Rendezvous At The Counter: A Tale of Forbidden Touch

I decided last week that I need a new knitting project, not because I need to remain “productive” in this period of social isolation, but because knitting has proven an effective method of self-soothing in the past. However, I find myself in an awkward position: on the one hand, my knitting skills remain … rudimentary. On the other hand, I am really bored of knitting rectangles, i.e. blankets and scarves.

I put this problem to Dr. Lake and she suggested that I knit myself a poncho, which was a good suggestion since a poncho is basically a rectangle with a hole in it. And I’m already a pro at holes—have made several in my previous knitting projects without even trying! After perusing possible poncho patterns, however, I started to feel that I am not a poncho person.

That is, I was not inspired as I scrolled through pictures of poncho-clad ladies strolling carelessly on the beach living their best poncho lives until, all of a sudden, I read the words midnight rendezvous capelet and my heart skipped a beat, because it struck me that perhaps I am a midnight rendezvous capelet person.

In a gesture of radical hope, therefore, I have decided to knit myself a midnight rendezvous capelet.

I describe this as a project of radical hope because embarking upon it entails committing to at least three debatable propositions.

  1. That I have the knitting skills to make such a garment (Louise, what do you think? Mum has her doubts. If you don’t think I’m up to it, could you recommend, shall we say, a more basic capelet? Something in the line of a happy-hour-with-colleagues-capelet? Or perhaps an elevenses capelet?).
  2. That rendezvous—that is, a meeting of at least two people, in which at least one person has to leave their home—will be an existent social practice at some time in the future.
  3. That I and also other people with whom to rendezvous will exist in the future. (One might ask: is a midnight rendezvous capelet still a midnight rendezvous capelet if there are no vous with whom to rendez? But let’s not ask that question.)

Even if all of the above conditions were to obtain, it remains true that I’m really only “a midnight rendezvous capelet person” in an aspirational sense; I’m usually tucked up in bed by 10pm. I’m trying to recall, in fact, the last time I stayed out after 10pm and I honestly can’t remember. Have I ever stayed out past 10pm, I wonder? Anything that happened more than a fortnight ago now feels indistinct, bathed in the sepia-tinted glow of yesteryear.

Ahh, the very very very early 2020s. It was a simpler time, wasn’t it?

EHA, do you remember how, in the olden times of Before March, we’d rendezvous at midday for lunch on Montana, and we’d often sit outside, sometimes at a table just 2 or 3 feet away from other people?

Katie, do you remember how, Before March, we went to plyojam and got all sweaty in a room with other people and then we went to Trader Joe’s and we didn’t have to queue somberly outside before entering and I didn’t even wipe down the cart handle?

KJ Rabbit, do you remember how, Before March, we had a midday rendezvous at that place on La Brea and when you asked if you could get something left off your sandwich the woman at the register was a bit snippy, like, “Umm, do you have an allergy or is it, like, just a preference?”

Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a snippy person at a counter now!

And, speaking of counters, remember when surfaces were just useful things to put other stuff on, and not death traps needing to be constantly wiped down like the sneeze-droplet-filled-germ-lairs that we all now know them to be?

That’s how I know that all those pictures of poncho-clad ladies are from Before March: they’re all languorously draped over various pieces of furniture without a care in the world! One woman, who clearly has a death wish, is leaning on a banister, and there’s no Lysol in sight. Doesn’t she know banisters are high-touch areas?

Knitting a midnight rendezvous capelet would also, then, express another hope: that we will at some point in the future once again inhabit a world in which, we will not only rendezvous, but, by God, we will also sidle up to counters and blithely lean on them with wild abandon.

 

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Day 217: the 405 is closed

405 is closed

Recently a series of memories have become threaded together in my mind, like worry beads on a string that I find myself turning over and over.

The first memory is from thirty years ago. Our family was on a summer holiday somewhere in the Mediterranean. We were staying in an apartment. I remember lying on the thin twin bed in the bedroom I was sharing with my brother and sobbing.

All I could say over and over was, “I don’t have any friends.”

