Teresa Moyo

**Teresa** is a major character in *You Feel It Just Below the Ribs*, and the wife of the main narrator, Miriam Gregory. She grew up during the Great Reckoning and her skills in seamstressing led her to become a fashion designer in the New Society.

> *"Teresa cocked an eyebrow at me. "I've already paid for my lunch," she said, "and all my dry cleaning is done through my work." She narrowed her eyes, appraising me with a slight smile. "There's only one option," she said. "You'll have to take me to dinner.""* **--Miriam in *You Feel It Just Below the Ribs***, p.215
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## Biography

### Early Life

Teresa's parents moved to the United States from South Africa before she was born, as refugees from the Boer War during which their farm was destroyed. They established a new farm in a small town in Wyoming where Teresa was born and lived throughout the Great Reckoning. Fighting never physically came to them, but the army would occasionally arrive to recruit people and commission food from the farmers. Teresa's father was among the recruits, signing up when she was eight, and his letters stopped coming a few years later, suggesting he had died.

When the army stopped returning and paying for food, divisions began to appear in the community. As Black South Africans, Teresa's family was either singled out, or felt themselves easy targets for the rest of the townspeople. Teresa's mother died of heart failure when she was fifteen. She was left to fend for herself, and learned to mend and eventually make clothes to take care of herself. She grew to love making and designing clothes, and experimented with whatever she could find, and after the war she eventually established herself as a fashion designer.

### Marriage and Career

#### Meeting Miriam

On a windy day outside Baltimore, Teresa was blown inside a diner, having to catch herself on the Please Wait sign by the door. When she righted herself, she made eye contact with a stranger and shared a moment of laughter with them. Around an hour later, as Teresa was leaving, she had coffee accidentally spat all over her white dress by Miriam Gregory. Horrified, Miriam insisted on paying for her meal and her dry cleaning to apologise, but Teresa said that since her meal was payed for and her dry cleaning was done through her work, Miriam would just have to take her out to dinner instead. The next evening, Miriam took Teresa to a small Turkish restaurant called Idyll, and they talked at length about their experiences of the Great Reckoning and lives since, until they realised the restaurant was closing around them, and Teresa suggested they continue their date at a bar.

They didn't make plans to meet again, but later that week Teresa returned to the diner where they first met and sat down with Miriam while she was working on her book, sketching up her latest designs. After a while of doing this, Teresa needed her sewing machine to continue working, so they started meeting at her studio, which she had restored from an old warehouse (and converted partially into a living space), instead of the diner. Teresa "rescued" Miriam from her damp basement apartment fairly quickly, though when she retrieved some of her things to start moving in, several items of clothing and notes had been ruined by mold in the two or three weeks she had been gone.

One day after dinner, the two of them were doing the dishes and Miriam was washing while Teresa dried, but Teresa kept handing the plates back to her saying they weren't clean enough. One plate slipped from their hands and smashed, making Teresa cry, and Miriam suddenly asked her to marry her (actually, it was more of a demand). Teresa and Miriam got married on 23 November, 1954, and it was a cold, grey, damp day. The following year, Nora came to visit and seemed to get on with Teresa well.

#### Childbearing

Around five years after they got married, Teresa was out buying coffee and saw a woman ahead of her who was pregnant. It got her thinking, and a couple of weeks later, she suggested to Miriam that she have a baby. Miri asked her to sit on it for another two months to be sure she wanted pregnancy and all it entailed, and when those two months were over, they made an appointment with the doctor. Teresa suffered from severe morning sickness and had to take leave from work at the fourth month. By the sixth, she needed so much help that Miriam also stopped working to care for her. For a while she could only eat porridge, and then had a two-week period where she craved very spicy curries. The baby came three weeks early, after an extremely short labour of 90 minutes. Teresa slept for fourteen hours after she was born. Despite the hardship, Teresa was immediately glad she had gone through with it, remarking on how beautiful her daughter had been.

Teresa recovered quickly, and was eager to get back to work, bursting with new ideas. One of her designs created during this period was a silk dress that Shelley Winters wore to the third annual Golden Globe Awards in 1962. At some point during this period, Teresa expanded her business by bringing in new designers, and the company moved out of the workshop to a larger space. Teresa and Miriam moved into a small house a short walk from the new warehouse.

Around another five years after the first pregnancy (although Miriam is much less sure of this estimate than her earlier one) Teresa said she wanted to contribute to the repopulation effort a second time. Unlike the first pregnancy, the second went much smoother for her physically, although it seemed to Miri to be taking an emotional toll. With some prompting from Miri, Teresa signed up to a research and counseling programme for pregnant people. She participated in biweekly therapy sessions during the pregnancy and a two-month inpatient programme post-delivery after her son was born on the 5th of October.

