Edie and Me, We Knitted a Scarf

Edie was the one who started it. And it was just like Edie, she didn’t say a word, she just got some wool together, some magenta, and some fluffy lilac, and she sat down and started knitting. She wasn’t even the sort of girl who did a lot of knitting or embroidery or any of that sort of thing. Just one afternoon, when we’d finished watching a movie or something and it was raining hard outside, she took up the knitting needles and started going to work.

“What’s that going to be?” I asked her.

“A scarf. Pretty sure.”

“Okay.”

I checked a few texts on my phone, touched up my nails a bit. I knew Edie, once she had her teeth into something she was going to get it done.

“Lottie,” she said, recovering my attention, “what colour do you think I should use next?”

#

Me and Edie, we were twins. And also not twins.

Put it another way: we were cousins. But we were born on the same day, at nearly the same hour, to mothers who were close sisters, who were only two years apart, but who looked so alike that it wouldn’t be a fantasy for somebody to think they were twins.

Me and Edie were kinda like that. You were never going to mistake as for each other, but we have a firm family resemblance that meant no-one was ever going to mistake us for strangers either. And since our mothers were so close, we ended up growing up together. Though we might not live together it felt as if we lived in two houses, and that the two of us were pretty much always together at one of these houses or the other.

She was always the dominant one. Or at least, she was the one who led the way, she was the boldest, and the slightly more colourful, the quickest thinker, the one most likely to leap before she looked. I was more like the one who leapt a few seconds behind her, sometimes seeing where she landed, sometimes not.

#

So, when she decided knitting scarves was the thing for her, she got into it with gusto. She wanted to use as many colours as she could, as many different stitches. She asked her mother, who just shook her head and told her she was only knew purl and plain, so Edie would have to look anything else up. She only had a few colours of wool, so Edie unpicked some old jumpers and stitched them on into her work. And when that ran out, we went shopping for more.

Edie didn’t think about the practicalities.

“We really can’t afford all this.”

“Of course, we can,” and she flashed me a proud wink. A couple of balls slid down her top and into her bra.

“Edie!”

“What?”

“We’ll get caught.”

“No, we won’t,”

Edie was like that, she never got caught.

#

Her scarf was getting long now. We sat in front of the fire on a snow day as she threaded some mustard yellow into the enterprise. She looked at me, “Well, aren’t you going to help then?”

“Me?”

“No, the other person in this room right now, the one who’s hiding behind that net curtain.”

“I don’t even know how to knit.”

“Neither did I. But the knitting teaches you. Trust me.”

#

I did trust Edie. My father used to say that that was my problem. I was so enamoured of her that I didn’t think straight, and when she was around, I was not myself, I was not the good girl I was at heart. Mum didn’t like that, I could tell. And Dad, he didn’t properly like Aunt Sylvia. I never heard him say so, but I know he didn’t. And I think he resented the closeness that they had. It was something with such a hard shell, he couldn’t break into it. It would always be Mum and Sylvia, first and foremost, sisters forever, and as much as she loved Dad –in a whole other way that didn’t belong to sisterhood – it was still not going to be same degree of love and closeness. And Dad knew it.

And he thought he knew me. “She’s a… difficult influence on you. You’re not the same good girl you are without her when she’s with you.”

And I couldn’t understand what he was talking about, because when wasn’t I with Edie? Me and Edie were a set, we were a package deal. We belonged together. And whoever I was was made up out of Edie as much as it was out of anything else in this world.

She was the one who convinced me that we should run away when we were ten, and it was her idea to stowaway on that train. We had no idea we’d get that far, or what we were going to do when our food ran out. I was sitting on a wall in a park in a city I couldn’t name, I was crying, with Edie’s arm around my shoulders, when the police showed up, offering us jellybeans, and telling us they could take us home.

It was Edie’s idea when we briefly took up smoking at age thirteen.

It was Edie who read my eyes and nodded when we were fourteen and the boys we were hanging with thought it would be fun to play a few rounds of strip poker.

Really, Dad, the knitting of an overlong scarf should have been the least of your worries.

#

And we were nineteen by then. The worry really should have simmered down. But Dad still had his hang-ups, and, of course, he still saw me through Daddy-lenses, some five years or so younger than I really was.

But Edie was right about knitting. It did just kind of teach itself to you. Edie took one end of the scarf and I took the other, and we extended it out from each end, a riot of colours, a mish-mash of stitches, and we threw in some patterns, we grew and we experimented.

And one day we stood in the lounge and realised that the scarf had grown so long that we could stand from wall to wall and it still didn’t stretch all the way out.

