The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater_Essays on Crafting

by Alanna Okun

  She did it again when I got my first apartment in New York, and then again when I moved to my own place. (I still have the curtains and the pears.) She did it for Moriah in her dorm rooms and in her apartments off campus in St. Louis, and for Matthew just ten minutes away from our house in Boston. When we got the place in Rhode Island, my mother would spend her weekends out there, using the bathrooms at Town Hall and Walmart because the water wasn’t yet turned on. She painted and rearranged and picked out a collection of furniture and tchotchkes that are just this side of nautical: no lobsters wearing sailor hats, but a whole bunch of knots. Each of these homes is like her—warm, open, practical with a few quirky touches—but they all feel different, reflective of those of us who live and grow there. Home always felt so natural, so effortless, that I didn’t appreciate how much work went into making one until I started to build my own.

  I spent a large part of my first year living alone pleading for my mother to come back to my apartment and help me install the new curtains she’d given me for Christmas. The ceiling was too high, I didn’t own a level, I was afraid I’d screw it up—I whined and I bargained. She promised she’d come visit me in the spring for my birthday, but then Moriah moved back home and was having too hard a time to be left alone; then my grandma got sick. Then it was July and then August and the curtains were still folded underneath my bedside table.

  I started asking her about it once a week, even though I could feel myself being bratty, missing the point: when are you coming, why did you say you would if you didn’t mean it, don’t you love me enough to bring your drill and yourself for just a day or two?

  This was not a new dynamic for us. “You promised,” I muttered (or yelled) throughout my childhood. “It’s not fair.” That was the flip side of my mother’s enduring care—the smallest, ugliest part of me thought I had to stake a claim on it to make sure there would always be enough. I wanted to earmark a chunk of her time, keep a tally, know for certain that no matter how old I got or how capable of handling my own problems, I could always call her up and she’d be there in minutes. Because the truth is, of course, that while her capacity for love is infinite, her time and energy do have limits. When Moriah started struggling with school and her mental health, it was my mom who flew out to St. Louis month after month; when my grandma started to fade, my mom was by her side.

  My mom has always kept all of her important promises, despite my whining to the contrary. When she couldn’t come through (which usually consisted of nothing more than being late to pick me up from musical rehearsal when Moriah had tennis and Matthew had guitar lessons), it was because she had so many other people and creatures to care for. She spends so much of herself building us up—our spaces, our creativity—that I sometimes worry there’s not enough left over for her own use. I want everything for my mother, but I also want everything from her. It only recently occurred to me, years later, that I can hang curtains myself.

  And in the fall, just a month after her mother’s funeral, my mom did come to visit. She drilled and hammered, cleaned each slat on the blinds, and installed insulating plastic over the windows before she hung the curtains at last. They bring the whole room together.

  * * *

  My mother’s parents got old quickly. They’d always been sharp and vital—I’d race my grandma for custody of the crossword every morning but it would nearly always be done by the time I made it upstairs—but one day my grandpa went into the hospital and never really left. He died in September, the day after my grandma’s birthday, and then one year minus ten days later she died too. They had been married for sixty-two years.

  Maybe the thing my mom and I have most in common is our love for having a project, and it turns out that death leaves you with a lot of them. There was the funeral to plan and the will to execute, the house to clean and sell. Her greatest superpower turned inside-out, the satisfaction of completing a room forced to live next to the grief over losing what it had once contained. She called me less frequently during this period, but the tone was more urgent. She wondered if the objects she sifted through, the ones she packed or threw away or donated, still held the spark of her old life, or had that gone away along with her parents? She was the one who cried on the phone now, even though she still left plenty of space for me to bemoan boys or work problems or whatever bullshit I was hung up on, and I did not know what to say other than that I was there, I loved her more than I would ever be able to express, there would be new life to build even as the old one fell apart.

  I miss my grandparents all the time. I miss their support and their opinions, their styles and their smells. I miss life with them in it. But I have to say, I miss them most of all for my mom. I miss when she got to be a daughter too. Now I find myself wanting to be everything for her, daughter and friend and mother, all the while knowing that I can’t—that, really, I shouldn’t. I can’t make a space for her where she feels as known and as safe as the one she’s made for me. All I can do is live in mine, and invite her in, and do the same for someone else someday.

  Pieces

  My sister makes baskets. She does this by sewing pieces of rope in intricate coils, dismantling the arms of sewing machines and investing in a lifetime supply of zip ties to hold everything together—our family Amazon account looks like it belongs to a serial killer with a flair for color. Some of the baskets are small, meant to house succulents or stray hair ties; some are shaped like vases or bongs. Some are meant to be hung from the ceiling or from the branches of trees, and others—the ones she made in art school—are meant to be worn, like diving helmets that are at once both cozy and deeply upsetting.

  Sometimes she sells these baskets, at open markets in Boston and Rhode Island. Other times she gives them as gifts; I have at least three in my apartment right now, with my eye on a set of trivet-looking pieces she’s been working on lately. Mostly, though, when I picture Moriah’s baskets, I picture her hunched over the family dining table or her sewing space in our parents’ house, intently weaving all those bits and pieces together, starting at the center and spiraling outward in ever-larger circles. To me, those materials look like they belong in the aisles of a hardware store (where many of them, in fact, are from); to her, they’re a way to make a life.

