But I consider those lines. And now I see them in other places too. In the carefully placed blueberries on top of my locally made muffin: What was the baker thinking about when she made it? Will I taste a difference if she was worried about her ailing grandmother or dreaming about her boyfriend? Or what about the way my mailman delivers mail on my street? I’ll never be able to tell what emotions he carried as he dropped the circulars into my box, but I can guarantee this: He had emotion then, about something, and if he was worried about the argument he’d had that morning with his wife, I hope that the act of clicking my mailbox shut and latching my gate acts for him as a kind of mechanical prayer. From the way I’ve felt yarn slipping through my fingers, I’ve learned that rote work, like dropping mail into boxes or placing blueberries onto muffins or knitting garter stitch with bamboo needles, can be more than just an act. It can be a wish, a dream, a desire, all of these tangled together in what usually comes down to a distillation of one thing: hope.
KNIT TWO TOGETHER
When I got engaged, I developed the romantic notion that I’d knit my own wedding dress. I envisioned myself in a simple knitted bodice with lace inserts, attached to a lace-edged skirt. Wedding guests would be gobsmacked by the dress’s beauty and elegance. I had it all planned out, which was surprising, coming from me.
I was never a girl who dreamed about her ideal wedding. I didn’t have a hope chest, and I didn’t practice that step-together-step walk that other girls did when playing with their mothers’ veils. When I was six or seven, I very clearly remember making a decision: When I was really old (twenty or so), I would have lots of boyfriends but I’d live with my favorite girl. Whether that was prophetic or coincidental, it didn’t change the fact that I’d never imagined a white wedding for myself.
But now that I was engaged, I wanted to make something gorgeous, something that I loved, something that would look great on me, with my own two hands. My engagement sweater was nice, with its knitted hearts circling the left wrist, but it wasn’t even close to being a showstopper. A knitted wedding gown—yeah, that would be something.
Friends thought I was crazy. “Why would you work so hard for something you’ll only ever wear once?”
Eh. What did they know? They aren’t knitters. Okay, some of them are, but I discounted their opinions just as readily. They weren’t thinking about it the right way—they weren’t imagining the joy of creating something gorgeous that would probably end up being a family heirloom, passed down through generations. I imagined carefully boxing the dress away after the wedding, wrapping it in acid-free tissue paper, storing it in the cedar chest to keep it safe and moth-free. Years hence, maybe I’d bring it out for a cherished great-niece who would be so overwhelmed by the heritage of the stitches that she’d knit her own matching shawl to go with it.
Big dreams.
They lasted until I started trying to find a pattern. I did online searches, and I was surprised to find that many people had already held knitted weddings. What? I wasn’t the first knitting-mad person to fall in love? I suppose I could have predicted that result, given the popularity of knitting, but I was surprised at how many there were, the vast majority of them absolutely awful. I found online photos of women wearing gowns that made them look like frosted doilies, grooms standing at attention with crocheted bow ties and cummerbunds made of yarn. The attendants held pom-pom flowers. Frankly, online galleries didn’t do much to recommend the idea.
I was starting to freak out. Every single pattern I found was nothing short of hideous. I didn’t want my dress to look like a Halloween costume— I didn’t want anyone laughing at me if they found me on the Internet.
My fiancé, Lala, asked me, “What are you trying to prove?” She wasn’t against the idea—far from it—but she was honestly curious.
“Nothing. I don’t need to prove anything. I just want a beautiful dress for our day, and the most beautiful thing to me is knitting.”
“Well,” she said in her reassuring Lala way, “you’ll be the most beautiful thing there. I don’t care if you show up wearing sweatpants.”
But the more I thought about it, I realized I was trying to prove a point— I wanted to be the girl who knitted her own dress and got away with it beautifully. My hubris chastened me when I recognized it, and I finally scaled down my idea.
