by Kyoko Mori
If the person who asked the question seemed unconvinced, I added, “My mother was never happy as a stay-at-home mom. She would have wanted me to do something different.”
Whenever I had to sit next to a baby on a plane or talk to a friend whose children kept interrupting, my head felt like a hollow eggshell. If the children grabbed my hand or touched my hair, it took all my effort to move out of reach politely instead of recoiling and pushing them away. Once, while I was waiting for a friend to pack a picnic lunch and her two-year-old daughter kept pulling the bottled water out of the bag and throwing it onto the kitchen floor, I pictured myself taking the bottle out of the child’s hand and telling her she was being unbelievably stupid. I made a lame excuse about having to re-pack my car and ran out of the kitchen.
As the door closed behind me, I remembered Hiroshi at the train station on our family vacation. By the time he lost his temper at the man who cut in front of us in the ticket line, my father had endured the whole morning with Jumpei and me. That man was only the last straw. Hiroshi couldn’t stop yelling because he was furious to be stuck with us. Years before that vacation, my brother used to wake up in the middle of the night to cry. From my room next to his, I could hear Takako running upstairs to check on him, Jumpei stopping for a few minutes only to start up again, then loud footsteps below and the front door slamming shut. My father didn’t come back for days. He claimed he had stayed at a hotel, as though it made any difference where he spent the night when he walked out on his family.
I didn’t refrain from having children to avoid my mother’s unhappiness. It was my father I was afraid of becoming.
The word spinster once referred to anyone—male or female—who spun yarn for a living, but in the middle ages, when the job fell to the unmarried daughter left at home, the word came to mean “an unmarried woman of a certain age.” A woman with children, even if she never had a husband, is never referred to as a spinster. Spinsters are supposed to be quaint and fussy, with a lot of time on their hands. With no children to raise, I was more of a spinster than anyone. I could devote hours every day to old-fashioned hobbies like spinning and knitting.
The rugged yarn I spun suited the sporty seamless sweaters, and I could make adjustments for the yarn’s unevenness in my knitting. After making a few solid-colored sweaters, I had enough odds and ends of hand-spun yarn to make Fair Isle hats, socks, or vests. When I first started knitting, I had been drawn to the almost mindless repetitiveness of the activity. With one-color knitting, there was little to pay attention to except an occasional increase or decrease. Once I became more adept, though, I enjoyed the added challenge of Fair Isle knitting. While holding two or three skeins in my hands and interlacing the strands after every few stitches, I had to read and follow the marks on the graph paper that showed where each color should go. On the chart, I covered all but the row I was working on, to avoid getting confused. At first, I stopped after every row to make sure that it matched up with the previous row and the pattern was aligned correctly. But most patterns are symmetrical, so once I completed a few rows, I sort of knew what color was coming next without looking at the chart. Mastering a Fair Isle pattern was like learning a song or memorizing a poem. I looked at the chart mostly for the pleasure of discovering that I was right. Row by row, I proceeded with a zing of recognition as I followed the pattern I could recite by heart.
A YEAR AFTER WE EXCHANGED our lessons, Sharyl quit her job and moved back to Colorado, where she enrolled in divinity school to become a Methodist minister. Before she and Bob left, she talked me into signing up for a week-long weaving class at the school in Northern Wisconsin where she’d gotten her start. “Think of all the things you can make with the yarn you’ve been spinning,” she said. “You’ll have a blast.” Like those for Fair Isle knitting, weaving patterns featured repeated sequences marked on graph paper. Taking the class seemed like a logical extension of my repertoire.
The weaving school was on Washington Island, off the northern-most tip of the Door Peninsula, which sticks out into Lake Michigan like the thumb of a mitten. Getting there from Green Bay, the base of the thumb, required a two-hour drive on a two-lane highway, a choppy half-hour ferry ride, and a twenty-minute drive across the heavily wooded island. Though the island was a summer resort, most of the vacationers had summer cottages so there were only a few motels and restaurants. The weaving school, housed in old farm buildings, had its own dorm. You couldn’t get off the island after the last ferry left at six every night. Had it been easier to leave, I might have.
