Yarn Read online

  Chuck was wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a denim jacket, with a folded red bandana tied around his forehead like “Easy Rider” outlaws, but his shoulder-length hair, pulled back with a rubber band, curled under on his nape like a little girl’s ponytail. With his high cheek bones and long eyelashes, he was just the kind of good-looking guy a drunk woman in a cab might feel safe enough to kiss. When he told me he was studying for a teaching certificate, I couldn’t picture him in a classroom. The only young male teacher I’d ever seen was Sidney Poitier in “To Sir, With Love.”

  “I decided to become a teacher because I never had a good teacher myself,” Chuck said. “I want to encourage kids to think for themselves and break the rules.”

  After George went to bed, the two of us stood on the edge of the balcony howling at the moon as it reappeared. Chuck walked me home, and we made plans to go running the next day. In the fall when he finally asked me out, Chuck told me that he had actually seen me running during his first week in Milwaukee the year before.

  “You looked really strong and determined,” he said. “I saw you every week after that and wondered who you were and where you lived. I had no idea we actually lived on the same street. I couldn’t believe when you were in my apartment talking to George. I almost said, ‘Hey, you’re the runner I’ve been wanting to meet for months! I hope you’re not planning to date George.’”

  For all that, it had taken Chuck nearly six months of our running together every week to ask for a date. “I never wanted to be the kind of guy who moves too fast,” he explained. “Whatever was going to happen between us, I figured it just would, if it was meant to be.”

  Unlike my graduate school friends, who couldn’t stop talking about their worst childhood memories, failed poems and romances, Chuck didn’t dwell on the past or worry about the future. On the stone wall along the bike path where we ran together, someone had scrawled in red paint, “Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It was Chuck’s favorite graffiti. “So true,” he said. “Going over all that negative stuff in your mind is how you get trapped into the same bad karma.”

  The week before Thanksgiving, when Chuck and I had been seeing each other for three months, George announced his intention to find his own apartment, and on that same afternoon, my friend Dale confided that his wife had left him so he could no longer afford his two-bedroom flat.

  “You and I can take over Dale’s flat and he can have this one,” Chuck suggested as we sat drinking coffee at midnight in the basement studio where I had been living with my Siamese attack cat, Dorian. “Things happen for a reason.”

  “I thought you were moving when you finish school,” I pointed out. “That’s next month.” On the night we first met, Chuck had told me he would apply for a job in Chicago or New York after getting his teaching certificate in December.

  “I don’t have to do that right away,” he said now. “It’s not like I’ve looked into it yet.”

  I still had two more years of school and had no idea where I would find a teaching job afterward.

  “Don’t worry about all that stuff yet,” he said. “No big deal. It’ll all work out. We should try living together for a couple of years. Then we’ll see how things go.”

  He’d had a dozen girlfriends and roommates in the past, but they were never the same people. I had only dated one other person, my senior year in college, long enough to refer to him as my boyfriend. Aside from my family and the two roommates who didn’t work out my first summer in Milwaukee, Dorian was the only living being with whom I had ever shared my space. Chuck and I toasted our move-in decision with our coffee, marveling at our spontaneity and saying we would just “play it by ear,” whatever it was.

  A month after we moved in together, Chuck graduated from college at twenty-eight and got a job teaching third grade at a small parochial school. In the world of my childhood, no one who worked on the railroad or drove a cab ever became a teacher. And none of my Japanese friends had lived with anyone unrelated to her by blood or marriage

  A YEAR AND THREE MONTHS LATER, when fifty job applications resulted in two offers, I chose a position in Green Bay for its lighter teaching load. I was almost done with my dissertation but nowhere near publishing my first book of stories or poems. My student visa would expire as soon as I finished my degree. I needed a job that would qualify me for a work visa and allow me to continue writing. I accepted the Green Bay job on the phone and called the other college to decline their offer.

  I didn’t expect Chuck to return to Green Bay anymore than I would to Japan. “I can come back to see you on weekends if you want,” I added after telling him the news. He had just returned from work, and we were sitting in our living room on the red velvet couch I had inherited from a poet who’d moved to New York and left me his furniture.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. “It’ll be too weird to have you living in my hometown without me. Besides, it’s not like I have a job I can’t give up.” The parochial school was on the verge of a financial collapse. Teachers had been asked not to cash their paychecks, because there were no funds to cover them, and the heat in the classrooms had to be turned so low that the students sat at their desks in their hats and gloves.

  “You could still go to New York, or Italy,” I suggested. We had heard on the news that New York City had severe teacher shortage, and a friend had given him a brochure about a Montessori school in Rome.

  “Listen,” he said, taking my hand, “if someone had told me when I first got here that I was going to meet a woman from Japan who was going to bring me back to live in Green Bay, I’d have said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ But what can I say? This is how things turned out. I still want to go with you.”

  My job decision had made perfect sense when I was alone, but now, it seemed bizarre. I had applied in every state from Alaska and Hawaii to Maine and Florida and ended up with an offer from Chuck’s hometown. We sat in a daze all afternoon until he said, “We have to believe there are no coincidences. Otherwise, this will drive us crazy.”

