Yarn Harlot (19 page)

Where does this leave a knitter? I haul out virtually every men’s pattern I own, all the books, the magazines, the leaflets, and the stuff I’ve printed out from the Internet. I pore over them for hours and discover that once you apply all the rules that I’ve gleaned, out of the hundreds of contenders, there are only a handful that pass muster. I hunt up some yarn, some plain gray wool (“steel” gray, not “dove” gray), and cast on a sweater for Joe, a sweater so plain that I’ll likely have to knit it in small chunks to avoid putting myself into a coma. As I cast on the bazillion stitches it will take to go around Joe’s forty-eight-inch chest, I think of the final irony. Not only do men want sweaters so plain they could give you narcolepsy, not only do they want them in boring colors without even a little “yarn over” to keep a knitter
on her toes, but they also want them in a yarn with no interest. The irony, I think, as I embark on the first of a hundred thousand mind-numbingly monotonous rounds, is not that we knitters are driven to knit for them despite all of this, oh no … the final crushing blow is that they are so often, much, much bigger than the knitter.

S
he was cantankerous, unkind, harsh, ill-tempered, and tidy. (It’s the tidy ones that really get to me.) There are lots of other words for the kind of woman she was, but in my family we were discouraged from using that kind of language. We just said that she was “A hard woman to love.” That doesn’t mean that no one loved her, just that it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. She was my grandmother and looking back, I realized that I loved her because she was in my family, because that was the expectation, and because, well, I supposed that at some point it became a force of habit.

I remember a lot about my nana. In my first memory I am very young. My mother tells me I would have been three and a half and my brother was a toddler. We were sleeping over at my nana’s house because my parents had somewhere fancy to go. We didn’t want to stay. I have a vivid memory of my brother screaming and screaming in the other room for much of the night. My mother tells me that the next morning, when they
arrived to pick us up, James was still crying, and my nana said he was “stubborn and a crybaby.” It wasn’t that she hadn’t taken care of us. It wasn’t as though she had endangered us or had been awful; she just hadn’t answered his cries. It was his bedtime and that was it. She had put him in bed and walked away. No concern for a little guy in a strange place without his mum. She’d closed the door and left.

It was always like that. It was not that she was cruel; she was operating on her own system of rules and balances. We could watch TV, but we weren’t allowed to change the channel. (I believe that this is actually the root of my deep-seated and unreasonable loathing for
Coronation Street.)
You could sit on the couch but you had to keep your feet on the floor. She would make you dinner, but it was awful, right down to the spumoni ice cream that she served us. Like everything else, the ice cream was an enigma. She loved her grandchildren and bought ice cream for us when we came, but she wouldn’t go all the way and buy ice cream that we liked. It was like her affection for us was an enormous game of “keep-away.” My entire childhood there was not one conclusive piece of evidence that she loved me. Hints maybe, but no proof.

Take the knitting. My nana was a professional knitter who worked for a shop. People would come in and choose their pattern and yarn; the shop would then send it out to my nana to knit up. She was very good and very fast. She knit for us too. Incredible things, things I look back at now with awe. Dresses, sweaters, a pleated skirt and sweater set, a pants suit. A pants suit! Can you imagine how long it would take to knit a kid a
pants suit? We still have some of the things that she knit and they are technically spectacular. They represent hours and hours and hours of painstaking expert knitting. There is a sweater there that was knit out of fine, fine yarn and I can feel my hands cramp up just looking at it. She had six grandchildren and we were all showered with knitted gifts. That’s love isn’t it? You look at all that knitting and finally say, “Aha!” There’s the proof. No one would spend that much time on knitting for you if she didn’t love you. Knitting an entire wardrobe for a grandchild must be an unqualified expression of adoration and affection—except for one thing.

It’s all horrible. Each one of the pieces was a masterwork of knitting skill, an homage to breathtaking ability with the needle, a veritable tribute to dexterity—and each one of them was so unbelievably ugly and uncomfortable that you’d wonder if she wasn’t out to punish us. They were the stuff of nightmares. If the color was good, the neck would choke you; if the neck was good, the color was so bad that you would wonder where she bought yarn that surprising. If the color wasn’t too bad and the style was okay, then you could be assured it was four sizes too small. There was always something.

