All Wound Up (7 page)

Joe said nothing. The silence was deafening. Joe is the sort of man who would never have me walk a neighborhood alone in the night, and I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t already on his way. Was he too frustrated? Was he too upset?

I waited and tried to figure it out. Obviously I was missing something, but I couldn’t think what it was. Joe gave me a few minutes, and then he said it.

This finished me. Entirely. I’d managed to hold it together until then, but that did it. The man had somehow gotten his truck wedged in an impossible situation, and not only had things gone from bad to worse, minute by minute, but that whole time, for the hour that he’d been trying to find a way out of it, he had been trapped in the truck and avoided telling me.

I collapsed on the floor, practically laughing myself sick. I kept laughing as I pulled on my boots, coat, and mittens. I kept laughing as I jogged the five minutes over to his parents’. I’d almost got a hold of myself as I rounded the corner to the alley, but dissolved helplessly again when I saw him. Truck wedged, sides deeply lacerated, mirrors askew, deep holes dug into the dirt and snow beneath it, with my husband sitting patiently, trapped in the dark. (For some reason, he wasn’t laughing much.)

I shoved the truck hard while he rocked it, and somehow we managed to get it out of the rut it had dug so he could finally back up, scraping what was left of the paint off as we went. (We did not hit the BMW.) I came around and joined him in the truck, and we began to drive silently home. As we rounded the corner and he slowed the pickup, it shuddered a little and made a new noise, another variation on an automotive death rattle, sort of a “urrrrhhhhgggg,” and it lurched around a bit. I looked at Joe. He looked ahead. We drove. At the stop sign we slowed again, and the truck repeated its mechanical-sea-cow-with-indigestion noise, and this time I asked Joe when that started. “At the thirty minutes stuck mark,” he replied, and we drove on.

We got home, parked, and walked together quietly toward the house, and I was thinking about his ordeal. Any other person, I thought, would have expressed some sort of hostility or loud frustration by then, but Joe’s a good-natured rock. If it had been me, trapped like that, trashing a truck in the dead of night, obstructing traffic, and listening to the transmission try to vomit itself out of the hood, you would have found me crazed in the thing, thrashing around screaming in a way that would have shamed the snot out of my mother—and she can compete at the Olympic level in obscenity, should the occasion demand it. I thought about that, and the bruises both the pickup and I would bear from my fists smashing against the interior in rage had that happened to me, and I looked at Joe. “You okay?” I asked him, trying to broach the idea that if he had a little anger to share I would listen, and he looked at me. He pulled off his boots. He smiled a bit, and he said:

abled Grey (nee Skein)—A mostly finished sweater and long-time yarn resident of Stephanie’s Stash in Toronto.

Cabled Grey died suddenly at home following a lengthy illness, surrounded by other knitting projects and a few knitters, on the 14th of November 2009. Cabled Grey was an ill-fitting sweater with raglan sleeves and largish cables, who began life as nine skeins of a pretty decent three-ply merino purchased at 20 percent off, and had marinated in the stash for about eight years. In his very early days, Cabled displayed a great deal of potential when executed as a beautiful gauge swatch, holding his shape and stitch definition, even when he was washed. Cabled will be remembered always for the promise he demonstrated when first wound into a ball of yarn, moments before his unfortunate infection with the terminal sweater pattern which was his eventual undoing. The yarns with whom he shared the work-in-progress basket fondly recall the cheerful way he endured re-knits due to errors in his chart, which of course became errors on his front, and for the way that he mostly managed to be a garment despite the way his raglan shapings were hopelessly miswritten in the pattern. They respected the way that Cabled held his ribbings high, despite the inescapable truth that there was absolutely no way that his designer had possibly written down the right number of stitches to pick up for his buttonband, leaving him eternally crooked round the front and neck.

In most obituaries, this is the part where one would say that the dearly departed fought valiantly or bravely, but such was not the case with Cabled Grey, who gave up on being a sweater faster than a sixteen-year-old can spend $50 at the mall. From the very moment that Cabled’s back was cast on, he was tragically doomed, for even though his gauge swatch had twenty-eight stitches to four inches, it turned out that Cabled actually harbored a secret desire to have twenty-two stitches to four inches, which is a destiny that he manifested about midway through the second front, creating a sweater that had cardigan fronts of two dramatically different sizes, which would have been fine were the breasts of the recipient likewise as different as a tangerine and a watermelon, which they were not.

Cabled was ripped back several times in his life, but it never seemed to bother him at all, and, in fact, his knitter rather suspected that he was trying to prolong the knitting process by embracing the errors and re-knits. He was the sort of project that was really able to cut loose and let things happen. Even as his knitter was begging him to please get his gauge together and honor the commitment that is making a sweater, Cabled was able to stay true to his inner nature, which was that of a mercurial, flighty yarn with no real goals. (Suggestions that Cabled Grey may have had some hemp in his fiber content are untrue, but we see why knitters might have gotten the idea.) In fact it was the way that Cabled was happy just to be knit, not to be knit with any degree of quality, and his stunning ability to avoid becoming a sweater through passive aggressive behavior that earned him the playful nickname “total piece of crap.”

