by Kyoko Mori
I’d been knitting for nine years before I made the shawl on the first page for my friend Jane’s birthday. I can’t remember what happened to the earlier notes. Even from this notebook, I only have vague recollections of the baby blankets, sweaters, and hats for Chuck’s nephews, the scarves and mittens for friends I haven’t seen in years.
Because I took my knitting everywhere, the margins of the notebook are scribbled with names, telephone numbers, and addresses, directions to the bookstores where I gave readings, hotel and rental car information. Some of the names are illegible and others might refer to someone who picked me up at the airport or to an author whose book I meant to read. The notebook is a shadow journal, a record of the last fifteen years in a code I can hardly decipher. The writing in it—an assortment of facts with no commentary—is the opposite of a composition.
WHEN CHUCK CAME TO SEE ME in Cambridge during my third year there, we drove to Walden. The park was half an hour from where I lived, but I had been saving it for Chuck’s visit. Rereading the book together in Milwaukee the year we met, we had pictured Thoreau sitting by a shallow pond and gazing at lily pads like a New England Buddha. Actually, Walden was a freshwater lake so vast and deep that we were afraid to swim in it. We hiked around its perimeter and came across the site of Thoreau’s cottage, marked by a pile of fist-sized rocks. A sign explained that people had brought these rocks from all over the world to pay tribute, even though the original structure had been made of wood.
Everyday for a week, I planned an outing so Chuck could meet the friends I’d made. Patricia, the woman who’d introduced me to her realtor, Pebble, had us over to dinner, and another close friend and novelist, Mako, went with us to an outdoor sculpture park in the suburbs. I organized a “Meet Chuck” pizza party for a dozen others. Chuck and I saw more people and sights in a week than we had done in several years of our marriage. He told funny stories about the first-and second-graders he taught, the middleaged football league he had joined, the times Dorian had terrorized people who came to our house.
At the end of the visit, as we waited for his plane at Logan, we talked about how I would find another job in the Midwest, build a cottage in Door County, and we would visit each other every summer. Two years later, I applied to over fifty jobs, hoping to move back to the Midwest, but the best offer I got was in Northern Virginia. I moved to a co-op apartment in DC, two subway stops from Dupont Circle, where Chuck and I had stayed in the 1980s. My new running routes overlapped those we’d done from our hotel. When I called to give him my new address, Chuck said he might be getting married.
“How do you mean, might?” I asked.
“Well, I haven’t decided,” he answered. “I could see getting married to this woman, or selling the house and moving out to the country by myself.”
“How long have you been seeing her?”
“Two years, off and on.”
“If you were to get married, when would that be?”
“Oh,” he said, “probably in a couple of weeks.”
“Good luck making a decision,” I said, and he actually laughed.
For the first time since our divorce, he didn’t mention visiting me in Door County someday. As we were saying goodbye, I remembered how, every night after dinner during his stay in Cambridge, he had gone up to the roof of my condo. I had assumed he was smoking or needing to be alone, so I didn’t ask what he was doing. He would come down while I was making coffee, and we would stay up talking about books and movies and mutual friends before I went to sleep in my writing room, giving him the bed as I did to any other guest. At the time, none of this had seemed strange or even particularly sad. I’d been delighted to be friends with him still, to be able to share the life I’d made out east. But now I imagined him standing alone on that roof with the skyline of Boston in the distance, the maple leaves rustling around him. How he must have felt about being a visitor in the home I’d made without him—in the long hours we talked, we could never broach that conversation.
Because he didn’t call again, I wasn’t surprised to hear that he had gotten married, though not even his sisters could say when or where. He emailed me on my birthday and explained he couldn’t telephone this year because his wife wasn’t—yet—comfortable with his being friends with me. Every year of our acquaintance, he had sung me a loud and off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday,” which was even better after I’d moved away, because, on the phone, he could really ham it up and we weren’t afraid to say how much we enjoyed being in touch with each other. I pictured the pile of rocks where Thoreau’s wooden cottage used to be and wondered about the hundreds of people who had brought them. Dedicated readers of the book, they must have known that the original shack wouldn’t have had any stones. Sometimes, the ritual didn’t match the past it was meant to honor, but it was no less real for that. The rocks told their own story.
I WENT BACK TO GREEN BAY a year later to give a talk at my former college. Jim, the Black Sheep priest, drove me to see my old house, which was being rented out. Chuck and his new wife had bought a house in another part of town. I hadn’t heard from him, but his sister, Carrie, came to DC on business and stayed with me.
