Free-Range Knitter (15 page)

Last year, I decided to knit a wee baby sweater. I’d been screwed a couple of years ago when one of the mothers on a school committee had taken off her coat and given me three weeks’ notice and a baby shower invitation, and no way was I going up the river again. I would knit a nice red baby sweater. Red’s a lucky color and equally good for a boy or a girl, and then I’d have it in reserve. The next time someone had a pregnancy that was unplanned, as far as my perspective went, I’d have some recourse. I knit it up over the winter. I even went to the store when I was finished and got an appropriate gift bag, some tissue, and a blank card. I gloated all the way home. This year, I had it covered. This year, they could all be as pregnant as they wanted, and I would look great at that baby shower.

I waited for spring.

As expected, at the end of March the weather turned, and I started to look for who was expecting. Green things appeared along with my neighbors, everything emerging from winter. Coats and hats came off, boots were traded in for shoes, and I began to walk among my fellow humans again. Lo and behold, one day in the school yard, there came the mother of one of
my daughter’s dear friends, as pregnant as it was possible to be. We chatted, I congratulated her, and I enjoyed the conversation entirely. How pleasant it was to find out someone was expecting and not have to immediately begin working out how long I had to knit a baby sweater. This preparedness stuff was fun, I thought, and I even let the idea of doing some of the Christmas knitting ahead of time this year cross my mind, just so I could have more of this good feeling. We stood and chatted, talked about her due date (two weeks, but what did I care?), and laughed about how funny it is not to be able to know these things in the winter. “You would think,” she said “that no coat could hide these two!” She patted the broad expanse of her belly.

“Two?” I said, beginning to feel slightly less smug and perhaps a little nauseous.

“Oh yes,” she said. “It’s twins!”

Step 1.
Do a gauge swatch, then measure your head and do the math. Then have a fight with your mother, who has knit like, 10 million hats and indeed has written books about knitting. Make the argument about who would know better how many stitches to cast on. Insist that you would be the expert. Glare at your mother for daring to have an opinion. Never, ever admit that your mother may be halfway intelligent; eventually cast on the number she suggests but do so in secret. Do not speak civilly to your mother for some time.

Step 2.
Begin knitting circularly but pause to have a fight with your mother, this time insisting that you are knitting garter stitch, because you are knitting every row (and your mother admits that she told you that garter stitch means knitting every row). Refuse to entertain the suggestion that circular knitting may be different from flat knitting, and again insinuate that your mother knows nothing about
knitting. Maintain the fight until your mother looks sort of twitchy.

Step 3.
Tell your mother (who is pretty freakin’ annoyed at this point, partly because of the repeated inane hat fights but also because she has not been alone, not even to go to the bathroom, in days and days) that the hat seems “sort of twisty.”

Step 4.
Even though you have not listened to one word your mother has said to you in days, and even though you have never, ever just accepted something that your mother has said without challenging it and asking for an explanation, even though there is not one molecule in your body that believes that your mother could be right about anything, when your mother tells you that stuff on circulars is like that sometimes until you get an inch, inexplicably choose this time to believe her, question nothing, and walk away.

Step 5.
Return to your mother the next day. Come to her when she is tired, has a limp from spinning, has a work deadline, and has just poured her first glass of wine. Be sure that this time is long after your expected bedtime. Come to her when she is weak and her resistance is low. Come hostile, and come loud. Show her the hat, which is now very, very twisty.

When your mother bursts out laughing, trying to say something about “Join, being careful not to twist,” darken your expression and scream, “This is all your fault” and make all sorts of statements that begin with, “You said …”

Step 6.
When your mother tells you that there is no way out of this, that it has to be frogged, threaten a meltdown that makes Hiroshima look like a minor problem.

Step 7.
Insist that your mother fix it or you will never knit again.

Step 8.
Watch your innovative and clever mother thread the hat onto waste yarn, sew up and down a row of stitches, and cut between the lines. (Refuse to learn the concept of steek if at all possible, even though it is right in your face.) Important note: Even if you think it is a good idea, resist the urge to say so. Try instead to insist that it will never work, even while it is working.

