by Alanna Okun
* * *
“No one loves me like she does,” my mother said to me on the phone a few days before her mother died, when we were already halfway to knowing that’s what would happen. I wanted to say that I loved her, that I could learn to love her even bigger to make up for whatever loss was coming, but I knew that wasn’t it. Later, with the person who knitted the first row of everything I would ever make in my life now gone, I dimly started to know what my mother meant.
What happens to an object when its creator is gone? It’s hard to know what tense to use when describing my grandma’s many projects. The blankets still exist—they are orange, it feels wrong to say that they were orange—but they’ve undergone a phase change. They weigh more and yet take up less space because there will be no more of them. There will be no more arguments in restaurants and no more enveloping hugs. And what happens to an object when it’s been given and then returned? I knitted my grandma so many things, first very bad and then pretty good. The Christmas before she died, I made her socks, which my mother gave back to me after the funeral. It wasn’t the wrong thing to do—even worse would be for them to get lost, to be loved and used by no one—but I can’t bring myself to wear them, although I doubt my grandma ever did. They look empty even though socks are supposed to be empty.
Missed Connections
You: Girl on Manhattan-bound F train, knitting what looked like a sock—didn’t get a good look because you disembarked one stop after I got on.
Me: Girl who wished I had my own knitting on hand so I could pull it out in solidarity, or at least that there were some kind of secret hand signal to indicate that I’m one of you, and not just some creep staring at you from across the car.
You: Hot guy knitting on the L train.
Me: Someone who never actually saw you, but who received two text messages from two separate friends on the same day informing me that they’d found my soul mate. Unless you’re two different dudes, in which case, hello to both of you.
You: Lady who seemed scandalized by my embroidery on the N train.
Me: Sorry for stitching the phrase “Butt Stuff” in public. In my defense, it was for a friend.
You: Entire ridership of that one car on the M.
Me: Grateful that none of you laughed when I attempted to knit while standing up, even when I dropped my ball of yarn and it rolled under a nearby seat.
You: Woman whom I spoke to for a long time on the 7, the first summer I lived in New York. You were a few years older than me and very pretty, with hair pulled back in one of those ponytails where you wrap a piece of hair around the elastic so it looks super fancy and deliberate. When you saw I was knitting you sat down next to me and spent the entire ride into Queens telling me about your own crafts, your favorite yarn stores, and your plans to start selling your stuff. You gave me your number—it’s still in my phone as “Christina Knitting”—and made me feel like the world was just the right kind of expansive.
Me: Sorry I never had the courage to text.
You: Manspreaders.
Me: Crusader in the fight for personal space, who uses her knitting as a cover for jostling the elbows of people who take up far more than their fair and reasonable share of the subway bench.
You: Older woman on the Delancey J platform crocheting faster than I can blink.
Me: Fake redhead who wants to learn your witchery.
You: Extremely kind pair of German tourists on the Brooklyn-bound G.
Me: Sobbing girl to whom you gave a bunch of tissues and an Andes mint. Jamie had died a few weeks before and I’d thought I was done with the sneak attacks of grief, but I guess I wasn’t. One of you told me, “Whatever it is, it’ll be okay.” At the time, this didn’t feel applicable to my situation, but now I think you were right. This isn’t about knitting or anything but I’ve regarded Andes mints with great affection ever since.
You: Beautiful braided scarf I knitted from soft gray merino yarn that cost way more than I will ever admit.
Me: Idiot who left you on some train one night when I was drunk.
You: Whoever picked up the braided scarf.
Me: Its maker, who sincerely hopes that you love it.
You: Guy on the R who told me my knitting reminded you of your grandmother, and then asked for my number.
Me: Uninterested woman who hopes, for your own good and the good of ladykind, that you never try a line like that again.
The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater
We broke up before I’d even bought the yarn.
I’d knitted Sam1 a lot of things in the years we’d known each other: a beanie he could wear to work, a cowl to keep his neck warm while he biked around Brooklyn, a pair of gray socks with red heels that were the exact inverse of a pair I’d made myself. Once I’d tried to knit him a bow tie, a spectacularly floppy failure that we laughed about together when he unwrapped it. The one thing I hadn’t made him was a sweater, and so that—large, gray, and cozy—would be his Christmas present.
But there was the small matter of the curse. Every knitter (and most crocheters) knows about the Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater. It’s essentially the opposite of Engagement Chicken, guaranteeing that if you set out to knit your partner a sweater, the relationship will end before you’ve finished.2 I had read hushed horror stories and equally staunch dismissals in the knitting magazines and all over the sites I frequented. I believed in it the way I believe losing my keys is caused by Mercury in retrograde or that I’m bossy because I’m an Aries: a not-quite-tongue-in-cheek explanation, a convenient way of keeping things in order. Part of the lore of my people, maybe, but not something to seriously take to heart.
