Yarn

by Kyoko Mori

  Nine years later in Rockford, we had so much snow the city was declared a federal disaster area. As I sat in my dorm room with the windows buried in the snow banks, I remembered my mother shivering at the kitchen table. She had stayed wrapped in her quilted bathrobe all day, too depressed to step outside or move around the house. My dorm room was dark at 4 P.M. I got up from my chair, put on my swimsuit and then practically all the warm clothes I owned on top of it, and trekked across campus. “Swim at your own risk,” the ID-checker at the door warned. “The lifeguard didn’t show up. You’re the only person in the building.” I was a mediocre swimmer and my eyes burned from the chlorine, but I was so grateful to be moving through that murky, barely heated water.

  Takako had written in her diary only in the winter. In the summer when she was happy and active, she had nothing to record. In college and graduate school, rereading her diary and then reading Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton—women my mother’s age, each with two children she left behind when she chose to die—I remembered a Japanese fairy tale Takako had told me about a desolate village in deep snow. Once upon a time, it went, a young farmer in the north country found a small crane shot down on the side of the road. He pulled out the arrow, nursed the bird back to life, and set it free. A few days later, in the middle of the season’s first blizzard, a beautiful young woman appeared at his door. She said she’d grown up in a faraway village and her parents, like his, were dead. The young farmer fell in love with her and married her. That winter was one of the harshest. After the couple had eaten their last handful of millet, the wife set up a loom in the shed and wove a beautiful white cloth for her husband to sell in the nearby castle town. Once the food he bought with that money was gone, she wove another cloth, and shortly after, spring arrived. The villagers, out planting their rice paddies, noticed that the young farmer had gotten married and he was not as destitute as before. When a neighbor asked him about it, the farmer told him about his wife’s weaving. The neighbor promised to get a better price for him, if only he could come up with another cloth.

  The wife, who had grown weaker with each weaving, had warned him that the second cloth was the last she could weave. But the husband begged till she reluctantly agreed. She made him promise—as before—that he would not come near the shed where she was working. She stayed secluded for two days and two nights. When the loom fell silent toward dawn, the husband went to the shed and cracked open the door. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he spied a small, sickly crane tearing out her feathers with her beak and adding them to the cloth. The crane turned back into his wife and told him he had once saved her life. She had hoped to remain with him forever, but the third cloth had taken too many of her feathers. She flew away to die while the husband cried in remorse.

  I used to think my mother, with her sewing and embroidery, was the crane wife. My father had betrayed her just as surely as the farmer had his wife, but her diary, more than her needlework, was the crane’s weaving. Neither a single entry she made in her diary nor a single poem of Sylvia Plath’s or Anne Sexton’s released them from their suffering. Their desire for death increased the more they wrote about it: they were tearing out their feathers and weaving them into the cloth, trading their chance for happiness for the words on the page. Plath and Sexton were accomplished poets and my mother only wrote out of her despair, but the results—for their lives—were the same. If my mother had gone to see her friends instead of sitting alone with her diary, she might have survived long enough for one of them to get her the help she needed. Becoming a writer seemed like the worst choice I could possibly make if I didn’t want to repeat her mistake, but I didn’t know how to stop. All I could do was take care of myself while I wrote, even if it meant having less time for other people.

  IN TRUTH, I HAD ALWAYS KNOWN how to save myself from my mother’s depression. The selfishness I’d inherited from my father was a protection as well as a curse. If Chuck had cheated on me and lied to me, I would have considered him— not myself—a failure. I had already forsaken the country of my birth, leaving my brother to fend for himself. I knew how to keep moving. My father had played rugby till a year before his death. I, too, was an athlete, constitutionally incapable of sitting still long enough to feel bad about myself. The winter after Chuck and I walked to the store for milk, I learned to run even when it was too cold for my car to start. I dressed in layers and ran around the park near my house, repeating the same half-mile loop so I could stop any time. Snow crunched under my feet and tiny crystals of ice formed on my eyelashes, magnifying the weak winter light. I was my own heat source; I imagined myself as a meteor blazing through space. The physical exercise was only a fringe benefit and not the main point. I had to be moving even while I was sitting at my desk.

