All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  If you think this sounds like a bit much, just know that a multitude of things have gotten in the way of Knit Night, things that I don’t think would happen if I worked outside my home. One week I was all pumped and ready to go, and when I went to get dressed it turned out that I didn’t have any clean “outside pants” to wear. Personally, I believe that if I had an outside job I would have noticed way before dinnertime that I had no pants on. Another time I made the mistake of answering a work call too close to leaving time, and got totally shafted into four more hours of work, and while I’m sure people are stalked by mobile phone, it’s gotta be easier to avoid your office phone if, at some point, you leave the office. I’ve missed Knit Night because I screwed up transportation, and again, I think that if I was transported out of that house more often due to necessity, I might be better at that part. To get to Knit Night I have to have all my ducks in a row, and while I’d have fewer ducks to shuffle if I was already dressed, up, out, and organized, there’s a cluster of landmines that are a big problem for me—and would be no matter what my job was like. I speak now, naturally, of my children.

  The young women who are my daughters are a disorganizing force to be reckoned with. Take your eyes off the prize for even a moment and you’re going down, and I have had my plans cancelled by every possible teenaged form of emergency. If I’m planning on going to Knit Night, when the girls come home from school, I launch an exhaustive quiz to make sure they aren’t going to mess with me. If you’re a parent you know what I mean. You’re just about to go out the door and the kid announces that somehow they’ve roped you into having to produce sixty-four cupcakes (with icing) before daybreak. Once they’re old enough to be told to make their own damn cupcakes, then it’s things like “very long essays” they forgot about until just now, or some sort of unscheduled breakdown involving a teenaged boy who didn’t meet expectations. (I actually really resent that. From what my teenaged daughters tell me, teenaged boys haven’t changed much since I was a girl and I’m not sure what it says about evolution that they’re still the same or that we’re still shocked about it.) On a day that I’m planning to leave the house, I inquire about boys and about school, and I also ask about friends, because last week I didn’t get to go to Knit Night because that skanky Allison in French class told one of my girls she thinks that the reason Daniel isn’t talking to her is because her hair isn’t nice, and it took me forty minutes to get the teen to stop sobbing and then wrestle the hair products from her hands. (I considered leaving anyway, but she was locked in the only bathroom.)

  This Knit Night, though, this time I have it nailed. I am aware of all the landmines before me, I am determined to buck my nature, and I have been working since early this morning to nail an absolute on-time departure. My outside pants are not only clean, but they are ironed, and to protect them from my preternatural gift for pouring coffee in my lap, I am working in my underpants until the last minute. I have been assembling the things I need to take with me all day, following a complex system of Post-It note reminders all over the house. (The final Post-It is on the door and says, “Don’t leave without the pile of stuff.”) I have prepared a pot of soup and bought bread so that the family has something to eat and I can shrug off the maternal guilt that can wash over me when a clutch of people who are all capable of making their own dinner stand there staring at me as I put on my shoes, as though I am abandoning them in the desert and taking the only water with me. I have found my keys and placed them in the pocket of my pants upstairs, along with a subway token and my bike lock key. (I am covering all my bases.) I’ve caught up on work, and now that it’s getting close to the end of the day I’ve begun to practice saying, “Sorry, I’m just on my way out. Can we do this first thing tomorrow?” I’ve said this in my head so many times that I’m starting to think that if the phone rings, I might actually say it. I close my e-mail, reminding myself that since I am going out, there’s no point in looking at it until the morning; and in a minute, when the family starts to come home, I’ll start checking in with them because after managing to pull off an escape plan this neatly, there’s no way that I’m missing Knit Night because a fifteen-year-old girl didn’t tell me until three minutes before I’m supposed to leave that she needs three sources to write a review of Stranger in a Strange Land and two loaves of bread for the student council lunch, that she’s lost her best pink lip gloss that she can’t go to school without, and that she’s being expelled from science if she doesn’t bring $7.85 (exact change required) and a permission form (that she’s lost) for a field trip that starts at 7:30 the next morning. I have checked the weather report. I know where my sweater is. My knitting is tidily packed into a bag to take with me, and I’ve even checked to make sure that I have two needles, the pattern, and a bottle of wine. (If you’re only leaving the house once a week, you have to do it right.)

