by Kyoko Mori
BEFORE THE MOVERS ARRIVED, I had to decide where everything should go. I had taken pictures of my furniture on special “Write-On” Polaroid film and recorded the dimensions. I now measured the walls and the floors of my empty apartment, diagrammed the layout, taped the furniture photographs on the walls, and marked the floor with masking tape. I measured, calculated, and re-measured as if I were planning a big weaving project. If all the furniture fit just right, the alcove could be my writing room, with the bigger room serving as a dining room, living room, and bedroom in one. In my sleeping bag, placed exactly where the bed would go, I felt the slant of the hardwood floor against my spine and remembered the nights I’d spent camping on my land. More than a thousand miles away, I was cutting back the invisible junipers and carving my paths around the new home.
After the furniture was in place, my first guest was Henri. We ate the jar of pesto I’d made in Green Bay and the bread I baked from the sour dough starter transported across several state lines in my cooler. In my new living/dining room, we sat on the kitchen chairs he had given me twenty years before in Milwaukee, so the meal was a communion with all the places of my past. The first house guest arrived before the week was out. One of the guys in my movie group from Green Bay had gotten laid off from his job and decided to take a road trip. I gave up my bed to him and slept on the floor of my new writing room. My head tucked under the desk and my legs scrunched against the radiator, I could see a tiny piece of the sky framed in the corner of the window. It was oddly like sitting in the backseat of my own car and getting a tilted view of a familiar road. Eager to show him the sights, I learned how to get around the city. I had stumbled on to the one thing that had been lacking in my studio in Green Bay. Entertaining turned a single person’s apartment into a home.
The very layout of my new apartment expressed what home meant to me: a large room I could share with guests, a small room where I could be alone to write, a kitchen where I could cook a single meal or a big dinner. Living alone made me appreciate the company I chose, but I wasn’t a person who moved easily from a day of writing to an evening of conversations. I liked gradual transitions, borders and boundaries, nooks and crannies, with plenty of blank spaces in between. Even in a place I had to myself, I preferred to keep things separate—solitude and company, writing and living, cooking and knitting. But equally important was the fact that I wanted all of these activities under the same roof to make a home.
IN GREEN BAY, DOOR COUNTY, and Minneapolis, once I got to know someone, I met a dozen of their friends who welcomed me into their circle. Our get-togethers were casual and impromptu, often involving food. Those who enjoyed cooking might call the rest of us and ask, “Hey, I just made a huge batch of soup. Did you have dinner yet?” or “I’m getting a group together to go apple-picking and make apple sauce at my house. Do you want to come?” In Cambridge, people did not visit each other unless they had been invited weeks in advance. My neighbors never knocked on my door to offer me food. When I telephoned my new acquaintances and asked how they were, they always answered, “Oh, I’ve been really busy,” which made me shy about inviting them to do anything. To make friends out east, you had to develop a thicker skin.
It took over a year to get to know half a dozen single women I could call—one at a time—to see a movie. Even if I could find a time when everyone was free, I couldn’t have gotten two of these women to see the same movie on the same night and sit in the same row. Everyone had strong opinions about what she wanted to see, what show time best suited her schedule, and how far she had to sit from the screen.
My new friends and I would go to a restaurant after the movie to talk, but most nights, every place was packed, so I started saying, “Let’s just go to my place. It’s quieter, and I have some food.” I hadn’t turned into the kind of single person who ate cereal for dinner. I always kept enough groceries in my refrigerator to make a salad and a pasta dish. In Green Bay, even Francis, the friend who couldn’t cook, had offered me lunch; after our long walks at the sanctuary, the tomato soup she made out of a can and the celery she smeared with peanut butter were just the right combination of hot and cold, salty, crunchy, and gooey.
I progressed from having friends over for impromptu dinners to inviting them ahead of time. “I’ll prepare something simple so it won’t be any trouble,” I said. The following year, I started having two or three guests over for a more elaborate dinner—an appetizer, an entree, bread, salad, pie. Then I threw birthday and book publication parties for my new friends. By moving the furniture, putting pillows on the floor, and baking a couple of homemade pizzas, I could entertain as many as twenty people in the one room that was my living room, dining room, and bedroom. The guest list, compiled by the author or the birthday person, sometimes included people I didn’t know. When the party was at my place, the part I dreaded—explaining who I was and why I was there—was suddenly no problem.
My new friends in Cambridge were writers, and except at parties, I saw them one at a time. None of them ever asked me what I was writing and how it was going. After staring at the same sentences for hours, erasing and rearranging them and wondering what they even meant, it was a relief to go out to a movie with someone who had spent a day doing the same thing and didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t have to explain why I was so often dazed and inattentive. On the rare occasions when we did discuss our work, we weren’t just making small talk or comparing notes. We were confiding in each other about what mattered the most.
