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  NONE OF MY FRIENDS at school had met my mother. When we started seventh grade, a month after her death, I was the only student in a class of one hundred fifty with just one parent. My classmates gave me worried looks when we read books or sang songs about mothers’ love or when our composition teacher asked us to write about our families. There was a girl two classes ahead of us who’d lost her mother in a car crash. Everyone at school, from seventh to twelfth grades, knew who we were—the two motherless girls out of nine hundred. I didn’t seek to commiserate with the other girl. More than anything, I was sure, she wanted to be left alone. Besides, even she wouldn’t understand.

  On the afternoon of my mother’s suicide, I had told the police that Takako had been crying for months, that she’d asked me what I would do if she wasn’t around anymore. The three officers who came to our house examined the packing tape with which she’d sealed the windows, the gas line she’d unhooked from the stove and held to her mouth, and the diary and the letters she’d left on the table. Then they accepted the money Hiroshi offered and reported her death as an accident. “Think of my children’s future,” Hiroshi had pleaded. “How could my daughter marry or my son find a job if there was a public record of this?” On the morning of Takako’s funeral, Hiroshi told us that our mother had shamed our family. To throw away a perfectly good life—a husband and two children, a comfortable home—was a sign of mental weakness. “Your mother’s family was always weak,” he said. “You can’t see them anymore. Don’t tell anyone what happened.”

  I didn’t believe Takako had shamed our family. On the contrary, we had shamed ourselves. I had known for months that she was planning to kill herself. Why else would she ask me to imagine a life without her? And yet everyday when I came home from school and saw her hunched over the kitchen table, I told myself that if I would just listen to her and let her cry, she would soon feel better. While my father was out with his girlfriends, I had sat right next to my mother, refusing to see how desperate she was.

  In the letter she left for me, Takako didn’t ask me to keep quiet about her death. She said that she loved me, that I should be strong and find happiness without her. I had let her down as surely as Hiroshi had. After making her believe that I, too, would be better off without her, I had failed to speak up when Hiroshi asked the police to lie for us. Then I kept repeating those same lies to everyone, and I had no intention of ever telling the truth.

  From time to time, when we were laughing in the school cafeteria or walking around downtown on weekends, my friends could forget about me being the only motherless girl in our class. They chuckled at my jokes, teased me for getting lost at the train station, and scolded me for once again misplacing my wallet or movie ticket. If I told them that my mother had killed herself and my father beat me to please his new wife, all of that would change: my confession would blot out everything anyone ever knew or thought about me. Unlike Hiroshi and Michiko, my friends loved me. They would cry for me and console me the best they could. My mother had chosen to die rather than go on pretending that she was content with her life, but I didn’t have the courage to face the truth. If no one knew my secret, then at least when I was away from home, I could continue to act like the spoiled, absentminded girl I used to be before Takako started crying. I preferred my father’s lies to the truth that would single me out forever.

  AT OUR SMALL PRIVATE SCHOOL, I had the same classmates year after year, and the dozen close friends I made among them were the rebellious types who wore faded jeans and wrinkled T-shirts to school, hair cut short as a boy’s or pulled back into plain, hippie-style ponytails. We were on the cooking teams that burned the sponge cake and the cream puffs and the fancy cupcakes; we turned in our mangled sewing projects and made fun of Mrs. Amasaki.

  The only girl I ever saw knitting outside the home-ec. class was Kimiko, a quiet straight-A student who blushed easily. During the winter of our high school sophomore year, Kimiko sat in the back of our classroom during recess, knitting a blue cable sweater for a boy who went to an all-male academy one train stop away from our school. He had asked her out the first time by slipping a note to her as she and her sisters were getting off the train. The oldest of three daughters, Kimiko was supposed to keep her family’s name from dying out. When she graduated from college, her parents would arrange a marriage for her with some family’s second or third son who could give up his last name to take theirs. She had no future with her boyfriend, who was an only child. Two sisters waited in the reading room of the public library nearby while the pair sat in a coffee shop or walked hand-in-hand on the pier downtown. Then, all three sisters went home together to keep their parents from growing suspicious.