  I stand there, looking at all I have wrought, and I feel normal. I’m just like other people, other people who leave the house all the time. I nailed it. I go upstairs to put on my outside pants (it is easier to feel prepared to leave when wearing pants), congratulating myself the whole way. Assuming that when everyone comes in from work, school, and play, I can dodge landmines like parental responsibility, and I’ll be out of here. Free as a bird, leaving the house. I’ll get to Knit Night and I’ll have a glass of wine and I’ll knit on the blue sweater I’m making and I’ll engage in conversation, and for one glorious evening nobody will know that I’m actually a woman who found cheese in her desk drawer and hasn’t worn a matching outfit since last Wednesday. I pull on my pants, proudly pat the subway token and keys in the pocket, and think about how if I really start to get the hang of this, then maybe I could raise the bar—maybe I could start wearing accessories! I see other women wearing accessories and matching outfits, and they look really great and people take them super seriously. For some time, I have thought that accessories were the key to something. I’m not sure what, but there’s a big difference between me and the women wearing them. I pop into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and I realize that, really, if this whole leaving on time thing starts to take less effort, then I could think about wearing outfits, and not just clothes, and I could have a hairstyle, not just hair, and I could even wear knitted stuff that matched my coat in the winter! Hell, if I’m going to be this person, a person who plans ahead and organizes stuff and knows where her keys are just like real people… I could even wear a hat and mittens that match! I’m giddy. I head downstairs, check the clock, and realize that I have mere moments before the girls arrive. I stir the soup, and when they arrive, I strike like a cobra.

  I welcome them home. I ask about their days, but not too much, since I don’t really want to know. It’s Wednesday; Joe can care today. They need a parent, but it absolutely does not need to be me. I remind them that tonight is Knit Night. Joe comes in, and before he can tell me one of the twenty-six reasons that I shouldn’t go, I launch into the whole thing. I show him the soup, the bread, the subway token, and point at my outside pants. When he tries to interrupt me, I tell him I’ve met my word count, and that I’ve done most of the e-mails and the rest don’t matter, and that some people leave the house every day. They do. They have jobs where the letter carrier doesn’t wonder if they’re struggling with mental illness and the whole family expects that they’re going to leave the house, and those women know where their purses are all the time. Every day. Joe tries again to interject and I cut him off at the knees. I tell him that I want to be one of those people who get dressed every day, and that he shouldn’t be arguing with me when I’m just trying to become someone who wears accessories because I think that those women have an easier time at parent–teacher interviews. Joe interrupts again, this time, sort of aggressively.

  “Steph, you’re a complete lunatic and I love you, and I can tell that you’ve worked really hard at being all organized, and you can wear accessories if you want to, but I’m really sorry. You’re not going to Knit Night tonight.”

 
; I stare at him, soup spoon clutched furiously in my hand. What did I miss? I had all the bases covered. School concert? Taxes? Some sort of appointment that isn’t on the calendar? Does one of the girls have a fever? Did he see my mother on her way over here? Is it Thanksgiving? Do I have to vote? I sigh, glancing dejectedly at my knitting waiting for me by the door, and wonder if any of my friends are going through this right now. Are all my attempts to be a functioning adult hopeless? Joe watches me, and I can tell that he feels really badly about this. Even though he’s occasionally one of the landmines that keeps me from going out the door, I know that he knows that I really want to go to Knit Night, that it’s symbolic of getting it together, that when I’m out and about it makes up a little for the way that I feel unpolished and scruffy the rest of the time, no matter how hard I try. Maybe I’m just scruffy and unpolished. Maybe it’s never going to be any different. Maybe, just maybe, I should work on loving myself better the way I am. A work-from-home, braless writer with a messy office, a lack of accessories, and a lost purse. Joe rubs my back. I tell him it’s okay. I’ll try again next week. I’ll plan better. Then I buck up a bit, and ask him what it is. What did I miss? What’s so important that I can’t just walk out the door on a Wednesday night like anyone else?

  Joe pulls me in for a hug and puts his arms around me and gives me a squeeze. Then he whispers in my ear the one thing that I can’t overcome. “Darling. It’s Tuesday.”

  CRYTOSCOPOPHILIA

  have a love of odd words. I love finding them out and thinking about how I might have occasion to use them. I delight in imaginary circumstances under which I somehow engineer (at a really posh party with really smart people where I am very thin) a conversation in which I am suddenly able to seamlessly insert a word that I love, completely in context. I imagine the look of respect on their faces as I say that I do know how to play the piano, but I’m not very good, because while I took lessons when I was little, I was a committed misodoctakleidist (a piano student who really hates to practice). Or in a conversation about the supernatural I could say, “Well, Mark, the Bermuda Triangle may seem naufragous, but really, it’s not borne out statistically.” I would be, you understand, the only person at the party who knew that naufragous means “causing shipwrecks,” though nobody would say they didn’t know that word because (in the party in my mind) they all want to be like me. (This fantasy may stem from real party episodes where people were glad not to be me, like the time I had my skirt tucked into my underpants, but I digress.)

  This love of words has yielded up some real treats. For example, I take great joy in knowing (though I have yet to figure out how to work it into conversation) that a ranarium is a frog farm (as a related point, one who eats frogs is batrachophagous). And, likely because I am one of the world’s only writers working within the niche field of knitting humor, I have managed to successfully use the word “adoxography,” which means “skilled writing about an unimportant subject,” in a professional context. My favorite ever, though, the most fulfilling word of all, is “crytoscopophilia.” When I first heard it I loved the feeling of it in my mouth—“cry-toe-sco-po-feel-e-ah”—but like most of the really great words I’ve ever learned, it was the meaning of it that turned out to be what gave it great and odd power.

