A Life in Stitches Read online

  WRAP AND TURN

  In the late nineties, a time of wild excess and growth for the Bay Area, I secured my first solo apartment. It was perhaps the worst time in history to look for affordable housing—the dot-com boom lasted from 1995 to 2000, and I was searching in 1997, during the roundest, most expensive time of the financial bubble. Most tiny studio apartments were renting at more than a thousand dollars a month, and I could afford less than half that. I’d already speculated with my own credit getting my undergrad degree, and I’d blown that endeavor quite spectacularly, so I was focused on living somewhere cheap in order to pay down some of my staggering debt. When I found my two-hundred-square-foot hovel in East Oakland for three hundred dollars a month, even with all its problems, I thought it was perfect.

  I was living alone! Finally! I bought my very own dish drainer. I looked forward to knowing that I’d be the only person to eat the ice cream in the freezer. And I’d be by myself, writing. By going to grad school for my master’s of fine arts in creative writing, my aim was to learn how to use words to make beautiful things—sentences—that could be strung together to make something useful—books—for other people. I was pretty sure a degree wasn’t going to make me lots of money, but I wanted to invent myself as a writer, the only thing I’d ever dreamed of becoming. I’d figure out how to make a living with the degree later, after I had it.

  My new apartment hung under a garage on the steep slope of an Oakland hillside. The kitchen was only big enough to hold a three-quarter-size stove and a mini fridge, and the space I liked to call the sitting room was no more than four feet long by three feet wide. I could hold out my arms and touch both side walls. The ceiling was so low I could press my hands flat above me without rising up on tiptoe.

  But it had a separate bedroom, and even though it wouldn’t hold more than my desk and a twin bed, the mere fact that it wasn’t a studio felt like the height of luxury. The bedroom jutted out from the sitting area, standing on stilts twelve feet above the ivy-covered slope below. Surrounded by trees on three sides, sitting at my computer, staring into tangles of greenery, I could convince myself that I wasn’t a student living in an urban metropolis but a writer honing her craft alone in the forest.

  While my friends joined start-ups and learned about wine, I planted my first garden with artichokes, tomatoes, basil, and nasturtium. It did wonderfully, and I adored sitting on my porch, smelling the jasmine I’d put in. My rental rate, however, reflected the care put into the property upkeep by my real-estate-speculator landlord. During the course of my stay, the apartment suffered creeping mold, a tarantula invasion (yes, real tarantulas covered in red hair), an electrical fire, and many, many blocked sewer lines due to tree roots tangled in the pipes. While flushing, I’d frequently hear a gurgle just before the toilet started gushing waste into the backyard.

  But I handled all of that myself when my landlord wouldn’t return my calls. I could kill huge spiders, even furry ones. The fire was a small one, quickly extinguished, and the toilet…well, I had Roto-Rooter on speed dial.

  What almost did me in, however, was the cold.

  Normally I don’t get cold. I’m usually the last person to put on a sweater and the first one to strip it off. But during the time I lived in my Oakland tree house, I couldn’t warm up. Even in summer when it was ninety degrees outside, the rooms sucked the coldness out of the hill they were built into, and the damp crept into my bones in a way I’d never felt before. Winter, with its constant fog and rain, was awful. I never managed to fix all the holes surrounding the door and windows, and the curtains flapped as chilling winds outside swept in. Of course, I wasn’t living in Alaska. I wasn’t even near the Sierras. We didn’t have snow. I wasn’t ever in danger of freezing to death, but that didn’t stop me from complaining that I might.

  I tried just about everything to keep warm: fleece blankets, an electric blanket, hot showers. I had a space heater that wheezed while emitting the smallest amount of heat imaginable, and some days I resorted to baking just so my miniature oven would heat up the small space. I learned how to make bread that first winter in an effort to stay warm. But nothing worked as well as wearing good old simple layers. And the best, warmest layers were made of wool.

