The Yarn Whisperer

by Clara Parkes

  It’s a bricklayer’s fabric, formed by the patient and orderly placement of stitch after stitch, row by row, until—surprise—you step back and see that you’ve made a wall. Keep going, and you’ll eventually have a strong, well-fitting home. It’s no coincidence that the Three Little Pigs abandoned their wood and straw houses for a brick one. With a little thought and planning, you can arrange those same blocks into sweeping arches and open windows, jutting peaks and pointy turrets. You can add doorways and balconies and buttresses.

  But it all begins with the single brick. And that first brick? More often than not, it’s a slipknot.

  Being the innately clever people we are, knitters have come up with endless variants to the basic cast-on. Some are firm, others stretchy. Some appear quiet, subdued. Others flaunt feathered boas or sparkly tiaras. Each has its own place.

  One of the simplest and most versatile ways to create stitches is called the long-tail cast-on. Its slipknot is formed in the middle of a very long strand—hence the “tail”—of yarn. We put the slipknot-clad needle in our right hand and expertly wind the two yarn ends among the fingers of our left hand like a sophisticated game of cat’s cradle. Then we make the right-hand needle swoop and dive from end to end in a graceful ballet that produces a tidy row of stretchy stitches on the needle. It’s mesmerizing to watch someone really good cast on a long row of stitches this way.

  Others bypass the cat’s cradle machinations and simply form a series of backward loops on the needle. Beware. The backward-loop cast-on is the spare tire of cast-ons, a handy emergency patch that’ll bridge short gaps and get you to the nearest gas station. It’s great for small spaces like buttonholes or the thumb of a mitten, but it has no real stability or structure for larger projects. Rely on that little donut tire for a full-length road trip, and you’re just asking for trouble.

  If you want to put both needles to work immediately, try what’s called a knitted cast-on. As Bill Murray’s character in the film Groundhog Day was forced to repeat the same day over and over again, the knitted cast-on creates stitch after identical stitch that is never allowed to graduate from the left-hand needle to the right one. I envision the knitter saying, “Oh look, needles, I think I’ll cast on!” over and over again, never remembering that she just did.

  Then there’s my favorite, the Charlie Brown variant called the cable cast-on. This is what my grandma taught me. It begins like a Groundhog Day cast-on, but instead of inserting your empty needle knitwise into that last stitch on the left needle, you slip your needle between the last two stitches on the left needle, as if they were a giant goalpost and your needle a trusting Charlie Brown going in for the kick. You wrap the yarn around the needle, pull the loop through, and then, at the last minute, Lucy yanks the ball and you’re forced to abort the whole operation and put the new stitch back on your left-hand needle. As frustrating as the cable cast-on may be for those hopeful stitches, it’s an excellent all-around cast-on that produces a nicely corded edge.

  Want more flexibility? Consider the Estonian cast-on, which borrows from the long-tail cast-on but alternates the yarn positioning on your thumb and direction of your needle’s swoops and dives. There’s a Channel Island cast-on if you want a pretty picot-style edging like the crenellated peaks of a castle. The German twisted cast-on will give you more stretch, ideal for a sock cuff or a collar on a top-down sweater. Need even more stretch? The tubular cast-on is for you.

  Most cast-ons produce some kind of edge. But for those times when you need your stitches to look as if they appeared from nowhere, like in the toe of a sock, consider the provisional cast-on. It relies on “waste yarn” (there’s an oxymoron) to create stitches you then unravel like when you unravel the stitches that seal a bag of charcoal or rice.

  An equally invisible cousin of the provisional cast-on is the Turkish cast-on, which is as distinct and endearing as Turkish Delight candy is sweet and chewy. You can also play with one of the other variants popularized by Judy Becker or Jeny Staiman. Want to make a pretty, multicolored edge to, say, a colorful mitten or hat? Try the braided cast-on. Cat Bordhi popularized a moebius cast-on that creates a very Zen edge. You magically find yourself in the middle of a piece of fabric with no beginning or end. Were a tree to fall on top of it in the forest, I don’t know if anyone would hear.