  Knitting had taught me to plunge into color and swim through it, each row of stitches like a long lap across the pool. Though the motion seemed repetitive, the rows were adding up to a larger design just as the laps were adding to the actual distance I had traveled. My writing, too, had to be a movement and not a repetition. If I could match the perfect knitting tension in my head—holding on and letting go at once—then the words and the sentences sometimes veered away from where they were going and guided me to a new thought that surprised me. I found myself suddenly on the other side of the muddled, tangled phrases, with words for what I didn’t know before. Those were the moments to write for. I didn’t need to record the same thoughts over and over, no matter how true they had once been. My mother would have written something else in her diary if she had been able. The crane wove three pieces of the most beautiful cloth and nothing else, but that hadn’t been her intention: she had meant to stay with the farmer for a long life of happiness. If Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton had survived their thirties and forties, they would have left a larger body of uneven work instead of a few nearly perfect books. I wanted to write the way I’d been knitting, by trial and error, aiming for endurance. Some projects would turn out better than others, but each would teach me what I didn’t know before and prepare me for the next. That’s how my life was going to be different from my mother’s, how I meant to redeem my father’s selfishness into a strength.

  BECAUSE I WAS TOO YOUNG to wear my mother’s clothes when she died, Aunt Akiko boxed them for storage, saying that I could have them when I grew up. Takako’s red and black mohair sweater had fallen on the floor under her makeup stand, where she must have draped it over her chair. I found it while my aunt was packing and hid it in my dresser. After Michiko threw out the boxes, it was the only garment of my mother’s that I got to keep.

  The sweater, a hand-knitted pullover, has braided cables around the waist and the cuffs. The red yarn and the black yarn were held together and worked as one, blending the colors. There is no label though I remembered it came from a boutique called “Mimosa.” Of all her sweaters, this was my favorite because the fuzzy yarn brushed against my cheek when she hugged me. I imagined us turning into bears hibernating in a snow-covered cave where no one would bother us all winter long.

  Though I had carried the sweater from Kobe to Rockford, Milwaukee, then Green Bay, it remained in the trunk I used as a bedside table. The day I received news of my father’s death, I pulled it out of the trunk, thinking I would take it to Japan and wear it in honor of my mother’s memory. I had grown up to be only an inch taller than Takako; we were almost the same size. But as I laid the sweater on my bed with the sleeves spread out, I saw how exquisitely fitted it was—curving in at the waist, rounding out at the bust. My mother’s pullover was nothing like the sweaters I made for myself. Takako had been pretty and feminine, a woman who dressed to look small and shapely. She had sat at her mirror every morning, outlining her mouth to resemble a tiny heart, shading her cheeks with the slightest blush.

  My mother wouldn’t have appreciated my baggy jeans and big sweaters, my plain face without makeup, my refusal to look pretty. If she had lived, we would have argued, like any mother and daughter, about my clothes, face, and hair
. We would have suffered through the agony of my separating from her to become who I was. With her gone, I could only imagine the pain and the exhilaration of my rebellion. I was thirty-six. By now, if we had been together, we might have become more like friends or equals finally able to accept our differences. I folded the sweater and slid it back into the trunk. In five years, I would be older than my mother had ever been. I couldn’t put myself inside her form. I had to let her be.

  — FOUR —

  Intarsia

  IF I HAD KNITTED CHUCK’S PULLOVER with a plain yoke, he could have worn it even after he gained fifteen pounds, but the beige and the blue yarns interlaced in the back made an extra layer that didn’t stretch. In Fair Isle knitting, you always sacrificed flexibility for warmth and durability. The designs were invented for hard-wearing garments like socks, mittens, and workmen’s sweaters.