I found an Edwardian-looking bodice in a knitting magazine. I could wear it again, I thought, on a gorgeous spring morning somewhere, remembering my wedding day. And I found the skirt of my dreams in another magazine, lace edged and delicate. I’d line it and wear that again, too, with tank tops and cute shoes. That wouldn’t be too show-offy, would it?
Together, the pieces, knitted in the softest pale yellow, would make me look like a 1920s bride. I would find a charming hat to perch askew on the curls that would be created for the day.
I could see it all. It was going to be perfect.
I had four months before the big day. Plenty of time. I’d make the skirt first, I thought. Lovely miles of stockinette intersected by trails of lace working downward. I cast on in excitement…which wore off by round twelve. Holy hell, there were a lot of stitches. And such a fine gauge! I never knitted to this kind of gauge, and my shoulders and neck started to hurt from looking down all the time, poring over the small stitches. The pain was new and unwelcome.
The more that people expressed surprise (and often dismay) that I was knitting my own wedding clothes, the more stubborn I became. I knitted faster. I brought the skirt with me to work and I knitted when it was quiet. I knitted all the time.
Finally, it was done. Holding it up, I knew it was perfect. Lovely, light, it would cling to my hips and hang just past my knees, curving exactly the way I’d wanted.
Then I tried it on and looked at myself in the mirror. It looked cute on me. I looked pretty.
I burst into tears.
I didn’t want cute or pretty. I wanted to feel beautiful and elegant, but this skirt looked home-damn-made. Instead of draping seductively from my curves, it clung to my belly, showcasing it, and then hung loosely to my knees. And I hadn’t even started working on the bodice yet. I despaired.
I didn’t show Lala the skirt, but I told her about it.
“Then get something else,” she said.
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not? What does it matter what you wear?”
It was easy for her to say; we’d found an incredible ivory suit for her, along with a black shirt with sequins on the collar. She was going to look like a million bucks. I was going to look like forty-two cents.
“What about a whatchamacallit?” I asked. “A girdle? Maybe I can go to Macy’s and get some Spanx. Isn’t everyone supposed to have one of those? Will it disguise my belly?”
Lala shot me a look over her coffee cup, the one with the heat-sensitive cow that disappears when filled with hot liquid. “I don’t care. It’s not about the clothes.” Her tone was firm. She meant it. Something about the way she said it finally shook me out of my bridal daze, and I heard what she didn’t say out loud: She’d been married before. She’d already walked down one aisle toward Aura, the love of her life—she’d already done all the cake tasting and invitation picking. What she cared about, now, was me, the second love of her life, something she’d never thought she’d find.
I glanced in the full-length mirror I’d propped in the dining room in order to look at the skirt: I was wearing sweats and an old beat-up T-shirt. My hair stuck up in places and lay flat in others. Not a stitch of makeup, not even lipstick, which I never left the house without.
She loved me like this. I was being a drama queen, and she still loved me.
I got it. It didn’t matter what I wore. What mattered was who I was walking toward, not what I was wearing when I walked. It wasn’t about me, it was about us.
I ended up going to Macy’s, and I found a dress on the sale rack. A cream sheath with beads and sequins, it had spaghetti straps, a low bodice, and hugged perfectly every curve
while disguising the ones I wanted hidden. At the knee, it flared out into a flurry of silk and net. It was cheap as hell for a dress its style, probably designed for a society woman to wear to a fancy dinner.
But on me, it was my wedding dress, because in it, I was going to marry Lala.
I still wanted to knit something, of course, because I don’t give up that easily. I only had a month left. I cast on for a shawl in cream Cascade Indulgence, something I’d had in my yarn stash for years. I designed a lace pattern with the help of Barbara Walker’s books, and I knitted lace faster than I ever have before or since. It felt like riding the knitting rapids. I knew I would get it done in time, though it would be close. But I knitted with a different intention: I was making the shawl to honor our day, in order to make a keepsake that would hold sentiment and memory. I wasn’t just knitting it for me.
I finished the shawl. And as I walked down the aisle (bare armed, because after all that, I forgot to put the shawl on until the very end of the reception), I felt like the most beautiful woman in the world, the way every woman should feel on her wedding day.