The house was newly painted, and the tenants had taken down our blinds and put up white curtains. As Jim and I walked up the empty driveway into the back yard, we remembered the afternoons we’d spent with the waxwings and the robins inside the walk-in cage that used to be under the maple trees, when I was working as a sanctuary volunteer. To help the birds figure out how to forage, I had buried earthworms in clay planters and tied grapes onto branches hung from the cage’s ceiling. Once the birds were eating on their own, I released them in my yard, but one robin kept returning—landing at my feet every time I went outside, rubbing his wings and opening his beak to beg for food. From the top branch of our tallest maple, that robin could tell me apart from other humans. He showed no interest in anyone else who came into the yard, but as soon as I stepped out the door, he flew down, making a huge commotion of chirps, trills, and squawks. In September as the birds began to flock up for migration, I watched my robin from inside the house, through binoculars. When he came down from the tree and didn’t see me, his head bobbed down into the grass to peck at the insects. So I started ignoring him no matter how he loudly he begged. After a week, he stopped flying down to visit me and disappeared from his perch on the maple. If he was still in the yard, I couldn’t tell him apart from the others. I didn’t know for certain if he had survived to join the flock. This was the saddest event in my years as a volunteer rehabilitator. I told Chuck how great it felt to do the right thing and let that bird go, and he pretended, for my sake, that this was the whole truth.
Jim and I crossed the back yard and came around to the east side of the house. As we proceeded along the narrow side garden, we were only a few feet away from the house, so the scratches and the gouges on the old paint were impossible to miss. It was April, too early for Chuck to be working outside. He must have started the previous fall and run out of time before the tenants moved in or the cold weather set in. The scratches might as well have been a hieroglyphic message. I had emailed him from DC and asked him to call my cell phone during the two days I would be in Green Bay. We could meet for coffee or at least talk on the phone. If that wasn’t possible, I said, he could tell me so by email and I would understand. Though he didn’t respond, I knew what he was thinking: I should call her soon. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. A person who doesn’t finish anything will never write you off, either. As long as we’re both alive, he must be hoping, there is still a possibility we would be friends again.
WHILE I WAS STILL LIVING IN WISCONSIN, my brother had telephoned me from various airports around the U. S. Sometimes, he was changing planes between South America and Japan and other times, he had stopped in New York or California to visit friends.
“Next time,” he always said, “I’ll come to Green Bay.”
In the background, I could hear the noise of the terminal.
If he had really wanted to talk, Jumpei wouldn’t have waited until the last few minutes he was in the country to call me. He didn’t fully understand how his actions had betrayed me. He might even have been hoping that his various loyalties could co-exist—his travels in South America, his closeness to Michiko, his business in Tokyo, his friends in the U. S., and me, his only blood relative. Like a needle working its way through an intarsia sweater, he wanted to be immersed in each block of color, one at a time. I should have understood that desire more than anyone, but when he finally stopped calling, I was relieved.
I haven’t been in touch with anyone in Japan since then. My grandmother, Fuku, died a year after our only visit; my two favorite aunts, Akiko and Keiko, too, a few years later from cancer. The last time I saw the uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends I still have, my novel had gotten translated into Japanese, and the publisher had arranged a book tour in Tokyo and Kobe. My relatives and friends took me out to dinner, and I promised to stay in touch, but once I was back in Wisconsin, I only thought, as Chuck would do about me later, I should write soon, I just haven’t done it yet. None of my female cousins or close friends had ever worked full-time. My two uncles who are teachers don’t have women colleagues or friends. The last woman they regarded as their equal was probably my mother, who they always said was the smartest of my grandparents’ children. My relatives and I have little in common anymore; even if we’d lived in the same country, we might have fallen out of touch. All the same, letting go is as scary as making contact, so I balance in the middle, postponing my decision indefinitely.
My mother had no use for indecision. In her journal, she never weighed the value of life against the relief she sought in death. She mentioned a few things she thought she should be grateful for—my brother and me, the home she’d made, the family she came from—but that’s not the same as finding joy in us and feeling grief at the thought of losing us. When she imagined her only alternative, she quickly ruled it out: death seemed far less painful to her than leaving her husband and going back alone to her parents’ house. In every entry, she made a list of things that depressed her, the reasons why she shouldn’t be alive. For the two years she wrote, Takako never wavered: she was gathering evidence against her life and nurturing her resolution. Once she became sure, she planned her suicide so carefully that there was no possibility of being brought back to life. When she insisted that my father take my brother and me on a rare Sunday outing, she was making sure that we would not be alone to find her. She thought of every detail and never wondered if she was making the right choice. If she had left her marriage instead, her parents could have loved and consoled her as she endured her disgrace; my brother and I might have come to her when we were old enough to leave our father’s house. Even if we didn’t, she wasn’t going to lose us any more in life than in death, but she wasn’t thinking of these chances. Takako didn’t believe in God or afterlife. She chose the absolute certainty of death—pure nothing—over the banal compromises of life.
Because I’ve spent most of my life in the shadow of her suicide, I’m drawn to compromises and ambiguity. I stayed in Green Bay for years pondering the changes I could be making. Indecision struck me as a kind of freedom, a chance to draw out every potential action into a long yarn of what might have been and could still be. Even the most complicated sweaters are made of loops of yarn. You can snip one stitch to unravel the whole sweater and start over indefinitely, making several sweaters out of the same yarn and never having to stop. Compared to what my mother had done—choosing the ultimate change, which was death—staying in one place and making no progress seemed like safety and contentment. But when Chuck started doing the same thing with our house, starting and stopping but never finishing, I could no longer live with him. Making no decision didn’t protect me from change. Things ended whether I finished them or not.