  * * *

  I’ve tried a lot of other crafts. Knitting is my first love, crochet and embroidery my shared second, but I’ve dabbled in plenty of others. There was my brief stint with felting, the same process by which wool sweaters shrink down to hard, small versions of themselves when you throw them in the dryer (except, this time, on purpose); mostly I just ended up drawing a lot of blood with the sharp hook required for agitating the wool. There was sewing, which I’ve felt guilty about not really “getting” for my entire crafting life, which is almost as long as my entire actual life. I can repair basic holes, and piece a few easy things together by hand, but what’s always drawn me to the yarnier crafts is that sense of making something out of nothing; I sort of hate the prospect of beginning with an overwhelming amount of material that you’re meant to whittle down into a manageable shape.

  Still, I always half thought I’d come back to it. I guess I’d hoped my grandma could reteach me, beyond the American Girl Doll pants she’d walked me through two decades previously.

  When she died and I flew back to Virginia for the funeral, one of the first things I did was pick a fight with Moriah over our grandma’s sewing machine. Moriah had been there since the day before, helping our mom and Kathleen plan the funeral and start to pack up the house, and had already called dibs.

  “That’s the machine she taught me on,” I hissed over lunch, suddenly filled with a possessiveness and anger that were desperate to manifest themselves this way. I hated the thought of Moriah taking it and modifying it for her own use, even though the odds of me actually ever using it were slim to none. I guess I wanted proof that I had mattered, that this was a special bond my grandma and I had shared, that everyone would just automatically know to give me this one
thing.

  “I just wanted something to remember her by,” Moriah whispered back. She was trying not to cry. She spent a lot of time trying not to cry, which usually caused her to cry even more.

  I felt trapped. I put my drink down too hard on the table, and the rest of the family looked up. I swallowed my misplaced rage and told her we’d talk about it later. It’s not that I felt like I was the Crafter except maybe, in this grasping little part of me, I did.

  Which brings us, indirectly, to weaving. In a fit of I don’t know what, a few years ago I bought a small loom that was intended for children, and spent a couple of months making wall hangings. I loved it—it’s the perfect way to use up leftover pieces of yarn that are too small to knit with but too pretty to throw out, and it’s so soothingly linear. Each new row builds on the one before, like in knitting or crochet, and yet it exists entirely within this predetermined space, like in embroidery. I experimented with shapes and tassels and hung the finished products in the entryway to my apartment.

  And then … I lost interest. It wasn’t the most portable craft (although at the height of my obsession I carried the loom around with me in its own tote bag) and I got a little sick of working within the same space, on something that was always the exact same size. I could have used those limitations to get creative; I could have bought a bigger loom or a smaller one, or taken a class on how to use a floor loom and made scarves and rugs and large pieces of fabric to turn into all kinds of other things.

  But I didn’t. I told a friend that I would make him a wall hanging more than two years ago and it’s still half-done on the child-sized loom.

  * * *

  The real weaver, it turned out, was Moriah. She started on the same type of loom as me but figured out how to really use it, when to add one unexpected color or start an entirely new pattern out of nowhere. She did take a class; she did learn to use a floor loom; she did make scarves, even made one for me. Later, she’d use that same motion—the in and out and around of it—to make the baskets.

  It wasn’t her first craft—she’d been right next to me throughout my entire childhood of making things, through jewelry-making lessons with our aunt Kathleen and selling clay creations to our neighbors. Moriah quietly drew and pasted and stitched, and by the time she got to high school, she was a bona fide Art Kid, taking AP-level art classes and researching architecture programs for college. I don’t think she wanted to be an architect per se, but like our mother she had always loved spaces, the way different elements fit together in real time.

  When we were growing up, the two of us used to play The Sims on the family computer for hours, creating entire mundane worlds with our characters until our mother would tell us to go to bed. I had no patience for building the homes these little avatars were supposed to live in—if left to my own devices, I’d plop a bunch of furniture down in a gigantic square of walls and call it a day—but Moriah loved it. She’d add staircases and sloped ceilings, would take five minutes to select the wallpaper for a room, and when she was done I would reclaim the mouse and get down to the real business of the game: forcing my Sims to make out and then killing them. (I belong in jail.) I constructed elaborate backstories, even re-created people I knew in real life, usually boys I had crushes on. Moriah never seemed to mind, happy to watch her space being put to use. Even then, she was the artist, and I was the writer.

  When Matthew came along, he completed the trifecta as the musician. Of course we didn’t know that right away, but it didn’t take long; by the time he was eight he had started guitar lessons, and by eleven or twelve it was clear that here was a kid with real talent. Now he plays everything: drums, guitar, viola, alto sax, piano. He can pick up anything you put in front of him, and teaches kids throughout the summer and school year. The writer, the artist, and the musician, born to two people who met at an accounting firm: I’ve always loved the mythology of us, the way the story sounds.

  And the story of me and Moriah goes that I claimed her right away.