  For all its technical nuance, I love the pure symbolism of the cast-on. It’s like patting the pregnant belly of a friend, or bashing that champagne bottle on a ship’s new hull. A few years ago, I began a tradition at my Knitter’s Review Retreat. On Sunday morning, we all gather to embark upon a totally new project that has to be different, challenging in some way—and expressly for us. We call it our “New Beginnings” project.

  When I raise my imaginary baton and give the sign, we all cast on that first row together. People are encouraged to take their knitting around the room to get good-luck stitches from one another. It’s a sort of smile, a blessing, a way to capture the kinship of the event and carry it back out into the world.

  I love knowing that all these happy stitches are circling the globe, scattering it with the quiet essence of knitterly goodwill. A while ago I ran into the designer Ann Budd at a conference in California. I hadn’t seen her since she’d taught at my retreat that fall, and she was wearing a beautiful green sweater. I complemented her on it, and she promptly pulled out the bottom and ran her finger along the cast-on edge.

  “You should like it,” she smiled. “Your stitch is right here.”

  LA BELLE FRANCE

  WHEN I WAS fifteen, I boarded a chartered jet at JFK along with several dozen other doe-eyed teenagers. We were part of the Nacel foreign exchange program and bound for Lyon, France. I knew nothing about where I’d be spending the next six weeks. As I waited for my pale blue Samsonite suitcase to emerge on the luggage carousel, I heard a funny-sounding announcement over the PA system. “Cla-haa pah-kiss?” it said. “Cla-haa pahkiss?” Which turned out to be my name, in French.

  My bag was the last one out, and they were paging me. I sprinted to catch up with the group as they boarded a tall, skinny bus. We drove through the country and into a town with narrow streets and little cars. We dragged our suitcases through a busy square, pausing to laugh smugly at the glossy food pictures in front of a pizza restaurant.

  “Look at that!” we snorted. “You call that a pizza?”

  “Not like in Baltimore,” said one kid. “We’ve got the best pizza.”

  “No way, man,” interrupted another, “I’m from Chicago. You can’t get better pizza than ours.” We all gasped at the last picture: Someone had cracked an egg on the pizza. A whole egg. Gross.

  We finally reached a train station and said our good-byes as the group split into smaller clusters. Five of us were put on a train with a kind but rather tired-looking woman. As the train began to move, she focused her clipboard on me. “Cla-haa,” she began. “Ear ees zee ann-formacion abouuut zee fai-milie whair you wheel be stayeeeng.” It turns out I was headed to Nîmes, where Jacques, his wife, Marianne, and their daughter, Sophie, were waiting for me. My life in France was about to begin.

  I soon learned that Jacques and Marianne were in fact not married at all. They’d fibbed to the agency so they could get an exchange student. My host sister, Sophie, was Jacques’s only daughter from a previous marriage. She adored her papa, worshiped The Cure and James Dean (“zee cure” and “jomms deeeen”), and detested Marianne.

  Jacques was a stereotypical Frenchman. He was short, had slightly hunched shoulders, was always puffing on a Gauloises cigarette, and maintained a contemptuous sneer for all that displeased him. He was estranged from his father, a famous actor I would see years later on the stage in Paris. He studied ancient mythology and was an abstract artist. He openly wept during a tribute to the late Jacques Brel, which he made me watch with him on the TV.

  Marianne belonged to that generation of women whose personality was formed primarily by those around her. She was warm and friendly, recently divorced,
and had two grown children of her own. She had dyed brown hair, a propensity for large, shapeless dresses, and an overdeveloped maternal instinct that made her speak to me like I was an eight-year-old—fitting, since my French language skills were at about that level.

  Sophie was petulant, competitive, occasionally hyper, and inclined to baby talk when in the company of her father.

  Our home was the top three floors of a tiny stone building in the center of Nîmes. Centuries of footsteps had worn down the stone stairs until they had a deep U in the center, giving the stairwell the feel of a Mediterranean luge run. The thick walls kept out some of France’s midi heat, but at midday we still had to close all the metal shutters to keep the sun out. Each evening, strains of the theme song from Dallas drifted over the tiled rooftops, mixed with the high-pitched squeaks of birds and occasional stray notes from the piano bar at the end of the street. Fifteen minutes to closing time, the pianist would always play Elton John’s “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.”