Even though neither of us are Jewish, the shawl felt like a kind of chuppah, a wedding canopy. A cloth held over the heads of two people getting married, sometimes it’s fancy, stretched over four poles, and sometimes it’s a simple tallis, a prayer shawl usually made of wool and held up by friends’ hands. Using a chuppah in the ceremony symbolizes “home,” and spiritually it means that God blesses the covenant of marriage. Mine was made of wool, as was traditional. It represented our creating a home together, a family newly composed of the two of us. Every step I’d been taking with Lala had brought us to this place. I was leaving my single life and entering a shared one.
I’ve only worn the shawl once since then, to a lovely wedding where it shed white alpaca fiber onto the dark suits of every man I hugged. It’s usually folded on one of my sweater shelves. But I run my fingers over it from time to time, and I remember the promises we made and think about the home we’ve built.
Together.
BASKET WEAVE STITCH
For many years, my cat, Digit, and my knitting were the only two constants in my life. I moved all over Oakland, and in every new place, he’d go outside, kick ass and take names, and come home at night to recover, sitting next to me as I knitted. I developed a special whistle that would bring him running to me from half a block away. I changed jobs, but he stuck around. I dated, and he gave only a select few a second glance—those were the ones I gave a third glance.
Before Digit came into my life I hadn’t planned on being a cat lady. You know the stereotype: the woman who knits and lies in bed eating bonbons and reading romance novels. I already had the knitting and the fondness for romance novels—I didn’t need another strike.
Nevertheless, I did want a cat. My boyfriend at the time was completely against it. He was allergic, and if we were going to end up living together, he said a cat was out of the question. Naturally, that just made me want one more. He got me a Tamagotchi, a little electronic pet that was popular in 1997, for Christmas instead. It required constant care, and I’d killed it by New Year’s Eve. He was pleased and thought it should prove something to me. What it proved was that a plastic keychain toy was totally inadequate when it came to cuddling, and so I was completely ready, when my upstairs neighbors came down to my apartment with two tiny kittens, to take the plunge. Not yet weaned, perhaps only four or five weeks old, the kittens had to be fed by dipping pieces of cloth into formula for them to suck, and they wobbled when they tried to walk, their legs giving out unexpectedly from beneath them.
It was love at first bite. The instant he sank his tiny little milk teeth into my hand, the moment he chewed on a ball of my yarn for the first time, the second I laid eyes on the extra toes that made up those huge feet of his, I was hooked. The woman who’d brought the kittens down to show me also wanted one, and I felt a fierce urge to scoop “my” kitten up and run. The other cat looked almost exactly like Digit, except he wasn’t a polydactyl, and instead of wanting to box and nip, he wanted to curl and cuddle. My neighbor pointed at him yawning in her lap seductively. “I like this quiet one,” she said. The relief was overwhelming, and I didn’t know how to say thank you. I wasn’t good at asking for things, and I was worse at receiving them. I didn’t know how to say that I wanted, needed this cat.
We belonged to each other instantly. I know. I can see your eye roll from here and I don’t blame you. But it’s the simple truth: I was now a cat lady.
As Digit grew, his natural tendency toward violent exuberance didn’t abate. His favorite game was to shred whatever I was knitting, but he only attacked if it was moving in my hands. He loved to get under the sheets when I made the bed and then growl and claw me through the fabric as I patted his rear end. Or he’d jump into an empty laundry basket so I could swing it around and around, the force of gravity keeping him in it as he purred like a freight train, refusing to get out when I wanted to use the basket for more prosaic things, like laundry. He howled without ceasing if I didn’t let him outside at exactly the moment he wanted to go, and followed up the howling by peeing in inappropriate places in retaliation for my slowness. I got good at running to do his bidding. Finally I built a two-by-four ramp up to my window so he could come in and out at will, and he did, bringing various half-dead birds and snakes in with him, usually when I was sleeping (there’s nothing like a bloody bird flapping itself against the kitchen windows to wake a person up).