  “You can call her Charlotte if you want to,” I’m told I said at age three, as my parents deliberated over possible names for the forthcoming baby, “but since I’m going to call her Moriah, she might get confused.”

  Another quote I was too young to remember saying: “She’s going to be my best friend.”

  There are other snippets: for years, my favorite outfit was a green dress my bubbe, my father’s mother, had given me, because Moriah had a matching one. I brought Moriah into show-and-tell at kindergarten. We ran our lemonade-and-clay stands and sold everything at an egregious markup. I cut her hair, and I stuck gift bows to her head, and once, when we got a red wagon for Hanukkah, I put her in it and wheeled her down the street, trying to give her away. Not because I wanted to get rid of her—just the opposite. I loved this smiley little person so much that all I wanted was to share her with the rest of the world.

  I don’t know which of these things really happened, apart from a few corroborating photos: us in our matching dresses, us brandishing boxes of clay things, Moriah with three shiny bows affixed to her hair. But I like the comfort in stories, their defined beginnings and ends. Nothing ragged or circuitous, nothing I can’t make sense of.

  * * *

  I would like this to be a story of how crafting saved my sister. On some level, that might be true; on another, it’s far too neat. And it’s still ongoing, so it’s hardly a story at all, just a series of sometimes-connected-sometimes-not things that happened.

  Moriah got into architecture school, a great one, and left home for St. Louis. The beginning seemed all right, but as time went on she started to call our mother in the middle of the night, breathless with tears. Moriah eventually transferred from the architecture program to art, where she made collages and large-scale prints of monsters and pieced together found objects from Goodwill. My mother’s calls to me got more and more worried—she was fielding Moriah’s calls at increasingly odd hours, even flew out to St. Louis a few times to be with her. Moriah mostly stopped responding to my texts, which were usually just clunky messages asking if she was okay interspersed with animal memes I found on the Internet. No one could decide if college was the right place for her to be, if the structure it provided was supporting or suffocating her. She couldn’t always finish her work, couldn’t always get out of bed, couldn’t always name what was happening to her. She became sadder and more manic by turns, and none of us knew what to do.

  In the small, white, wealthy town where we grew up, there was a way that you did things. Even when I was young I heard families talking about how they “moved here for the school system,” and that system had a purpose: to get you into college. Homework, rehearsals, SAT prep, guidance counselors all pitched in to get us to this seemingly final destination. We didn’t really talk about what happened once you arrived, and there was no map if you thought you might want to go someplace else.

  When it got to be too much, Moriah left school and came home.

  Somewhere in there she spent time in an inpatient program. It was Shark Week; she told me later that she remembered because it was all they were allowed to watch, and because a boy said that he had been there that time last year too. That made her sad. It also made her sad that they weren’t allowed scissors or other “sharps,” and so she had to make collages by ripping up pieces of paper. Even though she’d been in school to make collages and prints and all kinds of things, and the scissors were never the problem.

  Things got worse, and better, and back again. She went on an architecture trip to Germany that she had to come home early from, and a crafting trip to a school in Maine where she managed to stay the whole time. That was where she learned to sew rope and make baskets; after two weeks she’d made enough to cover the branches of a tree. The baskets looked like beehives or naturally occurring bird feeders, like they were alive or had been, like they were dripping.

  She stayed at home for a while and made more baskets. She took over the table in the sunroom and the unused nook in the hall
way between our bedrooms. She took over my bedroom too, which I’d watched gradually happen each time I came home on breaks from college. I’d climb the stairs to the room and the bed would be conspicuously rumpled, a few stray articles of clothing on the armchair and unfamiliar makeup on the bureau. I think she liked how monastic it felt; she treated her own room more like a very large and well-lit closet, with piles of clothes spilling onto the floor and the coatrack and the bright-blue chaise longue. On a few visits home I slept in her bed. I didn’t mind—I’d never really liked my own room, which she and I had shared when we were younger but which I’d inherited as we grew up—and I was there so infrequently that it didn’t so much matter where I dropped my bag. And part of me secretly liked being in this warm and eclectic-if-messy space Moriah had created while I wasn’t looking, even if I had to step over a mountain of Urban Outfitters crop tops to get there. She’d felt far away from me for a long time, and it helped remind me of who she really was.

  * * *

  A lot of that is secondhand. I missed so much. I was away, I was wrapped up in my own life: school, then graduating, then finding a job and finding an apartment and finding a boyfriend, and then another apartment and no boyfriend and still the same job. News of Moriah came in spurts, usually through my mom on one of our many phone calls. Moriah herself was not super open when it came to her feelings, sometimes replying when I texted her, sometimes not.

  You grow up thinking that somebody who loves you should automatically know how to care for you, and vice versa. That to love is to understand, and to understand is to know exactly how to act. But so much gets lost between people. We don’t even know how best to care for ourselves a lot of the time, so how could we expect to do it so effortlessly for others? I thought that if I truly loved Moriah, the way I knew I did, I should be able to help her. I should be able to give her exactly what she needed even if she didn’t know it yet: analysis, clarity, a plan of action. I should be able to follow the thread back to the moment it got tangled, the instant she first slipped into this sadness, and help her unknot it. That was what I was best at; that was all that I knew how to do.