Yarn

by Kyoko Mori

  Jim thought women should be ordained, the church should support reproductive rights, gay rights, and divorce, and people should be less concerned about the rules and more about true charity. He bought old religious books at rummage sales and library closing sales and wrapped them in silk or crinkled the pages one by one till the whole volume opened up like a big flower. He found antique chalice boxes lined with velvet and placed newspaper articles about human rights violations inside. He was planning a series of embroidered collages about domestic violence. No matter how disturbing the message, his art work was always beautiful to look at. His room at the abbey was covered with the silk kimonos and obi sashes—woven with gold thread—from the antique stores in Chicago. Jim had signed up for a weaving class at his art school but was defeated, he said, by “the mathematics of weaving.” He was still interested in needlework. It was as though, in the years we hadn’t seen each other, we had discovered the same interests.

  Jim and I started having monthly vegetarian dinners in the abbey’s guest kitchen with Beth, the new geographer at our college who had dyed her hair carrot red. A single mother and no spinster, Beth dated men she met through the personal ads placed in the Milwaukee Sentinel. She’d grown up in a small town on the Minnesota border, spent her twenties in South America doing volunteer work and geographical research, and come back to her home state so her teen-age daughter could finish high school. Beth knew the hidden word on the puzzling sign I saw out in the country, illustrated with a big cartoon rabbit holding red balloons: “Rabbits Live or (a blank space covered with paper to indicate temporary unavailability).” “Not,” “Skinned,” “Frozen,” “Ready to Eat,” were the guesses I’d fielded so far, but none of them sounded quite right. “Dressed,” Beth said. “My neighbors used to raise rabbits.” She hadn’t eaten rabbits since she left her home at eighteen. To our monthly potluck, which we called “the Black Sheep parties,” she brought lentils and brown rice.

  The fourth Black Sheep was Don, a Lutheran minister who taught theology at our college. I knew we were going to be friends when he knocked on my office door one afternoon and gave me a sock doll he’d made with the names of the two faculty members I really hated written in red; dangling from the doll’s neck were a dozen pretty cocktail toothpicks to stick into it. “How did you know I hated these people?” I asked. “I’ve been watching and listening,” he said. Like Beth and me, Don had gone to a foreign country to get away from his family. He’d grown up in Pennsylvania but attended college in Germany. His earliest memories included his father walking into their living room in a drunken rage and setting the Christmas tree on fire. “I only remember it like a silent movie,” he told us, “even though there must have been a lot of noise when it happened.” One of his life’s goals was to be a better father to his three young children and a reliable husband to his wife—an energetic, motherly woman who had “minister’s wife” written all over her—but he came alone to the Black Sheep party.

  What the four of us had in common was an early history of not belonging to anyone or anything. By the time we met, each of us had made a commitment other people could understand: the priesthood for Jim, the family and the Lutheran church for Don, motherhood for Beth, marriage for me. But we all felt like under-cover agents in the roles we’d chosen. With one another, we didn’t have to pretend or explain. We didn’t try to outdo each other with the horror stories of our past. We might even talk about something frivolous, like an obsession with David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” series. Don looked like Kyle McLaughlin, the actor who played Agent Cooper, the show’s main character. He was devastated when Agent Cooper became Bob, the evil spirit, in the show’s final episode.

  “What does that mean about me?” Don said half-jokingly. “I really identified with him.”

  “Oh, you’re not going to turn into Bob,” Beth said, patting his arm.

  “Not a chance,” Jim agreed.

  “Agent Cooper was never a devoted Dad,” I assured him.

  Don shrugged and smiled. Of course he was afraid of turning into his father—for all four of us, the evil spirit was our father, one way or another. We scarcely had to say it. Jim, Beth, and Don were the only people with whom I could be reticent because they already knew—not because they would never understand. Sitting on the roof of the abbey with them and watching the summer dusk fall around us, I thought I had finally found a group of people I wanted to know for the rest of my life.

