The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater_Essays on Crafting

by Alanna Okun

  * * *

  And then there was Sam. We met in college, where he was a year ahead of me. I’d watched him perform in a musical and liked him instantly: his high cheekbones and cute, slim butt and laugh like a sexy jackhammer. (He remains one of the only people I could ever sit in a theater with and not feel self-conscious about my own choking-sea-lion laugh.) We spent months eyeing each other at parties and making fun of each other after a cappella concerts and then two weeks before he graduated, one of us left a bar near campus and the other followed.6 Ten days later I left his house and cried all the way back to Boston.

  I’d thought that would be the end of it. He’d written me a letter on a thank-you note from the college bookstore (“I’m sorry for the inappropriateness of my stationery,” it began, “but it was all they had”) and then, I figured, he’d be gone, absorbed into adult life while I stayed behind and finished my last year of school.

  That summer I sublet a basement room on the Upper East Side. Sam stayed on campus to work at a theatre program. We were living at either end of the Metro-North Hudson train line, and one weekend not long after I arrived in New York, he took the train down to my borrowed bedroom. A few weeks later, I took it back up to his dorm-issued twin bed. Without ever really talking about it, that became our rhythm. (I went back to school not long ago and could barely fit my own self into one of those beds; I’m no larger now than I was then but I guess I take up more space. It must have taken some ship-in-a-bottle physics to get us both into one together.)

  Sam was New York City for me in the way that first basement sublet was, that first temporary job alongside Marina. The way Joe was my hometown and Hirschey was college. Sam bounded around the city with his endless energy and long limbs, taking me to strange off-off-off-Broadway plays and dinners we could afford with our collectively zero money. Something in me lit up whenever I got a text that he was coming my way, or an invitation to a show and a sleepover back upstate. He added a hazy excitement to that time, which must have been made, at least in part, of the fact that I was never totally sure he’d be coming back.

  And then, again, that intoxicating feeling of being seen. The way he studied me and asked me questions made me feel like this life I was starting to build was important, like my day-to-day choices—what I made for breakfast, the way I sat when I read, what I thought about people and plays and dry martinis—had meaning and weight, weren’t just the result of a series of subconscious accidents like I sometimes suspected. I hardly wrote or crafted at all that summer, telling myself I was too busy with work and with the city and with him; really I think it was that I felt too heightened to make much of anything, too fragile, too worried that if I looked away or inward even for a minute, it would all disappear.

  We switched places in the fall—Sam moved to Brooklyn and I went back to Poughkeepsie for my last year of college—and dissolved. It was a relief, really, to have myself back in one place again. But I never shook that singular, staticky feel of him. We kept in half-touch, dated other people. I spent senior year without a boyfriend, for once. I tried out for the first play I’d been in since high school (The Vagina Monologues, obviously) and wrote my thesis and soaked up my last months at this place that had loved me so well. I made out with roughly half the school. I graduated. I moved to New York City, just like everybody else. I met Aude and started my job. I started to make things again.

  * * *

  Sam sent me a message on my twenty-third birthday, a few days after Jamie died. He knew—our school was small. We chatted a little and discovered that we didn’t live very far from each other, and so decided to meet for brunch early one afternoon.

  Oh, I thought as I walked up and there he was, tall in a red-and-white-checked shirt, glasses thicker and rounder than they’d been in college, dark, wavy hair as shiny as ever. Like an actor playing the fuzzy version of him that had been living in my memory. Right. That’s what I’ve been missing.

  After that we met for a show, and then for a midday movie with a smuggled Nalgene bottle full of Manhattans (water never tasted the same from it after that, no matter how many times he rinsed it out). I didn’t let him kiss me for weeks because I knew what it would do to me. I’d be sent right back to that place of waiting for his messages, waiting to be wanted the way I wanted him. And then one day in the middle of summer we stood outside a friend’s birthday party while I threw up on the sidewalk.