IN ENTERTAINING, as well as in knitting, I had gradually moved from the easy, casual format to the more elaborate. The salad and pasta dinner after the movie was as simple as the seamless sweaters I used to knit, and just as fail-safe. When I said that I had food at my house anyway, or that I would make something simple so it would be no trouble, I was reassuring myself more than my guests and keeping the pressure low. I had gotten a job at Harvard by telling myself that the interview was a practice run. No matter what I was doing, I became terrified of bad luck when I openly wished for too much. Unlike my grandmother, though, I wasn’t really content with less, or so much less.
The one subject in which I didn’t mind taking tests in high school and college had been history. I loved reading about the kings and the queens, the reformers and the crooks, the new countries that appeared on the map of the world only to disappear by the following day’s lecture, but I had such difficulty with dates and other small details that I stopped trying to memorize them. At the mid-term or the final, I skipped the objective part and concentrated on the essay questions. I usually managed to write my way around the details I couldn’t recall. When my answer was halfway between right and wrong, it was especially important to place only the right details where they stood out. I enjoyed navigating through those essays; years later, when I improvised around the mistakes I made in knitting or adjusted the pattern to accommodate my uneven hand-spun yarn, I felt the same sly satisfaction.
I suffered nosebleed and migraines at the math test, because I couldn’t remember which was sign or cosign, and I panicked at English tests, because the perfect answers I knew couldn’t be put on paper in the allotted time. History was the one subject in which I wasn’t either good or bad. The B I got was exactly what I deserved. Long after I finished school, I continued to read history books. I forgot the details even as I was turning the pages, but I understood the overall story.
No matter where I taught, I wanted my students to relax and enjoy what they could, the way I had lucked into appreciating history. But being a teacher was like being one of the three spinners doling out every mortal’s fate—only, it was talent instead of life span I was called upon to judge. My new students at Harvard impressed me with their intelligence, their knowledge of the world, and their willingness to work hard. Many were good writers and a few seemed truly gifted. All of them would have been better off if I could have persuaded them to expect a little less.
The essays they composed about their junior year abroad were full of
lively details and sophisticated cultural observations, but the true story lay in the disappointment of rooming with another American student whose politics embarrassed them or the frustration of having a brother or a sister visit during the worst week of their stay. These small and yet troubling experiences—mentioned in passing—hinted at complications that revealed their personal quirks and family histories, but I could seldom convince the students to pursue the stories they considered so trivial. The few who focused on pain wrote about the depression, anorexia, or sexual abuse they had suffered. Asked to stand back and provide more perspective—or else return to the topic when they were ready to do so—they gave me revisions in which the huge unmitigated pain was described in even more detail and with less perspective.
In one of my classes, a young woman workshopped an essay about the discrimination she suffered for being a full-figured black contestant at a beauty pageant where all the others were white and several dress sizes smaller. The upshot of her story was that—due to the judges’ racially-skewed notion of beauty—she was chosen as a runner-up instead of being crowned the overall winner she deserved to be. In the class discussion, it came out that there had been thirty contestants rather than the four or five that the essay seemed to imply.
“You mean there were twenty-eight people who didn’t win any awards?” I asked.
The writer nodded.
“Maybe you should make that clearer. That changes the story completely.”
“Why?” one of her classmates asked. “She didn’t win. What difference does it make, how many other people also didn’t?”
“If I was in a contest with thirty people instead of five and I came in second,” I said, “I’d be thinking, Wow, I did pretty well. I almost won. I should be proud of myself. Better luck next time.”
To my surprise, no one laughed. The room was quiet for a long time. Finally, one of the men said, “Okay, maybe you have a point there. But more importantly, a beauty pageant isn’t a venue known for racial fairness, so the writer needs to explain why she expected to win.”
My remark—that finishing second out of thirty wasn’t so bad—was forgotten in the discussion that followed.
The student worked hard on her revision. After she provided more background and polished her sentences, her frustration with the “racial discrimination” came across even more dramatically. She would have been better off if the essay had fallen apart in the revision, forcing her to start over from scratch or write something else. The true story of the pageant was about her feeling more insulted by her runner-up status than with no placement at all. Just how big a part race played in her disappointment was an interesting question, but to really tell that story, a semester wasn’t long enough. In the few weeks she had left, she would only have gotten to a third or fourth draft that looked worse than the first. A beginning student often has to choose between finishing a bad piece and starting a good piece that might get worse and worse before it began to improve. I had been a more effective teacher for those Midwestern kids who had been getting B’s and C’s through school. For them, imperfection was a fact of life. I didn’t know how to get a group of sophisticated high-achievers to value a bad good story over a good bad story.
STAYING IN GREEN BAY had kept me from admitting how narrow my life was becoming. In the small towns and suburbs of the Midwest, it was a virtue not to expect too much or to stand out. If you had more money or education than your neighbors, you played down the difference until you no longer noticed it yourself. Having grown up in Japan as a girl, I had found it quite easy not to appear more accomplished than anyone. If I didn’t move away, I might have grown unable to distinguish modesty from mediocrity. I had to move to Cambridge and force myself to live among more ambitious people.
