Yarn

by Kyoko Mori

  To prevent me from ignoring his order and going to their house anyway, Michiko told me that Tadashi’s mother had complained I was no longer the nice girl I used to be. I didn’t yet know what a big liar Michiko was, so I thought I had made some careless remark that offended my mother’s friend. I didn’t find out the truth until Tadashi and I were nearly forty. By then, we had been out of touch for decades, and we lived so far apart. All we could do was exchange occasional holiday cards. After Michiko had lied to me, Tadashi’s mother had continued to invite me to their house, but I thought she was a hypocrite to sound so pleasant on the phone while talking behind my back. I declined the invitations with the lamest excuses till she stopped calling. Michiko was able to keep me from people who loved me, because I assumed the worst about everyone, including myself.

  THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FEMINIST and dress reformer Abba Woolson wanted to abolish lace shawls from women’s wardrobes. She believed they hindered movement, encouraged false modesty (they made women “hide and confuse the contours of this common human form, as if they were a disgrace”), and cut off circulation. She wished every woman would put on a “simple, sleeved garment” and go to work instead of sitting all day with their useless needlework.

  By the time I became a knitter, lace was no longer quaint, fussy, or modest unless it was on a doily. A few years after my falling-out with Catherine, a store called Leather and Lace opened in the downtown mall where we used to have coffee. The mannequins in the window were dressed in lacy camisoles and leather pants, shiny spandex leotards and poofy little-girl skirts with lace trims. Catherine would have loved those clothes. They were perfect for the trashy Lolita look she cultivated. She had been so thrilled and offended when men stared at her. I remembered the quick smile she flashed at them before turning away in scorn. Flirtation was all about keeping men guessing, about hovering between availability and aloofness, and lace was her favorite fabric because her skin peeked tantalizingly through the holes. Catherine had left Tom and was living in San Antonio with a karate instructor. I heard she was studying to be a New Age healer with crystals and herbs. I pictured her practicing yoga in the white lace leggings she used to wear with her weightlifting outfit. I shouldn’t have been surprised when she offered me a life-long friendship and then refused to speak to me. She had always been a mistress of mixed messages.

  My friendship with her was the opposite of my marriage. From the start, Chuck never confused me with grand promises and mixed messages. He didn’t make declarations of forever. Like the boys from my childhood, Chuck was my everyday ally and friend. I hadn’t been attracted to Tadashi and Makoto because I knew them too well. But Chuck had put himself through school by driving a cab, working on the railroad and in factories, and playing bass at weddings; he’d lived in a one-room schoolhouse with a bunch of guys and their dogs, all of them hiking to the bluff over Lake Michigan in the middle of the night to howl at the moon. When we first met and started running together, I was thrilled to hear his stories, but I thought it would be all right if he never asked me out as long as I could always know him in some way—like a brother who lived far away but stayed in touch. I didn’t experience the desperate, all-or-nothing love my mother must have once felt for my father. I thought I was lucky to meet someone I could love and admire in a logical, sensible way.

  My friendship with Catherine was as tempestuous as a love affair gone wrong. We got to know each other quickly and became inseparable; she promised to be with me forever, only to ignore my phone calls. I wouldn’t have been drawn to her if I really believed that love was logical or sensible, but I didn’t know that yet.

  THREE SUMMERS AFTER CHUCK and I bought our house, his grandfather, Charley, died unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm. He was in the hospital for just two nights, never regaining consciousness. Left to live alone for the first time in fifty years, Chuck’s grandmother, Alice, moved to a small apartment where it was easier to manage on her own. Though she was careful not to complain, her pale blue eyes had a fragile, surprised look.

