All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  While the first seeds of hysteria were sown within me, my pantry was emptied, unscrewed, detached, and removed, and the gentle Sir Washie finally came through the kitchen, went out the back door, and was taken far away. I felt badly for him as I stood at the back door watching him disappear into the night. I wondered if he would be alright right before—well, right before I remembered he was an inanimate object that had no feelings and that it was really only me wracked by grief… but I was distracted from my grief process by a crisis that had begun to develop back in the kitchen.

  The new washer is the same depth as Sir Washie but about four centimeters wider. This, we thought, was going to make it hard to get it downstairs, but not impossible. As I was still drying my tears, this was proving to be wrong. Even with the pantry removed (and lying in the hall) the new washer wouldn’t even clear the doorway. Joe said it was just a small part of the door frame that was the problem, which was no problem, because he could “make it work.” That little piece came off, another attempt was made to get the new washer in, and then Joe, with a zeal that was only matched by my sense of foreboding, announced that all we needed to do was remove a bigger piece of the door frame itself, and then we would be home free. He started to assemble his tools, and for some crazy reason probably related to insurance coverage, the minute he used the words “Sawzall,” “pry bar,” and “widen” the delivery guys panicked, got in their truck, and gunned it out of here.

  Joe called in the forces. My brother Ian and our friend Ken came to help, and our neighbor Greg provided a variety of saws and emotional support. (He may also have been watching his back, since his house is the other half of our semidetached, and once Joe started talking about sawing anything at all near a shared wall, Greg was keenly interested.) I should have known how it was going to go down when my brother bolted through the front door with a big smile on his face and said “I’m here to help. I didn’t miss all the sawing… did I?” That was when I had my first drink.

  In a flurry of sawdust and optimism, the guys removed the facing board and tried again to lower the washer. Nope. They reconsidered and hacked another board out of the frame. Still not big enough. They sawed another part of the frame out and then removed a light switch (on the theory that every centimeter counted) and with chaos and saws all around them, this time the washer cleared the door. There was much jubilation, but it was short lived.

  I had my second drink as they discovered that the washer (for whom I was beginning to feel a resentment nearly matched by my longing for the departed Sir Washie) would only go down the first two steps to the basement before the team encountered another problem in the form of the main sewer line on their left, and a wall on their right. Thankfully, nobody said anything about the sewer line, but it was decided very quickly that the wall couldn’t entirely remain if the washer was going to go down. I looked at Joe talking about hacking up more of the house, and I didn’t think he looked as worried as he should. In fact, he was standing in the basement with a large saw, a sweaty brow, and a crazy, determined look in his eye, all while smiling in a really strange way and saying, “I can do it, I can do it. I have momentum!”

  At this point, I completely flipped out. I called a halt to operations while I stood in the kitchen and took stock for a minute. We had removed the door, the food, the cabinet, the door frame, and the light fixtures, and we had sawed off chunks of the house. The house was trashed. The kitchen was trashed. There was a new washer mocking me from the back door, and nobody had clean clothes. I could tell that doorway would never be right again and we were a few hours from the start of the New Year while my husband delightedly planned to take out a part of our house that was in his way.

  I took a deep breath and gave a thoroughly impassioned speech about how we had crossed the crazy line. Totally crossed it. I told Joe that one of the things I love best about him is his optimism. He always believes that everything is going to work out, and I could see that Joe had decided that this washer was going into the basement no matter what it took. He was on a mission. I told him that I really loved his optimism, but that this time it just wasn’t appropriate. This wasn’t going well and I didn’t think it was going to start going well and the washer was too damn big and I had changed my mind and we needed to absolutely return it right now before he sawed up anything else. We needed to return this washer and pay the extra money and get apartment-sized appliances. I had said I didn’t want them because I’d have to do a load of laundry every fourteen minutes for the rest of my life but right that minute I didn’t care because, frankly, I had hit my limit for a sawed-up house, and saws, and washers, and problems. I burst into tears, while the assembled masses looked at me like they couldn’t understand how any of this could be bothering anyone.