  Shivering at my desk, I wore two sweaters, two layers of sweatpants, and three layers of wool socks. As a final layer, I wrapped my terry cloth robe around myself and watched my breath between writing sentences. Realizing I didn’t actually own enough woolen items, I sat on my wee green couch, only big enough for me and my cat, Digit, and knitted out of desperation. But without room for storage, it had been a while since I had stockpiled yarn, and after I’d made two hats (which I wore at the same time, pulling one over the other), I ran out of yarn.

  Back then, my budget didn’t even have room for cheese that didn’t come in a yellow block. When I wasn’t sitting at the tree house’s window attempting to write the Coldest Great American Novel, I was slinging hash at the Oakland Grill, a popular breakfast joint downtown in the produce district. My customers were well-dressed young people my age who were buying lofts in Jack London Square and talking about mind share and venture capital. They didn’t notice me except when they needed more mimosas brought to their booths. It took a long time to pool the dollar tips into what I needed to pay bills, and there wasn’t much left over for frivolous purchases. (I’ll admit there was, usually, enough for a drink or two after work down at Merchant’s, the blue-collar dive bar in the produce district that the tech industry kids were too scared to walk into.)

  Only, then, more than alcohol or other frivolous purchases, I needed wool. And I needed it cheap.

  Inspiration came while I was shopping with a friend in a department store. It wasn’t my kind of place—it sold purses worth more than my first two cars put together. Janice, a very successful tech writer for a microchip company in Silicon Valley, was in the fitting room, and I was wandering around, idly touching racks full of things I couldn’t afford, when my fingers hit it: a cashmere sweater on the sale rack, thick and warm. Even on sale, it was still out of my price range, but I yanked at its seams, peering at its construction.

  When she came out of the dressing room, I looked at her in amazement. “I could take this apart.”

  “Why?” She looked horrified as she examined the label. “It’s cashmere.”

  “That’s the point. It’s an ugly fit, and even on sale it’s fifty bucks, so I’m not buying it. But if I did, I could take it apart and make something else. Look here—it’s been machine knitted in pieces. That means it would unravel into cashmere yarn!”

  Janice looked around to see if anyone had heard us. “I’ll get it for you, but only if you don’t take it apart. You can’t buy a sweater in order to make a different sweater.”

  “That’s exactly what I want to do.” I didn’t let her buy it for me, though. I had a better idea. I could find cheaper sweaters. I wasn’t my frugal parents’ daughter for nothing. “I’m going to Goodwill. Wanna come?”

  “No,” she said, getting out her Platinum Card. “Thanks.”

  I went on my own, and I was right. The sweaters at the thrift store were plentiful and cheap. Most of them were acrylic—this was California, after all, not Alaska. But in among the tacky holiday sweaters decorated with snow men and wreaths were genuine woolen prizes that made my eyes light up brighter than a kid finding a bike under the Christmas tree. I pushed aside a Santa sweater and found an oversized fisherman’s sweater made of cream-colored wool with a small brown stain at the neck. I figured that I wouldn’t need all the yarn anyway and that I could just throw that blemished bit out when I unraveled to it. I was right—I re-knit that garment into a smaller gansey that fit me perfectly. An Old Navy men’s sweater that was hideous in its drop-shoulder construction yielded enough yarn to make a fitted cardigan and a matching hat. My thrift store finds were my own personal Christmas morning, come early.

  While the new sweaters helped, I was still cold. I was knitting my hands off, yet so b
undled up that I could barely bend my arms to hold the needles, the ineffective space heater clicking and sighing at my feet. And I could still see my breath. I’d move from the couch, where my knitting was, to my desk, where I’d peck out more sentences while jiggling my legs in an effort to generate heat. It helped when Digit sat on my lap, but sometimes he shivered too. To combat the frigid air, I needed something more, something bigger.

  At this point, I had a collection of thrift store sweaters and, one by one, I frogged them (so called for the sound it makes when you rip it, rippit), snipping seams and winding the crimped yarn into unequal balls. I cast three hundred stitches onto a forty-four-inch size seven needle, and I knitted back and forth, making a simple garter stitch blanket, changing colors every four rows. The narrow strips of color gradually layered on top of each other in stripes that I found soothing.

