Obstetrix(16)

“Can you do that?” Sarah asked. “We sell custom wedding veils on the Internet. I just assumed you probably wouldn’t have learned to do beading.”

“No, I was just curious,” I said.

“The custom sewing is part of how we make money for the community,” Sarah said. “It’s probably not worth teaching you those skills, though, because most of the time you won’t be using them.”

“No,” I said, and scanned down a little farther. “Mending,” I said, finally. “I stitch very neatly.”

When breakfast and morning prayers were done, about half the tables got folded up and rolled to the side of the room, and the others got shuffled around. I was directed to a corner at one end of the room, where a set of folding chairs sat around a basket of damaged clothes, with a couple of bright task lamps plugged in to the outlet on the wall. I took a seat, found a needle and thread in the sewing kit, and grabbed a sock out of the basket. Other women were settling in near me. “You must be Dr. Elizabeth,” one of them said. “We should introduce ourselves. I’m Sister Emma.” The names went around: Emma, Janet, Heather, and Natalie. Natalie looked about my age; the other three were younger, probably in their thirties. Emma and Janet were mending clothes in need of repair; Natalie and Heather were hand-beading veils, attaching tiny glittering crystals to the edge of a cascade of cream netting.

“Do you know how to darn socks? Because I can show you if you haven’t done it before,” Emma said. “Don’t just sew up the holes, that’s a recipe for giving someone a blister.”

“I darned a mitten once,” I said. “I generally just replace socks.”

“We have darning eggs, if you want to try, but let me know.” She clearly didn’t trust my darning skill, which, fair enough. I put back the sock and took a shirt with a seam that had given way. It had no tag and I was pretty sure it had been made on-site. Emma was patching a pair of boy’s pants with a Carhartt label on the back pocket, though, so clearly they didn’t make everything.

“Did you hear that Sister Grace Lynn wanted to name her baby Ozymandias?” Heather said as we stitched. I wondered if I should put in that she’d actually wanted the name Ozias, but decided to just listen. “Can you imagine?”

“Isn’t Ozymandias in the Bible?” Janet said. “If it’s a biblical name it seems like it ought to be allowed.”

“Ozymandias isn’t in the Bible,” Emma said. “It’s a poem. I read it in secular high school when I was growing up. Or—wait. Maybe he is in there, come to think of it. The poem’s about a pharaoh.”

“Right, there’s a pharaoh in the Bible,” Janet said.

Natalie cleared her throat and everyone fell silent. Probably no one would have wanted my helpful observation that Ozymandias was the Greek name for Ramses II, anyway.

I finished sewing up the ripped seam in the shirt I’d been working on and started to fold it. Natalie snapped her fingers and held out her hand in a “give here!” gesture, and I passed it over so she could inspect my work. She looked it over, brushed her finger over the seam, gently tugged to make sure my stitches wouldn’t give out again, then nodded, satisfied. “You’re not bad at this.”

I smiled and kept my retort about learning to sew in medical school behind my teeth, but Emma glanced at me like she’d had the same thought.

“Sister Sarah said you’re from Minneapolis?” Janet said.

“I didn’t live there very long,” I said. “I’m actually from Minot, North Dakota.”

Janet sat up with interest. “I lived in Grand Forks for a while when I was a kid. My dad was in the Air Force.”

“Oh,” I said, immediately reaching for the obvious connection point. “Mine, too.”

“We had to move to Illinois when I was still pretty young. And then he retired with disability, and went to work selling cars.”

“My dad was a pilot during the Vietnam War,” I said, wondering how ancient that sounded to these much-younger women. “He hangs out at the VFW, so most of his friends are fellow Air Force vets, but lots are younger than he is—closer to your dad in age, probably.”

I was hoping to draw Janet out a little more but she just said, “Probably,” shook out the child’s pants she’d patched the knee of, and went to work on the other knee. I glanced at Natalie; she wasn’t clearing her throat or glaring, so I tried, “Where are the rest of you from?”

“Originally New Hampshire,” Emma said. “But Jason and I, Jason’s my husband, we moved to Illinois, that’s where—” She gestured at the group, glanced at Natalie, and finished, “That’s where a lot of us are from.”

“I’m from Indiana,” Heather said.

Natalie didn’t say anything but radiated faint disapproval.

I tried another angle. “How did you find your way to Pastor John’s church?” One of the topics that would usually get an Evangelical Christian patient to loosen up was the story of their personal journey from “sinner” to “saved.”

It worked, kind of: everyone perceptibly relaxed. “Oh, Sister Emma and I met at a Rachel’s Hope meeting years ago. Years and years.”

“It’s a biblical support group for women experiencing infertility,” Emma said. “I’d had Bethany but hadn’t been able to get pregnant again. This was before I had JJ.”