woven

by Helaina Pisar Mckibbin

I was suffering from writer’s block or just a paucity of ideas.  So, I walked over to Peets Coffee House to do some people watching.  Once there, I noticed a woman knitting at one of the fake marble tables by the window.  I was intrigued because I like to knit myself, so I sat down at the table next to hers.  The woman’s piece, whatever it would turn out to be, was lovely: a red and blue tweed in a simple garter stitch.

She was dressed in a black cotton suit that hung on her emaciated body as if on a coat hanger.  Her cheek bones were prominent, and her features seemed gigantic in her gaunt face:  a long nose, a large mouth with taunt thin lips and round, dark eyes behind blue tinted wire framed lenses.  Her pale face was unlined, but her hair, which she wore in a bun, was gray.  It was impossible to determine her age.  On the floor beside her lay a large, black leather purse which also served as a knitting bag. 

Her brows furrowed in concentration; she wound the yarn around the needle as if writing cursive on the air.  But screw the poetic prose.  I would have to intrude on my scene and get some dialogue.  Besides it was an occasion to practice the interview skills I had learned in my online Ed 2 Go class, “Research for Writers.”

“Hi,” I said, “My name is Penny, Penelope.  It means “weaver” in Greek.” 

She shrugged.  “That’s fascinating!”  She said without looking at me.  I think she was recuperating a dropped stitch.

“What are you knitting?” I asked, shouting over the cappuccino machine.

“A scarf,” she barked.

A few people turned around and stared.

She sighed and bit her lip.  I was clearly annoying her with my questions, intruding on her space, so I stopped talking for a while but continued to stare at her and her knitting in silence.  There wasn’t much on the needles so, presumably, she had just started this scarf.

“I knit too,” I said after a while. “But I make mistakes.”

“What?”  she said, looking up.

“I m-m-make mistakes in my knitting,” I stuttered.

“Correct them with a crochet needle,” she said brusquely and went back to her work.

“I’m working on a pink sweater,” I continued.  “It’s got quite a few holes in it from dropped stitches.  The wool’s beautiful though, pure lamb.  I’ve been working on it for over nine months.”

“Can’t give birth,” she answered, “knitter’s block.”

“I’m not sure whose gonna wear it,” I said.  Can’t be me.  I’m allergic to wool.  Actually, I’ve rarely been able to finish a project.  Right now, I’ve got about two half knit shawls still on needles.” 

I waited for her answer.  None came.  I jotted down our interchange in my journal.  When I was finished, I continued to watch her winding her yarn around the needle in small, easy gestures, barely moving her wrist.   Suddenly, she looked over at my journal but was too far to read it.  Then she looked at me and narrowed her eyes like a cat. 

Embarrassed, I put my pen down and closed my notebook. 

“Actually, I’m, I’m, I’m working on a novel,” I said.

“Uh huh!” she said, still staring at me.

I leaned back in my chair, trying for nonchalance and listened to the Muzak.  A trumpet droned in the background, sounding more like a kid blowing a raspberry than a melody.  Every so often, the cappuccino machine joined in, chugging along, the high-pitched whine picking up speed like an approaching train. 

She took a large pair of scissors out of her leather bag– they looked more like kitchen shears than something one would use for knitting – and cut the yarn she had been using.  For some reason, the snipping sound of her scissors made me jump.  The strands were blue, red and very fine. They reminded me of capillaries.  Then she pulled some more yarn of the same color out of her purse and tied it to the cut strands hanging from the scarf.

“Why don’t you get yourself something?” she said, as if to get rid of me.

“Okay, will you have anything?” I asked.   

“Yes, I’ll have a decaf café mocha with extra whip cream and syrup, and three oatmeal white chocolate chip cranberry cookies.’’                           

I felt I had to buy her something to compensate for my intrusiveness.  It was odd though.  Why didn’t she just move or tell me to go to hell?  I stood in line for a long time.  When I put in my order, the barrister informed me that the oatmeal white chocolate chip cranberry cookie was called a “Scoodle.”  They had it at Starbucks, not at Peets.  He seemed irritated.  I ordered three regular chocolate chip cookies for my new friend along with her café mocha and a cappuccino for me.  

I went back to my table to put my cappuccino down and then went over to hers carrying her treats.  She looked up at me, and I noticed the dark circles under her eyes.  Her thin pale arm shot out; she grabbed the cookies and began stuffing them into her mouth.  She managed to gulp down all three of them in five bites.  “How do you manage to stay so thin?” I asked, mesmerized.