Weaving involves interlacing two sets of threads at right angles. The vertical threads, called the warp, are placed on the loom first; the horizontal threads, the weft, are added one pass at a time. Securing the warp onto the loom requires a lot of math, planning ahead, measuring and cutting, counting and tying. The first three days of our week-long class were devoted to this process. For the scarf I chose for my project, I had to determine how many warp threads to put on, how long those threads should be, in what color and pattern sequence, and how far apart they should be spaced. The scarf would shrink ten percent in length and five percent in width. The dent—the thread-spacer on the loom that looks like teeth—had twelve spaces per inch, but the thick wool I was using would look better if I used only eight threads per inch. This meant not pulling a thread through every space, but how many to skip and at what interval? I was stuck inside a real-life story problem.
I hadn’t minded when the yarn tangled and broke on my spinning wheel, because I could throw it away and start over. The warp couldn’t be changed once it was on the loom, pulled through its various parts and tied in place with square knots. If I didn’t measure, calculate, or count enough threads, my scarf would have to be shorter or narrower than I’d wanted. If I didn’t like the color sequence of the warp, I wouldn’t be able to reverse them. If I skipped a thread, there would be a hole. A weaver can work with either thread or yarn depending on what she’s making (thread for a table runner or a linen napkin; yarn for a scarf like I was making), and yet, in the process of preparing the loom, the material is always referred to as “thread.” Unlike knitting and spinning, weaving requires precision.
Sharyl, who gave up on knitting after three days, was an ultimate “thread” person. I remembered how organized she had been when we exchanged our lessons: she had divided hers into three parts and prepared a handout. Sharyl had loved weaving from the start. The detailed step-by-step instruction that was driving me crazy had suited her. Precision calmed people who were precise by nature. As I looked around the room, most of my classmates appeared busy but serene as they followed the meticulous instructions of our teacher, a heavy-set woman in her fifties who worked as a home-economist in a small town in Michigan, answering questions for the town’s “home-making hotline.” She knew exactly how many cups of blueberries went into every nine-inch pie.
The ten women in the class were teachers, social workers, store owners, and homemakers from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. I became friends with Holly, the only other woman who was having trouble. Her knots came undone and her threads tangled. “Right over left and then what?” we kept asking, unable to tie a square knot. Holly taught physical education at a high school, coached track, and rock-climbed and kayaked with her teen-age sons while her husband—an elementary school teacher like Chuck—stayed home to read. At forty-two, she still looked like the gymnast she used to be in college. In her black yoga pants and white T-shirt, her long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, she started each day with an hour-long tai chi routine. Then she made huge buckwheat pancakes in the dorm’s kitchen and shared them with anyone who walked in.
After the day-long instruction, Holly and I cooked a vegetarian dinner and took a long drive to watch the sunset instead of going back to the studio to weave as our teacher had recommended. On the west side of the island, there was a private beach with a sign that said, “Pattersons. Family and friends welcome.” “Friends, that’s us,” Holly said as she drove her stati
on wagon past the rocks that marked their property. The Pattersons must have been away. No one came to chase us off their land, so we kept going back. Every night, the sun dropped into the water in a dramatic splash of red and purple, all the more thrilling because we were watching it where we weren’t supposed to be.
Once the warp was on the loom, putting in the weft was easy and relaxing, like knitting, spinning, or running: the same motion over and over, keeping the tension right. I had envisioned the scarf as a study of blue and grey and brought enough yarn. The warp I’d put on featured alternating shades of the two, and I started weaving more of the same into the weft. After a few inches, though, the scarf looked bland. The colors were too similar to show off the herringbone pattern. Unlike the warp, the weft can be modified as you go along. I went to the yarn store attached to the school and bought small skeins of rose, purple, red, and hot pink, just enough to put in a few passes after every couple of inches. The extra colors made the various blues and greys stand out more.