* * *
Sam was not the first boy I knitted for; before him, I’d spent most of a decade in a series of back-to-back relationships. Ever since I can remember, I’ve thought of myself as a girlfriend. I’m good at it. I like the daily routine of goodnight texts and bleary-eyed morning sex, paying each other back for takeout and bus tickets, proofreading each other’s cover letters and getting to know each other’s friends. I like standing around at a party with one thumb hooked through the other’s belt loop, and squabbling over which movie showing we’ll reasonably be able to catch, and realizing halfway through a fight that the real fight isn’t about the thing you’re fighting about at all. I like to be able to look back and say, Hey, look at this life we’ve built. Like knitting a scarf or a sweater and watching the stitches pile up row by row: there goes a month, there goes a year. You can wrap yourself in the knowledge that someone has chosen you, someone sees you, and in that way, you are safe.
There is, of course, the other side. When I’m not with somebody I can get destabilized, a little manic, straining against the edges of my life like I’m trying to squeeze my head through a neck hole that’s too small. On to the next one, that mean voice inside me hisses, unless you’ve used it all up, unless you’re no longer worth it, unless all those times before were just a fluke. Being in a relationship is a Band-Aid of reassurance that no matter how flawed and fearful I may be, I’m still doing something right. That there is always someone there who will save me even if I can’t save myself. And so I’ve grabbed for it with both hands without pausing to ask if it’s what I really want.
For almost all of my boyfriends, I crafted. If you hang around me long enough, odds are good that I will try to drape you in yarn—over winter break of my senior year of college I made two sweaters, an infinity scarf, and a pair of cashmere socks for my four housemates, because I loved them dearly but also because I’d run out of parts of my own body to decorate. I make Christmas presents for my family nearly every year, and after that first baby sweater came a series of tiny hats one month after the other, as if everyone I knew had gotten together and drawn up a birthing schedule.
But with the boyfriends, it went beyond simple proximity. There is so much tied up in a handmade gift, so much that it can feel like a miniature version of the relationship itself. What do they want? (Cowl, hat, gloves.) Is it
really what they want at all? (Three pairs of abandoned gloves on the top shelf of the hall closet, never remembered when needed.) What are you willing to give? (Cashmere is so expensive but so warm.) Or learn? (Who knew glove needles were so fiddly to use?) Do you know their body as well as you think you do? (Hands the size of catcher’s mitts, really should have stuck with the piano.)
Will you hide it while you’re working on it, only wanting your partner to see the finished product? Will you save it for a special event—a birthday, an anniversary—or present it when it’s needed, that first morning when they look out the window and groan about steering their bike through all that snow? Are you waiting for a specific response when you do hand it over—“It’s perfect.” “You’re perfect.” “I love you and how could I ever leave?”
Because your gift is an assertion. “I love you,” it says. “I love you times ten thousand stitches and fourteen consecutive subway rides. I love you enough to keep you warm, and I love you enough to know what you need and therefore who you are, and in exchange I want you to think of me and want me and feel me there even when I am not with you.” It’s not a selfless act; a handmade object can serve almost like a walkie-talkie, a piece of string between two cups that the maker can whisper through: “I was here. I matter.”
* * *
The first boy I knitted for was also named Sam.3 We met at performing arts camp, and I loved him in the slack-jawed way that only a recently bat mitzvahed theatre geek can. I spent the summer staring at this wiry boy who wore his hair in carefully maintained spikes, laughing at his improv performances and listening to at least three of my friends talk about how much they liked him too. I was surprised when he asked for my AIM screen name at the end of the summer, asked me to take a walk around the town center, asked me if he could kiss me on the overstuffed armchair in my bedroom.
Our braces clinked and I was so happy I didn’t know where to put it all. I had planned my outfit so carefully that I remember it now, half a lifetime later, but I hadn’t planned for this rush, this feeling of arrival.4 I hadn’t known until then that liking someone meant they could maybe like you back.
Sam 1.0 and I dated for six months, a lifetime by eighth-grade standards. He lived one town away and our parents had to drive us to all our dates. We made out at the movies and in our darkened living rooms. He once took me out to dinner and paid with a $50 bill, which I found incredibly suave. I met his family and his friends and was thrilled when it seemed that they genuinely liked me, didn’t think it was odd that this golden, glowing person would want me in his life. I remember his older sister leaving to go back to college after a break and telling me, “Take care of my brother,” which seemed such a solemn and grown-up promise to make in a flurry of goodbye hugs. I’d been given a cell phone the previous year when I’d started walking home from school and spoke to Sam on it in between our reams of AIM conversations. (Measured in reams because of course I printed them all out.)
He told me he loved me for the first time over that phone. I started to knit him a scarf with green yarn. I didn’t think about us ending because I had no conception that we could end; I loved him and he loved me, so that was how things were now.
Just like I hadn’t known what it was to be loved, I also hadn’t known that the other person was allowed to stop loving you. And then one night at his house he told me that he was sorry, but he wanted to break up. I felt not so much sadness just then as shock—those weren’t the rules. He was supposed to be on my team, be my person, not just decide to leave one day without giving me a chance to make it right. What was I supposed to do with all of these feelings, all this time, all this space in myself I’d set aside for him? How could I go back to being just me?
