Comfort

by Ann Hood

  That fall Sam returned to the distraction of fourth grade. Lorne went back to his office, and although he often felt unable to work, his old routines and the needs of his clients kept him busy. Unable to write, I faced the loneliness of every day at home without Grace.

  On one such day, desperate, I opened the Yellow Pages and called knitting stores to sign up for a beginners’ class. But I had missed the start of most of them, and the others were held at night, when I wanted nothing more than to hold Sam and Lorne close to me. One afternoon, as I waited for Sam at his school, a friend of a friend ran up to my car, thrust a piece of paper into my hand, and said, “Call Jen. She’ll teach you how to knit.”

  I learned to knit while sitting in the corner of a busy yarn shop in a seaside town thirty miles from my Providence home. Jen, who ran Sakonnet Purls, her mother’s yarn store, with humor and cool efficiency, patiently talked me through the basics. Even after she explained, “Knitting is a series of slipknots,” and I looked up at her in total bewilderment, she never grew impatient. However, when I stood up to leave, two hours had passed, the first two hours in months that I hadn’t spent crying or cursing or reliving the horrible tragedy that had taken over my life.

  A week later, I was struggling through a scarf. I made a mess of it, randomly adding stitches, dropping stitches, then adding even more. When I showed up with this tangle of wool, Jen pulled it off the needle and all my mistakes were miraculously gone. I could start anew. Unlike life, or at least this new life of mine—in which I was forced to keep moving forward through the mess it had become—knitting allowed me to start over again and again, until whatever I was making looked exactly as I wanted it to look.

  Soon I became a voracious knitter. I bought more yarn, a crazy variegated self-striping ball of yellow, pink, and purple, and began to knit whenever stress or my overactive grieving brain took over. Which is to say that I knit all the time—in the grocery store parking lot, at the kitchen table, on car trips while my husband drove, even when those car trips went into the night. “What?” knitting guru Elizabeth Zimmermann wrote in her book Knitter’s Almanac. “You can’t knit in the dark? Stuff and nonsense; anybody can.”

  There were many days when all I did was knit. Once, after nearly eight hours of knitting, I could not even open my cramped fingers. I knit scarves and hats and socks, and as I knit, every part of me calmed. The quiet click of the needles, the rhythm of the stitches, the warmth of the yarn and the blanket or scarf that spilled across my lap, made those hours tolerable. I made a red hat for Lorne, a blue one for Sam. I knit my cousins fluttery scarves for Christmas, and for myself a scarf in Grace’s favorite colors: pink and purple. I began a sweater. I learned to read a pattern, to decipher the language of knitting. It quieted the images of Grace’s last hours in the hospital. It settled my pounding, fearful heart.

  One morning, as I lay in bed trying to figure out how to face another day, my phone rang. The woman on the other end told me her daughter had gone to school with Grace. As soon as I heard this tenuous connection, I wanted to hang up the phone. Wasn’t anyplace safe? Here in my bed, in my home, I had to revisit what I so desperately couldn’t handle? But, sensing the change of tone in my voice, the woman spoke hurriedly. Her own two-year-old son had died, she said, and I heard myself saying the words so many people had said to me: What happened?

  I understood the comfort in the repetition of the story. As she told me every detail, I got out of bed and began to pace: up the stairs, down the stairs, across each silent room of my house. Her words sent me into my own senseless movements. As soon as we hung up, I collapsed into a chair and began to knit. But first, I made a date with her: Come to my house, I told her. I will teach you how to knit. Knitting is the only comfort I can offer.

  For me, knitting is like meditation. It is not that my mind numbs or goes blank; in a way, the complete opposite happens. If I stop paying attention, I make a mistake. I confess that I love to knit while cooking shows play on my television. Knitters I know knit to all kinds of music, from classical to show tunes. But as soon as we pick up our needles, we enter that still place. Our attention becomes specific to what is in our hands and the outside world fades away.