  But Beth and Don had temporary jobs at the college, and when the positions opened up for tenure-track appointments, they weren’t even interviewed. After they moved away, Jim and I had dinners out, took day trips to Milwaukee to see art exhibits, or met on Saturday mornings in the fields and meadows outside town to cut the wild flowers he arranged for the sanctuary. Like my childhood friends—though for an entirely different reason—he had studied Japanese flower arrangement at college. He took the Queen Anne’s lace we gathered and mixed it with the peacock feathers a parishioner had given him. The white globes of the Queen Anne’s lace and the golden circles of the feathers floated over the altar, like a mysterious model of the universe that was infinite and expanding.

  Jim’s mother had died of cancer when he was twenty. His father had left the family when Jim was in high school, and later, belittled Jim’s decision to join the priesthood. Jim no longer spoke to his father, who was still, like mine, alive. Long before he became a priest, he knew he would never marry or have children. When we were walking around the fields—trespassing again—I could almost believe that the love of beauty we shared was a kind of faith. He was the person I was closest to even among the Black Sheep; still, I missed having a group around us, a fellowship of permanent outsiders.

  THOUGH I KEPT GOING to the spinners’ and weavers’ meetings, I was doubly a stranger to these woman by being Japanese and childless. As long as I lived in Green Bay, I thought, this was the best I could do: I felt more at ease surrounded by animals than by humans. I wished Chuck and I lived in a larger house so I could get a dozen angora rabbits to keep myself busy. Rossetti and Frida needed a haircut every eight weeks for their health as well as for my spinning. Unlike a cat’s, rabbits’ digestive systems are only equipped to handle vegetables, fruits, hay, and alfalfa pellets; ingesting their own long hair could block their intestines and even kill them. There are no long-haired rabbits in the wild. Rossetti and Frida were hybrids dependent on me for their survival. Like all domestic rabbits, they were also prone to respiratory problems. Chuck considered them pathetically high-maintenance, but I loved brushing and cutting their hair, coaxing open Rossetti’s mouth to give her medicine when she had a cold, or clipping Frida’s ingrown nails. Though they were docile, they didn’t crave my attention like Dorian, who slept with his head on my pillow and drank from my bedside glass instead of from his designated bowl on the floor. Chuck and I usually forgot that Dorian was not fully human. Caring for Frida and Rossetti actually made me realize how much I enjoyed working with animals. Since I didn’t have space for more rabbits, I went to volunteer at the wildlife sanctuary in our city’s parks system.

  Handling wild mammals like raccoons and squirrels required rabies immunization—a month-long course of injections with a blood test at the end to see if they even “took,” starting over if they didn’t. So, I signed up to work with birds and became one of the dozen rehabilitators on call in the summers when concerned citizens brought shoe boxes of baby birds fallen from their nests. In the winter, I helped care for the raptors who lived in the sanctuary’s aviaries, because their injuries had rendered them unfit to be released back into the wild. My favorite job was to hold the owls while another volunteer filed down their beaks and trimmed their talons. Most sanctuary volunteers were my age, childless, and vegetarian, and they belonged to other nonprofit organizations in town. Just when I was ready to give up, I had finally fallen in with a group of people who were more like me than not.

  As it turned out, in Green Bay, if you were interested in environmental protection,
animal welfare, homeless advocacy, women’s rights, gay rights, the Quakers, the Unitarians, the psychic church, or the health food movement, you eventually met all the twenty or thirty people who shared your interest. Within a year of attending my first training session at the sanctuary, I had enough friends from these groups to start a weekly movie-watching group. The core consisted of divorced women and gay couples in their thirties. Most had grown up in Green Bay or in the surrounding towns. A dozen of us showed up each week, and no one cared what we saw. Like my mother’s needlework group, it was the company we sought.