Despite several interventions, treatments, re-knits, and pattern adjustments, Cabled Grey eventually succumbed to the terrible pattern he had contracted. One desperate final surgery was attempted, but the craftspeople present during this ill-fated procedure all supported the diagnosis of the original knitter, which was that Cabled should be helped to the great big cedar chest in the sky, and never attempted again. Cabled entered palliative care in the hall closet, until the 14th of November, when he received his final visit from neighborhood knitters during a “stash tidy.” Knitters at the visitation were welcome to spend a few final moments with Grey, and every single one agreed wholeheartedly that it truly was best that this struggle end, as the knitter looked sort of desperate and frantic when Grey was taken from the bag, and it was clear that Cabled had an inoperable series of obviously miscrossed cables that were causing both him and his knitter a great deal of intractable pain. Knitters surrounded Cabled at this time, and disconnected him from knit-support as they withdrew the needles. Shortly thereafter Cabled Grey came to the end of his repeat, and the knitters departed, sadly acknowledging that he was indeed hopelessly ugly and unfortunately ill-fitting, and had a really, really bad pattern. Services, as brief as they were, consisted of dumping the sweater into the Goodwill bin, while quaffing red wine and declaring “Life’s too short for bad knits,” “Don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out,” and the profound, “Holy cow, I can’t believe I spent that much time and money on that sweater; man, I’m just pissed.”

Cabled Grey, or rather the idea of what Cabled Grey could have been, will be sadly missed by his knitter, the needles he so persistently occupied, and the pattern that was his ultimate undoing. Cabled Grey is survived by his daughter, Leftover Grey Yarn, who is thinking about becoming a hat to honor her father. Blue Mohair, who occupied the space next to Cabled Grey on the shelf for many years, will miss him tremendously, although seems rather fond of the cute hand-dyed laceweight who’s moved in. As usual, the sock yarns have no idea what is going on.

The departure of Cabled Grey was immediately followed by the casting on of Alpaca Lace Shawl, who shall be knit in his memory. In lieu of flowers, patterns without errors and yarn with good attitude may be sent to Stephanie’s Stash, although truthfully, she’s pretty much over it.

e walk down the street together, my family and I, three blocks through the busy city from our front door to a little restaurant that we love, and as I take my seat and shrug off my cardigan, I reach down to my bag sitting by my feet. My hand goes in, and as it does there is more air in that bag than I expect, and my heart skips a beat. No knitting? I pull up the bag to my lap and open it, trying to understand what is going on. No knitting? I never have no knitting. I don’t leave the house without knitting like other women don’t leave the house without lipstick or a bra—neither of which I am wearing, but that’s not the point. I always have knitting. It’s one of the things I take with me each and every time I leave the house. Wallet, keys, phone, and a sock-in-progress. Hell, I usually have two kinds of knitting with me if I go to the kitchen, never mind a restaurant. I start pulling out things from my bag. No knitting. I look on the floor. Did I drop it? Maybe it’s still with me? No knitting. That’s it. I have no knitting with me. I pick up the menu and try to focus, but I am instantly and completely uncomfortable. I’m a creature of habit and my habit is more or less continuous knitting, and that’s been true for decades, and now here I am in this restaurant and I don’t have anything to knit and the waitress hasn’t even taken our drink order yet, and this restaurant is good, but slow, and that means it’s going to be a long time with no knitting and… I check my bag again to make sure that I didn’t miss my knitting in there. Maybe it’s under the gum. I rifle my belongings again, trying really hard to quiet the stirring panic.

Amanda, my eldest daughter, notices that I’m looking for something, probably because of the blizzard of receipts, stitch markers, notepads, and knitting patterns emerging from my bag and piling on the table in front of me, while I continue hopelessly looking for the yarn and needles I know now are sitting uselessly on the kitchen counter. “What are you looking for?” she asks, while I stare at the bottom of my bag, sweeping my hand across the surface like maybe my knitting has become invisible and that’s why I can’t find it. I see her brow crease with concern, and I realize that she can see I’m missing something important—something like a credit card or my wallet—and I can see that I’m about to be very poorly understood. I’m about to open my mouth to say that I forgot my knitting, and then there will be an eye roll of epic proportions, probably coupled with laughter around the table. I’ve been down this road before. I’m just about the only person in my house who would put the word “important” in front of the word “yarn,” and I know what it looks like when I do. They aren’t going to understand this. My love of yarn is unique in my family. I accept it, but I still try to avoid them looking at me like I’m a few elves short of an effective workshop, so when Amanda asks me what I’m missing, I just shove everything back into my bag, set it back at my feet, and smile. “Nothing, dear. It’s okay. Have you looked at the menu?”

She hasn’t, and as the minutes tick by, I start to figure out what I’ll do. I’m looking at the menu but I’m not choosing what to eat. My thoughts keep getting dragged back to the knitting. We’re three blocks from home. The walk here took about six minutes, and I think if I went to get my knitting I’d be back pretty quickly. I look around at my family and realize that again, this is going to be poorly understood, and I start tossing around the idea of sneaking out to get my knitting. I could excuse myself to go to the washroom, and then bolt off down the street at a dead run, collect the knitting, and tear back. If I really hustled I think I could do it in about seven minutes. Can I be missing for seven minutes?