  Even now, I sometimes drive those thirty miles to Sakonnet Purls for a knitting lesson. Jen has moved to Chicago, and someone new runs the class. Six or eight or ten women sit in a circle, on sofas and chairs, and knit. We don’t talk much. I concentrate on manipulating four tiny needles to make a pair of socks. Our heads bent, from time to time someone moans, “Oh no!” or shares her measuring tape or sighs in satisfaction. Here I am just another person who loves to knit, not the woman whose daughter died. I am anonymous. Last week, a woman said, “I read somewhere that knitting is good for depression.” I kept my head down, even as I thought, If you only knew…

  There is a story in Ann Feitelson’s book The Art of Fair Isle Knitting about a storm that took the lives of eight Shetland Islands fishermen in 1897. She writes that the women left behind, stricken with grief, supported themselves by knitting. “Focusing on the knitting in one’s lap,” Feitelman writes, “keeps death and uncontrollable forces at bay.”

  Now I am kin to those women in Shetland, and to all those who find in the rhythm of the needles, the precision of our stitches, the weight of the wool, a way to keep death at bay, at least for a few rows.

  In her poem “Wage Peace,” Judyth Hill writes:

  Learn to knit, and make a hat.

  Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,

  imagine grief

  as the outbreath of beauty

  or the gesture of fish.

  Swim for the other side.

  Slowly, words began to return to me. I still struggled to finish reading a book, or to write a page. But every day I picked up my knitting needles. I cast on, counting my stitches. Then I swam, Gracie. I tried to swim to the other side of grief.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Comfort Food

  GRIEF IS NOT LINEAR. People kept telling me that once this happened or that passed, everything would be better. Some people gave me one year to grieve. They saw grief as a straight line, with a beginning, middle, and end. But it is not linear. It is disjointed. One day you are acting almost like a normal person. You maybe even manage to take a shower. Your clothes match. You think the autumn leaves look pretty, or enjoy the sound of snow crunching under your feet.

  Then a song, a glimpse of something, or maybe even nothing sends you back into the hole of grief. It is not one step forward, two steps back. It is a jumble. It is hours that are all right, and weeks that aren’t. Or it is good days and bad days. Or it is the weight of sadness making you look different to others and nothing helps. Not haircuts or manicures or the Atkins Diet.

  Writing about Grace, losing her, loving her, anything at all, is not linear either. Readers want a writer to be able to connect the dots. But these dots don’t connect. One day I think about how knitting saved my life, and I write about that. But how do I connect it to other parts of my grief? Grief doesn’t have a plot. It isn’t smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.

  Stories demand order, someone told me. But I no longer live an orderly life. I used to. For example, every day at five o’clock I cooked my family dinner. I planned it ahead of time. I squeezed melons and chose green beans and asparagus with care. I shopped for good cuts of meat on sale. I thought about food groups, balanced diets, flavors and colors that worked together.

  These are the things I remember:

  Grace loved cucumbers sliced into perfect circles, canned corn, blueberries, any kind of beans, and overripe kiwi. A family vacation to southern Italy had left her with a taste for lemons and kumquats. She carried hard dried salami in a small pink and white gingham purse and liked to go with me to Italian delis for fresh buffalo mozzarella. Her favorite dinner was pasta—noonies, we called it, a leftover mispronunciation from Sam when he was a baby—with butter and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Every day she took the same thing for her
school lunch: prepackaged cheese and crackers, those cucumber rounds, half-sour pickles. When her friend Adrian came over for lunch they always ate Campbell’s chicken and stars soup, Ritz crackers, and either pomegranate or kiwi. “Ade is coming today,” she’d remind me. “Don’t forget the pomegranate.”

  While I cooked dinner, Sam and Grace both helped me. They layered the potatoes for potatoes au gratin—cheesy potatoes in our house; they peeled the apples for apple crisp, the carrots for lentil soup; they shook and shook and shook chicken in a baggie of seasoned flour for chicken marsala. Grace used to like to press her thumbprint onto peanut butter cookies to flatten them before baking.

  These are the things I remember: a fire in our kitchen fireplace, soup simmering on the stove, Sam and Grace bursting in with their cheeks red, their snowsuits wet, dripping snow across the wooden floor to snack on pickles straight from the jar before heading back outside.

  Or: our first backyard barbecue of the year on a surprisingly warm April day, Sam at eight finally old enough to baste the chicken on the grill, Grace carefully wiping a winter’s worth of dust from the patio table and chairs, paper plates decorated with red cherries, the smell of molasses and brown sugar from the pot of baked beans, a bowl of canned corn dotted with butter, late afternoon sunshine, the purple heads of crocuses announcing themselves in our small garden.