  The sweater Kimiko was making had braided cables that looked like totem poles. The patterns were crowded together and the stitches twisted, crossed, and arranged into thick knots. No matter how careful Kimiko and her sisters were, it was only a matter of time before their parents would discover her secret. She had to cram every embellishment she knew into the only garment she would ever knit for that boy.

  Kimiko wasn’t a close friend, so I was more baffled by her than saddened on her account. I wondered how a girl whose hands and voice trembled in class could disobey her parents for a secret romance while I cowered in my room and listened to my stepmother downstairs baiting my father to hit me. I didn’t dare visit my maternal grandparents, uncles, or aunts against Hiroshi’s orders, and the secret I was keeping from my friends was bigger than the one Kimiko hid from her parents. I didn’t see how that secret would come between my friends and me until it was too late.

  DURING OUR FIRST SEMESTER at college, my friends suddenly started skipping our literature classes for the flower arrangement, tea ceremony, French cooking, and pastry-baking lessons with private teachers their parents had hired for their hanayome shugyo (bride training). When they did come to school, they were wearing long skirts and frilled blouses instead of the old jeans and T-shirts; their hair was carefully styled to frame their faces. Miya was setting aside a portion of her monthly allowance for the college tuition of the children she planned to have someday. Makko took driving lessons so she could participate in future car pools. Even Sachiko, the biggest tomboy among us, signed up for an afternoon class at the Shiseido counter of a department store to learn how to apply makeup.

  None of these girls had seen their parents holding hands or talking affectionately to each other. Like mine, their fathers stayed out late or failed to return home. Everyone in our school came from the same upper-middle-class background. Men and women lived in separate worlds, and marriage was for security. Our future husbands would go out drinking with their work friends and girlfriends while we waited at home, embroidering tapestries and supervising the children’s homework. My friends had never had boyfriends, but no one expected them to. Most women of our generation, like our mothers’, had arranged marriages.

  My own mother had married for love, only to kill herself a month after her forty-first birthday, so I knew my friends wouldn’t be any worse off with an arranged marriage than with a love match. Still, I couldn’t believe how easily they were going along with their parents’ plans for their future. Back in high school, we had often come across families gathered for omiai, the formal first “date” toward an arranged marriage, at the hotel lobbies we cut through on our way to the movies. A dozen men and women in their suits and kimonos sat uncomfortably together making stilted conversation. Entire families were there—the couple on their first “date,” their parents, siblings, aunt, and uncles. “Omiai,” we whispered and snickered as we walked on.

  If we ever had to get married, we’d said to each other, we would-n’t let our parents find us husbands from “a nice family” like ours. On our own, we would choose artists or musicians who had grown up in foreign countries, or in remote northern towns like the “Snow Country” of Kawabata’s novel, or in poor struggling families we read about in our social studies classes. Only boys like that were guaranteed to be different from ou
r fathers. But when I reminded my friends of these conversations, they laughed and said I was being childish. Without knowing my secret, they couldn’t understand why I was so set against marriage. But I felt betrayed, all the same.

  Hiroshi and Michiko didn’t encourage me to take up tea ceremony or flower arrangement, but when I turned nineteen, they made a list of acquaintances with sons my age. Perhaps in a few years, they said, one of these families would be interested in having me as their daughter-in-law. Michiko said it was too late for me to learn to keep house the proper way; I was sure to bring shame on our family. When she threatened to leave again one night, I said I would go rent a room. “I’ll be the one to leave,” I offered. “You can stay.” Hiroshi was furious. Young women from good families didn’t leave their parents’ house except to marry. Any woman living alone was bound to be someone’s Nigo-san (Number Two Wife). Since I wasn’t allowed to work like a poor man’s daughter, I had no money for rent anyway. Hiroshi paid my tuition and gave me a monthly allowance, as did all my friends’ parents.