Holly and I fell further behind after we discovered a good ice cream stand on the island, where we took long midday breaks in addition to our sunset viewing jaunts. I had to stay up on the last night to finish my scarf, because I wanted it long enough to wind around my neck. Holly went to bed earlier, having decided that hers could be the type that tucked in under the coat. After midnight in the weaving studio, the only noises came from the shuttle I threw across the loom, the beater I brought forward to press against the fabric, the fluorescent lights that buzzed overhead, and the hundreds of small moths and gnats throwing themselves against the window screen. I finished the scarf at four.
On the loom, the fabric gets rolled around the beam, leaving just a few inches of the work in progress in front of the weaver. You can’t see the whole pattern until you unroll the cloth at the end. This may be why the suitors in The Odyssey didn’t notice that Penelope was weaving the same part of the tapestry every day. When I unwound my work, I discovered that the sunsets Holly and I watched had made their way into the scarf. The herringbone pattern had turned into waves of grey and blue; the lines of rose, red, purple, and hot pink were the reflections of the sun. At the final show and tell, I announced that my scarf was titled “Watching Sunsets with Holly Smith,” but to myself, I called it the Trespass Scarf.
On the ferry ride back, the pine trees on the island, the sand and pebble beaches, the rocks sticking out of the water, the clouds in the sky, all looked like something we could weave. Holly lived two hours west of Green Bay, so she planned to follow me back to my house on the way back to meet Dorian. He had mellowed with age and only bit people like the vet and Chuck’s brother Brian (our reluctant cat sitter), against whom he’d held a longstanding personal vendetta. Holly and I left our cars in the hold and sat on deck, sipping the wine cooler she had hidden in her coffee thermos. When the ferry docked and some of the passengers rushed toward the stairs while the others continued to sit, Holly said, “God, people are so uptight. What’s the rush?” We remained on deck, chatting about the highlights of the week. After ten minutes, we suddenly realized that some of the people had hurried away because, like us, they had their cars in the hold. The more relaxed passengers had only themselves to get off the ferry. When we dashed downstairs, the long line of cars parked behind us were waiting to leave. Drivers beeped their horns in annoyance, but we only laughed harder.
Everything I wove after the class, on the loom I mail-ordered from Vermont, had the meticulously prepared part and the break-the-rule, forget-the-car, trespass-for-sunsets part. I made my second scarf from a bag of fleece I divided into batches and dyed in the oven—baked for an hour at 350 F°—with three flavors of Sugar-Free Kool-Aid: Grape, Cherry, Raspberry. When I finished spinning, the skeins of yarn ran a spectrum from pale pink to dark purple. On the warp, I wanted the dark and the light to alternate with subtle gradations of waves instead of the harsh contrast of stripes, so I taped the pieces of yarn on an index card to try out the colors before I put them on. But once the warp was in place, I chose the weft as I went along, using whichever color looked right at the time. The scarf resembled a sunset over a field of poppies. Wrapped around my neck, it smelled vaguely sweet.
THE WEAVERS’ GROUP I JOINED in Green Bay met every month at a different member’s house. At seven o’clock sharp, we began our business meeting. First, the officers—the president, the treasurer, the secretary, the historian, the social chair—gave their reports, and then we discussed the items on the agenda we’d been mailed. The topics included which books or tapes to purchase for our traveling library, what color our new group T-shirts should be, and what events we should organize for the art fair downtown and the “heritage day” at the history park (a place with restored old buildings and docents dressed in period costumes, some of whom spoke with a fake French or Southern accent). The meeting was followed by a round of show-and-tell and an hour-long educational program about how to eradicate wool moths, how to identify a mystery fabric by burning a small portion of it and examining the ashes, how to design one-piece garments on the loom. At the end, the hostess served coffee, tea, and homemade dessert.