Although the therapy was eventually successful, Miriam began to notice that Teresa would sometimes become absentmindedly unhappy. These moments happened once every few weeks for the first two years after the boy was born. One day, Miriam found Teresa sitting perfectly still at the kitchen table, holding her son's hospital ID tag, and when she was taken out of her trance state, she confessed that she had named the baby Moses.

Miriam began taking Teresa through meditation sessions a couple of times a week. Some time later during winter, seeing Miriam was distracted, she suggested that they go on holiday. They booked a beach house for a week, and spent it taking walks along the freezing beach, reading by the fire, and arguing about the books they were reading. In the mornings, Miriam took them through the Watercolor Quiet. Teresa spent much of the week mentally planning her next summer line of designs, and suggested suddenly on their final day that they get a dog. She was imagining a sleepy greyhound that would curl at their feet, called Moses.

### After Moses

Just under three years after Moses' birth, Rosemary called Miriam to suggest she come to dinner and meet her wife. She charmed Teresa immediately with praise of Miriam and the work she did at Gateway, and Teresa seemed to enjoy the insight into a period of her life that her wife didn't talk about.

Shortly afterwards, Miriam came home one evening to find the house empty. She called Teresa's assistant, Kiera, to ask if she knew of any plans she had had for the evening, but she did not know, only able to say that she had left the workroom at lunchtime for an errand or meeting. Sensing that something was wrong, Miri set out looking for her, driving past childhood centres, but when she did not find her, began to drive around in a panic. On her fourth trip down a particular street, she spotted Teresa sitting on the footpath outside the hospital where she had given birth, very still. Teresa expressed a wish to remember her children, but did not resist when Miri brought her to her feet and took her home.

After the Institute was built, Teresa and Miriam bought a small patch of land halfway between the facility and the city, on which they built a house. They were surrounded by nature, and Teresa had the option of working on designs at home or driving in to the workshop. She was never admitted to the Institute, but with Miriam's guided meditations, her condition improved. After a year or two, Rosemary, who came to dinner every couple of weeks, commented that seemed lighter and more at ease than she had. It was "against the rules" for Miriam and Rosemary to talk about work at dinner with Teresa and by the time the Institute had been running for five years, their dinner parties were much less frequent.

Teresa's work was also keeping her busy, as her recovery had reinvigorated her work and made her designs high in demand. She travelled a lot, showcasing her designs and making custom pieces for celebrities. She even started planning her own design school, and was in talks with the Council about it. Feeling that they hadn't had a special dinner together in some time, Teresa planned a surprise for Miriam; quails on a bed of arugula and walnut salad, with French onion soup and sourdough bread. There was also a cheese board, and crème brûlée, complete with a blowtorch bought specially. She laid out everything ready, and lit candles ready for the end of the workday. However, Miriam was late home, and though Teresa tried calling, she couldn't get through to the office. By the time Miriam finally arrived home, the candles were burned half down, the food was cold, and Teresa was upset. When they sat down to eat at last, Teresa asked Miriam what she was researching that had kept her. Miriam expressed some tentative doubts in Rosemary and the Institute, which Teresa was resistant to, being friends with Rosemary as well as already irritated with Miri.

While Miriam investigated the Institute, she would often shut herself in her study while at home, and many nights Teresa would go to bed alone. Around six or seven years into Teresa's acquaintance with Rosemary, she was unhappy with Miriam's apparent distrust and paranoia. Miri said as little about her findings as she could, to avoid worrying Teresa or prompting criticism from her. Rosemary came around to their house while Miriam was working, ostensibly to ask Teresa for a recommendation for a tailor in Baltimore (she also provided suggestions for colour and pattern). Rosemary found the "CARPENTRY" box in the study and she asked Teresa about it, who seemed unsure of its contents or purpose.

In the final months, Teresa and Miriam's dinners became strained, with Miri losing her appetite and being reticent to discuss anything. The two of them did not play cards or go to the movies together. Once, Teresa asked about inviting Rosemary over to dinner, and Miriam got up from the table without a word. Teresa said, "You think you're making your own decisions, but we both have to live with them." She began eating and sleeping separately and leaving rooms when Miriam entered, although she insisted it was the other way around.

Teresa was the one to report Miriam missing when she failed to come home from work in 1975. It is unknown how she spent the rest of her life, but she died of breast cancer in 1982.

## Additional info

* The meaning of Teresa's name is uncertain, but could come from the Greek "theros" meaning "summer" or "therizos" meaning "to harvest".
* Teresa and Miriam returned to the restaurant where they had their first date, Idyll, every year for the next decade.
* As a child, Teresa always dreamed of going to the theatre.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.217-19
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.215-16
3. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.221-24
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p. 232-33
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.227-29
6. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.237-40
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.241-52
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.253
9. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.259-61
10. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.265-66
11. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.269-71
12. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.284
13. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.288
14. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.297
15. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.301-04
16. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.308-09
17. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.312
18. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.318-19
19. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.338-39
20. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.2
21. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.367