Free-Range Knitter (20 page)

I cursed her. Why didn’t she just say it? Why didn’t she just say, “Hey, guess what. You’re wrong. It says right here that every time you come in the shop you’ve bought the same thing. You have this. At least go get another color.” But she didn’t. She left room for the charade to continue, and it did. I knew she knew, I think she knew I knew, but I was committed to the process of screwing this up, and every moment that passed only got me deeper in and further from an out. I knew this. I knew it was just like running down the road because I didn’t want to be embarrassed, in the process working all the way up from a small embarrassment to a freakshow humiliation. I was helpless to stop it. I looked at her again and said, “No, I’m sure. I didn’t buy this kit before,” and I tried to smile warmly and probably pulled off an odd grimace. Just ring it up, I thought. Just do it.
Just end it for both of us, and I’ll leave and stand in the driveway and think of all the ways I could have done this better, and you can call all your friends and tell them that Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was just in the shop, and boy is she weird. Let’s just get it done.

“Alright,” she said slowly.

“Alright,” I said firmly. She rang it up. I gave her the money, thanked her warmly for her time, and attempted to walk off confidently. That would have gone better had I not tripped on the mat at the door.

Outside, I moved to where she couldn’t see me and looked at the yarn. Damn it. Like I don’t have a big enough stash without buying the same thing twice.

I looked at that yarn and I looked down the street. I’m surprised I didn’t see Julie.

Like that of most Canadian children, Abby’s childhood memories were chock full of experiences of every possible kind of snow. There was the packing snow that was dense, wet, and heavy and made the most excellent igloos, snowballs, and snowmen. There was the high holy snow of childhood, the snow that falls in huge quantities, all rushing in through the nighttime. Abby could remember lying in bed as a little girl, watching the snow fall by the street lamps, hoping that when she woke up in the morning there would be the insulated quiet and crazy luminous light that might mean it was a snow day. She could recall dreading the walk to school on days the sky had rained the smallest accumulated diamonds, tiny adamantine snow that glittered and squeaked tellingly underfoot. That noise, kids were taught in school, is a way of telling the temperature. Snow only squeaks that way if the snow is less than 14°F, and that sound has come to be the sound that cold makes, as far as Abby
was concerned. Snowscrunch. Now that she was a grown-up, Abby was most likely to go straight back inside to her knitting when she heard that sound, and as she watched the snow swirl white outside while she knit, she wondered when exactly she had gone from being a snow participant to a snow observer. She wondered whether she had drawn some unreasonable conclusions from some terrible experiences.

There was the one day that maybe the whole snow thing had started to go wrong. She’d been fourteen years old and had an absolutely crippling crush on a boy named Jimmy Labropopulos. (The fact that she couldn’t spell his last name without looking it up in the back of her notebook did not stop her from planning their glorious and happy future together.) Jimmy had taken her on a date (which was really a bunch of kids going tobogganing together, and she wasn’t sure that Jimmy knew it was a date) over to a hill by the school that had a creek running behind it. The creek was really narrow, and snow and ice banks had built up on either side of it. If you hit them fast enough on a toboggan, these banks functioned exactly like ramps, and that’s what the kids were doing. Abby was a little scared, but her love for Jimmy made her bold, and so when she hit that snowbank and become gloriously airborne over the frozen creek, she thought that Jimmy would see that and be suddenly sure of their future together. Abby was sure he was watching her, too, which only made it more humiliating when, as she touched down clear on the other side of the creek, Abby had broken her
tailbone. There is no greater trial to young love than the mortification and indignity of having to limp home to your mum with a broken arse, and the relationship did not survive. Abby had never forgotten that snow had a hand in that.