She stared down at my round belly hanging over my sweats.  I quickly pulled them up and tightened the string. “Why don’t you just go back and sit down,” she snapped.

Shocked by her rudeness, I backed away.   Once seated at my table, I saw her gulp down her café mocha in one shot as if it wasn’t hot.  With my spoon, I scooped out the foam of my cappuccino, a large cloud of ecru.  The smell and taste were sickly sweet.  I had added too much Splenda. 

To hell with this woman, I thought.  I’ll damn well write about her if I feel like it, weave her and her yarn into some story. Yes, I’d lasso her in.  I usually couldn’t finish a story any more than I could finish a shawl or a sweater, but I’d find a way.  This bitch was too good a find to pass up.  So I picked up my pen anew and resumed.  I wrote about her gaunt face, her deft magic hands winding the wool, her hunger and her anger.  She knitted, and I wrote, I wrote, and she knitted.  

When I finally looked up from my journal, I found her staring at me.  I could see myself in those tinted lenses, a tiny face floating in blue.  Now I was the one to be studied like a fly on a tablecloth.  She continued to watch me as she knitted, her fingers on automatic pilot, and I felt as if she was weaving me into her scarf.

I tried to distract myself and looked out the large window of the café. The pane was covered by a linen shade that choked the afternoon light.  Through the shade, the street, the cars and the people looked as if they were covered in a shroud of white dust.  Only red and green traffic lights glared through the haze.  I looked at the woman again, and we stared at each other like two cats ready to fight. 

Though I had stopped writing, she continued knitting while staring at me. She had changed to a gold-colored wool: something shiny, almost metallic.  I watch her intermittently pull-out small gold colored yarn balls out of her purse.  They would appear as if by magic, and she would link them to the red and blue tweed yarn she had been using before.  She reminded me of the goose who kept laying golden eggs. 

For a moment, she looked down at her knitting.  I figured she had probably made too many mistakes to fix them easily with a crochet needle because she frowned, slipped the knitting off the needle and unraveled several rows.  Then she slipped it back onto the needle and reknitted that last section.

Afterwards, she added rows of purl stitches to her garter stitch.  The knit stitches looked like the ridges of a molar and the purl like rows of canine teeth.  Then she added cable stitch to the piece in a brain-colored yarn that swirled like a tornado.  I stared mesmerized at the braided wool winding its way through the scarf.  It occurred to me that the gray was the color of my polyester t-shirt.

“You’re very talented!” I said, out of the blue.

“So are you,” she said, stressing every word.

Sarcasm, I thought, but it was beneath me to get angry.

“Do you want some juice?” I asked instead.  “I’m gonna get myself a bottle of cranberry juice.” 

She paused in her knitting and looked up at me above her glasses which had slipped down her nose.

“I never drink... juice.”

I heard someone laugh behind me.  I didn’t.

I remained seated, and she resumed knitting.  I followed the yarn with my eyes, its twists and turns.   Then she tied some pale beige wool to the grey strand that hung from the needle and continued in that color.  It was an odd shade, almost peach, the color of flesh.  I didn’t know that such a color of yarn even existed.  Afterwards, she added a marbled red and white yarn-worsted, they call it.  It looked to me like chapped lips: crimson with patches of dry skin.

It occurred to me that I’d never asked her name, just given mine, Penelope.  So much for interview skills.  I opened my mouth to ask for it now, but the question stayed lodged in my throat like a morsel of food that won’t go down. 

She kept changing the wool, and I realized that it was in shades all found in the human body: the deep brown of a liver, the purple of a heart, the gold of urine.  The colors didn’t seem to match at all now.  I shivered.  Perhaps, it’s the air conditioning, I thought. 

I stared at the dance of her hands, her profile with its long nose bent over her work and the strands of her long gray hair falling out of her bun touching the emerging scarf as she knitted.  She was completely concentrated on her work now and didn’t look at me anymore at all.  Now I found myself wishing that she would stare at me again through her icy blue lenses.  But she didn’t.  She just went on knitting, her eyes a slit like her thin shut lips.

I squirmed, tried to pick up my pen again but found I couldn’t.  It was as if my whole right arm had gone to sleep.  Before I had time to ponder this, I felt a sudden itch on my back and scratched it with my left hand. Why would my old, soft polyester shirt suddenly irritate my skin?  It was the perfect synthetic!  That wool she was using, it suddenly occurred to me, must have been itchy as hell, real sheep’s wool, all the discomforts of nature.  It was as if I could feel the scratch on my skin just by looking at it.  Come to think of it, the scarf wasn’t even pretty anymore. The color scheme was wrong, clever maybe, imaginative, but not something you would actually wear.

