Free-Range Knitter (10 page)

I stood there, looking at the “7” light, and thought for a second. I tried to calm myself down. Surely lots of people have had yarn accidents in and around elevators, right? If yarn were so dangerous as to be able to cripple city buildings and cause expensive damage, they wouldn’t just let me carry it around, right? As I stood there, in front of the doors, my umbilical cord of yarn curving from the sock in my hand to the black line dividing the doors, two things happened. First, a few people came up and stood with me, waiting for the elevator, and second, the elevator began to move downward again. I jumped, startled into action, and decided that I had to at least try to prevent disaster. Now that there were witnesses, I couldn’t just stand there. I imagined how my inaction would look at the trial. This round-faced man beside me, up on the stand saying, “And she did nothing, Your Honor, nothing. She knew the yarn was in there and what it could do, and she just stood there,” and then he would break off, dissolving into hitching sobs.

This vision of my unpleasant future (a future in which all of my mother’s suspicions about the dangers of my wool issues were validated) prodded me into action, and as the incredulous witnesses watched, I tried to reel in the yarn through the crack in the door. I tugged, I pulled, I nervously watched the lights at
the top—6, 5, 4—why wouldn’t it come? Was it already caught on the mysterious inner workings of the elevator? I smiled nervously at the witnesses, who were watching me with rather astonished faces. One woman’s mouth actually dropped open as I worked my hand closer to the door, hoping to ease even an inch of rescue. Down it came—3, 2—and I began to wonder whether I was going to escape. Perhaps when the door opened, the ball of yarn would be sitting there with the yarn simply severed by the door. (Part of me hoped not. I hate weaving in ends.) Or maybe the yards that had pulled free were hanging in a big loop down through the rest of elevator shaft. I could get someone to hold the door open as I wound it all back onto the ball. As long as no harm was done, I might be able to convince these people that I was just quirky and charming, not several mental tools short of a workbox. I glanced around at them. From the looks on their faces I could tell that quirky and charming wasn’t quite what I was pulling off at the moment. Never mind. I could recover. The bell chimed, the “L” button lit up, and at long last, the elevator doors made ready to slide open.

I stepped forward, in front of the witnesses, and waited. I prepared myself for whatever I beheld when the door opened. I said a few words of thanks to whatever force may rule elevators, for allowing such a good ending, and I prepared to wind my fifty-five yards of sock yarn back up as quickly as I could so as to not inconvenience anyone any more than I had to. (It was going to be embarrassing enough. I could at least be efficient
while I was odd.) The door slid open then, and the tail of yarn that had been pinched between the doors drifted back under its sock and lay there. No one came out. Not a single soul. So the yarn had broken. Well, that was unfortunate but was probably what saved the elevator from doom and me from possible charges. I was rather pleased that I wouldn’t have to look any weirder than I already did and could avoid explaining to these nice people that they would be allowed to carry on with their important business just as soon as I was done playing wool games with an elevator.

That’s when I noticed there was no wool. The doors had slid open, the tail had fallen out, and there was no yarn on the elevator. I stared, then I jumped in and looked around. Where the hell had it gone? I goggled at the floor. I looked in all the corners. I examined every inch of the floor, inasmuch as it was possible to do so with all those other people getting on. Damn it. The urge to shove a woman blocking my view of the front left corner passed briefly through my mind. I settled for a more normal choice, but I got the impression that “normal” might not have been how I looked as I asked them all to check around their feet for errant yarn. It wasn’t there. The elevator began to move again. I couldn’t stop looking at the floor. I ran back through the series of events. I dropped a ball of yarn in the elevator. The doors closed, and the elevator went directly to the seventh floor. Presumably, at that point the doors opened, then closed again, and then the elevator came directly back to the lobby.
Since no one got off, nobody had gotten on at the seventh floor. So … where did it go?

As we rode up in silence, I tried to figure it out. Maybe it had all raveled. No, not far enough, was it? I looked at the sock in my hand and thought for a second. No, not far enough. A pair of socks takes three or four hundred yards, and I was still on the first sock, so at least two hundred yards had been in that ball. Even seven floors of building couldn’t use up that much. I wondered whether maybe the end had gotten pulled into a gear (I’m not sure how; when I’m upset my theories tend to be a little loose) and two hundred plus yards of fingering weight merino had been sucked into the workings just as I had feared, only now I’d been stupid enough to get on the elevator. I was an idiot. Not only could I end up stuck here for hours, imprisoned by my own wool, but I’d have nothing to do while I waited to be freed except stand there and hold the remaining half sock as evidence. Maybe I could eat it before they got the elevators fixed. I looked at the other people. Damn. Maybe I could eat it secretly. The elevator kept traveling, and I came up with another hypothesis. Perhaps, as the doors closed downstairs, me on one side and the yarn on the other, the yarn had sat in the middle of the floor where I’d last seen it. Then, as the elevator began to move, the yarn had, because the insides were a little bit tangled, you know how they are sometimes, not pulled free smoothly. The line had drawn taut as the elevator moved, and the ball of yarn had been pulled to the seam at the front of the elevator,
pressed against the spot where the yarn snaked out. The yarn, under tremendous strain between the two closed doors, had snapped, and when the elevator had gotten to the seventh floor, the second the door that the yarn was pressed up against opened, the yarn had fallen out the opened doors, and down, down, down the gap between them, all the way to a dark and lonely fate at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

Can you get things back from there? I visualized myself trying to explain to the building’s mechanic why I needed to go into the bowels of the building, but I knew (after the episode with the subway platform last year) that it probably wouldn’t go my way. I tried to imagine some risk to the building that would make them want to retrieve it and give it back to me, but my imagination let me down. As we approached the seventh floor, I reconciled myself to the fate of my yarn. Down the gap to a damp, dark eternity. Mystery solved.

