working on a quilt, as usual. Her quilts graced every bed in the house and many of the neighbors’ houses, as well. The colorful squares of material covered nearly every surface in Aunt Jane’s bedroom, and Sarah always found the sight of them comforting.
Aunt Jane looked up in surprise when Sarah walked into her room.
“You startled me,” she said, one hand on her enormous chest. “What on earth are you doing home so early? Are you ill? Are you crying?” Aunt Jane was up and walking toward her. “What’s wrong, precious?”
Sarah hugged her aunt, drinking in the familiar scent of the flowery soap she used. Aunt Jane was rooted like a tree, a solid, big-boned woman.
“Sit down on my bed and tell me all about it,” Aunt Jane said, moving some of her squares to make room for her niece.
Sarah sat down, but she was hesitant to relive the humiliation. Still, this was Aunt Jane, and she knew she was safe with her. If she’d told her mother, her mother would have said she deserved the taunting because she was sloppy about her appearance. It irked her parents no end that they owned Wilding’s, the most exclusive children’s clothing store in town, yet their own daughter looked like a tall, homely beanpole, no matter how carefully they dressed her. “She’s a poor advertisement for the store,” she’d once overheard her father saying. “Nearly as bad as your sister. Good thing Jane never goes out.”
She told Jane what had happened in her classroom and saw the sympathy in her aunt’s eyes.
“My poor darling,” Aunt Jane said, moving closer so she could put her arm around Sarah’s shoulders. “But you know what?” She waited for Sarah to look up at her. “Something good—something wonderful—will come out of this experience. Did you know that?”
Sarah was mystified. “What?” she asked.
“You are going to grow up to have a very thick skin,” she said, “and that is an important thing to have.”
Sarah looked down at her pale, bony wrist. “Thick skin?” she asked.
Aunt Jane smiled. “It’s an expression. It means that no one will ever be able to hurt you. You won’t be overly sensitive. What you’re going through now is hard, precious, but it’s good training for your future.”
Aunt Jane called the school then, and Sarah listened as she told the principal what had happened and that Sarah had left early and was staying home for the rest of the day. As she imagined what the principal was saying on the other end of the line, Sarah took comfort in her aunt’s theory that something good would come from this experience, and the image of her taunting classmates gradually grew hazy and indistinct in her mind.
When Jane got off the phone, she set aside her quilting and played canasta with her niece all afternoon. By dinnertime, Sarah was laughing again.
It wasn’t until Sarah was a teenager that she realized Aunt Jane was not like other women her age. Other women were married and had children. They went to the market. They shopped for clothes. They liked to go out to dinner or the theater. Not Aunt Jane, who would not even set foot in the backyard. She didn’t care about being married, she said, and what did she need her own children for when she had Sarah? But the truth was, ever since Aunt Jane had been a teenager herself, she had flown into a panic each time she ventured outside the house. It would certainly be hard to meet a man, and harder still to date, when you couldn’t go out your own front door.
Sarah liked that her aunt was always stuck at home, even though she knew she was selfish for feeling that way. Aunt Jane had been the one constant, loving person in her life. Always home, always ready with a hug and a loving word. But as Sarah grew older, she began to feel sorry for her aunt. People called her crazy, but Sarah knew that, like herself, Aunt Jane had a very thick skin.
Aunt Jane had wanted to be a nurse, but mental illness struck while she was in nursing school and she never got to complete the program. She took pleasure, though, in passing on all she’d learned to her niece. She taught Sarah to make beds with hospital corners, take a pulse and temperature, and give sponge baths. Sarah loved her lessons, and she grew to love the idea of being a nurse herself. She’d have to study hard in high school, Aunt Jane warned her, to be able to go to nursing school.
It was good that Sarah had her studies to attend to because she had little in the way of a social life. She had plenty of girlfriends, but the boys were studious in their avoidance of her. She’d be walking down the street, and a boy walking toward her would seem interested in her, but as he’d get nearer, he would quickly avert his eyes. And if there were two boys, she’d see them talking and snickering about her. It wasn’t that she was disfigured in any way. She was simply, unequivocally, homely, with a long, pointed nose and too little chin. New hairstyles, new makeup—nothing seemed to make much of a difference.
“You don’t need a man in your life to be happy,” Aunt Jane told her once. “But you do need work, and it should be work that involves you with people. Why, I’d go mad without you and your parents to look after.”
That was the first time Sarah realized her aunt didn’t know that most people considered her quite mad already. But those people didn’t know her the way Sarah did. If Aunt Jane was crazy, then all the world should be crazy. Everyone would be much better off.
So, Sarah decided she would be a nurse. She felt half trained as one, anyway, by her senior year of high school. Just before graduation, she learned that she’d earned the highest grades of anyone in her class and would be making the speech at the commencement ceremony.
She begged Aunt Jane to come to her graduation. “You’ve helped me so much to get where I am,” she told her aunt one night when she was helping her iron the squares of fabric. “I want you to be there,” she said. “It would mean so much to me.”
Aunt Jane put the iron down and studied her niece. “You’re closer to me than anyone in the world,” she said softly, “and yet even you don’t understand. I can’t do it, Sarah. I simply can’t.”
“Please,” Sarah pleaded. “Please try, for me?”
In the end, Aunt Jane agreed to try, but her effort turned out to be a terrible mistake. She, Sarah and Sarah’s parents had to take the trolley to a street a few blocks from the school. From there, they would walk the rest of the way. But by the time the four of them stepped off the streetcar, Aunt Jane was crying. She sat down on a bench and said, “Take me home, take me home,” over and over again. Her body trembled. There was no way to comfort her and no way to cajole her into continuing. Her panic frightened Sarah. She had never seen it before, because as long as she’d known her, Aunt Jane had stayed within the safe confines of the house.
“I knew this was a mistake,” Sarah’s father muttered.
Sarah finally gave up trying to persuade her aunt to walk the rest of the way to the school. She felt cruel that she had begged her to come to the ceremony at all. As Aunt Jane herself had said, Sarah had not understood the depth of her fear. But she understood it now.
“We’ll take the next trolley home again,” Sarah said, sitting down on the bench, as close to her aunt as she could get.
“No,” her mother said. “You go on to school, Sarah, or you’ll be late. Your father and I will take Jane home.”
Sarah looked at her aunt’s pale face. She couldn’t leave her here, shivering and terrified, on the bench. “I’ll wait till you’re all safely on the trolley,” she said. “There should be another one in a few minutes.” She put her arm around her aunt’s shoulders. “You’ll have to go across the street to catch it, though.”
Aunt Jane looked across the street, and it was as if her eyes registered a vast, deep ocean instead of a few yards of asphalt. She shook her head. “I can’t do it,” she said.
“Jane,” Sarah’s father said, “act like a thirty-nine-year-old woman for once, will you?”
Sarah shot her father an angry look. On an impulse, she ran into the street and waved down a passing