The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater

by Alanna Okun

  This phase can last for minutes or months. You start other projects in the meantime; you move on to something else entirely, like softball or smoking. You forget what it was like, exactly, to stare at those particular stitches, to picture what the finished product would eventually look like.

  And then one day things are different. Like after a breakup, that first morning when you wake up and realize you’ve forgotten to miss the person. Maybe you want the yarn for some new endeavor. Maybe you’ve decided that having nothing is better than having something that just isn’t working.

  And so you do the one thing knitters are taught never to do: you slide the stitches off the needle. It feels like a skipped heartbeat or a caught breath. Maybe there is a flash of regret—What are you doing, you could still save this—but it’s such a quick gesture that there’s no going back. For a moment the stitches look naked and silly, those little loops with nothing to give them structure. And then you take the end of the yarn and you pull. Knitters call this “frogging” because of the sound it supposedly makes: rip-it, rip-it, rip-it. “Rip it” sounds to me more like a command, a testament to how good it feels when you finally decide to just fucking do it.

  You pull and you wind and you watch your work unknit itself in one one-thousandth of the time it took you to create it. Then you reach the end. Where once you had the thing, now you only have its materials and its memory.

  The yarn will not be perfect. It will be kinked and ragged, marked with the shape it used to assume. Usually it will bounce back, though, when given enough time and maybe a little steam. It’ll become something different: a pair of mittens next winter, a basket to hold more projects in the spring. A series of squares, a single strand running through a tapestry, a gift for someone you haven’t met yet.

  Or maybe the yarn will become exactly what you’d hoped, exactly the project you’d started in the first place. Maybe one day—right away or in a year—you’ll pick up your needles and make it through the cast-on. You’ll count and you’ll recount, you’ll hold the yarn so it doesn’t choke and it doesn’t flop, you’ll catch the stitch you drop right away and put it back where it belongs. You’ll make a few mistakes but they won’t be worth ripping out.

  And sooner than you expected you’ll be back at the point where you abandoned the old version, and then you’ll get past it, and then you’ll bind off the stitches and be done. The stopping will be part of it; the restarting will be too. This time, you’ll get it right.

  The Best Places to Knit, Ranked

  8.  The movies. Too dark and your fingers are often greasy with popcorn residue, but still very satisfying, especially if the movie is dumb.

  7.  A bar. Also generally too dark, but it’s a good conversation starter, plus you’re usually up for attempting more-daring techniques after a few drinks.

  6.  Waiting rooms. Nothing good ever happens in a waiting room, but having something productive to do alleviates the boredom and, to a degree, the anxiety.

  5.  In transit. This is maybe too big a category because there are so many types of transit, with attendant pitfalls and advantages. Subranking:

  a.  The subway. Great for catching short little moments of peace, if you can grab a seat or a spot to lean against a pole that won’t cause major inconvenience to the other riders.

  b.  The train (Amtrak or commuter rail). Glorious, but so often you find yourself wanting to spend your precious in-between time doing other activities, like using the weak Wi-Fi signal to read every tweet your crush has ever posted or drinking $9 train wine or beer you smuggled in your duffel bag.

  c.  Planes. Same as above, except with the slight fear that this will be the time the TSA arbitrarily decides to confiscate your knitting needles and arrests you as some kind of fiber terrorist.

  d.  Car rides. Rad, as long as you’re not the one driving.

  e.  Boats. I don’t really like boats.

  f.  Walking. You actually can knit and walk, if the pattern is easy enough and you are okay with being the type of person who is knitting and walking, which I am in theory but never really think to do because there are so many other things you can do while walking, like listen to music or podcasts or contemplate your surroundings or stare at your phone wondering why your crush hasn’t tweeted in three hours, is it maybe because they got a new girlfriend?

  4.  Yarn stores. Most have tables expressly for this purpose—my favorite even has a small bar at the back—and usually everyone is nice. Sometimes they’ll look you up and down if you seem like a young hipster but you can’t blame people for wanting to defend their territory after the onslaught of Not Just for Grandmas™, and once they see you’re one of them they warm right up.

