The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater_Essays on Crafting

by Alanna Okun

  * * *

  For months after Marina and then Jamie died, I saw them all over the city. I’d catch a glimpse of her sharp nose or his spiky hair and then I’d realize that of course it wasn’t her, there was no way it could be him. That absence felt like missing a stair, like choking on a gulp of water gone down the wrong part of my throat.

  Now the missing is more abstract. Because they died so young, because my time with them both was so short, I wore out my few memories a long time ago. And so I transpose the two of them into places they never actually were. I think of Jamie when I play games, all types, even ones we didn’t play together and I’m not sure he ever had the chance to learn. Would he have liked cribbage or Settlers of Catan, or found them tedious? I imagine him at the parties I go to, populated by people we went to college with, and wonder if even now his RSVP on Facebook would make sure that I got there too, even on tired Fridays when Greenpoint or the Upper East Side is too far to contemplate. I walk through his old neighborhood and think about what it would be like to text him for a drink, to play a round of Scrabble, to hug him goodbye and catch the once-familiar, now-forgotten smell of the back of his neck.

  Marina I picture at work, and on Twitter, and at different parties from the Jamie ones. Book parties, theatre parties, parties where people stand around and yell above the music about how underpaid and overqualified they are, where they ask how one another’s art and love lives are going and later dump the replies into a strainer to find the nugget of truth, the reassurance that they themselves are doing all right by comparison. Would she and I have stayed friends, or would it have become one of those acquaintanceships where the only thing we had to talk about was the fact that we met at such a heightened, specific time?

  “Did you know we interned together?” we’d tell our friends the first few times we crossed paths, before fading into smiles and waves and the occasional counting of bylines.

  I don’t know what they would be to me now. All I know is that I am now older than either of them will ever be, and that scares me. The loss of those two people took up so much space that when I was asked to knit the baby sweater, six months after Jamie’s death and a little over a year after Marina’s, I had all but forgotten about the idea of new life.

  Making it was a tangible reminder. Making anything feels like seizing control, like defiant reversal in the face of grief: this thing is yours, the way you would like it to be, and it exists where before there was nothing. And with each row you knit on something meant for a baby, you start to see his or her outlines more clearly, waiting to be fully formed. I liked knowing that the sweater-to-be was in my bag during the workday and by my bed when I woke up. I felt it glow; I felt it breathe.

  I finished with a few days to spare. Aude suggested that I sew a little tag with my initials into the sweater before handing it over.

  “Who knows,” she said. “Maybe it’ll become an heirloom or something.” She said that whoever got it next—after this baby, who would be named Maya, who could turn out loud and present like Marina or quiet and kind like Jamie or endlessly open like Aude—would want to know where it came from.

  A few weeks after I handed over the cardigan, Aude sent me some pictures. They were of the new parents and Maya, born the night before. The baby looked tiny and quizzical, with a shock of black hair that would have made bald infant-me insanely jealous. She was still too small to fit the sweater, or even the matching hat that Aude had started and that I had wound up finishing. (We had always known that would happen.)

  That, I thought, was good. It gave her something to grow into.

  Not Just for Grandmas

  If I read one more article that begins with a line like “Knitting: it’s not just for grandmas anymore!” I’m ripping it up with a felting needle.

  Variations on this sentence are everywhere, peppering trend pieces about how millennials are flocking to the fiber arts and leading breathless news items about how knitting adds twenty years to your life and burns more calories than doing yoga while having sex.1 And look: I’m glad people are writing about the love of my life. I’m just not happy with the language they all too often use to describe it.

  Not Just for Grandmas™ reduces knitting (and crafting as a whole) to a cultural punch line, trotted out as a mild but harmless anachronism. Young people! Using their hands! Not even for sexting on their iWhatevers or dismantling the economy! Those millennials, always up to something quirky and inefficient.2 It’s the thinking that’s at work when lady characters in rom-coms or sitcoms or any-other-coms are depicted cradling a pair of knitting needles and a bottle of wine (plus maybe a cat or two for good measure) when they don’t have anything better to do on a Saturday night: knitting is so backward and boring that of course you only do it when you’re not equipped to face the real world.

