Yarn

by Kyoko Mori

  Dean suggested a company near Madison that specialized in atriums. Chuck thought they would have models for us to walk around in, so we talked about making a weekend trip and stopping in Madison afterward. But before we could settle on a date, the first blizzard of the season dumped eight inches of snow in western Wisconsin.

  “We should wait till spring,” Chuck suggested. “Who wants to wander around the countryside looking at atriums in the snow? The place might be closed anyway.”

  “If it’s too cold to visit these atriums in the winter,” I asked, “do you think it’s such a good idea to build one on our house?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “It’s a glass house. Maybe it comes with solar panels.”

  Our house had a gas furnace and forced-air vents. I hadn’t thought about how the atrium would be heated. “There’s a lot we haven’t considered,” I said.

  “That’s true,” Chuck agreed. “I’ll start renovating the upstairs. We’ll talk about the atrium in the spring.”

  SO CHUCK STRIPPED THE WALLPAPER and scraped the paint from the spare room upstairs. Plaster crumbled in fist-sized pieces and scattered on the floor. We closed off the room so Dorian wouldn’t lick the dust and get sick. “Maybe we need new drywall in there,” Chuck said.

  I wasn’t sure what drywall was, but I asked, “Isn’t that something we should hire a professional to do?”

  “We’ll take care of it later,” Chuck answered. “I’ll do the downstairs.” He peeled off the wallpaper from the dining room, then the living room. To his relief the walls were plain white underneath, without the archeological layers of paint and wallpaper many people found in their renovation efforts. Maybe houses had their own karma and attracted the same kind of owners decade after decade. Whoever had built my basement writing room had put up two-by-fours to make a dropped ceiling but stopped halfway when they ran out of time or the materials. How hard was it to buy more two-by-fours, even I had wondered, but it never occurred to me to finish the job, either.

  After taking down the wallpaper from the two rooms and scraping the paint off the back hallway, Chuck was tired of demolition. The hallway seemed like a good place to start re-painting, but when he brought back the color chart from the hardware store, we couldn’t believe how many variations of white and off-white there were: atrium white, classic white, Navajo white, vanilla, wheat, parchment, ecru, cream, etc. In all the years of house painting, Chuck had never been asked to choose the color. For the exterior of our house, he’d used the leftover can he found in the basement and had it matched when he ran out.

  “Maybe we could use a stain,” he said. “Then we could leave the wood its natural color, more or less.”

  He planned to go back to the store for stain samples, but he must have known that they, too, would come in a dozen different colors and types and confuse him further. Weeks went by without either of us mentioning the back hallway. The weather began to change. When the annual Home and Garden show came to town, Chuck asked Dean to go with him so they could look into building the atrium. That company near Madison, or another one, would surely have a booth.

  Chuck came home with a dozen clear plastic rolls that resembled the inflatable life-saving devices for children, the kind that wrapped around their arms.

  “These are walls of water,” he said, spreading them on the patio to demonstrate how each rib-like section could be filled with water. The walls then formed an insulating layer around the seedlings and the saplings.

  “Dean got some for his trees,” he explained, “and I thought we could use them, too, for the raspberry bushes in the back. I don’t think an atrium is such a good idea for us after all. I should keep fixing the house without adding more to it. Next year when they have the Home and Garden show again, I should be ready to find a contractor and start planning the new house.”

  The atrium had shrunk into a dozen plastic tubes—see-through tents in which the raspberry bushes waited for better weather.

  FOR THE NEXT YEAR AND A HALF, Chuck kept knocking the walls and tearing the floor. He didn’t know how to build a new wall or lay down the tiles, but he was sure he could read up on the work when the time came. Periodically, I tried to remind him that we were supposed to make the house look better instead of worse. My talk was just like his repairs: I didn’t know how to follow through. Chuck acted insulted whenever I suggested hiring a handyman or a carpenter to finish the job.

  “I can do it myself,” he said stiffly. “I just have to find the time.”

  “I’ll hire someone to work as your assistant then. I know a lot of students who need summer jobs.”

  “That wouldn’t help me. It’s more trouble showing people how to do things.”

  Especially when you don’t know how, I thought but didn’t say.

  “Do what you want, then,” I told him instead. “It’s up to you. I shouldn’t be telling you how to do your job.”

  “No,” Chuck said. “You shouldn’t.”

  My writing room was yet untouched by Chuck’s demolition, but it was only a matter of time before he got to the basement. When I heard that a colleague’s husband, a photographer, was trying to rent out the upstairs of his portrait studio, I went to look.

  The tiny apartment was divided into four cramped rooms: a kitchen that was more like a windowless hallway, a bathroom smaller than a utility closet, and two little rooms overlooking the one busy street in town. But when I shut the door behind me, I couldn’t believe how peaceful the space felt. The photographer said I could bring my cat to work, so I signed the lease on the spot.

