by Kyoko Mori
We were both gagging, scarcely able to breathe.
I grabbed the cat, and we sprinted down the rickety stairs to the parking lot in the back of the house. We hadn’t brought our coats, but I’d remembered my car key, wallet, and the blanket I’d made for the cat. My fingers were numb and my eyelashes had frozen shut. Chuck’s moustache looked white. I wrapped the blanket tighter around Dorian. His deep blue eyes stared out from the beige folds.
“Let’s take my car.” I tossed the key to Chuck. “You drive. I’ll hold Dorian.”
We drove around town with the heater on high. It took my new car a good half hour to warm up.
“How long do you think it’ll take the smoke to clear out?” I asked Chuck.
“I don’t know. A few hours.”
“Maybe we can get something to eat. I’m not planning to cook any more tonight. That polenta was really terrible.”
“We can’t go to a restaurant with the Buddy.” Chuck called Dorian the Buddy in celebration of their friendship. “He’ll bite the waiter, and we’ll be asked to leave.” Dorian had to be confined to the spare room when we had guests—even a temporary visitor such as the gas meter reader—because he attacked everyone who set foot in our apartment. The vet, a cat specialist and not a young man, had told Chuck’s mother that Dorian was the worst cat he had ever met. To me, he only said “one of the toughest.” Dorian drew blood every time.
But he was completely docile with Chuck and me. He let us hold his front paws and walk him around the apartment on his hind legs in a trick Chuck called “the Bipedal Buddy,” and he was a polite passenger in any vehicle we drove. “We can’t leave Dorian in the car and sit in a restaurant by ourselves,” I said.
We drove to the frozen custard stand where we often got turtle sundaes—three scoops of vanilla frozen custard with hot fudge, hot caramel, pecans, whipped cream, and a maraschino cherry. The parking lot was empty, and a hand-written sign taped to the window said, “Closed Due to Bad Weather.” The ink on the sign was faint, as though the pen or the writer had been on the verge of death.
“We could go to your parents’ house,” I said. “Maybe they’d give us food to go, but I don’t want to tell them how I poured Drano and carbolic acid down the drain. It’s too embarrassing.”
Though it was only seven o’clock, the roads were deserted. The cold weather warning was advising people not to drive anywhere unnecessary. We passed the houses of my colleagues. “I scarcely know these people,” I kept saying.
“Oh, let’s just drive,” Chuck said.
We circled the city several times, listening to NPR. The station played jazz that night. Chuck, I, and even the cat had written during the last pledge drive and complained, because the evening program almost always featured opera. We each promised to double our contribution if the selections could occasionally include jazz, rock, or “classical music without the human voice” as one of us so eloquently put it, but so far we had only received identical noncommittal answers. But maybe on this dangerously cold evening, the programmer was finally agreeing with us and choosing Dizzy Gillespie over Wagner. Dorian slept, woke up occasionally to scratch the blanket, and closed his eyes again. By the time we went home, three hours later, the smoke had cleared and the polenta had disintegrated. We could see our breath as we stood in the kitchen. I made Chuck promise that he would never tell anyone about our polenta odyssey. Sometimes I imagine that we are still circling the frozen city, the three of us making an itinerant family of our own, more at home in the small, dark interior of a moving car than settled inside any house.
I HAD HOPED THAT MY JOB would give me a sense of purpose or belonging, but like the rest of Green Bay, the college was old-fashioned and Catholic. The year I arrived, I was the only woman and non-Catholic on the English faculty. Other departments—philosophy, theology, history, art, biology, chemistry— had no women. Of the ten women who taught full-time college-wide, three were nuns. Most of the secular women on campus were faculty spouses, widows, or daughters who taught part-time or worked as secretaries. One of the vice presidents had hired his wife as his head secretary. My colleagues belonged to a different generation.
When I attended the dinners on campus, someone always pulled out my chair so I could sit down; later as we were heading out to a lecture or a meeting, someone else would pick up my coat and hold it for me unless I jumped up and grabbed it first. “You don’t pull out chairs and hold coats for each other,” I said, “so why do it for me? It makes me uncomfortable to be singled out.”
