All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  There’s a family on the far corner of my jogging path and I pass by them all the time. Every time I do, there’s a man folding laundry and a woman watching TV. After I’d seen them doing the same thing a few times, I started to form opinions—to infer things. I inferred that they’re people who like routine. (I can’t fault them for that, since I wouldn’t know it about them if I didn’t have one.) I also inferred that they have a modern relationship—I mean, he’s doing the laundry and she’s watching TV. Statistically, men in relationships only do 10 percent of the laundry in North America, so as soon as I see that reversal I’ve decided that he’s the best guy on Earth and that their marriage is terrific. Of course, the inference I’m making about this couple is crazy. They might not even be married. They could be roommates, and he’s doing his own laundry. It could be that they are married and that she does everything else to do with every single one of the chores, and this is the one thing the jerk ever steps up to the bat for. He could be a neatnik; she could be a slob. She could be allergic to laundry soap, or maybe she has a broken wrist from a nasty fall from a bus, and he’s just doing the laundry until it’s better. I really don’t know—I really don’t—but my biases and hopes feed my imagination, and because of my own stuff, I want to believe that they’re just so happy together and that they’re enjoying the fruits of a noble marriage with a truly gracious and equal division of labor. I can’t help it.

  I wonder then, about those people who have my house on their route. If they pass by once and see me knitting, it’s likely to be interpreted as a moment, a little vignette. It’s unlikely that they’re going to make a big decision about me or my lifestyle. If they pass my house every day though, they’re going to notice that the knitting happens a lot. A whole lot. Regardless of the time of day or night, anyone conducting even the most casual and benign of surveillance is going to come to the conclusion that the amount of time I spend on yarn-related activities is really high. (This is not all my fault, by the way. The amount of time I spend with yarn wouldn’t be so bizarre if the rest of the culture I live in wasn’t skewing the bell curve by engaging in no yarn activities at all.) Maybe one day, after a while, they would walk past my house, glance in, and, much to their relief, I’m not knitting. “Thank heaven,” they’d think, because they really were starting to think that I spent an obsessive amount of time at it. Only then would they notice that, while I’m not knitting… I’m sitting at a spinning wheel.

  I worry about this. I understand fully and deeply that the ideas that these strangers hold about me can’t possibly matter. If someone walks their dog past my house every evening and comes to the conclusion that I’m an obsessive freak with no life, or a social life as barren as the Sahara, there is no possible way that can influence my life, not really. The people who know and love me still will, I’ll still have a job, and the roses in the back will still get black spot every summer no matter what I do. Nothing will be better or worse for me if that guy or a multitude of people walking by all decide that I’m boring, old, weird, simple, and likely have a thousand cats that they just can’t see. It wouldn’t even matter if they all formed a club where on Tuesday nights they all walked by together, casting a crytoscopophilic peek into my window en masse while wearing Tshirts that said, “we glance in the Crazy Knitting Lady’s windows together.” It wouldn’t matter at all. I mean, I wouldn’t like it; I would have my own inferences to make about those people, not the least of which would be that they were trapped in a hopeless stereotype about knitters. Nope, it shouldn’t matter at all what they think, so the clever part of me is stunned that I really do care what complete strangers might divine from a glance in my window. I want the story they tell themselves to be accurate… or at least if it can’t be accurate, I’d like for it to be flattering.

  I would love for people to walk by, glance in my window, and think two things. First, that I have exquisite taste in home decorating, and second, I’d like for them to see me knitting or spinning and at least come close to inferring the right thing. I’d like them to infer that I’m a fiber artist, intent on using and creating my own raw materials to express myself through a constructive art form that’s a thousand years old. Barring that, I’d settle for them at least thinking that what I’m doing is interesting, instead of a sign that time spent with me would likely be as stimulating or appealing as a bowl of cold oatmeal. Realistically I don’t expect them to infer it, and I understand that we all come to infer things based on our own biases and theories, and that every single one of us thinks that you can look at what a person does for one second a day and be sure that you know something about them. Hell, the fact that I care what couch you have when I pass by even means that I believe that I can tell something interesting about you from what you own. (This problem is just one of the many reasons that I don’t let people open closets in my house.) If I see that you’ve painted your walls purple with pink stars and hung vivid paintings, obtained a polka-dot couch, and are in the process of hanging chartreuse-striped curtains, then I know I’m not going to think you’re shy, even though there are a million reasons (if we remember the rules of inference) why you could be doing that, including that you’re colorblind or have lost a hideous bet with your rather cruel, yet creative, cousin Sven.

  Crytoscopophilia is the urge to gather information so that we can infer the snot out of something, because most of us think that inference works, even if the truth is that most of us get it pretty wrong a lot of the time. We’re simply not neutral enough. We’re too biased, and we think we know too much. That one glance I get through your window doesn’t explain anything to me about why that man washes your underpants, and it doesn’t tell anyone anything about me or the seemingly alarming amount of yarn I have and the shocking quantity of time I spend fiddling with it. It makes me wonder why any of us are crytoscopophilic at all, considering how little of what we gain is of actual use. This is what I’m thinking when I’m out for a walk and I’m glancing in your window, and this is what I’m thinking when you’re out for a walk and I see you glancing in mine.