  A smaller but related pet peeve of mine is when knitting is incorrectly depicted in movies or on TV. Someone clacks two sticks against each other and a sock appears, or the yarn is held nowhere near the tips of the needles. There used to be a blog cataloging these mistakes—thatsnothowyouknit.tumblr.com—and while it might seem pedantic, just think of how much time and money go into producing even a second of screen time. Think of all the takes, all the rewrites, all the costumes and the salaries and the sets. Or, in the case of animation, all the hundreds of hours spent making sure every detail is consistent. And nobody could be called in to confirm whether a character is holding the yarn correctly? Actually, I would love to be a freelance knitting consultant, so if you are the head of a major studio please hit me up.

  I’m sure the authors of these articles and creators of these shows don’t set out to be dismissive; they (or their editors) probably think they’re being clever and original, or they’re not thinking at all. It’s not their world and so they fall back on shorthand to describe it—I’ve absolutely been guilty of that in my own writing. When Pinterest first came onto the scene it was treated to the same kind of lazy introduction: wasn’t it novel and funny that a glorified Internet scrapbook, with its recipes and clothes and houses, had real value? That someone (a lot of someones) had poured actual advertising dollars into such a service?

  But these “soft” things do matter. What we put in and on and around our bodies is important, and so are the things we create. They’re a series of choices we get to make when we may not be able to choose much else: our jobs, our loves and losses, our place in the world. And so maybe in some accidental way, those sad-sack sitcom jokes about knitting contain a grain of truth: making things can certainly help you navigate when the outside world gets to be too much. The difference is, we’ve chosen to do it.

  Taken one at a time, these slights are petty annoyances; together, they paint an ugly, sexist picture. Crafters are told that we have to have permission to indulge in our pursuits, bestowed by the Whatever Tribune or blahdiblah.com, because otherwise all we should be is embarrassed by them. That’s tacitly what these types of clunky, thoughtless trend pieces do: assume a beginning and an endpoint. They deny roots and they erase nuance, variance, and the lives of actual, real-life people who have spent their passion and energy learning how to create the world they want.

  Which leads us to my least favorite part of Not Just for Grandmas™: how disrespectful it is to the grandmas! Grandmas rule! I can’t wait to be one! So many people’s stories about crafting begin with a grandmother, my own included, and that should be a point of pride, not disavowal.

  “I was six/twelve/thirty when my grandma decided it was time for me to knit/crochet/embroider,” these stories begin, recounted to new acquaintances at yarn stores, to strangers on subways, or to old friends at bars. Often they’re offered as answers to questions: “What are you doing?” “When did you start?” “Why do you always carry around so many needles?”

  Sometimes the grandmother in question is stern and withholding, only giving the storyteller rare flashes of affection when he or she struggles to knit a first crooked row. Sometimes the grandmother is kindly, forever
pausing crochet lessons to pull another sheet of sugar cookies from the oven. Sometimes she is on her deathbed, intent on passing down a skill before she goes, and sometimes she lives long enough to stitch bibs for every one of the storyteller’s children.

  Often the grandmother is not a grandmother at all, but a middle school teacher, or a church group, or an uncle. Sometimes the grandmother is your age or much younger. Sometimes the grandmother is YouTube. The fact remains that knitting and its cousins aren’t innate skills. They’re taught and they’re learned and reinforced and passed down, in an interlocking series of loops that builds and layers just like the crafts themselves. Why should we feel flattered when some news outlet tells us not to worry, we’re so much cooler and hotter and more modern than the people who were once so generous with us?

  Look, I’m being 1,000,000 percent defensive here. I know there are much, much bigger cultural battles to wage, and that no matter how clumsily some of these articles are written, at least one of them resulted in at least one person visiting a craft store for the first time. That makes it all worthwhile. But the sanctity and value of making things feels like it’s worth defending, and when you’re armed with pointy sticks, it’s that much easier to stab back.

