by Kyoko Mori
Chuck and I loved arguing about religion. “How could you believe all that Christian bullshit even if you were so young?” he would ask, and I would point out that Buddhism, too, had been used the world over to trick the poor into accepting their lot. We talked for hours, but our debate only revolved around the ideas we had acquired as adults. Nothing we said revealed the confused children and lonely teenagers we had once been.
In Japan, less than 1% of the population is Christian—about the same as the minority who practiced Zen Buddhism in Green Bay. Chuck’s Zen and my Christianity were one and the same. By the time we were in high school, neither of us was close to our family and we felt misunderstood even by our best friends. In our frustration, we longed for a spiritual practice to set us apart. If we couldn’t be understood and appreciated, we wanted to be different, at least, by choice. Chuck had stuck to his beliefs and I had given up on mine, but we were opposites and yet the same, like the right mitten and the left mitten. If we’d been more honest, we could have grown closer.
— TWO —
Seamless Sweaters
AFTER LEARNING TO READ RECIPES, I should have been able to knit from the pattern books published by yarn companies. They began with a list of yarns, needles, and notions like the ingredients and the utensils, and the numbered directions, such as “Cast on 120 stitches,” were similar to “Preheat (the) oven to 350 F° or “Heat 1 Tbsp of oil in (the) pan.” But knitting patterns also included diagrams like those for assembling furniture and appliances. A mis-assembled sweater wouldn’t surround itself with smoke and sputter out like the vacuum cleaner I took apart to clean and put back together (or so I thought); no matter what I did wrong, there would be no melted electrical cord dangling from the outlet. Still, those diagrams gave me a headache. I especially hated the broken lines that meant something should go under something else. It was unfair to have to follow such complicated directions only to make a sweater that looked exactly like the photograph on the cover. After all that trouble, a knitter should end up with an utterly unique garment.
I preferred the way Sabina had taught me to knit by taking my own measurements and “making things up as you go.” My sweater could be as long or short as I chose; I could use whatever yarn I liked, knit it at the gauge that suited me, and change colors or put in stripes or make the neck extra snug to keep my throat warm. After Sabina went back to Germany, I visited the yarn store by myself and found a book that improved on her method. Instead of making the front and the back separately and sewing them, The Sweater Workshop showed how to design a seamless sweater by making three simple tubes (one for the body, two for the sleeves) and knitting them together at the yoke. Once you mastered the prototype seamless sweater—a basic pullover with a crew neck—you could try a v-neck or turtle-neck or add a hood or a pocket or a belt. Each sweater could be as long, short, wide, or narrow as you wanted. Just like in Sabina’s method, you chose the yarn, took your own measurements, and “made things up” as you knitted along.
The author, Jacqueline Fee, said she was offering “a retreat from dependence upon others, an alternative for you who wish to knit sweaters on your own, to become an independent, thinking knitter.” The book was published in 1983, but the oatmeal-colored pullover on the cover had the homespun look of the 1960s back-to-nature movement. Seamless sweaters almost shaped themselves as they grew. Their invisible construction, at once clever and mysterious, made them sturdier than the pieced-together kind. These sweaters were unique without being flashy.
IN GRADUATE SCHOOL, I did nothing but study and run, so I only met other students, teachers, and runners. Moving to Green Bay at twenty-seven, I looked forward to becoming a part of the larger community. I was finally an adult with a real job, and I expected my new life to be as roomy and comfortable as a seamless sweater.
I hadn’t considered how different Green Bay was from Milwaukee’s East Side. According to the 1980 census, 97% of Green Bay’s 87,899 residents were white; among the remaining 3%, only 369 people were of Asian descent, 47 of them Japanese. Milwaukee’s population of 636,212 was just 72 % white, and there were 3,459 Asians—446 Japanese. I didn’t exactly blend in anywhere in Wisconsin, but Green Bay was the first place where cars slowed down and drivers turned their heads to stare at me on my morning run. Instead of becoming a seamless part of the community, I stuck out like a lone sweater on a rack of swimsuits. Strangers stopped me in grocery stores and offered to introduce me to the 47 Japanese people in town. “You must be homesick,” they said. “I know a Japanese woman who goes to our church. She has an American husband.” When I suggested, “Maybe the Japanese woman is an American, too,” I got a puzzled smile in response, as though I had recited a Zen koan (“What was your face before you were born?”).
