REWEAR

My grandma had a bathtub full of fabric scraps. She is a quilter, and when I was growing up her collection of cloth was too extensive to be confined to cupboards and shelves. It overflowed into her unfinished and unused upstairs bathroom, where in the absence of running water all the colorful pieces of printed cotton seemed to bubble up the sides of the tub and spill in soft soapsud streams onto the floor. As a kid I wanted to dive into the bath of color as if it were a pile of leaves.

I didn’t literally dive into her fabric, but throughout my childhood and adolescence, I sifted through it looking for treasures. For most of a decade I was on a mission to find old floral prints to go in the labor-intensive graduation quilt she was making for me—a bed-sized honeycomb pattern of thousands of inch-sized hand-pieced hexagons that was originally intended to be ready in time for my high school graduation, but which was finally finished for my college graduation instead. The long process of quilting matched my own long indirect path – through education – as I dropped out of high school twice and took seven years to get a college degree. Throughout my wayward youth, I periodically helped my grandma to cut and piece the hexagons: a constant during a tumultuous time.

I also discovered some whole or nearly whole garments which I rescued (temporarily or permanently) from a patchwork fate: a 1940s wrap dress, cream with red flowers and a bright red cord belt, and a black and blue wool skirt of the same vintage with elegantly matched plaid that hugged my waist and hips. I mended them and wore them both for years. I still have them, though they don’t fit the way they used to.

The dress might have been one my grandma wore when she was the age I was then. It might have traveled from house to house with her over the decades. Or she might have found it at a thrift store or rummage sale. Either way, its rag-bag provenance seemed perfect to me. It could not have felt more magical than if it had materialized from the end of a wand. Against all odds, I had found it, and it fit me. Against all odds, it had lived to see another summer. When I wore it, I felt like I was wearing matriarchal tradition and women’s creativity and the miraculous persistence of history. The still-bright colors were dyed decades before I was born, and the topstitched cotton was still crisp.

Patchwork is an art form born out of salvaged and incomplete pieces. Like mosaic or collage, it is a mode of reimagining and reuse. Although in theory one could go to a fabric store with a master plan in mind and buy the exact required amount of harmonizing yardage in complementary colors, that is not the way most quilters throughout history have worked, and it is not my grandma’s way. She prefers to get her creative ideas from cloth that she has been living with for years. Even now, at 94, with a greatly reduced fabric hoard that fits in the small storage unit in the basement of the retirement home where she now lives, she is still making plans for the scraps that she already has.

When I visited my grandma in Tacoma this Christmas, just a couple months before the pandemic arrived and put us both in quarantine thousands of miles apart, I went down to the basement with her and helped her sort and label her the boxes. Shirt fabric. Wool fabric. Muslin. Batting. She is in the paring-down and giving-away stage of life, but there are still some projects left to do.

In one of the boxes I found a soft slinky 1930s navy blue bathrobe with light blue polka dots that was still wearable despite a few raveled tears along the seams, one elbow patch in a mismatched print, and a large hole over the right shoulder that displays my upper arm and a hint of my breast. It is made out of a silky semi-synthetic material that is more clinging than slippery—a drapey rayon with a slightly sleazy feel. I knew when I found it that it was the last piece of clothing I would salvage from my grandma’s scraps. At the time I thought this was just because her hoard had become so small that there would be nothing new to discover. Now I don’t know when I will be able to see her. Her retirement home is on lockdown. She hasn’t spent time with family since the pandemic began.

I took the robe home to New York with me intending to mend it, but it turns out I love to wear it torn. Sometimes it makes me feel like a disheveled gangster’s moll with bedhead—a bottle blonde with a bottle in hand. Other times it connects me to the long-ago wonder I feel whenever I entered my grandma’s world. During my long months of solitary quarantine, the soft cling of the robe has felt like company, and the gaping tears have felt like fashion at the end of the world.

Briallen Hopper is the author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions and co-editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Killing the Buddha. She teaches creative writing at Queens College, CUNY, and lives in Elmhurst, Queens.