All Wound Up (19 page)

close the door, saying good-bye to the postie who’s just delivered me a package, and it strikes me that he must wonder about me. This family gets a fair number of packages, and sometimes I see this guy three times a week, and it just occurred to me now (I’m pretty quick that way) that even though he comes in the early afternoon, about nine times out of ten I’m sort of unkempt, clutching a half-knit sock and clad in leisure wear when he arrives. (By calling it “leisure wear,” I’m trying to make it sound okay that I’m actually wearing old yoga pants and a coffee-stained T-shirt that says “talk nerdy to me” on the front.) He’s never asked me what I do, why I’m always here, or how come I so seldom look like I am prepared to go out in public—and now that I think about it, I wish he would. Compared to what he must be imagining about how I spend my days, I’d rather he knew that I am a writer, a knitter, and that somehow, or at least in my life, that combo means that I don’t get dressed as often as other people.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, the sort of person who can just leave the house, although I hear tell that most people can. I even watch my friends and family do it, and I see people walking down the street in the morning, all of them getting up, getting dressed, brushing their hair, picking up their bags, and leaving their houses for work, and, while I salute those people, I can’t identify with them. I work from home, and I have a tiny office off of my kitchen, and while I occasionally think about what a leg up on the world you would have if you had the sort of job that made you get dressed every day, I don’t want one, and truthfully, when I did have one, it didn’t help a lot. Mornings would often find me looking for one of my shoes, discovering my blouse was buttoned funny, and spilling coffee on my last pair of clean pants. (Eventually I learned to have my first cup of coffee naked. It worked pretty well.)

My trouble with leaving for work wasn’t just about work. I have the same trouble going anywhere. Even trying to leave for a grocery shop I can’t find my list, my keys are gone, and even though I’ve taken great pains to prevent it from happening again, I have nothing to wear that makes me look like a grown-up who can be trusted. (It has been suggested to me that this may be related to my belief that putting on my one bra is really only for special occasions, but I still find it difficult to believe that controlling your breasts is the secret to being taken seriously.) If this is the sort of person you are, with uncontrolled breasts and naturally messy hair, then it turns out that you may be happier working from home, as I am, where the expectations for my appearance, timing, and foundation garments are a little bit lower. It has been awesome for me, because other than the fact that my postie likely thinks I’m chronically depressed, home moves at the speed and with the priorities I can cope with. I work when I like, eat when I like, talk when I like, and do laundry when I like, and frankly, a commute of ten steps without even having to brush your hair is hard to top.

Working from home has its down side, like that the only structure in it comes from me. You need a fair bit of self discipline about getting yourself to work if you’re the only one who’s going to notice if you get there. Everyone else has to get dressed and organized every day or their bosses will notice, while a lack of reasonable sensibility on my part could mean that if I’m not careful, I can end up hanging out at my desk in my underwear thinking about how great it would be if I could pay the cat to do housework. (Think that over. She’s just lying there.)

I accept who I am—it’s hard not to once you’re in your forties—but I still sometimes wish that I was that other sort of woman: the kind where you can come over anytime and she’s got clothes on, or the kind who can put her hands on her purse without a search-and-rescue mission that takes twenty minutes and a minimum of three family members. To stay in the habit and to keep myself from becoming entirely feral and unacceptable to society, I try to go to a regular Knit Night one evening a week. It’s on Wednesdays, and I’m pretty attached to it. Despite my natural tendencies to hang out at home, there’s not a lot that can happen to make me miss a Knit Night. I don’t go if I’m sick, since, even if I feel almost well enough to go, only a sadist gives a fellow mother a cold—especially if her kids are little. I don’t go if I’m working (though I really try not to be working those nights), and I don‘t go if it’s a parenting conflict, like parent–teacher night or a school concert, or something else where your kids will end up in therapy explaining how they were completely unsupported because their mother cared more about yarn than she cared about them. (I understand that my kids will probably need therapy someday anyway, simply because I’m their mother. I just want for it not to be about the knitting.) My point is that I really do try to get out to Knit Night, and some weeks when I’m swamped and my goal to be sort of normal fails, it might be the only time I leave the house for social reasons. That means that without Knit Night, I’m essentially having all my interactions with other non-family humans when they sell me produce or cheese, which worries me. I feel like the only thing that keeps me from falling into an abyss where the neighborhood kids talk about me like I’m some vague legend and call me “The wool lady” is making sure I get out there once a week.

In order to rally against my basic nature, I conceive a huge plan—a grand effort where I plan ahead, try not to let things get in my way, and hope it all culminates in walking out the door at 6:00
P.M
. on Wednesday evening looking like someone with clean, matching clothes, brushed hair, and subway tokens. In short, I try to leave looking like someone I’m not. (You can imagine the strain.) All day long I think about what I need to take with me, and I make a little pile on the piano. A skein of yarn I promised Andrea, a bit of fiber for Denny, a book I’m lending Rachel, the book I’m returning to Jen… my keys (That’s a hard one. I’m bucking a genetic trait for key loss) and, of course, my knitting. I put together one of the few outfits I own that doesn’t make me look homeless, and I try not to lose touch with my goal. I get my word count written for the day, I get my e-mail caught up, I even make dinner for the family—which I think is very generous, considering that I won’t be there to eat it. I start early in the day, I maintain the focus of a sniper, and I watch out for the landmines that can trip me up and ruin the fragile shot I have at making it out of here. It’s like planning an escape from a disorganized, low-security prison.