It remains one of the kindest breakups I’ve ever been a part of. My mom couldn’t come back to pick me up for another couple of hours, or maybe I just didn’t want to tell her what had happened over the phone, so Sam and I watched L.A. Confidential and he let me cry into his neck. I spent the rest of the school year crying, and the following summer at camp I met a different boy, and then another the summer after that. I never finished the green scarf I’d started for Sam; eventually I unraveled it and used the yarn to make a lumpy, experimental pair of slippers, which I never wore.
* * *
I made more scarves and a couple of hats for the camp boyfriends, for a guy a few years ahead of me in high school, for the tall bassist who came over to talk to me one day in the town library and turned out to be the boy I’d date for the next two years. Joe asked to borrow my AP US History textbook and I only found out after we’d been together for months that he was taking Modern African History at his all-boys Catholic school down the road.
He drove us around in the old white Volvo he’d christened “White Heat” and took pictures of everything, me and my sister and all of our friends, turned the flatness of our suburban town into something layered and exciting. Sometimes we smoked weed and once my mom found a teal Trojan wrapper on the floor of my bedroom. Mostly, though, we were content to listen to music and play video games and lie with our heads on each other’s stomachs. This is what it is, I’d think, looking at him and the hundreds of photographs he’d logged of our time together, to have a partner, a buddy, a witness. He made me feel so seen.
I tried to make him socks the summer after we graduated from our respective high schools, when I was anxious and unemployed and had plenty of time to learn knitting techniques. They did not turn out well, more like the universe’s most depressing Christmas stockings than anything meant for a human foot.5 And then summer was over, and I was leaving for school in upstate New York, and he would be staying in Boston. I was restless and impatient, in such a hurry to get where I was headed next that I think now I was unkind, didn’t listen with more than half an ear when he told me that he’d miss me, that he wanted to visit, that we should try to make it work.
* * *
“Maybe you’re allergic to peaches,” my freshman roommate offered on the second night of college as I dry-heaved over our trash can.
Maybe, I thought, or maybe I’d had one too many PBRs, but the nausea turned out to be a panic attack, the first of many I would have in the following years. That night it came on because I felt violently lonely and constricted by that loneliness, and my body didn’t know how to process it. It was about Joe, to a point, but larger and more shapeless than any absence was this sense that I had been a girlfriend for so long and all of a sudden wasn’t anymore. I had done this to myself; I was the thing that was broken.
I didn’t feel that way for long. Instead, I outran it. Two months later I came as close as I ever had to challenging the curse by crocheting a sweater for my new college boyfriend. He was a tall, skinny sophomore with curly black hair and bright-blue eyes, and even though his name was Michael, nobody called him that unless they were making fun of him. Instead, he went by Hirschey, a spin on his last name. I liked how it turned my mouth into a smile whenever I said it.
I’d met him the first week of classes and immediately we’d fallen into each other, spending every night in his tiny, clothes-strewn single room two floors away from mine. Each Sunday we’d order a large square pizza from the drunk-food place across the street and we’d nibble on it throughout the week; sometimes we’d supplement with boxes of Cheez-Its and glazed doughnut holes. We were so excited by the freedom, so excited to be excited by each other. I thought about Joe and my hometown and my high school sometimes, but it was just easier to look ahead than to stop and sort through what I’d left behind.
The sweater was a monstrously heavy garment made from black acrylic yarn during a semester’s worth of art history lectures; my hook ducked and wove through Caravaggio, Kahlo, and Koons. Hirschey wore it gamely through a few Hudson Valley winters, even accompanied me to a yarn festival, where I trotted him around like a living mannequin. When we finally decided to end things after two and a half years, hundreds of nights, infinite pizzas, it felt like it was time. I hardly knew college without hi
m; we were both ready for something different.
After a period of not speaking, we started a ritual on Sundays. He’d pick me up in his roommate’s car and we’d drive to a legendarily weird twenty-four-hour diner near campus decorated with neon pictures of Greek ruins. We’d split gravy-covered disco fries and milkshakes and fill each other in on our weeks. We’d eventually talk about the people we were falling for and the ones who bruised our hearts. And then he graduated, and by then, I wasn’t sad to see the sweater go.
* * *
What started to worry me wasn’t the near-relentless pace of my dating life. It was the edges I smoothed away with my blinding desire to get to the next place, the next person, to tell a compact story. “Serial monogamist!” said with a smile and a wink is an easy way to avoid talking about the hurt I’ve received (and doled out) in ever-shifting measures. It implies an ease, an effortlessness, skipping from rock to rock without ever stumbling.
It elides the boys whose heels I nipped at for months before they turned toward other girls or just away from me; it erases the headachey mornings spent stumbling back to my own bed, not floaty with hope but heavy, laden. So many people I slotted into the boyfriend space because they were there, only to realize much later that they didn’t fit or didn’t want to fit. So many times I cried furiously at myself for not being enough. And I’ve done it too, more times than probably even I know: hardened and retreated in that exact way I so dread from others. I’ve had next boyfriends fixed in my sights before the old ones were gone because I couldn’t imagine confronting a gap, a moment of silence, of stillness.