Institutional Disapproval

Although I’d made pretty much straight As across the board in high school, during my freshman and sophomore years in college I found myself grappling with the reality of pulling a mixed bag of Bs and Cs, with the occasional A in subjects where I could evince a little more enthusiasm. Mostly I dealt with my academic slippage by not confronting it at all. Professors would hand back a marked paper in class, and if I was pretty sure I hadn’t done as well as I wanted, I’d slip it, unlooked-at, into my notebook. I wouldn’t pull it out again until I was alone and I could steel myself in private for the disappointment. I didn’t want anyone else to see my expressions of rue.

It was a bad habit. I’m not proud. Once I finally found my academic groove, I was glad to be rid of that behavior.

Only I really wasn’t, because during this last month I uncovered something else I’d put aside during my college days. Something I planned to examine again when I had my composure and my dignity, in private, at a time when it couldn’t hurt me any longer. It wasn’t an essay or a blue exam booklet, but a memory. Even though I’d locked it away and mentally forbade myself ever to appraise it, when I unpacked it and removed it from the airless container in which it had mummified for thirty years, it hadn’t lost any of its potency. It still has sharp, painful edges that cut when I handle them. It still hurts.

My friend and old college roommate Eric earlier this month asked if I’d considered giving an oral history to the Stephens Project—an initiative by William and Mary’s Swem Library to collect and document the stories and experiences of gay and lesbian alumni, staff, and faculty about our time at the college, and the impact the college had on our sexualities.

I try to keep myself at arm’s length from any alumni activity, so my initial internal reaction was a hearty hell no! I could see that the project was worthy, though, and knew it was the kind of thing that would be a good outlet for me. Plus the grad student collecting the oral histories was already conducting a spate of them in Manhattan this week. It would be convenient not only for me to schedule an appointment while he was here, but for him as well.

Loath as I was to talk about my awful college days at length, I knew that enough decades had passed that it really was time to scrutinize the string of mostly negative events that made my college years a trial. And moreover, it seemed time to examine them as a continuous narrative, set in the context of both a socially conservative Southern college setting, and the repressed early nineteen-eighties when I was entombed there.

So I decided that I’d talk about how I’d entered college fairly at peace with my sexuality, thanks to my super-liberal parents—though I had absolutely no intentions of ever coming out during my life. I’d already patterned my future adulthood on the “confirmed bachelors” among my parents’ academic friends—a lonely life of antiques, an appreciation of Bette Davis movies, and furtive sexual trysts of which I’d never speak again.

I suspected I’d talk about how I had problems assimilating my freshmen year, but my issue was more how to pass as a white boy, than how to pass as a straight one. I’d been a racial non-minority minority in my all African-American high school. Landing feet-first in the preppy, lily-white freshman class of 1981 was more culture shock than anything I’d ever experienced.

I knew I’d talk about my sophomore year, when my first roommate sexually harassed me for months before moving out and then starting a completely false whisper campaign on campus that I’d raped him. That reputation haunted me the rest of the time I was at William and Mary. It was an impeachment I couldn’t refute or counter because it was never formally leveled against me. And in those days, the gayness of it all was even more horrifying to people than the actual crime of rape—so I was always whispered about, and always supect.

I knew I’d talk about the boyfriend I had during my junior year who made me walk fifteen feet behind him on campus and who would only have conversations with me at the campus cafeteria if we sat at adjacent tables, facing the same direction. I knew I’d talk about “The Plan” that he had, the ridiculous and totally un-ironic notion that he and I would graduate, get nice conservative jobs in Richmond, buy adjacent houses, marry pretty William and Mary grads for wives, and that on weekends we’d consummate our unholy homosexual desires in the garage while our wives gossiped over the back fence.

I figured I’d have to address my junior year roommate, who unbeknownst to me was grappling with his own sexuality and his heavily-religious background. He decided shortly before we were supposed to move into our senior dorm together that he wouldn’t be rooming with me our final year, because I was interfering with his personal relationship to God . . . which I interpreted as meaning that he’d somehow found out I was gay, and didn’t approve. And then I started to think about that first weeks of my senior year when that roommate showed up and moved into the room we’d chosen anyway, and how intolerable the time was that we lived silently side by side, not exchanging a single word.