  It had been one of the hottest days on record in an already-boiling July. I’d left work early and canceled a promising second date with someone else, partly because I was dizzy but mostly because I couldn’t think about anybody besides this boy who had taken up space in my head for so long. When Sam invited me to the party I shook off my nausea, forgot all about the heat.

  In the months since he’d come back into my life I’d wanted him to see me as someone who had it together, who didn’t need him or anyone to make me whole. But I hadn’t eaten since lunch and the night felt no cooler than the day and so the three beers I’d drunk reappeared as we stood talking outside.

  He dropped his cigarette when I bent double. He rubbed my back and stroked my hair and all I could do was let tears leak and mumble, “I don’t want you to see me like this. I don’t want you to see me this weak.”

  He looked confused. “Why not?”

  I don’t remember what I said. Something sputtering and unrehearsed, something about how much I cared about him and just wanted him to see me as my best self. Even then, before the fights about ambition and sex, before the frustration of him not being able to tell me what he wanted and me not being able to give it to him, before the year of sleeping curled around each other’s sweat-soaked bodies and the six months of sleeping back to back, I was scared that the wind would blow the wrong way and he would leave again. I never stopped being scared. My fear would manifest itself as jealousy, as paranoia, as anger and nagging and everything but the thing it was.

  And I do not know about brain chemistry but I do know that it wasn’t the drinking that blurs this moment for me now, nor the years in between. It was the most raw I’ve ever been in front of another person, a crumpled, spitty heap asking-begging-demanding to be loved back. Something in me (maybe everything in me) shut down, so unused to this unplanned concession of control.

  Whatever I said, when we woke up the next morning he was my boyfriend. We were us.

  * * *

  I spent so much energy over the course of our time together making and collecting totems. I embroidered Sam a sampler that said “BARF” and felt a flush of ownership every time I saw it hanging in his bedroom; I felt the same way when he’d walk around a corner wearing the knitted beanie. I inventoried our kisses and I-love-yous, reread texts and emails until I knew them half by heart. In the few photos we took, I studied our faces for evidence, I think, that we were real.

  Loving someone can give you a purpose and a project. It can give you a context and therefore a clearer sense of yourself: here is who I am because here is who he is. Look at what we’ve made together. Look at how far we’ve come, the plans we’ve concocted, the keys we’ve exchanged. The hope I was capable of containing. I never shook the twisted fairy-tale idea that if Sam could just patch up a few holes, he’d be able to love me as fully and forever as I wanted him to, and that, in turn, would mend my rips as well.

  Our year and a half is hazy to me now, in a different way from that first terrifying night. More like the memory of a country I visited when I was young, or a vague blanket of sensations with a few distinct moments scattered throughout: the first time we said “I love you,” at my office holiday party; dancing around his living room while he blasted Fleetwood Mac on his roommate’s record player; a fight at a house belonging to a family friend for whom we were taking care of an extremely old cat and a reasonably young dog. (We were always playing house with other people’s pets.)

  And I don’t remember the beginnings of our fights, nor their causes—a few careless words, plans changed at the last minute—just where we’
d end up. I’d become so convinced that his smallest gestures signified his desire to leave me, that he didn’t love me the way I wanted, the way I thought I needed, the way that meant I could finally rest. Of course I never said that, out loud or to myself; of course what I wanted was impossible, and not really what I wanted at all. I was just scared, because I did not know what would happen if I had to leave this cozy, cramped place I’d helped to build. I didn’t know where else to go.

  But no matter how I clutched—I’m sure, partly, because of it—we grew at different rates and in different directions. The same repeated fights and disappointments wore a groove and then one night, the mushy hurt solidified into a surprisingly compact decision. This part, I remember.

  It was a Sunday night. I’d returned to Brooklyn after visiting my family for Thanksgiving. We’d fought, yet again, over text, the lines so familiar it was like we’d rehearsed them. Sam came to my house. We ate spaghetti carbonara in my tiny kitchen, decided it would be right to kiss goodbye, and then he left.

