Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  “My fingers hurt,” he said on Sunday night.

  The next Saturday he was invited to Jeremy’s house for a sleep-over and he wanted to know what he could take his knitting in. Morley was afraid he would get teased, but she packed it up nevertheless, and he headed off with his toothbrush and his sleeping bag and his bag of wool. At nine o’clock Jeremy’s mother phoned and said, “You aren’t going to believe this. You know what they’re doing? They’re downstairs watching Lethal Weapon Three . . . and knitting.”

  Suddenly knitting was the thing to do. Suddenly everyone wanted to knit.

  The next weekend there was a hockey tournament in Whitby. Dave drove Sam, Jeremy and two other boys.

  “They all sat in the back,” he said. “And they were talking about hockey and the game and how they were going to cream the team from Whitby—the kind of stuff you’d expect to hear from a backseat of little boys. And then one of them said, ‘Damn. I dropped a stitch.’

  “They’d talk about hockey some more. Then all you’d hear was the clicking of their needles, and then someone would say something like ‘Look how long Jeff ’s is. Jeff, you’re going so fast. You must have done this before.’

  “It got quite giddy. One of them said they should knit on the bench between shifts. It was rather wonderful.”

  Morley didn’t think it was wonderful at all.

  As far as she could tell, her Christmas project was headed off the rails. She was worried about Sam. She thought he was getting compulsive about the knitting. He would disappear into his room and sit on the edge of his bed and knit for hours. And he kept unravelling everything he did. It was never perfect enough.

  “It’s fun to destroy it,” he said. “I like the feeling of the knots coming undone.”

  It didn’t seem healthy.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  On Saturday afternoon while Dave was in Whitby, Becky Laurence had shown up at the front door.

  “Is Stephanie home?” she asked. She was holding a package wrapped in brown paper.

  “No,” said Morley. “Stephanie is out. Shopping.”

  Becky had turned to go, but then she had stopped and held the parcel up and said, “Tell her the present is ready. Tell her she owes me fifteen bucks.”

  She had shown up twice more that afternoon.

  “Tell her I need the money,” she said.

  Morley was fairly certain that Stephanie had pulled Dave’s name out of the pot on that night in October. And that placed Morley in a terrible position. She wanted to talk to Dave about what was going on. Stephanie had paid her best friend to make a present!—something so completely contrary to the spirit of the family that Morley had no idea what to do about it. But the present was supposed to be for Dave. And Morley didn’t want to hurt him.

  Anyway, as far as Morley could tell, Dave hadn’t begun anything himself.

  There was barely a week to go before Christmas, and her entire project was turning into a fiasco. Her chair was a mess. Stephanie was cheating. And Dave thought Sam’s knitting compulsion was cute.

  “Jacques Plante used to knit,” he said.

  “What?” said Morley.

  “Jacques Plante was a goalie for the Montreal Canadiens,” said Dave.

  “I know who Jacques Plante was,” said Morley.

  “He was the oldest of eleven children,” said Dave. “And they were poor. And his mother needed his help to make clothes for his brothers and sisters. When he was in the NHL he knitted his own underwear.”

  “What’s your point?” said Morley.

  “He said knitting calmed him down.”

  “You think Sam needs to knit?”

  “I have a friend,” said Dave, “who thinks the reason Jacques Plante was such a good goalie was because of all the knitting. He believes the knitting improved his hand-eye coordination.”

  That night, on her way to bed, Morley found Sam under the covers, knitting by flashlight. She went in and sat down.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “My wrists are sore,” he said.

  The next night as she was preparing supper she could hear the knitting needles clicking against something.

  When Sam came down for dinner he was wearing his skate-board wrist guards.

  After dinner Sam called her into his bedroom. He was crying.

  “I’ll never finish the coat,” he said.

  He was pointing at the sum total of his knitting: a rectangle of blue wool about six inches wide and a foot and a half long. One side of the rectangle was completely asymmetrical. He didn’t seem to be able to maintain constant tension as he worked. Each row was coming out a different length.

  “It’s . . . lovely,” said Morley.