  3.  Your house. Alone, with people, watching something, eating something. It’s your house, your ways. I can’t presume to know them.

  2.  On vacation.

  a.  With other people.

  b.  Alone. My favorite knitting experience ever took place on a solo trip. More on this in a minute.

  1.  At the beach. More on this right after that.

  Moving the Needle

  Here is the story of my favorite knitting experience ever.

  The summer after Sam and I broke up, I had a particularly memorable week. I had been dating a guy for a few months, the first time in my newly single life where anything had grown to the point where it could really be a thing. He was funny and sweet and had a British accent; on our third or fourth date, we’d had to rush his roommate’s sick cat to the vet and saved her life, which was a good enough story to cement two people together, at least temporarily. I liked the idea that I could move on neatly and relatively quickly, that the world was full of possibility, that all it took was going to the right friend’s karaoke party or opening up Tinder at the right moment and I could be back in the game—wanted, needed, loved.

  But then he broke up with me. It was a Tuesday. On Wednesday, sad and anxious and wanting a task, I went to urgent care; I’d woken up earlier in the week with a large round bruise on my thigh that I had no memory of getting, and rather than healing, it was getting worse, its edges purpling and the veins in the center becoming more and more prominent. The bruise had been described variously by friends who had seen it as “gnarly,” “vicious,” and “Whoa, doesn’t it kind of look like the night sky from this angle?” I figured it was time to get a professional opinion.

  As an inveterate hypochondriac, I was almost relieved when the doctor seemed alarmed by the bruise—I wasn’t just fretting for the sake of it! I was less relieved when he said that it could be a blood clot. I had, in the course of my nighttime Internet trawling, discovered that blood clots could turn into something called “deep vein thrombosis,” which could travel elsewhere in your body and kill you. I did not want to die, and so I spent the next two days running around Manhattan leaving vials of my blood at various facilities. It was, at least, a nice distraction from the breakup (which one, I couldn’t tell you), and from the general stagnation of my life. It wasn’t that this boy had made me truly happy, but he had been something to think about, to build toward, proof that I wasn’t going to wander in tight circles forever. Now there was nothing.

  On Thursday afternoon, while I was at work, I got a call from an unknown number.

  Ugh, I thought, bracing myself for news of my own impending dramatic death. This is it.

  But it wasn’t one of the testing centers. Nor was it the British boy, calling to declare his undying love for me, nor Sam, breaking the silence that had sprung up ever since we’d parted ways. No, instead it was my agent, with the news that I had sold this book.

  I usually find it self-indulgent and time-consuming when writers get all meta, so feel free to skip ahead until the following page if that is also true for you. But all I had ever really wished for was this. Yes, I’d wished for boyfriends and jobs and apartments, and for the people I love to be happy and healthy, and for democracy not to crumble in my lifetime. Abo
ve all, though, I wanted to make something that was mine, something that could stretch further than a sweater and mean more than a stack of embroideries. I’d been writing my whole life, from my knockoff Harriet the Spy–style notebook scribblings of everything my friends and family were doing to the essays and articles I wrote for the website I worked for. Writing was—is—how I make sense of the world, and like crafting, I can do it without permission, without waiting, entirely on my own.

  But it was still exciting and terrifying to realize that other people would soon read what I had to say too, that I would have the chance to collect the bits and pieces of my life and weave them together, see what they looked like as a messy but cohesive whole. And so I hung up the phone, and I poked at my bruise, which—spoiler alert—did not wind up traveling to my brain or lungs to kill me, because it was just a regular bruise, albeit a big one of mysterious origin, and then I asked my boss if I could take off the following week and go to Montreal.

