Yarn

by Kyoko Mori

  Cardigans

  THE ONLY WAY TO DESIGN a cardigan as three tubes knitted together is to make a pullover and cut it open down the middle. “Cut on basting, then lie down in a darkened room for fifteen minutes to recover,” Elizabeth Zimmermann advised in Knitting Without Tears. “You will never fear to cut again. (But always be sure to cut at the right place.)” Since I couldn’t be so sure, I never made cardigans in my first twelve years of knitting. They were too fussy and feminine, I decided—favorites of 1950s cheerleaders and suburban housewives.

  Actually, the cardigan started out as a military uniform in England in the nineteenth century. James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, spent his own money to keep his cavalry regiment looking smart, and the knitted waistcoat he introduced became known as “the cardigan jacket.” The earl was legendary for his bad temper rather than for his sartorial excellence. He wounded one of his own officers in a duel, illegally placed another under arrest, and was stripped of his command for his undue severity, but his family’s influence secured him another post. In 1854, at age fifty-seven, he went to fight in the Crimean War as major general.

  His cavalry was stationed on the heights above Balaklava, a British supply port on the Black Sea. When an order came for them to march down into a valley guarded by the Russians, the earl sent back a query to make sure. His superior repeated the order, so Cardigan led his men into the valley where the Russian cannons, muskets, and rifles fired at them from every side. 40% of the soldiers died. Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to celebrate their bravery. Cardigan was lionized on his return to England and appointed inspector general of cavalry. When another military man published a book falsely asserting that Cardigan had not led the famous charge, the earl sued him for libel. Cardigan died at seventy by falling off a horse in peace time. Like my father, he was a volatile and arrogant man obsessed with his reputation. The Battle of Balaklava had been indecisive at best, and the famous charge had made no difference in the outcome.

  In the twentieth century, the gallant military jacket became the button-down sweater worn mostly by women. Mr. Rogers and Perry Como, the two cardigan-clad men of my father’s generation, came from small towns in Pennsylvania. Fred Rogers was a puppeteer and a Presbyterian minister before he made his debut as Mr. Rogers. Perry Como started sweeping up in a barber shop when he was ten years old and sang as he worked. His mellow baritone voice and easy-going manner eventually made him a popular TV host, but the movies he starred in were considered unremarkable. His personality wasn’t flashy enough for Hollywood. He and Mr. Rogers occupied the opposite end of the spectrum from the Earl of Cardigan.

  My friends in Green Bay and Door County, too, were nice guys from small towns. Some even wore the old-fashioned camel-colored cardigans with wooden buttons. The more stylish, like Jim the priest, preferred the wholesome J. Crew look, which was an updated version of the same thing. Pete, the librarian who fell asleep at the movies, wrote and directed children’s puppet shows. Don was a minister; Jeff volunteered as a reading coach and a Big Brother. The others worked as high school counselors, college professors, graphic designers, or restaurant managers. They were steady, low-key people. If they took on an ambitious job like remodeling their house, they set a realistic goal and met it in a reasonable amount of time. They didn’t get obsessed with their project or paralyzed by it. I loved my friends, but I wasn’t attracted to them.

  Chuck hated Mr. Rogers’ naive and cheerful manner. Though he, too, was low-key, he was far from steady or mild-mannered. He refused to make his students recite the Pledge of Allegiance; he had them listen to Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of the National Anthem instead. He scorned fellow teachers who were afraid to utter “the f-word” even when no students or parents were around to hear them. His motto behind the wheel was “when in doubt, drive offensively.” Chuck was the biggest, most unapologetic under-achiever I knew. All the great funny stories he told me on the night we met were about how little he’d accomplished by any conventional standard in the ten years since high school graduation. The joy he took in not settling down was what I loved about him and why I couldn’t be with him anymore.

  THE INTARSIA SWEATER DESIGNED by Norma Jean, my Door County neighbor, had a boat neck, dropped shoulders, and dolman sleeves. The first sweater I ever knitted from a pattern, in four flat pieces instead of three tubes, it looked more feminine than any garment I owned. For years, I had worn the same pullovers and T-shirts with baggy jeans or sweat pants. Almost forty, I still dressed like a boy in junior high school. Looking sloppy was my version of being an under-achiever, of endlessly demolishing the house instead of renovating it.

