The Yarn Whisperer (11 page)

My mother had lived in Paris in the early 1960s on a Fulbright scholarship, and I'd grown up gazing longingly at her black-and-white pictures. This was nothing like those pictures, but it was still magical. I loved how different everything was—how thin the writing paper was, how funny my desk lamp looked, how smooth the light switches were. I got hooked on writing with a fountain pen, drinking from tiny glasses, and tearing off pieces of bread to wipe my plate clean. I became an expert at bathing in a tub instead of a shower.

Until then, my only reference for picnics was thick peanut butter sandwiches and a warm plastic canteen of tap water, followed by a bruised banana. But here we perched on a hillside in Provence and ate buttery cheeses on fresh baguettes, followed up with big chunks of chocolate, all washed down with bottled
water infused with sugary fruit syrups (no wine for me).

I took the family to see a performance of Puccini's
Turandot
, which was staged outdoors in a Roman amphitheater. We rode a creaky little Ferris wheel and watched fireworks for July 14, Bastille Day. I was even tempted to go back to that yarn store and pick up some fine-gauge wool of my own. I loved everything—the cadence of the culture, the sounds of the words coming out of my mouth. I never wanted to speak English again.

All too soon it was time to leave. On my last night there, over ice cream parfaits at the piano bar at the end of the street, we tearfully promised to keep in touch—and in my heart, I vowed to return.

Back home in Tucson, I became that insufferable snob who started all her sentences with, “Well, in France …” I used to lie in bed with my Walkman, eyes closed, listening intently to the tape recordings I'd made of my street—its cars, birds, music, footsteps. What a jolt to open my eyes and find myself so far away.

As soon as the ink dried on my high school diploma, I was back in France for the summer, sipping a grand-crème at the Cafe Flore in Paris before boarding the TGV for Valence, where Marianne would meet me and take me back to her summer home. But it was different. Sophie was more sullen, Marianne seemed needy, and Jacques wasn't there. At first they said he was too busy with work to join us, but then Marianne confided in me that they were having problems. My language skills had improved to the point where she didn't need to talk to me like an eight-year-old, and what she did say made it clear I'd stepped
into a difficult situation. I was relieved to take the train back to Paris for the rest of the summer.

Again, in college, France pulled me back. I spent my junior year in Paris studying at the Sorbonne. It wasn't just the fountain pens and the funny light switches that kept drawing me back. I'd discovered a sort of parallel universe in France, and I liked it infinitely better than the one back home. They say that people acquire the traits of the dominant culture associated with the language they speak—they almost have a different personality with each language. I certainly did, and my alternate Clara was a charming antidote to all that troubled me. It was like a comforting cloak of invisibility.

Gradually, a problem revealed itself: The closer I got to fluency within French culture, the more I was identified as American. If France's cultural fabric were made from that superfine baby-blue wool Mylène had been knitting, I—no matter how hard I tried—was a big, goofy brushed mohair. If I tamed my halo, twisted myself tight, tucked in my ends, I could almost pass from afar—people thought I was Swiss, or Danish, the cultural equivalent of mohair passing for a shimmery Wensleydale—but the minute I opened my mouth, my true nature revealed itself. Not because of how I spoke, but rather because of the underlying structure of how I thought, saw the world, reflected, and responded. I could change my twist and ply, but I couldn't do anything about my cellular makeup.

I finished college and returned yet again, this time through a fellowship with the French government. I was an
assistante
, a sort of tutor-slash-babysitter for high school English students.
I was placed in the northwest city of Nantes, the birthplace of Jules Verne and the hub of the French slave trade. Whereas my previous trips had allowed me to quietly assimilate into the culture, this time my whole raison d'être was to be a foreigner—which literally translates as “stranger.” My dreams of disappearing behind the cloak of French culture couldn't materialize. I'd been hired to be different—to be l'Américaine.

We were given two days' training in how to teach English. My favorite lesson was the afternoon we were taught how to operate a VCR. The teacher spoke to us slowly and carefully, pointing to the button marked PLAY, explaining what it did.

School began. I was a lousy teacher. I saw the same students only twice in a month, making serious continuity impossible. When “How was your weekend?” failed, I resorted to games, having students fill in the empty speech bubbles in Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, or translate the lyrics to “Hotel California.” Finally I gave up and showed everybody the ancient copy of the movie
Manhattan
I'd discovered in the media library.

The teachers were friendly enough, but they never let me forget my otherness. One morning I'd arrived in my French attire, dressed up in a little skirt with my tights, clunky leather shoes, thin wool coat, and a wool scarf I wrapped around and around my neck as I'd seen my students do in crowded hallways (thwacking me in the face as they wrapped them). I confidently clip-clopped into the teacher's room, which still had a mimeograph machine, and one of the English teachers came up to me. “Ohhh, Cla-haa,” she cooed, “Have you hurt your neck?”

Meanwhile, the school concierge, a great fan of Westerns,
discovered I grew up in Arizona and would stage a mock shootout every time I came and went. “Ehhh, Cla-haa!” he'd yell from his tiny windowed room by the front gate. “Pow, pow, pow!” he'd shoot his imaginary guns before putting them back in his imaginary holsters. “Eye amme zee cow-buye, yaah?”

When my year was up, I no longer believed I could escape and become someone else in France. As charming as French Clara was, my cloak of invisibility was wearing thin. There was no getting away from the fact that French Clara's brain and American Clara's brain were one and the same. I knew I could stay in France until I was ninety and people would still call me l'Américaine—and that wasn't what I wanted. I'd also come to realize that brushed mohair is actually quite pretty when you give it space to bloom.

