by Kyoko Mori
In the end, I decided to try harder to settle into Green Bay without bothering Chuck about it. If I made friends away from the college and stayed busy, everything might still fall into place. I was trying to transform the grey stretch of my routine into colorful Fair Isle knitting. Like my mother, I turned to needlework and other women to decorate the empty space.
AT THE ANNUAL ART FAIR held in the parking lot of the downtown mall, I found three women sitting on folding chairs and making yarn on old-fashioned spinning wheels. One was using fleece that had been cleaned and processed to the consistency of cotton candy. The second had clumps of greasy wool with pieces of hay stuck in it. The third held a white rabbit on her lap; wisps of long hair came off its belly and turned into yarn. The women looked like three fairy godmothers in a folk tale, each offering a gift. The one with the clean, cotton-candy wool was a psychology professor at my college.
A plump woman in her late thirties with short dark hair, Sharyl was wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and a hand-woven vest. She and her husband, Bob, had moved to Green Bay from Colorado. They lived out in the country and had no children. Sharyl knew how to spin and weave but not to knit, so we decided to exchange lessons. Her large ranch house had a “fiber room” with two looms, three spinning wheels, and skeins of yarn hanging from the ceiling. Bob, who taught computer science at the technical college across town, had taken spinning and weaving classes with Sharyl. “We needed something to do during the long winters here,” he said. He went back to the rug he was making and didn’t talk again the whole afternoon. Even their Shetland sheepdog, debarked by his former owner, was quiet.
For our lessons, Sharyl had copied articles about spinning history, equipment, and techniques. On our first day, she had me practice handling the wool by itself—stretching it out, pinching and twisting it between my thumb and finger. The second time, I learned how to treadle the empty wheel. During our third lesson, Sharyl finally asked me to sit down at the wheel with the wool. The wheel, which had spun smoothly enough when it was empty, wobbled and stopped and spun backward while I clutched at the wool. My yarn broke and tangled.
Aside from scribbling a few basic instructions on a crumpled piece of paper, I hadn’t prepared a lesson. I thought Sharyl could watch me and learn by trial and error. In spite of my lame teaching, the scarf she had started looked like a scarf while the matted and tangled fiber on my bobbin resembled mutant maggots. Every time she made a mistake, though, Sharyl muttered, “I’m never going to learn how to do this.” “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll get the knack of it eventually.” She quit when the scarf was several inches long and slightly crooked. When I told her that it would look straight enough wrapped around her neck, she shook her head and said, “I’m never going to be that good at this. It’s too frustrating.”
Sharyl had no patience for being a beginner, because she was already so good at everything. She had made straight A’s in school, finished her Ph. D. at twenty-seven, and gotten tenured a few months before her thirtieth birthday. Maybe I was lucky to have received D’s and F’s in several subjects and failed my driving test four times. My mediocre performance at the spinning wheel didn’t surprise me any more than my inability to parallel park. I bought my own wheel and started practicing by myself.
THE SPINNING WHEEL TURNS WOOL into yarn simply by twisting it. All a spinner has to do—theoretically—is hold the prepared wool with both hands, treadle the wheel with one foot and slowly stretch the fiber so it gets twisted evenly, and let go of the resulting yarn to wind on to the bobbin. If you allow too much twist before letting go, though, the yarn tangles on itself; too little, it breaks. A skilled spinner can adjust her treadling speed and the tension of her hands to the consistency of the fiber and produce perfectly smooth, soft yarn. But since finished yarn is usually plied (two or three strands twisted together, also on the wheel, for strength), the thick and the thin spots will combine to make a fairly uniform yarn even if each strand is bumpy and uneven, so long as it doesn’t tangle or break. The irregularity adds to the homey texture of the homespun.
After a month of practice, I came up with enough yarn from the plain fleece Sharyl had given me, to knit a watch cap. Sharyl and Bob took me to a spinning festival near Madison, where I bought a bag of “rainbow-dyed fleece,” which looked like psychedelic cotton candy with streaks of green, blue, purple, pink, and red. I spun a handful of each color, and from the dozen walnutsized balls I got, I knitted a pair of socks with Fair Isle checkers.