I remember getting a birthday present at her house. It was wrapped in pink paper with a ribbon and a bow and I still can feel the tickly feeling in my stomach as I unwrapped it. The anticipation, the hopefulness! A dolly? A set of books? My grandfather had made me a dollhouse and I wished more than anything for tiny furniture to go in it. Breathlessly I opened the crisp white box inside and lifted the pink tissue paper … and there it
was. A knitted sweater and skirt made out of scratchy acrylic the exact color of barf. It was covered with cables that looked like stacked hearts and it was the perfect size; it would have been beautiful, it would have been proof of her affection, except that it was the horrible yellow-green-brown color of barf.

That’s the way it was with her. There was always a catch, always the moment where you would look at it, then at her, and wonder to yourself why someone would spend hundreds of hours knitting you a birthday present that would make you look like a hairball. She was baffling.

It only got worse. Once I had this stuff, this token of her esteem, which would leave me wondering, “With knitters like this, who needs enemies?” the real horror would begin. I
had to wear it.
My grandmother had knit this uncomfortable scratchy barf-colored sweater and skirt because she loved me, my mother explained. Now, to show her how much I loved her, I would wear it. It was this vicious circle. She knit them because she felt she had to, we wore them because we felt we had to, and quite frankly, I don’t think anybody felt the love.

Our relationship never improved. I never liked her and she never liked me, I didn’t recall a hug or a kiss, and in fact, I didn’t have any sort of evidence that she ever loved me at all, except for one thing.

It was summertime, and I sat in the warm, quiet rose garden in her backyard, under a willow at the side of the yard in a wooden lawn chair. I remember that my feet didn’t touch the ground. Even now, more than thirty years later, I can remember the exact details of everything around me. I’m wearing a blue
dress, and my nana is beside me and her dress is white and green, one of those Sears catalog housedresses with no waist. In my lap is a ball of yellow yarn and in my hands are cream-colored plastic needles, and I am knitting for the very first time. I remember every moment. I remember wrapping the yellow yarn around, bringing the needle through the loop, and the thrill of dropping the old loop off. There was something about it that was immediately right—instantly satisfying and spiritually moving. I was taking one thing and turning it into another. It was magic, it was orderly, and it was the first time in my life that I felt a sense of mature accomplishment. I was four, and I was
making something.
I felt powerful. I remember those moments the way that I’ve heard other people speak of moments of religious epiphany. When I finished a whole row of knitting, I proudly laid the work on my lap and looked up at my nana. “You missed a stitch,” she said, and showed me the one. “Keep going.” And with that, she went into the house.

Well, I kept going. It’s a long time now since I gave up trying to figure my grandmother out, a long time since I stopped wearing barf-colored sweaters in a futile attempt to make her love me or to make myself feel what I was supposed to. It’s been a long, long time since I accepted that not every grandmother bakes cookies, tucks you in, and is soothing, loving joy. Now, long after that “hard to love woman” is dead, my whole house is full of knitting and yarn and needles that give me so much happiness that I occasionally (well, maybe more often than that) wonder if I’m normal. The irony is not lost on me that a woman with whom I shared only mutual dislike, a woman whom I loved for no good
reason I can think of, and who never once did anything that made me feel completely accepted, now has a legacy all over my house. I wonder then, if her love was some strange genetic thing, like baldness or being nearsighted, and it was there and real and undeniable, but like chromosomes, it was invisible to the naked eye and that like baldness, it simply skipped a generation.

My grandmother’s love for me and the proof I always wanted is finally something that I can see, as I fold the soft green sweater, knit with the stitches she taught me, into a box for my daughter’s birthday. It turns out that she gave me one lasting, invaluable gift, after all.

