And with the products of my needles, I was advertising my mating potential no more subtly than a male peacock fanning his tail. The traditional association of needlework with morally commendable women described in Proverbs 31: 10-13 had trickled into my consciousness: “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies . . . She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.” I would make a good wife, I was saying with my gifts, even though I also suspected that this boy and I would never manage marriage.

I felt like a stitch dropped so far down in a piece of knitting that no one would ever be able to pick me up again.

It was another of our family’s moves that caused us to break up. In my senior year, my father was promoted, and we moved back to Phoenix. Only months later, I found myself once again in Tucson, unpacking my suitcases in Manzanita Dorm at the University of Arizona. I didn’t want to be there. I’d had scholarships to women’s colleges Back East, but my father said no; since I’d only be getting married and having children, it would be a bad investment. By then, my family and I had moved seventeen times; I had attended twelve different schools in thirteen years. And during that time, the U. of A. had been dubbed and dismissed by my father, a cum laude graduate of Princeton (class of ’39) and now reaching the top of a regional bank’s chain of command, as a fraternity-run party school for yahoos.

Melville writes in Moby-Dick of the life-line, the “monkey rope” that secures Queequeg working in the water to Ishmael moored more safely in the boat. Bound together, their survival depends on each other. Suddenly, it seemed that no one held the other end of my line. And when I confessed to him, timidly, my ambition to study literature and write, he scoffed, “You? What would you have to say?” I felt like a stitch dropped so far down in a piece of knitting that no one would ever be able to pick me up again.

Dalecarlian Girl Knitting. Cabbage Margit, 1901
(Oil on canvas, 72 x 57 cm )
BY Anders Zorn
The National Museum of Sweden

So I knitted. My grades plummeted while I made sweaters for myself that I wore even when the temperature soared above seventy. Knit one, pearl two — I knitted during sorority meetings while curfews were decided. I knitted while alumnae teas were planned. Knitted instead of reading Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” The woolly fabric growing in my lap, the plush ball of yarn by my side. Perhaps the pace of Madame DeFarge’s knitting needles that Dickens describes as so “disconcerting” to all around her was not only a display of stony revolutionary zeal; perhaps it was also a way of steadying herself during a time a person could be annihilated in a flash. A way of steeling herself at the sight of all those severed heads.

I was married after my sophomore year, to the only man I knew other than my father who liked to quote poems over dinner. (Larry was particularly fond of Robert Browning, and I can still hear him growling, “G-r-r-r, there go, my heart’s abhorrence!” over a pepperoni pizza.) He was also a gifted high school music director, the only man I knew with an interest in classical music as passionate as that of my father, who, in rare moments of exuberance, mimicked Toscanini in our living room.

The following summer we moved to San Bernardino, where the phenobarbital a doctor prescribed (to counteract the side-effects of an asthma medication he had also prescribed) caused hallucinations. The psychiatrist’s diagnosis was “schizophrenia.” Shock treatments, he said, were the only solution, filling out forms to commit me to the state mental institution. Instead, Larry hurriedly made reservations for us both to fly back to Phoenix.

Recovering among the orange groves of a sanatorium, I knitted. And knitted. Too tranquillized to follow even a paragraph of a novel, I made sweaters for my family, who could visit me for only fifteen minutes at a time, and not even every day. I knitted a dark brown crew-neck pullover for my husband, a bright yellow angora V-neck vest for his sister, an olive green cable-knit cardigan for me. Increasingly intricate patterns. Two knit, three pearl. Seed stitch. My mother brought me the wool. Over and over, holding on to the needles, the yarn — rope that pulled me through.