It was while I was thinking about this painful month that I tripped some mental wire that exposed the memory I’d been trying to hide from myself for three decades. At first I recoiled. I tried to pack it away again; it shouldn’t have seen the light of day. But then I edged around the loathsome thing, kicked it a little, and decided to pull it out. Painful or not, it was the crowning summation of all the indignities I experienced at William and Mary. It went on to define my relationship to the college—or lack thereof—ever after.

So, on the day after the Supreme Court repealed DOMA, I shared the following story with a total stranger for the very first time.

I’ve had precious few moments of absolute clarity in my life, but during the summer between my sophomore and junior years I realized that I wanted to be a campus tour guide for prospective students. I don’t know what gave me the idea I’d be perfect for it, but I knew I had all the qualifications. That is, an enthusiasm for talking at length, a broad knowledge of the college and its activities, a knack for public speaking, and most importantly, the ability to lecture a group of unfamiliar high school students and their parents while walking backwards.

I’d never really manifested such college spirit as when I decided I wanted to lead campus tours. I’d never before really set myself an independent goal with no concept of how to make it come to fruition. I was not accustomed to making bold decisions and taking chances with unknown experiences. But I marched into the college admissions office, asked how one became a tour guide, and filled out a form. The secretary at the desk asked if I had an adult reference. I thought a moment, and decided to go straight to the top. I threw out the name of Mrs. Thomas Graves, wife of the college president.

I’d become acquainted with Mrs. Graves in the first month of my freshman year when she and Mr. Graves had extended an invitation to my freshman roommate—and his roommate—to dinner at the President’s House. My roommate had been a graduate of (and had a father who taught at) the Phillips Exeter Academy, a prep school in New Hampshire, where the Graves were seeking admission for one of their sons. It was supposed to be a bit of a schmoozefest and my roommate obviously did not want me there. He’d invited me only grudgingly, and because he had to. He was a bit of a Neanderthal during the entire evening. I don’t recall that he actually picked up his plate and licked off the gravy, but if I were writing a screenplay of the night, that’s what I’d have him do. It was pretty close. But I was charming and the highlight of the evening was when Mrs. Graves heard I was taking piano lessons and invited me to play Flo Ziegfield’s historic piano for her. I sat down and whipped off the “Moonlight Sonata,” which happened to be her favorite composition. She was my advocate for the rest of our mutual tenure at the college. I could do no wrong, in Mrs. Graves’ eyes.

And what was the admissions office to do, when they had the college president’s wife pressuring them into taking me on as a volunteer? They caved. So all during that summer, my junior year, and the summer following, I worked for Admissions. Once or twice a week I’d meet a group of prospective students and their parents in a room of the historic Wren building. I’d play them a promotional slide show filled with inspirational images of happy students crowded around stacks of books (in my memory the photographs always showed one white female student, one black male, an Asian female, and a Latin guy, which was totally unlike any group of undergrads I ever saw at the school), or playing lacrosse, or strolling in front of gauzy, out-of-focus Colonial Williamsburg landmarks. Then I’d turn on the lights, introduce myself, and corral the group on a one-hour loop around the campus.

I loved being a campus tour guide. I never before felt so much in my element as I did when I was conveying my enthusiasm and affection for the college on those tours. I should have had a shaky period when I was still trying to anticipate what the parents and kids wanted to hear the most, or what questions they might ask throughout the tour—but I honestly don’t remember having one. I launched into that role with a confidence that I’d never once known. I was informative. I was on point. More importantly, I was entertaining. I learned how to spice a narrative with dashes of humor. I had a fantastic time.

And my enthusiasm showed. At the end of each trip around campus I had families linger to tell me how very much they’d enjoyed the tours, and how much better they had been than visits they’d made to other institutions. Parents wrote letters of praise about me to the Admissions Office—a fat file folder full. That position was the very first job I loved. It was a volunteer job, to be sure, but I found it fulfilling in a way that no other activity during my college years ever, ever approached. I don’t know what instinct had told me that I’d be a perfect match for this responsibility. But I’d been right on the target.

