The Knitting Story
by Tara Ison
(Tin House, Summer 2015, and the story collection Ball, November 2015)
She knits as a clumsy, pudge-fingered child, because her mother loves to tell her the once-upon-a-time story of knitting socks for her college boyfriend, painstaking argyle-diamond wool socks for the princely young man who carelessly thrust his foot through the sock toe after all that labor the mother did to show and prove her love, because that was how. She knits because her mother is at a luncheon or antiques show or mah-jongg and Can’t the child occupy and entertain herself, and so after school the child trudges to the craft shop and spends her allowance coins on a Let’s Get Knitting! booklet, and fuzzy pink yarn like a long bubble gum worm, and a pair of pointy twig-thick needles she is a little frightened of, because if you walk around with them and trip you could poke out an eye, and on the floor of her canopy-bed bedroom she teaches herself how to cast on, how to loop little nooses of yarn through other loops, scoop the alive loop through and let the old loop fall away and die, loop loop loop, your rows like little crooked corn fields growing, and then you cast off and are done and look what you have made and can do, ta-da!
She knits gifts for her mother—a potholder, a hot pad, a long tubular scarf, everything a wormy fuzz pink—because that is how, and her mother exclaims with joy at their sweet misshapenness and spills bloody meat juice on the hot pad and scorches the potholder and cannot wear the scarf because of its so beautiful but impractical color but is so very proud and What else can the child make, What else can she do?
She knits because she grows absorbed by the taming of chaotic string into structure, the geometry of a messy line turned to a tidy grid, and her fingers slim to deft and she buys slenderer needles and more elegant yarn and her after-schools and weekends are now so very busy herself, in her room with all those squares. Square, square, square, a big gifty pile of them, this is what she can make and do.
She knits because it is precious of her, because grown-ups find this little knitting girl adorable.
She knits because her best friend in high school has prettier ringlet hair and wears girlier, more impractical shoes, and so she teaches her best friend how to cast on and loop loop and cast off, and they both make the now-perfect potholders, the precise hot pads, the scarves that lie flat, and then the best friend goes away to an expensive college in an icy state and returns at her first Christmas holiday with magical sweaters, glorious garments with plackets and cables and set-in-sleeves and stitches like vines and popcorns and the holey appearance of lace that everyone goes ooh and aah for, and the best friend explains it is not enough to just Let’s Get Knitting!, the same childish stitches over and over again for row after row gets you nothing but a pile of meaningless squares that no one wants or loves, you must follow a pattern in order to create an actual ooh and aah thing, and she is angry and ashamed the prettier, better-shoed, and effortless-at-everything best friend had understood this and she had not.
She knits to perform the trickery with cable needles and yarn overs and ribbing and moss stitch and basket weave. She knits to tame sloppy loose skeins into tidy submissive balls in her hands, at her feet. She knits to exhibit mastery. She knits in public, at coffeehouses and airports and parties, her crafty hands blurred with speed, and people look in approving wonder at her industriousness, her occupying and entertaining herself, her un-idle hands, no lazy devil’s handmaiden, she.
She knits because she can rip out what is imperfect and do frogging, the unraveling of the completed or semi-completed thing to an again loose scribble, because you rip it rip it rip it out, like the ribbiting frog, who is only an ugly sticky frog and not the perfect prince and then you can start all over.
She knits because her kneaded dough will not rise into a proper loaf.
She knits because it frightens her to read.
She knits because she doesn’t understand calculus.
