Hem and Haw
the diary of a costureira in Newark · 1997

Página em construção! Priscila is still teaching me.

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Quarta-feira, 24 de dezembro de 1997 · Wednesday, December 24, 1997

Christmas Eve. In a few hours we go to the Missa do Galo, the midnight Mass, and after, the ceia at my brother Wellington's: bacalhau for Luís's side, because for the Portuguese Christmas Eve is always codfish, and rabanada for my side, which is bread soaked in milk and fried with cinnamon sugar, like your French toast but better, I am sorry. And panetone. And Coca-Cola. And too many people in a small apartment, which is how Christmas should be.

Sunday Priscila took me to see "Titanic." Three hours! Luís came and slept through the iceberg. I cried at the end like everybody. But I will tell you the truth: half the time I was looking at the dresses. The beading on the dinner gowns, the long lines, the little buttons. I wanted to stop the film and walk up to the screen and turn up the hem and see how it was finished inside. Priscila says this is not normal. Priscila is twenty. She will learn.

Feliz Natal to whoever reads this. Priscila says the counter says forty people. Forty! Who are you? Write me.

Quinta-feira, 27 de novembro de 1997 · Thursday, November 27, 1997

Dia de Ação de Graças. Thanksgiving. In Brazil we don't have it, but in Newark we have everything. Wellington's wife Cida made a turkey and also farofa, which is manioc flour toasted in butter with bacon and onion, and the turkey was very happy with the farofa. Luís's cousins came with a pot of Portuguese rice. Nobody made the cranberry. We don't understand the cranberry.

Before we ate, Wellington said everybody should say what they are thankful for. Luís said, "Ana." Then everybody said "ahhhh" and he turned red, and then he said, "And the Giants," and everybody threw napkins.

I am thankful for Luís. For my hands. For Mãe still strong in Valadares. And for the letter that came Monday: they took Luís's fingerprints for his citizenship application in the spring and now finally they send him a paper saying the application is still "pending." A paper to say nothing is happening. But it means someone opened the folder. Graças a Deus.

Domingo, 12 de outubro de 1997 · Sunday, October 12, 1997

Today is the day of Nossa Senhora Aparecida, the patroness of Brazil. In Brazil it is a holiday. Here it is a Sunday, so I went to Mass and lit a candle, and then I bought a phone card at the store on Ferry Street and called Mãe.

The card says forty-five minutes to Brazil. It always lies a little. We talked about the mango tree in her yard, which has too many mangoes again, and the neighbor's son who went to Boston, and my sister Rosângela's knee. Normal things. I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the refrigerator the whole time so I could hear her better.

At the end, like always, I said, "A bênção, mãe." It is how we say goodbye to our mothers in Brazil, we ask their blessing. And she said, "Deus te abençoe, minha filha." God bless you, my daughter.

Six years since I saw her face. I cannot go. If I go, I cannot come back. So I sit on the kitchen floor and ask her blessing through a card that lies about the minutes.

Domingo, 21 de setembro de 1997 · Sunday, September 21, 1997

She walked.

Sandra's wedding was yesterday at the Portuguese church, and I sat in the back row with Luís and watched my dress walk up the aisle. Ivory silk, the Alençon lace on the bodice, thirty-two little covered buttons down the back that I made one by one, and the train. From the back row you cannot see the stitches. You can only see a girl who is happy. That is correct. That is how it should be.

Luís held my hand so tight my ring made a mark. When Sandra passed us he leaned over and whispered, "Não caiu nada." Nothing fell off. That is Luís's idea of a compliment. It is also my idea of a compliment.

At the reception I went with her to the ladies' room with my little kit and did the bustle, eleven hooks and eleven loops, so she could dance. Dona Fátima found me after and held my face in both her hands and said something in her Portuguese from the north of Portugal that I did not fully understand but I understood.

Three brides called this week. Three!

Segunda-feira, 1º de setembro de 1997 · Monday, September 1, 1997

Princess Diana died yesterday. In Paris, in a car.

In July 1981 I was twenty-one and I watched her wedding on television in Valadares, at my aunt's house, because my aunt had the color TV. The whole street came. When she got out of the carriage and the dress kept coming and coming, that train almost eight meters, my mother put her hand on her chest and said, "Ai, meu Deus, who is going to iron that?" Everybody laughed. But I did not laugh. I was sitting on the floor thinking, how did they fold it inside the carriage? How did they keep it from wrinkling? That was the day I knew what I wanted to do with my hands.