This wasn’t really true. I was maybe fourteen—the age my son is now—and had some lovely friends; but I also felt immensely guarded in front of them—in front of everybody—as if the real me was shielded by a carapace and that the jig would be up if I ever let it down. I imagine this to be a fairly universal experience of adolescence.

My Mum had tried comforting me, “You DO have friends!” to no avail.

Then my Dad came in, and he took a different tack. I cried and he sat on the bed next to me. I tried to explain. “I just don’t feel like anybody really knows me. I feel so lonely.”

“You and I are very similar,” he observed, and he caught my attention. I suppressed my sobs to try to listen to what he was saying.

“Do you think I have a lot of friends?” he asked.

Yes …” I said hesitantly.

It was certainly the case that my Dad appeared to me to be enmeshed in a large and close-knit social network. If I picture my Dad in his element, I imagine him sitting at the center of a crowded dinner table, his chin leaning on his hands interlocked together, a wry smile playing on his lips. My parents were friends with lots of couples and I remember observing that, with many of them, it seemed that the initial connection was through my Dad; they were people he knew from his psychotherapy training, or other people he knew through his work.

As a result, what he said next startled me.

“No,” he said, “I don’t.” “And I never have,” he added. “Because I don’t need them.”

I frowned, feeling that this talk was not headed in the direction I had anticipated.

“And I think you’re the same,” he said. “People like you and me, we don’t need other people, we’re loners.”

I frowned again, trying to take in what he was saying.

“I mean, I have Mum,” he added, “but I don’t really have any close friends.”

I reflected to myself then and also later that I didn’t quite understand where he was positioning my mother in this equation.

“But,” I hesitated, “but that’s not what I want. I want friends.”

He nodded, as if he understood, “yes, but people like you and me, we’re special, we’re thinkers, and people are never going to understand us, so we’ll never really have any friends.”

I’ve reflected long and hard and talked many times in therapy about whether my Dad meant what he was saying here and what effect he meant it to have.

I did not react positively. “If that’s true,” I yelled, “then I don’t want to be like you. That’s not what I want.”

He kind of shrugged as if to say you get what you get and you don’t get upset. I started sobbing harder than ever and he left the room.

***

I was reminded of this exchange by a recent conversation with a friend. I was expressing some version of this same feeling, a kind of cosmic loneliness. Now it manifested as a yearning not for friends, per se, but for some deep sense of connection, a sense of seeing someone and feeling seen in return, a kind of connection that, my Dad’s comments to the contrary notwithstanding, I had always thought was a kind of intimacy I wanted and was capable of but that increasingly seemed to recede from view the more I tried to reach for it.

I confessed to my friend that I felt this gnawing envy of people—like him—who seemed to feel in their bones a kind of sureness about the person they had chosen to make a life with. He agreed that he was very fortunate in this respect—though, of course, it’s not only good fortune, it’s also inhabiting an attitude that I’ve always struggled to muster.

I started talking then, about the many other sources of joy and fulfillment in my life—most of all, the unfolding, intricate relationships I have with my children, these creatures whom I know both more and less intimately every day as their worlds become ever wider. I was talking about those rewards and more, but also how the whole was pervaded by a sense of something missing.

Then my friend observed, quite cheerfully, “Well, maybe this is just your lot in life.”

“My lot in life?” I repeated, a little taken aback.

“Yeah, I mean, maybe you’re just not a person who is ever going find happiness in a conventional monogamous relationship and you have to look elsewhere in your life for other sources of joy and fulfillment,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Hmmm.” I thought about this. “I mean, that makes sense but ….”

I paused and laughed. “There’s just something about that phrase, ‘your lot in life.’ It makes me think, I dunno … governessspinsternun

***

For the next few days, I would murmur to myself, “it’s just my lot in life,” and crack up. It so vividly summoned a very particular style—both behaviorally and sartorially—of renunciation. I would probably need a plain, high-necked black or possibly dark grey worsted dress, I thought to myself. Possibly a twill. Something that wouldn’t show the dirt. And my hair scraped back in a severe bun. I pictured Miss Hardbroom from The Worst Witch television series (based on the books by Jill Murphy), which I’ve been watching with the younger. I could fancy myself as a strict witchy headmistress resigned to my lot in life of keeping all the young witches in line.

