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The Other Side of the Page · The Evening of the Second Curtain

The children's book, The Same Stick (ages 6-8), on Spark & Anvil

This is the same evening as "The Same Stick", the last book of "The Day Before". Lan's mother was not on the Green.

The curtains had been her idea, which was the trouble with them.

The children's room got the early light, and in summer it got it at about half past four, which was exactly when she was getting up for the bakery anyway, but Tí, who was four, took the light personally. He woke when it woke. The old blind had a crack across the middle where Lan had once tried to climb it, and the light came through the crack in a long gold stripe that landed on Tí's pillow like an alarm clock.

So she had bought fabric. Dark blue, thick, with small yellow moons on it, from the market on a Saturday. Enough for two curtains, the woman on the stall had said, if she was careful. She had made the first one last week, on the kitchen table, on her one late morning. It had taken all morning. It hung at the left of the window now, and it was, she thought, a perfectly good curtain. It reached the sill exactly. Tí had approved it by patting the moons.

Tonight was the second one.

She had the fabric spread across the kitchen table, under the light, with the pins in a saucer and the big scissors beside them. She had been on her feet since half past four. The radio was on low. It was the kind of evening when a job that needed no thinking was the best possible job, and she had decided, on the bus home, that the second curtain needed no thinking. It was the same as the first one.

She measured the window again anyway, because her own mother had always said measure twice. She used the metal tape from the toolbox, the yellow one that snapped back into its case and made Tí jump. A hundred and forty-eight centimetres, top of the rail to the sill.

Then she measured the fabric, to mark where to cut, and stopped.

Last week she had used the cloth tape from the sewing tin, the soft one, older than Lan, that she had always used for sewing. She had written the number on the back of an envelope, which was still on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a pineapple. 152, it said.

A hundred and fifty-two by the cloth tape. A hundred and forty-eight by the metal one. Four centimetres apart, for the same window.

She stood and looked at the two numbers for a while.

She was too tired for this. One of the tapes was wrong, obviously, and it was obviously the cloth one, because a cloth tape could stretch and a metal tape could not. That was the sensible answer. She would cut the second curtain to the metal tape, and it would be right, and if the first curtain was a bit long, well, it was a curtain. Nobody measured curtains.

She picked up the scissors.

The front door banged.

Lan came in the way she always came in, all at once, coat half off, talking before she was through the door. She had been on the Green with Inkling, the girl from the lake houses, since after school, and she had the look she sometimes had when she came back from there: a little distant, a little pleased, as if she had been somewhere further away than the Green and had not quite got all the way back yet.

"What are you doing?" said Lan.

"The other curtain," said her mother. "The tapes don't agree."

She meant to stop there. But she was tired, and Lan was standing at her elbow looking at the two tapes, so she started to explain. "One of them must be wrong. The cloth one stretches, you see, so it says more than it should. So the right length is the metal one, and the first curtain is—"

She stopped, scissors open over the fabric. Because she did not, in fact, know that. The metal tape was newer, but it was also the one Lan had used, in the spring, to measure the length of the garden fence and the height of the cat, and once, she was fairly sure, to try to lasso the cat. The little metal hook at the end was bent. It might be the metal one that was wrong. It might be both.

She did not know which tape was right. She was not going to find out tonight.

She put the scissors down, and sat, and for a moment said nothing at all.

Lan looked at the two numbers on the envelope and the table. Then she went to the window.

She unhooked the first curtain from the rail, carefully, the way she did almost nothing else, and carried it to the kitchen in both arms like something asleep. She laid it on the table. Then she pulled the new fabric across and laid it on top, edge to edge, the moons on the bottom one showing through a little at the corners.

"Cut it level with that one," said Lan.

Her mother looked at her.

"Then they're the same," said Lan, as if that settled it, which it did. "It doesn't matter which tape. You just copy the first one."

Tí had appeared from somewhere, in his pyjamas, which he had put on back to front. He took hold of one corner of the fabric without being asked and held it very still, because he had been told about scissors.

Her mother cut along the edge of the first curtain. It took about two minutes.

They hung the second curtain together, Lan on the chair, her mother holding the chair, Tí supervising. The two curtains met in the middle of the window and hung side by side, dark blue with small yellow moons, and they reached the sill exactly, both of them, by the same amount.

The crack in the old blind behind them did not show at all.

"Even," said Lan, from the chair, very satisfied.

Later, when Tí was asleep under the moons, and Lan was meant to be, her mother sat on the end of the bed for a minute.

"Where did you get that from?" she asked. "Copying the first one."

Lan thought about it. "A boy with a stick," she said, and yawned, and turned over.

Her mother did not ask which boy. She had learned, over seven years, that some of the things Lan brought home from the Green came with a story and some came without, and that asking for the story did not always bring it.

She went back to the kitchen and wound up the cloth tape, the old soft one from the sewing tin, and looked at it for a while. Then she put it in the bin, and put the metal tape back in the toolbox, and wrote on a piece of masking tape stuck to the lid of the sewing tin, in marker pen, so that she would see it next time:

Copy the first one.

The question for your own table

When two people in your house have to make things that fit together, whether shelves, a meal, a plan, or a shared calendar, what do you both measure from? Is it the same thing?

Something to do

Next time you make a second of something, lay it against the first one instead of measuring again.

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