Unravelling

Unravelling

From a small, bogside cabin in rural New England, 38-year-old Aimee Slater unravels the story of her life, attempting to make sense of the tangled thread that leads from her mother's house-a short, unbridgeable distance away-to the world she now inhabits. It is soon after the Civil War; Aimee lives alone, but is graced with visits from two friends, a crippled man and a troubled eleven-year-old girl. She is perpetually caught between the sensual world she so desires and the divine retribution passed down to her by her mother's scorn. How Aimee ultimately creates a life for herself and bridges that distance makes for a moving story of love and loss. Told in a voice of spare New England lyricism, Unravelling is a remarkably haunting account of the power of redemption. “Like Margaret Atwood in Alias Grace, Elizabeth Graver examines what happens when a nineteenth-century woman defies the conventions of her place and time. . . . This tender, thoughtful novel pays tribute to the way a woman can ultimately patch together her crazy quilt of independence and fulfillment."-Glamour “A pleasure, quiet and increasingly gripping. In images as simple and specific as that of Aimee's blind rabbit sniffing its salt lick, Graver endows the habits of coping with a profound dignity."-The New Yorker “This beautiful novel captures the bittersweet relationship between mothers and daughters, where what is not said is just as important as what is."-Seventeen ELIZABETH GRAVER is the author of Unravelling and The Honey Thief. She teaches at Boston College and lives in Massachusetts Unravelling By Elizabeth Graver Harvest Books Copyright © 1999 Elizabeth Graver All right reserved. ISBN: 9780156006101 Chapter One This for the two stones inside me, The two shadows gone from me-- That they may begin to understand. At night, because it is summer and the air is hot and close, the mosquitoes float like snowflakes over the bog. I step onto the peat, which gives like a mattress, and the insects circle me in clouds. When I was a child playing here, my flesh was plump and sweet and they flocked to me and drank my blood; now I am no longer a girl, but still they swarm me. On my bog there is heat lightning, and lightning bugs too, blinking across the pond which grows bigger one year, smaller the next. In the beginning I thought that pond would mark my life, its circle growing smaller every year, hemmed in by the peat until it was only a puddle, a drop, a memory in the sludge.Then I noticed how the mass of floating land inched forward one year only to inch back the next. My mother liked to say that life is a long straight road if you live it right, but mine has turned and tumbled. In 1829, when I was born, she picked my name from an article in The Ladies' Pearl. Aimee. At Factory Improvement Circle, I learned how in French it meant Loved. My mother did not know. "It was a lady's name," she told me. "You were born with fingernails like a lady's. You waved your fingers in the air and howled like you owned the world." First I was loved, like my name. Then I was unloved. Now I have Amos and Plumey who visit me, the village cripple and the village orphan, as they are known in town. I have my rabbits who give me fur to spin into yarn. I have my house, built to last, chickens who leave me eggs, clear vision and a strong back, a mother I never see. Amos brings me trinkets and sings me songs about pretty girls, though I have lived thirty-eight years on this earth. In beauty I am no longer a great believer, nor proud the way I used to be. It is a fact that I was prettier than most at the factory, pretty as an angel, I was told. When the strangers came through, the factory owners from England looking at how it was done, I was one of the girls who was led to the front looms and asked to demonstrate. When the men from Washington came through, I was one of the girls to carry the banner: "Welcome to the City of Spindles." We wore white muslin dresses with blue sashes that day. We carried parasols edged in green. We marched singing to the factory: "How Doth the Busy Bee." Afterwards they made us give the dresses back. I wove that, I wanted to say, or if not that one, then one like it. I knotted the knots when the thread broke, and ran fromone crashing loom to another, and threaded the two thousand weft threads until my fingers swelled like rising dough. Mine, I wanted to say. I only looked like an angel. Perhaps if I had been named something else, things would have turned out differently. I might have been named Charity, or Faith, perhaps, or Grace. But Grace can go crooked and Charity is often no more than a guilty conscience, and of Faith I have my portion--or would I still be waiting every day? This morning, like most mornings, I make my way over the peat and wash my face in the dark green water of the pond at the center of the bog. Once a fortnight in the mild seasons I bathe there, too, and if I raise my leg to