Free-Range Knitter (22 page)

When I learn to do something new, I undergo a period of profound interest (some might call it obsession, but I think that’s a bit strong) in that new thing. When I learned to bake bread I could have run a bakery with all that I turned out, and there was a similar incident involving making my own marmalade. (By the way, if you’d like a jar, I still have plenty.) When I learned something new I celebrated by going to town with it. Not Sam. Learn it, know it, move on. The knitting was a perfect example, and one that was particularly hard for me to understand, considering that I’ve been celebrating learning to knit by doing it daily for thirty-five years. For the life of me, I cannot understand why Sam and I can’t have this tender connection. She could be my “last knitting daughter.” We could go to shops together and knit in the evenings; it would be wonderful and sentimental, and I would be able to score some points back on my motherhood scorecard. Maybe make up for the
afternoon I told them all that Santa Claus was never coming back to the house again if they didn’t let me have a bath alone. It would have been one thing if she sucked at it or found it difficult, but she was, and is, an entirely natural knitter.

I tried for years to call her back to it, trying to turn her into my little knitting progeny, but all I’ve gotten over the years is an hour of success here and there and Sam’s remonstrations to “pull myself together,” along with more mature eye rolling and sighs, usually in combination.

So I’ve tried to get over it and pull myself together. I’ve given myself several lectures on not letting my sentimental, mushy feelings about my last little girl (sorry—teenager) get in the way of who she is destined to be, and I think I’m getting better. I was choked up for only a few minutes the last time she picked up the needles; I only cried for five minutes at “the last elementary school concert”; and I’ve thought about entering therapy to get me ready to deal with the last time a fourteen-year-old screams “You don’t know any thing about me” in my face, a moment that I am sure will make my heart ache with tenderness.

I am not, however, going to give up entirely on the knitting. The kid can suck it up once or twice a year to humor her poor mum, and I can have my moments here and there, watching this last clever girl of mine navigate landmarks and milestones that won’t pass the way of this mother’s heart again.

After all, it’s really the last time a fourteen-year-old daughter of mine is going to tell me to stuff it.

As I stood in the garage, it all became so perfectly clear. After this many years together you want to believe that you are the ones who are going to make it, that you can beat the odds and stay together, but as I looked at my minivan hooked up to the mechanic’s computer as if on life support, I knew.

In the beginning the van just seemed depressed. It leaked oil on the driveway. Then it was slow to start in the mornings, and it seemed a little sluggish when turning left. I accepted it. It’s important to stay flexible in relationships. The van was aging, and old people and old things get quirky, and my van and I had been through a lot together, and if it needed a little compassion to grow old gracefully, I could stand by it. A suburban mother and her minivan are not easily parted; after all, it was only the van that stood between complete isolation and me. I was supportive of its needs. I thought about knitting it a cozy, or maybe a wheel cover. I wanted to cherish it in its golden years. The
van and I were simply moving into the phase of a relationship where you stay together in spite of your quirks. I got self-help books from the library about working it out and changing my own oil, and I spent hours in the driveway with an oil pan and a good attitude. I thought about it while I knit.

Things got worse. The van started to make a disturbing noise and shudder while turning left. From time to time I feel the same way, so sympathetically, I adapted by planning right-turn-only routes and bargaining with the van. For my part, I agreed that I would knit in the van one evening a week while the kids were swimming. (I think he wanted more time together.) I would give it the premium gas, bury my building, hostile resentment, and never offend it by turning left, and in exchange it would start (most of the time). As I pored over the maps of my neighborhood at night, doing recon for my right-turn days, I wondered whether I was enabling the van. I felt a little like the van wasn’t making an effort, but I was trying to stay together for the children, so I let it go.

The van and I were holding it together, but it took commitment. It’s only three miles to the yarn shop, but with my right-turns-only-or-your-van-shudders system to spiral in ever-decreasing circles, it’s a four-hour round trip. The strain was wearing me down. One afternoon, dizzy and exhausted with the children screaming things like “She’s looking out my window” from the back seat, I got rattled, forgot myself, and attempted to turn left into the yarn shop.

