(painting by Matug Aborawi)
Her yelping wail awakened him for the 5th time that night. "DANNY!" His name was Robert.
He pulled himself up. The day was stark, grey and listless already at 7am. The midwestern winter was closing in on him while his sister Mary lay dying in their mother's bed. He hadn't slept for more than 5 hours all week and his tongue was thick and mossy as a dead tree trunk.
"I need....."she struggled to get the words around the thought. Her thoughts floated around like lost dirigibles looking for a place to land....clear to her, but intangible and obtuse to him. The brain tumor was eating away the language.
"I need...yep..that's it..a lemon. You know, it's what she said it was- that thing near an airplane."Her arm flailed expressively, clearly indicating a thought.
He went through his list: " You want food? Water? TV? Yes? Okay, channel 1? 2?" etc.
"YOU GOT IT!" Mary was always happy when she was understood. There were a lot of things he didn't understand-like why Mary had taken to the bed. There was no physical reason that she couldn't get up. Or why she could remember all the words to the songs of West Side Story as they watched the film, singing together.
He gazed at the asbesto flaking ceiling of the retirement home apartment. "America's 10 Unsolved Murders" blasted through the thin walls, shaking the furniture. "She was found without a head and her left foot missing."Mary's hearing was fine, but she kept turning the TV up more and more, cocking her head to one side with a perplexed look- trying to finally decipher the hidden meaning. And she kept going back to the murder channel, with a morbid kind of satisfaction in the grim details. She loved the violence of it.
"What you want to listen to all that blood and guts for? Isn't real life enough for you right now?"
Mary turned her head on the pillow and gave him a straight on glare. He hadn't seen that look for a long time. Her intelligence and sharp wit edged around her face while the sarcasm dripped out, "No, I guess it's not, is it?"
His knitting lay in his lap like an old mophead. His therapist had insisted that he take something with him to take his mind off of everything. What she didn't understand was that the mind stops functioning after awhile, and a kind of animal instinct takes over. Something primal and ferral, he imagined like giving birth-you just had to push and scream and the thing just came right at you. In this case it was Mary's inevitable death. It was clawing at him, it was talking to him through the TV.
When the hospice volunteer showed up he headed out to buy knitting needles. KNIT WITS was the only shop in the ghetto where they had grown up that sold yarn. The crafty storefront seemed out of place with the bullet sheared walls and broken windows. A junky sat outside on the curb, his hair greying and natty, his arm ringed with rutted tracks.
"Brother gimme some sugar Caint you see I ain't gon make it?Givus some sugar."
He took a quick intake of breath and stepped into the warm glow of colors of the yarn shop. The dank smell of wool clawed at his nose and he wanted to escape. "Yea", he thought to himself. "You the number one star Knit Wit of the team."
"Well what we got here?" Clara's large frame was covered head to toe in knit items. Her mauve body length tunis was held together with a gold lame belt. Large. Large came to mind.
"Did you make that outfit?" he breathed out as he took in the whole image, down to the purple knit leg-warmers. "Umm, umm umm girl."
"Honey pie, you about to be be-dazzled," she growled. The roomed filled with a cackle and he swung around. There were 6 or 7 women perched around a wooden table like nesting hens, knitting needles poised and aimed at him. He shot an anxious look at the door calculating the number of steps it would take to get out. The junkie had his mouth pressed against the glass making hideous faces.
"No you don't sweet thing. You way too sweet to be getting gone that fast. You go on and sit on down, and get yourself set up."
Within an hour he had learned how to cast on while the women carried on with their chatter. His fingers felt like putty, and he was sure he was going to break something with the effort it took to get the yarn around the needles. He jumped up, taking the table with him when he saw the time.
"Good lard, chile,look like you seen a ghost."
"Oh, it's...well...I've got to run, thank you."
"Ummm hummm, yeess, we know ole Robert's got someone waiting at home for him."
Their laughter followed him as he ran out into the street. The junkie grabbed his leg as he flew by. He had a vision of Mary laying there with her face stretched taut.
