Take a Lemon

With 20-20 hindsight, I should have been able to figure this out. I had grants and loans to help pay for tuition, but I needed to supplement that; my agreement with Mom and Dad was that I was responsible for a few thousand dollars a year, which wasn’t all that difficult for me, playing occasional gigs. Since she didn’t have my guitar, Marsha would have needed some other way to pick up cash. Mom had been bringing in a decent income as a seamstress, and had taught Tina to sew. Obviously, she would have taught her older daughter as well, if she’d had one – as she did, now. I knew nothing about sewing, but there was clearly a lot involved, or Mom wouldn’t have been able to make money at it.

I had arranged to call Tina in the evenings on a regular basis, for more coaching as needed, and this certainly counted. I dialed her cell.

“Hi, Marsh. Everything OK?”

“Not quite,” I answered, as calmly as I could. “Tina, remember I asked you to warn me about things that would be different?”

“Yeah…?”

“Teen, how does Marsha bring in money for school?”

“You- I mean she’s a seamstress, Marsh…” she started. Then she got it. “Oh. Wait. You… you probably don’t know how to sew, do you?”

“Bingo. When Mom was teaching you, I was practicing my guitar.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Oh man. I’m sorry, Marsh, I guess it never occurred to me that she wouldn’t have taught a boy to sew.”

“Yeah, maybe I should have told her I wanted to learn, ‘just in case some mad scientists turn me into a girl, one day’! Tina, what the Hell – I mean,” I corrected myself, “‘what in the world’ – am I supposed to do now? There are lots of people expecting me to sew things for them, and I don’t know the first thing about it!”

“Um… I’m not sure.”

“Yeah, I think I have to give up, now,” I said, tightly. “I’ll go to classes tomorrow, but afterwards I’m going to have to go back to the guys who changed me and have them undo it. There’s no way for me to fake this.”

“What??” The panic was evident in her voice. “Marsh, you promised! You said you’d give me at least until the end of the year!”

“Yeah, but that was before I found out how impossible it was going to be. I can act like a girl, Teen. I can pretend to know Marsha’s friends and I can take her courses, but sewing…? That’s a skill, Teen. You know how much is involved. It’s not like I haven’t tried, but there’s no possible way around this. To keep playing the role of Marsha, I need to be able to sew, and I can’t.”

“Wait, Marsh! Please wait! Give me time – let me figure something out. This is my life we’re talking about, here.”

“It’s not your life, Teen,” I said, exasperated. “You’re the same little sister I remember. The only change is that you’ll remember having a brother again, not a sister.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Marsh. It’s not your entire memory that will be ripped away and replaced. Please, Marsh, give me some time.”

I sighed. She knew I couldn’t do anything that might hurt her. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t, but she was so panicky, and she was my little sister… “OK, I’ll wait. I’ll see when these things are promised for, and I’ll try to make excuses about being late. But I need a solution, Teen. I can’t just go the rest of the term without delivering what Marsha promised, and I can’t afford to stay in school if I don’t have any kind of an income. Do you have any ideas?”

“Maybe you can learn, Marsh. You have Mom’s old sewing machine, right? Why don’t you start by learning how to use it? The manual should tell you how to thread it and how to do some basic stitches. I’ll think about what else we can do, OK?”

“Sure, Teen.” I guess she wasn’t the only who had been panicking. I didn’t see how reading the manual was going to do me much good, but it at least let me put off any irreversible decisions, and Dad had always taught me to delay those as much as possible. I could always give up later, if things really started to become impossible. Promising to talk again tomorrow, we hung up.

There was no manual attached to the sewing machine, but I knew that some appliance manuals were available online; after all, the manufacturer makes their money by selling the hardware, and having a manual available can cut down on calls to their support lines, so it was in their interest to make it easy to get one. A quick web search using the make and model number brought me to an electronic version. I was a bit annoyed to find that I had to pay for it, but my need was great enough to make it worthwhile, so I did so and downloaded an electronic copy. Since I’d spent my break catching up on my course reading, I had time to deal with this problem. I started to read the manual from cover to cover. Some of the terms in it were things I’d overheard Mom and Tina using, like ‘bobbin’ but I’d never been quite clear on what they were. Using the pictures included, I managed to find the bobbin. Apparently, I had to wind it somehow, which meant finding the thread.

Marsha’s sewing basket was next to the machine, and contained dozens of spools of thread, as well as needles, pins, scissors, and other tools I didn’t recognize. There were also several bobbins, some loaded with varying colors of thread, and some empty. For a moment, I sagged in my chair. This whole thing just seemed impossible. “One step at a time, Marsh,” I reminded myself. Other trite sayings came to me then, like “in for a penny, in for a pound,” and “look before you leap,” although the last probably should have been something like, “look before you are pushed.”

Deep breath time. The first few steps were purely mechanical, and didn’t seem to require an excess of skill. I found an empty bobbin and put it in the machine, then picked one of the larger spools of thread. I figured that I was going to be wasting some of it, and didn’t want to run out of something I might need later. Winding the bobbin wasn’t really all that difficult – it took me a few tries, but after a bit I thought I had the knack of it.

Pleased with an early success, I next tackled actually threading the machine. After several false starts, I discovered that it could pretty much thread itself, if I just started it properly. The acid test, of course, was whether I could actually sew anything with it. There were lots of descriptions in the manual about all kinds of fancy things you could do with the machine, which I just ignored. Finally, I found what I was looking for – starting a stitch. It didn’t seem all that hard. The biggest problem was that I had hold onto some cloth really close to the needle. And I needed some cloth to experiment with – I was not about to practice on actual clothing.

I did find a few scraps in the sewing basket, but they were really small, perhaps an inch by six inches. Following the instructions, I put one of them under the ‘foot’ crosswise, so that I could keep my hands a couple of inches away from the needle. In some ways, it felt like using a table saw – I had to guide the work through the danger area without letting my hands get too close.

Taking a deep breath, I stepped on the pedal and the cloth shot quickly through the area where the needle was. I hadn’t actually expected that – with a table saw, you have to push against the blade and the wood tries to kick away from it. With the sewing machine, the cloth was actually pulled into the needle. In a slight panic, I lifted my foot and found that I had sewn a line of thread most of the way through my cloth strip. The directions told me how to end it, so I pulled it back and tried again.

It took me a few tries, but I discovered that it was actually a lot easier than a table saw. For one thing, the cloth was being moved by a separate mechanism; you didn’t have to push. For another, since the needle just moved up and down, I wasn’t really in any danger of hurting my fingers. I practiced for close to an hour before I was satisfied. Now I could… sew a line into a strip of cloth, which was probably not very useful. At least the machine was becoming slightly less foreign. I think if I’d had any idea how much I really needed to know, I would have felt a bit more confident – or possibly more intimidated.