  “No. It’s not,” said Sam. “I hate it.”

  He began to unravel it in front of her.

  Morley brought Sam’s chair home on the Monday before Christmas. The next night Dave found her in the basement crying. She had a bolt of beige corduroy at her feet. She was trying to tack a huge piece of foam to one of the arms.

  Dave watched her for a moment without saying anything. Then he reached out and touched the top of the chair. The legs were uneven. It wobbled unsteadily.

  “It’s pathetic,” said Morley, dropping her hammer on the floor.

  “It looks . . . like it was made with a lot of love,” said Dave.

  “It looks like it was made by a two-year-old,” said Morley.

  “Well, it hasn’t been covered yet,” said Dave. “Any chair without upholstery is going to look . . . awkward.”

  “Pathetic,” said Morley. “Not awkward.” She picked up the hammer, swung it around her waist and laced the back of the chair.

  “This is not working,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

  Half an hour later she appeared upstairs, looking angry and defeated.

  Dave looked at her. “I have a suggestion,” he said. “Can I make a suggestion?”

  Morley didn’t say anything. But she didn’t walk away.

  Dave said, “You could spend the next few days down there wrestling with that material and you’ll cover the chair, and we both know you’ll end up with a bad chair.”

  Morley nodded.

  Dave said, “Forget about the foam padding. Forget about the upholstery. Don’t put fabric on it. Put wheels on it. What you have down there isn’t a chair without covering. What you have down there is a go-cart without wheels. Put wheels on that thing and you will have one very happy little boy on Christmas morning.

  And then he said, “I’m going to walk Arthur.”

  The next night after supper Sam called Morley into his room. He was frantic.

  “The needles won’t go through anymore,” he said.

  He waved at a pile of wool lying on his bed—another six-inch square of knitting—each line of the square getting progressively tighter, giving the work the appearance of a triangle resting on its point.

  “You have to relax,” said Morley.

  “I only have two days left,” said Sam.

  “Two days is not a lot of time,” said Morley.

  Sam nodded his head in vigorous agreement.

  “But it should be enough time for a pro like you to knit a scarf,” she said.

  “I’m knitting a coat, not a scarf,” said Sam.

  “Oh,” said Morley, “I thought you were knitting a scarf. Let me start it for you.” Once again she began a row of stitches and once again handed it to her son. Then she stood up. “I have to do the dishes,” she said.

  On Christmas Eve, after Sam and Stephanie were in bed and the last present was wrapped and under the tree, Morley called Dave down to the basement. “Can you help me carry this upstairs?” she said.

  She had taken the wheels off Sam’s old wagon and attached them to the bottom of her chair. Dave climbed into it and smiled. She had left the wagon handle in place. It rested between his legs like a joystick.

  “He’ll love it,” he said.

  And then he scre
amed.

  She was pushing him toward the washing machine.

  First gently. Then faster and faster.

  “Where’s the brake?” is the last thing he howled, before he crashed into a wicker basket full of dirty clothes.

  They could see light spilling out from under Sam’s door when they went upstairs. They could hear the sound of his needles rocking together.

  “He’s still at it,” said Morley. “What should we do?”

  It was almost one.

  “Come to bed,” said Dave. “His door is shut. He wants to do this himself.”

  “He was working on a scarf,” said Morley as she prepared the bed. “But this afternoon it changed into a headband. It wasn’t going to be big enough to be a scarf. When I suggested headband, you know what the little bugger said? ‘But isn’t her head the fat-test part of her?’ It is the most pathetic headband you’ve ever seen. God, I hope she’ll wear it . . . at least around the house.”

  “He’s going to love his go-cart,” said Dave.

  Morley was sitting on the edge of the bed.

  She turned around.

  “Stephanie drew your name,” she said. “There’s something you should know about her present.”

  “No,” said Dave. “Don’t tell me anything. I want to be surprised.”

  Morley stood up and walked toward the bedroom window.

  “Don’t worry,” said Dave. “It will be fine.”

  And so it was.