My senior year came around. I was stuck in a dorm room with someone clinging desperately to his religion and who’d told me he wouldn’t be rooming with me, but appeared to be rooming with (but not speaking to) me anyway. I’d auditioned for a one-act play in the theater department and gotten a good role, only to lose it again because one of the women who’d also been cast didn’t want to have to go onstage with a gay rapist. Then, one day after one of my campus tours, one of the higher-ups in the Admissions Office asked me to come to his desk to have a little talk.

He was one of those Good Old Boys that populate the staff of Southern colleges—stuffed into a too-tight button-down, always perspiring, florid of complexion, narrow-minded, a hearty conservative fellow who’d probably been a frat boy and a William and Mary grad himself, who’d probably gotten his job through cronyism and intended to cling onto it for dear life until retirement. He was not, in other words, the kind of man I entirely trusted. But I was riding a high from giving my tour, so I was open and friendly with him as he asked me about the kinds of extracurricular activities in which I participated.

I told him about the plays in which I’d appeared, and the fun I’d been having in the school’s craft workshop. I jawed on about the writing I was doing, about the college radio. I was in the middle of explaining the work that I was doing in forming a new local chapter of Parents Anonymous when he interrupted me and said, “So . . . most of your extracurriculars are . . . artistic?”

I blinked a couple of times and started to say that a self-help group for abusive or potentially abusive parents wasn’t really considered the fine arts.

He interrupted me again, though. “But most of your activities . . . would you say they were. . . .” He lifted his head, gave me a sidelong look, and then repeated himself. “. . . artistic?”

There was something in the man’s tone that arrested my volubility. Insinuation poisoned the word. He said it as if he were saying syphilitic. I hadn’t really thought about the reasons this particular staff member might have for wanting to talk to me. But suddenly I was wary, and very much alive to the possibility that it wasn’t something good. “I suppose,” I conceded.

“You don’t play in intramural sports?” I shook my head. “No? Not even tag football? Lacrosse? Basketball? Soccer? No? You don’t belong to a fraternity?”

No, I hadn’t done any of those things. Privately, I thought they sounded deeply unappealing.

“This brings me to something we want to say, then,” said the man, leaning forward. He clutched one fist with his hand, and smiled in a falsely convivial, chummy manner. “We’ve decided this year that we need to go in a . . . new direction . . . with our campus tour guides. We really don’t find that someone artistic is a good representation of what William and Mary is all about.” I sat there, stunned, and didn’t say a word. He repeated himself in different ways. “You see, a fellow who’s artistic like yourself just isn’t a positive representative for the campus. The college doesn’t really want anyone artistic to represent it. It’s embarrassing for the college if prospects think all our students are artistic.”

I looked dead into the eyes of this man, and realized exactly what he was telling me: You’re obviously a god-damned queer. We don’t want a queer representing the College of William and Mary. My awakening to his true meaning froze me. This man, who represented everything I disliked about about smug, self-satisfied, white, male, heterosexual, small-town, Southern America was not only letting me go from a job into which I’d poured hours of volunteer time and outright passion, but he was enjoying every moment. He licked his lips and did it with relish.

So I sat there, and stared at him, and kept my exterior perfectly composed and unruffled while inside, every emergency siren blared at full blast. Never before in my life had I been called out and derided for my sexuality. Never before had I been denied anything because of who I was. This is the way things are, son, I understood the man was telling me. I get to make the rules, and I’ll kick disgusting lowlife homosexshuls like you straight to the curb. Every damn chance I get. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

It was a shock that, to this day, still feels like a knife to the chest.

When the noise in my head cleared, I heard the man trying to make the blow sound like he was doing me a favor. “It’s your senior year, anyway,” he was saying. “You don’t want to be doing something like working for the admissions office. You’ve got plans to make. Things to do.” Things that don’t include dirtying up my office, faggot, I understood him to mean, very clearly.

