Sister of Eve

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

Nana made our clothes until her hands couldn’t hold the thread. She dedicated her downstairs living room to the craft: pins and needles scattered across three tables, streams of colorful fabric cascading down shelves and her, there, in the center. The cloudy white curls of her hair shone as they floated through the whirlwind of color.

My family wore the skill of her artistry like a living gallery, which traveled to jobs and schools and park benches. She was everywhere; she was a housewife; she was everywhere.

Even after she passed, the colors of her fabric shone in the rose petals that fell from our grieving hands.

Nana taught me that the best place to buy fabric is a women’s clothing store. When I walk through the racks of Eve’s Leaves, I can hear the clatter of coat hangers from when she used to pile shirts, pants and dresses into my arms.

“Guh,” she would say when she found the perfect one. “This dress has the most awful waistline, and Nana needs all the help she can get there.”

On the wall outside, a mural of a tree with a single, solitary apple extends from sidewalk to roof. It can’t be plucked — it already was, in the beginning, and so Eve sewed her first clothes with the sweet taste between her teeth.

Crematoriums burn bodies with their clothes still on — usually the clothes the dead arrive in, but sometimes in outfits specially chosen for the occasion. Nana died in a one-size-fits-all hospital gown and was burned in a cardboard box.

I don’t know if they clothed her in modesty and somber tones like Mother Mary quietly awaiting her ascension. If they did, she felt relief when the fire consumed the costume and left her body naked, as Eve had been in the beginning. She had always been a sister of Eve in a world that only valued Mary’s son.

When the religion of her husband told her to love and obey, she became a housewife who refused to learn to cook. She couldn’t watch her artistry descend into the dark of a stomach; instead, she stitched pride into every article of clothing, and it was well deserved.

At Nana’s funeral, the pastor stood before a church of mourners and reminded us that it is because of Eve we are all fallen and undeserving of redemption.

“You will see Nana again if you accept the Lord.”

He dressed Nana in the language of his religion like ill-fitting clothes made from a pattern for all dead women over 80. He talked about the two husbands that she “cherished in life” with generic and tasteless charisma.

He didn’t mention the abuse the family endured at the hands of the first. There was no acknowledgment of the homemade shirts that covered bruises of purple, yellow and green, which mocked the joy of the fabric. He certainly never said that the second man to share her home wasn’t her husband at all — but, of course, he might not have been told that Nana chose financial independence over holy matrimony.

Throughout the service, all I heard was Nana making fun of the picture they chose to represent her on stage.

“Who’s that old woman and where’s all her hair gone?” the 92-year-old would ask.

Silently, I said, “How does the urn suit your waistline, Nana?” 

We both agreed that it was wonderfully slimming.

Her son didn’t attend the ceremony. He said his goodbyes a month before to a mind lost to Alzheimer’s and a body lost to infection. Before he left, he told her he loved her the only way he knew she’d understand.

“Mom, you’re a lousy cook.”

She breathed her last as laughter fell from cracked lips.

They carved the name “Elene” into the stone of her grave. Elene, sister of Effie and Edna and Eleanor and Erna, daughter of Ernest. If I put Eve’s name among them, will Nana smile from her haunt beside the discount rack?

In the downtown mural, the sunshine strips the color from the apple, the rain carries paint chips to the gutter and, little by little, the image fades. The tale of a lost, naked perfection fades with it, leaving behind the clothing to be made and remade.