  I was drawn to the mohair shrugs and lacy merino cardigans displayed at yarn stores, and yet I only made unisex pullovers. Some had bright colors, elaborate cable panels, or Fair Isle patterns, but all were shapeless. The few accessories I’d designed for myself, like the angora-fox, were quirky and whimsical instead of gorgeous. I only made beautiful things for friends—hats trimmed with silk roses, scarves with long braided fringes, evening bags embellished with beads. I had made little progress since choosing that yellow yarn for the first-ever knitting project in the seventh grade. My mother’s death had separated me from beauty.

  WHENEVER TAKAKO PLANNED A NEW dress for me, the two of us used to look through the pattern books and go to the fabric store together. The salesladies unrolled bolts of cotton, wool, or velvet and opened drawer after drawer of buttons, some sewn onto cards, others loose inside white enameled boxes. Finding the right fabric, notions, and embellishment was a treasure hunt. During the weeks my mother spent cutting the cloth, basting, sewing, and embroidering, she had me try on the dress several times to make sure I liked the way it was turning out. My mother’s taste for me was very feminine. She preferred puffed sleeves, frills at the hem, flowers embroidered onto the bodice, a bow in the back, a lace collar. These dresses were entirely different from my classmates’ store-bought shirts, skirts, and shorts. My clothes resembled what my mother wore in her more elegant, adult way.

  Back then, it never occurred to me that women dressed to please men. My father was seldom around, so my mother spent her weekends and evenings with my brother and me. During the day when we were at school, she was alone at home or having tea with the women in our building. When she came to our school plays and concerts, she saw other mothers and our teachers, most of whom were women. Takako kept a courteous distance from the storekeepers and workmen she did business with; she had never met the fathers of my school friends, and she only knew her neighbors’ husbands well enough to say hello to if they passed each other on the street. The only men she talked to regularly were her father and brothers. My friends’ mothers, my aunts, our women neighbors all said that my mother was beautiful. When my grandfather and uncles praised her, they said she was smarter than anyone they knew. I could only conclude that men didn’t notice what women wore or looked like.

  DURING THE FIRST MONTH my stepmother lived at our house, I woke up in the middle of the night and went downstairs to get a snack. The light was on in the kitchen, but I scarcely noticed. By the time I stopped, I was standing between the hallway and the kitchen, and Michiko was glaring at me from the table where she was seated, pouring whiskey into a glass. Her pink nightgown, made of nylon, was sheer and low cut. My father, whose back was toward me, had on his boxer shorts but no shirt. As she handed the glass to him, Michiko raised her chin and pointed at me with her face.

  Hiroshi turned around. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  I could have asked him the same thing, but I didn’t. I ran back to my room without answering. Although I wouldn’t find out the “facts of life” for six more months, I started noticing how tight Michiko’s pants were. She wore clingy shirts that she didn’t button all the way to the top. Even when she wasn’t in her nightgown, she was trying to get my father to see through her clothes. Once, after she got a haircut she liked, she said her hair looked so good,
because her new hair stylist was a man. “Only a man can really see how a woman looks,” she gushed. I didn’t think her hair looked particularly good then or ever, but her comment made me uneasy. She was saying that her hair stylist and my father both had special see-through vision because they were men.

  When she got rid of the dresses my mother had made for me, Michiko said I was too old to be wearing frilly dresses with bows and embroidery. The pant suits she put in my closet were too big. No real mother would buy clothes for their daughter without the two of them going shopping together to try them on. I threw them out as soon as I started buying my own clothes at fifteen. Like my friends, I wore jeans, T-shirts, sweaters. For the first and last time in my life, I blended into the crowd. But when we turned eighteen, my friends went shopping with their mothers for their new wardrobe of tailored dresses, loose-fitting blouses, and long skirts—tasteful clothes that advertised their modesty as much as Michiko’s outfits flaunted her lack of it. Either way, I saw, women dressed to attract men, to send them a message. Although that was true enough, men had nothing to do with why I went out of my way to emphasize my plainness. I envied my friends’ shopping trips with their mothers, the long afternoons they spent at the beauty salon getting haircuts and manicures together. After all these years, I was still stuck in the same limbo of a motherless teenager. I felt sorry for myself for having no one to fuss over me.

