cast off loosely

The mohair was too scratchy, the stria too bulky, but the homespun tweed was just right for a small frame. I bought slate-blue skeins softened with flecks of pink and size-ten needles for a warm but light sweater. The pattern I chose was a two-tone V-neck with an optional six-stitch cable up front. Pullovers mess up the hair, but I did not want to buttonhole the first time out.
       From a needlework book, I learned to cast on. In the test piece, I got the gauge and the correct tension. Knit and purl came naturally as did the rhythmic sliding of the needles.
       I spent hours separating tangled threads, working together raveled ends into something tangible and whole.

“Would you get me a Dr. Pep, girl, and turn up the AC?”
       I put down my knitting. In the kitchen, I found some sugar-free, and took it, with ice, to Dale Anne. The draft lifted her hair as she pressed the button on her Niagara bed, which she got during her last month at the insistence of Dr. Diamond. She was also renting a swivel TV table and a vibrating chaise.
       Once the angle was right, she popped a Vitamin E and rubbed the oil where the stretch marks were going to be.
       I moved in with Dale Anne near the end. Her husband was often at the lab, where he studied the mind. He was not a doctor yet, but we called him one by way of encouragement.
       I had picked up a hank of yarn and was winding it into a ball when the air-conditioner choked to a stop.
       Dale Anne sighed. "I will cook in this robe. Would you get me that flowered top in the second drawer?"
       While I looked for the top, Dale Anne twisted her hair and held it tight against her head. She took one of my double-pointed six-inch needles and wove it in and out of her hair. With the hair off her face, she looked wholesome and much younger.
       I turned my back while Dale Anne changed. She was as modest as I was. If the house caught fire one night, we would both die struggling to hook brassieres beneath our gowns.
       I went back to my chair, and as I did, a sensational cramp snapped me over until I was on the floor.
       Dale Anne started out of bed. "Easy, girl—what's the trouble?"
       “It sometimes happens since the procedure,” I said, easing up onto the chaise.
       "Let's not talk about that for at least ten years," said Dale Anne.
       Then the front door opened, earlier than usual. Dr. Diamond was home and he came over to kiss his wife. Knowing that a lack of concern for others was a hallmark of mental illness, I straightened up and said, "You look hot, Dr. Diamond. Can I get you a drink?"

I bought my materials at a small place in the residential section owned by a woman named Ingrid. She was a large Norwegian woman who spelled needles with a k. She often wore sample knits she made for class demonstrations. The vest she wore the day before hung in the window. There were typically four or five women at Ingrid's round oak table, knitting through a stretch they would not risk alone.
       Often I went there when I didn't need a thing. In the small back room stacked high with pattern books, I sifted for hours. I scanned the abbreviated instructions like musical notation. K10, sl 1, K2 tog, psso, sl 1, K10, to end. The ability to decipher the code made you privy to the secrets shared by Ingrid and the other women at the round oak table.
       In the other room, Ingrid told a customer she used to knit two hundred stitches a minute.
       I leafed through the French and English catalogs, noting the longer length of coat and admiring the breadth of knowledge there was to acquire on each visit.
       I hummed Mary Had a Little Lamb as I left the shop. "Its fleece was white as snow.”

Dale Anne wanted a nap, so Dr. Diamond and I went out for margaritas. At La Rondella, the colored lights on the Madonna told you every day was Christmas. The food arrived on manhole covers and mariachis filled the bar.
       “In Guadalajara,” said Dr. Diamond, “there is a mariachi college that turns them out by the classful.” But I could tell that these were not even graduates of mariachi high school.
       I shooed the serenaders away, but Dr. Diamond said they meant well.
       Dr. Diamond meant well too. He’d had a buoyant feeling of fate ever since he learned Freud died the day he was born. I knew he was the right person to talk to.
       Eventually, I brought up the inexplicable stomach pains I was having.
       “You know how I think,” he said. “What is it you can’t stomach?”
       I nodded but didn’t answer.
       “Have you thought about how you will feel when Dale Anne has the baby?” he asked.
       With my eyes, I wove celestial strands of tinsel over the Blessed Virgin.
       “I thought I would burn that bridge when I come to it,” I said. “I guess I will think that there is a mother who kept hers.”
       “One of hers might be more accurate,” said Dr. Diamond.

