The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater_Essays on Crafting

by Alanna Okun

  During the worst of this I would get so frustrated, at myself and at our parents and at her. Even though I knew the answer—namely, that we were different people with different chemical makeups—I could never quite understand why she couldn’t push through. Why couldn’t she just open her laptop, finish her finals, put her feet on the floor, and leave the room? Why couldn’t the motions of productivity save her the way they had saved me, over and over again, from my anxiety and my fear and my grief?

  I was frustrated when we talked about Moriah like she was a problem to be solved, and because I was the number-one perpetrator of that fantasy. I was frustrated by the barbed little remarks she’d make when I was back home—my jacket was weird, the way I made avocado toast was substandard—and how it was impossible to separate my run-of-the-mill sisterly feelings toward her from my feelings toward what she was going through. I was frustrated when our parents acted like she was made of glass and took her side because it was easier than letting her fall apart. I was frustrated because I knew she was tougher than that, if we’d just let her be.

  I was frustrated with myself for being frustrated! And my frustration—which was really just helplessness in an uglier outfit—would come out as shortness, as sharpness, as slammed cups at the table and joyless laughs issued from between my teeth. It caused me to pick fights over minuscule things I should have just let lie and mutter unkind words about the person I loved best in the world, half hoping she could hear them. It made me want to kick Moriah out of the cockpit of her own brain and take over the controls myself, because of course I, above anyone else in the world (including Moriah herself), could save her.

  “I need you to be my sister,” she told me once on a visit to New York, when I was trying to give her advice or prescribe a course of action or doing something other than what I should have been doing, which was listening. “Not my teacher, and not my therapist.”

  I shut up, and we finished our breakfast in not-uneasy quiet.

  * * *

  Moriah went back to school after a few semesters at home; when I go back now, I sleep in my own bed again. She lived in an apartment off campus, where in typical form our mother painted the walls even though the lease was just for the year. She brought one of our family’s several cats—Harry, who had belonged to our grandparents when they died. She sent us pictures of him lurking in the space between the fridge and the ceiling, or pacing around the craft corner she set up with her sewing machine and scraps and strings. And finally, after years of stopping and starting, she graduated. We all flew out to St. Louis and sobbed freely when she walked down the aisle with her classmates, when the professor handing out diplomas called her name, when she won an award signifying her work in sculpture. It’s not that everything is fixed, or ever will be. It’s just that it was time to keep going.

  On the rare occasions when we are in the same place at the same time, I like to watch her work. Her projects are so different from anything I make, but in some ways they’re the same—starting from what looks like nothing and incorporating new nothings over and over until they become a something. Her crafts are hard where mine are soft, sturdy where mine tend to flop and fold and lie flat. I like how they look next to each other: a basket of hers hangs on a doorknob in my apartment, facing the wall of embroideries and the two tiny wall hangings I made before losing interest in weaving; another sits on my bookshelf beside a pile of notebooks I’ve filled with scribbles, my attempts to turn my own messy life into a series of neat stories.

  I have this fantasy of the two of us opening a store together where we sell our stuff, a sort of general-store-meets-yarn-store-meets-coffee-shop (-meets-bar, knowing us). Moriah snorts at me when I get too sentimental, when I get too ahead of myself or gush about being proud of how far she’s come; she knows, better than I do, that this is not over, that there is so much further for all of us to go. But I don’t mind being the sentimental sister, the lover of neatness and narratives, one of a pair of crafters. In fact, it sounds like a pretty good story.

  The Weather Was Better Before You Woke Up

  To my knowledge, my dad has never made a hat. He doesn’t knit or crochet, doesn’t sew or embroider. I can hardly even remember seeing him draw a picture. When he sits in silence, in his favorite armchair in Boston or at the dining-room table in Rhode Island, it’s usually with an iPad in hand, or a sheaf of work papers. Not like me, with my hands that are never still, always fluttering to bring small things into the world. But the older I get, the more I realize that we are made of the same stuff.

  * * *

  In Rhode Island, he wakes up before dawn. He tries to be quiet, to collect his boots and fishing pole without rousing the rest of us, but the walls in the house by the beach are thin. Doors stick or else burst open without much more provocation than a breeze; floors creak like stifled laughter.

  He rustles and putters and is out the door before the sun is a sliver. Sometimes our dog joins in, although the only help he offers is company and a permanent smile. Sometimes my dad drags a kayak down to the ocean or the nearby breachway (a word I learned from him) and paddles out to meet the fish. Usually, though, he stands on the shore and he waits.

  I do not do the pre-sunrise ritual but I often stir when he does, and even though I exaggerate my yawns later in the day, I’m glad for it. I like to lie in the twin bed I take when I visit and watch the sky streaks through the window. I like to doze off and wake up again for a minute when he comes back home, dumps his gear in the garage, and puts on a pot of coffee that’s still hot three hours later when the rest of us are alive. I like to bear out-of-sight witness to this ritual my father has built for himself over the past few years. He’s extended the invitation for Moriah and Matthew and me to join him, but we are the type to sleep until ten and make a lot of noise. We are not the type, as our dad is now, to let fish or tides tell us what to do.