FARM WOMEN OF SHETLAND, too, had used whatever colors they could get for the brightest, most striking combination. The sheep on the islands were famous for the variety of their natural colors—white, cream, light brown, dark brown, reddish brown, grey, black—and lichens, berries, nuts, onion skin, indigo, and other plant materials could produce greens, yellows, blues, and reds. The caps the women sold to sailors were colorful enough to be spotted from a long way off. It was only in the twentieth century that “natural” came to imply subdued earth tones, because, compared to the artificial dyes that produced the lime green and the sky blue of my rainbow-dyed socks, the lichens and the indigo were quite subtle.
Although the spinning wheel was not invented till the middle ages, spinning itself was practiced as far back as 15,000 B. C. The early spinners used the spindle—a long stick with a round top to twirl by hand—or just rolled the fiber a little at a time against a convenient smooth surface like their thigh. Sheep’s wool was available in Mesopotamia as early as 4,000 B. C. Cotton was cultivated in India around 3,000 B. C. The Salish Indians kept small white dogs—now extinct—exclusively for their hair. A woman at the spinning fair was selling watch caps knitted from her Samoyeds’ hair. The caps had the unmistakable odor of dog. I wouldn’t have wanted to wear them in rain or fog, but they would have been perfect for running in the country where farm dogs chased me. The meanest German shepherd would have tucked tail and fled, if he could have been persuaded that I was a one-hundred-and-and-twenty-pound Samoyed.
The Chinese had a monopoly on silk for centuries starting around 2,500 BC. They exported caravans of finished silk textiles through the Silk Road but refused to reveal the source or methods of its production. Finally, in the sixth century, two Persian monks who used to live in China returned there and smuggled silkworms back to Constantinople in the hollows of their bamboo canes. All the silk produced in the Middle East and Europe until the nineteenth century could be traced back to these stolen worms. Spinning could transform dog hair into hats, moth cocoons into scarves, and religious men into industrial spies. I hoped it would change me, too, into someone who could live happily in a remote town.
AT THE MONTHLY GATHERINGS of the local spinning group I joined, I met several women who kept angora rabbits. Unlike sheep’s wool, rabbit hair didn’t have to be washed, degreased, or fluffed up in preparation. It could even be spun right off the animal on one’s lap. The rabbits were bred for their docile temperament as well as for the quality of their hair. The women who had them lived in town, not on a farm, and bought them treats—organic greens, blueberries, papaya—at the few high-end grocery stores that were still novelties in our area in the early 1990s. When the rabbits got sick, they were rushed to the veterinary hospital where Dorian had terrorized his cat doctor, to see the exotic animal specialist.
The farmers who sold wool at the spinning festival had also offered lamb skins—tiny white fur puddles with four legs sticking out—and ice chests full of lamb chops packed in cellophane. The sheep whose fleece I bought had been allowed to live past their first edible phase, but when they got too old to produce good wool, they, too, would be sent to the slaughter house. No one ate angora bunnies even on a farm. Unlike silk, which was produced by plunging the unhatched cocoons into boiling water, angora was a luxury fiber harvested from pampered pets. As a vegetarian, I told Chuck, I had no excuse not to raise my own cruelty-free fiber. He agreed.
The first angora I got, from a woman in my spinning group, had black tresses cascading down
her forehead like the beauties painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The hair on Rossetti’s back and belly was silver. The second rabbit, from an award-winning breeder near the Minnesota border, was pure white. I named her Frida, after Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait in the enormous white collar. To clip their hair, first I tried the electric shears from a farm equipment store. The roaring, grinding noise didn’t upset the rabbits, who just sat there. I switched to plain scissors because the noise scared me.
