By Donna Cameron

Photo by Matt Benson on Unsplash

To look at me now—in my baggy jeans, long sleeve tee, and orthopedic slippers—you’d never know I was a fashionista at age eight. My closet was filled with matchless dresses and skirts in vibrant colors and designs. My friends were envious that my clothes didn’t come from J.C. Penney’s or Montgomery Ward’s. Even the girls whose mothers took them into San Francisco to shop at Magnin’s drooled over my distinctly not off-the-rack wardrobe.

“Your mom makes such neat clothes,” they’d whisper reverently. “You’re so lucky!”

Mom taught herself to sew as a teenager. She was tall, curvaceous, and beautiful, and her foster parents wouldn’t let her wear anything but dowdy hand-me-downs. She was allowed to use the sewing machine, though, and she’d alter those castoffs into dresses they would never see. These weren’t dresses for church. They were party clothes. 

By her early twenties, Mom was working as a secretary in an insurance company’s corporate office, and modeling on the side. Her stunning looks and sharp fashion sense caught the eye of a recently transferred executive, and the rest, as they say, was history.

My parents married and had two daughters. Mom continued to make her clothes and her daughters’ with exquisite skill. Where some of our friends’ mothers also made their clothes, those were easily recognized as home-made: crooked zippers, clumpy seams, puckered darts, and uneven hems. Mom had an innate ability to select materials, colors, and styles that would look good on her slightly overweight, graceless daughters. Maybe she was dressing the dolls she never had as a child.

All that changed when my father died, felled by cancer, far too young, for him, for his children, and for his wife. I was eleven years old, in sixth grade. I didn’t notice that mom had packed away her sewing machine, not until the end of summer when she announced it was time for back-to-school shopping. She was through with sewing, thank you very much. For the first time, we went into the city and bought dresses, skirts, and blouses. Hours Mom had once devoted to sewing were now spent nursing vodka tonics.

I started junior high wearing what other girls wore—even occasionally discovering that a classmate might wear the exact same dress as I. It wasn’t a big deal. I adjusted quickly. I’d adapted to bigger things in recent months. At home, I endeavored to adjust to Mom’s nightly drinking and the empty spaces it created in our house.

Another grim adjustment was having to take home economics classes. I knew how to boil an egg and grill a cheese sandwich, and I could scour magazines for glossy pictures to illustrate the food groups. Most of our class time, however, was devoted to learning the feminine art of sewing, seated at rows of sewing machines where we were given cheap fabric to practice with. We sewed seams, basted hems, made button holes. My efforts were consistently clumsy and crude, which our teacher, Mrs. Helvig, never hesitated to point out. I didn’t care. At age twelve, I didn’t want to sew my own clothes, now or ever.

And I didn’t much like Mrs. Helvig. She was a grim-faced woman who wore tight woolen suits and high heels, accessorized by a strand of pearls around her crepey neck, with an oversized pearl clasping each earlobe. She spoke to us formally, seemingly determined to mold us in her image, a shuddering thought. Fabric, she instructed, must be tasteful—not too bold or too colorful. Trims were to be understated. Everything must be pressed—wrinkles were a sign of sloppiness. To that end, we would learn to press our clothes with surgical precision. I had ironed a few times before and knew enough to glide the iron across the fabric and not allow it to sit and scorch.

When it was my turn at the ironing board, I carefully laid my fabric across the board and checked that the heat setting was right for it. I skated the iron across my seams, laying them flat, pleased that they weren’t puckering.

“Miss Cameron!” Mrs. Helvig’s voice shrilled from across the room. I set the iron on its stand and watched as she strode toward me.

“Miss Cameron. We do not iron with our left hand.”

“I do,” I replied. “I’m left-handed.”

“Not here, you’re not.” 

She spoke loudly enough that everyone could hear. Sewing machines stopped whirring. Faces turned toward us. 

No one had ever tried to change my left-handedness. I’d heard stories of people in more primitive times being punished for being left-handed, or being required to learn to use their right-hand. I couldn’t imagine that this was happening now, to me.

“But I’m left-handed,” I repeated, assuming the fact would sink in and she’d say “Oh, of course, so sorry.”

But she dug in. “I don’t care what hand you write with; you are going to iron with your right hand.”

I could have done it. Left-handed people become adept in a right-handed world. It would have been easy. But I wasn’t about to let Mrs. Helvig win this battle. There had been enough losses over the past year—ones I had no control over.

“No,” I said. “I am left-handed and I am going to iron with my left hand.”

“In my class, you will do as I say. And that means ironing right-handed.”

I looked at her. Looked at the faces of my classmates watching us, mesmerized and eager for a confrontation. I stepped to my desk, picked up my notebook and, without a glance at my teacher, marched out the door.