  At the end of our sophomore year, I won a two-year scholarship to finish my B. A. at our sister college in Rockford, Illinois. The scholarship included room and board and a job at the library, so I no longer needed Hiroshi’s money. My friends came to the airport on the day I left and cried. For once, they understood what I didn’t say: I was never coming back.

  IN THE NEXT TWO YEARS, while I applied to graduate school to study writing, my friends back home advanced through their long omiai process. Their parents reviewed stacks of dossiers gathered by a professional matchmaker or a family friend. Once they found a good prospect, they asked the matchmaker to set up an omiai (the word means “mutual-looking”) with the young man’s family. Some of my friends only had one “date” and others, several, before their families could agree on a match to pursue. Then there was a long period of waiting while each family hired a private investigator to scrutinize the other’s background. By then, it was the last semester of college, and my friends could scarcely sleep or eat.

  Growing up, we had heard horror stories about marriage proposals that fizzled out when a detective discovered that the prospective bride’s aunt had suffered from mental illness or her great-grandfather had been adopted rather than born into the family. Every illness or misfortune was suspected to be hereditary, something a woman could pass on to her children. No family would have wanted their son to marry me if they knew about my mother’s suicide. Even after I was married, my husband would have divorced me and disowned any children we had, if he found out. My father expected me to continue his lie as long as I lived, because when a woman failed to find and keep a proper husband, her whole family was disgraced.

  Makko wrote a week before her college graduation with the news of her engagement. “All the stress I felt in the last two years is gone,” she declared. “The uncertainty is over. Now I can settle into my life.” In the fall, others sent me wedding photographs. Each girl wore a traditional Japanese kimono for the ceremony, changed into a wedding dress for the reception, and left for her honeymoon dressed in a two-piece suit and pillbox hat like Jackie Kennedy. Their faces made up, their hair professionally styled, these young women looked nearly identical.

  By then, I was in graduate school in Milwaukee. My friends stopped writing after they were married, so I don’t know whom Kimiko’s family chose as her husband and their yo-shi-san (“an honorable adopted son.”) I imagined her knitting baby socks for her children and wondered if she still remembered the sweater she’d made for her boyfriend, with the raised stitches that crossed over, split apart, and came together again.

  I LEARNED TO KNIT in the last year of graduate school from the German Rotary Scholar at our university. Like me, Sabina was short and plain. Her brown hair was cut straight across her nape, and her wire-rimmed glasses gave her eyes a pinched look, but she had a closet full of beautiful sweaters. She came to school in a ruffled mohair shell one week, a sturdy fisherman’s pullover the next.

  “I make all my sweaters,” she said when I complimented her on the red angora cardigan she was wearing. “I can teach you.”

  I told her about my mitten fiasco.

  “Knitting is easy,” she insisted. “A sweater is bigger than a mitten but much simpler.”

  “The pattern will confuse me.”

  “You don’t need patterns. You can make things up as you go.”

  On the April afternoon I turned in my creative writing dissertation—a manuscript of short stories and poems—the spare bedroom I used as my study looked too tidy. I had thrown out the earlier drafts of everything I’d put into the dissertation, the written comments I’d received from my teachers and fellow students, the notes I’d taken. My desk top was as spotless as my stepmother might have left it.

  “Can I still get that knitting lesson?” I called Sabina and asked. “I don’t know what to do with my time.”

  Sabina showed me the only six things I needed to know to knit a sweater: cast on, knit, purl, increase, decrease, cast off. She placed two chairs side by side in the kitchen and sat next to me. To my surprise, I recognized everything she was doing: the yarn wrapped around the palm like a cat’s cradle for the cast-on; the row of stitches, the size of rice grains, lined up on the needle; the tip of the other needle going in and sliding more yarn through. I picked up a long bamboo needle—less slippery than the thin metal ones from Mrs. Amasaki’s class—and a ball of light blue yarn from Sabina’s basket. The first stitch of every garment is a slipknot. I tugged the yarn so the knot was snug but not too tight around the needle and cast on nineteen more stitches. The first row, I remembered, is always the hardest, because there is no fabric yet to hold onto.

