A Life in Stitches

by Rachael Herron

  So if she lost the sweater, which I believe is what happened, the corollary was that she kept the loss from me. An action occurred that she then covered up. By not mentioning it to me, it was as if it didn’t happen.

  What did that say about her? So much of her previous life, her life in New Zealand, in Germany, in Western Samoa, was unspoken, and therefore, unknown. Private. I hoped with all my heart to find a journal in her possessions—to have a glimpse into her real thoughts and feelings—but we found nothing more than postcards and photos of people we couldn’t identify.

  It’s not as if I think there were dark secrets she was hiding. I never got the sense that she was abused as a child or that she was a drug-addled teenager. But everything she left unsaid remains a question in my mind. What else didn’t I know?

  When I was eighteen, my mother gave me a gold and platinum diamond ring that had been her Great-Aunt Lucy’s. I asked for her story, but Mom didn’t tell me. I lost the ring when I was twenty. Deeply upset, I searched everywhere for it, but I didn’t tell my mother for a year. When I finally confessed that it was gone, she went to her room and dug around in her jewelry box, coming up with my ring.

  “I found this while vacuuming,” she said.

  “When?” I sniffled, happy tears in my eyes, and slid the ring onto my finger.

  “Oh, months and months ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She shrugged. “If you didn’t want to tell me you’d lost it, that was your business, not mine.”

  I had loved thinking of her during the winter, wrapped warmly in a sweater I’d made her, and it made me sad that she might have lost it and kept it from me on purpose. It makes me sadder to think of all the secrets she had wrapped up in her body, tales that I’ll never hear told. I know, for example, that she loved a man in Germany named Gert—he’d written a letter to her in German on the front marbled endpaper of a German book of love songs. The first words were all I understood: Mein Liebchen, which I knew meant “my darling.” She’d told me perhaps someday she’d translate the rest for me, but she never did. I played piano from the book after she died, and it made me cry knowing I’d never know Gert’s story.

  The last time we were in New Zealand, she and I took a long walk from the hostel one night in Coromandel. There was no moon, and we walked in almost complete darkness along the bay, a hill rising sharply to our right. If we peered into the ferny growth, glowworms lit up the greenery with a pale, eerie light. At the end of the road we found a closed gas station and a pay phone, and I learned Mom had an objective I hadn’t known about. She pulled out a scrap of paper and used a calling card to call a man who had given her a guitar when she was in her early twenties. I think he was her first love. I walked up the road to give her privacy, and the wind started up. As I studied the glowworms and tried not to be frightened by the blackness of the night and the water, I heard her laugh float over the roaring wind. When she’d finished her call, she told me in a rare moment of confidence that he’d lost his wife many years ago to cancer. We turned to walk back and I tried to tease more from her.

  “You should keep in touch with him,” I said, hating the sadness in her voice. “Did you get his e-mail address?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll never talk to him again.” It was all she would say. We walked back together to the hostel, chilled by the night wind.

  My mother just didn’t talk about loss. I don’t think it was because it was embarrassing or something to be ashamed of—I never got that impression from her. Loss, to her, was intensely private. She didn’t speak of the loss of Gert or of the boy who gave her the guitar. I never saw her cry when her mother died, although I’m sure she did, privately, and she didn’t speak of missing friends long gone. After her favorite cat, Rowena, died, we barely heard her name mentioned again. She didn’t talk about my lost ring, and she never confessed the loss of the sweater I gave her, the sweater that symbolized her lost country. But her stories were her business, no one else’s, not even her children’s. And as difficult as that was for someone like me, who loves to talk about loss, to accept, I have. I won’t ever know the stories. But it doesn’t stop me from wishing I did.

  DOUBLE CROCHET

  John and I met in Amsterdam, two American twentysomethings high on the thrill of backpacking across Europe (and maybe a little something else). We kissed in Dam Square under a full moon, and went even further on the hostel’s balcony, trains racing past us just yards away. Before he put me on the train to go to my next city, he told me he’d seen a wedding gown in a window and thought it would suit me.

