All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  Now all of this, this closet talk, is important here, not just because closets are great places to keep yarn—I’ve developed all kinds of entirely radical and innovative yarn storage skills as a result of my closet shortage—but because of what that means. No closets means that the yarn habit can’t be in the closet, and so the people who live here have to get down with my yarn situation pretty quickly, because it is impossible to live in a closetless house with a knitter and have the yarn be a secret. It just doesn’t work, and that extends to all of your belongings, no matter what you tend to hoard. Having no closets breeds a certain sort of openness and honesty about your stuff and how much of it you have. If you can’t hide things, if you can’t just decide not to decide if you have to have them and stick them in a tiny room with a door and no light created in your home just for the purpose of holding things, then you have to start deciding about what you’re going to keep and what you’re not. If space is at a premium—and you don’t know at what sort of a premium closet space is until you’ve lived with three teenage girls, a knitter, and a man who has kept (he’s very sentimental) every item he’s ever owned—and you have only two closets, then you have to make crazy, harsh, and deliberate decisions about two things. You need to know what—in a culture that says you should have more and new stuff all the time—is exactly worth having, and you need to embrace the idea of sharing that space and negotiating what is important to each of those five people, given that all of you will be competing with Olympic vigor for said limited space.

  Over the years that we’ve lived like this, it’s the last point that we’ve struggled with the most. Sure, it’s hard to prune our belongings down to reasonable levels and to fight the wave of consumerism that tells us we should have a lot more stuff than what fits in those closets, but it is the ranking system that gives all of us the most grief. When the girls were little it was easier. Homes with little children are more dictatorships than democracies, and it was up to me to decide what the girls owned, how much of it got kept, and what was important. Extensive Barbie stashes were kept reined in by periodic nocturnal abductions, and from time to time a kid looked at us suspiciously when a vast collection of rocks from a neighborhood park simply vanished while they were out. But by far and away, the dictators dictated what stayed and what didn’t, and the closet space was shared the way we thought it should be. As the girls have grown older, this has gotten more challenging. For starters, they sleep less, giving me far less opportunity to rifle a closet and collect things that I don’t approve of, and it’s been my experience that they have way stronger feelings about waking up to discover you squatting on the floor in the dark, tossing out half their collection of outgrown Tshirts into a bag for charity. (For the life of me, I cannot understand why you would have an emotional attachment to an outgrown, plain T-shirt that has to drive your mother to abscond with it in the night. It’s not like it’s from a U2 tour in the ’80s, which is my husband’s excuse for his.)

  Now that my daughters are young women, I have come to realize that I need to make my closet points with logic and common sense. A box of books that you don’t love enough to have on a shelf for rereading? Sell or donate. You won’t forget what you’ve read, and if you won’t re-read it, it has no purpose here. Clothing that you will never, ever wear again? Sell or donate. Toys that aren’t fun anymore? Out. The charger for a cell phone that you had four years ago that got lost but might come in handy if you ever find the phone? (Which, I’d like to point out, is super unlikely if your room is always a sty like that… but I digress.) Gone. Twelve green Tshirts? No duplicating. Pare it down. Seven binders from grade eight French? Nobody’s testing you on that again. Moving on. The skanky tank top I don’t want you to wear at home, never mind in public, and I keep stuffing behind the board games so you can’t find it? Give it up. Bottom line rule: If an item is not going to be used by us, then it doesn’t get to use our space.

  Gradually, as the girls have grown old enough to be included in our ranking system, and to be respected (mostly) for their personal choices and what they would like to keep, they have also grown old enough to challenge the things that my husband and I have in those closets. While I thought this was pretty fun when they were suggesting that Joe didn’t really need a box of sailing magazines from the summer he was sixteen (I have long believed the same, and was thrilled that they had grown into young women of such common sense), the rollicking good time that is judging the choices your mate makes and holding them accountable for it stopped being all that much fun when that same keen eye was turned toward the stash. When a family is gathered in front of a closet, jockeying for enough room for a snowboard and two pairs of inline skates (that no one ever uses, that’s all I’m saying) everybody’s stuff is suspected of being useless and taking up valuable space. The next thing I knew, we had finally and entirely moved from a dictatorship to a democracy, and my kids were asking me to justify the yarn-based use of a closet.

  The ladies had several arguments and were so well organized that they resembled the debate equivalent of a yarn stash black ops strike force. If clothes they will not be wearing had to go, they suggested, then why not yarn I will not knit? Some of that yarn, they argued, has been in that closet since we moved here. In a stunning example of turning my own logic against me, they suggested that if I had not used it in ten years, then I maybe wasn’t going to. Wasn’t that what I said to Meg about the bead making kit she’s been saving since her eighth birthday, just in case there’s some sort of crazed emergency that demands handmade beads? Besides, Sam proffered strategically, hadn’t I told her that saving an extra radio was ridiculous, since there was little chance that she would need it, and it could be easily replaced if there was a need? Didn’t that, she cannily noted, apply to merino? From there, things went downhill, as Joe spotted the opportunity for a little sport.