  Every few days we’d pack into Jacques’s bright orange vintage Datsun coupe and speed through the countryside, Sophie and I squeezed in back on either side of their large, panting spaniel, Duduche. Up front, a cloud of cigarette smoke; in back, hot, wet dog breath.

  We went to the ocean, where I had my first taste of passion fruit in the smallest scoop of ice cream I’d ever seen. We climbed to the top of a Roman aqueduct, we swam in cool, slow-moving rivers. We visited a shopping mall—very new and exciting in those days—and passed a yarn store full of pastel-colored skeins, all identical in shape and all frighteningly fine in gauge. We sped along ancient tree-lined routes to Avignon and Valence and to a tiny town called Beauchastel, where Marianne and her children had a summer home. There we met Marianne’s son, Christophe, a bronzed, blue-eyed god recently returned from a spiritual pilgrimage to India. Sophie’s mood improved immediately.

  We prepared feasts at the summer house and sat out under shady trees at a rickety table with mismatched chairs. I watched mayonnaise being made by hand. One day I was in the kitchen with Marianne’s daughter, Mylène. She was knitting a light-blue baby sweater out of a fine-gauge wool just like the kind I’d spotted days before. I was thirsty, so I asked her for a … a … um … She put down her knitting, held up a glass, looked me straight in the eye, and said “verre.” I can’t say why, exactly, but that moment marked a turning point in my French language immersion.

  I’d arrived having studied French for only two years, the first of which barely counted because it was with a permanent substitute who didn’t speak the language herself. I went to the same school as my older brother, and he’d fared so badly in French that when I arrived and Madame Gehrels had to shuffle overflow students to the sub, she saw my last name and must have muttered an emphatic “non!”

  So I’d arrived in France with a basic Le Petit Prince understanding of verbs and nouns, but I could barely function fluidly in any kind of everyday setting. This trip was my baptism by fire. No computer, no Google translator, no Internet even. Nobody in the house really spoke English, and I certainly couldn’t call home, long-distance rates still being a splurge.

  And so, by some combination of survival instinct and skill, I managed to stay afloat and eventually to swim. That day in the kitchen when Mylène held up the glass I was trying to ask for and said “verre,” something in my mind clicked, or surrendered, or did whatever minds do when they stop fighting. I let go and began thinking in French. Soon Sophie and I were memorizing lyrics to popular songs and singing them together. We made up silly new verses, we whispered secrets to one another, I began to dream in French, and I even started cracking jokes that made people laugh.

  My mother had lived in Paris in the early 1960s on a Fulbright scholarship, and I’d grown up gazing longingly at her black-and-white pictures. This was nothing like those pictures, but it was still magical. I loved how different everything was—how thin the writing paper was, how funny my desk lamp looked, how smooth the light switches were. I got hooked on writing with a fountain pen, drinking from tiny glasses, and tearing off pieces of bread to wipe my plate clean. I became an expert at bathing in a tub instead of a shower.

  Until then, my only reference for picnics was thick peanut butter sandwiches and a warm plastic canteen of tap water, followed by a bruised banana. But here we perched on a hillside in Provence and ate buttery cheeses on fresh baguettes, followed up with big chunks of chocolate, all washed down with bottled water infused with sugary fruit syrups (no wine for me).

  I took the family to see a performance of Puccini’s Turandot, which was staged outdoors in a Roman amphitheater. We rode a creaky little Ferris wheel and watched fireworks for July 14, Bastille Day. I was even tempted to go back to that yarn store and pick up some fine-gauge wool of my own. I loved everything—the cadence of the culture, the sounds of the words coming out of my mouth. I never wanted to speak English again.

  All too soon it was time to leave. On my last night there, over ice cream parfaits at the piano bar at the end of the street, we tearfully promised to keep in touch—and in my heart, I vowed to return.

  Back home in Tucson, I became that insufferable snob who started all her sentences with, “Well, in France …” I used to lie in bed with my Walkman, eyes closed, listening intently to the tape recordings I’d made of my street—its cars, birds, music, footsteps. What a jolt to open my eyes and find myself so far away.

