Swish Page 2

  Rob’s scarf reached its full six-foot length in a matter of days, and I was hooked. I started knitting everywhere. I knitted on the subway. I knitted at my job. I knitted during the sermon in church.

  It is not, of course, Jewish custom to attend church, but I needed the money. In New York, as in many other large metropolitan areas, church choirs tend to be made up not of parishioners but of professional singers, irrespective of faith, so as to ensure the high quality of the music. I’ve worked at a number of New York churches; at the time I learned to knit I was singing at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Times Square, known around town as Smoky Mary’s because of all the incense. I was thrilled to get a job there, not just because Smoky Mary’s has no acoustic peer in the Western Hemisphere, but also because the congregation has historically been composed almost exclusively of men who know the difference between beige and taupe. This is the church at which Tallulah Bankhead is reputed to have caught the attention of the thurifer as he walked down the aisle swinging the censer and said, “Darling, I love your dress, but your purse is on fire.”

  The most exciting thing about singing at St. Mary’s, however, was that the choir sat above and behind the congregation, which meant that nobody could see us. And so, when we weren’t singing, we were doing the crossword, flirting shamelessly with one another—at least the tenors and basses were—and, now, knitting. Whoever invented the phrase “preaching to the choir” clearly had no idea what goes on when the antiphon is over and the music folders come down. The choristers at Smoky Mary’s were abetted in our delinquency by the sound system, which consisted essentially of tin cans connected by dental floss, so that we could never hear anything the priests down below were saying. It’s certainly possible that the sermons preached at St. Mary’s would have uplifted my spirit and saved my soul had I been able to hear them, but after five minutes of intense, strained focus at my first Sunday-morning service there, I decided that blissful ignorance was preferable to an inner ear injury, and (since I had not yet learned to knit) opened Mansfield Park.

  The music was a different matter. The walls of Smoky Mary’s are made of stone instead of concrete, so sound bounces off them and comes back twice as rich and clear—and then hits the opposite walls and reaches the congregation’s ears quadruply refined. Singing in that room is as effortless as breathing; you open your mouth and your voice pours out like water from a jar. Even the worst music becomes beautiful in that space, and the best can fill you with the desire for what is known in Hebrew as tikkun olam, the healing of the world. “As truly as God is our Father,” we sang one Sunday in a gorgeous setting of a text by fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich, “so just as truly is He our Mother. In our Father, God Almighty, we have our being; in our merciful Mother we are remade and restored. Our fragmented lives are knit together, and by giving and yielding ourselves, through grace, to the Holy Spirit, we are made whole.” And then the echo died, and the priest started muttering, “Umpho flumpish klizmar,” and I picked up my size-eight needles.

  In our merciful Mother we are remade and restored? I thought as I went back to my first attempt at working in two colors. Our fragmented lives are knit together? Their god may be a lie, but if he’s a cross-dresser with good hobbies he can’t be all bad.

  It was around the time I began my first hat that people started speaking to me on the subway. People had been speaking about me on the subway from the moment I first pulled out my yarn on the uptown A train, and I loved it. There is no joy quite like that of hearing people whisper, “What’s he knitting, it’s so complicated, I used to be able to crochet but I would never have the patience to do something like that” in the hushed tones ordinarily reserved for apparitions of the Virgin Mary in food. But being spoken to turned out to be an almost invariably unpleasant proposition. No matter how mellifluous the voice that asked, “What are you knitting?” when I looked up I was bound to see someone either wearing a funny beret decorated with plastic flowers or carrying a portfolio brimming with tattered, close-written proofs of the two-shooter theory.

  On the crosstown bus one evening a boy of eight or nine leaned forward and spoke to me from across the aisle. “What are you knitting?” he piped.

  In addition to dreading that question, I also hate children. One would think that these two facts in combination should have inspired me on this cold December night to a stony silence, but I was feeling generous. “A baby blanket,” I answered condescendingly, glad to be able to broaden the waif’s horizons.

  He sat back in his seat. “I just finished a scarf,” he said primly, “in fisherman’s rib. Now I’m working on a Fair Isle sweater, but I have to hurry if I’m going to finish it in time for Christmas.”

  Once I recovered my equilibrium, I responded. “That sounds terrific. Good luck.”

  What I wanted to say was, “Does your mother know how gay you are?”

  It was in the summer after ninth grade that I came out to myself, and, a week later, to my parents. When my mother said she wanted to talk to me after lunch, I knew she was going to ask me whether I had an eating disorder (I had been eating nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches for the last several weeks, and not very many of them). So when I went up to her room to talk to her, I was relieved when all she said was, “Joel, are you gay?”

  “Oh,” I said casually. “Yeah.” The library books I’d left on the kitchen table must have clued her in; it would be difficult to misinterpret a title like Now That You Know: A Parents’ Guide to Understanding Homosexuality.

  Not a muscle in my mother’s face moved. “What do you mean, yeah?” she asked in a voice that could have flash-frozen the population of Zambia.