I was a quiet kid, a good student, mostly invisible, even more so since my father’s death. As I walked to the principal’s office, I recognized that I was doing something entirely against my nature. I quavered even as I bolstered my courage for what would come next.

The school secretary looked up when I came in. 

“I need to talk to the principal,” I told her.

“What is this about?” she asked kindly.

Part of me seemed to be standing off to the side, watching as I behaved in a way I never had before. “Mrs. Helvig,” I said. “I’m in her class. I just walked out.”

She looked at me levelly for a moment. “Let me see if he’s free.” A minute later, she ushered me into the principal’s office.

I sat in the chair opposite him and explained what had just happened. “I will not let her try to change me,” I avowed, then added “Can I take shop instead?”

The principal considered me for a few moments before explaining that woodshop was out of the question. He cited sharp tools, power drills, heavy chunks of lumber. Obviously, he had no conception of the dangers mere girls faced in home ec: boiling water on hot stoves, scalding irons, sharp shears, and the peril of feeding fabric past pumping needles on sewing machines controlled by touchy foot pedals. From his perspective, he was preparing students for the future the school system envisioned for us.

He offered, “I’ll speak with Mrs. Helvig. I don’t think this will be a problem again.” He told me to go on to my next class.

That evening, I told my mom what had happened. She seemed impressed and a little surprised that I had gone to talk to the principal. “Good for you,” she said. “Don’t let anyone make you do anything you don’t think is right.”

The next day, Mrs. Helvig didn’t say a word to me. When it was my turn at the iron, I picked it up with my left hand and skimmed it across my fabric. From the corner of my eye, I could see Mrs. Helvig furtively eyeing me. We kept our distance that day, like foxes assessing our adversary and defending our territory. As I was filing out at the end of class, she gave me a tight smile. It didn’t reach her eyes. While I’d expected anger, her eyes held fear. What had the principal said to her? I pondered how I could leverage this new balance of power.

Our final assignment was to make a dress: buy a pattern and fabric, lay it out, cut it, sew it, fit it, and finally, model our creation in late spring. We were to do most of the work in class, but if we had a sewing machine at home, we could work on it there. 

Mom took me to the fabric store. We found a cute empire waist pattern that would flatter my figure, drawing attention from my lumpy hips to the breasts that had recently budded quite tolerably. The fabric I chose bore a kelly green floral design on a cornflower blue background. It enhanced my eyes, which vacillate from blue to green depending on the light.

This is where I’m supposed to describe how hard I worked on that dress, how carefully I pinned the pieces together and basted the seams. How, after multiple fittings, I got it just right and reveled in my new-found skill and accomplishment.

But that’s not what happened. 

Mom pulled her Singer out of the closet and restored it to its home on her sewing table. She pinned the pattern to the fabric, then cut, pieced, and stitched it together. Yep, she made the dress. She even used some of the Singer’s decorative stitching options to add fancy edging around the neck. In class, I puttered with fabric or pulled out a book and worked on homework for other classes. Mrs. H never said a word.

As long as Mom had her sewing machine out again, she tossed off few extra dresses for my sister and me, using fabric she had stockpiled before our father’s death. With her hands busy, the vodka wasn’t replenished as often. Even with a glass always within arm’s distance, it in no way impaired her talent. Once again, my wardrobe boasted mom couture and elicited attention from my schoolmates. I savored the feeling. But would it last?

I wore my pretty blue-green dress to school for the class fashion show in May. Mrs. Helvig circled each of us pointing out what had been done competently and where our efforts had fallen short. She circled me twice, spent a full minute examining the zipper that had been inserted and stitched with perfection. My expression innocent throughout, I stood erect and confident as she studied the decorative needlecraft at the neckline and bent to inspect the perfectly even stitches at my hem. 

“Excellent work, Miss Cameron,” she declared. I couldn’t miss the hint of disappointment in her voice. 

When I told Mom she had earned an A in home ec, she laughed and poured more vodka into her glass. The next day, she packed up her sewing machine and stowed it back in the closet. 

I would never have cheated in any other class. And my mother never would have countenanced my cheating in any other subject, with any other teacher. But for Mrs. Helvig’s class, we had no misgivings. I felt no guilt then and I still don’t all these years later.

When Mom died, I found that Singer sewing machine in the back of a closet and I brought it home. I’ve used it a few times to mend a seam or make a simple curtain. I’ve never wanted to do more with it, even as I see friends make splendid clothes for themselves or their grandchildren. No. No, thank you.

When I do notice the dusty Singer case in our laundry room, I’m reminded of how I learned to speak up for myself and speak out for others. How a dispute over an iron instilled in me a sense of justice that serves to this day. How, for a short time, and never again, my mother and I shared a common enemy, and we vanquished her together.