  As soon as the ink dried on my high school diploma, I was back in France for the summer, sipping a grand-crème at the Cafe Flore in Paris before boarding the TGV for Valence, where Marianne would meet me and take me back to her summer home. But it was different. Sophie was more sullen, Marianne seemed needy, and Jacques wasn’t there. At first they said he was too busy with work to join us, but then Marianne confided in me that they were having problems. My language skills had improved to the point where she didn’t need to talk to me like an eight-year-old, and what she did say made it clear I’d stepped into a difficult situation. I was relieved to take the train back to Paris for the rest of the summer.

  Again, in college, France pulled me back. I spent my junior year in Paris studying at the Sorbonne. It wasn’t just the fountain pens and the funny light switches that kept drawing me back. I’d discovered a sort of parallel universe in France, and I liked it infinitely better than the one back home. They say that people acquire the traits of the dominant culture associated with the language they speak—they almost have a different personality with each language. I certainly did, and my alternate Clara was a charming antidote to all that troubled me. It was like a comforting cloak of invisibility.

  Gradually, a problem revealed itself: The closer I got to fluency within French culture, the more I was identified as American. If France’s cultural fabric were made from that superfine baby-blue wool Mylène had been knitting, I—no matter how hard I tried—was a big, goofy brushed mohair. If I tamed my halo, twisted myself tight, tucked in my ends, I could almost pass from afar—people thought I was Swiss, or Danish, the cultural equivalent of mohair passing for a shimmery Wensleydale—but the minute I opened my mouth, my true nature revealed itself. Not because of how I spoke, but rather because of the underlying structure of how I thought, saw the world, reflected, and responded. I could change my twist and ply, but I couldn’t do anything about my cellular makeup.

  I finished college and returned yet again, this time through a fellowship with the French government. I was an assistante, a sort of tutor-slash-babysitter for high school English students. I was placed in the northwest city of Nantes, the birthplace of Jules Verne and the hub of the French slave trade. Whereas my previous trips had allowed me to quietly assimilate into the culture, this time my whole raison d’être was to be a foreigner—which literally translates as “stranger.” My dreams of disappearing behind the cloak of French culture couldn’t materialize. I’d been hired to be different—to be l’Américaine.

  We were given two days’ training in how to teach English. My
favorite lesson was the afternoon we were taught how to operate a VCR. The teacher spoke to us slowly and carefully, pointing to the button marked PLAY, explaining what it did.

  School began. I was a lousy teacher. I saw the same students only twice in a month, making serious continuity impossible. When “How was your weekend?” failed, I resorted to games, having students fill in the empty speech bubbles in Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, or translate the lyrics to “Hotel California.” Finally I gave up and showed everybody the ancient copy of the movie Manhattan I’d discovered in the media library.

  The teachers were friendly enough, but they never let me forget my otherness. One morning I’d arrived in my French attire, dressed up in a little skirt with my tights, clunky leather shoes, thin wool coat, and a wool scarf I wrapped around and around my neck as I’d seen my students do in crowded hallways (thwacking me in the face as they wrapped them). I confidently clip-clopped into the teacher’s room, which still had a mimeograph machine, and one of the English teachers came up to me. “Ohhh, Cla-haa,” she cooed, “Have you hurt your neck?”

  Meanwhile, the school concierge, a great fan of Westerns, discovered I grew up in Arizona and would stage a mock shootout every time I came and went. “Ehhh, Cla-haa!” he’d yell from his tiny windowed room by the front gate. “Pow, pow, pow!” he’d shoot his imaginary guns before putting them back in his imaginary holsters. “Eye amme zee cow-buye, yaah?”

  When my year was up, I no longer believed I could escape and become someone else in France. As charming as French Clara was, my cloak of invisibility was wearing thin. There was no getting away from the fact that French Clara’s brain and American Clara’s brain were one and the same. I knew I could stay in France until I was ninety and people would still call me l’Américaine—and that wasn’t what I wanted. I’d also come to realize that brushed mohair is actually quite pretty when you give it space to bloom.