  The spring that Grace died, I remember that April remained relentlessly warm and sunny, but inside our house I shivered uncontrollably. Wrapped in flannel blankets and shawls from visitors, I could not find comfort. This was the unthinkable, the thing every parent fears. And it had come to our house and taken Gracie. When I looked out the window, I wanted her to still be there, making bouquets of chives from the garden laced with purple myrtle. Or when I walked in the kitchen, I expected to find her there, standing on her small wooden chair, plucking one cucumber round after another from her pink plate into her baby-teeth-filled mouth.

  People brought food. Chicken enchiladas in a throwaway foil roasting pan and rich veal stew simmering in a white Le Creuset pot and cold cuts and artisan breads and potato salad and fruit salad and miniature tarts and homemade chocolate chip cookies and three different kinds of meat loaf and three different kinds of lasagna and chicken soup and curried squash soup and minestrone soup. It was as if all of this abundance of food could fill our emptiness.

  We sat, the three of us left behind, and stared at the dinners that arrived on our doorstep each afternoon. We lifted our forks to our mouths. We chewed and swallowed, but nothing could fill us. For months people fed us, and somehow, unimaginably, time passed. Summer came and friends scattered to beaches and foreign lands.

  One day, gourmet ravioli filled with lobster and a container of vodka cream sauce appeared on our doorstep with a bottle of Pinot Grigio. Our garden was in full bloom by now. Hot pink roses. Ironic bleeding hearts. Columbine, and unpicked chives topped now with purple flowers. I carried the bag into my quiet kitchen and thought through the steps for cooking pasta. The process that had once been automatic had turned complicated. Get a pan, I told myself. Fill it with water. I had not done even these simple things in almost three months. Yet soon the water was at an angry boil, the sauce simmered in a pan beside it. The simple act of making this food felt right.

  The next day, I once again set a pot of water to boil. But instead of expensive pasta, I filled it with the medium shells that Grace had loved. When they were al dente, I tossed them with butter and parmesan cheese. That night, as the three of us sat in our still kitchen, the food did bring us comfort. It brought Grace close to us, even though she was so far away. Crying, I tasted the sharp, acrid tang of the cheese. It was, I think, the first thing I had tasted in a long time.

  We think of comfort food as those things our mother fed us when we were children. The roast chickens and mashed potatoes, chocolate cream pies and chewy brownies. But for me now, comfort food is cucumbers sliced into circles. It’s chicken and stars soup with a side of kiwi. It’s canned corn heated to just warm. In losing Grace, there is little comfort. But I take it when I can, in these most simple ways. On the days when grief grabs hold of me and threatens to overtake me again, I put water on to boil. I grate parmesan cheese and for that night, at least, I find comfort in a bowl of noonies.

  Not long ago, I was in the supermarket and a small basket of bright orange kumquats caught my eye. I remembered that long-ago trip to Italy when Grace developed a taste for this funny fruit. I could almost picture her in the front seat of my shopping cart, filled with delight at the sight of kumquats. I reached into the basket of fruit and lifted out one perfect kumquat, small and oblong and orange. When I bit into it, tears sprang into my eyes. The fruit’s skin is sour, and it takes time before you find the sweetness hidden inside.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Now I Need a Place to Hide Away

  I WANT TO connect things. But how do I connect, for example, knitting and cooking and tattoos and the Beatles? All of these things are important to my story, to my grief, to losing Grace. But I don’t have a timeline:

  August 2002: cooked pasta again for the first time.

  October 2002: learned to knit.

  I am struggling to put things in order. For example, September 24, 2002. Grace’s sixth birthday.

  My three cousins and I piled into a car and drove across town to the Federal Hill Tattoo Parlor. Until that day, my experience with tattoos was pretty limited. My father had one on his forearm, a giant blue eagle in front of a red sun with the letters USA across the bottom. I used to trace its outline when I sat on his lap, the colors already dull and faded. When he was fourteen, he ran away from home and got the tattoo at a carnival in rural Indiana. In college, a group of boys my friends and I palled around with got drunk one night in Newport and got tattoos on their hips. They stumbled into the dorm and lowered the waistband on their jeans to show off the swollen, tender designs: a sea horse, a devil, a grinning leprechaun. The students who live in my neighborhood have tattoos peeking out from shirtsleeves and necklines and the cuffs of their pants.