  Crytoscopophilia is the urge to look in people’s windows as you pass. The minute I read it I knew it was me. I do that all the time. Out for a walk at night, with the homes that you pass by lit up from the inside, offering little glimpses of the lives inside. It turns out that it’s a nearly universal urge, too, since almost everyone who hears it proclaims that they have crytoscopophilia. The few who don’t have it think it’s creepy, but I defend the practice and point out that crytoscopophilia departs from what those who don’t partake in it might call stalking, peeping, or an invasion of privacy in one significant way. The definition is precise. It is the urge to look in windows “as you pass,” and that’s the relevant part. It stops being crytoscopophilia the minute that you start thinking about standing in someone’s rosebushes, or consider fetching a ladder or some night-vision goggles.

  I love what I can tell about people’s homes just from the momentary vignettes I see. I love the tiny story that is told in that moment as I catch a glimpse of someone putting a book on the shelf, or a couple exchanging words, or a family eating dinner. It sets my mind afire, and I can’t help but extrapolate and wonder. What book is going onto the shelf? Was it good? Should I read it? Maybe they were just looking something up? Maybe it’s a photo album and this character in my now imagined world is marking the day that they returned from the war and fondly recalling a fallen comrade. Perhaps the couple exchanging words are talking about the bills or maybe they’re planning a bank heist in Switzerland. There’s just no way to know, and that’s the magic. We have no idea what relevance the moment those people are having has to the world, but we are so interested that we actually think that something satisfying and important can be gleaned by knowing that their living room is blue. (Maybe that’s just me, but I’m terrifically interested in the decorating habits of my targets.)

  Hemingway allegedly wrote one of the world’s shortest short stories. It was six words and read, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I think about that a lot as I glance in windows and try to figure out what I can gain. It’s not about what I can see. As in Hemingway’s story, it’s about the beauty and intrigue of getting a taste of what I don’t know. In that very short story, there is very little stated. You’re left to imagine the details. It’s precisely that magic that we gain from a crytoscopophilic glance—one tiny nugget of information that sets off a whole stream of imagination. Crytoscopophilia is the magic of inference. What can you tell—or what do you think you can tell—from a narrow flash of insight? Why were the shoes never worn? Was there no baby? Did a baby come but not walk? Is it a tragic story of infertility, or did the family get rich and buy better shoes, relegating these ordinary ones to the sale shelf? There are actually a thousand stories present in that one magnificent phrase, and each one of them is equally possible. Inference is defined as a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning, which makes it sound as if it’s firm—as in “he inferred from the presence of the snow that it had been snowing,” but the magic lies in the other possibilities. With inference, you’re working with evidence and reasoning, not facts. Maybe what really happened was that there was snow because a film starring Tom Cruise was made just there, and a snow-making machine the size of Malawi was brought in to transform a hot July street into November for a few short hours. Inference is not just the ability to know what happened based on what you see and know, but the ability to guess at a thousand possibilities.

  When looking at ancient languages and the way they move around the globe, linguisticians really have no choice but to use inference to guess at the source of the language. There’s nobody to ask and no one wrote down the exact path a language took. There are only clues. For example, if a language has no word for “cow,” you can infer that the language comes from a place without cows. A language with no word for artichoke, likely artichokeless. A place with no artichokes and cows? You can put that together and come up with a locale. Linguisticians can tell us that there is no word for knitting in any ancient language on Earth. Not Greek, Roman, Aramaic—nothing. The first appearance of a word for knitting was in the Middle East about 1,000 years ago. In the English-speaking world, nobody draws a picture of it, or includes it in a story, until Shakespeare’s time. From that historians can infer that there was no knitting there until that time, and that’s a huge thing to know about knitting, and it’s derived from inference—little peeks, small pieces—and we all do it. We’re convinced it works and that we’re truly finding things out.

  The trouble is, what have you really found out? Well, knitting really is only about a thousand years old. The information we glean through inference there is reliable and accurate. The trouble with information you get is that it’s sometimes accurate, but usually it�
��s not. I personally have had a whole whack of conversations in my life based on nothing more than a little bite like, “Did you hear what he said?” which is a fairly inevitable stop on the way to, “Why do you think he said that?” which leads inexorably to, “I think he likes you.” Shockingly, I’m in my forties and have only just now worked out that this system is about as reliable as me walking by a window and deciding that the couple talking inside are planning that Swiss bank heist. It probably means that I’m not hopeless, that I no longer think that the only conclusion a girlfriend should infer should lead her to write what will clearly be her new last name in her notebook seventy times.

  Seeing this rampant case of crytoscopophilia in myself, the way that as I get these little bits of information about people around me as I pass, and knowing as I do that this urge is almost universal, it makes me wonder what people infer about me when they look in my windows. Someone passing my house at night and looking in my windows is going to see some stuff a little off the norm. They would likely see me knitting, and from that they might infer that I have a nice hobby. That’s a pretty normal thing to think if you see someone knitting. Maybe though, just maybe this person has a dog, and my house is on their evening route and they pass by my house every night.