I stood up, smiled, nodded, and walked out of Admissions. I hadn’t even reached the front stoop before I had taken the experience, packed it away in a heavily-insulated box, and stored it in a dark place. I’d examine it later, I told myself. Later, when it didn’t hurt as much, I’d think about it.

I didn’t know it would take me twenty-nine years.

Nor did I know that even at that distance, when it was just me and a voice recorder and a friendly, listening stranger, in a silent room on a sunny summer’s afternoon in Manhattan, the memory still would slice and throb.

Even though I absolutely refused to examine my dismissal, or even acknowledge to myself why it had happened, the meeting still had consequences. I went home that afternoon to my inhospitable dorm room, looked around, and marched right out again to the student life office to request that I be transferred to a single. Once I moved, I withdrew for the rest of the year—withdrew from boundaries of the college itself to a remote off-campus dorm where I could shut the door to my single room and no one would have to see me. I withdrew from the theater department and dropped my double major. I basically dropped all my extracurriculars. One month into my senior year, I was already making plans to disengage and depart.

If someone from William and Mary’s Alumni House were to ask me why I’ve never attended a homecoming or a class reunion, I’d have a glib answer—it just wasn’t really my thing. I lived too far away. If someone asked me why I’d never once contributed to any of the college’s capital campaigns or fundraising efforts, I’d tell them that I’d worked too closely with a university development office for years to see the campaigns as anything more than shaking down the alumni . . . or that I’m cheap. If they’d asked why I didn’t submit updates to the class notes of the alumni magazine, or why I hadn’t attended any of the regional alumni auction events or meetings, I’d have replied that I simply wasn’t a joiner.

But the fact of the matter is this: I’ve never done any of those things because I had been told—at an institutional level—that the College of William and Mary wanted no truck with my kind. The college had looked into my eyes, licked its lips, and informed me that under no circumstances did I represent what they stood for. Even though I refused to examine or revisit that encounter in the admissions office, all my knee-jerk instincts to keep the college at arm’s length, to disassociate myself from my classmates and my fellow alumni, date back to that afternoon. They date back to the moment that a university official told me that I could no longer do something I loved, simply because he suspected I was gay, and simply because he didn’t like gays.

I know the college these days would have absolutely no problem taking my gay dollars. But I’m sorry—my resentment is still too strong.

Sometimes it seems one learns more about a thing in its absence, than when it’s up close and present. Detroit was like that. I understood more about Detroit and the midwest and its toxic, insular small-mindedness upon moving away than I did during the twenty-five years I was there. Likewise, when I left college, I realized how very narrow-minded and suffocated was Williamsburg, and that there was a vast world out there that didn’t share its ultra-conservative values. As Eric remarked to me, William and Mary was saltpeter to the soul; I discovered that leaving it and discovering new perspectives was the antidote.

The point I really wanted to make in my oral history was that when I left William and Mary, feeling beaten down and dispirited in a way I hadn’t when I’d entered it, I could never have imagined for myself the life that I’ve had since. I couldn’t have envisioned meeting within a mere five years the man with whom I’ve spent the last nearly quarter-century. I couldn’t have predicted how smoothly I’d come out. I would never have even fantasized about the then-unimaginable prospect that I’d be legally married or have the ability to file a joint federal income tax return. When I left college, it was with a conviction that if anything good happened to me in my life, it would be in spite of my sexuality—not alongside it, or because of it.

If anything, I’ve lived the last three decades so fully just to spite my alma mater. But damn. What rich and colorful and wonderful decades they’ve been.

A Single Hippo in Possession of a Good Fortune

Nintendo marketed the original version of Animal Crossing as a 'communication game.' By which it meant that it's one of the only games around in which you're expected to write people letters. Long, meaningful letters. Usually with gifts attached.