  * * *

  I don’t quite know what possessed me to go on a trip, the first I would ever take alone. I’m not a spontaneous person, if that hasn’t been made exceedingly clear yet; I don’t like to spend a lot of money or rearrange my schedule. I was already living on my own, so it wasn’t that I needed to evade roommates, and despite the ever-present eau de hot trash, I actually like New York in the summertime, with its rooftops and empty weekends. Maybe I wanted to run away from myself and all my attendant worries, at least for a couple of days; maybe I wanted to run away from everything else, to help myself get back to me.

  I do, however, know why I chose Montreal. Proximity, for one thing—I could take a train all the way from Penn Station, without needing to board a plane. Expense, for another—the train ticket cost around $120 round-trip, and the small but lovely apartment I found on Airbnb cost less even than that per night. And finally, familiarity—I’d been once before, with my college boyfriend.

  Hirschey and I had taken the train up during a break from school. On the first night I became convinced I had meningitis, because my neck was extremely stiff and I felt feverish and some college student somewhere had, I think, just died suddenly of it so it stood to reason that I would too. Anxiety is nothing if not narcissistic.

  Hirschey, so kind and worried, hailed a Canadian cab and we went to the Canadian emergency room. We were in and out in twenty minutes, because Canadian health care is amazing and also because I did not have meningitis (that might have slowed things down somewhat).

  I wanted to go back to Montreal on my own because, I told myself, we hadn’t really done it right. From what I recalled we mostly went to bars near our hostel and drank Labatt Blue without being carded. I wanted to do it differently, on my own, without having someone to slow me down or save me. I wanted to go somewhere that felt far away even though almost everyone spoke English. And certain places feel like they belong permanently to certain times and certain people, and sometimes you just decide it’s time to make them yours again. I hadn’t been able to do that yet with Sam’s neighborhood, below the park, nor with the various bars and restaurants around the city I’d visited with all those not-quite-there boys. I would, instead, cross borders.

  So I booked the Amtrak ticket and the Airbnb. Twelve hours is a long ride, but all of a sudden I had a purpose. I had a book to start writing; I had a strange blue cotton jumper thingy I’d been seized with the urge to knit, even though the longer I spent with it the more it looked like it would have been better suited for a toddler. I liked that I was making something a little ridiculous, something that nobody in the world would think to ask for; it made me feel slightly better about striking out and starting to write something that, in my deepest heart, I worried would be the same.

  I don’t think I wrote at all on my way up. I watched a lot of Sex and the City on my laptop, and thought about the boy and the book and the bruise, and looked out the window at an increasing number of cows and lakes. (This may not seem like an efficient way to fill twelve hours, but it’s amazing how much space self-pity mixed with self-satisfaction can consume.)

  When I arrived in Montreal, though, all other thoughts evaporated as soon as I got to an ATM. I hadn’t thought to bring cash—I’d just take some out when I arrived, I’d reasoned, and skip all the cumbersome cash exchange rates—and yet now my debit card wasn’t working. I tried my credit card; same thing. The machine kept telling me it was unreadable; when I attempted to buy a bottle of water at a nearby kiosk, the woman behind the counter told me the same thing. After trying one more newsstand and two more ATMs, I called my bank. It took twenty minutes to get through to a human, who kindly informed that, oh yes, this happened sometimes in Canada because of “inconsistencies with chip technology.” I did not really know what that meant, and still don’t, and asked her what to do so that I could have access to my money in the next five days.

  “You could always find someone to take out cash for you!” I believe she said. I can’t exactly remember, because right around then came my panic blackout.

  You have to understand that this was my first trip alone. Of course I’d traveled by myself before, but always to meet up with my family or coworkers; there was an endpoint to the aloneness, people waiting at the other end to help me. The one time I’d ever missed a connecting flight, I cried until the airline booked me a free room at the Miami Holiday Inn Express. I was nineteen years old, but the flirty waiter at the hotel restaurant let me order a glass of red wine without checking my ID.

  But until Montreal, I had never really planned a trip. I hadn’t studied abroad in college, hadn’t traveled after graduation like so many of the people I grew up with. In fact, I’d sort of looked sideways at the whole business—it smelled strongly of escapism to me, of ducking the life you were supposed to be building in favor of a brief, expensive fantasy. I preferred to think of myself as someone who built homes where she was, who could take any dorm room, any life path, and make it her own. I couldn’t see the point in investing, especially temporarily, in anywhere else.