I’ve un-knitted necklines that looked sloppy or cuffs that turned out too tight and replaced them. There were a few sweaters I took apart around the halfway mark, because I didn’t like the way they looked, and no amount of adjusting could save them. But in all the years of knitting, I have never unraveled a whole finished sweater and knitted it into a new garment. Though nothing I’ve made is perfect, after numerous partial corrections, there comes a time to accept the result and move on to something new. The pleasure of knitting and unraveling, finishing nothing, is potent. Sometimes, I imagine myself sitting in a magic circle of invisible stitches, endlessly repeating the same easy motion. But I have a notebook full of scratch marks to remind me of the stitches I’ve made and kept.
Notes for Further Reading
and Knitting
BOOKS THAT TAUGHT ME HOW TO KNIT:
Fee, Jacqueline. The Sweater Workshop. Loveland, Colorado: Interweave Press, 1983.
This book introduced me to the seamless sweater and the watchcap (which Fee calls “the mushroom cap”). “Candle-Lit Windows,” the pattern I put in the yoke of Chuck’s pullover, also comes from this book.
Zimmermann, Elizabeth. Knitting Without Tears. New York: Scribners, 1971.
The tam-o’shanters I made with Katie and the cardigan (cut open from a pullover) that I didn’t try are both in this book. Zimmermann’s chapter on hats includes watchcaps and “snail hats.”
———. Knitter’s Almanac. New York: Scribners, 1974.
Zimmermann introduces a new project for each month. The shawl I knitted for Alice is for July. Zimmermann made hers while accompanying her husband on his business trip to Europe.
OTHER KNITTING BOOKS:
Carles, Julie and Jordana Jacobs. The Yarn Girls’ Guide to Simple Knits. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2002.
———. The Yarn Girls’ Guide to Beyond the Basics. New York: Potter Craft, 2005.
Fassett, Kaffe. Glorious Knits. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1985.
Fourgner, Dave. The Manly Art of Knitting. Santa Rosa, California: Threshold, 1972.
“Only a man would knit a hammock with shovel handles and manila rope for yarn,” according to the back cover.
Galeskas, Beverly. Felted Knits. Loveland, Colorado: Interweave Press, 2003.
Ligon, Linda (Ed). Homespun Handknit: Caps Socks Mittens & Gloves. Loveland, Colorado: Interweave Press, 1987.
Walker, Barbara. A Treasury of Knitting Patterns. New York: Scribners, 1968.
Barbara Walker collected 107 traditional lace patterns for this book.
PATTERNS I USED:
The felted bowler was made from “Fabulous Felted Hat” designed by Rena Brown and Carol Dunlap, published by Brown Sheep Company. Similar patterns appear in Beverly Galeskas’ Felted Knits.
“Sweater Sweater” was designed by Norma Jean Ek.
The pattern for “Flip-Flop Mittens” appears in a pamphlet, Mittens, Gloves, Hats, and Scarves (Lowell, Massachusetts: Classic Elite Yarns, 2000).
“Emmeline” (my first cardigan) can be found in Rowan Knitting Magazine, Number 28.
THE GENERAL HISTORY OF KNITTING, WEAVING
AND SPINNING:
Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. New York: Norton, 1994.
Macdonald, Anne. No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting. New York: Ballantine, 1988.
Rutt, Richard. The History of Hand Knitting. London: B. T. Batsfold, 1987.
THE HISTORY OF MULTI-COLORED KNITTING IN
THE BALTICS:
Bush, Nancy. Folk Socks: The History and Techniques of Handknitted Footwear. Loveland, Colorado: Interweave Press, 1994.
De Masters, Sandy and Mary Germain. Ethnic Socks and Stockings. Copyright, De Masters and Germain, 2002. This booklet was compiled for the class the authors taught at Sievers School on Washington Island, Wisconsin.
Upitis, Lizbeth. Latvian Mittens. Pittsville, Wisconsin: School House Press, 1997.
COCO CHANEL:
Charles-Roux, Edmonde. Chanel and Her World: Friends, Fashion, and Fame. New York: The Vendome Press, 2005.
Special thanks to Sabina, wherever y
ou are, for teaching me to knit.
Kyoko Mori
Kyoko Mori’s award-winning first novel, Shizuko’s Daughter, was hailed by the New York Times as “a jewel of a book, one of those rarities that shine out only a few times in a generation.” Her many critically acclaimed books include Polite Lies, The Dream of Water, and the novels, Stone Field, True Arrow and One Bird. Her stories and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, The Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review, The Best American Essays, and other journals and anthologies. Mori holds a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She was Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Creative Writing, Harvard (1999–2005) and, for the last 5 years, on the faculty of the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA program in Cambridge. Kyoko Mori is associate professor of English at George Mason University. She lives in Washington, DC with Ernest and Algernon—her Siamese cats.