The spinners’ group I’d been attending met at the same community center every month, but people regularly showed up on the wrong night because the fourth Wednesday, our designated meeting night, was not always the last Wednesday of that month. Every time there was an extra Wednesday, the few spinners who went by mistake were surprised to see the bingo players, the League of Women Voters, or the Environmental Action Coalition instead. The spinners’ group didn’t have officers, business meetings, or educational programs. The room was reserved from seven to ten, and people kept arriving and leaving throughout. All we did was sit around with our wheels, spin, gossip, and do a much less organized version of show-and-tell: “show-and-chat endlessly” for some, “show, don’t tell” for others, and for one woman who raised sheep and brought bags of fleece to every meeting, “show-and-sell.” Most of the spinners had several hobbies besides spinning and knitting. While the weavers limited themselves to showing the garments they’d woven or the weaving books they found helpful, the spinners brought handmade objects of all kinds even if they didn’t include hand-spun yarn or any yarn at all. We were supposed to take turns with the snacks, but people forgot which month they’d signed up for. It was okay to bring store-bought cookies or potato chips instead of homemade pies and cakes like the weavers. The community center had a hot pot for making tea and coffee.
The members of both groups were homemakers, nurses, social workers, teachers, librarians, dental hygienists, dairy or sheep farmers, data processors, and secretaries. Every time we met, twenty to thirty women showed up. The youngest were in their thirties like me and the oldest in their seventies. Many had been at the closing-day sale of the only yarn store in town and remembered the double-parked cars and the incredible discounts; they were still knitting and weaving from those bags of yarn. Everyone had children except Sharyl and me. Sharyl, who used to belong to both groups, was in Colorado by the time I joined the weavers. Most people eventually chose one group over the other. Spinners stopped coming to the weavers’ group, because “God, those people were such control freaks.” Weavers quit the spinners’ group, because “They were so unorganized they made me nervous.” When the two groups did joint demonstrations at the art fair, the weavers organized everything, the spinners came late, and everyone complained, but not enough to refrain from trying it again the following year.
I was more comfortable with the spinners, but I kept going to both and even served, one year, as the weavers’ vice-president. I was hoping my flexibility would keep the weavers from becoming too rigid, just as Sharyl’s discipline had saved the spinners from utter chaos. I didn’t understand the paradox that Sharyl’s move should have made clear. Sharyl didn’t fit in at the college any more than I did. As a childless woman whose husband took up weaving, she, too, felt out of place in Green Bay. While she had managed a cross-country move and a complete career chan
ge, I had only added a few hobbies to my routine. Fair Isle knitting and weaving had taught me to follow a few step-by-step instructions, but that wasn’t, remotely, enough. I was still working only one row of color marks at a time and hoping that some kind of over-all pattern would emerge by accident or through a miracle.
My haphazard, one-thing-at-a-time approach wasn’t flexible at all. On the contrary, I was paralyzed by my inability to make any long-range plans. If I’d had been better organized, I could have updated my curriculum vitae, written my job application letters, and sent them out instead of thinking vaguely about them forever. The big talk Chuck and I kept postponing could have been a problem-solving discussion. Although Sharyl couldn’t accept her crooked scarf, she had no trouble making a difficult and messy life change. She had moved on while I remained stuck. The women I met through spinning and weaving were small-town mothers with families to raise. They didn’t visit each other’s houses or meet at the downtown mall for coffee. I hadn’t even made any close friends. Although that was about to change, I could hardly take credit for the improvement.
DURING MY FIRST YEAR at the college, a student who was my age had taken the Modern American Novels class I was teaching. Jim already had an art degree then, but he had joined the Norbertine order as a novice and returned to school for a teaching certificate and signed up for my class as an elective. We’d had coffee and talked about writing and about how he hoped to balance his vocation and art. Five years later, he came back from teaching high school in Chicago to live at the abbey and to serve as the new chaplain of our college. He was now an ordained priest, though in his jeans, T-shirt, and denim jacket, he looked more like the models in a J. Crew catalogue. Over six feet tall, with a mop of blond hair that fell over his blue eyes, he had a warm smile and a quick wit. If he hadn’t been a priest, he might have been the most eligible bachelor in town.