The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater_Essays on Crafting

by Alanna Okun

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  Where new crafters start to get tripped up is somewhere around the word “needle.” “Needle” can refer to a huge range of objects, each more daunting than the last.

  There are sewing and embroidery needles, small and sharp and always disappearing right when you need them and reappearing in the sole of your bare foot hours later. These can be used to make pictures and words, to close up the edges of brand-new objects, but they can also be called upon for on-the-spot repairs: tears, escapee buttons, ragged hems. Keeping a needle and thread nearby is a small price to pay for the kind of help you can lend someone (or yourself) in these quietly dire moments. There are tapestry needles, otherwise known as yarn needles, meant to weave in the loose ends caused by scissors and endings. There are felting needles, terrifyingly jagged, with a broad handle that you clutch as you stab and agitate wool. Cable needles have a dip in the middle to patiently hold your stitches while you work on others out of order. Sewing machines have needles affixed to their front arms and are an unholy bitch to thread, and crochet hooks aren’t needles at all but it’s totally understandable to refer to them as such.

  All of them simple, all of them serving their different purposes, but all meant to do, largely, the same thing: plunge into the nebulous softness of your materials and tame them. They’re the bridge between what you have and what you want. Even though your route might be twisty and turny, full of mistakes and backtracks, needles are comforting in their persistent linearity, their definite end points, even their interchangeability. (You might have your preferences, but any tapestry needle will do when push comes to shove.) Yarn and fabric are slippery, each with an energy all its own. They represent possibility but also uncertainty, a certain impenetrability that taunts you until you’re reasonably sure you know what you want them to be. Needles don’t do that. They lack life until you pick them up and return it to them. And once you master them, they become an extension of you.

  Finally, there are knitting needles. I must own at least fifty sets—in bamboo and aluminum, circular and straight, short little double-points and long, unwieldy single-points. One of my first big purchases when I got my first job was a set of needles with an array of removable tips. It felt like I had bought the world; suddenly I didn’t need to hunt down a pair of size 8s right when I needed them, nor buy a new set of 10s or 15s when a pattern called for them halfway through. I could simply twist off the tips and replace them with different sizes, all laid out before me in a neat black binder. I liked being the kind of person with the foresight and the means to possess all the tools she could ever need. I liked that I had a system.

  But in a slow fit of entropy, the system broke down. A 6 would find its way into the slot meant for a 7; a 4 was bent so far out of shape that it more closely resembled a cable needle. I started leaving the tips in various jars and bags around my room, and then came the day when I desperately needed a set of 9s and couldn’t find them, and so finally I just went out and bought new ones. I was frustrated with myself—that was money I’d already spent, an investment I’d made—but then I got over it. The system had been meant to help me, not to make me feel guilty when I couldn’t perfectly adhere to it. I bought more needles, and then another set of interchangeables, and gave some away to students, and sometimes I can find exactly what I need when I need it and sometimes I can’t. I am doing my best.

  When my grandma died, I didn’t take much from her house. Partly because my apartment is small, unable to handle much beyond the essentials I’ve already collected. There isn’t room for an inlaid end table or a spare armchair. But even her books and knickknacks didn’t call out to me. They felt like such a product of the space they occupied that taking them out of it seemed like it might sap them of all magic, all memories. I accepted just a couple of knitting booklets my mother dug up as she packed up the house to sell it, and a single-serving French press.

  I didn’t even want any of her considerable yarn collection. They weren’t really my preferred colors (she favored dusty pastels while I go either full-on Day-Glo or neutral as heck), but that wasn’t fully the reason; I’d loved to plunder it while she was still alive. It had felt, in some small way, like a collaboration: her materials, my execution. I usually used her yarn to make little things, tiny bowls or ornament-sized sweaters. I liked showing my grandma what I’d coaxed forth from her yarn, so different from the afghans she made from the very same material, the large beside the small. Without her, there wasn’t anyone to show.