Solved, until a moment later, when I stepped out of the elevator and cast a mournful eye down. I stopped in the doorway. There was no gap, or technically, not one large enough for my ball of yarn to fall down. People went by me, pushing around me on my left and right, and I stood there and stared. No gap. My hypothesis crashed down around me. I straightened, eyes front, and looked at what waited outside the elevator on the seventh floor. A long queue of people spilled out of the passport office and past the doors of the elevator. They stood there, some with headphones on, some looking impatient, some of them
gazing off into space. The line wasn’t moving quickly at all, so I could guess that these people, or maybe those ones, a little farther up, had been the folks standing here when the elevator door opened three minutes ago with my little ball of yarn sitting in the middle of it. I stepped off, and I surveyed them.

That’s when it hit me. One of these people was a knitter. They had been standing here, waiting in the queue when they had heard the elevator bell chime, and out of natural human curiosity, they had looked over to see who was getting off. The door had opened, and there had been my single ball of exquisite handpainted merino sock yarn. They had been stunned. I mean, here they were, standing in line at the passport office, bored out of their tree (I imagined that this would be the one day they had forgotten to bring their own sock to knit with them), and out of the blue, while they were standing there thinking, “Woe is me, if only I had a little bit of sock yarn,” and the door opened, and they looked in and saw it. An offering from the elevator gods. They must have been stunned. They surely looked around, decided that if they were quick they might not be caught, ducked out of the queue, snagged the yarn, and resumed their position, clandestine yarn stuffed in their pocket, hardly believing their luck as the elevator doors closed and returned to me.

Suddenly, I knew this was true. I’d been robbed. Yarn stores occasionally report theft (and on my bad days, I could sympathize with the criminals), and who among us would say
that if they were suddenly offered free-range yarn, tendered by an elevator in the passport office, we definitely wouldn’t take it? Taking yarn from another knitter was one thing, but taking it from an elevator wouldn’t seem that bad. Elevators don’t even knit.

I took my place in line, my doomed half sock still clutched in my sweaty hand, and I tried to empathize with the thief. They couldn’t have known what they were doing. A knitter would never take the yarn that another knitter needed to finish something, and I really believe that they would never take the only yarn a knitter had on them, if only for reasons of personal safety. This mystery knitter couldn’t have thought it through. It must have seemed miraculous to them: Just stand there, and an elevator gives you yarn. What a great day.

I spent the rest of my time in line ripping back the half sock I had and beginning a pair of booties, since this event had changed my project’s destiny. I tried to be happy. I tried to love my fellow knitter. I tried to forgive and forget, and I didn’t shove a single person up against the wall by the elevator and frisk them on their way out.

I’m still rather proud of that.

I’m not going to describe how my friend Ken knits. Enough people look at him while he does it. He’s like a magnet. Everywhere he goes people swarm around him, particularly women. Now, Ken’s an attractive guy, but that just doesn’t explain the interest women show in him. Young women, old women, knitters and the non-knitting alike, they can’t take their eyes off him while he knits. They sidle up to him in restaurants, stare admiringly on buses. They stop walking and come over and talk to him about it, and I know it’s not just the knitting that does it, because I knit in public all the time, and all I’ve ever gotten is the occasional, “Oh, I wish I could knit.” Or, “You must be so patient.” Now, I’m at least as attractive as Ken, so I know that the attention has to do with the combination of his Y chromosome and yarn. You would think male knitting was Brad Pitt in a thong for how much attention it gets.

Last summer (or maybe the summer before) I sat on a park bench next to Ken, and we both knit. It wasn’t an experiment, but it sure got me some information. I happened to be knitting a lace shawl. Very fancy, very intricate—a whole lot of points on the “impressing people in public” scale. Though he is a very competent knitter, this day Ken happened to be knitting something squarish in plain, no bells, no whistles garter stitch. Two women came up out of nowhere and began to fawn over him. They asked him where he had learned to knit and how long he had been knitting. They stood over him like he was a rare bird or a valuable racehorse. They said things like, “That’s terrific,” “Good for you,” and the killer, “You’re just amazing.” I could have taken off all of my clothes and danced on the bench beside him holding only the shawl in progress over my private bits, and they wouldn’t have so much as said “Nice work” while glancing at me.

I know that this is how people behave when we step out of our expected gender roles, but I can’t help but be offended. It’s insulting, and not to me; I don’t mind that they didn’t care about my shawl. It’s insulting to Ken, and to all men. What does it say about our expectations of their gender that when one of them knits, just as we do, we think they are exceptional or remarkable? As Ken points out, they must think him as bright as bricks if they are so impressed that he’s able to manage.

It doesn’t stop with knitting; I’ve noticed that many otherwise bright and astute women have a remarkably low standard for men’s behavior, and they don’t even know it. There’s
a woman in our neighborhood who recently gave up full-time work to stay home with her three kids. Daycare wasn’t working out for them, and one of the parents needed to take the hit. She did so, graciously and with aplomb. You would think she would be the toast of the neighborhood. You would think the other women would all be talking about what a great mother she was, to see her kids’ needs and step up and sacrifice like that. You would think that the other mothers would have made her some sort of award. Instead, as they gathered in the park I heard the sainted mother in question and her friends discussing her husband and how he had gone from playing hockey three nights a week down to two, to give her an evening of “help” now that she had the kids full time. They were all talking about how he was the best father ever.