Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life (7 page)

“Look what just came in the mail,” she crowed and dropped it on top of my checkbook. The day camp was thanking us for our participation this summer and reminding us that they would be doing Winter Holiday Camp from December 17 through December 31.

I whispered, “I have one more camp for you this summer.”

Alice gasped in delight.

“It’s called Camp Alice’s Bedroom. Please go there now. I’ll see you the day after Labor Day.”

SO FAR, IT APPEARS I HAVEN’T FAILED AT THE MAJOR CHALLENGES
of rearing my daughter. Alice is usually clean, she sometimes looks people in the eye, and I haven’t bartered her for a bottle of Night Train. Still, whatever pride I take in having expanded the definition of adequate parenting, I have to admit I fail at one of the more modest yet critical aspects of professional mothering: the Making of Crafts. There are magazine racks dedicated to every sort of project a parent and child can create together while sitting at the kitchen table as a pot of homemade soup bubbles on the stove. There is no holiday so obscure that a photogenic craft can’t be found somewhere to commemorate it. Forget the obvious questions such as “Where the hell do you put the Arbor Day tree made out of recycled neckties, paper clips, and a shipping tube where it isn’t knocking over the giant Columbus Day faux ravioli made from a throw pillow and red poster paint?” Let us go to the more immediate concern.

I cannot make anything that requires glue.

This problem goes back to elementary school. I remember with terrible clarity sitting in class staring at a Valentine I had created for my parents. It didn’t resemble the traditional confection of lace and love so much as an accurate 3-D model of the heart of a very elderly person, complete with clogged arteries and tissue necrosis. My entire catalog of school artwork could best be described as “unsettling” or “a cry for help.” It bothers
me to think about how many trees lost their lives so I could create something that would lead teachers to say things like “Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day…” while patting my slumped shoulder sympathetically. If there had been a class called Remedial Crafts, I would have been there stringing macaroni jewelry well into high school. Lucky for me, eventually people stop caring if you can create appealing wrapping paper using poster paint and a carved potato so I assumed I could move on with life and be incompetent in new directions.

Flash forward a couple of decades. Alice took a class on California’s history at the local museum. Since the children were between three and four years old, this was mainly an excuse for the parents to get out of the house while their children ate Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers in an educational environment. Unfortunately, the (obviously childless) person who devised the class decided it would be nice to have the children make Conestoga wagons out of shoe boxes, construction paper, pipe cleaners, and glue.

The children did exactly what was expected of them: they wandered off to eat little fish crackers and try to remove one another’s eyes with pipe cleaners. The mothers were left to create whatever tangible keepsakes might justify the money we’d shelled out for the class. If I had been handed a person suffering a gunshot wound and told to stitch him up, I couldn’t have been any more anxious, ill-equipped, or under-qualified. But I tried.

I cut. I glued. I attached tiny wheels made from toilet paper rolls. In total candor, it did end up resembling one of the covered wagons our pioneer forefathers used to travel across this great land. Unfortunately, it resembled the wagon after an especially ghastly migration where the native people threw rocks at
it, shot it with flaming arrows, and stomped on what was left. If you looked at my wagon you would have sworn you could hear tiny pioneers sobbing from within. I shifted the remains into a paper bag and furtively bore it home. Later, Consort found the Bag of Shame and asked Alice about the class. “That’s mine!” she said brightly. For a preschooler, it was some fine work.

I didn’t correct her.

The years passed. Alice learned how to use scissors deftly. I learned to sense when the silence from the other room meant the scissors had left her paper and were now being used on her sheets. Her artwork improved. My ability to open a juice box with my knees and incisors while driving improved. She achieved legible printing and then handwriting. I finally learned to read her father’s handwriting, a dazzling array of blots and strokes which bears a strong resemblance to Morse code in linguini. I took pride in these small glimmers of competence and clung to the delusion that Alice hadn’t noticed how none of my new skills utilized a glue stick. I assumed she wasn’t aware how I would start twisting my hair every time we walked near a craft store. I hoped that if I was not perfect, I was at least worthy of imitation in her eyes. And for a while, I was.