  “Hey, you’re catching on very quickly,” Sabina said when a blue square began to form on my needles. “We should walk over to the yarn store so you can get some yarn and start your sweater right away.”

  The store was on a busy street next to a Chinese restaurant. In the window, a fuzzy pink sweater and a long purple shawl floated on invisible wires. Inside, in a space no larger than my writing room, more sweaters hung from the ceiling, and the walls were lined with plastic milk crates turned on their sides to provide shelving. Balls and skeins of yarn were everywhere—in the crates, in the baskets on the floor, in bags against the wall. Some had swirls of colors like peppermint or taffy. I was inside Hansel and Gretel’s candy house made of yarn, with the swans’ sweaters flying overhead.

  I bought five skeins of red cotton with a nubby texture. Over the next two weeks, following Sabina’s instructions, I first made the body of the sweater: two flat pieces, front and back, with simple decreases to shape the shoulders and the neck. They were surprisingly easy to sew together with a large blunt needle, using the backstitch my mother had taught me for my doll’s clothes. Sabina showed me how to pick up the stitches along the arm opening, connect the yarn, and knit the sleeves, going from the shoulder to the wrist. I finished my first sweater in a month. The result was slightly lopsided—one sleeve was half an inch wider than the other—but the arms looked even once I put the sweater on. Small mistakes in knitting disappear when the garment is on the body, where it belongs.

  I wore the sweater to my dissertation defense at the end of May and to the party afterward. I was twenty-seven, done with my Ph. D., and married to a man from Green Bay, Wisconsin—a small town a hundred miles north where I had gotten a tenure-track teaching job to start in the fall. I could finally learn to knit and catch up on home-making because my life was nothing like my mother’s, and my husband was more unconventional than anyone I knew.

  BY THE TIME WE MET, halfway through my graduate studies, Chuck had been in college on and off for ten years, changing his major from philosophy to environmental science to visual art, music, general humanities, then psychology. At twenty-seven, he had moved from Green Bay to Milwaukee to finish the elementary education degree, his absolute final choice, and found an apartment with a couple of other students—one of whom was my classm
ate, George. The early spring night George and I decided to watch the lunar eclipse, we were making coffee and dragging our chairs from the kitchen to the fourth-floor balcony, when Chuck came home from his band practice. As I held the door open for him to carry in his amp, he told me he was the bass player in a wedding band. He said he even sang a couple of songs that weren’t right for their female vocalist, like “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” He always forgot the lyrics after the first verse, but people were too drunk to care, so he hummed the tune, implying that the words were too profound to be vocalized.

  “I came to see the eclipse with George,” I told him.

  “Cool,” Chuck said. “I’ll get another chair.”

  He put his chair between George’s and mine and sat down. The moon looked full but nothing happened for hours. By the time the eclipse started, George was asleep in his chair. As we passed his binoculars back and forth between us, Chuck told me about working on the railroad on the Minnesota border the summer he was eighteen. From a resort town nearby, he’d sent a picture postcard of a Northern Pike, a truly ugly fish, to his girlfriend with whom he was on the outs, with the message, “Thinking of you.” He’d hoped she would laugh and write back, but she didn’t. When he came back to town, he got a job as a cab driver. On his first night, two drunk women squeezed into the front seat, and one of them tried to kiss him. He dropped them off and called the dispatcher to report, “Number Nine, coming in.” The dispatcher replied, “Number Nine, you just started your shift. It’s not time for you to come in.” “The hell it is,” Chuck told him, “because I’m quitting right now.”