  * * *

  In the year that followed Sam, I didn’t quite know how to be. My sadness over losing him had, again, that edge of relief—there would be no more fights, no more hope hardening to dread. I could just live here, in this quiet place where I didn’t have to tug, didn’t have to guess at what someone who was not me really wanted. Didn’t have to try and figure out what someone who was me really wanted.

  The first month was cozy in its loneliness, the weather so cold that there was nothing to do but hunker down in my apartment and ask Aude to sleep beside me every once in a while. Soon, though, my mind started to move in its usual patterns. I had a string of small but sharp disappointments, people who seemed promising and then abruptly (or, worse, haltingly) broke it off. I’d meet someone, we would start up, and immediately I would jump ahead to that intimate space I was so desperate to get back to. The present reality almost didn’t matter: who the person was, what they said they wanted or didn’t, whether I stopped to consider whether I wanted them at all.

  Each new romance would start with a few weeks of cautious happiness that soon curdled into panic—why is he taking so long to reply to my text? Why did he roll over in the morning instead of reaching out for me? Sometimes I would voice these swirling thoughts but often I didn’t. Instead, because I couldn’t control anyone else’s feelings or behavior, I’d spend that frantic energy examining myself. I looked for all the ways I was falling short: nose and teeth too big and crooked; too loud and dramatic, especially when drunk; deodorant application too infrequent; feelings too obvious; heart too easy; altogether much too much.

  After all that spiraling, all that jumping, all that work just for the sake of doing work, the final break always felt like a rest. A clumsy return to the floor after weeks of frightened hovering. Whether a text or a tear-streaked conversation, whether an “I’m sorry” or “I can’t” or, worst of all, “maybe one day.” The finality had a horrible crunching sound but at least it had edges. I would cry and stomp around and drink, probably too much, but at least I would know. At least I would belong entirely to myself again, my heart back in my chest, where it was safest, where maybe it could finally be still long enough for me to sew it back up.

  * * *

  Most of me is glad I never bought the yarn for Sam’s sweater. (The same part that must have known even then that we might not be together come Christmas—no self-respecting knitter, no matter how speedy, would wait until after Thanksgiving to start such a gift.) I don’t know what I’d do with twelve balls of gray wool now: ransack it to make a family’s worth of hats and mittens? Attempt something nuts and over-the-top like an armchair cover or a hammock? Just let it sit there on my bookshelf, taking up more space than all the surrounding colors, reminding me of what I had, what I lost, what I will find again? That’s the part of me that does wish I’d had the yarn in hand during our final weeks together, that I had started the project after all. Maybe it could have absorbed some of that hopeful-doomed magic, the last bit of proof that I was there.

  Since Sam, I haven’t attempted to challenge the curse. Not because I believe in it, or because there hasn’t been anyone worthy—I hope to knit somebody a lovely sweater someday, the kind you see in photographs of your parents when they were young. I want to build that kind of life and to make those kinds of memories. I still want to be loved fully and forever, and to do the same right back. I just don’t know the measurements for that sweater yet.

  But there is one body that I know by heart. After that first year spent on my own, right after my grandmother’s funeral, I bought an armload of soft gray yarn. It wasn’t the type I would have used for a boyfriend sweater, not a heavy fisherman’s wool, but a soft, haloed alpaca shot through with silk. I used it to knit a smaller, slimmer sweater. It’s a cardigan. It has cables twining down the sides, and pockets lined with mustard yellow flannel I’d been keeping for I don’t know what occasion. There was no pattern; instead, I tried it on as I went and adjusted as needed. I gave myself permission to leave mistakes if they weren’t worth the trouble to fix. I sort of came to like them, those uneven little marks in the fabric, a reminder that every part of this flawed beautiful thing is mine.

  As I knitted, it occurred to me that maybe the Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater is real, but it’s not quite accurate to call it a curse. Maybe it’s more of a litmus test, a method of determining whether what you have with someone is going to last. Is it solid enough to stand up under the weight of all those stitches, all that hope, all that work the two of you must choose to put in, or will it collapse before the final row?

