The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater_Essays on Crafting

by Alanna Okun

  I brought the yarn on the twelve-hour trip back to New York, where right away I set to work making it into a large, lacy shawl. That was my favorite knitting experience, even more so than sitting in the Montreal yarn store: it cemented the idea that I could keep that feeling of belonging and rightness and take it with me even when I left a place. I wasn’t who I was because I’d amassed enough tokens—a job, an apartment, a boy—or none at all. I could step outside of all those things and still keep that essential core. I could still make friends and write words and build nests, however temporary. I could still knit a beautiful lacy shawl.

  Lace is a funny thing up close, just a series of elegant, ordered holes. Lace patterns, at first, appear as unintelligible shorthand (ssk? sk2p? wtf?), and if you choose to go all in and attempt to read a chart, it resembles nothing so much as a blueprint for a very ugly apartment building. Once you get it in your head, though, it’s extremely satisfying, a game of trading—if you add a stitch here, you need to subtract one somewhere else. I made my shawl on the fumes of that trip and when it was done I draped it over the back of my couch, where it still lives. I never finished the blue jumper. I decided I didn’t really need it after all.

  Okay, So Here Is Why Summer Is the Best Time for Knitting

  1.  You tend to travel more in the summer, so there’s more time to kill in transit. I’m often asked if I’m worried about the TSA taking away my needles, which has never been a problem, although it’s sort of nuts that they don’t let you bring, like, lip gloss unless it’s cordoned off in a plastic bag, but you are allowed a bundle of sharp metal sticks? America.

  2.  And if someone (read: a dude) is taking up more than their fair share of the plane armrest, a subtle way to take revenge is by needleworking wildly enough that your elbow jiggles theirs. This is a summertime corollary to the year-round manspreader-repellent properties of crafting, usually deployed on subways or buses.

  3.  Suddenly everyone seems to be wearing these effortless, lacy tops and dresses and cover-ups. You can make those! Crochet was basically invented for this purpose, but there are plenty of simple, summery knitting patterns too. It’s not just for bundling up with beside a roaring fire or whatever.

  4.  It’s the perfect beach activity. You have to plan your project carefully, of course: nothing wool, no intricate patterns. Stick to cotton or linen. I’ve had great luck with headbands or simple shawls (the question of whether you need a knitted headband or shawl is another thing entirely)—something to keep you interested but not so engrossed that you can’t carry on a conversation.

  5.  If you’re feeling especially ambitious and a pattern is mindless enough, you can read at the same time. (This does require clean, dexterous feet.) Otherwise, it’s enough just to look at the water and match the rhythm of your stitches to the waves.

  6.  In my favorite photo of myself I’m sitting on the beach knitting a small yellow cardigan. I remember being very anxious that day—it was right before I was set to move into my own apartment for the first time, when I could barely brush my teeth in the morning because that small action could trigger nauseated panic attacks. Still, in that photo I am smiling so big, happy to be resting for a minute, happy to be there. Miraculously I was still in New York City, just a very long subway ride from home. There’s something more open about the warmer months even when things are hard, this sense that you can move more freely and nothing weighs as much. It’s never been the time when I can undertake huge, sustained projects, but I tend to listen better to my small impulses, those bursts of creative energy it’s easy to ignore the rest of the year. Maybe it’s residue from camp, or leftover relief-nostalgia about no longer being in school; maybe it hits everyone at a different time. For me, it’s always been in summer.

  7.  There’s a small thrill in incongruity—who knits at the beach? You could!

  Learning Curves

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “Aude, shhh.”

  “I keep stabbing myself with the fucking thing.”

  “Here, no, wait, let me do that.”

  “Seriously, fuck this fucking shit.”