A movie I watched by myself with great pleasure the other week, “The Little Hours,” slyly draws out what I started to think of as the comedy of closure … that is, the comedy of being closed in, closed down, and making do with your “lot in life.”

The movie’s plot is based loosely on the first and second stories from day three of Boccaccio’s Decameron. The main characters are three nuns—Sisters Alessandra, Ginevra, and Fernanda. While Ginevra and Fernanda are relatively content with their vocation, Alessandra, who has joined the convent at the insistence of her wealthy father, pines for a worldly life. In one scene, Alessandra’s father, Ilario (Paul Reiser), comes to visit Alessandra (Alison Brie) at the convent and tries to comfort her.

ILARIO: I know how eager you are to be married, my baby. I know, but maybe it’s … maybe that’s not your calling. How’s your embroidery going? You still doing that?

ALESSANDRA: Mmm-hmm.

ILARIO: Good, ‘cause you’re so good, and maybe that’s your calling, you know. Some people, it’s marriage and family and the warmth of a home, and maybe for you it’s … it’s the detailed embroidery. You know, keep … please. Keep your chin up.

and maybe for you it’s … it’s the detailed embroidery. Dads, eh? They always know just how to comfort a daughter.

There’s a passage in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Villette (1853)—a novel that I read when I was about the same age I had that conversation with my Dad—that perfectly captures the soul-crushing effort of striving to be satisfied with your lot in life in a world that feels like it is closing in. Here is Lucy Snowe, Villette’s narrator:

Those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools or of other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are liable to be suddenly and for a long while dropped out of the memory of their friends, the denizens of a freer world. Unaccountably, perhaps, and close upon some space of unusually frequent intercourse—some congeries of rather exciting little circumstances, whose natural sequel would rather seem to be the quickening than the suspension of communication—there falls a stilly pause, a wordless silence, a long blank of oblivion. Unbroken always is this blank; alike entire and unexplained. The letter, the message once frequent, are cut off; the visit, formerly periodical, ceases to occur; the book, paper, or other token that indicated remembrance, comes no more.

Always there are excellent reasons for these lapses, if the hermit but knew them. Though he is stagnant in his cell, his connections without are whirling in the very vortex of life. That void interval which passes for him so slowly that the very clocks seem at a stand, and the wingless hours plod by in the likeness of tired tramps prone to rest at milestones—that same interval, perhaps, teems with events, and pants with hurry for his friends.

The hermit—if he be a sensible hermit—will swallow his own thoughts, and lock up his own emotions during these weeks of inward winter. He will know that Destiny designed him to imitate, on occasion, the dormouse, and he will be conformable: make a tidy ball of himself, creep into a hole of life’s wall, and submit decently to the drift which blows in and soon blocks him up, preserving him in ice for the season.

Let him say, “It is quite right: it ought to be so, since so it is.” And, perhaps, one day his snow-sepulchre will open, spring’s softness will return, the sun and south-wind will reach him; the budding of hedges, and carolling of birds, and singing of liberated streams, will call him to kindly resurrection. Perhaps this may be the case, perhaps not: the frost may get into his heart and never thaw more; when spring comes, a crow or a pie may pick out of the wall only his dormouse-bones. Well, even in that case, all will be right: it is to be supposed he knew from the first he was mortal, and must one day go the way of all flesh, “As well soon as syne.”

Following that eventful evening at the theatre, came for me seven weeks as bare as seven sheets of blank paper: no word was written on one of them; not a visit, not a token.

About the middle of that time I entertained fancies that something had happened to my friends at La Terrasse. The mid-blank is always a beclouded point for the solitary: his nerves ache with the strain of long expectancy; the doubts hitherto repelled gather now to a mass and—strong in accumulation—roll back upon him with a force which savours of vindictiveness. Night, too, becomes an unkindly time, and sleep and his nature cannot agree: strange starts and struggles harass his couch: the sinister band of bad dreams, with horror of calamity, and sick dread of entire desertion at their head, join the league against him. Poor wretch! He does his best to bear up, but he is a poor, pallid, wasting wretch, despite that best.

