In the days following Hurricane Katrina, I worried about the fate of a sweater.
I knit the sweater for my oldest friend and first crush. Over the years, he had presented me with stunning gifts. Pearl earrings one Christmas. Ruby ones the next. I have only made three sweaters for men and he got one of them.
The first time I saw him he was a pudgy 8-year-old with jet-black hair and he was standing in front of the class. Whether he was new to our second grade or displaying something for show-and-tell, I don’t recall. But there he was, a bright, witty little boy, who would become part of my daily landscape.
By sixth grade, his baby fat had disappeared and I was completely besotted. Somehow I managed to get a copy of his school picture and I preserved it carefully in the sleeve of my first wallet along with other photos and my lunch money. Sometimes I would take out the picture and moon over it. The little billfold was purple.
At that age infatuations are fierce, but come and go like summer thunder. When Mrs. Thompson assigned us opposite-gender science partners in junior-high “Bionomics,” I was terrified the semester would be spent seated next to a foul-breathed nerd, or worse, someone who detested me. But she matched me and Art, and given the fact that my affections had strayed to another boy, it was only moderately discomfiting to view scratched film strips of male anatomy, memorizing terms like vas deferens and seminal vesicle, in his company. Together we learned about the real nature of a “French kiss” -- I was appalled, and neither of us could forget the morning Mrs. T waltzed in after viewing Deep Throat ready with definitions and social commentary. What about the day she passed around birth control devices for our inspection -- condoms, diaphragms and IUDs -- and the class became a free-for-all of flying prophylactics? The '70s were a free-wheeling time.
After one Christmas break, Art didn’t didn’t return to school. Our language arts teacher, Miss Haggard, informed us that his mother had died. That she was an Osage princess, the granddaughter of a chief, was exotic enough, but now she was dead as well. To my adolescent mind this was all very fascinating and frightening.
When finally he did claim the seat he occupied in front of me, I remember marveling at how unchanged he looked. I hope I told him how sorry I was, but I don’t recall. Given the inchoate nature of adolescence, we probably tried to pretend that nothing had happened, though the knowledge of his mother’s death weighed on our class like a heavy snow.
In later years, I would learn more details of how she died. Thinking it was for the best, his parents hid the terminal nature of her ovarian cancer from their four boys. I’m not sure Art ever saw her again once she entered the hospital for the final time. It was as if she had vanished.
Her passing aged Art precipitously. He lost his levity and his basic shyness grew more pronounced. He had a small income from her too. Because he had this “oil money,” the Osage being one of America’s few nations with mineral wealth, Art could afford things most of us couldn’t. When he turned 16, he bought a brand-new Ford Pinto, gray with a red interior. He once stuffed 13 of us into that tiny hatchback for rides home after play practice. There were times this made me jealous, though I knew he had these things because he had no mother.
In high school, my crush resurfaced and I bothered him like a rat terrier. I goaded him into acting -- he had a stilted, awkward stage presence -- and prodded him to ferry me to marching band practice and parties. He was my prom date, me in a white eyelet dress with ribbon straps, him in a brown corduroy suit. We ate lunch together everyday at a tiny sandwich shop off campus -- Italian subs drenched in vinaigrette. Everyone assumed we were a couple. But we never kissed, with the exception of an awkward peck or two, and hugging him was like embracing bailing wire.
After many movies where I’d inch my hand closer to his so he could hold it, and countless dinners at my house or his, where he had every chance to put his arm around me or touch my knee or make out, nothing. It wouldn’t be the last time I would manufacture a boyfriend out of the ether, pining over unrequited love. That he became my most cherished friend is the important thing.
Fuzzily, I remember knitting the sweater in college. The sweater I made was a heavy lopi with a traditional Icelandic yoke. I thought the design’s grays, ecrus and blacks would set off his dark shiny hair and dark eyes. It was a good Boulder sweater, perfect for winter nights on CU’s campus. I knit most of it after work on my long winter break, desperately trying to finish by Christmas. The pullover knit up quickly in the round and I loved seeing how the addition of the creamy white stitches and coal-black yarn sparked the sweater into life. I anticipated the giving of it like the wearing of a new dress. It was the first sweater I ever knit for someone other than myself.
Though I have gifted many hats and bags, scarves and shawls, I have knit sweaters for only a handful of adults -- my husband, an old lover, and the dear friend who stood with me at my wedding, and Art. More prolific knitters may give sweaters away with abandon, but for me, because of the labor, they are laden with meaning.
Twelve years ago, almost to this day of my writing this, he died. He was at his home in the French Quarter, surrounded by his lover and friends. Like his mother, he died of cancer. Unlike her, his was complicated by AIDS. I spoke with him often in the weeks preceding his death, and he was both hopeful of recovery and pragmatic about his circumstances. He wanted desperately to attend my fall wedding.
I visited in the prior spring. After collecting me at New Orleans International, we passed a local cemetery. “That’s where we’ll be,” he said matter-of-factly.
He had diabetes and was losing the sensation of hot and cold in his feet. His bear-trap memory was loosening and he was plagued by painful sores in his mouth, which tortured his handsome face into a twisted mask. Still he was well enough for limited excursions, including of course, beignets at Café du Monde and dinner at Moscas. We spent hours and hours talking, me learning things about his violent childhood, things he never mentioned as a kid. He had yet to turn 33.
One day he said, “This is the beginning of the world shrinking.”
I lost nothing in the hurricane, but the tempest surfaced countless memories and stirred a well of grief. I’ll be chopping vegetables and think: He played the accordion. Or hear a jazz rendering of “Almost Like Being in Love,” and smile because he adored that song. Or move a planter while vacuuming and realize he shipped it to me from Gump’s. Or recall that he once argued a case before the Supreme Court and owned every Barbra Streisand album ever recorded.
Because of the high water table, New Orleans’s dead were traditionally buried above ground in vaults. Their crowded, sculptural Cities of the Dead make death seem more a part of things, less hidden. Morbidly, I’ve worried about Art’s body and its disposition in Katrina’s wake; I’ve read about coffins popping out of the ground and floating through the streets. I’m disturbed that I don’t know whether he was buried or cremated. His death, two weeks prior to my wedding, made it difficult for me to travel to his memorial. For me his death got caught in the swirl of deadlines, family, emotion and high dudgeon that was my wedding, and of course, today as we approach our 12th anniversary, I wish for all the world I had jumped on a plane, so I would know where he is. Or was.
I wonder how he would feel to see the city he loved so devastated. He adored New Orleans’s rhythms, laundry and red beans on Monday, crayfish etouffee on Friday, church, then brunch at Commander’s Palace on Sunday. I wonder about the sweater, too. Did Art relegate it to the Goodwill, knowing he would never wear it in New Orleans’s tumid climate? Did Joey find it stuffed in a closet, preserving it because it smelled like Art? Is it lost in the mud?
How many other precious things lie on the Gulf’s floor?
There’s this image I can’t shake: I imagine the sweater, arms opened to the sky, floating on a clear blue sea, and like the thousands of lost souls dead and alive in the wake of the storm, seeking safe purchase.
Leslie Petrovski is a freelance writer who who lives, writes and knits in Denver and Westcliffe, Colo. She keeps the blog www.nakeidknits.com.
Photo by Flickr user harakiri