Free-Range Knitter (7 page)

The teacher was a serious sort, and that was fine with me because I was there to learn. The room contained a few other students, looms of all sorts, spinning wheels of all types, drum carders, hand cards, distaffs, and odd piles of fiber, and sitting there, in the middle of all of this incomprehensible stuff, was Denny. Denny is not supermodel material, which is not to say that she isn’t beautiful in a surprising way. She’s a little short, average weight, plain brown hair, even her age would be hard to pin down. She’s not old, nor young; she’s right in the middle, and she’d be hell to describe to a police sketch artist. There’s nothing remarkable about her—except, somehow, all of her. She was dressed, as she almost always is, in an outfit that defies description. Denny is one of those people who can wear whatever she wants and look grand. Denny can put on striped tights, a plaid skirt, a handknit sweater in a color that is not present in the stripes or the plaid, top it with a red velvet jacket and a white lace scarf, toss on German shoes, and look inspired. It’s a gift. If I put on the same outfit I would look crazy, or homeless, or both. I can spend forty-five minutes picking out my clothes,
and I will still look like I grabbed my outfit out of the dryer in the dark, but when Denny wears it, she looks artistic and creative and original. I’m standing in this class, dead serious and a little nervous, and here she comes, wearing I don’t know what, laughing, gesturing, making tea (when there was a huge “no food or drink” sign), breaking every rule that there was about everything, and I was taken aback. I didn’t know what to do with her. She was much too much for me, and that’s saying something, since I’m often accused of the same thing.

She was odd as fish, that lady, and my unease went on for weeks, and for a while there, if I’m being really honest, I can tell you that not only did I distrust Denny because she was an unknown quantity, but I think I actually disliked her for breaking the rules and getting away with it. Actually, not just getting away with it, but making the most of it, rising above it … thriving on it. Denny had more individuality in her little finger than I had in my whole body, and I was a little resentful. I wanted to be like that, so firmly me that I didn’t let anything stand in my way, and with that thought I caught the magic, and whether I wanted to or not, I started to admire her, and then to like her (quietly, and while she wasn’t looking), and then to genuinely love her and take her as a friend.

The magic was this: Denny is so uniquely, profoundly, and unapologetically herself that something crazy happens when you see her. Usually, when you meet someone remarkable like that, you are so awestruck by the wonder that is them that you feel a little bit like you want to be like them. You start to think
highly of them, look up to them. And Denny’s not like that. You don’t look up to Denny, and she wouldn’t be capable of looking down on anyone. She looks across at you, and somehow you’re inspired by her not to be more like her but to be more like yourself, whatever that is, and I think that’s why Denny’s best nature breaks all those rules, and it’s why she gets away with it.

It’s even there in the way she knits. You’re not supposed to be able to knit the way Denny does and not suffer the wrath of the knit fates. If you don’t use patterns, don’t do swatches, don’t even tension your yarn, then you’re going to have trouble. Her knitting should be terrible. It should look sloppy and uneven and show the lack of rules like the knitter’s version of a scarlet letter, but it doesn’t, and that drives us all nuts—for a while, and then you start catching on. There’s a reason Denny’s done away with the rules. She has to be unique and dance to her own drummer and do it all her way, so that you’re inspired to start playing around with the rules about who you are.

There are still people who don’t catch Denny’s magic. People who find her all the things I found her to be before I came to understand why I met her, what her magic is, and why I think she’s here. There are people who can’t get the hang of it or are offended by all the rule breaking, people who talk about how she doesn’t fit in, and I wonder about those people. If Denny’s gift is the ability to make you want to be more like yourself, then what about those people who can’t get used to her? Maybe they just don’t like who they are enough to want to be themselves.

Dear Designer,

How are you? I am very well, though somewhat disappointed that I haven’t heard from you about that brief letter I sent addressing what I felt were the somewhat inadequate instructions regarding the neck decreases on your most recent pattern. I know I was probably ever so slightly over the line when I claimed that you were not knitting with all of your needles, and I’m very sorry for any insinuation I may have made about your academic record in mathematics, but I still stand by my conviction that it would take you less time to write clear instructions than it would for me to reknit a neckline, but you would know better than me.