Ten quick and easy ways to make a knitter angry:

1. Consistently refer to her work as a “cute hobby.”
   

2. When the knitter shows you a Shetland shawl she knit from handspun yarn that took 264 hours of her life to produce and will be an heirloom that her great-great grandchildren will be wrapped in on the days of their birth, say, “I saw one just like this at Wal-Mart!”
   

3. On every journey you take with your knitter, make a point of driving by yarn shops but make sure you don’t have time to stop. (This works especially well if there is a sale on.)
   

4. Shrink something.
   

5. Tell her that you don’t know why she knits socks, that it seems silly when they are only $ 10 for five pairs and they’re just as good.
   

6. Tell the knitter that you are sorry, but you really
   can’t feel
   a difference between cashmere and acrylic.
   

7. Tell her that you aren’t the sort of person who could learn to knit, since you “can’t just sit there for hours.”
   

8. Quietly take one out of every set of four double-pointed needles that she has and put them down the side of the couch. (You can’t convince me that you aren’t doing this already.)
   

9. If you are a child, grow faster than your knitter can knit. Requesting intricate sweaters and then refusing to wear them is also highly effective.
   

10. Try to ban knitting during TV time, because the clicking of the needles annoys you.
    

I
have uncovered a plot. For years I have surmised that there was something going on. I didn’t share my suspicions with other knitters since I was worried about causing mass panic without being confident of the facts. I have now gathered enough evidence to share the following with you.

It would appear that a group I have named TAKE (Team Against Knitting Enjoyment) is active in my household. I am writing to warn you in case a similar team is operating in your house too. Some of you may be unfamiliar with TAKE, but most of you will either have had personal experiences or know a victim of its baby-led splinter group TAPES (Team Against Parents Experiencing Sleep). I have established that TAKE has four operatives inside my household, and has definitely infiltrated my friendships and extended family.

TAKE is insidious and will stop at nothing to keep you from knitting. Some of their more advanced agents will spend years insinuating themselves your life, even living with you, in order
to lull you into their antiknitting web. Some agents are small and innocent-looking, posing as mere children; even your own offspring may be suspect. These tiny charming agents can disrupt many, many hours of knitting time. Do not allow their friendly manner and cute ways to lull you into a false sense of security.

Be alert to the following clues that TAKE may be active in your home:

The ringleader is the trickiest. This advanced agent appears unafraid to invest years of his or her own life maneuvering into a position to spoil your knitting enjoyment, dating you for a prolonged period of time or even entering into unions such as marriage to ensure a position of influence. He or she may even appear to support you in your desire to knit, softening you up by calling you “dear” or “honey,” and perhaps saying things like, “What are you knitting? That’s really nice.” He or she may even seem to take your side against the other agents, saying, “Go play outside, kids, your mom is trying to knit.” Do not be sucked into the web of deceit. Watch for the subtle indications that this person is a TAKE member. For example, after sending the children outside, ostensibly so you can concentrate on your knitting, does he or she then interrupt you every two minutes? Expect meals? Need you to find his or her shoes? Attempt to engage in marital relations? This agent will stop at nothing to distract you from your knitting mission.

Other operatives may flatter you or even request knitted objects of your making. Watch out for this insidious phrase: “Wow, Mom, that’s really cool; will you make me one?” If you pay close attention to their deeper intentions there will be indications that
they are insincere. For example, after requesting a sweater, do they then make it nearly impossible for you to knit it? Common strategies include choosing a yarn you hate using, patterns that are outrageously expensive or out of print, bizarre fitting requests, or color choices that may actually cause permanent brain damage to the knitter. A classic example would be a child (read: operative) who would like an unreasonably complex Aran sweater knit out of acrylic in a neon variegated colorway, with the neckline adjusted so it isn’t “choky.” Other operatives may catch the flu, lose their mittens, or pester you with requests for homework help. The smallest of these agents is the most effective, especially those weighing less than twenty pounds, since they are willing to get up in the night requesting feeding or comfort, thereby making you too tired to knit. Realistically, these small operatives have less effectiveness than the ringleader, since they must eventually “grow up” and move out of the house. Be aware that while this would appear to solve the problem, in reality they have just completed their training and are moving on to new assignments with other knitters.