  I hadn’t consulted Chuck when I went to look at the studio, but he was thrilled when I told him I’d rented a place to write. Now he could play his stereo as loudly as he pleased while he tinkered around the house; he could even use the basement for his own storage. The move only took a few hours, with the help of the students I hired. My desk, loom, spinning wheel, and even the rabbits were now in my own space. The cat and I drove there every morning and returned to the house late at night. When I really needed to get away, I drove up to Door County and pitched my tent on my land or crashed on Norma Jean’s couch.

  I KNEW SO LITTLE ABOUT carpentry that I was planning to order a kit to build a summer home and another for a llama barn. Renovating the house was an enormous project with many complicated steps, and I had no idea where to begin, either. I had never been good at tackling a big job head-on. When I started a project or learned a new skill, I preferred to pin down a few simple details and figure out the rest by trial and error as I went along. That’s why spinning and knitting came more easily to me than weaving.

  Carpentry, like weaving, required precise, analytical thinking ahead of time: you couldn’t take out a ceiling beam once the frame was in place; it was crazy to knock down the walls without a plan. Chuck was destroying our house by trying to renovate it the way I knitted a sweater: do a little of this, try a little of that, and see how things shape up. He should have evaluated the project first, broken it into manageable tasks, and finished them one at a time. Though I knew nothing about carpentry, I could have told him that much.

  Thinking like a weaver was the most important skill I had learned from my hobbies, but weaving was a solitary activity. I did it alone at the loom, with the harnesses clattering and the shuttle swooshing. Even in a classroom with other weavers, there was no casual conversation. Although the craft had trained me in logical planning, it didn’t prepare me to work with Chuck and make plans at the same time. Odysseus, the most famous protégée of Athene, the weaving goddess, was a terrible leader and a lousy partner. By the time he made it home, he had lost all his followers; in his absence, his wife had raised their son and defended their home by herself. He might have been a good-enough team player in the Trojan War, but he wasn’t the leader of the Greek army; besides, compared to Achilles, everyone looked like an A+ team player. By nature, Odysseus was a lone hero.

  Unlike the modern weaver, medieval tapestry weavers worked as a team, a dozen
men standing side by side at the loom. The picture was divided into sections, and everyone was assigned his own narrow strip to weave. Their method was similar to intarsia knitting. The weft threads, kept on separate bobbins, stayed in the small areas where they were needed, instead of being carried all the way across the fabric; twisting them together at the color changes prevented holes. An average tapestry used twenty or more threads per inch. After a day’s labor, a weaver finished an area the size of his hand, and his work lined up perfectly with the next weaver’s. The weavers weren’t collaborating with one another, however, in a fifty-fifty, give-and-take sense. The team followed the master plan (called a “cartoon”) painted by the artist-designer of the tapestry. Their job was to carry out his vision, not to create their own picture together.

  Chuck and I might have been able to renovate our house and build a new one if one of us had taken charge as the artist-designer, with the other following along like a team of weavers. But we only knew how to split everything down the middle, each of us meticulously sticking to our half—otherwise, one of us took on the entire task with no help from the other. With us, it was always 50-50 or 100-0. When Chuck told me that building a new house was going to be his project, he was quick to assure me that I wouldn’t have to do a thing. Later, when it was clear he was struggling, I only offered to hire other people to help him. He might have been less insulted if I’d put myself forward as his assistant, if he could have done 80 % of the work with me picking up the remaining 20 % by running errands, preparing the surface he was painting, or cleaning up the debris he made.

  I could also have taken charge of our need to move forward. “You should have a better plan,” any normal person would have said to her husband. “Why not finish one thing at a time? Let me help you figure out what to do.” But while our house got worse and worse, I just spent more time away from it. I couldn’t make any suggestions to Chuck, because they were all variations of the one thing I had never asked anyone: do this for me, if not for yourself. If I had been able to say that at twelve, my mother wouldn’t have killed herself.

  AFTER CHUCK RIPPED out the floor boards and removed the doors from the cupboard, we could no longer cook in our kitchen. One night, as we were eating pizza off paper plates in the living room full of plaster dust, I imagined us living in one construction site or another for the next twenty years. This house or the new one in the country, it made no difference.

  “Even if we built a house out in the country,” I said, “I’m not sure if I want to move there with you.”

  “We don’t have to live in the country,” he responded. “We could sell that land and buy a bigger house in town. Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad idea. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be ready to build a new house.”

  I should have been relieved to hear him admit the truth for once, but all I felt was irritation. “But you were so enthusiastic about it before,” I lashed out. “This whole thing was your idea to begin with.”

  “That’s not true. You liked that two-acre lot more than I did.”

  “I never wanted to move out to the country. It’s depressing to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That lot isn’t out in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “It’s closer to your school than this house is.”

  We bickered about the location of the lot for the rest of the meal. Then while he was shoving the pizza box and the paper plates into the trash, I said, “Sometimes, I think I wouldn’t mind living by myself again.”

  “You’re kidding,” Chuck laughed.

  “No, I’m not,” I said, but I remembered those nights Michiko packed the suitcase she had no intention of taking anywhere. I could almost hear her carrying on. “Okay,” I conceded. “Maybe I’m just mad at you because you haven’t finished the house in all this time.”