  “We don’t store duplicates,” Joe said, “and thirty skeins of sock yarn are all sock yarn. That’s duplicating.” His eyes practically twinkled. “If I can’t have five caulking guns, then you can’t have thirty skeins of sock yarn.” Now he was playing with me. He knew damn well that there was a snowflake’s chance in hell that even one of the skeins was leaving; he was just enjoying watching me justify it. All I could think was “Keep laughing, buddy, because the ‘resistor collection’ that you’re saving ‘just in case’ and is practically all duplicates is next, and I’m going after the five amplifiers after that.”

  “He’s right,” said Megan, but she didn’t seem very sporting. “This closet is family space, and the other day when you were in here, you said that you couldn’t imagine what you were thinking when you bought those five skeins of linen. If that’s true, then shouldn’t they be sold or donated?”

  The kid had a point. They all had a point, but the longer I stood there, the more convinced I became that I wasn’t wrong. How would I explain to them how the stash was different? That their things didn’t deserve to be here, but mine did? How did I find a place where taking this much space for my stuff was more worthy and valid than whatever stuff they were attached to? They were right about a few things. I do have a lot of yarn. That much I can’t argue. A lot of that yarn might never get knit, and if I got rid of the yarn, I could always get more—easily, even. I stood there and tried to come up with my justification. I thought about telling them that knitting is not just my stuff; it’s me. I thought about telling them that none of it was really replaceable. I thought about telling them this: That the stash was not just stuff taking up our meager closet (and shelf) space. The beauty and the necessity of it all was that every skein of it was pure potential and inspiration. Where Sam certainly wasn’t going to use the outgrown Tshirts (and I certainly wasn’t going to let her use the skanky one), I might use the stash. Maybe, and that “maybe” made all the difference. I could haul off and knit all that sock yarn, every skein of it, and they aren’t duplicates. They’re all different and unique and most of them are handpaints and that, my friends, that fact makes them uniqu
e all by itself. They’re art, and they haven’t even been knit yet. Do people ask you why you have art in your house, even though it’s unnecessary? Do people question painting your walls a color, even though having white walls serves the same purpose? Did people ask Renoir why he was keeping all those canvases around? No sirree, they did not, and if his family had gotten all uppity about the paint in the closet, he would have told them all that there were lots of paintings inside those paints, and that all he did was release them, and therefore it stands to reason that he needs all those paints and canvases because the art couldn’t exist otherwise. Well, that’s how I feel about the sock yarn. All those skeins are larval sock art, and while we’re at it, this family is standing here in front of the closet all looking pretty damn smug, going after the stash that put those cozy handknit socks right on their feet. Do you—I thought about saying—do you wanna slap a pair of crappy store-bought socks on your feet before you challenge me on this, you bunch of ingrates?

  Those are all things that I thought about saying, but in the end I went another way. I stood up, wiped any look of shame off of my face, plunked down my box of yarn in its rightful space, turned to face my kids, and said the most important thing.

  I own the closet. You’re screwed.

  A LITTLE DEMORALIZING

  bout 12:30 one night, as I sat trying to make knitting headway on a little sweater and waiting for Joe to come home, the phone rang. I answered, since a phone call at 12:30 A.M. usually means something very interesting is happening, and lo, it surely was.

  Me: “Hello?”

  Joe: “You’re not going to believe this.”

  Now, it was a week before Christmas, the washer was broken, we were under the gun to get Christmas ready, I was on a “knitting schedule,” the news was calling the snowstorms headed our way “Snow-maggedon,” and we had just found out that neither of us was getting paid before the end of the year. There was not much that I wouldn’t believe at that point, and Joe knew that, so “You’re not going to believe this” was a pretty bold statement.

  Me: “Okay. Go.”

  Joe: “I’ve got the pickup stuck at my Mum and Dad’s and I can’t get it out.”

  Me: “Really?”

  Now, see that? He was right. Joe’s from Newfoundland. He can drive in any amount of snow. Joe never gets stuck. Ever. Dude knows how to drive in any amount of stuff, and he’s experienced enough to not drive if it’s really not possible. If Joe was actually stuck, then I was stunned. I was also knitting, and it was after midnight and cold, so I was also really not buying that he needed me to get him out. If Joe couldn’t handle a driving problem, I really wasn’t going to be able to.

  Me: “Seriously?”

  Joe: “Seriously. Baby, I’m stuck.”

  Me: “Why don’t you try a little longer, and if it turns out you’re really stuck, then I’ll walk over.”

  I said that because, frankly… I just could not believe Joe was stuck. I believed that what Joe was actually saying to me could be translated more like, “Honey, I’m frustrated so I wanted to share, but I’ll work it out like I always do because, well, I’m Joe.” I mumbled something sort of sympathetic, like, “I’m sure you’ll get it” and hung up the phone and finished my row. About twenty minutes later the phone rang again, and I was pretty sure it was Joe calling to tell me that he was out, and I should never mind, and he’d be home in a minute.

  Me: “Hello?”

  Joe: “Baby, you gotta come help me. I’m really stuck. I’m so stuck. This is bad.”