  Stephanie, it turned out, had not paid Becky Laurence to make her father’s present. She had written to her grandmother in Cape Breton and asked her to ship a photo of Dave and his father to the Laurences’ house C.O.D. It was a photo that had amazed Stephanie the moment she saw it—which had been two summers ago—when she had gone to Big Narrows for a week by herself.

  The picture was taken when Dave was five years old. In it, he is standing on the piano bench in the parlor, which makes him the same height as his father’s bass fiddle, which they are both holding between them. And laughing—both of them—her grandfather’s head moving backward and to the side, her father (a little boy) starting to fold over at the waist, his hand moving toward his mouth. The way her brother’s does in moments of hilarity.

  The photo had haunted her for two years. The first time she saw it she thought the boy was her brother and the man standing beside the fiddle her dad.

  “Where am I?” she had said.

  She didn’t believe her grandmother when she said, “No, no. The boy is your father.”

  When Becky Laurence gave her the picture, Stephanie took it to a photographer and had a copy made. She sent the original back to Cape Breton. She had her copy framed. It was wrapped and hidden in her cupboard two weeks before Christmas. Three times she had opened it so she could look at it. Three times she had to wrap it again.

  But Morley didn’t know any of this as she climbed into bed. As she fell asleep she was still worried about Christmas morning, about Stephanie and about the go-cart. She slept for a restless few hours, and then woke up. When she couldn’t get back to sleep, she decided to make herself a cup of tea. She was almost out of the bedroom before she noticed the ribbon tied around her wrist. Red.

  It ran to the floor, into a red pile, gathered at her feet. She was still dopey with sleep. She started to gather the ribbon up, and it was only as she did that that she realized it didn’t end in the pile at her feet but continued toward the stairs. She followed it: down the stairs and past the tree and into the kitchen. By the time she got to the back door she had gathered an armful of ribbon. And she was smiling.

  Dave and Morley have a pear tree in the corner of their backyard. Morley followed the trail of ribbon out the back door and across the yard to the pear tree. The end of the ribbon, the end not tied to her wrist, led to a switch fastened to the base of the tree. There was a note: Merry Christmas. I chose you. Love, Dave.

  Morley flicked the switch. The most amazing thing happened.

  The pear tree slowly and gracefully came to life.

  Little lights began to snap on in the branches above her head and then, as if the tree had been animated by Walt Disney himself, the lights spread along the branches until the entire tree was glowing a dark red crimson, a crimson like dark wine, a red light that cast a magical glow over the backyard.

  Dave woke at three and sensed he was alone in bed. He reached out his arm for his wife and didn’t find her. He lay still. He tried to will himself awake. He got up and called her name. He walked to the back bedroom and looked out the window. Morley was sitting at the picnic table. She was wearing his work boots, the laces undone, and his winter coat over her nightie. On her head was a toque that belonged to Sam. She was cradling a mug of tea between her hands. From the perspective of the bedroom she looked twelve years old.

  It had started to snow—big fat flakes of snow were dropping lazily out of the sky. Morley was staring at the snow as it floated out of the darkness and into the circle of red light.

  Dave pushed the bedroom window open and said, “Merry Christmas.” Morley bent down and made a snowball, glowing now as she stood in the red light of the tree, her hair wet and sticking to her forehead. She was working not so quickly that Dave didn’t have time to gather a handful of snow off the window ledge himself.

  The two of them threw their snowballs at almost the same moment, and they both laughed in wonder when they collided in mid-air, spraying snow like a shower of icy fireworks through the silence of the night.

  Harrison Ford’s Toes

  If it comes at night, when you are sleeping, the first snowfall of the year can be an astonishing event. If you wake up on a September morning and walk to the window and throw open the blinds and find the world silent and white, you will, if you are lucky, be whisked back into a childhood world of wonder.

  On a Thursday morning in late September, when she woke and saw snow on the ground, Morley stood by her window, taking it in, thinking eventually of her father and the skating rinks he used to make for her in their backyard when she was a girl. As she went downstairs to put on the coffee, she was wishing her father was still alive, wishing he could have met his grandchildren; wondering, as the aroma of the coffee filled the kitchen, if he were there, what she would make her father for breakfast.