  There was another, purely decorative way to knit with two or more colors. For an accent shape against a solid background (a white bunny on a red sweater) or large solid-colored blocks, panels, or vertical stripes, each yarn could be worked in its limited area and left hanging until needed in the next row. In this method, called intarsia, the yarns are lightly twisted together at the color changes to prevent holes; otherwise, they remain separate, keeping the fabric single-layered and flexible.

  The ideal marriage Chuck and I had in mind was intarsia: two yarns making their parallel journeys through the fabric, allowing each to cover only its own territory. In the week I spent in Japan after my father’s death, I didn’t call once to confide in Chuck or ask his advice. How I dealt with my family, I believed, was my business alone.

  BY THE TIME I GOT TO KOBE, it was already the third evening after my father’s death. I had missed the wake, the funeral, the family ceremony at the crematorium. In the morning, my brother came to our aunt’s house where I was staying and said, “Okasan is waiting for you. She wants you to pay your respects at the Buddhist altar. I’ll walk back with you.”

  At her house, when Michiko asked me to sign a form to put my father’s bank account in her name, I understood why my brother had urged me to come back to Japan. The document Michiko handed me didn’t show how much money was in the account.

  She was standing at the kitchen counter, with Jumpei, our aunt Akiko, and me seated at the dining room table with our tea.

  “This form is so vague,” I said. “I don’t really understand.”

  “It’s just some legal stuff,” Jumpei said with a shrug.

  “The paperwork doesn’t mean anything,” Michiko said, coming back into the dining room to refill everyone’s cup. “I don’t know why the bank has to bother us at a time like this.”

  The document wasn’t meaningless at all. It was asking me to sign over an unspecified amount of money. Even if I didn’t want an inheritance, I had the right to find out what I was giving up.

  Michiko hovered over us, still holding the tea pot. Jumpei and Akiko picked up their cups. Neither would glance in my direction. The night before, at the airport kiosk where I’d bought a can of soda, the attendant had put my change on a silver tray, carefully laying out each coin as though it were a gift. I couldn’t ask how much money my father had or why the form didn’t reveal the sum. My desire to learn the truth simply to know it, on principle, was so typically American.

  I took the pen Michiko had put on the table and signed the form. She said that in the next few days other banks and insurance companies would be sending similar forms. My father had kept his money in so many different accounts. She would bring all the forms before I left the country.

  “You don’t have to worry about Jumpei,” Akiko told me later when we were alone. “Your stepmother has more than enough to live on for the rest of her life, so she’s going to take care of him, too.”

  Though my stay was just beginning, Jumpei left the following afternoon for Tokyo. We walked to the station and said good-bye on the platform where each of us waited for a different train.

  WHEN MICHIKO BROUGHT THE STACK of papers for me to sign, my aunt didn’t say that I should think it over or consult my husband. People didn’t leave wills in Japan. By tradition, when a man died, his widow, oldest son, brother, or nephew inherited everything. A married daughter belonged to her husband’s family, not to her own.

  I had to sign the forms all the same and officially renounce my claim because by law, only 50 % of the family assets belonged to the widow, with the remaining 50 % to be split equally among the children. The courts didn’t care which child was male or female, first-born or second-born, single or married, but the legal division, called bunke (breaking the family), was the last resort. If I’d refused to sign the forms and forced my family to follow the law instead of the tradition, even the second cousins I’d never met would have been mortified.

  Chuck, too, would have been horrified by my greed. He made snide comments about the one high school friend whose father had been a doctor. When I planned to have dinner at our house with a woman who came from a well-to-do local family, he said I should ask her to coffee so he wouldn’t have to get involved. As far as he was concerned, all rich people were snobs or worse. He only made an exception for me, because I’d left home at twenty and gone to school without Hiroshi’s help.