Come to think of it, there was the day on the way back from the grocery store, too. The kids were all little, and Abby ran out of something critical during a blizzard and was forced to bundle up all three of them and go out into the snow. What was it? Bread? Milk? For the life of her she couldn’t recall what started the episode. It hardly mattered, either, for the horror was in how it ended. After taking forever to get the kids into their snow stuff and out of the apartment, she had an irritable preschooler, a biting toddler, and a screaming baby, and things only went from bad to worse. There was deterioration as they trudged through the snow to the store, further decline in the store as everybody got hot and sweaty from wearing snowgear inside, and everyone started screaming. The epic ended on the way home as Abby tried to hold it together, with the baby in the sling and the toddler in the stroller and the groceries over her arm and the preschooler standing in a snowbank up to her armpits crying about being stuck and buried, when Abby reached down inside herself for whatever strength mothers find when things are that bad, and she found it. She hauled the kid out of that snowbank, hiked the baby up on her hip, squinted into the swirling snow, and heaved that stroller forward, damn it. Abby still thought that she had never been the same after what happened next …
which was that one whole wheel snapped off of the stroller in the snow, and all four of them fell down into that treacherous white. Groceries, broken stroller, preschooler, toddler, baby, all of them sodden, everything smashed or squashed, all of them crying in the snow. Abby didn’t even have a clear memory of how she got them all home after that, a reaction she thought might be post-traumatic stress disorder.

Then there was the way the older she got, the harder it became to make a snowman taller than you. (If you can’t make a snowman taller than you, then what’s the point?) The way that people stopped paying her to shovel the driveway once she owned the driveway … and just somehow, the way that as a grownup, snow had started to seem like an impediment. Abby knit and thought about all of that as she watched the snow fall outside, watched the wind push it into drifts. She sipped her tea and felt a pang of fondness for snow, and she decided. She was going to take it back. Abby wasn’t going to let becoming a grownup ruin her sense of snow. She would wait for the perfect snow, and she would reclaim the joy that was in it. She might even knit some perfect mittens while she waited for it.

It didn’t take long at all for the perfect snow to come. Abby knew it when she saw it start one afternoon. The snow fell and fell and fell. It was big fluffy flakes, the ones that are bigger than snowflakes should ever properly be, the ones that are a million snowflakes clumped together on the way down. When you see those, you know it’s not too cold. She watched
it accumulate quickly on the road and sidewalk. When you see that, you know it’s not too warm. Flakes like those, they would be packing snow. If they were sticking to themselves on the way down, then they would stick to themselves in snowballs, on hills. It was perfect snow for her purposes, and it just kept drifting down.

What her purposes were, that remained to be seen. Abby decided just to go out and enjoy the snow. Just walk around in it and look at it from the outside instead of the inside and see what happened, and being a knitter paid off. Abby donned her cabled hat and her warm Fair Isle mittens, even wound her alpaca scarf around her neck. She was walking in the snow, and it wasn’t cold at all, and she reflected on how this was really where a knitter should be. Out in the snow, using the things she’d knit. Knitters should be embracing the cold that motivated them to turn out these things in the first place. What was the point of waging a personal war against chilliness if you never went into the snow to reap the rewards? As she walked, Abby lifted her hands and turned her mittened palms over to catch snowflakes, then squinted at them sparkling in the dark. The world was so quiet while it was snowing, and she stood and tried to hear the sound it made falling, thinking maybe that so much snow falling at once just had to make a noise. It didn’t, but as Abby stood there in the dark, watching each branch get its own little hat of white, she felt more and more joyful, and she had an idea.

By the time she got to the toboggan hill where her daughter had gone with her friends, the thrill of snow hadn’t lifted at all and Abby was even warmer, partly because of her alpaca and her excitement, and partly because hiking up a snow-covered hill in a blizzard was a little harder in her forties than she remembered. In fact, her daughter Rose and her buddies had made two full circuits up and down the hill in the time that it took her to ascend to the summit. Rose saw her mum arrive and raised a suspicious eyebrow at her, but once she worked out that Abby wasn’t there because she was in any sort of trouble, she decided to deal with the horror of her mother appearing in public by ignoring her entirely.

Standing there, Abby looked around and watched the kids play in the snow, and in a fit of she didn’t quite know what, Abby tipped her head back, toward the sky and stars. She closed her eyes, and the snowflakes fell on her lids and face, tiny, perfect pinpoints of exquisite cold. They began to collect in her eyelashes and, following some romantic urge, she opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue. There she stood, in the dark, on the top of a hill, forgetting that there was probably acid snow or pollution or some good reason not to eat snow, even snow that wasn’t yellow, and she let it fall. It was spectacular.

It was also, apparently, embarrassing and Rose, mortified in all the ways that only a thirteen-year-old can be when her mother is being obviously weird in public, came over and elbowed her hard to bring her back.