  As Christmas approached, I wanted to knit her a present, but I was stumped about what to make. Alice didn’t wear sweaters. She put on dress pants and blouses for formal occasions and jeans and sweatshirts for the casual. She had no use for hats and mittens since she didn’t go outside much in the winter. After reviewing the numerous knitting books I had collected, I chose the huge, round shawl from Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitter’s Almanac. It was by far the most beautiful garment I could possibly make. There was nothing weak or languishing about this shawl. It had heroic proportions, like a magic cape. It measured seventy inches across, and the yarn-over holes lined up to form a twelve-petaled flower. The light blue yarn, flecked with silver, was the color of Lake Michigan on a winter morning. Alice wore the shawl as she sat in her new living room, and she kept it draped over the back of her chair.

  But she didn’t stay in that apartment very long. By Christmas of the following year, she was diagnosed with cancer. When the chemotherapy didn’t shrink her tumors, she moved first to an assisted-living apartment and then to a nursing home. I visited her every week, while Chuck stayed home. He said it was too depressing to go there, to see her “in that hospital room with a metal cot.”

  Growing up, he had been close to his grandparents. When he was four, his family was living in Milwaukee, where Dick was finishing college, and Chuck already had two younger sisters. Every weekend, he traveled to Green Bay by himself to spend time with Alice and Charley. His mother put him on the train at one end, and Alice picked him up at the other, accompanied by Chuck’s teenage aunts. “My grandparents were more like my parents when I was young,” he’d said, “because Dick and Mary were busy with my sisters.”

  It was hard for Chuck to see Alice in a nursing home, because he had known her as a young woman—a mother of teenagers—while to me she was always old. I should have advised him to visit her anyway. She needed him now, just as he had needed her back then, but I seldom told people what to do unless they were my students. When friends asked for advice, I simply described what I knew they wanted to do, making it sound like I had thought of it. Chuck, who hated giving or accepting advice, didn’t ask me what to do. Nor did he expect me to lie for him, but I exaggerated how busy he was to spare Alice’s feelings. In the summer, he really was out of town often, camping in one wilderness area or another.

  “Don’t you get lonely?” she asked me once.

  “Oh, no,” I laughed. “I love having the house to myself.”

  “I wish I’d been more independent,” she said. “All my adult life, I was a football wife.”

  If she hadn’t gotten sick, I could have said, “But you’re on your own now.” Sitting in the nursing home with the heart and teddy bear decals pasted on the windows, a thin curtain separating Alice’s side from her roommate’s, I couldn’t even think of the right platitude to say. Alice politely changed the subject. Seven years had passed since that first awkward dinner at our apartment. I took her shopping and drove her to doctors’ appointments. Alice and I still turned to small talk, though, when the conversation got too personal. It was the way we’d both been raised.

  Alice’s family had left Sweden before she was old enough to attend school. Her younger brother, Arnold, had been a baby so he remembered nothing, and their parents didn’t talk about the old country once they settled in Nebraska though they spoke Swedish at home. One Christmas, Arnold was in the Nativity pageant at their Lutheran Church. He marched onto the stage with a paper crown on his head and said, “Greetings. We are the three wise guys of the Orient.” Their parents didn’t understand why everyone laughed. “They were typical immigrants,” Alice said, “very anxious to fit in. They wanted to be American, but they didn’t understand English.” Alice wanted to go back to Sweden to see her childhood home and look up her relatives, but she never got a chance. I wondered if I, too, would someday remember the places of my childhood in the same scattered way she did: a stand of trees on a playground, the layout of a parti
cular house, a favorite cousin—if I would cling to the memory no one could share.

  When Alice died, Chuck was camping in Northern Michigan. I couldn’t recall what day he said he was coming back or if he’d told me. His plans depended on the weather and the condition of the campground. He didn’t always come home when he said he would.

  I drove to the local camping equipment store and found the telephone number of the ranger station nearest the campsite, but the ranger wasn’t there. All I could do was leave a message on the answering machine. Chuck came home two days later, just in time for the funeral. He said he had been standing near his campsite in the late afternoon when the ranger walked up to him and asked, “Are you Chuck Brock? You’re wanted at home. Your grandmother passed away.”