Step 9.
Refuse to participate as your mother threads the hat back onto needles. Briefly smile, looking for all the world like a happy and content child, but hold the bitterness you feel for your mother deep in your heart.

Step 10.
Despite the fact that your mother has rescued you from your knitting disaster, immediately begin another fight with her, this time about how you can no longer knit the hat circularly. Mock her during her counterargument about how you were at the decreases and were going to have to switch to needles anyway and maintain that as usual, your mother has sucked the joy out of your life. Stomp away angry. Continue being a normal twelve-year-old, being sure to leave your mother emotionally tattered, exhausted, and confused.

Mum told me to go send you an e-mail thanking you for my birthday sweaters that came in the mail after I did my spelling but before I went for a bath so I am. Thank you very much for the sweaters. I like the blue one with the dog on it and the green one is a good color, but I think it might be itchy but Dad says he has been wearing your itchy sweaters his whole life and just to put a turtleneck under it so it doesn’t touch me. That’s what I will do I think.

I think this is a big sweater year for me because you sent me two and Randy gave me one, except for there was a train in the box too and he said that his mom gets sweaters at the store not knits them and I asked him why but he didn’t know. Also, Mum is knitting me a sweater, except hers is taking a long time and yesterday when she was trying to make the sleeve part she held it up against my arm and it was too short. Then she said a bad word and I told her that she had to put a quarter in the swear jar and she said that maybe she would just put a five in there
because I grow faster than she can knit and now she doesn’t have enough wool. She laughed, but I don’t think she really thought it was all that funny. Also, I grew out of my boots.

Dad said to her that it was nice that you had sent two sweaters to me for the winter because at the rate Mum goes maybe I wouldn’t have her sweater until the summer, and then Mum said that it must be nice that you have all that free time to knit and keep your house cleaner than our house and Dad said don’t start with that and Mum said, “Oh, I’m not starting,” and then she got a glass of wine and said she would be knitting in the bedroom and Dad said maybe it was a good time for Mum to have some time to knit so he will read me a story. Now he’s cleaning the kitchen because that is always what he does after him and Mum talk about you.

I’m going to have my bath now. I got mud on my hair climbing trees. Mum said she didn’t know there was mud in trees and neither did I.

See you at Christmastime. I will wear your sweaters until my other one is finished because I think Mum will like me to wear hers too. It is costing her a lot of money in the swear jar.

Love, your grandson,
Michael

P.S.: I think I almost have enough sweaters if you wanted to do something else for the next present.

I am a solitary writer. It’s taken me years to learn this, to stop beating myself up for not being able to work with noise and distraction. I envy people who can shut out the world and take advantage of found moments, or the time that the kids are watching TV, but I am not one of them. Neither am I a coffee-shop writer, who are those of the breed who, when they cannot find writing space in their homes, go to a coffee shop. I don’t know how they do it. The distraction of my fellow humans is too much for me. I watch people get their drinks, I listen to their conversations (I don’t mean to do it; I can’t help it). I wonder where they are going, wonder what they are doing. I stop doing my work and start people watching. I am distractible, and despite all efforts, I need quiet and a minimum of distractions, which is too bad because I really like coffee. An empty house is good and used to be something I could arrange. Joe worked at a studio outside the house, the kids were in school
all day, and I could have long stretches of uninterrupted time to think and write.