Towards the last of these long seven weeks I admitted, what through the other six I had jealously excluded—the conviction that these blanks were inevitable: the result of circumstances, the fiat of fate, a part of my life’s lot and—above all—a matter about whose origin no question must ever be asked, for whose painful sequence no murmur ever uttered. Of course I did not blame myself for suffering: I thank God I had a truer sense of justice than to fall into any imbecile extravagance of self-accusation; and as to blaming others for silence, in my reason I well knew them blameless, and in my heart acknowledged them so: but it was a rough and heavy road to travel, and I longed for better days.

I tried different expedients to sustain and fill existence: I commenced an elaborate piece of lace-work, I studied German pretty hard, I undertook a course of regular reading of the driest and thickest books in the library; in all my efforts I was as orthodox as I knew how to be. Was there error somewhere? Very likely. I only know the result was as if I had gnawed a file to satisfy hunger, or drank brine to quench thirst.

***

My therapist’s office is on the fifth floor of a high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard. You get a good view of the smoke curling up from the fires up there. The other day I barely made it on time because of the fires’ impact on traffic.

When the Lyft driver had picked me up in Burbank, I’d asked how the traffic was.

“Oh, it’s terrible,” he said.

“Right, because the 405’s closed because of the fire?” I said.

“Oh no, it’s not closed,” he said.

“It’s not?” I was surprised, having been following traffic updates all morning.

“No,” he said.

“Oh, it must have just re-opened then, at least that’s good!” I said, assuming he must have more up-to-date information than I did.

So we took the 5 to the 405 until we had to get off at the 101 interchange, because the twenty-five mile section of the 405 between the 101 and Sunset Boulevard was closed because of the fires.

“Huh, you were right!” he exclaimed. “But it was open last night!” he protested. “What was that you said about a fire?”

“The fire started early this morning,” I explained wearily. “The freeway’s been closed for the last couple of hours.” I didn’t bother stifling a sigh.

For the next hour and a half we crawled along in a line of cars that snaked its way through every inch, it seemed, of Bel Air, the roads so winding you could see nothing ahead, the air growing thicker as we neared the site of the fire.

I was irritated with the Lyft driver for dismissing my information but, more than that, I was angry with myself. I knew the 405 was closed. But I wanted to believe he knew better. So I suspended disbelief and assented to the possibility that my information was wrong. Deep down, though, I think I knew I was right. I knew the 405 would be closed but I didn’t want to argue with him about it, so I just let it play out. As we sat at a standstill in the middle of Bel Air and he cursed under his breath, I wished that I had tried harder to make him understand that things would turn out this way, that I had seen it coming. Maybe we still would have been sitting here stuck, unable to see the road ahead; but our nerves wouldn’t have ached with the strain of long expectancy. I took out my knitting and tried to keep my chin up.

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Day 201: an even tension

In the first week of my undergraduate class on literature and attachment, we discussed excerpts from John Bowlby’s foundational work, A Secure Base (1988) and Bruno Latour’s essay “Factures/Fractures: From the Concept of Network to the Concept of Attachment” (1999). Although Bowlby and Latour approach the subject from very different perspectives, they agree on one thing: there’s no wriggling out of attachment.

As Bowlby writes, having explained the three basic attachment patterns—secure, anxious resistant, and anxious avoidant (based on the findings of his former student, Mary Ainsworth), “each pattern of attachment, once developed, tends to persist.”

As Latour puts it, “We can substitute one attachment for another, but we cannot move from a state of attachment to that of unattachment.”

For Latour, the important factor is not the attachment pattern but the object to which the subject is attached, and whether, as he puts it quite starkly, the object is good or bad, “morbid” or “redemptive.”

Latour doesn’t elaborate on what he means by good or bad but his main example is that a smoker cannot hope to become detached from smoking but only “that other attachments will come to substitute for this one.” Latour cites a study about substituting methadone for heroin, so I took that model to be what he had in mind, that model being one in which “the aim is to substitute methadone, a legal, oral opiate with a long half-life, for the illicit, parenterally administered heroin, which is associated with a high risk of morbidity and mortality. (Anderson, I B and T E Kearney. “Use of methadone” Western journal of medicine vol. 172,1 (2000): 43-6.)