I do so grudgingly at times, because frankly, in my little town, the villagers already seem to regard me not only as some kind of unpaid courier who's there to ferry T-shirts and oddball tchotchkes between each other, but also as a maid who's expected to bring them fruit on demand, clean up the messes they leave in the middle of the town square (not that kind of mess . . . the animal villagers are house-trained, after all), and finance the rebuilding of the whole town out of what they apparently imagine is a bottomless bank account. Never MIND that I'm in illegal indentured servitude over my mortgage to real estate mogul and local representative of the one percent, Tom Nook.

Having to sit down at the end of the day and write these ingrates actual correspondence is sometimes a little beyond the pale.

But when Hippeux the Hippopotamus moved into town, I dutifully penned him a little note welcoming him and suggesting we get a beer and a burger sometime and check out the local babes. I should have suspected something was up when, a week later, he cornered me by the garden store, pulled out the letter from the breast pocket of his natty brown suit coat (the hamburger-print stationery was still pristine), and quietly asked if I remembered sending it.

He was going to cherish my first letter forever, he confided.

Uh-oh, I thought to myself. I gots me a stalker.

Then I sent Hippeux a piece of furniture in my mail. I don't even remember what. I think it was a candy jar. It had fallen out of some tree branches—you know, the way furniture does—and I wasn't going to use it. I like pawning off my trash on the other villagers to make them think I'm magnanimous. (Which, come to think, is probably why they're so willing to make me spend hundreds of thousands to finance a bridge infrastructure project on my very own.) I got this letter back from him.

Now, I've had villagers with—shall we say—sexualities outside the mainstream, before. Back in my original Animal Crossing village, Alfonso the Alligator would make a lot of shy requests for me to visit the local store and pick up a ream of stationery and a shovel and oh, if I happened to see a size twelve pink dress, maybe one of those, too. Let's just say I wasn't fooled. Alfonso would accept my smuggled gifts and we'd say no more about them until a couple of weeks later, when he'd cough and whisper that if I was at the store, he wouldn't "mind" if I bought him a pair of floral clam-diggers, or a Lily Pulitzer-styled muumuu, or a chic little black dress . . . for his "girlfriend," of course, who lived in "another village," probably in "Canada."

I never had any indication that Alfonso was into guys, and hey. What a single, tax-paying alligator wants to do behind closed doors is none of my business, right? But Hippeux's note was a different matter. I mean, talk about unsubtle. The floral stationery? I mean, that stuff was even perfume scented. To my beloved Manny? Seriously? I can't say I'd mind dot dot dot?

Sweet Jesus, hippo. Why not just ask me if I'd like to come watch your Will & Grace season four DVDs with you?

I wrote Hippeux back. I didn't save the letter because I thought I was being firm. Getting my point across, that is. I told him I was flattered and all that, but I was just getting out of a relationship, and had moved to the village to learn what it was like to be single again, and free to shake whatever trees struck my fancy.

I felt sure he'd understand.

This morning I fired up my game. My mailbox was blinking. I found this note inside.

For a minute, I was actually shocked and all, Damn, how'd he get a glimpse of my pane? I keep my blinds closed after dark! But then I re-read it, got what he meant, and was touched. I mean, gosh. How many guys get a local admirer—and Hippeux's not really bad-looking or anything . . . just a little more mature, shall we say, than a wisp of a lad like myself—who write letters of such lyricism and poetry? Our interactions had been few, but during those times our hands had briefly touched when I forked over the pop-eyed goldfish he'd requested . . . had he really seen into my soul? I had to know.

Maybe I overplayed my hand a little. I don't know. Our generation gap was extreme—would he even know who Lady Gaga was? Should I have gone with Barbra Streisand? Judy Garland? Lillie Langtree? But I steeled myself and left the mail with Pelly at the village center. Then I strolled into the clothing emporium and haberdashery of the Able Sisters, thinking that maybe I might find a change of underwear or something. I said hello to the ladies, and had scarcely been in the shop for ten seconds when I heard the bell tinkle over the door as someone strolled in.

Guess who it happened to be?

Coincidence? I think not. Awkwardness in the umbrella aisle!