Since the rabbits grew back their hair every eight weeks, I soon had several shoe boxes of clipped hair. I spun some of it on its own but sent the rest to a professional mill to be mixed with sheep’s wool. The blend was easier to spin—sheep’s wool, once prepared, is less slippery than angora—and more versatile. Alone, angora was too warm, soft, and feminine for most projects. With the hand-spun yarn of 60 % Rossetti and 40 % Anonymous Romney Sheep from Ohio, I knitted the grey socks Chuck wore to watch the Packer games in the winter. In the crowded stadium of 50,000 spectators, I’m sure he was the only person wearing rabbit socks (or eating his bratwurst during the singing of the national anthem).
For myself, with 100 % Rossetti, I designed a scarf in the shape of a fox. The main part of its body was a tube long enough to wrap around my neck; the gradual decreases I’d learned from my hats and socks helped shape the head to taper toward the pointed nose. To finish, I picked up a few stitches each to knit the tail, feet, and ears and sewed on buttons for the eyes and the nose. The nose button and the button loop hidden under the tail allowed the fox to stay curled around my neck; the silver bugle beads I sewed on the feet made the clicking sound of claws. The Rossetti fox was the first thing I’d figured out how to make entirely on my own. If I didn’t already have a job, Chuck said, I could make more to sell at fiber festivals around the country. They could be advertised as “Cruelty-free Fur” (my idea) or “Vegetarian Fox” (his). My booth at the fair would have an ice chest full of marinated tofu and meatless meatballs. There would be a big picture of Frida, Rossetti, and Dorian—my version of a peaceable kingdom.
Frida and Rossetti lived in cages in my basement writing studio, but they hopped around our house for a few hours every night while I watched to make sure they weren’t chewing the furniture or electrical cords. Dorian jumped up on the couch and didn’t come down until the rabbits were safely back in their cages. Frida and Rossetti looked more like dust mops with feet than like the artists they were named after. As they made their way across the room, their heads bobbed back and forth, causing their long tufted ears to sway. Chuck at first believed Dorian was eyeing the rabbits from the couch, waiting to attack like a deer hunter in his tree stand. He said it was unwise to have prey and predator loose in the same small space. But one afternoon, Dorian was eating his food when I brought the rabbits upstairs. He took one look at them, spat out the food, and fled to his perch.
“Come on, Buddy,” Chuck said. “You’re pathetic. You’re supposed to eat them. Don’t you know about the food chain?”
Actually, Chuck was afraid of the rabbits, too. He agreed to feed Frida and Rossetti in my absence but not to take them out of their cages, because they might bite him.
Frida and Rossetti never bit anything except their food; they practically went to sleep on their backs while I was clipping hair off their chests. But Chuck was serious. He had gotten bad rabbit karma in high school from the Easter bunny his mother had bought for his younger brother, Brian. In the middle of the night before Easter, the rabbit, which was left in a carrying cage outside Chuck’s room in the basement, started grunting and thumping loud enough to wake him up. Chuck figured that the rabbit was unhappy about being stuck in the little cage, so he let him out and went back to sleep. In the morning, Brian came downstairs and found the rabbit dead in the pile of saw dust from their father’s carpentry project. He cried, their mother got upset, and everyone concluded—for some reason—that the rabbit had died from eating saw dust.
“Maybe it wasn’t your fault,” I suggested. “I bet the rabbit was so restless because he was sick. He could have died even if you hadn’t let him out. A healthy rabbit isn’t going to eat saw dust and die.”
Chuck had never thought of that, but he didn’t seem comforted in the least. “That’s possible,” he shrugged. “But Mary was sure I’d killed him.”
Chuck had a lot of stories about his mother getting upset with him, though he usually tried to tell them as a joke. She locked him out of the house when he was five, because he’d thrown earthworms at her in the garden. A few years later, Chuck and his two sisters barricaded themselves in the bathroom while Mary was yelling at them. One by one, they crawled out of the window and went to play with their friends. “I don’t know how long Mary was pounding on that door, thinking we were still in there,” they said, laughing. Chuck and his siblings called their parents by their first names. Telling funny stories about Dick and Mary was one of the few things they had in common.
Chuck’s sister Chris had married right out of high school as their parents had. Her three sons were always wrestling in the kitchen, riding their tricycles down the hallway, playing catch in the dining room. Chris or her husband would yell, “Stop that. I’m going to count to ten.” But when the time was up, no one was sent to their room. Chuck teased, “Watch out. Russ and Chris are still counting,” which made the boys act more obnoxious.