  In the theater, we took up a whole row of seats and were often the only ones there. Pete, my librarian friend, fell asleep and snored every week. After we saw “Fargo,” everyone except me claimed that their parents, brothers, or sisters (but never themselves) talked like the characters. The bird watchers among us tried to identify every stray bird that flew across the screen, which drove the others crazy. “Too many tea cups,” Tim, an out-of-work mathematician, said about a movie based on a Jane Austen novel. “What a dog,” Lori, a pet-store clerk and former English major, muttered after a movie about T. S. Elliot. I thought she was criticizing the movie, but she meant the poet. Afterward, we went to the only pizza parlor still open at nine. The Black Sheep had been the siblings I should have had all along: Jim, Beth, Don, and I might as well have grown up in the same family in four different cities. The movie group was more like a gathering of cousins or neighbors, which some of them, in fact, were to one another; they were an extended family I had married into.

  Most in the group knew Chuck, because they had gone to his high school, their children attended the alternative school where he taught, or their friends, siblings, or cousins had dated, worked with, lived next door to, or bought a house or a used car from Chuck’s friends, siblings, or cousins. Chuck believed in the same causes that had brought us together. Still, he didn’t go to the Audubon Society meetings or the AIDS walks with us, and he came to the movie night only if he was interested in a particular show. While the rest of us drove to the pizza place, he went home alone.

  Chuck didn’t socialize with anyone he worked with at the alternative school. The only new friends he’d made since high school were his Milwaukee roommate George, with whom he went on an annual camping trip, and me. The group who watched football and played cards with him got smaller every year. “We were never that close growing up anyway,” Chuck would mutter about someone he’d stopped seeing, as though it had taken a quarter of a century to figure out who was and wasn’t a true friend from middle school. While I’d been working to expand my social circle, he had been trying to make his smaller. If my ideal life was a big Fair Isle sweater, his was a white linen handkerchief.

  One of his former roommates had a younger brother enrolled in the creative writing program I had finished. Chuck had known both brothers and their entire family since the seventh grade, but one evening when they called to get together, he handed the phone to me. “Why don’t you go by yourself?” he said after the younger brother, Pat, and I made the plans and hung up. “You and Pat probably have a lot to talk about. I’d rather stay home and read.”

  At the movie group’s pizza place, which was their old hangout as well, I told the Moran brothers that Chuck had a cold. I couldn’t believe I was making excuses for him to the people he’d known for more than half his life. Once we got talking, though, I was glad I’d gone alone. Pat and I compared our favorite teachers, classes, and books. His brother had been studying fiction writing at the adult outreach center. If Chuck had been there, the three of us wouldn’t have felt so free to carry on about the best and the worst writing exercises we’d ever been assigned or the craziest, least helpful suggestion someone made to us in a workshop. We wouldn’t have felt the same camaraderie. I didn’t care if the strangers at the next table stared at me. I was with friends who understood me. I didn’t have to worry about whether Chuck was having a good time, if he was offended by anything we said, or what he thought of the person I was without him.

  IN THE FALL OF 1992, the stories I had been writing and revising for years finally got published as my first novel. I gave readings at schools, libraries, and bookstores, and the local newspaper ran articles about me. “I saw your picture in the paper,” strangers in grocery stores and shopping malls said to me instead of, “Are you Chinese or Japanese?” Although none of them had actually read the book, I was pleased to be recognized as an author instead of a foreigner.

  “I can’t believe you were working on this all along,” my friends from the movie group said. “You were probably thinking some of these amazing thoughts even while we were watching movies together.” They shook their heads and smiled; they were so proud of me. “Really, I would never have guessed,” they said.

  I had only talked about the novel with Jim as we walked around the fields cutting flowers or drove back from an art exhibit in Milwaukee. I had revealed no more to Chuck than to the friends I saw once a week at the movie theater. I gave him one of the advance copies the publisher sent me, but it sat unread for months on his night stand.

  “I’m going to start soon,” he kept saying. “I just don’t have the time right now.”

  “You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.”

  “But I want to.”

  “You live with me. You already know me. You don’t have to rush to read my book.”

  I couldn’t believe what an insincere remark I was making. The truth was the opposite. Chuck felt betrayed by perfect strangers reading the words I had written and he hadn’t read. He didn’t know any more about me than they did. But now that I was working on the next project, I had even less desire to talk about my writing than before. Every afternoon, as soon as I finished writing for the day, I wanted to pretend—even to myself—that I was just a school teacher’s wife and a small-town college professor instead of a person who’d written an autobiographical novel about grief.