I’m writing to you today because although I have tried to forget that this happened between us, I can’t let go. I do not fancy myself your conscience, Dear Designer, but when I find
examples of your poor behavior I feel that I must speak up. You have been elevated to the status of a role model in the knitting community, and your designs are everywhere waiting to assault delight and enlighten knitters worldwide, and I feel that in exchange for this honor, you have a certain responsibility to us, the humble knitters gathered at your feet. I feel that even though you never answer any of these letters, you must bind each of them to your heart and deeply contemplate all that I write to you.

It is because we have this close (albeit somewhat one-sided) relationship that I was among the many knitters gathered around you at the bookstore where you gave a talk last week, and I was listening carefully to everything you had to say about your work and your calling, and it just so happened that I was sitting right next to the girl who asked you about the difficulties she had encountered with one of your fanciest colorwork sweaters. Her problems involved having so many different colors operating in one row that the number of yarns she had to carry along the rear of her work resembled a rope that would have been entirely at home along the bow of a transatlantic ship, and, I hope you recall, she had asked you for some direction about how she should accomplish this task. Nay, Dear Designer, she had asked what you, the matron of all knitters, the lighthouse by which we guide our yarny journeys, how you yourself managed to carry the seven (or was it eight?) strands of yarn that needed to be transported along that section of Fair Isle knitting.

I leaned forward then, for as you may recall from my fourteen-page letter of last October, I had tried to knit that sweater, and it was that exact row she was talking about that had resulted in the incident I sent you all of the full-color photos of, and since your answer to me had certainly been lost in the mail I waited to hear what you would say. How had you handled it?

Imagine my shock, imagine how completely stupefied I was, when you looked this woman in the eye, this woman who had (as we all do, I am sure you are aware) put all of her knitterly time and faith (as well as a fair bit of her yarn money, not that we think of the insignificance of mere cash when we are knitting one of your patterns) into working this sweater pattern of yours and supporting your career, and you told her (and this is an exact quote, since this moment is burned into my memory forever) that you “had heard the test knitter say there were some real challenges” but that you had “never actually knit that pattern.”

Never knit it? Never? You turned that row with the eight colors (because it was eight, you lunatic, I just went and looked) loose on the world without any sort of warning at all? Furthermore, you (without having strangled six of your ten fingers trying to follow your chart) had the audacity to have the caption beneath the photo read, “This charming summer pop-over, just bursting with the colors of the season, works up quickly thanks to sport-weight yarn and flirty cap sleeves.”

Flirty cap sleeves? Works up quickly? Your test knitter (who must be a saint among women; would you mind sharing her
address? I’d like to send her a
sympathy card
box of chocolates) told you that there were “some challenges,” you knew full well that you had eight colors in a row in your “flirty cap sleeves,” and you still felt that it was honorable to
inflict this on
share this with the world without having tried to knit it yourself?

Now, I am not a naive woman, my dearest designer, and deep in the seat of my intellect (which surely pales compared to your own) I was aware that you could not be knitting each and every one of these patterns. It is impossible for a designer to make a full-time living out of creating knitwear if they knit every masterpiece themselves. Knitting is too slow for any knitter, even a wonder such as you, to produce enough patterns in one year that she wouldn’t have to moonlight as a waitress at a local diner for the privilege. That part of me should not have been surprised. The rest of me sure was, though, as I sat there in that audience realizing that not only could you not give this woman, this fellow knitter, any help at all, but you also could not offer any real sympathy, not even a shred, and I was suddenly so shocked that I could scarcely breathe, and the world swirled blackly around me.

When I regained consciousness (having thankfully been caught by a loop of my circular needle so as not to fall into the aisle; can you imagine how mortified I would have been if I had disrupted your talk with the sound of my body hitting the floor?), I had sudden clarity of thought. As I tried to explain it to you right then (seriously, does a knitwear designer need
“security forces”?), it is not that you didn’t knit these things that stunned me. It was not lying awake wondering whether you could knit these at all that perplexed me. It was the realization that you and I are not in the same boat together after all, that when I knit your patterns it doesn’t link my work to yours in a beautiful chain of continuous art; we don’t share high moments and low points together, we are not having a shared experience in the slightest. I can no longer take solace in the idea that if it was possible for you, it must be possible for me.

