Читать книгу Dandarians - Lee Ann Roripaugh - Страница 17

SENCHIMENTAL

As a child, I weld the words centimeter and sentimental together because my mother pronounces centimeter as senchimental (sen-chee-mental), which sounds much like sentimental to me.

When measuring her knitting, she counts out loud, under her breath: “One senchimental. Two senchimental. Three senchimental.”

I don’t know exactly what sentimental means, but it seems to summon forth some vintage, thrift-shop version of “love”—steeped in nostalgia’s mothballs, crimped with a wry twist of camp. It makes me think of the red construction paper and lace doily valentines we make in elementary school—slightly sour skins of Elmer’s glue peeling off our fingerprints—or those chalky candy hearts embossed in Courier font with words like “Yowza!” and “Hubba hubba!” It reminds me of the stuffed white cat with a red ribbon around its neck my mother stores inside a wooden crate in her closet—underneath her hand-painted silk kimonos, along with my father’s gold football from high school that hangs on a chain, and the oddly drawn, explanatory pictures of buffalo on onion-skinned blue airmail paper sent to her in Japan from my American grandparents’ ranch in Wyoming the year they spent apart before eloping.

One senchimental. Two senchimental. Three senchimental.

My mother’s knitting needles are gleaming and sharp. Her tongue is even sharper.

I confuse love with knitting and think love is quietly meted out like the sweaters my mother knits for me, centimeter by centimeter. Soft rasp of yarn tugged from the unraveling skein of Red Heart worsted purchased on sale at Woolworth’s, rapid patient ticking of the knitting needles’ shiny syncopated clicking, red loops bleeding out from the needles and dripping into a complex network of Knit and Purl that ultimately takes the shape of something one can concretely name: red sweater.

Red sweater studded with bright silver buttons to push through the stiff emptiness of the buttonholes.

My mother knits us all matching red sweaters—mother, father, daughter—my mother and father wearing sweaters with brown buttons made from crisscrossed leather. It makes her happy when we go together, in our matching sweaters, to Albertsons, Vaughn’s Pharmacy, or “Mongol-Merry Wards.” In this way, she knits us all together, I think, visually insisting we belong to one another. (Is it because none of us are exactly the same race? I sometimes wonder.)

One senchimental. Two senchimental. Three senchimental.