  That is when I saw it. There was a huge scratch on the side of the washer, and I realized that it couldn’t be returned. That thing, that monstrosity that wouldn’t fit down the stairs, would belong to us forever. As that dawned on me, I was suddenly filled with an urge to hack a hole in the floor of the kitchen and just drop the bastard through to the basement, or maybe shove it onto the stairs and leap upon it with the full force of my body until it fell through, smashing whatever needed to be smashed to make it work. I took a deep breath. I poured myself a third drink, and then I told them all to put down their tools and get out.

  EPILOGUE: OR, THE REASONS WHY I AM TRYING TO LOVE MY NEW WASHING MACHINE*

  5. It is in the basement, not the kitchen. The next day, when I had recovered sufficient will to go on, it turned out that only one small part of one old wall needed to come down, and then the washer descended to the basement with as little difficulty as a four hundred pound washer can while being moved through a very, very narrow house by men who have been moving a washer for two days and aren’t really excited about it anymore. Turns out that Joe’s optimism was not only well placed, but necessary.

  4. Not to sound ungrateful for the years of service Sir Washie gave me, but it would appear that there have been some improvements in washing machines in the last thirty years. (Who knew?) For example, the interior of this front loader is so big that not only will it hold every towel in the house, but I also think I could rent it out as an apartment if we’re ever short of cash again. It holds so much stuff that if you bug your kids to do their laundry, and you finally manage to convince them to go and do it, they can do all of their laundry in one load and that means that you’re only going to have to fight with them about laundry and how people really do care how they smell once every week, not twice. I will lay down my life for anything that makes for fewer fights with my kids.

  3. It makes virtually no noise. I loved Sir Washie, but the sound of him running through a cycle was something that made you nervous no matter where you were in the house, and a slightly unbalanced load (like many of us in our last months, Sir Washie was mostly unbalanced toward the end) could shake windows, scare small children, and be generally louder than a fifteen-year-old stripped of a cell phone on a Friday night just after she found out that the new boy who moved in next to her friend said that he thought her hair was “sorta nice.”

  2. For weeks, we had been taking our laundry over to my motherin-law’s. This means that you bundled up yourself and your laundry, walked over to her place in varying types of freezing precipitation and over a variety of forms of ice, washed the laundry, and walked back, freezing your arse all the way. This is a huge chunk out of one’s workday, so we tried not to dirty clothes. Finally having a washer in the house meant that the next time someone spilled coffee, I could mop it up with a towel, rather than scream “Drink it off the floor! Drink it off the floor! Are you crazy! Don’t touch that towel!” like I did three days earlier when the last clean towel in the house looked like it needed to be guarded with my life.

  1. When Sir Washie finished a load (heaven bless him) he did nothing but lay there quietly, trying to recover from the effort. When the new washer finishes, it plays a song.** Joe thinks that the purpose of the song is
to tell you that the load is finished, but I don’t think so. I think it plays a song because it’s just so thrilled to be serenely fulfilling its highest purpose by doing my laundry. I think it’s trying to tell me that there is nothing else in the world that would satisfy it more than churning away so we can have clean gitch. I think it’s delighted to be in my service.

  I think it’s happy here, and I hope that Sir Washie knows that, song or no, I do still miss him.

  * My love for my new washing machine should in no way be taken as a lack of loyalty to the memory of Sir Washie. He was the best washer ever and can never really be replaced no matter how seriously slick his replacement is.

  ** The song is “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) by Schubert. I am totally not kidding.

  PERSONAL FILTERS

  while ago I was having coffee with an acquaintance, and when I pulled out my knitting to do a few rounds, she glanced around quickly to see who was looking, and then said, “Are you really going to do that in public?” I laughed, because it wasn’t like I was picking my nose, shaving my armpits, or loudly telling sexually explicit jokes, and I struggled to figure out how knitting was even on the list of things that she would consider embarrassing to be caught at. I wanted to ask her what she was thinking, but I didn’t know her very well and, truthfully, I was worried about the answer she might give me. Obviously in her world, being a knitter was embarrassing, and doing it meant something about you that you wouldn’t want other people to know—what, I couldn’t imagine. I thought of about a hundred snappy answers to her question while I was sitting there, answers like, “No, of course I’m not really going to do this in public. I just carry yarn with me as a prop so that I can repel people who are cool and hip like you,” or even just, “Yes. I like myself and I don’t worry much about what people think, especially if it has nothing at all to do with them.” As always, none of them came out of my mouth, because I have excellent personal filters. I think that what I said instead was something like, “Oh sure. I’m already a slightly dumpy mother of three in my forties. I have nothing to lose”.

