Page 50 - WTP Vol. IX #10

The Thread (continued from preceding page)
to head home to both their families and their video games) made dotted lines in the parking row in front of the store, morse code, “S . . . S,” my car included. Somebody help them, not even enough traffic for a proper distress signal, and still, I was surprised by the shoppers who remained.
I went to the store to find a thread, a tie to bind my wool against itself, to make a proper scarf. I wouldn’t need a pattern. Scarves, as I’m sure you know, are only slender rectangles folded and wrapped and tied around necks, some with fringe or tassels. My col- lection would have no fringe nor tassels, none of the indicators of bourgeois opulence. No, my scarves would draw the eye through their firm control of color, through the dyed wool and its contrast with the slender red thread, the bright and zig-zagging line along the wool’s edge. Though I could have
gone home and produced a number of reds from my drawer of thread, I wanted something new, some- thing daring, not the familiar reds of blood and candy apple, not the possibly-sourceless crimson or scar- let, not the apparently seasonal, subdued red that bordered orange and the call to autumn. I sought a red that was both deep and still-living, vibrant and unassuming. My tiny touch of red would bring the wool from its bolt state to a place of high fashion, to
a garment status. But to create such a piece, I had to first take my place among the elite creators of my age, those monied hands carving out their places in every boutique and magazine I’d never heard of. To create, of course, I had to buy.
The craft store, a narrow unit lined with fabric and frames and an entire wall of paint, felt uncomfortably full thanks to the four or five other artists whose cars sat next to mine in the lot. The tops of their heads bobbed along the aisles as they picked out their yarn, their canvas, and their turpentine, those minor tools lost to the casual eye amid the greater media, the
paint, the bright cotton strip. The employees charged with seeing the last of us back out to our muses were leaning over the glass countertop where they kept the register, laughing and glancing from time to time at the clock that hung above the door. They were young people, hardly older than the couple at the bistro, two dyed mops of hair that ended below the ears, two stick figures wrapped in red vests. My quick nod to them as I entered the store was a promise that I wouldn’t be there long. I, if anyone, would respect their will to leave.
The thread display was divided among endcaps near the mess of fabric, along with the darning needles, thimbles, and fabric shears. The store carried two of the most popular brands of cotton thread, what I as- sume are the big names for most craft stores, strands that didn’t become a visible mess of frizz when you held them up to the light. Both brands described their colors with numbers rather than the useless names otherwise assigned to the visible spectrum. Their arbitrary digits attempted to say nothing about what they were describing, because they knew, as any good artist knows, they could not.
The sun glared hot against the front window as I took the numbered threads in my hands and felt the plastic spools with my fingertips, the thread wrapped tight on the spools in perfect circles. A spool of #119 from one brand seemed to burst from the shelf, but then, so did the other brand’s #150. I long considered these threads, holding both spools. My eyes wan- dered about the room, and I let my mind, my artist’s instinct, take the place of my failing eyesight, the product of the modern age. My artist’s mind faded back into the deep recesses of my head, though, when I was distracted by the familiar weave of a woman’s mousey, brown-haired head over the top of an aisle at the other side of the store.
The head was bobbing along, seemingly uncertain, parted hair in the middle. It was a familiar head, perhaps the head of a former classmate, a one-night stand, certainly not my towheaded wife, who was
by now, of course, at home and forgetting her day in such a way as to render it unmentionable. This head, however, bounced up and down the short aisle before me. I was still standing there with the thread in my hand, forgetting which spool had been #119 and which had been #150 and why I had ever needed to consider either of them. Now, I was subject to a verifi- able mystery, the mystery of this bobbing skull full
of thoughts and ideas and wrapped in flesh and dull brown hair. In fact, it was only when the head, and the woman that belonged to it, appeared to find whatever it was that it was looking for and turn toward the regis-
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