  “If you were so upset,” he said, “you could have helped.”

  “I offered to hire someone, and you wouldn’t even hear of it.”

  When we were exhausted from blaming each other for having to eat pizza off the floor, Chuck said, “We wouldn’t be arguing like this if you were ready to leave.”

  “What would we be doing instead?” I asked.

  “We’d be screaming at each other instead of bickering about food.”

  I was almost convinced he was right. Compared to other couples, I still thought, we got along well enough. But when friends asked me if I loved Chuck, I had no idea how to respond. I had never thought that my happiness depended on being with him or anyone. In the hours I spent alone at my desk or on the road, I felt completely at peace even if the writing or the running wasn’t going particularly well. No one could give me the same satisfaction. Still, Chuck and I had been together for twelve years. All my grandparents and both my parents were dead, I didn’t plan to see my brother ever again, and my remaining relatives were dwindling out of touch. Chuck was the only person I could think of as family. I wished he were my brother or cousin instead of my husband so we would always be related to each other. It took me another year to figure out that this wasn’t a good reason for us to stay married.

  With Hiroshi gone, I didn’t need to be related to anyone. During his life, in spite of the distance I’d put between us, a letter from him could make me question everything I cared about. In his eyes, I was always less than nothing. I had wanted Chuck to be my family as an alternative to the father who continued to undermine me no matter what I chose to do. From the beginning, our marriage was meant to keep me from returning to Hiroshi’s house in defeat. But now, if I decided to live alone, my father wasn’t around to call me selfish or ridicule me for failing to stay married. His death meant I finally had only one home, the place where I chose to live, not that other place I was afraid of being dragged back to. When Chuck started tearing the wallpaper from our bedroom walls, I moved out to my studio.

  Chuck and I used to think of ourselves as free spirits afraid of nothing, but in truth, we were terrified of change. When we married, we told ourselves that we had already made a commitment by moving in together so marriage was an afterthought. We bought the first house we saw and the first piece of land we found outside a subdivision: they were “meant to be” ours. We could only accept a big change after the fact, when all the important decisions had been made by fate or by ourselves with so little awareness that it might as well have been fate. By the time we separated, I had my own apartment and five acres of land where I intended to build a summer home. My pets were used to spending time in my studio and, when I opened the tiny closet in one of the two cramped rooms, I was surprised to see that most of my clothes were already there. After Chuck tore out the shower from our house, I had been running from my studio. While he was demolishing our house, I had moved my possessions—a handful at a time—to my new home.

  Our whole marriage had been the opposite of a marriage. We had been so careful, from the beginning, not to make any promises about the future. We kept separate bank accounts, cars, friends, weekend plans. In the thirteen years we lived together, we hadn’t gotten any closer to having one shared life. We were like Penelope, who wove her tapestry during the day and unraveled it at night so that every morning, she was facing the same picture as the day before. But unweaving was hard work. With a knitted fabric, all you have to do is snip one stitch and pull the yarn. To unweave, you have to treadle the loom, following the pattern exactly backward, and unpack the threads that have been packed together. Wool, which has “memory,” sticks together and has to be tugged apart. I was surprised by how hard it was to leave even when I knew I was doing the right thing.

  In the first few months after I moved out, Chuck and I had many tearful conversations about how we might still “change the way we do things” and stay together. After every conversation, I left confused, only to be relieved and clear-headed as soon as I was alone in my car driving back to my studio. I didn’t want to live with Chuck no matter how he changed, or with anyone else. I loved being alone. Once I knew that, it was pointless to talk about our
future together. I never found out why Chuck took to un-building our old house instead of building a new one. He said he planned to finish the house someday and relocate to the countryside by himself.

  I FILLED OUT THE DIVORCE papers at the same pro se office Dean had used. Unlike Katie, who took two years to sign their papers, Chuck didn’t stall or try to change my mind. I had been living in my apartment for a year by the time we were filing the papers, and he had been renovating the house for three. He had painted some of the walls and hired workmen to put in the floors and fix the shower, but the bedrooms had no wallpaper. When he was done with the renovation, he said, he would move much farther out of town than the two of us had planned to. I didn’t want him to sell the house prematurely, so we agreed on half the equity I had accumulated and signed a contract saying he would pay me that amount whenever he was able to in the next twenty-five years. Because Chuck needed funds to complete the repairs and I had some money saved, I bought out his share of the land on the ledge and kept it along with my Door County land. We talked about how ironic it was I’d ended up with that lot. Although I continued to camp on my land in Door County, I never again went to look at those two acres where I once imagined living with Chuck and the llamas. A part of me couldn’t believe we were never going to be an old farm couple hearing the great grey owls hooting in the trees.

  At our divorce hearing, we asked the judge if we could sit together instead of occupying the separate tables set out for us. We sat side by side holding hands, something we seldom did in public. More than ever, we resembled two panels in an intarsia pattern, contrasting colors lightly twisted at the edge. We thought we could go on being separate but together for the rest of our lives, even after the judge pronounced our marriage “irrevocably broken.”