At my first year-end review in his office, our division chair noticed the button-down shirt I had put on for the occasion instead of the usual orange or neon-green T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon logo from some 10K race I’d run (“the Sampson Stomp,” “the Turkey Trot,” “the Armenian Martyrs’ Day Race”). “You look nice,” he said.
“Did you comment on the way my male colleagues were dressed for their reviews?” I asked. “If you didn’t, then you should say nothing about mine.”
The chair shook his head and smiled. I could only speak so frankly and ill-humoredly because he was a kind person who would never punish me for my rudeness. Still, I couldn’t forgive him for his failure to use gender-neutral language.
When people from the college invited us to dinner, Chuck wore a T-shirt and jeans, and I put on a button-down shirt and grey dress pants I could have worn to church. His attire was off the charts, but mine would have been perfect had I been a man. My colleagues had chosen the same style, later called “business casual.” Their spouses, in evening gowns with low backs, sat chatting about their children while I talked shop with the men. Chuck was on his own unless one of the men realized that he was the grandson of Charley Brock, the Green Bay Packer.
We were relieved when everyone had us over once and the invitations stopped. “Even my parents don’t get dressed up just to eat dinner,” Chuck said. We had no plans to reciprocate. Our apartment didn’t have a dining room, and our living room was cluttered with Chuck’s books and school supplies. Besides, I didn’t want my colleagues to see me stirring a pot of soup or taking a casserole out of the oven. I had never told them that I could cook or knit.
I DIDN’T KNOW, then, that knitting only appears to be a docile activity. In one of the “knitting Madonna” paintings from the middle ages, Master Bertram of Minden portrayed Mary finishing a little crimson shirt on four needles, getting ready to cast off round the neck. Reclining at her feet, the young Jesus gazes away from his mother toward the two angels who stand on the edge of the picture; in their hands, they hold out a cross with three nails, a spear, and a crown of thorns. The crimson shirt on Mary’s needles—made in the seamless method—foreshadows the seamless robe that will be stripped from him on Calgary. The painting implies that Mary is a brave mother who raises her son to die for a cause.
Even in my childhood story, knitting was the secret weapon for the princess who risked her life to save her brothers. She worked hard for seven years while they flew around helplessly. Her father failed to protect her from the evil stepmother, and her husband believed his mother’s lies and threw her in jail. The only smart and resourceful fighter in her family, the princess showed no mercy to her enemies. Instead of forgiving her mother-in-law, she sent the older woman to be burned at the stake.
In the middle ages, St Sebastian was the patron saint of knitters, because the arrows of his martyrdom resembled knitting needles. Throughout history, war has inspired more women to knit than peace. A woman from Philadelphia worked as a spy during the War of Independence by hiding her messages in her balls of yarn. She sat knitting by the side of the road, and when the American army passed by, she dropped her yarn for the soldiers to pick up. The British soldiers marched past her, assuming she was a harmless farm wife. Two World Wars caused great revivals of the craft, when women all over America made socks and sweaters for soldiers. Eleanor Roosevelt attended the kick-off party for “Knit for Defense” at the Waldorf-Astoria and finished the first row of th
e first sweater to be sent overseas. Soon, women were knitting everywhere—in each other’s homes, in parks, on buses—to contribute to the war effort.
World War II was the last war that inspired women to knit. Since then, the Armed Forces have adopted synthetic fabrics for their uniforms, and the ethos about knitting has changed. In the 1980s, around the time I started knitting, owners of yarn stores noticed that fewer women were knitting for their husbands or children; more were buying luxury yarns to make one-of-a-kind garments for themselves. Knitting was headed for another revival, this time among college-educated women. By the turn of the millennium, two women who quit their medical and legal careers to run the Yarn Company on the Upper West Side of Manhattan would be able to promote knitting among urban professionals like themselves. The book they published, The Yarn Girls’ Guide to Simple Knits, would offer thirty patterns for women’s sweaters, tank tops, hats, scarves, and ponchos. The three projects for men—given as an afterthought (“And, we have even included a few sweaters for a man in your life”)—would take up just 12 of the book’s 160 pages.
