Instructions For Threading A Needle

Mother wets the red thread with her tongue and misses. Again. The thread darkens between her lips. She pinches its little wet head flat, holds the needle against the window where afternoon has made everything merciful, and misses. Give it here, I say. “You think because you have young eyes.” She says this smiling. The dress lies between us, inside out, my wedding dress, though neither of us has called it that all morning. We have called it this thing, all this cloth, turn it, hold there. There is blood on the hem. Mine, I think. Mother has already put her thumb into her mouth. When I was six she threaded needles without looking. I remember this because I thought mothers had holes in their fingers through which all things passed: thread, splinters, fever, the button I swallowed and confessed three days later. She found the eye this time. See? I don’t. I say yes. She pushes the thread through and for perhaps one second the needle has a red tongue. The doctor says hers are cataracts. Mine has a longer name. I have not told her. There are mornings now when the bathroom mirror keeps my left shoulder and gives the rest of me back. There are letters I catch missing their middles. Yesterday, crossing the road, a bicycle came out of nowhere. It did not come out of nowhere. Mother begins sewing. Her stitches are ugly now. I am watching each one enter the white cloth and come back red-side-up, enter white, return red, like a small animal that is learning there is no more country. You are staring, she says. I’m learning. Learning what? I tell her the stitch. She laughs. “This stitch? Even a blind woman…” and stops. We both look at the needle.Such a stupid little instrument. A piece of metal with one deliberate absence. Mother holds it toward the window again. When she was a girl, she tells me, her own mother could put thread through an eye in the dark. Even after the lights went bad? 'What lights?' Nothing. Outside, evening has fallen, and darkness is now taking the houses one window at a time. She sews until she cannot. Then I take the dress. I make the next stitch too wide. The next one crooked. Mother reaches across the table and places two fingers over mine. Not there, she says. There. I move the needle. No. There. I move it again. Her fingers tighten: There. And because she is my mother I do not tell her she is pointing at nothing I can see.