  And the best side effect of knitting a blanket? No matter who you’re planning on warming with it in the end, as soon as it’s more than about twenty inches long, it keeps you warm while you knit. I grew to love the weight of it on my lap, and Digit ducked under it, sleeping in the pocket of warmth created between my thigh and the couch. I kept it with me as I shuffled between couch and desk, knitting stitches when I was stumped for words, and when it got long enough to be called done, I put it on the bed— and started another one. During those cold years, I felt like I was the only one in the world doing what I was doing. Surely someone else in the Bay Area at that time had to be writing, knitting, cooking, and gardening, but I didn’t know her.

  At school, I was surrounded by people who could afford to be in an expensive grad program and just focus on their degree. Sure, some of them tutored on the side, but I was the only student I knew who had to work. I served coffee and biscuits to dot-commers who were so casual with money that they’d sometimes leave fifty-dollar tips on a twenty-five-dollar meal (Yay! My utilities were paid for a month!). I drove a crappy Ford Festiva with a broken tape deck and joked that if I had two I’d have roller skates. I’m not ashamed to admit that I really had no idea how speculation worked in the dot-com industry that surrounded me. I just knew not to drive south on Interstate 880 in the mornings, or I’d sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic, surrounded by new Saturns and Saabs heading to Silicon Valley. In my chilly tree house, I felt isolated—was I screwing my life up? Doing it all wrong?

  I tried not to worry about it. I had to believe that my way was the right way for me. I had a hunch what I was writing wouldn’t turn out to be, actually, the Great American Novel, but I told myself one never knew. I kept writing and I kept hoping I’d figure out what I was doing. The blankets I knitted weren’t actually that attractive, but I kept knitting because they were warm. I believed in my broke, indebted, tree house-living self, even while I sat on the porch next to my artichoke plant watching the Roto-Rooter guy try to figure out the drains again.

  I graduated just before the dot-com crash. I left my ivory tower and got a real job, with benefits. I could afford to move into an apartment with a real heater. I had too many blankets even for me, and a few of them went back to the same thrift store where they’d lived in a former incarnation. I bought a used car that had power windows and a CD player. As I moved ever so slowly more upward and mobile, others came down in the crash, and we all hung out in the same bars, the same cheap breakfast places, just like we all splurged on a nice meal every once in a while. More of my friends starting growing vegetables and making their own pasta from scratch.

  I was still knitting, of course. While socks grew from my needles, for the first time people stopped laughing at my grandma-hobby and started asking, “Hey, is that hard?” No, I’d tell them. “Could you show me?” Sure, I’d say, even though I’d always been a terrible teacher. “With all those knits, you must never feel the cold,” they’d say.

  I’d shake my head. I wasn’t cold, not anymore.

  BACKSTITCH

  While cruising the yarn world on my laptop some years ago the word Ashburton jumped out at me as if it were blinking neon. Ashburton, a tiny town in the South Island of New Zealand, is the home of the famed Ashford spinning wheel, as well as my mother’s childhood home. I immediately ordered wool to make her a sweater. It wouldn’t be fancy. Made of rugged, stiff wool, it would be brown with blue and green stripes. It would be boxy, knitted in garter stitch—nothing delicate or intricate in its design—and would match the sturdy woman I was making it for. I loved my mother, of course. She was my little mama. But I didn’t know her very well, and I decided that by knitting her a sweater out of New Zealand wool, I might get a better understanding of where she came from.

  Mom didn’t share memories freely, but still we tried to coax as many stories about her life on her father’s sheep farm as we could. I knew, for example, that she loved dogs but was never allowed to have one as a pet—to her father, dogs were meant to work, not meant to be indoors. I was pretty sure she’d told me once that it had been bitter cold when she’d been away at boarding school in Timaru as a child, but later I couldn’t remember if this was a true detail gleaned from her or one I’d imported into my memory from reading Jane Eyre.

