A Life in Stitches Read online

  I shook my head. “Nope. Knitting a sweater.”

  “But it’s fun. Dad said he’ll make you a pair of stilts too. He wants to sell them if they work out. Will you be done soon?”

  “Probably.”

  Six months later, I was still dragging that blue yarn around. Kids at school teased me when it trailed out of my backpack. The electric color that had looked so mod, so exciting, at the yard sale now just looked like something a grandmother would crochet for a tissue-box cover.

  Dad watched my hands as I stubbornly knit while we watched TV.

  “So, you’re pretty fast, huh?”

  “Yep,” I said. At night, I liked to sit in our living room and use the window glass as a mirror, watching my hands flash. Seen in reverse, it made them look like someone else’s hands, not attached to me. They went so quickly, moved so nimbly. I was vain about the way I knitted. “I’m very fast.”

  “How much can you get for a sweater?”

  I shrugged.

  “But you think you can really make money doing that?” he asked.

  “How’s the bumper-sticker business?”

  We grimaced at each other and went back to watching M*A*S*H.

  Of course, it was the ugliest sweater in creation. For starters, I made a huge error with the neckline. When it said to bind off loosely, I didn’t think it was necessary. I didn’t want my stitches to be saggy—the garment already looked wonky enough. And I was in a blazing hurry. So I sewed it up using an unholy combination of backstitch and double (double!) crochet, thinking, Just these last final steps of binding off, and the sweater will be done! I’d pull it over my head, and my doubts would go away, and though it looked pretty strange on my lap, I was sure it would look great on.

  I bound off. I wove the end in so completely, so thoroughly, that it was completely hidden. I was good.

  Then I slowly stood up.

  I tried to pull it over my face.

  It was impossible.

  I hadn’t bound off loosely enough. After all those months of work, I couldn’t get my head through the neck hole. And I couldn’t even find where I’d so carefully woven in the end to undo it.

  I panicked and pulled harder. I managed to get the sweater over my head—the skin on my face was nearly scraped off from the rough acrylic, but it was on. My mother stifled her gasp when she saw me and managed to say weakly, “Well done.” My sisters laughed and laughed.

  To make matters worse, I dropped a few stitches right at the bust line, and somehow I thought it would be okay to sew them closed with white thread, thinking it would be invisible from the front. I was wrong. An early-developing eleven-year-old girl needs absolutely no help drawing attention to her bust. The sleeves were one step away from lace and barely stayed together with all the yarnovers. And the whole thing was three sizes too big for me.

  I was deathly nervous to show it to my father. He’d had even higher hopes than I had, and I’d screwed it up. I was an entrepreneurial-knitting failure. Whatever fantasy I’d entertained to make money by knitting died a rapid death in front of the mirror. I made my way into Dad’s hobby room, where he was whittling wood into crib toys, a pipe clenched between his teeth, wood-shavings at his feet. My scratched face blazed.

  “So that’s your prototype?” he asked.

  I tugged at the collar, which was so tight it made breathing difficult. “I don’t think I’m going to make sweaters for money.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a good color on you.”

  I looked at him in surprise. “You’re not mad?”

  “About what? You finished it.” He nodded and pulled on his pipe. “I think that’s great. Hey, what do you think about a mobile carwash business?”

  I never wore the sweater once I finally got it back off, taking another layer of my face with it. I was already unpopular enough with my glasses and braces and tendency to do things like knit—I didn’t want to make things worse with the kids at school. But I had finished my first sweater. It didn’t make me cool. And knitting wouldn’t make me money.

  But my dad, who’d started and scrapped at least four new businesses since the start of that year, thought it was pretty neat. I could see in his eyes that he believed I’d done something great, just because I finished it. And I thought it was pretty great too: I’d learned how to follow a pattern and how to create a whole garment, using simple sticks and string. I understood, finally, his excitement about starting things and the satisfaction that could be gained from carrying them through to completion, even when they were obvious disasters. Because when I looked at my awful sweater, the first thing I thought was, Oh, crap. The second thing I thought was, How can I make the next one better?