The Yarn Girls’ Guide doesn’t present knitting as a sacrifice. Each pattern is introduced with an anecdote about how easily one of the regular customers made an amazing shawl or sweater to wear to a party or a wedding reception. The cropped v-neck—“Bare That Belly”—was designed for Lisa, who wanted to show off her bellybutton ring and “washboard abs.” Another customer spent the whole weekend knitting and still went out on a date on Saturday night. These women don’t have to take care of boyfriends, husbands, or children. Making beautiful clothes is something they do for themselves, with other women.
If I’d lived in New York, I might have been part of this knitting revival at its beginning, but in Green Bay, the only yarn store that stocked luxury yarns went out of business the year after I moved there. At the closing-day sale, I watched dozens of women lining up with their bags of yarn and wondered where they’d come from. I had no idea that knitting was so popular, but if the store had stayed open and hosted classes and parties, these women wouldn’t have shown up.
The knitters in Green Bay were wives and mothers from modest families, hard-working Catholic women unaccustomed to spending money on themselves. Many were tallying the prices on their pocket calculators while they stood in line, putting back the items they decided were too expensive, even at half price. The bags of mohair, silk, and lambswool they bought would last years. For everyday knitting—mittens, socks, and baby blankets for their children and grandchildren—they purchased polyester yarn at discount stores in the mall.
Green Bay didn’t have enough Yarn Girls to replace the family knitters. The specialty yarn store was going out of business because it couldn’t compete with the discount chains no matter what it stocked. The store on Milwaukee’s lower east side, where I’d bought my first bag of yarn, closed soon after. By 1990, only those in Whitefish Bay, an affluent suburb of Milwaukee, and Madison, a college town, had survived. Green Bay was not so different from the world I’d left behind, where a woman married early and raised a family. The only way to have a seamless life in Japan or in a small Midwestern town was to be like everyone else—which was the one thing I couldn’t do.
IN MY LITERATURE CLASS, I taught a short story about a woman who loved to surround herself with beauty. The story, “A New England Nun” by Mary Wilkins Freeman, was published in 1891. Its heroine, Louisa, is a woman in her late thirties whose fiancé has finally returned from Australia to their small town to marry her. Louisa has lived happily alone during the fourteen years he was gone. Her mother and brother died and left her with a comfortable house. She can sit at her linen-covered table with her silver pitcher and pink teacup and drink afternoon tea by herself. Louisa takes such pleasure in sewing a straight seam that she sometimes rips out just to sew her stitches again. She shudders to imagine her pretty house filled with “coarse masculine belongings strewn about in endless litter.” When she finds out that her fiancé is actually in love with another woman, Louisa is relieved. She tells him that her feelings have changed and she no longer wants to marry him. After he leaves, she imagines “a long reach of future days strung together like pearls in a rosary, every one like the others, and all smooth and flawless and innocent, and her heart went up in thankfulness.” At the end of the story, we leave her “prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloistered nun.”
Like Louisa, Mary Freeman lost both her parents and all her siblings by the time she was thirty. She moved back from Vermont, where she’d worked as a music teacher, to her hometown of Randolph, Massachusetts, to share a house with her childhood friend Mary Wales. “A New England Nun” was published when she was thirty-nine. Ten years later, in 1901, Freeman married, but her husband became a violent and abusive alcoholic. They were separated in 1922, and at his death a year later, he left her one dollar in his will to spite her. Mary Freeman wrote no more books or essays after 1918—when she was fifty-six—and died in 1930 of a heart attack. While living peacefully with another woman, she had predicted her marriage and given her main character a happier ending than she was to give herself. When my students thought Louisa was pathetic because she chose spinsterhood over marriage, I reminded them of the pretty cream pitcher and the crisp table cloth, the straight seam, the canary singing in the sunny window, the joy our heroine found in solitude. Even a hundred years ago, some women were happier living alone.