Or, in the example I breezily presented to my students, “I get really distracted by my phone,” I confessed earnestly, “but my Mum just taught me to knit and I’ve found I’m spending much less time on my phone!” Here, I gestured smugly to the knitting stashed in my Virginia Woolf tote bag.

The class went really well and ended on a high note when one student posed a final question that used the Bowlby to gain a new vantage point upon the Latour.

She looked worried as she asked it. “So Latour says the important question is whether your attachments are good or bad. And that you can substitute good attachments for bad attachments.” But what,” she continued, “if you’re the anxious resistant type, and you’re just always attached to bad things. Or what if your attachment pattern makes things … even good things … bad?”

I was so jubilant at how she’d so deftly woven the two texts together that, in the moment, I just stood there, admiring the question as it hung in the air like a glittering spider’s web in the rain; and then we were out of time, so I just grabbed my knitting and left.

***

Knitting insinuated its way into my life so smoothly. These days when I leave the house for work my last minute check has an extra step: phone; wallet; keys; laptop; knitting. Part of the reason knitting integrated itself so seamlessly into my daily routine was that the knitting itself was easy. I was knitting a blanket square by square. Once I’d got the hang of casting on and off, completing a square was delightfully straightforward. My hands wanted to knit even when my hands were empty. Sometimes when I wasn’t knitting, I would fantasize about knitting. Dive under; loop over; push through; slide off; dive under; loop over; push through; slide off.

But then, a few nights ago, I hit a snag. A strange excrescence had appeared out of nowhere below my right needle, its lumpy appearance marring the effect of the rows of even stitches below it. What to do? I had absolutely no idea, I realized, of how to go backwards. Stay calm, I counseled myself. Theseus used the ball of thread to get out of the labyrinthYou just have to retrace your steps. 

I tried, gingerly, going one stitch back and then one stitch forward; but neither undid the mess. I felt myself start to panic.

What’s done cannot be undone.

I was completely stuck. Suddenly I was just holding a ball of wool and two sticks. What the fuck even are these, I thought to myself, staring at the knitting needles in dismay. The whole thing had become completely illegible to me, just a big, poky, tangle.

It was time to start reading stories to the younger and she’d gotten to bed late the night before.

She came in to see what I was doing.

“It’s all gone wrong!” I wailed.

She sighed.

“Just call Elo!” she urged.

“I can’t,” I whimpered, “it’s in the middle of the night there.”

She sighed again.

“Well just call her tomorrow.”

I knew I needed to lay the knitting down and start reading but I could feel tears filling my eyes at the very thought—at the idea that I would lay it down and not know where to pick up.

Let me just try to figure out how I can fix it, I thought. I Googled unraveling knitting and watched snippets of various YouTube videos and found a technique for unknitting stitch by stitch. But it didn’t seem to work and the sensible no-nonsense tones of the knitting YouTubers rubbed me the wrong way. I was left with even more of a mess.

My cheeks hot and my heart beating fast, I laid down the knitting and picked up Mary Poppins, which we’d just started reading. The younger was now overtired and fussy and I was irritable. She wanted Fudge-a-mania not Mary Poppins.

“But the thing is,” I tried to explain steadily, my voice growing shrill, “I actually don’t think I can read that book out loud again.”

There would be no spit-spot into bed that night.

***

When she was finally asleep and I went back to my own bed I thought about going to sleep but I just couldn’t. I picked up the knitting. It didn’t look so bad. But when I studied the two needles and the stitches held between and tried to imagine how to undo the defective stitches or transfer them from the right needle to the left, it engendered the same feeling of vertiginous panic as contemplating a horrendous equation. I felt nauseous.

All of my attempts at rescue produced more knots, but also, unfairly, a bigger hole. I watched more YouTube videos and finally decided, close to midnight, to attempt a drastic solution. I removed both needles and started unraveling my knitting down until I reached the part that was free of knots and holes. The yarn yielded stitch by stitch, as I gently pulled. It was pleasurable the way that ripping something along a perforated edge or toppling a line of dominoes is pleasurable. I could see the danger; once you started unraveling, it was difficult to stop. But I did stop. And then, holding my breath, I re-inserted the needle. It seemed to work. I knit forward with alacrity, eager to finish the square. The finished square was not perfect; there was a deviation in one of the rows, like a scar, I thought; but I felt ecstatic.