  * * *

  My own grandmother—my mother’s mother—made blankets. Afghans, she called them, a word I liked to repeat over and over on our visits to her house in Virginia, when I was still small enough to wrap myself up in one like an orange-and-purple burrito. They were a riot of dignified jewel tones that matched the colors in her outfits, her home, and her jewelry. (She never pierced her ears and so wore large, beautiful clip-ons her whole life. I still pause to look at the clip-on selection whenever I’m in a jewelry store, even though my ears have been pierced since I was thirteen.) She crocheted the afghans while watching TV with my grandpa, and I don’t know how many she made in total but it felt like many dozens, hundreds of hours of flashing hooks darting in and out of an ever-growing heap of nubbly fabric.

  I loved to watch her. I liked it the way some people like watching Olympic skiing even when they themselves have never set foot on a mountain: the speed of it, the almost superhuman elegance, that entirely new but somehow familiar method of moving through the world. I liked how she had complete control over whatever it was she happened to be creating, and how for every cause (that flicky gesture I couldn’t imitate no matter how long I stared) there was a direct effect (a stitch!). I liked to watch the pile of crocheted squares mount next to my grandma’s armchair, and I especially liked when I would come back six months or a year later to find that the squares had become, somehow, a blanket.

  My first project was a blanket too, although not one large enough for even the tiniest human. It was a rectangular piece of light-turquoise fabric, knitted under the supervision of my grandma one weekend at the beach. My family—my parents, my little sister, my little brother, and I, plus my mom’s folks and her sister, Kathleen—would go every year to a rented house in Delaware. The same way the word “afghan” stuck in my head, so too did the idea that going to the beach in Delaware was somehow very funny. Who knew there were beaches in Delaware? Weren’t all the beaches supposed to be in Florida, or maybe Cape Cod?

  Still, even as a know-it-all brat I loved the house we returned to, with its high, swooping ceilings and seashell-encrusted knickknacks. I even enjoyed the twelve hours it took to drive there from Massachusetts. My mom would pile us into the little blue Subaru in which I would, a decade and two attempts later, get my driver’s license. Moriah (my sister) and Matthew (my brother) and I would listen to The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter audiobooks on the cassette player and fall asleep on one another’s shoulders, waking up when we stopped at a Hampton Inn in New Jersey. It was our designated halfway point and always struck me as extremely glamorous, mostly because of the breakfast buffet.

  My memories from the beach town—Fenwick Island—have melted together into a swirl of boardwalk visits and shell-collecting expeditions. I, the oldest and the bossiest, directed these journeys, gamely followed by my grandma with her metal detector, the others bringing up the rear. I do not know where those shells are now but I do have three distinct memories I carry around:

  I am seven or eight, embroiled in a down-to-the-wire game of Pictionary Junior. It’s our family’s game of choice and nobody is given any slack, no matter how young or old. I am extremely competitive even though I am not that good at games or sports (a fact that persists until the present and feels like a minor curse). But I win this round by guessing, with hardly a doodle of a square to go off of, that the clue in question is, in fact, “Pictionary.” It is my first exposure to the concept of “meta” and I am very pleased with myself.

  A few years later my characteristically gentle grandfather sneaks up behind me outside the haunted house at the boardwalk. His coat is lifted over his head and he grabs me. I am so scared I cry. He feels terrible and takes me back to the haunted house a few days later, shows me that I have nothing to be afraid of. (The paint is peeling and you can see the bolts.) I tell this story at his funeral and people laugh, because he had been so thoughtful, so caring, so every inch the inquisitive and nurturing college professor that it’s like saying I’d caught Santa Claus smoking a cigarette.

  And the year I am six, when it rains. In fact, it hurricanes—the storm is called Floyd, which is much too dorky a moniker for a disaster that causes the boardwalk to be shuttered and all seashell endeavors to be postponed indefinitely. Matthew has not yet been born (he’ll come along in February) and I am bored of Moriah, who is three, after all the days spent cooped up inside together. I am whiny enough that my grandma pulls me up on the couch beside her and gives me a pair of dark-blue aluminum knitting needles. I keep them forever.