Not long ago, Alice and I were reading in perfect contentment. Or rather, I thought Alice was reading. I turned a page of my book and caught her eye as she stared thoughtfully at me. I asked why I was suddenly more interesting than those Magic Tree House kids.

“You read knitting books all the time,” she said in a pensive tone. “And you’re always in a good mood after you read them…”

Yes, I acknowledged. There’s nothing like a chapter about
tightening my buttonholes to make me happy. But it seems I had interrupted her, and she continued.

“…But you never actually knit.”

Sharper than a serpent’s tongue is an observant child. Now I had to confront my psychological irregularities, something I was planning to do in retirement, along with daytime drinking.

I do love to read knitting books. The pictures in knitting books leave me with nothing but happy scenes in my head:

I could make Consort and Alice these matching reindeer sweaters. They could wear them when they are playing in the snow. I could make a third matching sweater for the dog and a coordinating beanie for the cat! And a cast-cozy to go over whichever arm I injure trying to put a beanie on the cat!

1 could make this blanket and drape it over the spot on the couch, just like in this picture. It will be an elegant way to cover the juice stain that didn’t completely come out.

Everyone needs more pot holders.

However, actually knitting fills my head with one horrible, demoralizing question: Why does nearly everything I knit—infant cardigan, hat, sleeve—develop an uncanny resemblance to a gene sequence? The only things that don’t resemble the traditional double helix are the pot holders I knit. These resemble tumors.

The secret ingredient to my freakish skill, or lack thereof, is
gauge
. For the non-knitter reading this, gauge is the number of stitches per inch to be expected from the yarn and the knitting scheme. At the beginning of any pattern, you will find a gauge guide showing how many stitches and rows it should take to create a sample size. In theory, this keeps you from creating a seventeen-foot-long sleeve. But when I see a phrase like
Gauge: 9
sts and 13 rows = 4" over Stockingette stitch
I start chewing my cuticles. I’ll begin there, sure. The first three rows will be a model of conformity and balance. But I had carpal tunnel syndrome when I was pregnant and while it went slinking away within eighteen hours of my giving birth to Alice, it left me with some capricious nerve damage to my hands. I say capricious because I can type endlessly with no ill effect but if I bend my arm in the way a knitter is inclined to, within minutes the crunching inflammation comes rushing back, all too eager to remind me how it’s the boss of me.

What happens is that my thumb and first three fingers go completely numb. After a couple of minutes, I can look down and watch what feels like someone else’s hand knitting and purling away. If this other knitter were competent, it would actually be kind of fun. But since I have no feeling in the fingers creating the appropriate tension, I start playing something like Red Light, Green Light with the yarn. My fingers start relaxing until I could conceivably use the slackened yarn as a wee jump rope, then seeing that, I tighten up. But I tighten too much, having no digital feedback, so within a row, I have something between my fingers that looks like a garrote for a chinchilla.

In theory, a gauge sample is nearly always a square or a rectangle. When I do it, it’s always Anything Can Happen Day. Once in a while, feeling naughty and rebellious, I’ve continued with a knitting pattern without actually confirming the gauge sample. Perhaps you already see the problem; if my hand goes numb after a few minutes and the quality of my knitting goes to hell, what happens after, say, a half hour? Terrible things. The width of the knitting drifts in, wanders out, has brief rows of consistency that only give the observer a heartbreaking glimpse
of what might have been if only I knew what my fingers were doing. People looking at what I’m making tend to say the same things you say to small children who proudly present you with a picture of…something:

“Well, aren’t you working hard!”

“You must be very proud of that!”

“Wow, Quinn, that’s a great…That’s knitting, right?”

How does it develop the iconic twisting shape of the double helix? How do I, without fail, create a shape that would be the envy of high-school biology teachers everywhere? I’m not entirely certain, but it too seems to have something to do with my numb, club-like fingers. It seems that if you are tightening and loosening the yarn at random intervals, the knitting starts to spiral, perhaps in an attempt to get away from you.