  Obviously I had given her the wrong answer, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how. She and my father were civil rights workers, after all; they had committed their lives to tikkun olam. He had won his first Supreme Court voting-rights case at the age of thirty, and she, despite never having finished college, was the author of the law that forces corporations and government agencies to pay the lawyers of the people whose civil rights they’ve violated, which law is now the only reason anybody can afford to be a civil rights lawyer. Two weeks after the 1970 massacre at Kent State University of students protesting the American invasion of Cambodia, a similar massacre took place at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Nobody cared about this one, though, because the students killed were black. But my mother, who lived nearby, found an audiotape of the gunfire, which lasted for a horrifying thirty seconds, and convinced a local radio station to play it nonstop for an entire day and night. Then she organized a march on the governor’s mansion in which people carried signs offering friendly criticisms like GOD WILL GIVE YOU BLOOD TO DRINK.

  Furthermore, my parents stayed true to their principles even when they themselves were the wrongdoers. When I was five, I picketed my house, hoping to be allowed to eat breakfast before getting dressed rather than after. I marched back and forth on our porch, carrying a sign that said BREKFAST FIRST DRESSED LATER; since my parents didn’t cross picket lines, and since the front door was the only way into and out of the house, they were trapped inside until they acceded to my demand.

  So, if my mother had built her entire life around protecting the rights of the disenfranchised, no matter the price to herself, what problem could she possibly have with a little flouncing here and there? I cast about for other explanations. Perhaps it was my sloppy diction to which she objected. I tried again. “I mean…yes, I’m gay?”

  The thrust of the story will be familiar to many who have told their parents they’re not straight. My mother and father said they didn’t mind if I was gay—they just didn’t want me to make up my mind so soon. They tried therefore to eliminate all gay influences from my life; unfortunately, they did this by coming up with prohibitions so stupid they were embarrassing. I wasn’t allowed to wear bow ties. I wasn’t allowed to write in green ink. I wasn’t allowed to compose sonnets to boys (though given the quality of the verse I had be
en writing, that one was more than fair). They forbade me to see the one gay person I knew, the screamingly homosexual owner of Charleston’s best chocolate store. I regularly told them I was going to the library and went to see him instead, and when they found out they grounded me for a year—not for being gay, they insisted, but for lying to them. I tried desperately to explain that none of this was going to dampen my enthusiasm for opera or my interest in the minor works of E. M. Forster, but the murky cloud of their hope was impenetrable.

  It would probably have dissipated on its own in good time if my mother hadn’t also been dying of juvenile diabetes. For a long time she had kept the disease at bay with panache, decorating her portable IV pole as a tree one Hallowe’en when I was six or seven and showing up at a party as Johnny Apple-seed. By the time I was in junior high, however, her struggle had become more difficult; the first time she was carried out of the house to an ambulance in the middle of the night screaming that she was being ripped apart, I sat on the floor of my room paying very close attention to the model dragon I was gluing together until my uncle, her brother, knocked on my door frame and told me she was probably going to live. I thought that if I looked at him I might discover he was just as frightened as I was, so I kept my eyes on the dragon’s right hind claw, which with a great deal of concentration I finally attached successfully.

  After tenth grade my de jure grounding was over, but soon enough my father was spending all his time in Alabama arguing a desegregation case for which he was later named Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice; the case lasted a year, during which period I had to spend all my time taking care of my terminally ill mother and my younger brother, who had heard from Jamie Adams that Allison Orson had said I was a lesbian, and wanted to know what that meant. I still resented my mother deeply, because she kept doing things like collecting any mail that came for me, asking me if it was from people she’d want me to be in contact with, and throwing it away if I told her it wasn’t. It didn’t occur to me to lie, and since we had moved to a house with a back door a picket wouldn’t have done any good, so all the mail from kids on the pen-pal list I’d gotten from the gay youth hotline went unread into the trash. The return address on one letter was so illegible that it was impossible for me to tell who had sent it. My mother, in a backward baseball cap because she hadn’t been well enough to go to the stylist in months, opened the envelope and proceeded to read me passages from my own mail, grimacing at the expressions of affection contained therein. I sat frozen in helpless fury before her until I realized the letter was from a straight friend I had met at summer camp. At this point she allowed me to go and read the rest in my room, where I sat on my bed and turned the pages and trembled with hatred.

  I spun elaborate fantasies in which I would confront her, implacable in my oratory, and reduce her to a quivering pudding capable only of tearful attempts at reconciliation, which I would ruthlessly spurn. But when your mother gets out of her wheelchair and crawls up the stairs in her nightgown on hands and knees bleeding from diabetic neuropathy, gaily pretending that she has simply found a particularly invigorating new form of exercise, and all you can do, since your father is five hundred miles away saving the world, is make her a rum and Coke with enough Bacardi to knock out a rhinoceros, it becomes difficult to tell her that when she rejected your sexuality she hurt your feelings.

  Almost twenty years later, her reasons for reacting so badly to my coming out remain shrouded in mystery. Perhaps she had some traumatic experience as a child—more traumatic than all the rest of her experiences as a child, which, given my much-married grandmother’s propensity to cruelty, is really saying something—that predisposed her to rabidity. My great-great-uncle was purportedly the queeniest queen ever to queen his way down Queensville Pike; possibly she blamed herself for passing those genetic tendencies along. After she died I was looking through some of her papers and found a letter in which she seemed to come close to confessing an attraction to a woman who had lived around the corner from us when I was five. Maybe she was just jealous that I could say it and she couldn’t.