  She shows me how to get the first stitches onto the needle. She shows me how to hold the yarn (behind the tip), how to make a stitch (over, around, and through), and how to let the old stitch drop (carefully, steadily, trusting that it will all be okay). She tells me not to tug too hard or the stitches will turn out too tight, and patiently helps me work my way through the next far-too-tight row when I do not listen. I’m frustrated, at first—I’m always frustrated when I can’t pick something up right away, whether it’s Pictionary or cursive—but soon I’m working the rows myself, without my grandma’s fingers on my own to guide them. It starts to feel less like tripping over my feet and more like swimming in the ocean, and then like pulling into the driveway at the end of a long trip.

  We sit there for I don’t know how long, but I do know that at the end, when my grandma shows me how to finish the piece by casting off, I have this … thing. It’s not a scarf or a hot pad, too stubby and small to be much of anything, but it is very definitely an object. Someone, I think Aunt Kathleen, suggests that it could be a blanket for a stuffed animal, and that’s as good a purpose as any.

  Over subsequent visits to Fenwick Island and to her house in Virginia, my grandma shows me new techniques: how to purl, how to knit in the round. It opens me up to the bottomless world of hats, sleeves, mittens, and, one day in the far-off future, socks. I am at first too impatient to learn how to read patterns so I improvise, feeling my way through hats and scarves until they become a little less uneven, a little less lumpy, a little more shaped the way human bodies are supposed to be.

  Soon I move beyond my grandmother’s couch and start to learn from a handful of knitting books and a constellation of websites. I grudgingly learn how to decipher patterns and soon I can’t remember what it’s like not to be able to, the way you don’t quite know what it was like before you knew how to read. I even make up a move or two. I get better, I lose interest, I regain it, I improve. I get a boyfriend, I get into college, I get a job, I knit. I am anxious, I am joyful, I am lonely, I knit.

  * * *

  I haven’t stopped knitting, really, since that day at the beach. I’ve steadily amassed more needles and more yarn, in all sizes, in all colors. It suits my tendency to collect t
hings—the seashells, the dollhouse miniatures I liked to arrange as a child in what I called “setups” despite the fact that I never actually cared about dolls. Periodically, I would lay out all the fiber on the floor of my room, like some unibrowed little bird in her rainbow nest. Now I keep it in a bookshelf in the apartment where I live by myself, still organized by color. It’s the same idea: I like surrounding myself with the possibility of it, the reminder that whenever I want or need to, I can grab a ball and start to make something new. I get to be both bigger than myself and exactly the right size.

  I’ve wondered if that’s how it feels for everyone, when and if you find your thing. Not necessarily your calling, not exactly your passion, not a pursuit that you hope will bring you money or glory or a sense of elevation to a higher plane. Not even something that takes up a lot of space, but fits into your life so seamlessly it’s like there was always room for it. Just that quiet “ahh” of slipping into place, of a running shoe slapping the pavement, of the harmony found in a choir. Of a stitch sliding from one needle to the next.

  I never got the chance to ask my grandma if that’s what knitting—or crocheting or saxophone playing or singing or gardening or one of the dozens of ways she built a life—felt like for her. No, that’s not true—I had plenty of chances. I had twenty-five years of couches and Christmases. I just never thought to ask.

  Because unlike apocryphal grandmothers, Patricia Furey (Pat, or Ma, or Mama) didn’t just make blankets. She made music in her town band and choir, and she made sure that my mom, Kathleen, and their brother (named Michael, like my grandpa) had music in their bones too. She graduated high school when she was fifteen and got her master’s in sociology in her forties. She coaxed plants from dirt with the same magic she worked on sticks and string, and she loved us all fiercely, if at times a little critically. (My overplucked eyebrows were forever a sticking point, as was the unnatural purply red I dyed my hair back in high school. I willfully ignored her advice and now, with brows that have grown in and bad dye that has grown out, realize I’ve followed it to the letter.) She demanded the most comfortable, the most quiet, and the least drafty seats in restaurants even when the rest of us cringed behind her. She hosted Christmas in her living room every year. She wanted us to be our best.