  I decorated my sweater—my Girlfriend Sweater, as I came to think of it—with pins I’d collected (one in the shape of a piece of pizza, another that looks like an envelope, a third that just reads SHUT UP), and wore it for weeks until it started to smell. I’ve worn it on first dates and last ones, to protests and parties, when I need a boost or just an extra layer in my freezing Manhattan office. It reminds me that sweaters that aren’t the right size aren’t bad, or wrong, or signs that we are bad or wrong; they just don’t fit. Others will. And in the meantime, you can always make one for yourself.

  Frogging, or How to Start Over

  The hardest part of crafting isn’t threading an impossibly tiny needle. It’s not a complicated lace-knitting technique, nor is it working on a loom that is taller than you will ever be. It’s not carpal tunnel nor a hunched back nor eyes squinting to see your work when you should have gone to bed two hours ago. Not paint fumes, not paper cuts, not even the mile-long checkout line that exists at every Michaels in North America. No: the hardest part of making anything is knowing when to start over.

  Here is how it goes with knitting. You come across a pattern that grabs you, or an especially alluring ball of yarn. (Some people let the materials lead the way while others begin with the idea. I’ve always been pretty haphazard in my approach, which is why I own dozens of unknitted patterns and thousands of yards of unknitted yarn with no plans to ever wed the two.) You sit down in front of the TV or with a podcast in order to get through the tedious, unsatisfying beginning of any project: casting on. Getting that first row of stitches onto the needles takes the sort of counting and concentration that you are expressly trying to avoid by knitting, but until you can enlist a casting-on intern, it’s a step you have to take.

  The first row you knit after the cast-on is always difficult. Maybe you started too tightly and have to force your needles through the stubborn stitches, or maybe too loose and now you have to tug each strand of yarn so you don’t leave any holes. The beginning is a slog.

  But then, ten minutes or twenty or sometimes a week later, you look down and realize that what you have is a thing. Nothing yet identifiable as a hat or scarf, but no longer just the anemic start. You can tug it and pat it and stretch it out, and best of all, you can start to picture what it will look like when it’s finally really in the world. This fixed image is enough to drive you forward long after the show you’d
settled in to watch has rolled its credits.

  Which is why there’s a tiny apocalypse when you realize your mistake. You cast on 84 stitches when you were supposed to have only 48; you mixed up the right side and the left because who ever thinks to do that “L” hand trick after the age of, like, six? You frantically try to do some mental arithmetic that might fix it, and then when that proves too hard you rejigger your vision altogether—doesn’t your sister’s boyfriend have an unusually large head? They’ve only been dating for three weeks, but hey, everyone needs a winter hat, right? Right????

  Then comes anger. Fuck this pattern, you think, they should have picked a bigger font, made it beyond explicit what you were absolutely not to do.

  “Hey, [your name]!” they should have written at the top of the page. “We know you tend to zone out somewhere around the tenth row, so just a reminder that you should definitely start the ribbing by then so the whole thing doesn’t look lopsided! You’re great and we love you!!!”

  Because just about then your anger shifts to a more immediate target: you, the hasty, clumsy moron who didn’t bother to count, who somehow didn’t notice when a crucial stitch was dropped two inches back. Why did you think you could do this? Why couldn’t you stick to an activity you know, like biting your nails or standing in front of the open fridge for so long the lightbulb burns out? Why did you ever try to make something new?

  The project, meanwhile, keeps staring at you like a puppy in a kill shelter. You can stuff it deep in your bag or hide it under your bed but you’ll feel it anyway, waiting for its fate. Maybe you’ll even take it out once or twice and knit a few more rows before cramming it back out of sight. Melodramatic, perhaps, but there are moments when it feels like indelible proof of your failings: you’re too impatient, you tug too tightly, your execution can never live up to your ideas. In fact, the relative insignificance of a piece of knitting is proof in itself—you couldn’t control something as inconsequential as this? How are you supposed to be in charge of the rest of your life?