A week before I left France, I went to a used bookstore to sell some of my books. While the clerk was looking through my collection, I browsed the shelves. A familiar voice came across the aisle. “Mais non, ce n'est pas possible,” it began. “C'est la petite Américaine … Cla-haa?”

I glanced up to see Jacques—my Gauloises-puffing Jacques from that first summer. He had just moved to Nantes for a teaching position at the university. We quickly caught up. Sophie lived in the south with a boyfriend. They had a baby. He and Marianne had long ago split up. He was with a new woman. I'd like her, he said. I'd have to come and have dinner with them before I left. They didn't have a phone yet, so I gave him my number and we parted. After a quick trip to Rome to visit family, I returned to find that my roommates—all of whom were
also leaving—had disconnected our phone line. I left France for the last time without ever seeing Jacques again.

It's been twenty years since that visit and since I stopped trying to lose myself within someone else's fabric. I like to think my life fits my fiber far better now. I've relaxed into an open stitch pattern that highlights the mohair instead of trying to squash it. But I still long to go back to France. Whenever I'm on deadline, I'll have at least three different browser windows open, each featuring a charming rental cottage or apartment somewhere in France. The worse the deadline, the bigger the house and the longer-term the rental.

Part of me fears that the Clara I've become will still be sideswiped, if given the chance, by her long-dormant French counterpart. I worry that my beautiful life may suddenly seem once-again insufficient in the face of that alluring, smooth, tightly twisted worsted world. Or maybe France has changed, too? Maybe its fabric has relaxed to accommodate more variety. Perhaps now it would accommodate my fuzzy halo, and the two Claras could finally become one.

CHANNELING JUNE CLEAVER

THEY SAY THAT
beauty is only skin deep, that it's what's
inside
that really counts.
All this is fine, well, and good, but what about pie? You could have the most exquisite filling known to mankind, but if your dough is a flop, nobody's going to want a slice.

For years, piecrusts have eluded me. One New Year's Eve, I wrote a bucket list of things I'd like to accomplish before I leave this earth. Somewhere between “write a book” and “take off a year and travel to India,” I added “master piecrust.”

When I was growing up, nobody ever seemed excited about crust. They never hummed as they rolled it out; there was always a sense of obligation and dread as they waited for it to tear (it always did) or stick (it always did) or otherwise spontaneously combust somewhere between the rolling pin and pie plate.

My health-conscious mother made her crusts out of whole wheat flour, experimenting with various oils and “heart smart” alternatives to butter and Crisco. The pies of my childhood were always a bit dry, crumbly, slightly bitter in taste. Their tops were made from a patchwork of torn pieces that had been glued back together. And they were always served with the unspoken message, “Eat this damned thing.”

Living in Maine in a house overlooking acres of blueberry fields, blueberries figure prominently in my summer diet. I've mastered blueberry crumbles, blueberry pancakes, blueberry syrup … but every time someone visits—and many do—the first thing they ask for is pie.

How I've longed to be one of those June Cleaver people who can happily whip up the perfect pie at a moment's notice. What's that you say? A busload of tourists is stranded at the town hall, and they need two dozen blueberry pies for sustenance? Not a problem, let me just don my apron. Can I knit them some mittens while I'm at it?

But the ominous nature of pie dough has always taken the wind out of my sails. When you hear people groan about something enough times, it's easy to groan about it yourself—even if you've yet to give it a fair shot. People do this with knitting all the time. “Thumb gussets are impossible,” they say. Only after we follow the instructions, step by step, do we realize how incredibly graceful, logical, and downright
easy
a thumb actually is.

Funny enough, I managed to write a book—three, actually—before I felt ready to turn my attention to pie dough. After multiple failures, each adding a new layer to the compost pile,
I stumbled upon the golden recipe: the 3-2-1 Pie Dough from Michael Ruhlman's
Ratio.
This combination of ingredients (flour, fat, and liquid) and technique produces the dreamiest piecrust known to man.

It goes against all common pie dough wisdom. While everybody blends some mix of butter and Crisco, this one calls for nothing but pure, unadulterated butter. And everybody warns, “Do not overwork!” Yet I roll, fold, slap, and tease this dough to within an inch of its life. The final product? Airy and crisp, rich and buttery, both ethereal and substantial. Even when disaster strikes—like the time my nephew placed a ten-pound doorstop on the center of a particularly perfect blueberry-lemon pie—it still comes out beautiful, in its own way.

Not only did Michael Ruhlman help me get over my fear of piecrusts, he also gave me a chance to overcome my fear of introducing myself to famous people. Not that I succeeded, but I certainly did try. I was in Cleveland to film yarn-related segments for the PBS television show
Knitting Daily TV
. I'd arrived at the airport with my suitcase of swatches and TV-ready jewel-toned shirts, my freshly lacquered nails shining in the light. The weeks leading up to the trip had been a frenzy of swatching, researching, and fretting.

I was waiting for the producer and crew to arrive when I noticed another man waiting in the area. Our pacings crossed, and I glanced at his face. Without a doubt, I'd just walked past Michael Ruhlman.

I am not a person who walks up to famous people and introduces herself. First of all, I almost never see famous people—
or if I have, I certainly didn't recognize them. I'm always the clueless one in the group who turns around too late and says, “Huh?” after the person has passed. Second, I don't think most famous people would much care who I was. Third, and perhaps most important, I think everybody deserves a little privacy. When fate put me in an elevator with knitting luminary Barbara Walker, I let her dictate the conversation. (She was charming, and I learned that her husband does the dishwashing in their house.)

But this wasn't just any random celebrity, it was the man who'd helped me check an item off my bucket list. He'd been in my kitchen, helping me delight and harden the arteries of countless friends and family members. He'd made me a pie person. That deserved thanks, don't you think?