  A few days later, when I found out that I would still have to leave the country after defending my dissertation in May and apply for a work visa from Japan, Chuck said we should get married.

  “We already made a commitment by moving in together,” he said. “So what’s the difference?”

  That wasn’t remotely how I remembered it.

  “We didn’t make a commitment. We said nothing about the future.”

  “Maybe not,” he shrugged. “Still, you’re the first person I ever wanted to live with. I wouldn’t have moved in with you if I didn’t feel committed.”

  “But getting married is a big deal. We shouldn’t do it just so I can get a visa.”

  “Why not? It’s one of the best reasons I ever heard. Why go through the hassle when we can drive down to city hall?”

  According to a counselor I’d gone to see at our university’s legal clinic, getting a job offer didn’t automatically qualify me for a visa. Work visa applications could take up to a year, and many were turned down. In the meantime, if I didn’t leave the country as soon as my student visa expired, I would be deported as an illegal alien and disqualified from every coming back. After all these years, I was going to have to live in Hiroshi’s house again and wait for a visa that might never come through. But Chuck had told me about the women he’d dated in Green Bay—how they pressured him about marriage until he couldn’t stand to be with them.

  “You said you didn’t want to get married,” I reminded him. “You don’t believe in marriage.”

  “I only said I don’t believe in weddings. People act like idiots at weddings. Weddings are phony and stupid.”

  In the framed photograph of their wedding my mother had kept on her dresser, my parents stood in front of the Heian Shrine in Kyoto: Hiroshi in a black suit, Takako in a rented dress that was too long for her. She had told her parents, “If Hiroshi dies from tuberculosis, I want to be buried with him. I’ll never
marry anyone else.” Standing in that white dress in front of the oldest shrine in Kyoto, Takako couldn’t have imagined that a year later, Hiroshi would be having his first affair. Ever since her suicide, I had been determined to avoid her mistake by not getting married, but now, the only way I could escape being sent back to my father’s house was to get married.

  “We can just go to the court house,” Chuck said. “The ceremony is only a formality. We shouldn’t make such a big deal out of it.”

  “But what if things didn’t work out between us?” I asked.

  “We’ll deal with it then,” he said, “if it happens that way. There’s no guarantee for the future.”

  I was relieved to hear him say he wasn’t making any promises about the future. Getting married was just a formality, something he was willing to do to help me. If Chuck had sworn he loved me for always and wanted to be with me forever, I would have told him the truth. I didn’t believe in marriage if it meant vowing to be with anyone for the rest of my life. The only promise I wanted to make about the future was that we would let each other go if things didn’t work out, before one or both of us were destroyed by our marriage. But Chuck was already saying the same thing. We could get married because neither of us believed in “till death do us part.”

  We drove to the court house the next day for our marriage license and had our civil ceremony a few weeks later, telling no one about it until it was over. Finding a job, finishing my dissertation, getting my driver’s license after four failed road tests, even learning to knit and cook—I believed these were my real rites of passage.

  THAT SUMMER, as Chuck and I prepared for our move, I started a second sweater for myself and read the vegetarian cookbooks from which I had been making a few easy soups, salads, and sandwiches every week. Though I didn’t know how, I had volunteered for cooking when the two of us divided our chores, because I preferred it to cleaning and dishwashing. Aside from the sponge cake and fancy cupcakes, our home-ec. classes had taught us to make radish roses and cucumber threads, chocolate soufflés, cream puffs, platters of tempura, birds’ nest soup. Even if I had been paying attention, I wouldn’t have learned how to cook everyday meals for two people.

  Because cookbooks were written in numbered sentences without words like the and and, I’d imagined a tight-lipped, dour woman speaking to me through the recipes, like Mrs. Amasaki and my stepmother combined. I was stunned to discover that the recipes were actually simple and easy. Almost every baking recipe began with “Preheat (the) oven to 350 degrees.” For most main dishes, you heated the oil in the pan while cutting the vegetables and measuring the spices. All you had to do was follow a few directions and figure out the rest as you went along.

  Like knitting, cooking called for a trial-and-error approach. The first curry recipe I made said, “Add a quarter cup of water or more, as needed, to prevent burning and sticking.” Every soup, pasta sauce, or casserole recipe advised, “Season to taste.” In knitting, if the sweater was turning out too large or too small, I could throw in extra decreases or increases to adjust the size. I could unravel the yarn on purpose, undo a few inches of work, and correct my mistakes. Best of all, if the finished sweater was half an inch too small, it would always stretch.

  No one cared if their mittens were exactly the same size, any more than if the radish rose on their plate was missing a petal. Knitting and cooking were different from sewing. Before you even threaded your needle to sew, you could have made an irreversible mistake by cutting the pieces wrong; then you’d have to buy more cloth and lay out the pattern again. Every time you rip out stitches because you sewed the wrong parts together, the cloth frays. If the finished shirt is half an inch too small, it’s not going to stretch.

  The words thread (the string-like material we sew with) and yarn (the string-like material we knit with) convey different degrees of flexibility. Thread holds together and restricts, while yarn stretches and gives. Thread is the overall theme that gives meaning to our words and thoughts—to lose the thread is to be incoherent or inattentive. A yarn is a long, pointless, amusing story whose facts have been exaggerated. I had gotten D’s in home-ec., math, and science because I was concocting a yarn in my head when I should have been following the thread of each lesson.