  I’m also thinking that I should get curtains that are less sheer, but maybe that’s just me.

  FAIR TRADE

  hen I was twenty, I had an affair with crochet. I didn’t want to, because with the exception of Larry King, I’m probably one of the last people you would expect to find taking up with a hook. I am really very monogamous in my relationship with knitting and appear not to have a bi-craftual bone in my body. There’s nothing wrong with crochet. I just don’t like it, the same way that some people don’t like bananas or swimming. (For the record, I don’t like bananas either. I feel like there’s only a ten-minute window in between when they’re too green to eat and when they’re dismal, blackened, weeping things on the counter. Bananas take constant monitoring and I can’t get behind that. I do like swimming, though.) I’ve tried to get it together with crochet, but it’s never worked out. Nevertheless, one day in 1988, I had an unlikely episode. (Remember that 1988 was also when Die Hard came out; Ringo Starr went into rehab; and I had hair the size of a Buick and was wearing a ripped sweatshirt à la Flashdance. Anything was possible.) A good friend of mine was getting married, and I dropped off a bunch of craft magazines that had a lot of beautiful knitted things in them at her house and told her to pick her wedding present. I didn’t realize it at the time, but, much to my peril, one of the magazines I gave her didn’t just have knitting patterns but also some lurking crochet.

  A week later the phone rang, she told me that she’d picked the most beautiful knitted tablecloth in the world, and I swung round her place to see what she’d picked. You can imagine what I thought when she opened the magazine and plunked her finger on (and I quote exactly), “The perfect tablecloth,” and I leant forward to see what I would be knitting for her. It was crochet. A lace crochet tablecloth. Unbelievable.

  I thought about telling her I wouldn’t do it. I thought about telling her I couldn’t do it. I thought about saying something like, “Oh he
ll. That’s not knitting, choose again.” It would have been easy, but before I could get it out of my mouth, she said something like, “this is the most beautiful thing in the world. It is all I have ever wanted, and you’re a really fabulous friend for offering to make it for me, because, really, I can’t see myself ever loving anything else the way that I love this.” (I may be paraphrasing there, but only a little.) What choice did I have? I picked up a really teeny-tiny hook and a totally insane amount of fine crochet cotton, and I vowed to make her a stinking crochet tablecloth.

  The only important thing that you need to know about what happened between then and six months later is that, damn it, there was a tablecloth on her wedding day. The less important things that you don’t need to know are things like this: Every day that I worked on that tablecloth—many, many days—I thought about things that would be easier and more fun than crocheting a lace tablecloth. Things like running a marathon through Death Valley in August, or shaving the genitals of a wild musk ox—and I am not even exaggerating. Some of the skills I had from knitting were transferable, like the idea of managing string, and the concept of a stitch or following a chart. I had a lot of a leg up over your average beginner, but I’d also decided to go from not crocheting at all to churning out a fine lace tablecloth on a deadline, and that sucks any way you slice it. It was stupid. It took hours, and by hours, I mean days—no, months. My friend wanted this to be an heirloom, and that’s what I was going to make her, but nobody could make me enjoy it. I struggled through, I made it work, and, though I haven’t seen it lately, my friend has a really nice crochet lace tablecloth, and she had better take good care of it because, seriously, I’m never making another one. It was too hard.

  For some crazy reason, probably related to the crochet equivalent of post-traumatic-stress disorder, I haven’t thought about that tablecloth for a long time, and I probably would have continued to block it out of living memory if something wild hadn’t been said to me a little while ago. I live in a big city, and there’s a thriving Chinatown about fifteen minutes from my house. Last year I was down there looking for neat stuff to land in the Christmas stocking of a teenaged girl, and there was a stack of crochet tablecloths, including a big tablecloth—way bigger than the one I made—for about sixty bucks. I didn’t think anything of that, but I was with a friend who’s a crochet expert, and as I shuddered while I passed the tablecloths, she said something incredible. She just tossed it out there for me to catch. “You know,” she said, “that’s handmade crochet.”

  I had a delayed reaction to that statement. I suppose that initially what I thought was that crochet worked like knitting. I don’t know if everyone knows, but we all wear a ton of knitting every day. Not just the stuff that makes sense, like socks, sweaters, and hats, but tons of other commonplace items. Tshirts, pantyhose, turtlenecks, sweatpants, bathing suits, underpants—just about everything stretchy is produced by the commercial knitting industry, and I guess that because you can see crochet everywhere like that, I believed there was a big commercial crochet industry. Further to that, the term “handmade” can be confusing. You and me, we would think that “handknitted” means doing what we do, with two sticks, some string, one human, but it turns out that it’s perfectly legal for someone to call something “handknitted” if it was made on a knitting machine as long as the knitting machine wasn’t automated. If you were running that thing with your hands, if it was powered by you, then that’s considered handknitting, and that is what it can say on the label. (As a real handknitter, you will likely find that as offensive as I do, and even now you may be fighting the urge to correct the misnomer with every person that you meet. I’ll give you a hint: They will not be as concerned with this injustice as you are.) That is how I thought my friend meant “handmade” crochet. I’d crocheted a tablecloth, and I’m here to tell you that there was no way it would have been sold for sixty bucks. Even once I got good at it… sixty bucks?