  The funeral was at the Congregational church Alice had attended with Charley. The pastor talked about the afternoon, two weeks prior, when he’d visited Alice at the nursing home. Her condition was quickly worsening then, but she could still hear us and respond. “Her two granddaughters were talking to her,” the pastor said. He meant Chuck’s sister Chris and me. I cried as we stood up to sing—“This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears/All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres”—a hymn I had learned in the seventh grade, because it had been the favorite of our school’s founder, the American missionary woman. Alice was leaving us just when I was becoming her family.

  Chuck didn’t cry at the funeral, but he grieved in his hard, solitary way. Nearly three years later, he said, out of the blue as we were driving somewhere, “When I was feeling so bad because my grandmother died. . . .” I don’t remember the rest of that sentence, just that the point he was making had nothing to do with her. He could only mention his grief to me by slipping it into an incidental remark after enough time had passed. I knew I was supposed to look up, nod, and say nothing more.

  Chuck never told me why he’d gone to a wilderness campsite when his grandmother was dying, leaving a few days after she had stopped responding to anyone’s voice (He said, “She could be like this for months.”) or if he regretted making that trip. My grandmother was living alone in Japan, surrounded by the land she and my grandfather had lost. She had stopped writing to me a few years after I moved to Green Bay, because she could no longer see well enough. Long before that, I could tell she was having a hard time holding her pen—her handwriting had gotten fainter with each letter, as if her words were beginning to evaporate. How could I advise Chuck to stay and see his grandmother through her final days when my whole life was like a wilderness camp I’d gone off on to get away from my family?

  I fooled myself into thinking I was respecting his privacy, but the truth was, I didn’t want to hear. My mother had confided the worst of her unhappiness to me, and it had done us no good. I was relieved that Chuck kept quiet until he had gotten accustomed enough to his feelings to mention them in passing. I didn’t believe grief ever went away. It could only be contained.

  After Alice’s death, my father-in-law meant to save the shawl I had made for her, but someone had already taken her clothes to Goodwill. I knitted myself another in purple to remember her by. The yarn, from Shetland, was very thin and tightly twisted. Shetland is a group of about 100 islands, fewer than 20 of them inhabited. Even the inhabited islands are more isolated than the wilderness campsite where Chuck had gone to hide from his grandmother’s death. As long as he stayed away, he must have been thinking, nothing would happen to her.

  130 ocean miles separate Shetland from the northern coast of Scotland. In the late nineteenth century, lace shawls knitted in Shetland were sold all over Europe. The infants’ christening shawls, made by the best knitters, could slide through a wedding ring. My shawl started at the center with nine stitches and became larger and larger as it went around the circle, increasing the number of stitches at regular intervals until there were five hundred and seventy-six stitches squeezed around the needle. I was knitting in circles, my path expanding from the center out.

  Traditional lace was made in Italy in the fifteenth century by cutting tiny holes in linen and pulling out the thread. In knitting, the holes are constructed with yarn-over stitches. You add a hole instead of tearing it out. It would be years before I understood what the difference meant. You can build what is usually taken away. Loss can expand as well as constrict us: an absence is also an opening.

  — THREE —

  Fair Isle

  IN THE FIRST HALF of the nineteenth century before lace-knitting became a popular cottage industry, the farm women of Shetland made mittens, socks, and caps to sell to the sailors on their merchant ships. Their favorite patterns were yellow, white, green, or blue zigzags, checkers, x’s and o’s, and diamonds on a variegated background of black, red, and brown. The knitters worked with two or more skeins of yarn, holding the accent colors in one hand and the background color in the other. The colors not being worked were carried in the back and loosely twisted with the one being knitted. This interlacing method is still called “Fair Isle knitting” after one of the islands. When the novelist Sir Walter Scott visited the Fair Isle in 1814 with a party of Commissioners for the Northern Light-House Services, he bought mittens and caps to send home. He warned his wife in a letter that they should be “well scoured, for of all the dirt I ever saw, that of the Fair Isle is transcendent.”

