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Allessandro Vittoria Italian, 1525–1608, The Annunciation, 1578–1588, Bronze, 38 ½ x 24 ¼ in. (97.8 x 61.6 cm), Edward E. Ayer Endowment in memory of Charles L. Hutchinson, 1942.249, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.

The Annunciation

“Do not be afraid, Mary. You have found favor with God.” Luke 1:30

(A woman sits on a museum bench, facing the audience. Behind her is projected an image of Alessandro Vittoria’s bronze relief, The Annunciation. She is dressed in an urban style, an art museum tote bag at her feet. She is knitting—quite fixedly. Her project is currently indeterminate and scarlet red. She looks up and attempts a joke.)

Be careful. Knitting needles are dangerous weapons, I’m told.

(She laughs—then clears her throat.)

I shouldn’t joke. It could be like the airport. I’m not supposed to have these in here. Museum policy. But don’t tell. Artie over there could get in trouble. (Conspiratorially.) I was lucky to find a museum guard who looks the other way. He has a knitting mother. He knows the compulsion a good worsted weight yarn in a stockinette stitch can have on a woman. Lets me do my thing. As long as I can sneak the needles in, I’m good to go.

(She nods in the direction of the audience, as if she is facing Vittoria’s bronze.)

Knitting away with the Virgin Mary . . . Mother of the divine Word. A graduate student stuck in chapter three of a five chapter dissertation will try almost anything.

(She smiles stiffly, continuing to knit as she speaks.)

Do you knit? Most people knit to relax. I do guilt knitting. Something to keep my hands busy while I’m hiding out. You don’t run into members of your committee at the Art Institute nearly as often as at the university library. And the knitting itself is quite reassuring . . . lots of repetition and forgiveness. You make a mistake, it unravels beautifully. You just . . . (pantomimes pulling out a row with a trill of the tongue) . . . pull it out. Untangling anything should be that easy. I like pulling out the stitches more than I like making them. It’s the historian in me. Unraveling patterns to find the—(self-importantly) single causal thread. (A sheepish smile.) Who’m I kidding? Unraveling the stitches means I’m not lugging around a seventeen-foot scarf that gives my procrastination away. I’ve been knitting ever since I stopped writing.

(Gestures again toward the bronze.)

I saw this bronze about then too. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Annunciation paintings are a dime a dozen in this place, but this one’s different.

She’s scared, isn’t she? I never pictured her scared before. She looks like she’s ready to bolt. I suppose that makes sense. She’s got a tough row to hoe. But there are worse things. Like never giving birth to any word worth anything—much less a Word to change the world. Most women don’t get annunciations in the middle of the night telling them they’re “highly favored” or solving the “seminal quandary” Dr. Landau posed in their proposal review. I’d like an angel Gabriel for that—thank you very much.

Jay thinks I’m working. He kisses me goodbye every morning—thinks I’m off to do footnote-collecting or page-formatting or spell-checking or whatever it is he thinks I do. I give him some story over dinner, and he always says the same thing, “One day closer to be done, babe.” One day closer to being done.

Some days I’m scared it’s going to get done, and it won’t be worth the trees I killed to write it. You know, not all of us are Marys. Some of us are just ordinary girls with greater than average intellect and a generally good work ethic. When we’re not hiding out and knitting.

(She sees Artie offstage, nods in his direction, and quickly puts knitting in bag; in explanation,)

We have a signal.

(Standing, she walks behind the bench, attempting to look casual. She is uncomfortable with her hands unoccupied.)

I guess I think if I sit here long enough and put in my time, Mother Mary will tell me her secret . . . how she got picked. How I can get picked too.

Trust me, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it would help. Museums freak me out. Too much space . . . too much white on the walls. Like a glowing white computer screen waiting for words.

(Examining picture again, a memory calms her.)

But then, there is that bronze . . . the wind whipping Mary’s veil. I can almost feel that wind—like afternoon storms when I was a girl. My dad spent his summers in Indonesia. He was a textile artist. I used to fall asleep under cloths he had painted by hand—the rain pounding the roof. He knew something about inspiration—my dad—about Spirit bigger than you that fills you up with color and life . . . and makes a difference. He always said he wanted to paint canvases that people could run between their fingers, cloths that wrapped babies, and covered marriage beds. Cloths that draped a memory.

(Looks in Artie’s direction again and takes out knitting.)

Coast is clear.

My dad’s why I’m a historian in the first place. I’m not an artist. But, he taught me the importance of everyday things, everyday events. My dad loved the weave of a cloth—the part that every thread would play. I thought that’s what studying history would mean—giving every thread its due.

But now I’m somewhere in the middle of my tome on “Emergent Nationalism and Labor Movements in Sumatran Palm Plantations, 1913–1947”—(self-deprecating aside) ya’ want to read it already don’t you?—and I wonder. I wonder if all these words and all this work matter nearly as much as I want them too. I never see the whole cloth anymore —just threads—and lately, even those slip in and out of focus.

The knitting helps. It reminds me what a single thread can do.

(She looks at yarn in her hands.)

And what it can’t.

I taught myself to knit seven months ago. I’m still not very good. I always get my stitches too tight—but I thought I could at least make something warm to wrap up a baby on cold nights. Something a child could remember as she grew. Jay and I’d been trying for two years. And then it came . . . my own Annunciation. My own personal Gabriel, in the form of two little lines on a plastic stick.

But not all of us are Marys.

No fall or trauma. No warning. Just some cramping and a thread of blood that didn’t stop for days. And even though there was no more baby to knit for, I couldn’t put the needles away. To see them sitting unused was just one more reminder that God hadn’t send an angel for me.

(After a pause.) They have these shadow puppet plays in Yogya. A puppeteer creates these epics by casting shadows on a lighted screen. The performance goes on all night. And my dad and I used to argue about what side of the screen to sit on—because you could sit on either. You could watch the puppeteer himself, from the backside of the screen, moving three or four puppets at a time . . . or you could sit in front and watch the illusion—the shadows coming to life. My dad always wanted the illusion, of course. I wanted to see the man behind the screen. I wanted to see the man making the shadows.

And I still do. I want to see this God whose shadows are supposed to be dancing across my life, because I think He’s left the building. “The Holy Spirit will overshadow you,” Gabriel says to Mary. I got no such promise from my Puppeteer.