  That $60 represents the whole shebang. There’s the markup for the store (usually about 100 percent), the shipping, the packaging, and the manufacture, all coming in under $60. That, I reasoned, wasn’t possible if it was actually handmade. A 100 percent markup means that the manufacturer only made $30. Even if you didn’t have packaging and shipping costs, and who knows whatever else, even if somehow the person who made the tablecloth got the whole thirty bucks, how could they do it? How’s that practical, reasonable, or possible? I reasoned that it just couldn’t be true, so when I got home I did a little research, mostly just so I could tell my friend to stop going around telling people that things are handmade when they just aren’t… but that’s not what happened. Here is what I learned.

  Every stitch of crochet you have ever seen, every tablecloth, every curtain, every piece of lace trim or band on a hippy blouse at the Gap, everything was entirely and completely made by a human being exactly the way that you would do it if you were crocheting it yourself. Human, yarn, hook. That’s it. The construction of crochet means that a machine can’t do it, and hasn’t ever yet. Just think about that. The tablecloth in the discount store? That’s someone’s work. Someone like you. Can you imagine how you’d feel if you made something like that, because I bloody well can, and if anyone told me it was worth anything less than their firstborn child and $1,000 I’d have exploded with rage. To see it at a discount store for sixty bucks—that’s crazy.

  Think about shopping for clothes. I was in a huge department store a little while ago. The kind where you can go into one of their stores in St. John’s, Newfoundland, or Victoria, British Columbia, and you’ll find exactly the same stock, and they had a whole raft of nightgowns with crochet trim. That’s got to be thousands or millions of crochet bands, all the same, and no machine produced them. They all came from the hook of someone just like you who’s earning a living churning the stuff out like it’s noodles. In any honest estimation, these artists must be making pennies an hour to produce something that you and I would expect nothing short of a ticker-tape parade for accomplishing. Mentally add up how much crochet you’ve seen in your life, and then reframe it so you imagine a person making it. It’s a mind blower. (If you have any room left in your brain, I’ll give you this. Baskets are the same. All baskets. Every basket. True woven baskets are made by hand; machines don’t make them. Toss that around in the old brain hopper the next time you’re in Ikea and see how you feel.)

  All crochet is handmade, the way you would make it. In a way, this makes me jealous of crocheters. A knitting machine was one of the heralds of the Industrial Revolution, created at the end of the 1500s. In the intervening eras, knitting machines have only become more complex, more efficient, and more incredible. I can go to the store right now and buy about twenty things that were knit by machine, and sometimes it will be obvious, like with scarves, hats, or mittens, where the “handknit” look is in vogue. Sometimes, though, only a handknitter himself would be able to spot the differences between what’s available in the mass market and what’s available as a special bonus for knowing me, or you. As a knitter, this essentially means that I can be replaced, but a crocheter cannot. I love the fabric knitting makes, and I prefer it to crochet. It simply suits me better. This means that I shouldn’t feel an affinity for crochet, and I guess I don’t, but I can’t help but feel an affinity for whosoever made that tablecloth in the discount store. The one I made almost killed me, and I expect it to be cherished. The one she or he made is wrapped in plastic in Chinatown thousands of miles away, and most of the people looking at it don’t even know what it is, never mind that the artist made pennies per hour to make it. Personally, I don’t find crochet, in any incarnation, to be as beautiful as knitting, but there is absolutely no denying that it may have this one leg up on knitting. We as a civilization have imaged the human mind with magnetic resonance, obliterated diseases worldwide, built pyramids and the Internet, and traveled to the moon and even walked there… but we have never, ever figured out how to make a machine crochet, and that might mean that cr
ochet is a far more human activity than is knitting.

  THE DEEP DARK

  et me tell you a little something, a secret. I love getting up in the night, and I always have. I know that if you’ve got babies right now, you’re probably going to have trouble believing that, but it’s true. When my babies were little and woke me in the night, I got up with them, and but for the few nights when the sleep deprivation pushed me near the limits of survival, I loved it. The night has a lovely intimacy, and in the dark my baby and I were the only two people alive. I loved nursing them and rocking them and looking at their little fingers curled like unfurled moonflowers. (I know their father would tell you something different, that there were nights that I stood by the side of our bed with a screaming bundle of infuriated human and said, “You know, it’s not like she and I are the only two people alive. You could get up and take a turn,” but those were moments, not themes.)

  The night has a certain sort of delicious loneliness. For those of us who like to be alone and find ourselves good company, but are beset by family and children all day, the night has opportunities. I know that if I stay up long enough, I’ll be alone. It’s a fetish that I indulge only occasionally as a married woman, since a pervasive desire to be alone can hurt the feelings of your spouse, but I’m writing this now, in the deep, dark quiet night, all alone, just my thoughts and me.