When I was in high school in Monticello, New York, girls were required to take home economics and boys, shop. I had never shown any aptitude for domestic duties, but, nonetheless, as a girl, I was required to take home economics.

I learned to operate a sewing machine in that class. The class project for the semester was to make a dress using the sewing machine. We were allowed to choose the type of dress we wanted to make, and I chose a jumper. (After all, that was only half a dress.) I bought some attractive blue rayon fabric and selected a design for a v-necked jumper. The design had pretty embroidered flowers in many colors along the neck.

Fortunately, we had a Singer sewing machine at home,and I worked on my jumper all semester. I particularly
enjoyed doing the flowered embroidery. On the day before I was to turn it in, I finally finished it and put it on. As I looked at myself in the mirror, I was appalled! Everything about the jumper had turned out fine--except that it did not fit. It was too tight. Tears rolled down my cheeks when I saw the work of a semester wasted. My mother heard my sobs and came running from the other room. When she saw me in the jumper, she realized what was wrong.

I was totally distraught. "Don't worry," Mother said. "Did you forget that your father was a tailor?" I was too upset to see what my father, excellent tailor that he was, could do in the part of the day that was left to rectify the situation. But he and my mother saw the solution immediately.

The jumper was constructed of two pieces of fabric,front and back, joined at the sides. All my father had to do was buy another piece of fabric for the back, larger than the one I had, and substitute that for the back piece of the jumper I had made. He dashed off to the yard goods store, matched the fabric, came home, and redid the jumper. This time, it fit beautifully.

I wore my new jumper to class the following day--and passed home economics. My grade, however, was only a B+. I thought my father deserved an A.

Copyright 1999 by Sonia Pressman Fuentes

The above story is an excerpt from the author’s memoir, Eat First—You Don’t Know What They’ll Give You, The Adventures of an Immigrant Family and Their Feminist Daughter.