  I’m glad I decided to stay where I was back then. I made some fantastic friends in that quiet semester when so many people were gone. I entered and won the writing contest where I met Marina, which indirectly led to that internship in New York, which indirectly led to where I am now. My fear can be useful. It focuses me and makes me decisive, flags me when something truly is wrong. But it’s also limiting, knee-jerk, and makes me averse to any situation where I don’t know the outcome, because it means having to give up that most precious thing: control.

  Which, it turns out, yeah! That’s kind of the point of traveling! Here is what happened when I finally left the Montreal train station, tear-streaked and laden with my luggage. (I’d planned to take a cab to the place where I was staying, but you can’t take a cab without money.) I walked the mile or so there. I texted the girl from whom I was renting the apartment. I told her that I knew it seemed weird, and I wouldn’t be at all offended if she said no, but if she could take out some cash for me (I’d pay her via PayPal or via the checkbook that I was blessedly carrying, since I’d boarded the train straight from a therapy appointment) I would be eternally grateful.

  She did. Her name was Ariane, and we liked each other so much from our brief transaction that we decided to meet for drinks later in the week. I’d reached out to a former classmate, whom I hadn’t thought to contact when I was planning the trip, and he did the same—spotted me the money and invited me to a party. All of a sudden this quiet, solo trip I’d planned was peppered with engagements, which turned into more when I met some girls my age. I spent a lot of time with them, and a lot of time by myself, and I ate so many bagels. Did you know that bagels are best as a drunk nighttime food? I didn’t, until Montreal. Montreal bagels are thin and cost nothing, especially if you factor in the exchange rate. I bought a tub of cream cheese and it was the only thing I kept in my borrowed fridge, and every night after eating and drinking and talking to wonderful strangers I would buy a bagel from the famous twenty-
four-hour spot around the corner. I would eat it at the dining-room table, dunking it directly into the cream cheese because there was nobody watching to tell me that was gross. I knitted my jumper and did not look at my phone and fell asleep each night so, so happy.

  * * *

  That solo trip gave way to more. Not a lot, but enough. I went to Berlin for a week and ate a lot of bread and cheese and mastered the subway; I spent a month writing and housesitting at a beachside mansion in Rhode Island, during a deserted February when I spoke to almost no one. I flew out to San Francisco to see a great friend for a memorial service and wound up kissing the good, kind boy who I am still with now. I learned that I like my own company, my own rhythms, even outside the circumscribed life I’d built for myself in New York. I like waking up early and locating a place that will serve me a sandwich or salad before ten a.m.; I like doing yoga when I want, writing when I want, walking down a snowy beach with a fur coat and a glass of Chardonnay, Grey Gardens–style, when I want. Above all, I like knowing that I can save myself, or can at least drum up the courage to call upon others when I need it. The world doesn’t need to end even when I’m outside mine.

  It’s not like a few days in Montreal precipitated all of this; maybe I would have seen Germany anyway, would still have told the boy I thought he was cute. But it did move the needle. I spent my last afternoon in a yarn store I’d read about, a place I’d planned to pop into for only a few minutes. Instead, the owner and I got to talking, and then she offered me a cup of tea, which turned into an entire pot and an afternoon spent knitting the jumper, the light going gold and then fading outside. I can’t even remember the name of the store—it was in French, which I still do not speak despite the efforts of Aude and the Needham High School French exchange program—but I remember how calm I felt, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be and it was all because I’d made a series of decisions to get myself there. I deliberated for almost an hour over a skein of silk-and-linen yarn (it cost more than any meal I’d bought over the course of the week) and then finally relented: its color matched the brilliant light, exactly what I pictured as a child when I read “Rumpelstiltskin,” as he spins straw into gold. I think he gets a bad rap in that story: at least he took nothing and helped someone turn it into something.