As my fellow knitters and I await the latest inspired manipulation of wool and genius to fall from your pen and in our general direction … perhaps you could do us the humble and profound honor of at least knitting a freaking swatch of the damned thing before you inflict it on us.

It is only fair, Dear Designer, because if we do not stand together as knitters, then we do not stand at all (or sit, actually, because it is less comfortable to knit standing up, but you know what I mean).

Thank you.

Your humble servant,
Stephanie

I think I am understanding it now. This is a test. A test of my character or my will or something. Some higher power has decided to find out what I’m made of, and lo and behold, my test has come not in the form of a child to be rescued from a burning building or a choking stranger who needs the Heimlich maneuver. Nor has it come in the form I most feared: I took French until I graduated and was congratulated on that day with the knowledge that now that I had completed grade thirteen French, my government considered me bilingual. I feared that my allegedly bilingual nature would be recorded, that my name would be written on some large official list of people who could be counted on to translate French in a pinch, and that all of this would culminate in some incredible nightmare of an afternoon when a desperate police officer pounded on my door and dragged me into the street to perform a French-speaking function to save thousands of lives—something like defusing
a French bomb. I have imagined this moment ever since that day, and in this horrible vision I imagine myself horror struck, finally realizing that the moment of testing is upon me, and all I think of in that terrible moment is that my final grade in French was only a 64, and that means I am only 64% bilingual, and it’s been years since then so it’s probably much, much less, and I try to explain that to the police. I try to tell them they should get someone else, and they just won’t listen because my name is on the list, and I do my best but kill us all through my pathetic lack of French, and the last thought that passes through my mind as the bomb explodes is that it all could have been different if I had done just a little more homework. That would be a character test with some drama. That is more in keeping with what I thought the ultimate test of my self would be, but no. The same way I was disappointed to discover that parenthood is really mostly about washing things, it turns out that the test of my character that I have felt was coming for forty years turns out to be a tiny cream baby bonnet.

I have, at the time of this writing, ripped it back out no less than eight times, and I swear to you in the name of everything I hold dear that if I had not promised my sister-in-law that I would work this out (and if I had not been cocky and self-assured when I did so), I would have shoved the whole thing in my mouth by now, gnawing at it until my eyeteeth were sharpened with rage and I could spit sodden bits of it upon the dirty ground until my revenge felt entirely sated. The
last time I was this frustrated by something this small it was an eight-pound newborn human who had invested in a personal mission to keep me awake for days on end and then puked on me to make the point. I didn’t take action then only because I loved the thing, and it took me thirty-seven hours of labor to get (other than that, I would probably have abandoned it, at least for a little while).

I owed this bonnet no such allegiance.

It had started, as all the best tests of character do, with a pretty ordinary event. (Tests of character are like that. The person who is to be tested seldom has any warning.) My sister-in-law Kelly, who, despite how it went down later, is actually a very nice person who (I think) bears me no malice, showed me a small thing and confessed an obsession. She produced, out of the things her daughters had when they were babies, a wee bonnet. It was cream-colored plain wool. Fine wool, too, the weight called “baby” that always seems so perfect for tiny new beings, and it was a little felted and worn from frequent and affectionate use. It was garter stitch, plain knitting every row, it had a wee peak that dipped down onto the baby’s forehead, and it tied under the chin with ivory satin ribbon stitched to the front bottom corners. The hat itself, as much as it was simple and charming, was rather queerly wrought, and this was the challenge. It was knit side to side somehow, with short rows to shape the crown (I thought) and subtle casting on and off to make the peak. Kelly felt in her heart of heart that this
hat was the best and possibly only thing that she could knit for an impending baby, but the pattern had been lost. Kelly had received that hat while she was living in Denmark with her babies, and she had been so enchanted with this style of bonnet, so unlike anything she’d ever seen before, that she had asked the knitter for the pattern. She’d received it, not in the form of a book or a leaflet, but handwritten on a piece of paper. Kelly had cherished it for years, this heirloom pattern, but as time passed and they moved from country to country, she had misplaced it. Now she needed it so she could carry on this time-honored tradition and bless a friend’s new baby with it. Was there anything I could do to help?