  THE SECOND SWEATER I MADE from a pattern came from a book published by Rowan, a British yarn company. The dozen sweaters in it all had names—Kiri, Steffi, Miss Brown, Miriam—or maybe the names referred to the models. “Miriam” sat on a blue bench in front of a blue house leaning against a grey-haired man, the blue of her cable cardigan matching the background color of his Fair Isle pullover. At the bottom of the picture, barely visible in tiny letters like subtitles of a French movie, the direction said, “Miriam in DK Tweed by Debbie Bliss, pattern page 85.” I flipped through the book and found the sweater diagramed with precise measurements, yarn recommendations, gauge requirements, and step-by-step directions you had to be fully awake—not leaning so languidly against a man old enough to be your father—to understand. It was like meeting the same person twice and being impressed by how really smart she was.

  I chose Emmeline, another cardigan, because its peplum waist had tiny twisted cables like the embellishment on my mother’s heathered pullover. The recommended yarn, a mixture of mohair and lambswool, made a fuzzy halo like that pullover, but the cardigan had a boxier, padded-shouldered look. Emmeline in the book’s photograph was brown, worn by an Irish beauty with raven-black hair and icy blue eyes, but the yarn came in a dozen other colors.

  I chose dark green, the color of the tea Takako and I had sipped in a temple garden in Kyoto on a spring afternoon when I was ten. The tiny pink cake served with the tea was sweeter than anything I’d ever tasted because its purpose, my mother explained, was to deepen the rich bitterness of the tea. If it hadn’t been for the astonishing contrast between those two tastes, I might not have remembered that afternoon so clearly: the cherry blossoms and the rocks of the temple garden, the sun falling on the straw mats of the tea room, my mother and me lifting the heavy cups to our lips. Bitter and sweet always went together. If my father or stepmother had loved me, if I had been happy with them, I might have forgotten Takako as my brother had. Because I was a girl, I had gotten to spend time alone with Takako even after he was born.

  Once I stitched the knitted pieces together and sewed on the pearl buttons from an old fabric store whose dusty drawers contained threads and button cards from decades ago, the green cardigan resembled the nettle shirts in my mother’s bedtime story. Takako hadn’t read that story only to keep up her own courage in my father’s absence. Long before she became unhappy enough to kill herself, she must have had a premonition. Surely, she meant to warn me about the future. She might have been disappointed. I had turned out to be nothing like the brave knitting princess who triumphed over the two evil queens—the witch and the mother-in-law. I had more in common with the brothers who flew away.

  Afraid to soar higher or to come down to the ground, the swan-boy kept beating his awkward wings. He had nothing to hold on to in that thin air above the tree tops, and yet he was stuck. The sky refused to release him.

  That was my story so far, but the beauty my mother had shown me hadn’t disappeared. In a story retold night after night, as in a dream, I could be anyone—even two people at once. I was both the sister and the brother, the one releasing the magic shirt she’d labored over for so long, and the other landing at her feet, finally, to accept it. To break the spell, I had to stop the endless circling.

  — FIVE —

  Flip-Flop Mittens

  THE THREE GODDESSES OF FATE in Greek myth were spinners. In a small room behind the kitchen in the palace of the gods, the first treadled the wheel, the second measured the thread, and the third lopped it off. They were older than all the others on Mount Olympus, and even Zeus was afraid of them. When a race of giants attacked the palace, the fates chased them away with a golden pestle from the kitchen. No one could fight against them and win. The thread they made determined each mortal’s life span.

  My grandmother, Fuku, and her two sisters, Masu and Ko, seemed as mysterious to me as the fates. At a family reunion in Kobe in the early 1960s, they were seated side by side at the head table, each wearing a grey kimono, her white hair put up in a bun. When I went to greet them and said, “Obahchan”—Grandmother—they turned to me at once, their faces wrinkled into identical smiles. Their bent backs and short necks, each with a hump at the base, looked exactly the same. It was as though my grandmother had split herself into three people.