  All the way home from the coffee shop, I imagined a world where, when people say something stupid to me about knitting, I just say what I’m thinking. Just let go, roll with the adage that if you ask a stupid question, you should get a stupid answer, and let it rip. I know I’d never really do it, because it’s wrong to make people feel bad, even if they deserve it, but still, when I got home I wrote a list. Even just getting it down on paper makes it more likely that I won’t ever say it out loud.

  THINGS THAT NONKNITTERS SAY TO ME AND WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY BACK

  (but Never Will Because I am a Good Person)

  SCENE: Me, knitting. Nonknitter approaches and says, “Wow, are you knitting?”

  WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY: Nope, doesn’t it look like it though? Really, this is a careful illusion made possible through my many years of studying enchantment and magic. In reality, I’m just sitting around like everyone else, but I make it appear as though I’m knitting to create a feeling of coziness, make me look smart, and give me a way to meet people. Hi!

  WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID: Yes.

  SCENE: Me, knitting on an airplane. Nonknitter looks at me and says, “Did they let you through security with those?”

  WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY: No. Security did not allow me through with these knitting needles. Instead of coming through security just like everyone else on this plane, I had to come up with an extremely complicated plan. This morning, before I left home, I positioned the needles on my person and then when I passed through the X-ray machine I told them it was a steel plate I have from the war. When they looked suspicious and snapped their latex gloves, I ran. I bolted past the desk, deliberately abandoning my things in the search machine (having strategically removed all identifying materials ahead of time), and streaked through the airport, hiding briefly in a Starbucks to elude Homeland Security. When I saw them pass, I used the door codes I’d stolen from a pilot I shagged last week to open the gates, and slunk through the back corridors of the airport, stepping in every puddle I could find to avoid leaving a scent for the tracking dogs. I backtracked, made only left turns, and briefly rappelled until I made it all the way back to my original gate where I used a counterfeit German passport to sneak onto the plane. Now, I’m sitting here, knitting, and celebrating the fact that, even though I have certainly secured myself at least fifteen years in federal prison, if not a violent shooting death upon landing (assuming, of course, that I am not taken out by an Air Marshall long before arrival), I have at long last met my goal of sneaking needles past security so that I can at long last knit a damn sock on a plane! (At this point I imagine I would laugh maniacally.)

  WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID: Yes.

  SCENE: Me, knitting and appearing to enjoy it. Nonknitter says, “You knit a lot. Do you enjoy it?”

  WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY: No, I can’t stand it. It’s fiddly and dumb and the needles keep poking holes in my purse, but you know what? I bought hundreds of skeins of yarn before I was sure about it, and I’m no quitter. As soon as I get this yarn used up I’m off it. It was a horrible mistake.

  WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID: Yes.

  SCENE: Me, knitting socks. Nonknitter approaches and asks what I’m making. I tell the person that it’s socks, and we have a brief conversation about how long it takes to make a pair of socks, at which point the helpful nonknitter tries to release me from my slave labor by telling me something that I obviously don’t know, or I wouldn’t be knitting socks. The nonknitter asks, in all sincerity, “Did you know that you can get socks for a dollar a pair at Walmart?”

  WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY: Are you serious! Really? Why didn’t someone tell me this before now? I feel dizzy. I need to sit down. Do you know how much time it takes to make a pair of socks? Do you know how much time in my life I’ve spent on this? It takes forever to knit socks—and it’s boring and expensive! Please, I beg of you! Take me to this mysterious and magical “Walmart” so that I too may have socks that don’t need to be knit! Oh, happy, happy day! Now if only something could be done about sweaters.

  WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID: Yes.