  After Chuck read the book, he didn’t ask me which things I had made up and which I had actually experienced. He must have hated having to wonder about it, but he allowed me to act as though my writing was “no big deal, it was just a story.” It wouldn’t have made any difference if he had been angry or brave enough to confront me. I would have gone on telling him nothing, saving up all my true feelings and thoughts for my writing. I didn’t know how else to be a writer.

  WHILE I WAS LEARNING TO SPIN, Sharyl had given me a drop spindle to practice handling the fleece: drawing out the fiber, letting it stretch, allowing it to twist and turn into yarn. The drop spindle has a metal shaft and a wooden knob. You hold it level with your shoulder, tie a short piece of already-made yarn around the shaft, attach one end of the prepared fleece onto this lead yarn by twisting them together with your fingers, give the knob a good twirl, and let go. If you put just the right amount of spin, the fleece will turn into yarn and the spindle will hang in the air a few inches above the floor, swinging gently. You pull up the spindle by the yarn you just made, wind the yarn onto the shaft, give the knob another spin, and let go again. As you add more yarn, the spindle becomes heavier and drops faster so you have to spin it harder to keep the yarn from breaking. When the spindle is too heavy, you can unwind the yarn into a ball, leaving enough for the lead yarn, and start over. Once you learn the right timing—holding on, letting go—you can walk around your house while twirling and dropping the spindle, or herd your sheep to the grazing ground and back as women in South America and the Middle East still do. I loved watching the yarn spin out like a life line as the spindle glided down.

  While I was trying to finish the novel, I had gone back to Japan for the first time to see my grandmother, aunts, and uncles. I’d spent the summer of 1991 traveling around the country and staying with some American friends in Kobe. At last, I was able to talk to my relatives as an adult and hear the stories I’d been too young to know, but as soon as I returned to Green Bay, my trip felt as distant as my childhood—something to write about from the safety o
f my studio. That winter, as I was driving back in the snow from the spinners’ or the weavers’ meeting or sitting in the dark with friends whispering and passing popcorn down the row of theater seats, I finally felt at home where I was. After the book was out, I traveled across the state and even the country to give readings and to speak on panels with other writers, but what I liked the most was coming back. My car was a spindle clattering down the highway; the maps in airports reminded me of the wheel, with long threads spinning out of a few hubs and stretching across the continent. Over and over, I was drawing away and pulling back before the yarn broke.

  Spending a few days in New York or San Francisco didn’t make me wish I could move there. Plenty of other people like me—exiles from other countries—lived in those cities. Being in a small town in Wisconsin was my unique destiny. At last I felt married to Green Bay for better or worse, and my marriage to Chuck was the foundation of my ties to the community. As a single woman from Japan, I would have been an outsider even among the divorced women and the gay couples I met. As Chuck’s wife, I was almost a local, a member of the famous football family known to everyone. Although he seldom went anywhere with me, Chuck anchored me to the home I’d chosen.

  I should have given him the same chance. Visiting the Zen temples in Kyoto had been Chuck’s lifelong dream. When I decided to go to Japan, though, I’d said, “I need to do this on my own. I have a lot of people to see and talk to.”

  “Well, maybe next time,” he’d replied, “if you take another trip there.”

  My grandmother had never spoken to anyone from another country. She was past ninety: of course I wanted to be alone with her. Still, I could have arranged for Chuck to visit Kyoto while I was at her house. I might have introduced him to an American friend who could show him around or signed him up for a meditation class at a Zen temple. But in Japan, even to go somewhere without me, Chuck needed my help. The thought of having to plan his trip as well as mine overwhelmed me. So I left him behind, better to take care of myself. After making him move back to his hometown for my job, I refused to give him even a few weeks in mine. I didn’t notice how selfish I was being because leaving people behind was all I had ever done.