Oh, Hippeux. I thought we were beyond feeling each other out with "code." Of course I'm "fashionable" and know all about the "latest looks." You might even say I'm "artistic." But we're not all "flamboyant," you know.

Um, no. Frankly, I thought Hippeux was audacious enough, without leopard print or gold lamé or a goddamned feather boa. We're not back in the days of Wayland Flowers and Madame, dude.

I made an embarrassed escape, but damn. Hippeux was determined to corner me. I was standing by the cliffs looking over the beach later in the day when I felt a hand on my upper arm. His touch was as gentle as his voice in my ear.

Readers, it is time for a confession. At his question, my pulse quickened. All I could do was look into those fierce green nostrils and feel the heat of his grass and water-plant-scented breath upon my neck. Had I secretly hoped for this moment? Had I donned my best Thurston Howell the Third drag hoping that he would find me? My poor girlish brain was too aflutter to plumb the depth of all the questions racing through it. "Why?" I heard myself asking aloud. "Why me?"

Oh. Of course. We were out in public. I might be a worldly fellow, but Hippeux obviously saved his passions for behind closed doors. "Decorating ideas." Wink wink. Nudge nudge.

Okay, I told him. Visit me at five. "Don't be late," I murmured, with a come-hither look in my eye, and the faintest trace of promise upon my quivering lips.

Five o'clock came. On the dot, I heard a knock at the door.

I cleared my throat, checked my reflection in the glossy ebony of my grand piano, and answered the door.

Crafting? What the heck was he going on about? Was it slang? For something dirty? Or wait—dude, I'm not really up on all that old-school lingo. He was going to be asking me about the hanky code next. I made my way over to the wall, pretending I wanted to show him my antique clock. But he cornered me and came right to the point.

I blushed like a schoolgirl. My face turned red. Yes, Hippeux. I knew who to call Just think how great that would be, dot dot dot.

To conceal my embarrassment, I walked over to the piano and played the first movement from Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Opus 27, No. 2. Yes, the "Moonlight Sonata." I just happened to have the music sitting on the rack. At the conclusion, Hippeux applauded wildly.

"Oh, that old thing," I said modestly, cracking my knuckles. "'Twas nothing."

Hippeux moved in. For a moment, I thought he was going to reach for my long, sensitive pianist's hands.

Oh, Hippeux. I feel the same about you. Truly! If only I could express everything I felt at that moment! I blossomed with a sweet and tentative smile. Then he moved in for the kill.

DAMN, DUDE! WHO TOLD YOU ABOUT THE SEX DUNGEON?

Um, that is—goodness gracious, Hippeux, whatever in the world could you possibly be implying?! Did the carpenters say something? God damn it. I paid them extra to keep their mouths shut. There are all kinds of reasons a single gentleman living alone might want sturdy hooks installed in his ceiling! Maybe I cure my own meats!

His eyes bore into mine with meaning. I couldn't lie to him any longer. He would keep my passions confidential. I could tell he was discreet. Slowly I led him upstairs, to the room that no one among my villagers had seen.

My heart leapt. But please. Don't toy with me, Hippeux. Not in front of the anatomical model. 

He seemed to understand my embarrassment. Maybe he sensed he had moved too swiftly, too soon. He led me back downstairs again and stood in front of the door, obviously intending to take his leave. He took a step forward, and said, in words that reeked of intimacy and longing:

And then he left me alone with the warm memories of his kind words, his gentle glances, and the lingering scent of Old Spice Denali Body Wash and Deodorant.

I think I may have met the sweetest guy in the entire Animal Crossing kingdom.

Knitting Duh-rama!

The name of Knit in Public Day has, I think, an unfortunate tendency to imply that knitting is something shameful—a hobby best indulged behind closed doors, in private, and away from the scrutiny of polite gentlefolk. It somehow manages simultaneously to equate yarn work with both self abuse and the act of scarfing down cake frosting directly from the can with one’s fingers. But my monthly mostly men’s knitting group had participated in the June Knit in Public Day last year, and had enjoyed themselves immensely, so I agreed to join them and make an afternoon of it, my reputation as a genteel indoors private knitter be damned.