  Thread was all I got at home after my mother’s death. Every time my stepmother said I would disgrace our family when I married because my mother hadn’t taught me the right skills, she was talking like a sewing teacher: I had made a mistake, I couldn’t fix it, and I only deserved a D. Michiko was saying what everyone around us believed. In Japan, a woman had one chance for a secure marriage. My mother couldn’t reverse the mistake she’d made by choosing the flashy, arrogant man her parents had warned against. If she had left Hiroshi, she would have lost my brother and me—like everything else in our parents’ house, we belonged to Hiroshi and not to Takako—and even the people who knew about Hiroshi’s affairs would have blamed her. She had nowhere to go except back to her parents’ house to become a financial burden. Takako was like a seamstress who had ruined the only piece of cloth she was given. She didn’t get a second chance for happiness. She dreamed of me becoming a writer or an artist so I would have the freedom she never knew.

  But if she’d ever envisioned me getting married, she might have chosen someone like Chuck, a teacher who encouraged his students to think for themselves and break the rules. Chuck would never cheat on me and lie to me as my father had done to my mother. Even more important, he valued freedom and open-mindedness as much as he did honesty. If we became so miserable together that one of us wished to die, he, too, would want us to go our separate ways to be happy alone or with someone else. In the meantime, as long as we both chose, ours could be a marriage of yarn: two flexible strands connected loosely into a warm sweater, a good story instead of a terrible lesson.

  I DIDN’T KNOW, THEN, that knitting is a relatively new invention. The oldest surviving knitted objects—blue and white cotton socks discovered in an Egyptian tomb—are dated 1200 A. D., eight thousand years after the first artifacts of weaving: clay balls with imprints of textiles found in Iraq. Weavers appear on papyruses from ancient Egypt and in stories from ancient Greece. In Odysseus’ absence, Penelope weaves and unweaves a funeral tapestry for her father-in-law to keep her suitors away. Arachne is turned into a spider when she challenges the goddess Athene to a weaving contest and loses. No Greek hero’s wife or foolish mortal ever received praise or punishment for knitting. The earliest images of the craft are from the fourteenth century, when Italian and German artists painted the Virgin Mary knitting in brightly-lit drawing rooms with the baby Jesus at her feet.

  A knitted garment, whose loose construction traps air against the body, is warmer but more fragile than a woven one. One broken stitch can release all the others, making the fabric “run.” Knitting didn’t appear until the middle ages, because the earlier people had no use for fragile luxury goods. The delicate silk stockings knitted in France in the sixteenth century were reserved for the royalty and were more like today’s designer shoes than the humble wool socks. Queen Elizabeth I refused to wear the stiff woven-and-sewn socks from her own country after trying on her first pair of soft knitted French silk stockings. Her cousin and enemy, Mary the Queen of Scotts, wore blue-and-gold knitted silk stockings to her execution.

  Even in the nineteenth century, when the craft was widespread among the common people, knitted garments were treasured as family heirlooms. Every girl in Latvia learned by the age of six so she could get an early start on mittens for her dowry chest. A full dowry chest reduced the number of cows and sheep her family was required to pay the groom. On the wedding day, the mittens, which had colorful interlocking geometrical designs, were distributed to all the participants from the carriage driver to the minister, to the numerous relatives, in-laws, and neighbors. At the feast, the bride and groom ate with mittened hands to invite good luck. When the day was over, the bride walked around the inside and outside of her new home, laying mittens o
n all the important locations: the hearth, the doors, the windows, the cow barn, the sheep shed, the beehives, the garden. Depending on the number of guests, she needed a hundred or two hundred pairs of mittens to get through her wedding day.

  Knitting with two or more colors makes a stronger fabric than using only one. The tiny diamonds, crosses, squares, and x’s and o’s repeated across the mittens were proof of the bride’s ability to perform the careful, monotonous work of a farm wife. If you held a Latvian mitten up to a lamp, no light would shine through the tightly-packed stitches. Unlike the silk stockings from France, these mittens were as sturdy as any knitted item could be. They were result of many years of labor by the bride who gave herself to her community and her new family, grafting her childhood on to her adult life, marrying her past to her future with the groom. Mittens brought together all the people who received them. The last pairs left were collected by her mother-in-law. Her dowry box finally empty, the bride placed herself under the older woman’s guidance, under her thumb.

  Knitting was a new craft in Latvia compared to weaving and embroidery, but its purpose was ancient: bringing people together and creating lasting ties. A Latvian wedding was not so different from my friends’ omiai in hotel lobbies, attended by the families on both sides. A bride secured her family and her community around her by placing herself firmly in the center. She stayed home while her husband went to work. No matter where he’d been or how long (or with whom), he would find his wife caring for their children and guarding their home when he returned. It’s an ageold story, from Penelope to my mother to my friends, Makko and Miya. In Japan, the ideogram for safety is a woman under the roof, and a man refers to his wife as ka-nai, “house-inside.”