12

Frank’s Spring semester schedule was Advanced Fiber Arts, an independent study on silence with a professor named Kierkegaard, and three thesis hours. I shook the printout at him. “Is this for real?” I’d been back in Ithaca for only a few hours and already the darkness and cold were making me testy.

Frank smiled. “I got them to count the independent study as American lit and the art class as an elective. The thesis hours bump me up to full-time so I keep getting my stipend.”

I felt like a sucker. Flying north over landscapes of green, then brown, then dirty white, I’d accepted the fact I’d be spending another semester in classes that would be depressing and disappointing at best, infuriating and insulting at worst. I’d even forgiven my Tennessee professors. At least those old clowns worried their students might be smart enough to see through the pomposity they used to hide their laziness. No one seemed worried about that at Cornell. I’d convinced myself an Ivy League Ph.D. and all it promised was worth a few years of discomfort, but Frank had figured out how to earn the same degree working at the loom.

“An independent study on silence?” I was jealous even though I had no idea what that could mean. “With Kierkegaard?”

“He’s a visiting art history professor from Denmark,” Frank explained brightly. “He’s writing a monograph about the first American photographer, a guy who lived in New Orleans in the 1840s. I met him at Denny’s.”

“I need some air.”

“Wait. Okay, I know how to knit, that’s why they allowed me into Advanced Fiber Arts. My grandma taught me right before she died, when I was about ten and she came to live with us, and I didn’t tell you because I thought you might think it was sissy, but hold on.” He ran to the closet and came back with a package that looked like a balloon made of newspaper. “Merry Christmas.” When he dropped it into my arms, it burst and a banner five shades of purple unfurled across the floor.

He’d knitted me a scarf ten feet long and so soft it felt like it was made from teddy bear pelts. He wrapped it around my neck and shoulders and pulled me out into the frigid air, his gloved hand squeezing my mitten’d. The gray slab of sky had dimmed, Ithaca’s winter version of twilight. Snow was falling. I loved the scarf and felt like crying. I’d assumed he’d be my ex-boyfriend by Christmas so I hadn’t gotten him anything, then I’d forgotten to get him something after the hubbub of not being pregnant and not breaking up. He was smiling, almost skipping. The snow looked as if it were pouring from the streetlights.

We rounded the corner and came upon a yard sale, a bizarre sight in the snow and the dark. Beside a card table stacked with toys a teenaged boy stood imploring a man who appeared to be his father—same nose, albeit crooked, same chin, albeit beefier.

“Take what you want,” the man told Frank when we stopped to browse.

“Excuse me?” Frank said.

“Dumbfuck here stole his sister’s allowance to buy weed, so take what you want.”

The kid looked away.

“I like your scarf,” the man told me.

I pointed proudly to Frank. “He made it for me.”

“You knit?” the guy said incredulously, eyebrows rising.

I wished I’d said it was a gift. Being thoughtful wasn’t fruity. Frank picked up a toy video camera from the table.

“His grandmother taught him.”

The man looked like he was reconsidering giving his child’s things to Frank.

“Just say no,” Frank scolded the kid, then pulled me along the sidewalk, back toward the apartment. Already the footprints we’d made were filling with snow. Soon they’d be gone.

In the cold bedroom, Frank slowly took off my clothes, even my socks, and then draped the impossibly soft scarf around my neck and looped a half hitch under my chin. It hung over my breasts, rubbed my knees, pooled on the tops of my bare feet. I shivered from lust. I wanted to do it wearing the scarf. Frank knelt and began wrapping me in the scarf and I understood this was its purpose and I didn’t feel so bad about not getting him a Christmas gift.

In the mirror on the back of the closet door I saw myself tied up in purple rope, lover supplicating before me. Still on his knees, Frank looked over his shoulder at the mirror. His reflected eyes widened when I lifted my hand from where it rested atop his head and stuck my fingers into the yarn between my legs. He frantically fumbled with the buckle of his belt.