  The women were barely in their sixties then. They had grown up in a prosperous home in Himeji, a castle town, and their names read together, “Masu Kofuku,” meant “increasing happiness.” After the war, when all three lost their land, my grandmother became convinced that they had been punished for their parents’ arrogance in choosing such auspicious names. To prevent more bad luck from befalling our family, she suggested the humblest of names for her two oldest grandchildren. Mine, Kyoko, meant “respectful” and my brother’s, Jumpei, “mild-mannered and humble.” Our two names together, “Kyo-jun,” meant “absolute and humble obedience.” By the time we were born, the bombed-out buildings in our city had been replaced by high-rises. Other children had optimistic names: Machiko (“polishes her intellect”), Kazumi (“harmonious and beautiful”), Susumu (“marching forward”), Makoto (“absolute truth”), Tadashi (“justice and integrity”), Ryukichi (“lucky dragon boy”).

  The women in my grandmother’s family were famous for their longevity. Widowed in their seventies, Masu, Ko, and Fuku would each manage alone instead of becoming a burden to her children; all three would die in their nineties from heart failure or pneumonia. The moral of their story was that you shouldn’t wish for too much. The greatest virtue was in being content with less.

  THE FEW PIECES OF FURNITURE I bought for my studio were cheap and light-weight, intended for students, widowers, divorcees, and other people in transition, but I was going nowhere. I had the same teaching job, volunteer activities, and weekly get-togethers with friends in Green Bay and Door County. I shopped at the grocery stores whose layout I could describe in my sleep and ran and biked the routes I had figured out years before. Dorian lived with me but stayed with Chuck when I traveled out of town, so even his routine was undisturbed.

  The only other time I had faced a major change—moving from Kobe to Rockford—I had attended classes and studied in the library as before, listened to the music I already knew, and worn the clothes I’d bought in Kobe. I had arranged my dorm room to look just like my room at Hiroshi’s house, with the bed and the desk against one wall, the dresser against the other, and the Indian “Tree of Life” tapestry from a junior high school bazaar tacked on the ceiling. A similar tapestry now covered my futon bed. I hadn’t experienced any real change since my mother’s death,
because I had become an expert at keeping everything the same.

  When I first moved into my studio, I had considered building my log house in Door County right away or buying a condo in Milwaukee and commuting to my teaching job. By the time the divorce was final, the thought of all that driving back and forth, week after week, exhausted me. I didn’t even have the energy to find a larger apartment in town.

  Chuck and I played tennis once a week—hitting the ball back and forth without keeping score—and ate dinner at the restaurants we’d gone to a hundred times. The only change was that I had him over for coffee in my studio, a space I had never shared with him during our marriage. One night as he was leaving, he told me how upset he was with his mother for being so critical of him; another night, he said he was worried about a childhood friend who was drinking himself to death. When I complained about my job, he shook his head and said, “That’s terrible. No wonder you’re upset. You deserve better.” My college was becoming more like a business school every year. I dreaded staying there till retirement, but I was afraid to give up a secure job I already knew how to do. “I feel the same way about my job,” he admitted. “It’s scary to stay or to leave.”

  I used to have dreams in which my mother came to visit me. We had deeply satisfying conversations I couldn’t remember on waking, except that all the time we were talking we both knew she was dead. Chuck and I seemed to be floating through our afterlife within this lifetime. Just like in my dreams, a part of me always knew that we were only having our great conversations, because our real life was already over. I didn’t wish we hadn’t split up. I only wanted to stay in this afterlife with him forever.

  In October and November, as the days grew shorter, we found a deserted tennis court on the edge of town. Maybe the city forgot to turn off the lights in that park. Long after the other courts had closed, the single court by the river was illuminated at night. By four o’clock, when Chuck met me in the empty parking lot, dusk was falling. The last flocks of geese flew overhead, wave after wave of black shadows. We played wearing our hats and gloves, and the ball bounced differently now that the asphalt was so cold. In Milwaukee, near our apartment, a small group of old men had played tennis year round on the lakeside court the city had plowed especially for them. For all our talk of living for now and not planning for the future, we’d envisioned ourselves being like them someday: two stubborn people defying winter and old age, united in our eccentricity and rebellion. But when our riverside court got buried in snow in December, the city didn’t send out a plow to clear it for us. Chuck and I talked about joining the indoor tennis club that had just opened in town, but neither of us took the initiative.