“Mum,” Rose whispered, “Stop it. Why are you here? Why are you doing that? Is something wrong with your face?” Abby looked at the kid, and for a moment she regretted invading Rose’s fun before she remembered that she was there to capture her childlike whimsy for snow, and darn it all, no child was going to get in the way of that.

“Don’t badger me, Rose,” Abby said. “I’m just enjoying the snow.”

“Do you have to enjoy it here?” her daughter asked, looking nervously over her shoulder at her friends. There’s a social contract in place that doesn’t allow mothers to hang out with kids, and she wondered how long her mum could break it before her friends would leave. “You know, it’s snowing all over the city.”

“No badgering,” her mum replied, and she watched some of her daughter’s young friends fly down the hill on a wooden toboggan. The kids were moving so fast one of them had her hat blown off. They whooped and screamed as the group hit a wee bump and the toboggan slowly came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, and all the girls tumbled off, giggling in a heap.

“Rose?” Abby said, turning to face her daughter, looking as stern and powerful as possible, since her idea wasn’t going to go over well at all, “I’m going to need to borrow a toboggan.”

In Toronto, trees near the bottoms of hills in wintertime are nothing more than accidents waiting to happen, and every fall the city comes around with mountains of old tires that they put around the trunks to serve as bumpers for sledding kids. (I
guess the city worked out that providing this service was infinitely cheaper than the alternative, which would only begin with a fleet of ambulances.) Abby, who had always thought this was a very good idea, reflected now, as she sat at the top of the hill on a borrowed toboggan, that it was nothing short of bloody brilliant. She’d been sitting there a while, since it takes real time to stuff adult concern for life into a back pocket, and the gaggle of thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds milling around anxiously behind her were growing more and more concerned about her behavior. Abby could feel the pressure, knew that she was killing Rose, and took a deep breath, bent her knees, leaned back to get a good launch position, and … sat there.

Rose watched this whole thing, desperate to get her mother moving along and beginning to imagine that this series of false starts might be becoming a habit. The idea that her mum could be here a while was too awful to imagine, and so she approached.

“Mum? You’ve been sitting there a while. Your bum is getting wet, and nobody is tobogganing. We’re waiting for you. You’re on our toboggan.” Then she waited. Nothing happened, and Rose wondered whether maybe her mother was waiting for some sort of permission.

“It’s your turn,” she said. Abby didn’t move. Sure, she thought about moving, and if Rose could have seen inside her mother’s head she would have been impressed with the progress she was making toward moving, but outwardly it looked
for all the world like Abby was just sitting on a sled at the top of a hill. Eyes fixed ahead, snow falling on her handknit hat.

Rose shifted her weight from foot to foot. She glanced behind her and shrugged at the questions in her friends’ eyes. She didn’t know why her mum didn’t go. In a moment that would have made her mother proud, had she known it had occurred, Rose decided not to push her mum squarely in the back and end this thing. Instead, she leaned forward again. “Are you scared?” Abby looked gratefully at her daughter and thought about saying, “Hell, yes,” and she thought about asking Rose to push her squarely in the back.

“Mum,” whispered Rose. “Sometimes you just have to do it. Going down is better than going home. Everybody is watching, and those are your only two choices. Do you want to go home?”

Abby looked at her very wise daughter, and she knew that it was entirely true; she knew that the only thing that could be worse than ending up a mangled heap at the bottom of a snowhill in Toronto was getting off that toboggan and kissing the experience good-bye forever. Abby took another deep breath. “Screw it,” she thought. She thought about being eighty years old and looking back on her life and decided she wanted to remember a day when in her forties, she’d tossed herself down a hill like a kid again, not a day where she humiliated herself in front of a group of teenagers by being afraid. Besides, these kids had been throwing themselves down the hill all day and
nothing had happened to them. Adult cowardice was not going to get her, damn it all. It was just snow, just a toboggan. Abby blinked, set her jaw, and bent her knees. Rose looked hopeful. She asked whether Abby wanted a push. Abby resisted the urge to push Rose (good parenting is all about what you
don’t
do most days) and instead muttered, “Don’t badger me, Rose. I’m going; I’m going when I’m ready.” And then suddenly, she was ready.