It was after midnight.

***

The next morning, galvanized by my triumph, I talked sternly to the younger, with Poppins-like authority, about dawdling at bedtime.

But as we were walking to school I admitted, “But it was my fault too. Because I wanted us to get bed early but then I got distracted by trying to fix my knitting.”

“Why did you get distracted?”

“I don’t know. I just felt like I couldn’t put it down.”

“It’s like knitting is your screen time,” she observed casually.

“Hmm,” I said.

“And then you stayed up till midnight knitting,” she went on. “You’re really addicted to it!” she exclaimed.

“Huh,” I said, uncertainly. “I guess I am.”

***

I have to finish proofreading something tomorrow. I had been putting off even starting it for weeks and today was the day I had resolved to start. So I went to the yarn store and picked out some beautiful soft yarn for a new project. It was thicker than the yarn I’d been using for the blanket so I needed some new needles, but I wasn’t sure what size. I asked the very patient assistant who had already been advising me.

“Well, it depends on your knitting style,” she said. “What’s your pattern, do you tend to knit loosely or tightly?”

I shook my head. “I really … I really have no idea,” I said … “Uh, perhaps you could look at my knitting and tell me?”

She smiled, but her gaze did not drop down to the knitting in my bag to which I was gesturing. Instead she held my gaze for a second, strode to the back of the store, grabbed something off a rack on the back wall, and then strode back to the cash register.

“I think these will suit you,” she said, handing me a pair of needles, each one the thickness of a fountain pen. I believed her.

 

knitting

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Day 196: why did the Kindle go to the knitting store?

A and I are lying in bed. 

A: None of my jokes make sense.

Me: What do you mean?

A: OK, here’s one. Why did the Kindle go to the knitting store?

Me: I don’t know, why?

A: Because it wanted to make a sweater.

Me:

A: See, it doesn’t make sense.

Me: I do see. I mean, it kind of makes sense, it’s just not funny.

A: Here’s another. Why did the mean guy go the knitting store?

Me: I don’t know.

A: Because he was a knit-wit.

Me: Oh, that makes sense!

A: But that one doesn’t count because I got it from a joke book.

Me: Oh.

A: Here’s another one. Why did the frog get a Kindle?

Me: I don’t know.

A: Because he wanted to learn how to read. See! None of them make sense.

Me: Or maybe they make too much sense? Why do they all involve knitting stores or Kindles?

A: I don’t know!

Me: I think I’ve got a good knitting store one.

A: OK.

Me: Why did the woman go to the knitting store?

A: I don’t know.

Me: Because she was coming unraveled.

A:

Me: Do you know what unraveled means?

A: No.

Me: It means coming apart.

A:

Me: So she’s going to the knitting store because she hopes they can knit her back together!

A: It still doesn’t make sense.

Me: OK. [Feeling I’m on the verge of a breakthrough]: Is the reason why Kindles and knitting stores because Kindle begins with K-I-N and knitting store begins with K-N-I?

A [rolling her eyes]: Um, no.

Me. Oh, I thought of another. Why did the Kindle go to the knitting store?

A: I don’t know.

Me: Because it thought it was a spindle!

A:

Me: It’s because a spindle is a thing for making wool, like in Sleeping Beaut

A [interrupting]: I know what a spindle is! It still doesn’t make sense.

Me: because it was a Kindle but it thought it was a spindle.

A: [disparagingly] Oh, because they rhyme?

Me [meekly]: Yes … because they rhyme …

A: [mulling it over] Eh … it’s good enough.

 

A few minutes later M comes in.

 

Me [to M]: Hey, why did the Kindle go to the knitting store?

M: Umm … so it could tell its yarn?

Me [delighted]: Oh, that’s good!

A [primly, to M]: but that’s not the right answer.

Me: Yeah, but his is better than mine.

[to M]: My answer was because the Kindle thinks it’s a spindle.

A [to M]: See?

M [perplexed]: Uh …. no. Why would the Kindle think … it’s a spindle?

A [scornfully]: Umm, because they rhyme.

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