Chuck and I rented a two-bedroom apartment in the heart of downtown where the streets were named after trees and presidents, but the area was deserted after the shopping mall on Adams and Cedar closed for the day. Sirens sounded through the night, announcing the shift changes at the Proctor & Gamble paper mill a few miles to the north. “It’s like someone dropped a neutron bomb in the middle of the city,” Chuck said.
Our apartment was upstairs from a realty office in a small frame house. We had our own side entrance and a rickety stairway leading up to our door. In the eat-in kitchen, the yellow linoleum floor and the lime green curtains matched the old avocado-colored dining table Chuck’s parents had passed on to us. Chuck hadn’t eaten off that table since two days after his high school graduation in 1972, when he moved out of his parents’ house to live with friends in an apartment across town.
In addition to skipping his Confirmation class to ride in a stolen car, Chuck had painted his neighbor’s siding with tar on Halloween, stolen beer from garages, shoplifted books and records all over town, built a huge barricade of picnic tables in a park into which a police officer crashed his cruiser and broke his collar bone, and thrown rocks at Richard Nixon’s motorcade on its way to the airport. “My parents didn’t know what to do with me,” he said. “They were relieved to see me move out. My parents are like vanilla—boring but harmless.”
I had only met Chuck’s parents at family gatherings in crowded restaurants and noisy backyards. His extended family seemed a little bland, but no one really believes that their parents are boring or harmless. Chuck didn’t spend his teenage years acting like a juvenile delinquent to protest against vanilla. If I got to know his family better, I thought, I would feel more at home in my new town.
Chuck’s parents and grandparents showed up for dinner in their jeans and sweatshirts and sat in our kitchen, carefully passing food around the old table. Chuck’s grandfather, Charley Brock, had played football with the Green Bay Packers from 1939 to 1947. Every football season, the pre-game “History of the Packers” program showed pictures of Charley, but unlike the players who came after him, Charley didn’t make a lot of money playing football. He and his wife lived in a modest ranch house near Chuck’s parents. Dick, Chuck’s father, taught social studies at a middle school and had been the star of his high school football team. Chuck didn’t play sports when he attended the same high school eighteen years later, because making the team would have required a haircut. Like anyone from Green Bay, however, he watched the Packers every Sunday.
During dinner, while the men talked about football, the women complimented me on the meatless “meatballs” I served over pasta. Chuck’s grandmother, Alice, had a wide, pleasant face and wavy white hair parted in the middle. Chuck’s mother, Mary, was a slightly overweight woman with platinum blond hair; in her youth, she had looked like Donna Reed. Mary’s family was Norwegian, and Alice was from Sweden. Chuck’s grandmothers had immigrated to the U. S. as young girls, but no one asked me about growing up in Japan. Unlike the people who stopped me at grocery stores, my in-laws went out of their way not to call attention to my being a foreigner. I wished my new family didn’t try so hard to ignore our difference, but I had no idea how to tell them that their politeness was
only making me more uncomfortable, so I kept smiling and offering more food.
Charley helped me wash the dishes while the others went to sit in the living room. All I knew about football was that—unlike in basketball—only one person, the quarterback, was allowed to throw the ball. Thankfully, Charley seemed perfectly content not to talk.
After the family left, Chuck said, “Well, that was okay. Everyone seemed to have a good time.”
“I guess so,” was all I could say.
Dick and Mary were eighteen when Chuck was born. They had three more kids by the time Dick finished college and got his first job as a car salesman. Years later, he went back to school for a teaching certificate. Teaching was a job to Chuck’s father, not a calling.