  SCENE: Me at my spinning wheel, making yarn. Nonknitter asks me what I am doing. I reply, “making yarn.” Nonknitter asks, “Real yarn?”

  WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY: No, not real yarn. Real yarn can only come from a machine and a store. Spinning wheels are a way of replicating yarn, but it’s not usable, just ornamental. It actually disintegrates after a few hours and leaves only a pile of lint.

  WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID: Yes.

  SCENE: Me, knitting away, no pattern in sight. Nonknitter approaches and asks where my pattern is. I reply that I’m not using one. She looks boggled for a moment, and then asks, “If you don’t have a pattern, aren’t you worried about what you’ll end up making?”

  WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY: I really am. I’m hoping it doesn’t turn out to be another hat, because that’s what it was the last two times I knit without a pattern. I like the element of surprise, though—the way that when I don’t use a pattern, it’s all up in the air. Could be a sweater, could be mittens, no way to know until I’m finished. It’s fun, but frustrating.

  WHAT I REALLY SAID: No.

  SCENE: I’m knitting, as I usually am, and I’m approached by a nonknitter who points out that every time she sees me, I’m knitting. “You knit a lot,” she observes. What comes out of her mouth next is the only thing a nonknitter has ever said to me that has effectively silenced not just my actual voice but my inner one as well.

  “You must have a lot of time on your hands. You should think about getting a hobby.”

  OUT OF THE CLOSET

  live in a teeny-tiny house, one of several in a row, built more than 130 years ago for the workers of a nearby piano factory. (In an odd twist of fate I actually own one of those pianos, built by someone who lived in my house. I like that.) These are thrifty, odd little houses, and everything about them and even the street I live on tells
a story about what things used to be like here. For example, nobody has a driveway (because nobody owned a car) and yet the street is twice as wide as all the others in the neighborhood because there used to be a dairy nearby and the horse-drawn milk wagons needed room to turn. My little house sits right at the sidewalk, with only a few square meters for a front garden, and over the years the whole house has increasingly begun to list toward the light post. (I’m almost afraid to look into that.) The history of this place and its odd little quirks give this house a set of charms that you won’t find in a new house in a modern suburb, although I admit that I do occasionally (and by “occasionally” you understand that I mean “pretty often”) envy those dwellers something. While I love my claw-foot tub, I sometimes think about what it would be like to have water pipes big enough to grant sufficient water pressure for a shower, and while my friends in newer homes can plug something in without a thought, I live with electrical wiring that seems to have been installed by M. C. Escher and scares the living snot out of every electrician I hire to try and make sense of it. While it was charming, and even knitterly, to discover that parts of my home are insulated with newspaper and wool, in the February of the Canadian winter I consider nothing but the dead sexy nature of modern and efficient insulation. There is much that I have pined for, but if I had to drill it down to one thing I have always wanted, always wished that this little house had, it’s something I bet you never thought about taking for granted. It’s closets.

  Oh, as the mother of three daughters, how I have longed for closets. At the turn of the century, when this house was built, closets weren’t at all in vogue. People owned very few clothes and when they did hang them up, it was on hooks, not hangers, so closets were hardly an efficient use of space. As a result, the closets in Victorian homes are often sparse, and tiny, and without a rod to hang hangers on. If you do install a rod in your tiny little closet, the closet itself is hardly deep enough to accommodate hangers—many of us end up choosing between having hangers and having doors on our closets. My entire house has (brace yourself) two closets. Two. Two tiny closets so small that one of those plastic storage bins—the ones that are about two and a half feet long, and about one and a half feet deep—barely fits. That’s small. There is no coat closet (we have hooks by the door), no linen closet (we have a wardrobe for towels and sheets), and most importantly, and I’m sure you can feel me here, nowhere to shove the mess if someone is coming over and you really need to hide all the dirty laundry. There is no closet big enough to be a proper hide-and-seek spot, and the phrase “come out of the closet” held no meaning for my children until they were old enough to grasp it as a metaphor, because if you told them someone should come out of the closet they would stare blankly at you wondering why, or actually how, whoever it was got in there.