  Hope always came right behind disaster in my dad’s world—if the poor man’s gas grill cobbled together from an old hibachi and a propane tank didn’t work, then it just meant that he’d have to come up with the next big million-dollar idea. And the idea would come. It always did.

  We both sat in the living room that night watching M*A*S*H. with unseeing eyes. I wondered if it would be hard to knit slippers, and if there might possibly be a market for them. They’d be faster to knit than sweaters, that was sure. He was probably plotting something that involved selling tooled leather at the flea market. Like father, like daughter. And that was all right by me.

  SLIP KNOT

  When I was twelve, my father, who’d always had the feet of a wanderer, got a job overseas. My family moved from California to a tiny island in the middle of the Western Pacific. Saipan, just twelve miles long by three miles wide, was a star in the Northern Mariana constellation, and from our living room we looked over the lagoon and out into the dark blue waters of the deepest trench in the world. While we lived in paradise, I was trying to figure out how to grow up.

  We’d packed our suitcases full of essentials—soap, cutlery, plates—and shipped everything else. We lived on the island for months before the boat delivered our other precious belongings: books, records, and games. But I’d made a crucial mistake when packing. At twelve, I wasn’t very good at planning for the future. When told I could ship my own box, I’d filled it with books, blank journals, construction paper, and crayons. Then, at the last minute, still wobbling on the fence-rail between childhood and adolescence, I’d added my beloved stuffed cat. Between the books and the plush toy, my yarn didn’t fit, so I left it behind with the rest of the items in storage.

  Saipan’s average temperature was eighty-four degrees, and the ocean water was eighty-two. We got used to the warmth and felt chilled on stormy days when the thermometer dipped into the upper seventies. My sisters and I spent our mornings in homeschool, our mother strict about start hours and homework, and we spent our afternoons snorkeling in the lagoon.

  My new best friend, Tammy Moen, lived across the street. We were both wild for crafts, any kind (I remember in particular a bloody incident that included streamers and a pair of scissors), but I couldn’t stop thinking about knitting. I missed the snick-snick of the needles slipping against each other and the feeling of yarn dragging across my little finger. I even missed the eternal dent in my first finger that came from shoving too-tight stitches off the end of the left needle. I was homesick for knitting. When I realized my mistake in leaving my yarn three thousand miles behind, I plunged myself into other crafts, trying to fill the void. I took classes at the local recreation department in palm-frond basket weaving and traditional Chamorro beading, but the delicate work wasn’t enough to satisfy me. Joeten, the local supermarket, carried latch hook rug kits featuring hideous leopards and clowns. The stabbing motion of driving the hook through the mesh wasn’t anything like knitting and only frustrated me.

  Then I learned that Grandma Moen, who lived in the one airconditioned room of Tammy’s concrete house, was holding. Along with cases of cigarettes, a gross of playing cards, and hundreds of Harlequin romances, she’d brought yarn to the island when they’d left the States a year before. She didn’t have much, but she was generous with what
she did have, letting me “borrow” skeins from her if I had a good reason.

  And boy, did I have a reason: knit gloves. I wanted them so badly I could almost feel them when I wiggled my fingers. Perhaps they weren’t at all practical for a tropical island. But in the island’s library, which only opened the third Saturday afternoon of every month, I’d found one thin pattern pamphlet. I had a choice between making gloves or a sweater, and I knew I couldn’t ask to borrow enough yarn to make a cardigan.

  Grandma Moen, who had lived in Minnesota and knew from cold, asked me what I’d do with gloves in eighty-two-degree heat. She stared at me piercingly, trying to see if I was worthy. Tammy was busy making a doll out of old pantyhose and wasn’t paying attention.

  “Someday I’ll live someplace cold,” I said. I didn’t know if it was the right answer, but I dreamed about being grown up, living in New York, walking through Central Park in the snow on my way to a fabulous party.

  “Would you like that?”