  Once we were back in the States, it was clear this was more than a travel fling. Even though he lived and worked in Montana, and I lived in California while finishing my undergraduate degree, we managed to see each other at least once a month for a few days—it would keep us on track, John felt.

  From the beginning, John knew we were meant to be. But he wouldn’t propose until the moment was right, until we’d reached the right moments in our separate lives. I thrilled to the words, but for some reason never imagined an actual wedding. The months ticked by, and my frequent flier miles added up. Three years of short flights made me tired of packing my suitcase, but I loved John. I wanted to be with him as often as I could, yet, at the same time, I loved being at home.

  I started to feel like I had two separate lives. At home in the Bay Area, I felt independent and wild. I smoked. I drank with strangers in bars and flirted inappropriately. But when I went to visit John, I could feel myself changing, sometimes while still on the airplane. He was the first to admit he was judgmental, to the point where he usually thought models could stand to lose some weight, and though I knew he loved me, the closer I got to him, the less pretty I felt. My face looked fatter in my compact mirror. Stepping off the plane and hauling my size twelve self up into his Jeep, I felt less competent. Not as smart. I craved cigarettes with every fiber of my being, but he hated smoking so I pretended I’d given it up.

  Little did John know that when he left for work, I’d listen for the creak of the garage door and watch the Jeep leave while peeking through a crack in the Venetian blinds. Then I’d go out to his porch and light up while looking at the distant Rockies. I stood upwind, moving as the wind changed, dancing with my illicit smoke. When I was done, I tamped it out on tinfoil I brought onto the porch with me, then wrapped the butt up tightly so I could toss it in a neighbor’s trash can. Inside, I washed my hands and face and brushed my teeth so hard my gums bled. John said that he had a sensitive nose, that he could always detect cigarette smoke on people, but he never once smelled the lie on me.

  I was doing a lot of undetectable lying, in fact. And a lot of traveling. What I wasn’t doing was knitting. I’d become so confused about who I was that I’d forgotten some of my favorite things about myself. I never made John a sweater, citing the boyfriend curse (the notion that if one makes a sweater for a boyfriend, the relationship is doomed), but that was a lie too: The truth was I didn’t want to knit for him. I didn’t want to knit for anyone. I’d lost the appetite for yarn entirely. The only creative thing I could do was write, and even that felt like a stretch. I’d lost the ability to make entries in my journal, because whatever I wrote felt false, angry, untrue, and unnatural.

  In class, I studied again one of my favorite stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written almost exactly one hundred years before, and I identified as I never had before with the narrator, unreliable as she was, dealing with her John. Gilman’s words spoke to me as if she’d written the story for me: John is practical in the extreme. Oh, yes. An extreme libertarian, my John kept in his house a stockpile of everything he might need in case the government failed. I suppose John never was nervous in his life. My John never dithered. He was always sure of himself. It does exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition. I was getting confused by my lies, almost tripped up so often that I stopped calling him as frequen
tly, not trusting myself to get my stories right. I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive. Every sentence he spoke was loaded (even though he didn’t know it); every moment we were together, I wondered if I could keep from flying apart. Lost, and feeling as trapped behind bars as Gilman’s protagonist had been, I had become an unreliable narrator too. I kept my writing to fiction, spinning webs of lies—it was the only thing I could think of to do.

  I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

  I entered a short story in my college’s creative writing contest. To my astonishment, “The Yellow Afghan” (named in homage to Gilman) won third place. About a woman lost while following her dreams who wraps herself up in an afghan to cry, it wasn’t a great story, but winning the small accolade confirmed my desire to pursue writing. I’d applied to Mills College’s MFA program, and I was considering moving to Oakland in the fall.

