkward incident had never happened. I rejoined the family, and they welcomed me back with open arms.
That writer, the one who wrote about deep work, did I tell you how he does all his big thinking? He dims the lights, brews a cozy mug of coffee, and then that bastard places a “Do not disturb” sign on the door of his heated campus office.
*
Eventually, I gave up the music lessons. One of my last pupils was a twelve-year-old girl with a green ribbon. Her adoring eyes positively melted me when she came through the door each week. She’d balance the guitar on her tiny thighs and deftly press the strings with twig fingers. Teaching her should have been a joy. But instead it deflated me. No, I wasn’t bitter at a little girl. I didn’t seethe with jealousy at the thought of her bright future. It was an image that parked its haunches in my mind and wouldn’t leave. I pictured this little girl, years from now, with the junk of her cold attic threatening to topple down on her as she played for mice in the rafters.
I got good with the hot glue gun, mending as the ribbon’s unraveling required. One afternoon, my husband caught me in the bathroom, doing the old hot glue and needle routine.
“What happens if it goes?” he asked.
We’d never discussed it. I stared at my neck in the mirror.
“Don’t worry about it, hon. After I fix it, I’ll get supper going.”
I smiled comfortingly at him. He didn’t seem willing to move, so I turned my gaze back to the mirror, waiting until he slipped from my peripheral vision, back downstairs. The boys were outside, laughing and playing catch in the front yard with the neighbor kids.
I glanced at the scissors on the edge of the sink.
No. Don’t. Don’t even think it.
But why not? What was stopping me? It was my ribbon. I snatched up the scissors. Let it join its offspring in the bathroom trash.
Snip.
Such a tiny sound. The petite metal jaws biting gently like a sweet dog taking a treat.
It fluttered to the counter, landing oddly on its edge and making a soft click.
“Oh,” I said, or imagined myself saying. I couldn’t have actually said it, you see, because vocal cords were separated from lips. My head caught the edge of the counter on the way down and hit the tile under my feet like a melon.
Ruggiero is a writer and produce farmer in Pennsylvania. She lives with her husband and son.