WHEN CHUCK AND I WENT house hunting at the end of our second year in Green Bay, we were not thinking of making a beautiful home. We were twenty-nine and thirty-two, too young, we’d assumed, to own property. With our two incomes, however, we needed a mortgage and the tax breaks that came with it.
After spending two hours with a realtor, we made an offer on a two-bedroom Cape Cod built in the 1920s with a large backyard of maple trees. We were tired of driving around, traipsing through other people’s private quarters, and trying to decipher the layout diagrams on brochures. The Cape Cod was the first of five houses the realtor showed us, which we took as a sign that it was “meant to be.” We bid under the asking price and told the realtor and the mortgage broker that we kept our money separate and split all the cost down the middle, that we wanted to make sure either one of us could afford the house alone in case the other died or we got divorced. When the seller refused to budge on the price or have the house professionally inspected, we didn’t press. It seemed pointless to argue over a few thousand dollars when we were signing up for a thirty-year mortgage. As Chuck said, no one, not even the house inspector, could look that far into the future. “We might as well hire a psychic,” he said.
The closing was in May, when my school was out. Chuck’s wasn’t. The following week, I transported everything I owned in the backseat of my Corolla. By Saturday, when I helped Chuck with his boxes, I was finished unpacking my own. The house had a basement office, which I set up as a writing room. Chuck could now put his desk in the spare bedroom instead of the living room. We flipped a coin for closet space and he won the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, leaving me with the smaller one in the spare room.
After our third move, Chuck and I still had not consolidated our books, music, closet space, or bank accounts. We claimed we were sparing each other—we were both notoriously unorganized—but actually, we couldn’t stand anyone going through our closet, library, or checkbook. In spite of what we’d said to shock the realtor and the mortgage broker, we thought we were lucky to be with each other. No other partner would be so willing to leave us alone and let us do whatever we wanted with our time and money.
Like my seventh-grade home-ec. team, Chuck and I were united by our rebellion. While other couples negotiated over spending money, we could tell each other, “Go ahead. Live a little,” every time he got another vintage guitar he didn’t need or I bought state-of-the-art running shoes I would wear out in six months. When a storm hit a backyard maple, we didn’t get bids from several tree trimmers like Chuck’s parents advised us to do. We chose the guy with
a funny ad in the Yellow Pages: “We go out on a limb for you.” The guy’s wife answered the phone and said her husband was “in a tree somewhere,” so we hired him. “What more do we need to know?” Chuck said. “He was in a tree when we called.” We didn’t care how much he charged. Each of us was only paying half, and nothing in Green Bay was that expensive. We could act bold and reckless because, in reality, we were totally safe.
AFTER WORKING AS A SUBSTITUTE teacher for two years, Chuck landed a position at the only alternative grade school in town. Every child studied at his or her own pace in an open classroom, and no letter grades were ever given. His assignment was just what he’d wanted: first and second grades. He loved teaching kids who weren’t yet jaded or scared about school.
Though my college was traditional, I quickly figured out my own alternative program. My motive for becoming a teacher was the opposite of Chuck’s. I didn’t want to change my students’ lives by introducing them to exciting new ideas. I preferred self-motivated advanced-level students who scarcely needed me. Though the classes at our college were scheduled three days a week, I only met mine twice a week. The brochures from the admissions office claimed that our faculty was more committed to teaching than to academic research or artistic pursuits, but I had taken this job for its lighter teaching load. I wasn’t going to give up my free time to sit in my office, serve on committees, or sponsor student organizations. “Just Say No,” one of the artists told me. Eighteen years my senior, he deeply regretted he hadn’t devoted himself to painting when he was my age. “Don’t repeat my mistake. Do your work.” His warning echoed my mother’s: don’t kill yourself trying to please other people, don’t be like me. Of course I took it to heart.