  I don’t usually care when Aude swears, but we’re in a tiny, elegant boutique, surrounded by people I barely know and whom she’s just met. They’re crafters, mostly, people I know from the Internet and through my job writing about DIY stuff; I was invited to this embroidery workshop by one of them, and perhaps somewhat ill-advisedly brought Aude along. Even though I know crafters to be a vibrant, accepting bunch, I’d prefer my best friend not yell “Fuck!” around them too much.

  We’re both hunched over a single pair of black pants as she struggles to poke an embroidery needle through the waistband. I’ve shown her the basics and immediately she jumps right into a big project: stitching the word “Player” in gold thread. It’s hard work, maneuvering the needle through that thick double layer of fabric. But Aude has never been one to avoid something just because it’s hard.

  * * *

  We met at a publishing course the summer after we graduated college, which was neither a time when nor a place where I expected to meet a best friend. And I especially didn’t expect to meet this best friend.

  There were 102 of us, mostly women, nearly all immediately out of school. We were stuffed in an overly air-conditioned lecture hall for nine hours a day, and I knitted through almost all of them. We were anxious and eager and everything was so heightened it was amazing you couldn’t smell it. Because what we wanted were jobs. We were happy to learn, and to have a reason to be in the city with something to do once we’d been cut adrift from our various academic institutions, but the endgame, gleaming quietly in some eyes and on fire in others, was to Get. Fucking. Hired.

  I was happy to be there. Or maybe it’s more that I was relieved. College had been my place—the only school I’d applied to, exactly the right size at around 2,400 students, exactly the right distance at three and a half hours away from home. I’d shown up my first week and instantly fallen in friend-love with the people on my hall, the members of my all-female a cappella group, my (mostly) laid-back but (generally) brilliant classmates. I loved the trees that lined the long drive up to the Main Building and the old-fashioned Gothic architecture of the library. I loved writing papers and throwing parties with themes like “Geometry” and “America” and developing sudden, painful crushes that sometimes culminated in sweaty two a.m. tussles in twin-size beds. But mostly what I loved was the sense of who I was. I liked being known—as the girl with dyed-red hair and choir-girl posture, as the humor editor and the beatboxer, as a frequent hand raiser and earnest advice giver and loud drunk. Even when the self-contained bubble of the campus got to be claustrophobic, even when I got sick of going to the same parties and kissing the same people and reading the same essays, it was always exactly the right size for me.1

  And so when I had to leave it at the end of four years, I didn’t quite know who I was or where to go; all of a sudden I’d reached the end of a road I’d comfortably plodded along for my entire life. My friends were off to grad school and DC and Indonesia, some to start their forever-lives, some just testing out new detours until they figured out what they wanted, no longer just a few doors or a dining-hall dinner away.

  I’d liked New York when I’d interned there the summer before, but without a job or a reason to be in the city, it didn’t make sense to just pack up and go back there. So I applied to this course because, hey, I liked books and words, and I applied to a lot of random entry-level jobs that I did not hear back from. Two weeks after my mother moved me out of my college apartment she turned around and drove me to New York, a hundred miles to the south, never once complaining.

  The first thing I did when I got to this new, far more porous campus was set up my room. I’d been fastidious about my spaces in college—my mother and I installed curtains, swapped out the horrible dorm light fixtures, and drove the same green rug back and forth for years until a roommate threw up on it and it was fina
lly retired—and so even though I’d only be in this shared grad-student housing for six weeks, I needed to feel like something was mine. I taped postcards above the desk and bought a basil plant from the hardware store across the street. It didn’t survive the summer.

  I met other students at lectures and in the dining hall and we sized one another up. They were like remixed versions of the people I’d come to love, only without the benefit of time to soften their quirks and habits into fuzzier, more forgiving versions of themselves. Instead, each foible became a stand-in, to my anxious mind, for entire personalities: the iPad-wielding note takers in the front row were type-A try-too-hards, the handful of boys scattered at the back were conniving jerks out to seduce the horde of frenzied women. And, look, we were none of us our best selves that summer—too heightened, too uncertain, too torn between figuring out what we wanted and presenting that we knew exactly what to do. Too eager to come to conclusions about people we knew almost nothing about, because it seemed easier than admitting we didn’t know ourselves very well either. And everyone, me extremely included, was kind of insufferable.