I was getting sleepy for some reason and yawning, as if trying to get more oxygen into my system, and still staring at the emerging scarf winding its way down its own path.  She added some dark beige to the piece.  It reminded me of my cappuccino before the foam had blended in with the rest of the drink.  Filmy-eyed, I felt as if I were looking at the world through linen shades again.

I was breathing laboriously now as if I wasn’t getting enough air, and I was too hot as if wearing wool in the summer.  It was a dry heat with no sweat, the kind that burns you up, and my back itched all the more.  Then she yanked on the yarn, and I felt a momentary cramp in my right hand.

The woman segued into a rib stitch, bone thick strands, alternating rows of purl and knit, four stitches of each, then three, two, one:  knit, purl, knit, purl, knit, purl. The hands jumped back and forth on either side of the needles.  Now the wool was black and spidery like my hair.

Something tickled my nose and throat.   I wanted to sneeze, to cough, to gag even, but I couldn’t.  She had knitted me into her scarf: my ink-stained hands, my pen, my round belly and my face.  My Roman nose, long and large, and my dome shaped forehead were flattened.  My receding chin was pushed forward into perfect alignment with the two-dimensional picture in the wool, a true bas-relief caught between lip long rows and toothy stitches.  I found I could still breathe a little though the spaces between the stitches, and I could see the sunlight, but barely, muted as it was by black yarn.  It must be like that for Muslim women who wear the full burka.   It was as if I was looking through my own shroud.  The itching was unbearable and, flattened as I was, I couldn’t even scratch.  In fact, I could barely breathe, and my lungs burned.

A red strand of wool passed before my eyes: the rash on my temple.  She was unraveling a few rows because she must have made several mistakes again.  Then she reknitted the top of my head, and it felt like a migraine. 

All of a sudden, I felt myself lifted and jostled.  Then my limbs were folded up across my chest and belly, and I heard the sound of a snap.  She had stuffed me into her purse and closed it.  All was dark.  I felt myself swinging as she carried me.  That and the awful smell of leather made me nauseous.  I tried to scream but found I couldn’t make a sound.

“Finished,” I heard her say.  “All I gotta do is add the fringe.”

Then I heard the screech of the café door as it opened.  Deprived as I was of my sight, I was relying mostly on hearing:  the sound of teenage laughter, a baby’s sharp cry and muffled conversation of polite women chattering in a melodious tongue, making their way through thickets of consonants-Polish maybe.  I felt more than I heard the hard thud of the woman’s shoes on the pavement as she carried me. 

She stopped next to a parked car and opened her large purse.   As she was rummaging through it, I had time to notice that she drove a small, black Toyota, but as I was facing the side of the vehicle, I couldn’t see the license number, a good thing to know when you’re being kidnapped.  She found her remote, and I heard the pop of her car doors unlocking.  Then she closed her purse, and I felt myself fly up in the dark as she threw it in the backseat.  The car started and we jostled down a bumpy street, then turned abruptly onto some smooth road, a freeway perhaps.  The ride seemed to go on forever.

I was gasping, choking on wool, sucking in the remaining air inside the purse.  I felt dizzy buried as I was in my own shroud.  Soon I found I couldn’t breathe at all, but the funny thing was that after the moments of terror, I found I didn’t need to.  The acrid smell of leather had disappeared.  I no longer felt the scratch of wool and the itch on my skin. 

I still saw black, but it wasn’t the inside of a purse anymore.  It was just the night which had fallen since we’d left Peets, and I was looking up, beyond the scarf, the Toyota and the busy streets.  I wasn’t watching the people or the cars swarming on the ground, colored interstices in the dark.  No traffic lights or neon signs glared fluorescent.  I was floating beyond the stars even, and I saw the night as I’d never seen it before in glorious velvet, smooth and stitchless.  It was as dull as coal, as shiny as onyx, a world of solid space.

Photo of Helaina Pisar Mckibbin

BIO: Helaina Pisar Mckibbin lives with her husband in Los Angeles where she worked as an ESL and French teacher for many years. She is now focusing more on her writing which includes short stories and poems. Some of these have appeared in the following journals: “The Storyteller,” “Rattle,” “The San Gabriel Quarterly” and “Onthebus.” She has also published some translations from French to English and vice a versa.