When Digit did manage to sleep with me, he curled at my head, next to my pillow. What he most wanted to do was to suck on the neck of my shirt, but I broke him of the habit by holding his paw, letting him nuzzle my hand. When I rolled over, he’d get up with a sigh and thump over me with his huge feet so he could settle next to my head again, and put his paw in my hand.
It’s said that the Internet is made up of three categories: knitting, porn, and pictures of cute animals. I can vouch for two of the three. The knitters who visited my blog loved Digit. Sometimes I got more comments on pictures of him than I did when I finished new sweaters, and if too much time passed without a photo of him, he got e-mail from fans, wondering how he was doing.
Eventually, I got another cat, Adah, to keep him company when I was out of the house. He never warmed to her.
Digit was my guy. He was the most important.
Then I met Lala. And she had dogs.
Falling in love with Harriet and Miss Idaho was part of the fun of being with Lala. Digit, though, wasted no time on such feelings. He hated the dogs with a fiery passion rivaled only by the way he loved me. After some time, he could grudgingly be in the same room with the dogs, but he still loved to strike at them whenever they got within range.
We moved into a new house and lived there for a year. Digit roamed the neighborhood but came home with fewer trophies—there were more stray cats in our new neighborhood, and I think the pickings were slim when it came to rodents and birds.
One night in February, he didn’t come home. I gave the whistle and didn’t hear him thumping toward me. I tried several times that night to call him in, and he didn’t come. I didn’t worry too much—he’d been gone before, sometimes for a few days, returning none the worse for wear.
But he didn’t come back. A week later, I started to cry. Two weeks later, I mourned. The space by my head seemed so cold and my hand felt empty when I slept. I felt too sad to knit anything but socks. I searched the streets, and I checked all the shelters, going through their heartbreaking kill files and peering into each cage. I put up fliers and offered rewards. I stopped when I drove past cats that had been recently killed by cars and moved their bodies up to the sidewalks, knowing that if it were Digit, I’d want someone to do the same for me. Maybe they’d find their pets and get to bury them. I hadn’t been able to do that for Digit, and I grieved.
After about a month, I was finally able to write about it on my blog. I got dozens of condolence e-mails, stories of special cats and the
people who loved them, and each e-mail rebroke my heart. I didn’t know how to thank anyone, not appropriately, not with the thanks they deserved, so I didn’t respond to most of the e-mails—I just let their kind words wash over me.
Four months after Digit disappeared, I was sound asleep when Lala burst into our bedroom. She said, “You have to come to the kitchen. Now.”
“Is there a fire?” Crap. I’d been meaning to buy a fire extinguisher but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
“Nothing is wrong, but you need to come right now.”
“I swear to God,” I said. “If this is a picture on Cute Overload, I will kill you.”
“Just come.”
In the kitchen, square in the middle of the tiled floor, sat Digit. He swayed as if he were drunk, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. He’d been a sixteen-pound bruiser when he left; this cat couldn’t have been more than seven or eight pounds. His face was swollen and I wasn’t sure his left eye was intact. His entire rear end was a mass of infection, and he stank to high heaven. Lala said that she’d had to check his toes when she’d seen him swaying at the back glass door, because she’d barely recognized him. But he was my cat. My cat.
The vet couldn’t find a heartbeat and told me I had a zombie cat. I didn’t care, as long as the zombie was Digit. He purred and growled and leaned against me as hard as he could as he shook on the metal table.
They figured he’d been walking since he disappeared. The pads on his feet and his claws were worn right off. He’d disappeared in the beginning of February; this was late June. Sometimes, the vet said, cats jumped in cars or truck beds to sleep in winter when they were cold and then ended up being transported far away. Walking at a cat’s pace, he could have been as far away as Seattle, and it was awful to have to leave him at the vet’s for treatment after he’d worked for four months to get to me.
A Life in Stitches Page 7
