RIGHT AFTER I was born, my father called my Great-Aunt Kay from the hospital to tell her the news. He called collect, and she was so insulted that she refused the charges.
So heavy was the burden of her guilt that, for my sixth birthday, she made amends by shipping her mother's entire bedroom set to me. Which is just what every six-year-old girl wants, isn't it? A heavy, carved-walnut seven-piece Victorian bedroom set?
My room wasn't nearly big enough to contain it all. I was entrusted instead with just the bed, the shorter of the two dressers, and the dressing table-a real-live dressing table at which I sat, throughout my entire adolescence, and stared at myself. I looked nothing like the girls in Seventeen magazine. My room was nothing like their rooms, and my life, well, I might as well have been on a different planet.
But still I sat at that dressing table with my Maybelline mascara and my little tub of purple eye shadow-it had fine silver sparkles in it-carefully applying them and wishing they could somehow magically make me fit in.
By the end of college, I'd abandoned makeup entirely, dismissing it as the oppressive mantle of the patriarchy.
Then, in 2009, I got an email. Interweave was filming segments for its TV show during the National Needlework Association conference in Ohio. They wanted to do a "wild about wool" show, and would I like to host it? Sure, I said. I can prattle about wool for hours, cameras or no cameras.
Everything was fine until the producer emailed me the guidelines for being on the show. There in black and white, right below "get a professional manicure," were the dreaded words "apply your own camera-ready makeup."
The notion of talking to a potential audience of millions didn't scare me a bit. But the prospect of applying my own makeup? Terrifying. That tub of sparkly purple eye shadow had been gone for easily twenty years. I had nothing. They might as well have been asking me to hang drywall or remove an appendix.
I picked the fanciest hair salon in town, a hoity-toity place that offered sparkling water in wineglasses and advertised massages on the third floor, Botox on the fourth. I scheduled a makeup class. "Can I also schedule a manicure?" I found myself asking. How foreign were these words. Who are you, mouth, and what have you done with Clara?
Soon I was at the reception desk giving my name to a slender woman with perfect teeth and impossibly tall shoes. She tottered us to an area that resembled a giant church organ, only instead of keys and buttons and knobs it had tier upon tier of tubes and jars and bottles of color, color, and more color, stacked as high as the eye could see. (Which wasn't that high considering I'm only five foot two, but still.) A young woman swung around and smiled. I immediately forgot her name, but it ended with an "eeee" sound. We said our hellos and she glanced around me expectantly. I realized she was looking for the gawky preteen daughter I'd presumably brought for the lesson.
"Uh, no," I explained, "this is for me."
And we were off. She pulled my hair back and started rubbing my face with a cool gel that tingled. "I'm just applying a toner to make sure we get rid of any residual makeup."
"No worries there," I mumbled.
For almost an hour, I sat while she slathered, smeared, dotted, brushed, and blotted my face with layer upon layer of cream, paste, powder, and gel. She played a cruel trick of applying things on just one side of my face, then making me apply them on the other side. Soon I looked like a Raggedy Ann doll that had suffered a stroke. She kept notes of what she'd done, marking swirls and slashes on a drawing of a face and then adding product names and colors. The eyes alone had twelve different notations.
While I gazed at the weird face in the mirror, she asked if I felt confident enough to do this on my own.
"I think so," I lied.
"Should I start setting you up with some product?" she asked.
"Uh…sure."
The initial tab came in at $600. We slowly whittled away at her masterpiece until I left with just an etching of a face. It was still wildly over budget, but what could I do? This was television, after all.
The morning of the shoot, I met a friend at the hotel elevator. She studied my face for a good long time. "You look," she said finally, "like someone who got a very good night's rest." I decided she meant it as a compliment, but as soon as the taping was over, I returned to my room and used a hot towel to remove the well-rested face and let the puffy, jet-lagged one back out. On the washcloth was a clear outline of my face, like the Shroud of Turin.
The closest thing we have to cosmetology in the knitting world would have to be duplicate stitch. While the rest of what we do involves building our foundation from scratch, block by block, stitch by stitch, duplicate stitch is about etching new colors and fibers directly on top of existing ones. You may know it by its raised-pinkie name, Swiss darning. The goal is to trace the exact outline of the existing stitch with new yarn so that it is, in fact, a duplicate. But just like my TV-ready face, everybody knows that something is different.
The knitting show wasn't actually my first time on TV. In the 1980s, around the same time that duplicate stitch was being used on sweaters with giant shoulder pads, I appeared in a local-access TV show called Back Alley's. High school friends and I wrote, acted, directed, produced, filmed, and edited this path-breaking drama whose only real claim to fame was a guest appearance by the late Michael Landon. I played Alley, the wisecracking owner of the bar where all the characters hung out-when they weren't being hit on the head by watermelons and feigning amnesia in the hospital.
This led to an equally brief but illustrious career in television voice-overs that lasted, if my memory serves me right, exactly one commercial. I went into the dark, padded sound room of a Tucson studio and donned my headphones, each the size of a sweet roll. I gazed at my on-screen subject: a woman handing a bag to a customer and saying the words "thank you." That was my canvas.
I wanted this to be utterly seamless, so I got to work. What was her motivation? Did she like her job? Was this at the beginning or end of her shift? Had she eaten lunch yet? I looked closer. There was something in her expression…perhaps she and this man had been lovers years ago, and she was hoping he wouldn't remember-yet was secretly hurt that he didn't.
We recorded about thirty takes before the job was done. I tried to make my addition as smooth as possible, but I'm sure my voice, like even the most expertly worked duplicate stitch, still formed a slight bump on the scene's otherwise smooth surface.
That's how duplicate stitch works. It's the voice-over of the knitting world, a kind of lipstick or wig, press-on nails, a fresh coat of paint. Anything bigger and you're asking for trouble.
Not too long after we moved to Tucson, my brothers and I witnessed a failed duplicate stitch attempt. Both my parents had begun sowing their wild oats after the divorce was declared final. My mother dated an assortment of fellows, musicians and astronomers and waiters alike. My father soon fell in love with one of his college students. They made plans to marry, but there was a slight problem. She belonged to a church that didn't believe in divorce.
For the new marriage to take place at the church, my parents' marriage had to be declared null and void-not just from that day forward, but as in "never legitimately happened." So everyone filled out a heap of paperwork, answered a lot of nosy questions, and mailed in their checks. In return, the church pulled out its giant magic darning needle, threaded it with a particularly bright white acrylic, and proceeded to cover my legitmate childhood with shiny new pretend stitches.
Of course, the new stitches were perfectly obvious to everyone, like the clumsy detective wearing dark glasses and a false mustache and hiding behind a potted palm. I was unimpressed. But it was enough for the Powers that Be. History annulled, the marriage was allowed to proceed.
Today I live in my Great-Aunt Kay's old farmhouse, and I still have that bedroom set. Now instead of pimples and adolescent angst, the mirror reflects fading hair pigment and strange creases where once my skin was smooth. I can see the temptation to start dubbing, spreading thick coats of spackling compound over the cracks.
But it never works. I consider the lovely women at my hoity-toity salon, with their biologically implausible hair colors and faces stapled open in expressions of perpetual surprise. Or my TV-ready face, or even that white acrylic lump of duplicate stitches on my childhood fabric. We're not fooling anyone.