  I loved Saipan’s wet warmth, loved the way it felt on my face, and how the webs between my fingers never quite dried out. I loved the brilliant green of everything. I loved the almost constant warm rain that fell in the wet season. I even liked the drama of the typhoons that swept the island with regularity, the way Dad would put up the storm boards and we’d test the batteries in the radio. The truth was I never wanted to leave.

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to live in the snow someday.” This, too, was true.

  It was the right answer. She handed over the yarn.

  Something about the fiddliness of shaping the fingers after knitting the wide tube of the hand was inherently pleasing to me, and I caught on quickly to the technique. I made the first green glove within two days, and the second one went even faster. I put them on and chased my little sister with them, telling her that I had monster hands. Six-year-old Bethany squealed in delight and climbed the trunk of the flame tree to escape my grasp. I turned around and strutted toward the boonies, the jungle edge of our yard, imagining a handsome man helping me up by my gloved hand into his carriage. I couldn’t decide which was better, pretending to be a monster or dreaming about faceless men. Confused, I chose both.

  Shortly after I’d ripped out the gloves and started them over again, just to have something to knit, I got my first period. It was nothing like the books said it would be—it was messy, the cramps were painful, and God knows I’d have used tampons if I could have figured them out. But reading the applicator instructions by the light of a bathroom candle in the middle of one of the island’s frequent blackouts didn’t work out for me, and I couldn’t ask anyone—Tammy hadn’t gotten her period yet, and I would have died before asking my mother. It felt like I was misunderstanding something really important, and I felt ashamed and very young.

  But I knew what I was doing when I was knitting. The yarn, a thin acrylic sock-weight, resisted pilling as if it were made of iron. I knit and reknit those gloves until the morning Mom called them my security blanket. Her words horrified me. I didn’t need a childlike blankie for comfort—I was a woman now. I hid the knitting in a cardboard box under my bed. Just before I pushed it away to rest in darkness, I added the stuffed cat I’d shipped from home. I loved cuddling it at night, but grown-ups didn’t cuddle stuffed animals. So I wouldn’t either.

  Time moved on. Mom and Dad marked our heights against the wall next to the louvered windows in the living room. We celebrated Christmas with a pathetic branch from the ironwood tree—Dad drilled holes in it and stuffed more branches in them, gluing them in place. It was the ugliest tree I’d ever seen, and it made me cry. I suffered through my first crush: Mario at the post office had kind eyes, only nine fingers, and never once noticed me.

  I turned thirteen, and Dad decided twelve-year-old Christy and I were ready to learn how to drive. The quarried coral used in Saipan’s roads made them light pink and slick as sin in the rain. Dad gave us lessons on how to stop quickly—we’d go to an unused strip of old airfield and speed up in the old Suzuki, and then at some point he’d yell, “Panic stop!” The goal was to stop as quickly and cleanly as possible. Looking back, I can’t believe a) we never flipped the car, and b) that Dad thought this was a good idea. I thought it was a fantastic idea, and after six months of practice, I was allowed to drive places by myself if I promised to be very careful. That clinched it. I was a grown-up. Driving a car proved it.

  Early one September morning when Dad was off the island, we were woken by a phone call telling us to board up for the typhoon screaming across the Pacific in our direction. The western sea-facing windows of our house had no glass, only screens, so with help from neighbors, we covered them with plywood secured with heavy-duty six-inch nails. Then we took cover, hoping that the concrete walls and ceiling of our government house would hold strong. I thought it was exciting. I was the oldest daughter, and since Dad was gone, I was Mom’s right hand. I told my sisters that everything would be all right. The brave words felt good in my mouth.

  Supertyphoons—those with sustained wind-speeds more than one hundred fifty miles per hour—don’t occur often, but when they do, they devastate everything that gets in their way. Our tiny island lay directly in Supertyphoon Kim’s path, and she tore into the island with terrifying ferocity. The eight-foot pieces of plywood broke off from the house and shredded into splinters, and as the rain started to fly horizontally through the house, as the roof started to make ominous noises, my mother decided to evacuate us to the neighbor’s house. It was a short run, less than fifty yards, and Mom gave us strict instructions to drop flat to the ground if the wind tried to pick us up. She gave charge of Bethany to me, and my chest puffed with pride before it sank in fear again at the roar of the storm.