The event took place on the upper terrace of Bryant Park, right in the rear shadow of the main building of the New York Public Library. During the summers the terrace is shady and cool and dappled with both the waving branches of the London planetrees and the reflected surfaces of hundreds of windows along 42nd and 40th Streets. My knitting group arrived early so that we could congregate in roughly the same area and share the food we’d agreed to bring. We managed to grab a number of tables and chairs beneath the terrace umbrellas and stake our claim shortly before another hundred and fifty or more knitters from across the city filled in around us.

It was a gorgeous day. The temperature hovered in the lower seventies. The sun was brilliant and warm, the sky sapphire. It was just one of those perfect late spring afternoons that never seems to end, on which time ambles at its own leisurely pace, dilly-dallying in the sunshine and lingering on in the memory like a good dream. On the tables lay food enough to feed a small battalion, and all around them, in irregular clusters, sat good people unabashedly knitting. In public, no less. I’d never seen a more peaceful and unspoiled scene.

Until the Canadians invaded, that is. It was, as my knitting friend Kody later noted, “They infiltrated and took over before anyone knew what had happened! They’re like, aliens! Canadians are like, fucking body snatchers, man!”

What happened was this.

Kody and his puggle, Charlie, were sitting to my right; Kody and I were taking turns watering the dog and making sure he was happily supplied with veggie bacon-covered dried bananas treats. (I was tempted to snack on them myself.) Someone had been sitting in the two chairs to my left, but had abandoned them to join friends elsewhere. Almost the minute they’d been vacated, a young woman in her twenties sidled up. “I don’t have any friends here,” she said. “Would it be okay if I sat next to you guys?”

“Of course!” said Kody.

“We’ll be your friends,” I told her warmly.

I asked a few friendly questions as she set down her knitting bag and purse. She was from Canada—Alberta. “The boring part of Canada.” She was working in New York City for a four-year term, and had only been living there eight months of that. I asked how long she’d been knitting. “Oh, only four or five months,” she said.

Immediately I felt protective of this poor Canadian fledgling. I got her one of the bottles of water that Kody had provided for the group; I got her a paper plate with a sandwich and carrot sticks and one of my Hello Dolly bars. When she asked if we minded if her non-knitting sister joined us, I found another chair and made sure she had room and refreshment. I was determined, on such a beautiful afternoon and in such a serene urban setting, that no one was going to feel left out of Knit in Public Day. Especially two wholesome and innocent Canadian girls.

I thought it was odd, a few minutes later, though, when the non-knitting sister pulled out some kind of audio recording device and started to conduct an interview with the knitter—who had finally pulled out the project she was working on, which was quite a large and complex sweater worked at an exceedingly fine gauge. All I could do was look at the sweater sleeve I was halfway up, which in comparison looked like it had been knitted out of fisherman’s rope by two restaurant chopsticks . . . in the dark, by someone cross-eyed . . . and think to myself, Holy crap, and she’s only been knitting for four months??

Kody and I both watched with interest while the knitting sister made a rambling monologue about how there she was in Bryant Park at Knit in Public Day. Once they’d shut off the recording device, Kody asked, “What was all that about?”

“Are you with the CBC?” I wanted to know.

The girl laughed and said no, she and her sister had a knitting podcast. Opinions about yarn and patterns, and some knitting-related variety acts thrown in. I was simultaneously trying to think of what knitting variety acts could be (tap-dancing while knitting? Walking a tightrope of Vanna White-brand yarn?) while thinking to myself, Gee, a podcast is awfully ambitious for someone who’s only been knitting for four months, when she pulled out a professionally-printed card with her name, her podcast’s name, and her website’s address on it, and handed to me. I blinked, and Kody’s eyes narrowed, when with artful slight of hand she pulled from nowhere an entire stack of identical business cards a couple of inches thick, gave half to her sister, kept the other half for herself, and then asked us to watch her things while they both blended into the knitting crowd, passing them out to everyone.