The van instantly responded to the forbidden left turn by seizing, emitting a sound I could only compare to the noise of a large cat falling into a flushing toilet, and stopping dead mid-turn. Panic filled me, honking oncoming traffic squealed to a halt, and after four frantic attempts the van leaped back to life, lurched out of the intersection, and gracefully coasted into the yarn-shop parking lot, acting for all the world like nothing had just happened between us. I had to buy six skeins of the new merino sock yarn just to regain my composure.

When I came back to the van I sat in the driver’s seat and thought about what had just happened. I realized that we needed professional help. The van was sick, and it had anger issues. It was time to let go of the shame of not being able to maintain my own minivan relationship. At the garage, I sat and knit while the van endured a battery of tests and difficult moments. Finally, I was waved to the van’s side by the mechanic on duty.

With dismay and shock showing clearly on his face, the mechanic showed me the display on the diagnostic computer that was connected to my minivan.

My very seriously ill 1987 minivan was claiming on the glow of the digital readout to be a perfectly healthy 1990 sports car. I was standing there, wondering alternately where you can get your car therapy for denial and how the hell I was going to get to Knit Night when it hit me.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are the five stages of death, according to Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
The van had been working through its terminal illness. It was finally over between us. I took my yarn from the trunk, left the wheel warmer as a memento, bowed my head, and gently touched the fender to say good-bye.

Months later, turning left late at night in my new car, I struggled with the guilt of a failed relationship. As much as I loved that van—and I believe that I gave it everything I had—part of me still wonders whether deep in my heart, I turned left on purpose that day.

1. Puppy. Lace. Thirteen hundred yards of silk in a ball. Please don’t make me speak of it.
   

2. Moths. We can pretend all we like, but the odds are exceptionally good that moths are like knitters’ herpes. Nobody wants to admit they have them, and once you’ve got them, you have them forever even if you’re just waiting for the next outbreak.
   

3. Finally succeeding in teaching all your children to knit, only to discover that this means they want your stash.
   

4. A sweater going into the wash human-sized and coming out doll-sized. (This is especially painful if you weren’t the one who put it in the wash or if, like many knitters, you no longer play with dolls, no matter how well-dressed.)
   

5. Deciding to survey your lifetime stash accumulation and realizing it’s a horrible tragedy that the period of your life in which you had the most money to spend on yarn (and
   did spend on yarn) also appears to be the time that you had the least amount of taste.
   

6. Watching as you gently immerse your elegant new sweater, fresh off the needles, into its first gentle bath and feeling the horror spread over you as the deep red yarn of the yoke bleeds—no, hemorrhages—most of its ruby dye into the pristine ivory white of the body.
   

7. Ripping a sock back because it’s too long, then reknitting the toe and finding it too short, then doing it again to make it longer, then running out of yarn on the second one because it turns out you don’t have enough yarn for long socks and need to make short ones.
   

8. Dropping one needle somewhere in the parking lot of the Marine Atlantic ferry dock in Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, and not noticing until the ship has left port to make its seven-hour crossing to North Sydney, Nova Scotia.
   

9. Knitting the whole plain body of a sweater that will have a fancy yoke, finishing the boring part that took forever but didn’t require you to look at the pattern, then realizing, after ripping up the house for fifteen hours looking for it, that you’ve probably recycled the pattern in a fit of tidiness.
   

10. After spending six months knitting your sister a beautiful violet lace cardigan, which is lovingly wrapped under the tree in the next room, you sit in abject horror and depression at Christmas dinner with your family, listening to
    your very fashion-conscious sister say she would never, ever be caught dead in something as dowdy, out of vogue, and hopeless as a violet lace cardigan.
    