He opened the door to an eery silence, which he realized was the absense of the blaring TV. He crept up to the bed, where Mary's arm lay hanging at an unatural angle. Her face was turned away, and he caught the acid flavor of guilt that hung in the back of his throat.
Her head jerked around, eyes popped open, and he jumped back.
" What are you, it's that she needed something to eat." He let out a hoarse laugh and sat down, patting his knee. "Yes indeed," He echoed. "She needed something to eat. And what is it, bacon ham or pork?"
"You got it." Mary had already forgotten what she had said.
3 am and he was wide awake. He leaned over the balcony and looked down onto the street. One lone hooker leaned against a burnt -out 1985 Cadillac. He seemed to have a dim memory of that car, but it could have been any number of cars that his pimp friends had driven. He remembered when he was 16 and Mary was 21, how she helped to pay for his books so that he could take the enriched classes for pre-law. Mary was already working as a teacher, and would come home exhausted. He remembers one night he snuck out with his buddies to the corner diner , and seeing Mary coming at him through the door. Her sheer 300 pound bulk filled the florescent lit room in a blur of color as she swung past the steamy, adolescent glares.
"If you think I'm working my ass off to pay for you to be setting on up here like some kind of sheik of Iran you got another thing coming mister. And if you think I give a hairy RATS ass about what your scummy junky pimp friends think you can just go on out and pimp your ugly ass." In one fluid motion she had him by the ear and was pulling him toward the door.
"BIIILLLLYYY". The familiar cry always made him jump, no matter how many times he heard it. He finished dragging on his cigarrette, flicked it into the street and pulled himself into the dank smelling apartment. He turned on the light and Mary looked knowingly at him, and matter of factly handed him what was in her hand: a steaming roll of shit. He took it from her and walked out the front door to cry.
Knit Wits was buzzing. "Well ladies, oh, and gentle man, today we going to to work on color and color coordination."
Clare was decked out in purples today. His eyes took in more than the last time, and he saw that each woman had the same bag on her lap, with the Knit Wit logo of a woman with knitting needles coming out of her head. He pulled out his cast-on of 35 stitches and got to work pulling at the yarn. One woman was humming, and he peeked at her, her head dipped down low, angling in at her knitting like a hawk narrowing in on its prey. She was attacking it with each beat of the song.
"How can you sing and knit at the same time?" his voice sounded small. He was exhausted from the night before, remembering stuffing Mary's dirty sheets into the washing machine at 3:30am.
There was a silence in the room, a meaningful exchange of glances, an escape of a twitter, then a release of huge guffaws of laughter. The women were spitting and wiping their eyes. One stick thin creature beside him was trying to hold it in, but kept blowing air through her nose and making shrill birdlike noises.
"Well...mister..mister....Robert...it's just that, you being so elegant and dressed up and profesional looking, we just done said before you came in that you must have a secretary to do all the odd jobs for you so that you can concentrate on your knitting." The laughter was uncontrollable now, and had mutated into screaming.
He stood up roughly and swung the door open so fast it dented the wall. A thin line of magenta mohair wool slid behind him on the street, like a shameful snake. He stomped away from the frilly window, every inch feeling like more grateful distance.His cell phone vibrated in his pocket.
"Yeah? Oh sorry...yea....everything's fine." His law-firm was running without him, but he knew that he had limited time before everything started to fall apart. "Uh huh, well, we'll get right on that. Yep. Thanks." It actually felt good to hear the firm masculine voice of a colleague, someone who had nothing to do with the madness he was living here. He reached down and grabbed at the mohair trailing behind him. The little stick figure of a girl was coming at him up the street, rolling the ball of yarn slowing as she meekly walked behind him. She handed it to him with an apologetic glance, and he remembered last night with Mary. He clicked the phone off, and sat on the curb and started to cry.