  I made friends with a girl who liked to sit in the second row, like me (not as try-too-hard as the blazer wearers in the front row, but still close enough that our glowing, competent faces would be noticed), and then with a girl who had dyed-red hair just like mine. Lines formed to mob visiting lecturers before they’d even pushed back their chairs onstage; the second a new job listing was emailed out to the group there was an audible whoosh of unemployed honor-roll students rushing back to their laptops. We listened to book editors and magazine publicists talk about how they spent their days, and imagined how we would one day spend ours, and every time someone mentioned the runaway success of Fifty Shades of Grey (that summer’s blockbuster and the purported future savior of the publishing industry), we made tally marks in our notebooks, and took that number of gulps at the bar later.

  And then came the résumé workshop. “Miriam is scary,” we’d heard in whispers from people who knew people. “Miriam takes no shit whatsoever.” Miriam was the career counselor who would be critiquing our résumés and cover letters, some of which clocked in north of three pages.

  I liked her immediately. She was no-bullshit, had no time for pontificating about what a company could do for you and no interest in your summer lifeguarding job. In her care our material became, harshly and without ceremony, leaner.

  “I have a question,” Miriam said during one of her talks to the group. She held up a piece of paper, clearly some poor student’s résumé. We all silently prayed it wasn’t ours, but all résumés look the same from fifteen feet back. “Which of you listed under your Interests section, um”—she consulted it—“‘fire-breathing’?”

  There was silence. Then a girl sitting all the way at the back of the room raised her hand. “I’m also a pretty good stilt-walker,” she said. Her voice was husky and could have been ironic, but she didn’t seem to be making fun of anyone, not even herself.

  “Huh,” Miriam said, because that’s all there was to say. “What’s your name?”

  “Aude-like-‘Ode-to-Joy,’” the girl said in a single breath. “It’s French.” When she stood up to answer, her short brown hair and small pointed nose were visible. She did not seem afraid. Miriam seemed pleased by this answer and offered a couple of tweaks to the résumé, but the fire-breathing, it seemed, would stay.

  After that day I noticed her everywhere. Who is this bitch? I wondered, like I had with Marina the year before. Who comes to a place like this, so polished and airless, and still manages to be so truly herself? So what if she spoke fluent French, and had been raised in Brooklyn, and had enormous boobs and a wardrobe of crisp white button-downs and a ubiquitous pack of cigarettes? Nobody could be that self-possessed. I thought that she had to be faking it.

  I’m bad at first impressions. Not making them—I know how to smile and ask questions in all the right places; I’ve always been good at charming adults and teachers and first dates—but reading them is another story. I’m often repelled by the same people I’ll later come to love, or, worse, drawn to ones I soon won’t be able to stand. I’m so quick to slot new people into defined spaces that I’m wrong about them a lot of the time; I want them to be boyfriends or best friends or nemeses as soon as we’re through with introductions, and for them to see me the same way.

  But, thank God, one day Aude-like-“Ode-to-Joy” joined me and Anne (fellow second-row enthusiast) and Liz (faux redhead) for lunch, and I realized just how much I wanted her in my zone.

  The four of us spent the rest of that summer in a hermetic, cackling huddle, eating our lunch on the tiny porch outside the dining hall while two of us pined over boys who didn’t deserve it, one of us cooed in sympathy, and one of us (guess who) offered dismissive remarks between drags on her cigarette. I applied for exactly one publishing job and wanted it so badly, if only so I could feel needed again. I found out that I didn’t get it at the bar after class; someone else from the course had. I ran back to my room in tears and Aude bought me a beer the next day.

  “Fuck them,” she said. “Fuck that. You’re going to be so much happier.”