  John loved that I wanted my master’s degree, although sometimes I wondered if he loved it more than I did. He had his master’s from Yale and believed in higher education for anyone he spent time talking to. In one late-night phone conversation, my feet propped up on the wall, my head hanging off my bed, I asked, “Would you still be with me if I just finished school now? For good?”

  He said, “Well…”

  I sat up, my head spinning from coming up too fast. “You wouldn’t? Really?”

  He coughed and then said, “I just always thought I’d end up with someone who had as much education as I did.”

  I cried silently into the phone, blaming hiccups for the funny sound. The next day, I mailed in my acceptance letter to Mills. I wanted, needed, his approval, while at the same time I was sickened by how small that neediness made me feel.

  Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far. I don’t feel as if it was worthwhile to turn my hand over for anything, and I’m getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.

  Even after I started graduate work, I wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to do with an advanced degree in writing. I only knew one thing: Nothing I did felt authentic. I was failing at my relationship, even if I was the only one who knew it. I was behind in my bills. I fought bronchitis constantly, a side effect of living in a moldy apartment with a pack-a-day habit. And whenever I disembarked in Montana to see John, I knew I was lying to him and, worse, to myself, about practically everything. I pretended to be cheerful. I acted like I was happy. I kissed him as if I felt it and made love even though I didn’t want to.

  John must have picked up on my emotions—he started to worry about my fidelity, and though I was a good liar, he had good reason to be worried. I was casting about at home, too, trying to find myself in whatever, and whoever, came near me. I was lost in the wallpaper of my own making.

  John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

  I went to see him at Christmas. I can’t remember now what I gave him, but it was probably something prosaic: a nice pen, maybe, or a jacket. When I unwrapped my gift from him, I didn’t understand it at first. It was an afghan. A bright yellow crocheted afghan. Oh, I thought, like my first published story. How sweet.

  “I love it,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

  He grinned that full-body smile I’d fallen in love with, and my heart twisted. “I made it. I bought a book and taught myself, and I’ve spent the last two months making it for you. I worked on it every night when I got home and for hours every weekend. Do you like it?”

  Did I like it? It was the best, sweetest, most considerate gift I’d ever received, bar none. And I didn’t deserve it. I was the knitter, and I’d forgotten how to make myself knit. I pulled John’s afghan around myself, and finally, swathed in yarn for the first time in a long time, I felt something like strength begin to fill me. I started to remember, dimly, who I was. Who I’d been.

  There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.

  Back home in California, I bought yarn for the first time in a long time. Casting on for a sweater for myself felt like stepping out of a dark room into the light. As my fingers caught the rhythm of the needles, I caught the rhythm of my thoughts, and I was able to write not just fiction but in my journal again too. As the sweater grew on my lap, something strange happened. When I tried to lie, I stuttered and stammered and turned bright red. Since I’d been with John, I’d been able to lie so cavalierly, without thought of consequence. Now, every stitch mattered and each word meant something.

  Ending things with John was horrible. I broke his heart, breaking mine in the process as well—I loved him. Perched on an antique chair covered with roses in a dreadful bed-and-breakfast, I clutched my knitting needles and kept telling him the truth. John had never liked tattoos—I pulled up my sleeve and showed him I’d gotten my first one. The woman’s symbol made of a ball of yarn and a pen, it made me feel free. I told him I wasn’t even sure I was completely straight. I told him I’d slept with someone else.

  The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

  The ever-truthful John sat there, stunned. I wasn’t proud of my past actions, but I was proud as hell that I’d changed direction, that I was taking back the reins of my life, and, by God, I would make myself into a better person. None of it was his fault—he hadn’t asked me to be anyone but myself. But I thought he had—every time he’d criticized a star on the screen for being too heavy, I’d measured myself to her and found myself heavier, uglier. Every time he’d praised the genius of a writer, I wondered if I could write those lines and decided that no, I couldn’t. So I’d pretended for years, trying to be better, smarter, thinner, prettier, more perfect than the actual real person I should have been—the only person I was good at being: me. I’d disguised who I was for years, and when I found the woman behind the wallpaper was actually myself, I felt only relief.