  The wind was so forceful inside the house that Mom could barely wrestle open the leeward door to shove us out. I tucked Bethany under my arm and ran—later, even though the wind had ripped off one of her tightly tied tennis shoes, she said she never felt it. Mom, despite her warnings to drop to the ground, was picked up and blown into a palm tree. Our neighbor crawled outside to drag her in, and we all huddled in the safest room until the eye passed over, the quiet terrifying in its suddenness. Then the wind returned, hitting us from the opposite direction. We learned later that the storm broke the island’s wind-speed meter at 212 miles per hour.

  When it was over, I walked behind my mother as we waded through our house, still knee-deep in water. I couldn’t admit it to anyone, but I only wanted one thing: the box under my bed. I wanted that yarn and, just as badly, I wanted that old plush cat. I wanted to knit, dreaming of when I’d wear my gloves in Central Park, and at the same time I wanted to curl up with the cat and close my eyes, staying safe and warm and dry under my mother’s watchful eye. I went first to my bed and pulled out the box, thrilled that the contents were only wet, that they hadn’t floated away.

  We didn’t have running water for a week. Terrified of spiders and snakes and centipedes, I hated nothing more than having to go into the boonies to dig a hole to use as a latrine, so I tried to eat and drink as little as possible. It was a childish reaction, and I was ashamed of myself, but I couldn’t help it. I was scared to be alone, half naked, in the jungle.

  I followed my mother’s lead, carrying clothes and food out into the now-beaming sun to lay them on the lawn to dry. Book by book, we spread their pages on the grass, trying to save beloved classics. It took days to set everything out, and I felt brave swallowing my tears like my mother did.

  We still had a week before my father would return from the States. I did what my mother asked me to, watching over Bethany and Christy when they wanted to play, and I helped clean and dry the house and our possessions as much we could. In daylight hours, I was strong. I think I was helpful. At night, without my father there to push back the black night, I was scared. Leaving the circle of candles in the living room and walking down the hall by myself, carrying one flickering candle to my bedroom, terrified me. Never scared of the dark before, I could
n’t walk in front of darkened mirrors while carrying my candle without being convinced something would rise in the black glass, something that would kill me. The bathroom at night, already the site where I dealt with the blood that I hated, with its scary mirror, horrible centipedes, and occasional tiny scorpion, became the most frightening place in the house. I didn’t feel grown up. I felt younger than six-year-old Bethany. She wasn’t afraid to go to the bathroom by herself. I longed for the feeling of yarn in my hands, but the gloves were still outside, drying with everything else. I wanted to remake them. I wanted a do-over. I wasn’t getting growing up right yet, and I wanted to give it another try.

  One by one, things dried on the grass outside. We stacked our dry but warped books and laid bricks on top to weigh them down and help flatten them back into shape. When my stuff was finally dry, I hugged the plush cat and put it back in its box. I picked up the gloves, thinking about how much time I’d put into them, again and again. I pictured myself ten years hence—at twenty-three, I would probably be a famous writer and have fabulous friends and many lovers, all of whom would kiss me as passionately as the heroes kissed the heroines in Grandma Moen’s romance novels. I might still knit, I decided, but by then I’d probably be knitting grown-up things: sweaters for boyfriends, fancy scarves for my friends. In retrospect, I can see that I wanted to leap directly from childhood to womanhood, and the in-between pauses made me feel stuck, as if I’d never get there.

  At that moment gloves felt childish to me, like the cat did. I realized that I didn’t need them anymore. I ripped the yarn back, rolling my former gloves into a neat ball. Every stitch I tugged out of the gloves was a wish. Every round I ripped represented another step I thought I was taking toward womanhood.

  And then, without asking myself why, I grabbed the stuffed cat out of its box and put it back on my bed. It couldn’t hurt to keep it close at night.