But once settled there, I became more uncomfortable than ever with the competitive notion of excellence. It was exhausting to be around students who wanted to be the best at everything—even a beauty pageant they believed to be rigged. I preferred making mistakes and trying activities I could never excel at. Even my five-day condo purchase, which impressed my new friends, hadn’t been perfect. I learned about real estate by reading Home-buying for Dummies and ignored half the advice the book offered, starting with the huge math worksheet in the first chapter that was the foundation of all the other advice because it determined how big a mortgage I could really afford. I calculated my price range from the down payment I had, and instead of getting three mortgage quotes, I went with the mortgage broker who shared Pebble’s office so I wouldn’t have to find a ride to another part of town. I had planned my apartment hunt the way I approached a weaving project, with an overall plan of action broken down into steps and stages, but in practice, I improvised and fudged the way I did in my knitting even when I was following a pattern. I could only be good at something if no one expected me to be perfect. Living in Cambridge, where few people had time for old-fashioned homemaking, I devoted myself to cooking and knitting.
In the middle of Harvard Square, I found a small yarn store with plastic milk cartons of yarn crammed against every wall and shawls and sweaters hanging from the ceiling on invisible wires. The women who worked there were dressed in the sweaters they’d made. Customers sat at the table in the middle of the cluttered room, getting a private lesson or just hanging out to work on their projects. The store ladies and the customers alike commented on the yarn I was buying or the sweater I was wearing and told me what they had made from the same yarn. Unlike anywhere else in my neighborhood, I was free to talk to strangers without being introduced first, or needing to exchange phone numbers and email addresses at the end. This was another thing I’d been missing: casual, no-big-deal contact with people I might or might not see again. I had spent the first few months in Cambridge believing that I had offended the couple who ran the corner grocery store because they never asked me if I was new in town, where I’d moved from, or what I was going to make with the huge bag of peaches I bought. At first I liked not being stared at, but after a while, I was “creeped out,” as Chuck would say, by the way people in my new town stared straight ahead and made no comments about the weather or the earliness of the hour as we stood side by side waiting for the same train. The yarn store, where women gathered around the table surrounded by bright colors and chatted about their needlework, felt like a shrine to warmth and civility.
I knitted every night at home, making sweaters from patterns that had two-page instructions in tiny print. In my twenties and thirties, I had wanted everything I did to express what I considered my essential nature: casual, relaxed, and intuitively creative, rather than formal, precise, and meticulous. Now, in my forties, I was finally ready for balance. If following step-by-step instruction didn’t come naturally to me, that was all the more reason to try it. I would rather knit from a complicated pattern and make a few mistakes than execute an easier one flawlessly. A bad good sweater deserved my time and effort much more than a good bad one.
The folklore among knitters is that everything hand-made should have at least one mistake so an evil spirit would not become trapped in the maze of perfect stitches. A missed increase or decrease, a crooked seam, a place where the tension is uneven—the mistake is a crack left open to let in the light. The evil spirit I wanted to usher out of my knitting and my life was at once a spirit of laziness and of over achieving: that little voice in my head that whispered, I won’t even try this, because it doesn’t come naturally to me and I won’t be very good at it.
THE HARDEST THING I MADE in Cambridge was a pair of mittens called “Flip-Flop Mittens,” whose top half could be made to flip back like a hinged lid, exposing the fingers in a fingerless glove. I thought of them as “cat mittens”: at the necessary moment, the sheath pulled back and out came the claws. It was a slow and complicated project. To achieve the gauge for the pattern, I had to use number zero needles. The new bamboo set I bought in the Harvard Square store resembled long toothpicks. The fuzzy mohair yarn made the stitches difficult to see, and each fin
ger had to be knitted separately. It took me two months to make myself a pair. Then I started another pair for my friend Junko, whose hands were smaller than the smallest measurement in the directions. I was proud of having managed to follow the directions and, at the same time, make a few adjustments on my own, until I finished the second mitten and realized that—only on that hand—I had caused the top to flip forward instead of back. After thirty years, I had been blown back into the purgatory of mismatched hands. Once again, I was defeated by the mitten, the ultimate symbol of home-making.
The next morning, I sat down and thought of the various tricks I’d learned in my years of knitting. I looked at several knitting books, went over the notes I’d made in the margins of some patterns. Finally I figured out how to snip one stitch on the palm, unravel a few rows around it to detach the flip at the front, make a new edging for it, and graft the stitches to the back of the hand so that the flip now faced the correct way. The procedure left a small scar, hardly noticeable in the fuzzy mohair. When I gave the mittens to Junko, I showed her my mistake. Across the back of her left hand stretched a broken line, like a rural road on a map of the desert, a path across unknown terrain.
– EPILOGUE –
The Knitting Notebook
THE SPECKLED BLACK “COMPOSITION” BOOK in my knitting bag has a record of every project from the last fifteen years—what I was making, which yarn I used, the number of skeins, the needle size, the gauge, the final measurements. This information only takes a few lines, so most of the space is filled with the scratch marks I made: for every five rows I knitted, I drew four vertical lines with a diagonal slash across them. The tally resembles bundles of kindling stacked across the page.