Free Triptych by Margit Liesche

dress she is wearing, where she got it, how much it cost, why it makes her feel good?
    â€œ Troi oi ! A beauteous cloth,” Hoa says, walking toward me in slacks and a blouse.
    Hoa is older than the other women in the group, and she looks it. Bossy, funny, and filled with newcomer zest, it is hard to imagine that just two years ago she left Vietnam in a leaky boat filled with passengers packed so tightly for four days and four nights that they could not even get up to relieve themselves. Now she works the night shift at the horse-meat processing factory on the outskirts of town, a different sort of nightmare.
    â€œMany colors,” Meena says softly. A shy, pretty young woman with huge dark eyes, Meena was originally from Kurdistan. A pastel blue and white scarf covers her head and shoulders, and only her face, framed by the cloth, is visible as she stands behind Hoa, peering over Hoa’s shoulder, her eyes slightly downcast
    Ioana is eyeing my shoulder. “What happen here?” she asks. A barrel-chested, big-boned woman originally from Romania, Ioana is wearing tight jeans and a baby doll top. Her unkempt bottle-blond hair is parted down the middle and hangs like curtains along the sides of her face. The curtains close as she leans in for a closer look. “Blunder?”
    I can smell the cigarette smoke embedded in her clothes. I inch away. “No, it is not a mistake ,” I say. “It’s my creation.”
    Like my mother, I enjoy needlework, but with a different twist. I transform secondhand embroidered linens by removing the original pattern, counting the stitching by color, then re-embroidering a modern abstract design. In the shoulder cluster motif, threads in bright primary hues of yellow, red, blue, and orange had once composed a floral pattern, but I had reworked the threads to form a series of irregular rings. Circles within circles, with the dominant threads forming the outer ring, and the inner circles descending to a center dot of the most negligible color.
    â€œBut you are from Hungary,” Ioana says. “This, it look more like a creation of Kandinsky from Odessa than work of a Magyar.”
    Talk about Auntie Mariska’s shawl was supposed to lead into the story I had planned to share about her escape from the Hungarian Revolution, thirty years ago. The challenges she met on her journey to the States. How she had come with nothing, but now was co-owner of a business. She had even managed to hire me during summers while I was in college. Yet now the ladies only want to know my intent for unstitching and re-stitching the design.
    â€œI look at it as building a relationship between the artist’s earlier work and modern work,” I tell them. “Bringing the past into the present.” The women look unconvinced. “Or a way to connect to the past,” I say, paring the concept to its core.
    It is an uphill battle, with several women in the group sure that what I am doing is sacrilegious. Even my explanation that the shawl had been mass-produced, not hand sewn, does not placate them.
    â€œYou are unpicking a woman’s history,” Hoa protests. “Stripping bare the love, talent, time…soul…she put into creating.”
    â€œ Stealing . In my country, for this you lose a hand.” Meena’s voice trembles, and her comments are barely audible, but I feel their sting.
    I remind them that in America, there is freedom of expression. Re-stiching is more of a craft, but also an art form. Art is meant to move the viewer, and it often moves two people differently. This prompts discussion. Welcome to America.
    Willow Grove’s identity for the better part of the last 150 years has been mainly European. Expansion of the local university’s curriculum in recent years has attracted a more diverse faculty and student base. Because Willow Grove has almost no unemployment and a relatively low cost of living, three years ago it was selected