Dear
John
Sweater,

I have been struggling with how to tell you this since the episode with the miscrossed cable, and I know that as soon as you read those words, you will know that whatever I’m about to write can’t be good, and you’re right. I know it can’t just be me who has felt a distance develop between us; after all, how could you not feel it, what with the way I’ve had you rammed into a ratty knitting bag in the back of the hall closet. I know it’s been obvious to you that we just weren’t finding time to be with each other, and you were right that I have withdrawn from you, both emotionally and physically. I know you blame me for that, what with you being an inanimate object, and I know that when I pulled the needles out of you the other day and used them for something else it was a terrible way to show you how I felt.

I finally decided that as immature and cowardly as it may seem to leave you a note, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you to your face. I didn’t want this to turn into a scene. I tried writing you a casual letter, just a quick “Good-bye and thanks for all the stitches,” but I find that I’m too angry, and all the clichés that people write in these letters just didn’t ring true. As a matter of fact, they all made me madder.

I thought, when I achieved gauge with your swatch, that it meant we were a good fit, and then, when everything kept working when you were an actual sweater, I developed what was obviously a sense of false confidence about your commitment to me. Achieving simultaneous row and stitch gauge doesn’t happen much in this world, let me tell you, and I took it as a sign that you cared. Now that you’re just about finished, and you come nowhere close to fitting, I can’t help but feel that you lied to me. You’re too constraining, and I’d love to be able to look you in the eye and utter the classic line, “It’s not you, it’s me,” but my breasts haven’t changed at all while we’ve been on this journey, my woolly friend. I know, because I measured them again this morning, and since they are exactly the same size and shape they were three weeks ago, that does makes it you … not me.

I told myself that in this sort of letter, I’m supposed to write something about how the failure of our relationship doesn’t mean anything about your worth as a sweater. I’m supposed to tell you that I’m sure you’re right for someone, but I have to
tell you, your arms are too damn short, and not just for me. I have shortened the sleeves of every sweater I have ever knitted. Due to the somewhat petite nature of my arms (fine; they are stumpy, I grant you that much), I have whacked four inches off of every pattern I have ever been with. This time (perhaps sensing your duplicitous nature) I only took an inch off. It would piss me off royally if the sleeves were now an inch too short, but it has incensed me to vicious purple wrath that they are actually about five inches too short. This means that they wouldn’t have worked even if I just let you be you, and that means that there isn’t a woman alive that you’re a match for. I’d try to be reassuring, but your future as a garment in a relationship with a human looks bleak.

I’m not going to say, “We could still be friends,” because we both know that after the way the armholes went, that’s just not going to be possible. I know that I’m the one who said we should try for set-in sleeves, but every time I feel you pinch my underarms and bunch up at the top, I think I’ve been a fool to try. If I told you once, I told you a hundred times that I can’t be in a relationship with a sweater that can’t see the way I need sleeve caps to fit into openings, and I can’t listen to you tell me again that I just need to work on “ease.” Screw it.

I know that part of this has been my fault. I did things with you that I thought I would never do with anyone. Before I met you I knew there was a kind of commitment in knitting that I wasn’t emotionally ready for, but then I met you, and
something about your deep, strong ribbing made it seem like it was going to be okay. I should have been true to myself and stuck with what I know, but you weren’t honest about your bad sweater attitude. The next thing I knew, I was cabling all over the place. I found myself up late, neglecting all the things that I’m responsible for. I know love is a mad, mad place, but when I found myself doing a three-over-three left twist cable without a cable needle, I had to do some deep thinking. I still don’t know what about you made me take a chance like that, but I know that I’m the one who’s going to have to deal with an unplanned dropped stitch, and frankly, I think my mother was right, and the only way to deal with the risk is abstinence.

Good luck in all your future endeavors. I don’t know what your future will hold for you, what with the way I intend to rip you all the way back into balls as soon as I have a stiff drink and stomp on you for three or four hours, but I suppose that maybe you could go back to the yarn store where we met. That alpaca you were snuggling with the first day I saw you might be fool enough to let you back on the shelf.