I arrived at the yarn shop as Ingrid turned over the open sign. I had come to buy Shetland wool for a Fair Isle sweater. I felt nothing would engage my attention more than a pattern of ancient Scottish symbols and alternating bands of delicate design. Every stitch in every color was related to the one above, below, and on either side.
       I chose the natural colors of Shetland sheep—the chalky brown of the Moorit, the blackish brown of the black sheep, fawn, gray, and pinky beige from a mixture of Moorit and white. I held the wool to my nose.
       “It’s been fifty years since the women of Fair Isle have dressed the yarn with fish oil,” said Ingrid. “This yarn comes from Sheep Rock, the best pasture on Fair Isle. It is a ten-acre plot that is four hundred feet up a cliff. Think what a man has to go through to harvest the wool.”

        I felt an obligation to the yarn and to the hardy Scots who supplied it. There was a heritage that I could keep alive with my hands.

Dale Anne patted capers into a mound of raw beef and slathered some onto toast. She kindly offered one to me.
       “Not a chance,” I said. “Johnny Carson says he won’t eat steak tartare because he has seen things hurt worse than that get better.”
       “Johnny was never pregnant,” said Dale Anne.
       When the contractions began, I left a message with the hospital and with Dr. Diamond’s lab. I turned off the air conditioner and called a cab.
       “Look at you,” said Dale Anne.
       “I can’t help it,” I said. “I get rational when I panic.”

        The taxi came in minutes.
       “Hold on,” said the driver. “I know every bump in these roads and I’ve never been able to miss a single one of them.”
       Dale Anne tried to squeeze my wrist, but her weightless touch was as porous as wet silk.
       “When this is over…” began Dale Anne.

When the baby was born, I sublet an apartment on the other side of town, filling the place with patterns and needles and yarn. On a good day, I made a front and two sleeves. On a bad day, I ripped out stitches from neck to hem. I made socks for variety. The best ones I made had little beer steins on the sides and the tops spilled over with white angora foam.
       I couldn’t work with the sound of the fan even on its low setting. Music slowed me down and there was a great deal to do. I planned to knit myself a mailbox and a car, perhaps even a dog and a lead to walk him.
       As soon as they were done, I blocked the finished pieces and folded them in drawers.
       Dr. Diamond called from time to time.
       “Exercise will set you straight,” he said. “And why not have some fun with it? Why not tap-dancing lessons?”
       “It would be embarrassing,” I said.
       “Why?”
       “Because the rest of the class would be doing it right,” I said. “And besides, I don’t have time to dance.”
       On the day I went to see Dale Anne in the hospital, I stopped at the nursery first. The baby was lying face down and wearing yellow duck-print flannels. I caught a glimpse and went straight home.

        Dr. Diamond had told a story about the young daughter of a close friend. The little girl had found a frog in the yard. The frog appeared to be dead, so her parents let her prepare a burial site—a little hole surrounded by pebbles. But at the moment of the lowering, the frog kicked its legs and came to.
       “Kill him!” the girl had shrieked.

One day when I was walking through the park, I saw a dog trying to eat his own shadow. Another dog was herding a stand of elms. Eventually, I stopped telling people how handsome their dogs were. I too often received the reply: “You want him?”
       When the weather got nicer, I stayed home to sit for hours.
       I had accidents. Then I had bigger ones.
       The dreams came back and back until they were just—again. I wished that things would stay out of sight the way they did in mountain lakes. I’ve been to one where the water is so cold that gas can’t form to bring a corpse to the surface. Although, you would not want to think about the bottom of that lake.
       Around that time, I talked to Dr. Diamond.
       “Conception is not like walking in front of traffic,” he told me. “However badly timed, it is an affirmation of life. You have to believe me here. Do you see that this is true? Do you know this about yourself?”
       “I do and I don’t,” I said.
       “You do and you do,” he said.
       “Dr. Diamond, I am giving up,”
       “Now you are ready to begin,” he said.
       Andean alpaca was what I planned to work up next. The feel of that yarn was not the only wonder—there was also the name of it: Alpaquita Superfina.
       I was ready to begin.
       Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep.
       Begin, slip together, increase, continue, repeat.

