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68 Crocheting Time —Lia Ottaviano It is 1972, late at night.Anna, my grandmother, sits alone on her living-room sofa. Through the bay window in front of her, she can see only streetlamps. Her neighborhood, quiet during the day, is now a ghost town. The neighbors have long ago called their children inside,finished dinner,walked dogs, locked doors, turned off lights. Anna’s daughters—sixteen, fourteen, and twelve—have been in bed for a time now. Hours. The television is silent. A lamp is lit. Beside her on the sofa, a book is cracked open. Anna’s hands are moving. Her fingers are slim, and she still wears her wedding band on the ring finger of her left hand. In her right hand, she holds an aluminum hook, its shiny stalk slender and its tip curved in. Looped around the hook is a length of yarn, the most affordable she could find at the craft store without having to compromise quality. Her lips move in silent count of stitches. On the clock mounted to the wall beside her, the second,then minute,then hour hands tick.She looks to the book when she’s uncertain, then continues to wind and draw. The evening pushes into next day’s dawn. She can’t seem to get herself tired. Friends and acquaintances have paid their respects; the gifts of food have been eaten or gone bad and been discarded. The casserole dishes have been washed and dried, forgotten or asked after and returned to their owners . The flowers have died and been thrown away, tossed in the wastebasket with the spoiled leftovers, taken to the dump to decompose.Anna has been awake a long while. Her husband has recently, suddenly, died. She’s teaching herself to crochet. Anna’s grandmother, Elisabetta, emigrated from Naples circa 1900. Anna’s mother, Mary, nicknamed Mary Red for her rust-colored mane, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in December 1911. Mary Red divorced her husband, Anna’s father, while Anna was still a child, and while Mary worked in a jewelry factory at the peril of several of her fingers, Elisabetta, nicknamed Grandma Lizzie, looked after Anna. My mother tells me this story whenever we drive through Providence, past the abandoned buildings 69 that once housed the assembly lines on which her grandmother, my greatgrandmother Mary, used to work. I look at my mother’s ten fingers on the steering wheel and am glad she was spared that fate. Neither Grandma Lizzie nor Mary Red taught Anna needlework. Grandma Lizzie lived in the apartment above the one whereAnna and Mary Red lived. She was a strict disciplinarian who believed in corporal punishment . As a girl, to escape her home and to earn some extra pocket change, Anna stuck gum to the soles of her shoes, stomped across scores of busy city lots, and discreetly stole pennies from the men pitching them to the edges. She attended dances often and school less often, courted boys, and bellied up to malt shop counters, while Grandma Lizzie kept her own house plus Anna and Mary Red’s. Mary Red worked late nights and arrived home exhausted. Grandma Lizzie and Mary Red didn’t devote time to crafts or handiwork, and even if they had, and had attempted to teach her, I doubt Anna would have had the patience to learn. Anna takes to needlework as an adult as a way to mourn. Amid funeral arrangements and increased church attendance, after burying her husband and wearing black and weeping, she does not consciously intend to initiate , in her own life, a ritual from her ancestors’ homeland. The bed coverings she creates for her children following the death of her husband are not bequeathed to her, nor produced by a skill she inherits, but they are designs of her will. When Anna’s husband dies beside her of a heart attack in the middle of the night, she knows of no such practice. The last breath he takes is in the bed they share. She discovers him cold and unmoving when she awakens in the morning. It is summer, and their bed is dressed in light linens. There’s no need to sleep under anything thicker than a sheet. The bed is not fancy or elaborate but neat, the top sheet secured with the hospital corners whose crease my grandmother has mastered. She is well under forty and a widow. Not given to lavish displays of emotion , she...

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