One Thanksgiving, Chuck had a big argument with Chris and Russ, who insisted that all welfare recipients were deadbeats. In the car going home, Chuck rolled his eyes and said, “Chris was driving me nuts with that snide tone of hers. I had a flashback about shoving her face in a snow bank, so I had to stop.” Another afternoon, Brian and his wife, Dawn, had the whole family over for one of their three sons’ birthday. Dawn belonged to the conservative Lutheran synod that didn’t celebrate Halloween because it was a witches’ holiday. She didn’t let their children go trick-or-treating, and she insisted that “Barney” was the only wholesome show on TV. When Chuck and I started singing off key in our bad Barney imitation, Dawn walked out of the dining room where we were having cake and went upstairs. Brian shook his head at us and said, “You guys.” Even their sister Carrie who wasn’t at all religious, said, “I don’t know. I think Dawn’s really mad.” When Dawn came back downstairs, we apologized, and nothing more was said about our bad behavior.
“My family,” Chuck said on our way home. “At least they leave us alone. They don’t expect us to see them much just because we live fifteen minutes away.”
Chuck’s family didn’t pressure us about anything. “Oh Chuck,” they usually laughed when he tried to shock them with his ultra-liberal opinions. “You always had your own ideas about things.” To be dismissed so casually must have given him a lonely, excluded feeling; he was forever the oldest child sent to his grandparents’ house so his parents could care for the younger children. Chuck picked fights with his family to get their attention, to make them notice how different he was forced to be from them, but if any of them felt bad, they didn’t show it.
As we drove away, Chuck and I made fun of the things his parents and siblings had said and laughed about the visit. His family was misguided but they meant well, we said to each other. Unlike Hiroshi and Michiko, Chuck’s parents loved him even though they hadn’t known, for decades, how to talk to him. In spite of their disagreements, his sisters and brother looked up to him as the oldest. In all the stories they told about their childhood, Chuck was the ring-leader, the hero of their escapades. He couldn’t just write off his family the way I did, but I never stopped to consider how much more complicated and painful his situation was than mine. So long as Chuck remained an outsider to his family, I could pretend that I belonged to them, too. I could claim them as much as he did, and no more.
IF WE WERE TO RECONSTRUCT the missing arms of Venus de Milo, she might be holding a spindle in her right hand and a distaff (the stick around which the flax was wound) in her left. The positions of her shoulders suggest that her right arm was extended and h
er left arm bent. Venus, the goddess of love, brought a man and a woman together to produce the thread of new life. She could easily have been portrayed as a spinner.
If I had really wanted to become a part of Chuck’s family or the community we lived in, I should have had children. Then I would have been one of the colors in a Fair Isle sweater, intertwined with those around me to help the design continue and repeat itself. Often, it’s the one color that almost clashes—specks of ochre in an otherwise green and blue composition—that completes the harmony and enlivens the pattern. I could have been that color for Chuck’s family, but I didn’t like children even when I was a child. In the summers at our grandparents’ house, I walked in the woods by myself while my brother played in the yard with our younger cousins. I snuck out during afternoon naps to swim in the river alone, to get away from the crying babies and my aunts fussing over them. As I dove into the water, I wondered how terrible the grownups would feel if I drowned. Of course I was trying to get their attention, but I also loved the clean loud splash and then the muffled silence, the perfect solitude underwater.
Long before Chuck and I started dating, I told him how much I hated being around kids.
“I can’t imagine teaching grade school,” I said. “I’d die if I had to spend a whole day with crying children. I’m never going to have kids.”
Chuck seemed amused by my candor. “I wouldn’t necessarily want my own, either, just because I like working with them as a teacher,” he said.
I was so set against having children that the two of us never discussed the possibility. After we’d been married for more than a year and people asked us why we hadn’t yet become parents, Chuck answered, “My wife doesn’t even like other people’s kids. No couple should become parents unless they’re both committed.”