  The women of the Fair Isle must have been too busy knitting, cooking, growing vegetables, herding sheep, and taking care of their families, to keep their houses tidy. They were the opposite of my stepmother, who did nothing but clean. Michiko didn’t bake, sew, knit, embroider, garden, entertain her neighbors, or read. She threw out the tapestries Takako had made, saying they were cluttering the house.

  My mother hadn’t had time to sweep and vacuum every day. Between when I was six and ten, when our family lived in a large apartment complex near the sea, I often came home from school to find a dozen women from our building seated around our dining table with their embroidery. Getting together with the neighbors was one of the few things a married woman could to do for entertainment. Everyone was talking and laughing. Some came just to drink tea, eat the cookies my mother had baked, and admire the flowers in the garden—the zinnias and the snapdragons Takako would cut for them, the pink “Queen Elizabeth” roses she sketched and photographed, the peonies and the hydrangeas she’d transplanted from her parents’ house. My mother might have been the only one who really loved embroidery. “Your mother made such beautiful things,” her friends said at her funeral. “But it was her company we came for.”

  Twenty years later, I found the folk-art borders Takako used to stitch on her tapestries—stars, flowers, birds, and dancers holding hands—in my books about Latvian and Hungarian knitting. As Fair Isle knitting spread from Shetland to Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, women copied their embroidery and cross-stitch patterns on to their mittens and sweaters. The stars, flowers, birds, and dancers traveled from country to country, now in cross-stitch, now in knitting. The wedding mittens of Latvia were made in the Fair Isle method, using some of the same geometrical motifs. Knitters in Norway became famous for their luskofte, or lice-patterned sweaters, made in dark wool with a sequence of patterned bands. They only used white in places, like the hem, where it never showed. Between the bands of roses, stars, or stags, the Norwegian knitters put in tiny dots called “lice stitches” (after the insect) to decorate every inch of the garment. None of these women saw embellishment as clutter. Even lice could inspire a lively pattern.

  TAKAKO HAD BEEN HAPPY at the apartment surrounded by her friends, but after we moved to a single house up on a hill, she was alone every afternoon. The women in our new neighborhood had retired husbands who were home all day expecting to be waited on. Takako’s old friends couldn’t easily travel the few miles that separated them. None of them could drive; besides, married women didn’t leave their neighborhood except to go groceryshopping or to visit their children’s schools.

  By my fifth year in Green Bay, I,
too, was stuck in the house with no one to talk to. I dreaded going outside except to run. Strangers in grocery stores and shopping malls continued to ask me about Japan, and our neighbors stared as I worked in the garden. I had stopped socializing with the new couples at my college because their bitterness depressed me. Chuck was the only person I felt comfortable with, but we had less and less to talk about.

  The two of us had a good time when we visited Dean and Katie in New Mexico or went sightseeing in the cities where I attended academic conferences or gave readings. If I found another job in a real city, he said, he would quit his and come along. But looking through the national job list every October left me too exhausted to apply to any. Since my big move from Kobe to the U.S., I’d only migrated two hundred miles north—from Rockford to Milwaukee to Green Bay. Chuck had traveled the same distance and ended up where he’d started. Now, the two of us could hardly manage an evening out.

  Whenever he told me he was willing to move, Chuck said in the same breath, “But it’s okay if we stay here, too.” He complained that Green Bay was a horrible place, only to add that most cities in the U. S. were worse. He mentioned wanting to move to Canada or Mexico or even Europe, then suggested finding a bigger house in our neighborhood or building a summer cottage in a nearby town. He must have been as confused as I was. If we could have talked about how terrified we both were to stay or to leave, we could have helped each other move on or accept the home we’d made. But discussing the future felt as overwhelming as planning an expedition to the Arctic. Every time I geared up for a talk, Chuck acted tired and put out, so I told myself that we were comfortable enough where we were.