“When I was growing up, my parents didn’t have any books,” Chuck said. “I never saw them reading. They were too overwhelmed to be great parents, but they did their best. I liked how busy they were. They left me alone. I could do my own thing while they were fussing over the other kids.”
In his most recent letter, my father had said I should have studied the literature of my own country before getting a Ph.D. in English. Michiko said I was lucky to have married a foreigner since no Japanese man would want a wife who was more interested in her studies than in housekeeping. I wrote to them only once every two or three years, because whenever I heard back from them, it took me months to recover from feeling so bad. I couldn’t imagine ever having Hiroshi and Michiko over to dinner. The distant but cordial relationship Chuck had with his parents seemed ideal. I didn’t understand how lonely Chuck must have felt before he learned to act so independent.
ONE OF THE FRIENDS CHUCK had left home to room with still lived in the country schoolhouse they bought by pooling their money in their early twenties. Chuck, Dean, Dean’s brothers, and various friends and their dogs had camped out on the floor of the one room while they renovated the rest of the house. Dean eventually bought out everyone’s share, got married, and started making furniture in the wood shop he set up in the basement. Every Saturday, Chuck and I drove out to visit Dean and his wife, Katie.
Katie and I sat upstairs with our yarn and needles while our husbands played guitars in the basement. Katie, a registered nurse, had learned to knit from a neighbor a few years earlier. Like me, she avoided regular patterns and favored seamless sweaters made from three tubes. Designs that required assembling four flat pieces were more versatile if you wanted dropped shoulders, dolman sleeves, fitted bust lines, cinched waists, and other feminine touches, but Katie and I preferred our clothes to be unisex. The seamless sweater, with its rugged raglan sleeves, went well with our baggy jeans, corduroys, and sweat pants.
Katie had a round face, short brown hair, and fair skin; she looked like the portrait of Renoir’s wife in the country with a straw hat. Aside from a couple of inches in height, I looked the same as I had in the seventh grade, with my hair pulled back into a scraggly ponytail. People in Green Bay described me as “tiny,” but in Japan, I would have been average height and weight, as Katie was in Wisconsin. Neither of us wore makeup or jewelry, and never wedding rings. We were proud to look healthy and plain.
Katie and Dean had conceded to a church wedding for their Catholic families. In the photograph of the wedding party on their kitchen wall, everyone except Katie, in a white dress but no veil, wore jeans and a peasant shirt, making the group look like a large folk-rock band with a female vocalist. At the ceremony, Katie’s brother Tommie had opened the missal on the wrong page and read the passage meant for novices joining the nunnery. Even Chuck, who had grown up Lutheran, knew something was wrong when he heard, “Seven virgins they went into the cave, and seven virgins they came out.” Tommie kept reading faster and faster. When he finished, the ceremony went on as though nothing unusual had happened. At the reception, a potluck in the backyard of the schoolhouse, some of Dean’s friends clinked the coffee cups with their spoons to make the bride and the groom kiss. Katie stood up alone and announced, “This is the one and only time we’re going to do this. I’m not joking. I really mean it.” Dean got up, they kissed, and both sat down. No one clinked their cups after that.
Katie had made her first seamless sweater from Knitting Without Tears by Elizabeth Zimmermann. Born in 1910 in England, Elizabeth Zimmermann attended art schools in Switzerland and Germany, married a brewer she met in Munich, and immigrated with him to the United States. She started her own knitting newsletters, because she was frustrated by the magazine editors who turned her easy, conversational instructions into obscure jargon that only experienced knitters could understand. She wrote four books, launched a mail-order business of patterns and supplies, hosted a public television show called “The Busy Knitter,” and held knitting camps in Pittsville, Wisconsin, where she and her family—like Dean and Katie—lived in a renovated schoolhouse.
“Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit,” she declared, “and it doesn’t hurt the untroubled spirit, either. When I say properly practiced, I mean executed in a relaxed manner, without anxiety, strain, or tension, but with confidence, inventiveness, pleasure, and ultimate pride.” I wished Elizabeth Zimmermann had been my home-ec. teacher. She complimented her readers instead of making them feel stupid: “Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.”
Katie and I took the leftover yarn from our sweaters and tackled the tam-o-shanters in Knitting Without Tears. Unlike watch caps, which fit like a sock on the head, tams are designed to drape over to the side. The pattern started at the forehead with a narrow circular band like the watch cap, but in the main part of the hat, where we doubled the number of the stitches, there was enough room to incorporate two- or three-colored designs. “Set unexpected colors next to one another,” Zimmermann advised. “Get carried away.” I made tiny checks with the light blue from my v-neck sweater and the denim blue from the sweater I’d made for Chuck. Katie came up with zigzags, mixing the various browns and greys from her own and Dean’s sweaters. We dampened the finished hats and stretched them over her dinner plates to dry.
Katie and I were interlacing the yarns from our sweaters and our husbands’ sweaters, working the multi-colored patterns like those on the Latvian mittens, but the irony of the symbolism escaped us. Katie had refused to kiss Dean more than once at their wedding reception, and we both carried our own luggage, paid for our own meals, and attended our work parties alone. At the schoolhouse, the four of us spent most of the afternoon apart: Katie and me, Dean and Chuck.
When we all piled into a car, it was usually to visit the dairy farm a few miles away where Katie had grown up, the youngest of eight children. Her mother had died of cancer while Katie was away at college. Her father had sold the farm and its main house to one of Katie’s brothers and moved into a trailer down the road. Dean and Katie often helped out on the farm and had Sunday dinners with her siblings, who lived nearby.
Dean had grown up in Green Bay, and his brothers and sisters, too, had married and settled within fifteen miles of their childhood home, so some afternoons, Katie took care of her nephews and nieces on both sides. The children played in her yard, chasing the chickens and geese Katie and Dean kept. They didn’t care who they were related to by blood or by marriage, anymore than I had at their age, surrounded by my uncles and aunts on my mother’s side. Although Katie asserted her independence, she and Dean were unmistakably a couple, their marriage anchored by their families. Compared to them, Chuck and I were like plants people kept in glass vials—vines that live on air, gathering nutrients through the wispy roots sunk into nothing.
Elizabeth Zimmermann, who had her own television show, wrote about accompanying her husband on his business trips and spending her afternoons knitting in hotel rooms, because she was too shy to go sight-seeing by herself. I could never admit that there was any place I couldn’t go to on my own, any occasion when I wished I was close
r to my in-laws, or any reason to regret that Chuck and I weren’t more like other couples. What Chuck and I had in common was the pride we took in our independence, the distance we kept from everyone.
DURING THE WEEK, the two of us had dinner at home and read or watched television; I would knit all night, and he would play the guitar during the commercials. One evening in February, when it was twenty degrees below with a wind chill of minus forty, I overcooked the polenta and—distracted by a phone call—dumped it in the sink instead of the garbage can. I might as well have poured cement down the drain. The plunger and the Drano did nothing.
Under the sink, next to the Drano was a bottle of carbolic acid that was given to us when our bathtub was plugged up. Remembering how quickly the tub had started draining again, I picked up the bottle and tipped it over the sink. A lot of acid sloshed out before I could tip the bottle back. White smoke rose from the drain, and its strong sulfur smell almost choked me. When I turned on the faucet, water hissed and bubbled. Too late, I recalled my high school chemistry teacher’s advice about cleaning each test tube separately to avoid mixing the chemicals in the sink and blowing up the lab.
I shut off the water and ran to the living room, where Chuck was reading. “Hey,” I said. “I think I did something stupid. Maybe you should come and see.”
Chuck tried to open the kitchen windows, but they were frozen shut. Smoke continued to erupt from the drain. The smell was so strong our eyes watered.
“We have to get out of here,” he said, coughing. “We can leave the door open to let out the smoke. We’d better hurry.”