The organizer of the event, the Asian owner of a yarn store named Knitty City, passed by while they were making their rounds. She spotted the Canadian girl’s sweater-in-progress lying on her chair. “How exquisite,” she commented. “The stitches are amazingly even. Is it yours?”

I told her that no, it wasn’t. “The woman it belongs to has only been knitting for four or five months.”

The Knitty City owner laughed as if I’d told her a delicious witticism, dabbed at my shoulder to suggest I not pull her leg any longer, and moved on.

Kody shook his head at me. “You don’t still believe that blatant lie, do you?”, he asked.

“But she said. . . .”

“Sweetie,” he said, patting my leg with mixed pity and condescension. “Mark my words. Those women are not what they seem.”

He was right on that count. The pair of them took a very, very long time to return to the seats we were saving. A few minutes later, the next thing I knew, the knitting sister was standing up on a chair in the middle of the upper terrace and making an impromptu speech thanking the owner of Knitty City for pulling the event together, and then announcing that the non-singing sister, who happened to be a cabaret artist, would be singing a few selections from her cabaret act. Songs about knitting, specifically. And oh, if anyone liked what they heard, they could buy the CD for only ten dollars. Then with a pleasant voice she launched into the Glenn Miller song called “Knit One, Purl Two.”

I looked at Kody. His jaw had dropped. Beside him, Charlie was panting, but his tail wasn’t wagging. “I told you,” Kody said. “See? Those bitches have hijacked this event.”

“Now, now,” I said.

“They came in all, Oh, we have no friends here! We don’t know anyone! And now look at them. They have hijacked the whole event, Vance.”

“I don’t think. . . .”

“Oh, we don’t know how to knit! Bullshit.”

“Well,” I said, trying not to concede the point entirely—though I was tempted to agree. “To see an opportunity and take advantage of it takes. . . .”

“Cunning, guile, and a criminal degree of anti-social behavior?” Kody suggested.

“. . . chutzpah?” is what I lamely finished with.

“Hmfph,” is how Kody replied, as he flounced back into his seat and started purling furiously at his scarf.

A dozen songs and several sold CDs later, the sisters returned. Kody glared at them. “Nice singing,” I said to the non-knitting sister. “Really good job.”

“Your hat has a hole in it,” said the knitting sister to Kody, apropos of nothing. Kody was wearing a knit cap from which, he told me later, Charlie had taken a substantial bite at the crown.

“Yais,” he said, more starchy than Queen Elizabeth watching Fergie turn somersaults. “I am aware.”

“Did you make it yourself?” she asked. I couldn’t tell whether she’d picked up on his coldness and was trying to warm him up, or what.

“In-deed ’tis,” he replied in flinty syllables.

“You did not,” she said. “It has a seam.”

Kody took off the hat, turned it inside out, and icily intoned, “Yes, it does. It is a seamed pattern. It was the first hat I ever made and my mother seamed it for me. Would you like for me to give you her phone number in Utah so that you can call her and CHECK UP ON ME?” His voice rose a little. “Any other questions? Oh yes, I have questions. Who are you people, for one? You come in here all innocence and hijack the event, and then you dare to question whether I knitted my own cap? Why yes, I knitted my own cap. So who are you people? ARE YOU EVEN CANADIAN?”

Well. The sisters gathered their things and fled, basically.

“And you!” Kody said to me, in their wake. “You’re too trusting! Too nice!”

“That’s possible,” I allowed.

“Don’t you know that Canadians are the enemy? They sent us Jason Priestly!”

“And Celine Dion,” I conceded.

“And Celine Dion!” he repeated, nailing home the point. He shook his head at me as he spread out Charlie’s blanket on the sidewalk. He threw himself down on it and began knitting furiously on his back, while his shirt rode up. He started grumbling to himself, sounding more like a dissatisfied dog than Charlie. “. . . Canadian terrorists,” he mumbled. “Blending in, taking over.”

“I just didn’t know knitting in public could lead to such drama,” I said to him.

He waved his needles at me sternly. “Just promise me you’ll beware the Canadians,” he ordered. “They’re never up to any good.”