That system imploded last year when Joe began working from home and the girls hit a year where I have one in middle school, one in high school, and one in college, and I haven’t been alone for months. It’s like they’ve suddenly arranged to tag team me, making sure that I don’t have a solitary moment. I’ve searched the house for the secret schedule I know is here, because it’s just not possible for them to have achieved such total perfection and coverage. The other day I got up, and so did Meg and Samantha. They left for school, and I sat at my desk, only to hear Joe up and about moments later. It took him a couple of hours to make his calls and get himself sorted, and he walked out the door at 10:30, which in a remarkable coincidence was the time that Amanda’s alarm was set for. He went out; she got up and began her daily ablutions, then settled in to prepare her breakfast and study for an exam, taking a twenty-minute break to go buy some school supplies she needed, which she must have prearranged with Joe, since that’s when he came back to the house for lunch. Joe and Amanda exchanged sentry posts at 12:30, when Joe went back out to a gig and Amanda returned to use the phone and Internet and generally be in my way until 3:20, when she left for a late afternoon class. In what can only be described as an organized assault, 3:20 happens to be the time Meg gets home from school. Meg blew in with a pack of teenagers who ate everything in the kitchen (although I don’t
know why the sight of the prostrate writer sobbing in the next room doesn’t put them off their food) and then announced they were going to the pool for swim practice and blasted out the door at 4:00, just in time to say hi to Samantha. Sam told me about her day, then sat down to practice electric guitar until the whole family returned for a nice quiet evening around 6:00. Try and tell me that sort of coverage is a coincidence. It just can’t be. I have no idea why they would come up with a strategy that ruins the intellect and will to live of the person providing them with food and money, but I suppose it all may be part of a larger plan that I just haven’t come to understand yet.

While this system makes me absolutely wild at the best of times, the collusion of the whole family to keep me from writing makes me simply frantic as I approach a writing deadline. This time, I had a book (this book) due in just over a month and was falling behind on the work, mostly because of a crazy idea I had that I would be able to work a few hours a day. When I realized that the kids were about to go on winter break and would be home (in some combination or permutation twenty-four hours a day for ten days), I may have just about lost it. At that point, further time was taken from the writing schedule and lost to abject hysteria and closing doors more firmly (I hate to call it slamming) than was strictly necessary.

At this point, Joe had a masterstroke. He realized that if the book was going to get finished and I was going to be more than a mere husk of my former self, I needed some real time
to work, and work in a way that didn’t threaten the stability of everyone within a ten-mile radius. He decided I needed to be alone. (I maintain to this day that Joe’s best ideas spring from self-defense, this particular one from the very subtle hints I was giving him about my needs. Hints like me taking my laptop into the closet and dimming my screen so as not to be discovered, and the really understated way I kept screaming, “If I cannot get some time alone, this book will never be finished!”). He realized that he had a client who was sort of broke but wanted Joe to engineer and produce a record for him but was a little short on the traditional wherewithal. Joe happened to know that the guy’s family has a place in the woods, far from everywhere, a place where a writer could really get lonely and bored, and he worked out a trade. The guy got the start of his record made, and I got six days in the middle of nowhere in the dead of the Canadian winter.

When I say “nowhere” I don’t mean it as an offense to the place, and I don’t mean it was somewhere unimportant. It was a place in the woods where there was only a woodstove, electricity, and phone, and nothing for miles around. It sat in the center of about ninety acres, and if I wanted to see another person, I would need to hike a half mile to the road, then over four miles to the store, which was one of those crazy little stores that was the town liquor store, beer store, coffee shop, grocery store, post office, and gas station all in one small building. (The population of the entire township, if you add together all forty-eight
towns, is just over nine thousand people. I don’t know how many of them are knitters.) Here I would be a solitary writer, to almost a scary degree.

I was so thrilled to be going that I packed with a lot of glee. I didn’t bring a lot of clothes because I really intended to just sloth around in cozy old sweaters and a pair of yoga pants until the writing was done, and I relished the idea of being so free that I didn’t even have to expend the energy to put on decent clothing. (Every member of my family would tell you that this differs in no way at all from my ordinary days, when I sloth around writing in some of the world’s most tragic clothing, but the point of the cabin was that it would be appropriate.) In place of clothes, I packed, as I always do, a lot of yarn. A lot of yarn. I was going into the woods for six days, maybe eight, if the weather kept me there, and I brought enough yarn for four pairs of socks and an entire sweater, all of which, I am ashamed to tell you now, I thought I would complete while I was there. (Also, when you are a day’s hike through the forbidding snow to the closest yarn store, you want to make sure you’ve got your back covered.) No kids, no husband, no nothing. I would just be knitting and writing, writing and knitting. That could take a lot of yarn.