Today I sewed all day on Sandra's lining with the radio on the news. I cried for her and for her two boys. I am not ashamed.

Quarta-feira, 13 de agosto de 1997 · Wednesday, August 13, 1997

Today I went to New York for Sandra's fabric. The train from Penn Station in Newark to Penn Station in New York, twenty minutes, and then I walked to the Garment District, where the stores on the side streets have fabric to the ceiling and men who call everybody "sweetheart."

I bought ivory silk shantung, which has little slubs in it, little bumps in the thread, so it looks like it has a secret. And for the bodice, a piece of Alençon lace, French, with the flowers outlined in a fine cord. The lace cost more than the silk. I paid it with money from three months of hems. I held it on my lap the whole way home on the train like a baby.

At home I laid it on the cutting table and did not cut it. You do not cut lace like that on the day you buy it. You look at it for one night first. My mother taught me that. I don't know why. It is correct.

Domingo, 27 de julho de 1997 · Sunday, July 27, 1997

First fitting for Sandra. Before I cut the real fabric, I make the whole dress first in muslin, cheap white cotton, and fit it on the body. Every seam. Every dart. Then I take the muslin apart and it becomes the pattern. It is slow. It is the only way I know.

Sandra stood on my kitchen chair in the muslin and I went around and around her with pins in my mouth, taking in here, letting out there. Her mother sat at the table and watched and after a few minutes started to cry and say "Ai, a minha menina," my little girl, in her Portuguese from Portugal. I could not cry because I had pins in my mouth. That is why seamstresses keep pins in the mouth. To keep from crying at fittings.

Sábado, 12 de julho de 1997 · Saturday, July 12, 1997

My husband Luís is Portuguese. He came to Newark with his parents when he was ten, from a village near Aveiro. He pours concrete for a Portuguese company: foundations, basements, sidewalks. He leaves at half past five with his cooler, bread and chouriço and a thermos of coffee, and he comes home gray with dust and eats like three men.

We fight about words. He says pequeno-almoço for breakfast, I say café da manhã. He says autocarro, I say ônibus. He says my Portuguese sounds like singing. I say his sounds like somebody chewing gravel. It is the same language, only one of us is correct.

It is 95 degrees in the workroom. The fan blows my pattern paper all over the floor, so I hold it down with cans of beans. Luís came home and saw the beans on the table on top of the paper and said, "Dinner?"

Domingo, 29 de junho de 1997 · Sunday, June 29, 1997

Olá! My name is Ana Lucia Barbosa. I am a costureira, a seamstress. I am from Governador Valadares, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and since 1991 I live in Newark, New Jersey, in the Ironbound, the neighborhood behind Penn Station where everybody speaks Portuguese, some from Portugal and some from Brazil, and we argue about how to say breakfast.

My niece Priscila made this page for me. She takes a computer class at the community college and she says I need to be "on the Internet." I said for what? She said, "For the brides, Tia." So. Here I am. For the brides.

The name was her idea too. Last month a bride's mother sat in my kitchen one hour saying maybe the lace, maybe not the lace, maybe satin, maybe not. After she left, Priscila said, "Tia, she really hemmed and hawed." I thought it was a sewing expression! To hem, I know. Haw, I did not know. Priscila says it means to not decide. So now the page is Hem and Haw, for the sewing and for the not deciding, which is most of what brides do, and to be honest, most of what I do also.

I sew in our apartment, on the second floor of a house on a street off Ferry Street. The front room is my workroom. My old Singer that I bought used in 1992. The overloque, what you call a serger. A cutting table Luís made me from a door. And Dona Maria, my dress form, who has no head and is very patient.

Right now on Dona Maria is my first wedding dress from zero. Not alterations, not a hem, not taking in. From zero. For Sandra, the daughter of Dona Fátima who lives downstairs and owns the house. The wedding is in September. I have sewn maybe a hundred dresses in my life but never a noiva, a bride, from nothing. I am so nervous. Luís says I talk about darts in my sleep.

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Ana Lucia Barbosa · [email protected]
Last updated September 26, 1999