  Eventually, after I’d run out of friends to make scarves and hats for, I decided I needed to move on to something more challenging. I was sort of dating a guy named Mike; he was about to move to Boston for a year, so I resolved to knit him a pair of warm socks. We’d been seeing each other for several months, and I liked him, but I knew that he was not my true love and I was relieved that he was moving away, because it meant I wouldn’t have to suffer through an agonizing conversation about how I didn’t want to be his boyfriend. I could just let distance tear us apart.

  Knitting scarves and hats and baby blankets had been all well and good, but socks required an entirely different level of commitment. First, the patterns I’d been using for scarves and hats and baby blankets never called for needles smaller than size six; for the socks I needed size one. Second, where for flat garments I had used two needles, socks required four, which complicated things exponentially. And third, Mike had size-eleven feet—it should be clear why I was dating him—and so knitting his socks took forever. I walked around Manhattan carrying a set of four long toothpicks, yarn trailing behind me; the bamboo needles were so thin that every other day I’d break one and have to buy a new set. I used self-patterning yarn, however, which is the closest thing this world has to witchcraft: it’s dyed in such a way that you don’t do a thing but knit it, and the sock you end up with looks like a foot-shaped Rembrandt.

  By the time Mike’s move was at hand, I had finished only one sock of the pair. In the few days I had left, I tried heroically to complete the other, sitting up nights turning the heel and decreasing like mad, but in the end the task was beyond me. The evening before he was to depart for the frozen north—thank God—I gave him the finished sock and an IOU. I knew I was creating the potential for messiness here: if I’d given him both socks, I could have made a clean break, whereas by incurring a debt I risked maintaining a closer connection to him than I wanted. My plan was therefore to finish the companion sock quickly, send it to him, and then e-dump him.

  Unfortunately before I could do so he wrote from Boston asking me what was going on. Were we still boyfriends? Did we have a future? Would I go antiquing with him in the spring? I replied evasively, as was my custom with him. It was not clear to me whether we had ever been boyfriends, I said, I wasn’t sure whether we had a future, and I didn’t know whether I would go antiquing with him in the spring. All of this was a lie; it was clear, and I was sure, and I did know. But I couldn’t bring myself to say so, because he might have gotten mad at me.

  He had dated me for nine months, though, and I suspected that he was able to see through this tergiversation to the rejection behind it; my suspicions were strengthened when he didn’t respond to my e-mail. This wouldn’t have been a problem except for the unfinished sock. The way I saw it, I had three options: 1) I could finish it and send it to him; he was, after all, its intended recipient, and my having broken up with him didn’t change that. Or 2) I could finish the sock in my size, get the yarn to make another matching sock, and keep the pair for myself. Or 3) I could leave the sock unfinished, to act as a beacon to my real true love, calling him to me as surely as a siren calls a sailor to the shore. Fate would deposit him on my doorstep, he would tell me his foot size, and I would finish the sock and knit a matching one. In a modern-day Cinderella ending, he would see that the sock fit his foot like…well, like a sock, and we would live happily ever after.

  I had more or less decided on 3)—if nothing else it would allow me to stop bumping into people as I walked down the street because I was so engrossed in my knitting—when Mike sent me an e-mail with the subject heading “I want my sock!” It was an extraordinary piece of writing, full of forgiveness and warmth and wit. If I had been a character in a novel, this would have made me fall in love with him and we would have ended up getting married. Sadly, I was not a character in a novel. I moped around my apartment for the rest o
f the day, knowing that no one would ever love me and that I didn’t deserve to be loved anyway. Then I had sex with a stranger and on the 1 train back from his apartment I finished the sock, which I sent Mike the next day along with a lame note.

  As I stood in line at the post office, sock-filled envelope in hand, I looked up at the grubby calendar on the wall and realized that it was ten years almost to the day I had last seen my mother alive. By the time I finished high school, the two of us had reached a détente: she no longer voiced any displeasure with my choice to be openly gay, and I did not push her for more. But the rift between us never mended completely. In 1992, in the morning hours before I left for my sophomore year of college, we sat together on the porch of my family’s ramshackle beach house and watched the tide ebb out to sea, knowing she would not live to see Thanksgiving. From the stereo inside, Joan Baez sang a song about the honest lullaby her mother had sung her, a song my mother had taught me years before, guitar on her knee and tenderness in her voice.

  “We’ve had a lot of time together,” my mother said to me as the waves washed farther and farther away, “and a lot of that time we’ve been really close, so it’s as if we’d had twice as much time as we’ve actually had.” As we laughed the next song started, about how for all we knew we might never meet again, and we had to love each other tonight because tomorrow might never come.

  My father came out to tell me we had to leave for the airport. I stayed put, because I knew what was coming next; moments later the air vibrated with Joan’s rendition of the spiritual from which thousands of people had drawn strength for hundreds of years. She was free at last, she sang, free from the world and all its sin; she was free at last, for she had been to the top of the mountain.