  He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control.

  After John left for the last time, I curled up on my tiny twin bed, the yellow blanket wrapped tight around me. The yarn cut into my fingers, but the pain was mine, and I didn’t mind it. I imagined sweaters I’d make myself, journals I’d fill with authentic thoughts, lovers I’d take without lying. It would be easy to say the afghan he gave me saved me by reminding me who I was, where I came from, but it didn’t. It did, however, cushion my fall.

  CIRCULAR KNITTING

  I loved smoking. Really. I was passionate about cigarettes. I loved everything about them. I adored that first tang of sulfur when the match was blown out, the initial draw, the long middle, that last sour, greedily sucked puff at the butt end of the smoke. I loved that smoking gave me an excuse to sit and do nothing. Seven minutes of silence is precious sometimes. Other times, smoking gave me something to hide behind. Like in all the best Bogie movies, the way a person holds her cigarette tells you something about her, and my smoking said I’m not scared. But of course, that wasn’t true.

  I’m not normally a very shy person, but in highly social settings, I get nerves so badly that I have to have something to grip, something to anchor me down. During my twenties, that something was smoking. At parties, I was the one who first got a glass of wine from the host and then immediately went to stand outside with the other socially awkward addicts. There was a bond among us, an agreement reached when we lit each other’s cigarettes with the butt ends of our own. We understood each other. And the fact that we looked like cool kids smoking outside, while we really were just nervous, was a lie we’d keep to ourselves.

  I had tried to quit many times before, but I had a pack-a-day habit, and I failed, again and again. I know it sounds stupid, but quitting felt like losing a friend. No, worse. It felt like losing twenty of my best little filter-tipped friends, all standing at attention in my purse, always there for me, ready to get me out of sticky situations, easing the stresses of
everyday life. If I quit, what would I hide behind?

  It wasn’t until just before my thirtieth birthday, when I gave myself the ultimate bribe, that I gave up smoking for good: If I quit, I could buy as much yarn as I wanted. Everything. The finest merino, baby alpaca—even cashmere wasn’t off-limits. Heck, I was going to save four bucks a day by not buying cigarettes. I could almost afford qiviut.

  The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota says that keeping the hands busy by taking up knitting can help with quitting smoking, and med-school doctors note that knitting lowers your heart rate, your blood pressure, and your breaths per minute. Knitting had always been soothing to me and, maybe, just maybe, it would offer me the same shelter that smoking had. Even better, I would be doing something productive rather than destructive.

  So I bought yarn like sheep were going bald, and I kept the sock yarn in my purse in the same spot my cigarettes had been. Yarn was a different, healthier lifeline, and hey, I got to knit indoors! As a smoker I’d always been outside huddled in the cold and rain. Every time I craved a cigarette, I pulled out my yarn. I made more socks that first year than I’d made in the previous ten years.

  Sock knitting is almost entirely thoughtless knitting. I don’t like fancy, lacy, patterned socks. My socks are just good old stockinette tubes with a heel and a ribbed cuff. I like the challenge of having to concentrate on sweaters and shawls, but I’m not looking for anything complicated when it comes to the socks I carry around in my purse. I just need them to be there for me, whether I’m stuck in line at the post office, or at a party chatting with people I barely know.

  More than just helping me remain calm, smoking had always been a literal screen to hide behind when I felt something worse than feeling stressed: when I felt inadequate. If I tripped off a curb, I’d light up a cigarette and laugh it off. If I was unsure about the right answer to a question, I’d take a casual puff while considering my best options. I’d pretend that I was cool when, really, I was feeling woefully underprepared. I knew I wasn’t cool. It was just another lie I told myself about smoking—in my heart of hearts I knew I was killing myself and looking like a bit of an asshole at the same time. But I hid behind the smoke regardless, ignoring that voice, until I quit and picked up the needles in desperation.