Halfway through the project, I bow to the inevitable and acknowledge that this twisted bit of increasingly arbitrary width is not going to magically transform itself into a set-in sleeve, and I unravel the yarn. I unravel the yarn sullenly. I unravel the yarn ungraciously. I unravel the yarn while picking fights with people. But I unravel the yarn. Then I commence the re-knitting of the sleeve. But it goes no better the second time around. Or the third. After the fourth time, when the yarn is now grubby and irredeemably stretched-out, I jam the entire thing into the bottom of the closet, along with the other crafting dead ends:
Anyone Can Felt
and
Decoupage for Dummies
. By the time the third half-finished double helix bounces off the closet floor, I am prepared to admit that knitting affords me no pleasure and generates no attractive accessories. In fact, knitting irritates the hell out of me.

Thinking
about kniting, though, is wonderful. In my mind, I’m one of those women who knit in movie theaters. I decide on
Tuesday to whip myself up a stylish halter top and wear it on Saturday night. Alice and I pore through my most recent knitting magazine and she points to a Fair Isle sweater and shyly asks me to make it for her. I fondly pat her head and say, “Of course, sweetheart.” People stop using rulers in this house, preferring to use my gauge samples, because they are
just that even.
How I love to think about knitting. When Alice came to me to learn knitting, I offered her a pile of knitting magazines and tried to teach her how to
think about
knitting. She sighed. I pretended that the problem was with knitting and my log-like fingers, not with all crafts. Surely, there were other things I could teach her to do.

Then Alice spotted a child-size sewing machine in a catalog I hadn’t buried deeply enough in the recycling bin. Charmed by its size and pinkness, she declared she wanted to learn to sew. I patted her hand and said, “Well, ask for it for Christmas” in what I hoped was an “I look forward to teaching you how to sew, a thing I know how to do” tone of voice but would have more accurately been a “Dear God, please let her develop a hatred of the manual arts before I have to let that demonic box into my house” tone of voice. I took sewing class four times in summer school and failed every time. I didn’t just fail the final project; I failed threading the machine.

Every time, I would say to the instructor, “I am the dumbest person alive and the only thing my sewing machine will ever produce is thread goiters.” And every time she would rub my head and say, “There, there. You just haven’t had it explained to you correctly.” The same portion of the brain that allows some people to think
you don’t hate fruitcake, you just haven’t had the
right one yet
is that portion of the brain that leads sewing instructors to believe the only thing standing between me and sewing proficiency is speaking very slowly. The instructor would open the back of the machine and I, as if staring into an active digestive system, would flinch and avert my eyes.

“Oh,” she’d croon, “it’s really quite simple. You just put the bobbin up and wind…the…thread…through…the…hole…under…the…crankshaft…halfway…to…flibst…the…innermost…Jovean…moon…spin…it…around…this…Salvadorean…parabola…and…it…comes…up…here! Now, the bottom one is a little more tricky…”

She would do it for me. Then she’d watch me do it eighty or ninety times before realizing someone else in the class had sewn her hand to her shirt or made a bong out of a steam iron, at which point she would leave. I would insert fabric, put my foot on the pedal, and within twenty seconds create a thread-goiter of such density as to render the machine unusable for the rest of the school year. I will become that woman who sends her daughter to sleep-away sewing camp to avoid the look of pity and horror I would earn giving this shiny new sewing machine an intestinal blockage.

Still, I kept trying to be the crafty mom. We made a pinecone Christmas tree. In under a minute I had glued the tree to my hand. I started ineffectually jabbing the pipe cleaner I was supposed to use for tinsel between the tree and my hand, to free it from my skin. It did loosen a bit, but only after I stabbed myself in the palm, leaving a permanent silvery reminder under my life line. It’s hard to get excited about homemade ornaments
when you’re trying to decide if you need an antibiotic booster for Boxing Day.

At one point, Alice was given a book of elegant paper dolls and I, removing them from the page, cut off their heads. This wasn’t a complete loss, as it led to a fun afternoon of “Alice dresses the aristocracy during the French Revolution.”

A parenting magazine showed a picture of a rock with googly eyes and painted hair attached. In its own way, it was strangely winning. The magazine swore we could do it together. That day, I learned I can attach googly eyes to anything and no matter where I place them, no matter how many times I move them around or align their focus, the effect is that of a mortally wounded soldier on the battlefield, gazing up into your soul, mutely begging you to shoot him.