  Bad? Joe doesn’t get into bad trouble backing out of a parking spot at his mum’s. It wasn’t like she lives in rural Ontario and he could be in a ditch. It wasn’t like there was a ten-foot snowdrift to be stuck in, or he had the car hanging off a cliff over the sea. He was three minutes from home in a back alley drive. Bad?

  Me: “Bad?”

  Joe: “You gotta come.”

  Me: “Joe, what’s going on?”

  Joe: “Well, I was trying to back out, but there was a BMW, so I didn’t want to hit it, you know? So I pulled up between the garage and the light pole, but the truck slipped on the snow and ice.”

  Me: “Slipped? Why don’t you get out and dig yourself out? Why don’t you give up and we’ll deal with it in the morning?”

  Joe: “I told you, Steph. It’s really bad.”

  We kept talking, and here’s what I came to understand.

  Joe had the pickup truck (which is a completely eccentric piece of junk that only starts every day due to a small miracle) parked at the bottom of his parents’ garage. There was a BMW (which we can’t afford to breathe on, never mind hit) parked behind him, so he pulled forward slightly, between the light pole and the garage, and was then going to reverse out. Unfortunately for Joe, as he drove forward, a most unexpected thing happened. The light rear end of the truck suddenly fishtailed out, the front end swung in (what with them being attached like they are), and whammo… The truck was suddenly and entirely wedged in diagonally between the garage and the light pole, which are, in a remarkable coincidence, spaced exactly as far apart as the truck is wide. Joe pulled forward, spun on the ice, tried to rock back, spun on the ice, and somehow, in a trick that reminds me of that crazy Chinese finger trap, only succeeded, with every minuscule move he was able to make, in wedging the truck ever more deeply between the garage and pole.

  Every inch he convinced the truck to make smashed the sides of the truck in a little more, and by the time he called me, he was not only entirely and hopelessly stuck, he had smashed up the truck real good and had reconciled himself to the fact that any solution at all was going to involve ripping the mirrors off and further demolishing the sides of the thing. (Which, it turns out, he preferred to wrecking the side of his parents’ garage, because even at forty years of age, wrecking your dad’s stuff is A Big Deal.)

  He couldn’t ask his parents for help because he felt strongly that it would be best if they didn’t see this, for the sake of the parent/child relationship and because he had only recently convinced them that he was the sort of adult who would never be in this fix. To ice the cake, and just to make sure that this event reached catastrophic proportions, the truck, jammed diagonally as it was, had the entire alley blocked so that nobody in the whole neighborhood could get their cars in or out when daytime came and they all tried to go to work or school. He was right. I didn’t believe it, and It Was Bad.

  Me: “Dude.”

  Joe: “Exactly. You gotta come over here.”

  Me: “Okay. Walk over and get me and we’ll go back together. I’ll try to rock it and you can push it.”

  Joe said nothing. The silence was deafening. Joe is the sort of man who would never have me walk a neighborhood alone in the night, and I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t already on his way. Was he too frustrated? Was he too upset?

  Me: “Honey?”

  Joe said nothing. I heard him sigh.

  Me: “Honey?”

  Joe: “Steph. You don’t understand.”

  Me: “Sure I do. Truck stuck. Very Bad. What aren’t you telling me?”

  Joe: “Steph. Think about it.”

  Me: “….”

  Joe: “Steph. The truck is wedged between the pole and the garage.”

  Me: “Got it.”

  Joe: “I don’t think you do.”

  I waited and tried to figure it out. Obviously I was missing something, but I couldn’t think what it was. Joe gave me a few minutes, and then he said it.

  Joe: “Honey… The truck is stuck between the garage and the pole. I can’t come get you. I can’t open the doors.”

  This finished me. Entirely. I’d managed to hold it together until then, but that did it. The man had somehow gotten his truck wedged in an impossible situation, and not only had things gone from bad to worse, minute by minute, but that whole time, for the hour that he’d been trying to find a way out of it, he had been trapped in the truck and avoided telling me.

  I collapsed on the floor, practi
cally laughing myself sick. I kept laughing as I pulled on my boots, coat, and mittens. I kept laughing as I jogged the five minutes over to his parents’. I’d almost got a hold of myself as I rounded the corner to the alley, but dissolved helplessly again when I saw him. Truck wedged, sides deeply lacerated, mirrors askew, deep holes dug into the dirt and snow beneath it, with my husband sitting patiently, trapped in the dark. (For some reason, he wasn’t laughing much.)

  I shoved the truck hard while he rocked it, and somehow we managed to get it out of the rut it had dug so he could finally back up, scraping what was left of the paint off as we went. (We did not hit the BMW.) I came around and joined him in the truck, and we began to drive silently home. As we rounded the corner and he slowed the pickup, it shuddered a little and made a new noise, another variation on an automotive death rattle, sort of a “urrrrhhhhgggg,” and it lurched around a bit. I looked at Joe. He looked ahead. We drove. At the stop sign we slowed again, and the truck repeated its mechanical-sea-cow-with-indigestion noise, and this time I asked Joe when that started. “At the thirty minutes stuck mark,” he replied, and we drove on.