  The only things I found myself truly wanting after she died were her knitting needles. In the den next to the bedroom where Moriah and I had always slept on visits was a corner devoted to my grandma’s crafting: a closet lined with plastic organizers full of yarn, her sewing machine, her ironing board, and a large chest of drawers that contained all of her other tools. These, and the yarn, were always arranged perfectly in order, as if they floated back to their assigned spaces once she was done with them.

  In their own drawer lived a neat display of knitting needles and crochet hooks. My grandma didn’t have nearly as many as I do, because she didn’t need to: all of hers were clearly visible, organized by type and size. Whenever she needed a particular set, there it was. I’d pilfered those, too, on my visits; whenever I’d return from the fancy yarn store in town with a new haul, I’d run to her drawers. Sometimes I returned them before I left and sometimes I didn’t. My grandma never minded. In the last years of her life, she encouraged me to take whatever I wanted. She didn’t knit anymore.

  After her funeral, when we returned to her empty-but-still-full house, I went right to the craft corner. I didn’t even take off my shoes or jacket; I didn’t know where else to go. I picked up almost every single needle, turned them over in my hands, prodded the tips with my fingers. I didn’t take all of them, just the ones that filled the holes in my collection, and the ones that reminded me the most of her.

  Months later, I’d loan a pair to a friend just learning for the first time. She’s a cook and took to the repetitive motions instantly, loved the gray cowl she cast on with me so much that she took the project home with her for the holidays. When she came back, she apologized up and down: her baby cousin had broken one of the needles. I didn’t care, and I didn’t think my grandma would either. They’d already served their purpose, venturing out into the world and allowing someone new to fall in love with knitting. Besides, I had others.

  And the Girlfriend Sweater, the gray cabled one I made for myself instead of any boy, that came to be on my grandma’s needles too. I would have gotten the same results with any twenty-four-inch size 5 circulars, but I loved looking down at the light-gray aluminum darting in and out of the yarn and imagining them in my grandma’s hands. Hands that played piano, that planted gardens, that rubbed my back and my sister’s and my mother’s and her sister’s. Hands whose leathery firmness I won’t ever feel again, that will never again rub my back, that will never hold my children. But they did the work they set out to do.

  Her needles made my finished sweater feel like it was imbued with a promise, that I came from somewhere, that I had been and would be so, so loved. And when I cast off, the needles slipped into my messy collection and blended in right away. I’m not even sure today which ones they are! But I don’t feel too precious about them. I just like knowing that they’re there.

  Small, Surprising Things That Remind Me of the Feeling of Crafting

    1.  When the bartender gives you a free drink, or at least remembers your usual order.

    2.  When you crave a food and then acquire the food in a timely manner and it’s exactly like you imagined.

    3.  Arriving at home and realizing you are alone and that it’s clean.

    4.  Laundry that’s still warm from the dryer.

    5.  Good, comfortable sex.

    6.  When you are tasked with opening the bottle of wine and you do so on the first try.

    7.  When a new acquainta
nce you like a lot invites you to something out of the blue.

    8.  When a cool stranger compliments your eyeliner or jacket.

    9.  Eavesdropping on a really juicy conversation.

  10.  Finishing the crossword, with or without help.

  11.  Buying a new outfit and wearing it that same day.

  12.  Singing in a choir.

  13.  Underlining a particularly moving passage in a book with a particularly smooth pen.

  Homemaking

  After her father and then her mother died, my mom went back to the house in Virginia where she grew up. She’d been back and forth plenty over the previous year, she and her sister, Kathleen, checking in on their now-widowed mother, taking care of the place, and eventually moving her into an assisted-living facility. My grandma stayed there only a few days before, a touch defiantly, she died.