She knits for the first grown-up man she falls in love with, a damaged man whose flattering cruelty sends her to study a library of patterns, swatch multiple yarns, debate even in her sleep the best fiber content and thickness, because the right sweater will heal him, the correct cotton merino or cotton cashmere or cashmere merino blend will basket-weave and moss-stitch and cable this man to her, the ribbing will cleave him unto her and keep her at his side, because look at this, her handmade healing labor of love, so she obsesses over this yarn’s slight scratch and will it irritate him or keep him sensitized to her, or that yarn’s lack of elasticity and will it make of her precious gift a saggy and shapeless thing? She knits because his flattering cruel attentions are trickling hourglass sand, his growing coolness stiffens her fingers, and so she knits faster and even faster like the princess in the fairy story who races to knit sweaters out of stinging nettles for her twelve beloved brothers turned into swans from a witch’s curse and thus turn them back again before they are stuck that unmanly swan way forever, knitting with bleeding fingers to save them into complete-again princes by this show of her love. She knits feverishly, her fingertips pricked into splits, but the sand-gritty time’s-up man carelessly thrusts her away before she can finish the last magic stitch, like the fairy-tale princess ran out of time and had one sweater with only one sleeve for the swan brother who would now be stuck with one wing instead of an arm forever, and she is consumed with guilt and fury at her failure to craft the perfect healing thing in time, and so she frogs the finished sweater, erasingly, wishing a witch’s curse on him, an eternal hair shirt of stinging nettles, a next-in-line indifferent and cruel woman who will brutally cripple and leave him an open, forever-after wound.
She knits wedding-present blankets for fiancé’d friends, the Victoriana-flowered or fisherman-Aran afghans to adorn the feet of marital beds or drape across the Mission sofas in the den or warm their couples’ embrace. She knits to soak the DNA from her sweaty fingers into their lives, as they TV cuddle or fuck or share nighttime tales of their tedious stitched-up lives.
She knits because she doesn’t like the smell of children.
She knits because she is afraid of her career.
She knits because she is not allergic to cats.
She knits for another man, who is gentle and loving and neither frog nor prince, and she grows impatient knitting for the pattern of his gentle lovingness, she knows nothing she knits will shape him well or into the right thing, so she stealthily unravels her work by night like Penelope’s secret unweaving to forestall the choice of a suitor, but by day she keeps on knitting for the gentle loving man, because that is what you do, that is how. She knits like the spider at the center of the web disdains the ensnared fly even as it feeds, she knits in her mind while the gentle loving man makes love to her and she comes only when she imagines herself stabbing her shiny needles into his soft flesh, into the wet, submissive ball of his heart, and so she hurries to cast him off and away before she destroys him with her hateful, unmagical knitting for real.
She knits for pregnant friends’ future joys, knits whimsical pea pod snugglies and pumpkin hats and the treacle-pink or frozen-waste blue or gender-neutral blankies to be soon covered in apple juice vomit and leaked urine. She knits for the ooh and aah baby shower moment of applause, and then it is time for the next, less-wondrous gift to be opened, and she knits to pity them all.
She knits while watching a television program about people who choose to be cast away on a desert island and contest with each other in mock tribes to remain there, cast away and useful to their tribe in some mysterious strategy for survival, and she knows she would knit hammocks from palm frond strings so everyone might sleep hammock’d up and away from the sand fleas and snakes and rats, she would knit to keep everyone else clothed, she would knit nets to catch fish, and then when all her tribal friends were well slept and fed and clothed and warm, they would cast her away, cast her off, throw her in a volcano and be rid of her forever.
She knits vests for the shivering, soapy penguins newly cleansed of oil spill oil, because she is nurturing.
She knits sweaters for the naked baby pandas in a Chinese zoo nursery because she is internationally engaged.
She knits a cardigan for her elderly father, who is already shrinking and shivering inside his closet of clothes meant for a full- and warm-muscled man, but she knits slowly, for she knows once the sweater is finished he will be, too, so she knits stitch by stitch as if patiently teaching a clumsy, pudge-fingered child she doesn’t have, until there are no more stitches to stitch and she wraps her father’s loose bones in the sweater and buries him in it, because that is how.
She knits security blankets of bargain-bin yarn for homeless abandoned infants, because she is maternal.
She knits chemo caps soft as kitten bellies for brave, hair-shedding friends with translucent skin, because she is supportive and merciful.
She knits because studies show knitting reduces the risk of dementia, and she will not become a fogged, unraveling person who must rely on mocking, merciless tribal friends for survival.
She knits until her hands are swollen and carpal tunneled into witchy old-lady knuckle knobs, into burning nerves. She knits into numbness, into scrim.
She knits and knits like Madame Defarge in her chair, content in the breeze of the guillotine blade, knits until she feels the blood has risen warm to her ankles and it is suddenly, surprisingly, her turn now, sees she has blindly knitted herself into the wooly smothering thing that will bag her own cold, twiggy bones, and that is all she has ever made, or done.