Dr. Diamond answered the door. He said Dale Anne had to run to the store. He was leaving, too, flying to a conference back East.
       “The baby is asleep,” he said. “You should make yourself at home.”
       It had been a year. I left my bag of knitting in the hall and went into the kitchen. I washed the dishes that were soaking in the sink. The scouring pad was steel wool awaiting knitting needles.
       When Dale Anne couldn’t sleep she watched TV, which is probably where she obtained most of her collection of specialized utensils. She had a Tomato Shark, a device to core tomatoes, and a metal spaghetti wheel for measuring out pasta. She had a colorful variety of plastic melon-ballers and a push-in device that turned an ordinary cake into ladyfingers.
       I found pasta primavera in the refrigerator. My fingers ached to cast on the cold linguini, laying precise strands of noodles across the oily red peppers and beans.
       Then Dale Anne opened the door.
       “Look out, girl,” she said, dropping a shopping bag onto the counter. She unloaded ice cream, potato chips, carbonated drinks, and cake. “It’s been a long time since I walked into a market and expressed myself.” She tossed me a carton of cigarettes. “Wait for me in the bedroom,” she said. “West Side Story is on.”
       I could hear the blender crushing ice in the kitchen as I adjusted the contrast on the color set. Dale Anne handed me a peach daiquiri so large it had a tidal force.
       Dale Anne left the room long enough to bring in the take-out chicken. She upended the bag on a plate and picked out a leg and a wing.
       “I like my dinner in a bag and my life in a box,” she said, nodding toward the TV.
       After the movie was over, we watched part of a lame detective program.
       “That show owes Nielsen four points,” she said, reaching for the TV Guide. “Eleven-thirty,” she read. “The Texas Whiplash Massacre: Unexpected stops signs were their weapon.”
       “Give me that,” I said with genial irritation.

        “There’s supposed to be a comet tonight,” said Dale Anne. “We can probably see it if we watch from the living room.”
       Just to be sure, we pushed the couch up close to the window. With the lights off, we could see everything without anything seeing us. Even though both of us had said we had quit, we smoked at either end of the couch.
       “Save my place,” said Dale Anne.
       When she came back in, she had the baby in her arms. I looked at the sleeping child and felt I had aged fifty years. I wanted nothing that I had and everything I did not.
       “He told his first joke today,” said Dale Anne.
       “What do you mean he told a joke?” I said. “I didn’t think they could talk.”
       “Well, he didn’t really tell it. He poured his orange juice over his head and when I started after him, he said, ‘Raining?’”
       “The kid is a genius,” I said. “What Art Linkletter could do with him.”
       Dale Anne laid him down in the middle of the couch and we watched him and the sky.
       “What a rip-off,” said Dale Anne at dawn.
       But I did not feel cheated that there had not been a comet. I did not even feel tired.
       She walked me to the door. My knitting bag was still in the hall.
       “Open it later,” I said. “It’s a sweater for him.”
       “Well, I have to see it now.”
       She said the blue one matched his eyes and the camel one matched his hair. “The red will make him glow,” she said. “Help me out.”
       Three more sweaters had pictures knitted in. They buttoned up the front. Dale Anne held up a parade of yellow ducks. There were the Fair Isles, too—one in the pattern called Tree of Life, another in the pattern called Hearts. It was a precautionary excess of sweaters.
       Dale Anne looked at the two sweaters still in the bag. “Are you really okay?” she said.

The worst of it is over now, but I can’t say that I am glad. In losing a sense of loss, you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves one step at a time toward health as does the mind.
       Ask a mother who has just lost a child, “How many children do you have?”
       “Four,” she will say. “—three.”
       Ask the same question years later, “Three,” she will say, “—four.”
       It’s the little steps that help—weather, breakfast, crossing with the light. Sometimes it is all the pleasure I can bear to sleep, knowing that on a rack in the bath, damp wool is pinned to dry.
       Dale Anne thinks she would like to learn to knit. She measures the baby’s crib and I take her to Ingrid’s. Ingrid steers her away from the baby pastels even though they are machine-washable.
       “Use pure wool,” says Ingrid. “Use wool in a grown-up shade. And don’t boast of your achievements or you’ll be making things for the neighborhood.”
       On Fair Isle, there are only five women left who knit. There is not enough lichen left growing on the island for them to dye the yarn. But knitting machines can’t produce their intricate designs and the women keep on working the undyed colors of the sheep.
       I wait for Dale Anne in the pattern room. The songs in these books are lullabies.
       K tog rem st. Knit together remaining stitches.
       Cast off loosely.