  And so it fell to my mom to do one of the things she is best at: make a home. She had helped us kids set up our dorm rooms and apartments, had presided over the renovation of our house in Boston and the purchase of a small beachside place in Rhode Island. She’d even tried to work her magic on her mother’s room at the facility, not knowing it would be inhabited for such a short time; she returned the armchair that had sat, almost unused, in the corner. My mother knows how to look at the smallest, bleakest space and transpose everything you’d need to make it cozy, to make it feel like you. She helps us pick out all our furniture and hangs our shelves and paints our walls, no matter how fussy the terms of the lease.

  This time, though, would be in reverse. My mom, Kathleen, and their brother, Michael, had decided to sell the house, and so it needed to be cleaned out and staged for future inhabitants. My mom kept texting us pictures that looked like they belonged on HGTV: the basement den where my grandma had kept her craft supplies, now transformed into a modern seating area; the soft, squishy living room where we’d crowded on top of one another to open Christmas presents all of a sudden rendered in clean, straight lines, with a coffee table in the middle that totally would have gotten in Santa’s way.

  The house looked smaller in those photographs than I remembered, probably because in the twenty-five years I spent visiting, I never really thought of it as a house. It was more like a country, ruled over by the twin guardians who were my grandparents: Grandpa, tall and peaceful, and Grandma, small and fierce and loving.

  But of course it was a house, and it had already been a home, for a long, long time. It was where my mom and Kathleen and Michael had grown up (apart from stints in New Jersey and England) and where Matthew, Moriah, and I spent vacations. We would enter the house and it would swallow us, with its familiar smells (pine needles and cats, but in a good way) and its mythical supply of knickknacks (a vase full of peacock feathers, a carved wooden elephant on every surface, always a Whitman’s Sampler somewhere to be excavated for its caramels and maple creams). Even when we reached our twenties, Moriah and I would run down to the basement bedroom we shared—I used to “suggest” that she sleep on a cot next to the bed, but in later years we each just picked a side—and one of us would immediately jump on the ancient gold exercise bike parked in front of the TV. We’d take turns slowly pedaling while watching a steady stream of Degrassi episodes and Christmas-movie marathons, each promising the other we wouldn’t peek as she wrapped her pile of gifts.

  Our bedroom was full of relics. In the far corner stood cabinets piled high with my grandpa’s patents and research papers. He had taught mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, an enormous university down the street that seems to take up half the town. It’s where my mom and her siblings went to school, and where my grandma worked in the sociology department for years. (It’s also where, in 2007, thirty-two students were killed by their classmate, who went on to shoot himself. There is now a massive memorial that kids who weren’t even born back then run around. If someone’s heard of Blacksburg before, this is often why.)

  Across from the bed was a floor-to-ceiling set of shelves displaying photos of my grandma as a young model, as a student, as a sister and wife and mother, and, always, as a grandmother. There she was, holding Moriah, fresh from the bath with her adorable cap of hair. There was baby me, alone and practically bald, examining what looked like a seashell on the beach but upon closer inspection was probably a cigarette butt. (My mom and I couldn’t stop laughing when we figured that out.) We all looked so happy.

  We’d often be woken up in the morning by Grandma or Kathleen coming into the room so they could let out the resident cat.1 There was always a rotating cast of cats; my grandparents fed the neighborhood strays, eventually constructing what we called the “cat condo”—a sprawling outdoor structure with different heated compartments and a roof to protect their furry visitors from the Virginia elements. Eventually a cat would attach itself to the family and move into the main house. When one died, before too long another would come and take its spot, although each cat held a special place in the family’s collective memory: Franklin, Spooky, Purdy, Bosco, Goldilocks, Harry.

  My mom and Kathleen packed away the photos. They donated the exercise bike to a local thrift store and the cat condo to a nearby farm. They made the house ready to become someone else’s home, now that their folks were both gone.