"You can always re-use this yarn. There's very few times it can't be recycled." Her voice trailed off and it was as if she going invisible. "We really didn't mean anything. Please come back. Please." It was barely a whisper. When he looked up, he saw that her eyes were the same color as the mohair. She had a piece of yarn hanging from one braid, and she was struggling not to cry.
He walked back with her to the solid wooden table and sat down, snorting out of one side of his nose, stubbornly leaning into his knit one, purl one, mohair, mohair eyes, mohair breath, mohair fur growing around him.
That night he dreamt they were in a homemade canoe that their dad had built. He was yelling no, but his dad made the whole family get in. He was paddling harder and harder, but they were sinking and the grey waves of the water were overtaking them. He stopped paddling and started beating his father with the paddle. The voice of America's 10 Unsolved Murders came through the waves and he knew noone would ever know what happened to the mangled bodies of his family.
Mary was looking out the window-the house uncharacteristicly quiet.
"Lord, lord,lord, this street has changed."
It was the first complete sentence he had heard from her in a month.
"Yep. Everything is going upscale now. They say the yuppies are buying out the buppies and Generation X are going to be yesterdays corporate America," he had no idea what he was talking about. He just wanted to keep the conversation flowing.
"Precious, how long are they saying I got?" She hadn't called him that since he was a boy. He felt his tongue thickening up in his mouth. He didn't want to lie. All of his smooth-talking lawyer silk felt like that piece of mohair trailing behind him. He wanted to gather it up and make a sweater for Mary, to save her from what was coming at her.
"They all saying you ain't got much. It could happen at any moment."
She turned her face back to the window. "Is it winter, fool?"
He smiled. It was the old Mary shining through like some rangey, sassy hyena.
"Yep. It's winter all right."
The subway platform was 30 below zero, with no train in sight. He ran down the stairs to get out of the wind, just as the train pulled up. He raced up the steps 2 at a time, and got to the train just as the doors were closing. An automated voice said, "Step away from the tracks. The train is leaving the station." He started beating on the train with his mittened fists, howling into the wind. The cold steel of the train jolted him and tasted hot. His fists were pummeling it as if it were a living body, the relief in the inanimate steel burnt through him and the world at last had the same metalic sting that had been holding him hostage ever since he had come home.
"My, my my look what the cat dragged in."
The clicking of the knitting needles stopped. There was a strange echo in the room, and he realized it was his own breathing. "I.....want....to.......make.....a face mask.........."
He sat in his spot around the wood table, pulled out his bag with the Knit Wit logo, and fervently started to knit. The wool was pilling, and he realized it was wet from his tears. He was afraid if he looked up at the faces around the table he would split apart.
Clara's high heels tapped the floor. "I remember when I knit my baby a blanket."
He didn't want to hear it. He pulled the number 9 needle out of his bag and started counting.
"Um hum. It was the purtiest thing I ever made in my life. It had a different color for every month he lived on this earth. That would have been 18 different colors God made in this world just for my little baby boy so that he could go off to God's green pastures carrying the colors of the rainbow around his heart."
The needles didn't stop, although no one seemed to be breathing. He wished he could fill the silence with something.....wished that his cell phone would ring.. that he'd get called out into a meeting.
"Look at me, boy. I said LOOK AT ME. I want you to look around this room. I want you to tell me if you think you the only person in the world who ever lost anything. Yea, I know you ain't never said nothing about what ugly secret you been running home to every day. But I imagine it's shit colored and don't smell like roses neither. And if you want to keep your corporate America suit from staining from those tears I suggest you look around this room and really know what knitting is all about."
The little stick girl with the mohair eyes let out a snicker at this. He looked up and caught her eyes, the two of them trying not to laugh. Once she started to smile the two of them sputtered out giggles, earth shaking ground stomping heart moving laughter. Even Clara's stony face started to crack into a helpless grin, and before long the whole room was stomping and slapping their knees and blowing their noses with a laughter that's half-way between bitterness and confusion, on the road to the ridiculous and not so sublime, breaking through a grief that is wordless-he was learning to knit.
lac