  As a child, I loved picturing my mother in such a completely different environment—she had known lambing and shearing and all things wooly. She’d been allowed to help when she could, but since her father died while she was still young, that wasn’t often. My grandfather was a mystery to me—I could barely imagine him. All I could picture was the man I called Grandpa George, my mother’s stepfather. To me, George was my grandfather and her only father, and to think that she’d had a different one before him boggled my brain.

  “What was your father like?” I asked my mother when I was about sixteen. She was at the sink, rinsing dishes, and I was at the kitchen table, ostensibly working on math homework. I longed for anything to take my mind off the agony of my textbook. I didn’t really expect an answer. Mom was deft at sidestepping questions.

  But this time she paused, placing the plate in the dish drainer deliberately before answering me. “His left hand was hard like a farmer’s, but his right hand was soft. Like a woman’s.”

  “Why?”

  “Every night as the sheep came in, he’d count them to make sure they were all there. As they came past the stile with the dogs driving them, he’d touch the back of each one. His right hand was always coated in lanolin.” Mom looked out the kitchen window into the night, as if seeing something that I couldn’t see, something that I wanted to understand.

  “What was it like, living on the sheep farm?”

  She looked back down at the sink. I’d pushed too far. “How’s the math going?” she asked. The subject was closed.

  Still, it was more than I usually got. It never struck me how little I knew my mother until a mutual friend commented on their relationship. Ruth was the manager of the bookstore where Mom and I both worked.

  “You know, I think your mom’s one of my best friends,” she said. “Jan knows everything about me. And I don’t know one damn thing about her.”

  I was vaguely surprised and didn’t understand why she’d said it. Then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t know my mother either. I had a little knowledge of her upbringing and her travels before she met my father, but when it came to stories, the kind that everyone tells, the once-upon-a-time stories, I didn’t know any. She didn’t tell them.

  So when I found yarn from Ashburton made from Corriedale sheep, the very breed her father had raised along with South Downs, I was elated. I imagined that perhaps the sheep that bore the wool I bought had grazed the same land her father had tended. The sheep could very literally be the progeny of the ones she’d known as a child. Finally I’d found a gift I could give her that had real meaning.

  Christmas came. Mom opened her package. She pulled the sweater out and called it lovely.

  “It’s from Ashburton,” I cried.

  “Really?”

  “From Corriedales. Like your dad raised!” I waited
for her to yelp with joy, to cover me in kisses, to weep from emotion.

  But instead she smiled and said, “Oh, lovely. It’s lovely. Thank you.” And that was that.

  She wore the sweater sometimes. I have a picture of her with me and my sister standing on her back porch in the sunshine—all three of us are wearing sweaters I knitted, she in the brown New Zealand wool one. My mother was the kind of person who wore her clothes for decades. If a piece of clothing had any life in it at all, she kept putting it on her body until the holes were irreparable, and then the clothing was cut into strips and used as rags.

  After she died too young at sixty-eight, my sisters and I proved to be good at divvying up her possessions. I’d heard stories of families ripped apart when heirs fought over estates, but we didn’t. We went through her jewelry calmly in a fair distribution. We were equitable when claiming favorite dish towels.

  If necessary, however, I was prepared to lock my sisters in a room and run out the front door with the thing I wanted clutched to my chest: the knitting. I wanted the green vest I’d given to her when it turned out to look ridiculous on me, and I got it. I wanted the hand-spun lace scarf I’d designed for her, and my sisters let me have it. And I kept waiting, as we went through her things, to find the Ashburton sweater.

  We didn’t find it. It wasn’t anywhere in the house, not in the closets or the cedar chests. Her old acrylic sweaters were all there, including the cream one with the coffee stain in the middle of the chest, and the gray striped one with the holes in the sleeves that had never fit her well. But the one I made her was gone.

  She wouldn’t have given it to anyone. She wouldn’t have put it in a bag for Goodwill. The only logical answer left was that she had lost it. Jan Herron, however, did not lose things. If not in the ignition, her keys were in her purse in the same side pocket. Her reading glasses rested in their case next to the bed. She’d rarely misplaced as much as a pencil.