  * * *

  My mom and I have always been extremely close. For a while, it was just the two of us and my dad—they like to tell me of when they first brought me home from the hospital, put me on the dining-room table, and realized they had absolutely no idea what to do next. But they figured it out, and soon enough there was Moriah, three-and-change years after me, and then Matthew, three-and-change years after her. Before them, though, before I could walk or read or recognize my reflection in a mirror, my mom and I started talking. We still do talk constantly, about our feelings and feelings about those feelings, about books and movies and music, about how we spent our days and what we’re looking forward to next. We’d talk as she drove me to and from school and choir practice, and then as she drove me to and from college. Now we talk on the phone most days, in little snippets as I’m walking to the subway or she’s walking the dog, between her visits to New York and mine to Boston and Rhode Island. Also, she’s gotten really good at texting.

  She is, in a word, dope. Lots of people think their mother is the best, but I have to make a strong argument in favor of mine. There’s the matter of her name, for starters: Pamela Joy Furey. Joy! Furey! It’s so perfect that if this were fiction it would sound too on-the-nose and I would have to cut it. I like my name a lot, but I’ve always resented the fact that if my parents had cared more about my don’t-fuck-with-me quotient, they would have at least thought to name me Alanna Okun-Furey. There’s also the fact that my mother is a drummer. She’s played since high school—I used to try on the white majorette boots that were relegated to our Halloween costume bin and stomp around—but really doubled down once we kids grew up, taking lessons in town and sharing a drum kit with Matthew. (They are around the same height.) She plays in klezmer bands and in pit orchestras for musicals.2 Once, Matthew was slated to play drums for a summer production of The Music Man, and realized at the last minute that he wouldn’t be able to make one of the performances. He frantically texted our mom and she showed up without complaint, twice the age of anyone else involved in the show.

  * * *

  Growing up, I didn’t fully appreciate the magnitude of my mom’s ability to make a home. Our house was nice, but it also just was. She inherited my grandma’s penchant for vases of feathers and bowls of orbs; the living room in particular is full of tchotchkes that, if you stare long enough, are truly bonkers: a large brass pear with a keyhole in the middle, a ladder that leads … nowhere. She prefers understated palettes (you can’t possibly know how many shades of taupe there are in the universe until you’ve spent forty-five minutes with my mom at Benjamin Moore) and is a genius at getting furniture retailers to sell her floor models at a deep discount. But there’s nothing fussy about he
r taste; one of her great joys is when we’re all clustered around the granite island in the kitchen, or draped over one another on the giant couch in the sunroom. Her even greater joy is when we all go to sleep and she can have those rooms to herself and her design magazines. For a while, she worked for an architect, and then went on to consult on home renovations, doing for other people what she’d already done for us.

  And she was there to oversee the design of each one of my homes, no matter how short a time I’d be there. She’d help me figure out what I needed to buy (and usually wind up paying for it), sketch out floor plans on napkins and in newspaper margins, and drive me and all my earthly possessions up and down the East Coast. She would construct IKEA furniture, drill holes in walls that were essentially cardboard-covered concrete, and disguise hideous light fixtures or school-issued furniture that we weren’t allowed to just get rid of.

  “Whoa,” a friend said upon walking into my room junior year of college, the first time I had my very own single. “This is, like, a home.”

  It was. My mother had stayed for two days, sleeping on an air mattress she’d brought from Boston. The room had been a disaster, all the furniture pushed aside in order to make space. I’d gotten annoyed with her; there wasn’t enough room for both of us to work, so I stood by and watched as she measured and marked and nailed her way through each task.

  “It looks fine to me,” I said, seven or eight times.

  “I’ll be done soon,” she would reply breezily. I left and went down the hall to see my friends, and to whine that my mother was a maniac.

  When the room was finished, she called me back in and I cried. The dusty red curtains we’d picked out together fluttered in the late-summer wind; the four light fixtures meant to replace the glaring overhead glowed softly; the two strange paintings of pears I’d found at IKEA hung side by side like they were displayed in a gallery. I cried because it was just mine, and because she had been the one to make it so. That my mother could come into this space with a few disparate things I’d kind of sort of liked a little and create a home so uncannily mine—that was what did it. My room was proof that I was loved.