“That’s way too long to be a scarf,” I stated the obvious.

“Hm, agreed, well let’s turn it into a blanket. For a king-sized bed.”

She just wanted to keep on knitting and knitting. And she didn’t want to start something new, she wanted to knit this, this scarf-or-blanket-or-something that she’d begun. This was her thing. And when Edie had a thing…

#

It got to the point where we didn’t need to be together to knit anymore. We’d taken up random spots on the side of the scarf and started extending it out into a blanket. But I could do it from home, and Edie could do it from her new flat, and it wouldn’t matter. Everything I knitted from home just flowed on into the new blanket. It didn’t care about distance, or solid objects, or weather or any of that nonsense. It knew where its home was and it just found its way there.

#

Two years later, Edie got married.

I liked Phil. Phil was a cool guy. He was straight and upfront and funny and - I don’t mind admitting it – easy enough on the eye.

Edie kept telling me, “We really need to get you a boyfriend.”

I blushed, shook my head.

And then she’d say, “we really need to get you a fiancé.”

“Maybe we should work on getting you hitched first, before he changes his mind.”

“He won’t,” she said.

And he wouldn’t. There were strands of his hair, and the remains of one of his old jerseys knitted into the big blanket, which was way bigger now than would fit on Edie’s new king-sized bed. But that was fine, because she just folded it over a few times, and she was warm and safe beneath it. And part of Phil was always there, always with her and holding, keeping her warm and safe, even when he wasn’t.

She wanted some of her marriage to be in there as well though, so we took some of the leftover lace from her wedding dress and we knitted it right on in. The blanket had become a measure of the last two years of our lives, maybe longer, since she’d knitted her childhood in there early on. It was our lifeblood flowing around in the wool now, and something as big as her wedding had to be incorporated.

#

Edie was a beautiful bride. There was no way she couldn’t be. She’d cut a couple of squares off the blanket and hidden them in her bra.

“For luck.”

She chose a couple of blue squares.

“Fair enough.”

“I’m going to throw the bouquet in your direction. You need to get ready to catch it, okay? Promise? I want you to be the next bride.”

“Oh yeah? But whose?”

“I don’t know, I’ll think of somebody. As cool as Phil.”

Was any guy as cool as Phil? Edie had a knack for landing on her feet. And she sure seemed to have done so with Phil.

She walked down that aisle, white and angelic, golden and incandescent. All eyes were on her. She all-but glowed. She winked at me as she threw the bouquet neatly into my hands. A limousine whisked her away as if it were a carriage made of pumpkin, with horses magicked from scurrying little mice.

#

I didn’t sleep much that night. I was on edge, a little high, I was nervous. I was everything Edie should be feeling. And I felt as if she needed me. I sat in my bed and did some knitting. It just seemed like the right thing to do, a bevy of pinks and golds and love-touched sunsets, soothing and soft and warm. What I thought she might need – there in her splendid hotel room with only those two little blue squares to hold onto.

#

Edie’s house flowed with her knitting. People thought she was a bit weird. My Dad grumbled things a little less kind, and my Mum gave him sour, hard-edged glares. “They’re both in their twenties, Robert, don’t you think its time you got over all this?”

And Edie’s house was awesome. There was something amazing about a house that didn’t just have these lovely, home-knitted blankets, it had these home-knitted rugs that fanned out across every room, lapping at the edges, beginning to climb the wallpaper, teleporting out to the front porch in the form of a stripey doormat.

Why shouldn’t it be that way?

And I wasn’t left out. The blanket had migrated to my place as well – I had my own little rented cottage now, and on the bed there was a scrunched, multi-coloured knit blanket. It kept me warm no matter how cold the nights, but it could shield me from the summer heat as well. I felt safe under it. And it smelt of lilac, but also of roast chicken, or sweet caramel, or roses, or buttered popcorn. Whatever I needed it to smell of, it was there for me.

It found its way onto the wooden floors, pooling there as small rugs that quietly grew as we continued knitting them. They dug their way into the floorboards so they would never have to leave. So that I would never have to leave. I was confident that the landlord would one day sell the house, and he’d do so just when I had enough money saved up for the deposit. My blanket would make sure of it.

All was perfect, really.

And there were even some nights when Phil would come over. I knew it wasn’t really Phil, not quite, because he was still just a touch ethereal, and I could see the stitches when he was up close. But his hands still felt warm, and they were still so terribly good at what they did when we lay beneath the blanket in my bed together. His kisses still felt like flesh.

And it was okay.

I knew Edie didn’t mind.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work