  Pancakes, said her father.

  She was looking for the maple syrup when Dave appeared.

  “Do you know where my blue sweater is?” he asked.

  Morley had a dim springtime memory of folding sweaters and sealing them in cardboard boxes—but she had no memory of what she had done with the boxes.

  This was dangerous territory.

  If Morley said anything that implied the sweater might have passed through her hands while April passed to May, she would be opening herself to all sorts of liabilities. If she couldn’t produce the sweater she was liable to be labeled a sweater thrower-outer, a sweater loser.

  If, on the other hand, she was to deny all responsibility, she would be denying her image of herself as a wife and homemaker and mother. In her heart Morley wanted to be able to produce the blue sweater—she expected it of herself. That’s what mothers do, she felt: they pull blue sweaters out of cardboard boxes the way fly fishermen pull trout out of mountain streams.

  When it came to finding lost clothes, Morley was more a trawler than a trouter. She stood in the kitchen over her bowl of pancake batter imagining the impending search. She saw herself moving through the house like one of those draggers that scour the ocean floor looking for scallops—as likely as not leaving as much carnage behind her.

  “Don’t ask me about sweaters at breakfast,” she snapped. “Unless they’re made of maple syrup.”

  It was the only thing she could think of saying.

  That night, after supper, Morley headed into the basement with a cup of coffee and a heavy heart. She chose the basement instead of the attic because it fitted her mood: it was dark, damp and as far from God as she could get without leaving the house. As she open
ed the basement door and stared into the gloom, Morley had a dim notion that this was the right direction—that down was the direction of redemption.

  She put her coffee on the washing machine and stared at the pile of boxes along the basement wall.

  That one, she thought, shrugging. The box was sealed with masking tape. As she pulled the tape loose it caught in her fingers. She rolled it into a ball. The ball stuck to her pants. She shook the ball loose. It stuck to her slipper. She stepped on it with the other foot, and it stuck there.

  “Damn,” she said, trying to kick it free.

  She bent down and opened the carton—baby clothes. How had that box got to the top of the pile? It was not a good sign. It meant the boxes were out of sequence.

  The next one was full of magazines. The one after that was a box of pants she hadn’t worn in years. She was about to close the pant box when something in it caught her eye. There was something pushed down the side of the box—a package, about the size of an apple. She pulled it out. It was wrapped in green and red paper. There was a little card taped on one side. Merry Christmas, Sam. Love, Grandma.

  Morley must have hidden it at Christmas. She had no memory of what it might be.

  She sat down on a pile of boxes and reached for her coffee. She took a sip and opened the present.

  It was a palm-size plastic disc with a video screen—a miniature electronic game. It was the Tamagotchi Dave’s mother, Margaret, had sent from Cape Breton.

  Morley remembered now. Remembered the frustrating hours she had spent on Christmas Day searching for the Tamagotchi when it hadn’t turned up under the tree. She hadn’t wanted to give it to Sam. But she hadn’t deliberately misplaced it either.

  Funny, she thought, what the mind does. And totally in keeping with the way things were going that she would stumble on it now—now that Sam had clearly outgrown his interest. He was moving so fast. Even six months ago the Tamagotchi would have brought a whoop of delight. But her son had been going through a stage of toy divestiture. Across the basement there was a red plastic milk crate that Morley had carried downstairs herself not a month ago—Sam’s collection of plastic dinosaurs. His Hot Wheels—his HOT WHEELS!—were in a similar box outside his bedroom door, waiting for the same sad, one-way trip. Music was his growing passion—the toy cars and the games of make-believe had been replaced by a Walkman—a depressing development that marked, as clearly as a mouthful of missing teeth, another stage of boyhood. It was a lurch toward adolescence that made Morley feel even worse about the Tamagotchi in her hand. Her little boy, her baby boy, was growing up—maybe if he had got the Tam he wouldn’t have been in such a damn hurry.