  “Too bad you slept so long,” he’ll say, even if we do happen to be awake at eight, even if the sky is perfectly blue and the air is just the right level of warm. “It was even nicer out there this morning.” We roll our eyes and drink all of the remaining coffee.

  * * *

  My dad worked hard when I was growing up, and still does. He’s been at the same accounting firm since he graduated college, moving his way up to partner, spending late nights and early mornings at the office and traveling everywhere from Dublin to Midland, Michigan, to see his various clients. Our relationship is quieter than the one I have with my mom, fewer phone calls about boys and more emails about tax returns. But as close as my mom and I are, my dad is the person I really take after (and not just in the nose and eyebrows department). He is sociable and straightforward, like me; sarcastic and impatient, like me; likes to fix things, like me; and to know that everyone he loves will be okay, will be provided for, will be safe. Every day he’s worked has been in the service of making sure we are happy. And when he needs to field the odd boy-related phone call, he always comes through.

  Following his example, I worked hard too. I got straight A’s and performed in musicals and quit softball as soon as it started interfering with choir practice. I wasn’t unhappy in high school—I had my series of boyfriends, my small but strong group of friends-friends, and I actually kind of enjoyed doing homework—and I loved the comforts and rhythms of my family, but I couldn’t wait to get out of our suburb and head to college. Once I did, I only dipped back home a couple of times a year for breaks. I didn’t see exactly when the subtle yet strong transformation in my dad took hold.

  What I do know is that one summer my folks, seemingly out of the blue, rented a small house near the beach in Rhode Island, about an hour away from where they still lived, in Boston.

  “Wait, what’s the town called?” I asked, three or four times.

  “Quonochontaug,” they would reply. “But you can just call it Quonnie.”

  So I did. Quonnie turned out to be the site of what I less-than-half-jokingly describe as the gentlest midlife crisis in history, t
he moment my dad slowed down and looked inward. And it was all, seemingly, because of fishing.

  He had golfed on and off through most of my life and so was no stranger to early alarms and long, dragged-out spells of silent concentration bundled up as communal male sport, but fishing was different. It came with no handicap. It didn’t require acres of land or a group of three other accountants; it didn’t require permission or planning or witness at all, except for when the dog went along. It meant he had new gear to research, new permits to acquire, new modes of transportation to buy (he owns, for some reason, two kayaks, even though he has only one body). He learned about lures and bait, how to read tides and tie knots. He had the thing that I’ve sought, in some way or another, for my whole life: a series of soothing, repeatable tasks.

  Eventually my dad found his fishing companion, a man named (honest-to-God) Gil, who is twenty years his senior, and they would go out in the mornings together. Where other fishermen would jealously guard their best spots, Gil and my dad would share; after an especially great solo outing, my dad would call Gil like a preteen with juicy gossip to spill. He grew a beard, which he kept, and a little bit of a belly, which he tried to vanquish. He slowed down, worked from home a few days a week, wore his life much more comfortably. He seemed, for the first time in my life, like he’d found peace.

  * * *

  Before I left school, my parents bought the house next door to the place they had rented. Even though it was a new load for him to bear, this mortgage that meant my dad had to continue working as hard as ever, he never regretted it. The house meant that he could wake up and be on the water within minutes. It meant there was a space for all of us to gather that wasn’t quite home and wasn’t our respective other places—school, work—with their accompanying responsibilities and stresses.

  At first I was unconvinced. “You replaced me with a house?” I’d say. I spent my own summers working at camp and then in New York, feeling happy and lucky to go down to the beach for a week but never really understanding the draw of the place. Much like in Delaware before, some obnoxious little voice in me kept asking why anyone had elected to put a beach in Rhode Island.

  “Is it near Providence?” a friend would ask.

  “Yes.”

  “How about Newport?”

  “Yep.”

  It’s near everything because everywhere in Rhode Island, the most diminutive state in this great nation, is near everything. Quonnie (technically not a town but a “fire district”) is tiny and nearby Westerly is too, with a few restaurants and bars and one really excellent coffee shop/clothing store. There used to be a yarn store, which closed, but now there is one of those cavernous, suburban-style Michaels. There is also, miraculously, an Amtrak station.

  This turned out to make all the difference for me. I discovered that I could hop on a train out of Penn Station and be at my parents’ doorstep in a little over three hours. I could escape the smells and the heat of the city baking itself in the dead of summer. I could avoid, at least for a weekend, the boring yet deeply demanding litany of needs that make up my everyday life, and settle back into the nest of my family (which has its own needs, of course, but at least they’re different from the usual menu). It was so liberating to realize that what feels like the impossibly strong gravitational pull of my city and my job and my sense of who I have to be isn’t actually that hard to resist. My dad feels the same way; for all that my mom loves the house, which she appointed with her characteristically warm touch, and Moriah and Matthew like the beach and the infinite supply of beer, it’s my dad and I who look forward to summers the most, who talk about it obsessively on the family group text in between pictures of the now-four pets. We like the salty smell and the soft light. We like our lower frequencies, our calmer minds. We like who we are there.