If you think this sounds like a bit much, just know that a multitude of things have gotten in the way of Knit Night, things that I don’t think would happen if I worked outside my home. One week I was all pumped and ready to go, and when I went to get dressed it turned out that I didn’t have any clean “outside pants” to wear. Personally, I believe that if I had an outside job I would have noticed way before dinnertime that I had no pants on. Another time I made the mistake of answering a work call too close to leaving time, and got totally shafted into four more hours of work, and while I’m sure people are stalked by mobile phone, it’s gotta be easier to avoid your office phone if, at some point, you leave the office. I’ve missed Knit Night because I screwed up transportation, and again, I think that if I was transported out of that house more often due to necessity, I might be better at that part. To get to Knit Night I have to have all my ducks in a row, and while I’d have fewer ducks to shuffle if I was already dressed, up, out, and organized, there’s a cluster of landmines that are a big problem for me—and would be no matter what my job was like. I speak now, naturally, of my children.

The young women who are my daughters are a disorganizing force to be reckoned with. Take your eyes off the prize for even a moment and you’re going down, and I have had my plans cancelled by every possible teenaged form of emergency. If I’m planning on going to Knit Night, when the girls come home from school, I launch an exhaustive quiz to make sure they aren’t going to mess with me. If you’re a parent you know what I mean. You’re just about to go out the door and the kid announces that somehow they’ve roped you into having to produce sixty-four cupcakes (with icing) before daybreak. Once they’re old enough to be told to make their own damn cupcakes, then it’s things like “very long essays” they forgot about until just now, or some sort of unscheduled breakdown involving a teenaged boy who didn’t meet expectations. (I actually really resent that. From what my teenaged daughters tell me, teenaged boys haven’t changed much since I was a girl and I’m not sure what it says about evolution that they’re still the same or that we’re still shocked about it.) On a day that I’m planning to leave the house, I inquire about boys and about school, and I also ask about friends, because last week I didn’t get to go to Knit Night because that skanky Allison in French class told one of my girls she thinks that the reason Daniel isn’t talking to her is because her hair isn’t nice, and it took me forty minutes to get the teen to stop sobbing and then wrestle the hair products from her hands. (I considered leaving anyway, but she was locked in the only bathroom.)

This Knit Night, though, this time I have it nailed. I am aware of all the landmines before me, I am determined to buck my nature, and I have been working since early this morning to nail an absolute on-time departure. My outside pants are not only clean, but they are ironed, and to protect them from my preternatural gift for pouring coffee in my lap, I am working in my underpants until the last minute. I have been assembling the things I need to take with me all day, following a complex system of Post-It note reminders all over the house. (The final Post-It is on the door and says, “Don’t leave without the pile of stuff.”) I have prepared a pot of soup and bought bread so that the family has something to eat and I can shrug off the maternal guilt that can wash over me when a clutch of people who are all capable of making their own dinner stand there staring at me as I put on my shoes, as though I am abandoning them in the desert and taking the only water with me. I have found my keys and placed them in the pocket of my pants upstairs, along with a subway token and my bike lock key. (I am covering all my bases.) I’ve caught up on work, and now that it’s getting close to the end of the day I’ve begun to practice saying, “Sorry, I’m just on my way out. Can we do this first thing tomorrow?” I’ve said this in my head so many times that I’m starting to think that if the phone rings, I might actually say it. I close my e-mail, reminding myself that since I am going out, there’s no point in looking at it until the morning; and in a minute, when the family starts to come home, I’ll start checking in with them because after managing to pull off an escape plan this neatly, there’s no way that I’m missing Knit Night because a fifteen-year-old girl didn’t tell me until three minutes before I’m supposed to leave that she needs three sources to write a review of
Stranger in a Strange Land
and two loaves of bread for the student council lunch, that she’s lost her best pink lip gloss that she can’t go to school without, and that she’s being expelled from science if she doesn’t bring $7.85 (exact change required) and a permission form (that she’s lost) for a field trip that starts at 7:30 the next morning. I have checked the weather report. I know where my sweater is. My knitting is tidily packed into a bag to take with me, and I’ve even checked to make sure that I have two needles, the pattern, and a bottle of wine. (If you’re only leaving the house once a week, you have to do it right.)

I stand there, looking at all I have wrought, and I feel normal. I’m just like other people, other people who leave the house all the time. I nailed it. I go upstairs to put on my outside pants (it is easier to feel prepared to leave when wearing pants), congratulating myself the whole way. Assuming that when everyone comes in from work, school, and play, I can dodge landmines like parental responsibility, and I’ll be out of here. Free as a bird, leaving the house. I’ll get to Knit Night and I’ll have a glass of wine and I’ll knit on the blue sweater I’m making and I’ll engage in conversation, and for one glorious evening nobody will know that I’m actually a woman who found cheese in her desk drawer and hasn’t worn a matching outfit since last Wednesday. I pull on my pants, proudly pat the subway token and keys in the pocket, and think about how if I really start to get the hang of this, then maybe I could raise the bar—maybe I could start wearing accessories! I see other women wearing accessories and matching outfits, and they look really great and people take them super seriously. For some time, I have thought that accessories were the key to something. I’m not sure what, but there’s a big difference between me and the women wearing them. I pop into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and I realize that, really, if this whole leaving on time thing starts to take less effort, then I could think about wearing outfits, and not just clothes, and I could have a hairstyle, not just hair, and I could even wear knitted stuff that matched my coat in the winter! Hell, if I’m going to be this person, a person who plans ahead and organizes stuff and knows where her keys are just like real people… I could even wear a hat and mittens that match! I’m giddy. I head downstairs, check the clock, and realize that I have mere moments before the girls arrive. I stir the soup, and when they arrive, I strike like a cobra.