  If I had called from Japan and told him that I was about to give up 25 % of a sum large enough to support my stepmother for the rest of her life in the most expensive suburb in Japan, he would have cheered me on. But I didn’t tell him until I had signed the forms and left the country. When any real-life event was important enough, I treated it like my writing: I could only work in secret, keeping my thoughts to myself. The best way for Chuck to support me was to leave me alone.

  I DID RECEIVE A SMALL inheritance from one of the numerous life insurance policies Hiroshi had through his job. For some reason I couldn’t understand, the benefits for this policy had to be divided among the three of us instead of paid to Michiko alone. In the eight years I lived with him after Takako’s death, Hiroshi had never let me forget that he was sending me to an expensive private school when public education would have been enough for a girl. I hated to be beholden to him even after his death, but the sum was less than what I made every year from teaching. Besides, I already knew what to do with it.

  For a few years, I had been spending my summer weekends in Door County, the peninsula I’d first driven through on my way to the weaving school. Situated between the two bodies of water—Lake Michigan and Green Bay—the narrow strip of land had old orchards and dairy farms, meadows, woods, rolling hills, and inland lakes. The vacationers came from Chicago, Milwaukee, or Minneapolis, but the year-round residents who ran the bed-and-breakfasts, art galleries, gift shops, and restaurants had grown up in the small towns across the Midwest. Most of them were single, divorced, married but childless. Just like the movie group in Green Bay, once you knew a few people, you met all their friends.

  The person who introduced me to everyone was Norma Jean, who sold hand-made clothes, yarn, knitting supplies, looms, and spinning wheels out of a barn on an old cherry orchard. She was a tall, vivacious woman in her fifties whose grandparents had grown up in Norway. The farm house she lived in, next to the barn, was like a lice-patterned Norwegian sweater in which every space, however small, was decorated. The rooms and the hallways were crammed with Scandinavian furniture, antique lamps, tapestries, quilts, paintings, photographs, doilies and table runners, countless glass dishes and wooden bowls full of trinkets. Next to each chair was a different knitting project Norma Jean was working on.

  At the store, as she arranged and rearranged the crowded racks of hand-made clothes, Norma Jean would be trying to knit a scarf, give you a sweater pattern, tell you about her mother’s health, teach her Corgi a trick, and wait on her other customers, all at once. She had gone into debt to open two additional stores on the peninsula. Soon after we met, she had to close all three stores, sell the cherry orchard and everything on it, and move to the vacant office of a defunct local newspape
r. When the coffee shop she ran out of that space also failed, she went to live in a farm house one of her customers had recently inherited. A friend of ours hired her to hostess at his restaurant. Norma Jean was still designing patterns and knitting sweaters for her former customers. “I’m not organized enough to manage a store,” she said. “I don’t know why I opened three stores when I could scarcely handle one.”

  Her landlady was getting ready to sell the farm house and the surrounding twenty acres. Norma Jean couldn’t afford the whole parcel, but the landlady agreed to divide the property and sell her the farm house with the five acres around it, if she could help find buyers for the rest. The bank promised a mortgage if Norma Jean could get a cosigner willing to put up collateral. Norma Jean’s cousin made an offer on the back ten acres. The eighteen thousand dollars from Hiroshi’s insurance was the exact amount I needed to buy the remaining five acres and put them up as collateral to cosign Norma Jean’s mortgage. Helping her stay in her new home would get rid of whatever bad karma came with Hiroshi’s money. Half a century after my mother’s parents had lost their land, I could claim a piece of land whose beauty they would surely have understood.

  The five-acre parcel had a stand of maples in the front and an old stone fence in the back. The rest was covered with juniper bushes, meadow grass, wild flowers, and rocks. A mile away, the shoreline with its pines, cedars, and rocks reminded me of the rugged coast of the Japan Sea. As in Japan, people gathered in the small towns on the peninsula to view the cherry blossoms in the spring, the maple leaves in the fall. The tourists didn’t stare at me, because they were used to seeing people of color in the big cities they came from, and the locals knew me as a new neighbor. I felt at home in Door County as I had never done in Green Bay.