  It’s not like Boston is that much farther from New York—maybe an hour and a half longer by train—but I’ve never had quite the same urge to go home-home as I do to visit Rhode Island. Home-home is where the nest can quickly become a black hole, sucking me into the same spot on the couch and back into the same person I used to be when I was fourteen. I don’t love who I am there; I’m cranky and bratty, all of a sudden incapable of putting my dishes in the sink and prone to staying up until the birds start to chirp, doing next to nothing. It feels a little too heavy, a little too layered, a little more like regressing than revisiting.

  But going to Rhode Island is clean. It’s light. I bring almost nothing—there are toothbrushes and pajamas there already—and exhale more fully. It does mean contending with Penn Station, which if you have never visited is like if a midsize strip mall were located inside an armpit, and Amtrak tickets can cost as much as a trip aboard a vehicle that’s actually capable of flight; similarly, my dad has to battle traffic and tolls and poisonously early alarms in order to make it back and forth as often as he does. We both know, though, that it’s never once not been worth it.

  * * *

  Fishing, I believe, is my dad’s version of crafting, a place where he can focus on his breath and the patterns that he and the waves have worked out together. He knows how to read the tides and the weather the way I can read a piece of knitted fabric or Moriah can read a basket, and decide how to proceed from there. We all get to be experts. We all get to give ourselves over to things that are at once much bigger and much smaller than we are. Did you know that your parents are also people? I didn’t.

  “Look what I made!” I crow when I’ve finished the last row on a hat or a scarf. After twenty years of crafting you’d think it would get old. Maybe it has for the people I’m yelling to, but for me, never.

  “Caught a keeper today,” my dad says as soon as one of us stumbles bleary-eyed down the stairs in the morning. It doesn’t always happen—many days he doesn’t get a bite, and when he does, if it’s under twenty-eight inches or will just go to waste, he throws the fish back anyway—but when conditions are aligned, we wake up to a freezer full of striped bass. And honestly it doesn’t seem to matter if he catches something or not; he always comes back calmer and happier than when he left, not like in the days of golf, with its scorekeeping and wins and losses.

  On the days when he does catch something, though, he and my mom will turn it into fish tacos, and the five of us will crowd around the table on the back porch and gamely eat the product of my dad’s labor, his hobby, his love.

  * * *

  I wake up. Not as early as the first shift, but before my dad is done with his post-fishing nap. I patter down the creaky wooden stairs, past Matthew snoozing facedown on the couch (he has a bed but seems to prefer this option), past the begging eyes of the dog, left behind this time. I pour myself a mug of coffee and slip out the back door and head toward the beach. Even in summer it’s fairly empty at this hour—the fishermen have mostly packed away their things and the beachgoers haven’t yet arrived to stake out their spots—and in the fall and early spring it will be downright deserted. You can stare down the coast for miles and not see another person.

  I like to sit on this one benchlike piece of driftwood when the tide is in, and atop a smooth collection of rocks when it’s out. Sometimes I bring my knitting but mostly I just sit, kicking off my sandals, breathing in the salt air before the day and the caffeine kick in. From here I feel like I can see forever: my future kids, rolling around in the sand with their cousins, getting so tired they almost fall asleep on the short walk back to their grandparents’ house. (Which by then will have an entire insulated wing so my parents can stay there year-round—even now it’s open from basically March until Thanksgiving, daring the pipes to freeze.) Maybe one of them will take an interest in fishing; like knitting, I’ve heard it skips a generation.

  There are so many ifs—if I find someone I want to reproduce with who wants that as well, if I can have kids, if the same goes for my siblings, if climate change doesn’t gobble up the shoreline and all the surrounding real estate. If we all still like one another. If we’re all still here to see it.
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  But on the beach in the morning, the ifs feel very far away. I stay for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes before returning home, shoes still in hand. My dad is awake by now, rinsing out the coffee pot and preparing more for the rest of the family.

  “How is it out there?” he asks.

  “Beautiful,” I say. “But probably not as nice as this morning.”

  Casting Off

  I’ve been working on a blanket for years. This is unusual for me. I tend to plow through projects in concentrated bursts, a month or two at most. If I can’t seem to make the Flashdance-inspired sweater or the ill-advised pair of knee socks work, I eventually unravel them and put the yarn toward some other use. I have my small pile of perpetually unfinished objects (UFOs) but their fate is uncertain; chances are, there’s a reason I’ve tossed them into the basket at the foot of my bed, and it’s not because I plan on falling in love with them one of these days. Maybe the fit wasn’t right or the pattern was too hard to understand. Maybe I ran out of the color of yarn I wanted, or decided I didn’t actually need a set of crocheted succulent planters when I already own a set of non-crocheted succulent planters. Maybe—most likely—it was because I lost momentum, or because my desire to be done grew so strong that it latched itself onto the next project, and the next and the next, leaving these little not-quite-rights behind to be eventually, inevitably discarded.