  But I was not running away from home, or drunk, or rebelling. I was getting a tattoo as a constant reminder of Grace. It had been five months since Grace died. In her own words, she was five and seven-twelfths that April. In the past, she had planned her own elaborate birthday parties. For her third birthday she had a tea party; for her fourth, a costume party. On her fifth birthday—her last one—she gathered her friends into a parade and marched around the neighborhood singing “Happy Birthday.” Now, her sixth birthday arrived without her to celebrate it.

  Birthdays of a child who has died are strange events. How can a mother ever forget the joy of that day? Her first glimpse of her baby? The lightness of a newborn in her arms? Grace was born on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s one hundredth birthday. She weighed six pounds three ounces, and already had the blue eyes that the doctor announced were “keepers” and wouldn’t change color. Her skin was the color of apricots. On all of her birthdays, including this most terrible one, I remembered how my labor began at dawn; how my father brought me his homemade stew for lunch; how, at the hospital, I spent an hour in a bathtub, then got out, dried off, and delivered my beautiful daughter twenty minutes later.

  Grace’s birthday dinner was always sliced cucumbers and shell pasta with butter and parmesan cheese. I had planned to have that dinner this year too, and rosé because pink was her favorite color. But somehow it didn’t seem enough. I needed to do something more, something that would last beyond this one day. When I decided that getting a tattoo was the perfect way to mark my daughter’s birthday, even the knowledge that it would be painful seemed right.

  In the tentative way that people approach a grieving mother, my cousins asked what I needed to help get through Grace’s birthday. As I told each one what I had decided to do, they decided to come with me and get tattoos too. On that sunny Saturday afternoon, we walked into the tattoo parlor and studied the books of designs. There were Chinese symbols and pinup girl
s and butterflies; broken hearts and beating hearts; flags, cars, scrolls, and skulls. But nothing seemed right.

  Melissa, the youngest of us and already boasting three tattoos, came up with the idea of a bell. A small pink bell at the ankle in honor of Grace’s self-proclaimed nickname, Gracie Belle, and her brother Sam called her Miss Belle. A bell was perfect. But in all of those books, there were no bells. So Gloria-Jean, the oldest of us, drew a bell for the tattoo artist. Her pen hesitated a moment, and then she added two small lines at the bell’s edge. These bells were ringing, and they would keep ringing.

  As I lay on the table, my eyes squeezed shut, I could not help but think of six years earlier, when I had laid down to bring Grace into the world. The needle buzzed and pierced my skin, sending burning pain though me. I felt myself begin to cry. “How bad is it?” Cousin Gina called to me. I swallowed hard, thinking of the pain of childbirth, the pain of loss. “Not bad,” I told her. “Not bad at all.”

  I have now passed as many birthdays without Grace as I did with her. I still serve shell pasta with a side of cucumbers on that day. I still pour rosé. I still remember how happy I was when I first held her in my arms, the way she looked up at me with a calm that newborns usually don’t possess. Once a year, on her birthday, I let myself feel that painful joy of having had Grace, and having lost her too soon. But every day, every single day, I look down the length of my leg to the inside of my ankle where that small pink bell sits, still ringing.

  YES. I LEARNED to knit.

  I got a tattoo.

  But mostly what I did was hide. I hid from people who maybe didn’t know what had happened. One day, Sam and I were in CVS and we saw a woman whose daughter had played soccer with Sam when they were both about four years old. Her younger daughter was named Grace and was the same age as our Grace. Sam stopped playing soccer after a year or so. I hadn’t seen the woman since. But now here she was in CVS with her daughters, her Grace. I crouched behind giant rolls of paper towels. I ran up an aisle as she entered it. My heart was beating fast while the sound of her voice floated across the store. Sam held my hand tight, unsure of why I was acting this way. He was getting used to my hiding. The week before I had hid behind my car to avoid a woman I knew pumping gas across from us. One day I practically jumped under the table at our local diner to avoid eye contact with two ballet moms whose daughters had arabesqued with Grace since they were all three.