  And then the six weeks were up, and we’d given our résumés to everyone we encountered and were still no closer to a paycheck, and Aude invited me to come stay at her parents’ house in Brooklyn. They would be in France for the month, she told me, visiting family, and she could use help feeding the cats and watering the plants. It’s probably the kindest lie I’ve ever been told.

  So I packed up my postcards and threw out my basil plant and moved in. To a beautiful townhouse in a Brooklyn neighborhood I hadn’t heard of before that summer, alongside Prospect Park and resembling not New York so much as the New England suburb where I’d grown up. I slept in Aude’s middle sister’s room—when I found out she was the oldest of three girls, I was whatever the opposite of shocked is—and we spent our days avoiding the heat wave and applying for whatever jobs we could find. (Well, I did, in manic spurts; Aude was more measured in her approach, and spent a lot of time scowling and drawing in her notebook on the couch.) We ate a staggering amount of American cheese.

  We fought a lot. She got cranky and withdrawn in the face of figuring out what to do with our lives while I got shrill and accusatory, and more than once we found ourselves yelling on the street, neither of us able to remember the catalyst. But we started to notice a strange thing happening. We always got through these fights and came out better than we were before. We reached tiny epiphanies: “Oh, when you say that, you actually mean this.” “Ah, I get it, that wasn’t a question that called for an answer.”

  The more often it occurred, the better we got at closing the gap between the initial flare-up and the eventual understanding. We learned to jump to that part almost right away. We learned to speak each other’s language and started to put together one of our own. We learned each other’s methods of performing in front of other people, especially when we were uncomfortable or uncertain: the Aude Show was blasé but provocative, studded with references to its proprietor’s (frankly amazing) boobs, while the Alanna Show was high-pitched and smiley to the point of creepiness.

  “EVERYTHING IS SO GREAT!!!!” I’d chirp.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Aude would mutter.

  The truth of us is somewhere in between. She is hopeful and sensitive, able to pick up on my moods sometimes even before I can. And I was not raised in Brooklyn nor am I fluent in French, but I can find my strength and my resolve too.

  After a month of cohabitation I got a job. It wasn’t one of the jobs we’d been pointed toward by the course, no phones to answer or manuscripts to read. Instead it was at a website, one I’d seen popping up more and more on my Facebook feed but hadn’t really thought about until they posted a listing for their new women’s lifestyle section. The Wild West of the Internet looked like the sort of place where you could basically do whatever you wanted until someone told you to stop, you burned out, or your com
pany abruptly shuttered, whichever came first. Aude was the one who told me it was okay to want something a little different, a little to the left of what we’d been preparing for. She would wind up taking a similar kind of job, in communications for a magazine.

  With a small but steady source of income, I moved to an apartment just a ten-minute walk from Aude’s house. She gamely mounted the five flights of stairs to my new place, even helped me carry an air conditioner all the way up. (She liked to take off her shirt whenever we’d reach the top floor, I think to the chagrin of my roommates.) She was as much my person as ever, maybe more once we had to make the continual choice to see each other.

  And we did—over the next handful of years we cemented our status as a couple of sorts. Even when we aren’t in relationships, it feels like a lie to say that either of us is single—we always have the other to sleep in our beds, to do the crossword with, to share beers and burgers and advice we’d be better off giving to ourselves. We are anxious a lot of the time, and we get hurt a lot too—we both fall for people easily, expect a lot, pore over text messages and parse silences for evidence of our desirability, for proof that one day soon we will not be so lonely. We worry about our families and our jobs. Usually, thankfully, these moods do not overlap; one of us will fret while the other comforts, reminds her that we’ve both been here before and that it will pass, that we are just as loved and good as ever, that boys are supremely bad at feelings and that we will probably not be fired because of a poorly worded email. In the rare moments when our anxieties do spring up at the same time, we’re still capable of looking at the other and regarding her the way she really is—tough, kind, able to spiral ever closer to what she wants—even if we can’t do that for ourselves.