This year, it was a cold summer. At least, it was in one very specific part of Japan: the Kusaka household.
Our marital Cold War broke out in August. There was no room for summer memories, or anything remotely resembling a good time. And now, at the end of September, it’s still going on. Trying to distract myself from the awkward silence, I started knitting. To my dismay, I was getting an awful lot done. Knitting is a solitary pursuit.
It all started with a drive. “It’s summer vacation. We should rent a car and go somewhere.” I am, quite literally, a dangerously terrible driver, so I asked my wife to take the wheel.
And sitting in the passenger seat, I remembered: “Yellow means go. Red means take your chances.” That was her racing philosophy. If the light was yellow, you went through. Obviously. If it was red, you went through anyway. Might as well take a shot. She had been living in Tokyo for seventeen years, but the moment she got behind the wheel, her hometown driving style came roaring back. According to my wife, “That’s how everyone in Oita drives.” Absolutely not.
“Turn right at the next traffic light,” the navigation system announced. By the time we heard it, the light had already been yellow for several seconds. My wife hit the accelerator and cranked the steering wheel ninety degrees. The view through the windshield shot sideways to the left. Our daughter, in the back seat, tilted with the car. “Wooooah!” She was having the time of her life. Wasn’t there a scene like this in Lupin the Third?
“There’s a kid in the car!” I shouted instinctively. It’s pathetic when your natural speaking voice is high enough to sound like a scream. Actually, it was a scream. My wife yelled back, “What about me?!” Let me translate: What about my life? Thrill after thrill.
“Sorry.” She ignored my apology, and from that point on, the only voice echoing through the car was the navigation system.
Since then, my wife has said only one thing to me: “Move.” Low calorie. High lethality. I sometimes wonder if, eventually, even saying it will become too much work and she’ll just make a T-shirt that says MOVE.
To be fair, I probably shouldn’t have left all the driving to her. It was her summer vacation too. Then again, maybe this was just the spark. Maybe she had already been accumulating similar frustrations for a long time, and I simply hadn’t noticed. The drive was only the trigger.
I feel as though the Doomsday Clock of our marriage is ticking steadily toward midnight. And every time I wonder whether the next thing she’ll say after “Move” will be “divorce papers,” all I can do is curl up in the corner of the room. For weeks, I sat there knitting miserably, stealing sideways glances at my wife’s profile.
It has been a year and a half since I started knitting. When I first began, I couldn’t understand the structure of patterned stitches at all. But gradually, my hands began to understand them. “I can actually do this.” Eureka! Once your fingers learn what to do, something strange happens: you start to see the flow of the yarn itself. I concentrate on the movement of the needles and the yarn. The random thoughts disappear. And in their place, my ears become strangely sensitive.
I hear my wife’s footsteps going back and forth. The kitchen. The bathroom. The bedroom. The front door. In the silence, her footsteps seemed somehow lighter than before. I followed the sound with nothing but my eyes. The feet that appeared and disappeared beyond the table had, at some point, become noticeably thinner. I imagined her stumbling and worried about her. I know she’s not the kind of person who stays down after a fall. But that wasn’t the point.
Then I noticed something else. It seemed to me that she was spending more time doing housework. I knit at a pace of about ten minutes per row. While she did the dishes, while the washing machine was running, while she vacuumed. She would make several trips back and forth during each of those jobs. No wonder my knitting was progressing so quickly.
My wife’s main household duties were the jobs involving machines: the dishwasher, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner. Everything before and after those tasks, and most of the other housework, was either shared or my responsibility. I remembered those jobs being finished much faster. Especially the vacuuming. She kept banging the vacuum head against the baseboards, as though she were conducting a durability test.
It was only the other day that I began to see something slightly different in her.
It was late at night. I was secretly knitting on the sofa when my wife, who I thought was asleep, came out of the bedroom. Without even noticing my panic at having wandered back to my usual spot without permission, she walked straight to the dining table and popped one of my sleeping pills into her mouth. She hates swallowing tablets, so she tilted her head back like a bird swallowing a fish whole. “Take two. They work better.” “I know.”
I hadn’t noticed that my pills were disappearing. I hadn’t noticed that she wasn’t sleeping. Losing weight. Getting irritable. Unable to fall asleep. Behind the silence between us, perhaps things were happening inside her body that only she could feel. I know it wasn’t necessarily all because of her physical condition. But even so, there were far too many things happening to her that I simply hadn’t noticed.
“Are you okay?” “No. I’m getting old.” I didn’t like the thought of my wife becoming a grandmother somewhere I couldn’t see it happening. That’s why I asked her to marry me. And the seventeen years since then have gone by in the blink of an eye.
And it’s not just her. Last year, I took a leave of absence from work myself. I had only recently experienced what it feels like when the phrase “business as usual” no longer applies to you. For the first time, I felt as though I could actually see the pace of our lives beginning to change, ever so slowly.
Right now, I’m knitting a balaclava for my wife. I’m glad I made progress on it while it was still summer. If I take too long, winter will be here before I know it. Cold is the enemy. Then again, she might be having hot flashes too. Will she actually wear it? There’s a pretty good chance she’ll say, “Move.” Actually, I’m almost certain she will.
Oh, well. It’s not going to spoil. Although—wait. Wool can rot, can’t it? I’d better store it properly.
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