Knot Theory
By Monica Mische
My daughter’s trying to explain what she’s studied at her summer research program. Because I want to understand—at least a little.
Say you’re holding a string, she says, and you loop it a couple of ways. Then you fuse the ends together. Is it a true knot? Or can it untangle to a circle?
I picture a frayed cotton cord, the kind I used to hang my children’s laundry on, before we could afford a dryer. I imagine the tiny shirts and dresses fluttering to the ground, the rope twisting loose then reconnecting in the wind, a grey jumbled disc sailing above the clouds.
She tells me about the other quandary. You have two knots side by side. They may look different, but could they be the same knot, one morphing into the other?
I recall the satin threads of my grandmother’s sewing, the rose-patterned quilts she made for each child. I see also the old green wire my dad used for patching our backyard fence. The delicate pink and the rusted jade entwine until it’s impossible to know where one string ends, where the other begins.
When my daughter was in grade school, she’d sit cross-legged after dinner, absorbed in her math sheets. Her pencil bobbing, she’d race through extra-credit problems, nodding gently as she mastered each one. Later, in high school, she’d labor past midnight, the bedside lamp casting soft gold circles on her textbook and on the faces of her sisters sleeping nearby. Derivatives and integers, epsilon and pi floated and hovered like a halo overhead.
If you hold a knot to a light and move it slightly, the shape of its shadow changes.
When my kids were born, the midwives presented them, damp and naked and covered in vernix. They laid them on my chest, enveloping us with soft grey blankets. I loved their tiny grunts and murmurs, their freshly bruised faces, their swollen eyelids, the mottled softness of their skin.
Motherhood. It’s messy. Gushing amniotic fluid. The placenta’s bloody pulp. The fibrous twists of the umbilical tube, this first of many knottings. And the decisions. Do we tie or clamp the cord? How do we hold them? Help them latch on? Do we embrace at every cry, or learn to let them be?
I loved how on lazy mornings they’d pile into my bed. In our cave beneath the quilt, we’d tangle ourselves together. Whose arm? Whose leg? Whose toes? Whose fingers? With snorts and giggles we’d capture limbs and appendages, holding them hostage, until, bursting with laughter, we’d collapse in a heap.
If we count the times a cord intersects itself, where it wraps over, where it wraps under, we can determine its complexity.
I remember her first viola, borrowed from school, how she lifted it from its velvet-lined case. Soon, she learned to rosin the bow, polish the wood, install new strings. She’d wind the steel strands on to the pegs, attaching the loops to the fragile tailpiece. Over time, fledgling scales gave birth to Bach preludes, the sonorous rhythms soaring heavenward, stirring my soul.
I remember her, age six, her hospital bed, how she lay there silently, a morphine drip beside her. She was incredibly brave, the surgeon said. Solemnly, my daughter showed us the long rows of x’s stitched into her skin.
As young teens, they’d stretch a rope from the backyard maple to the sagging fence behind it. They’d take turns leaping over it, our neighbors’ hounds observing. Clearing one level, they’d retie the rope higher, starting this time farther back, running even faster, careening through the air. I’d shout out from the window, but that never quelled them. The next day I’d find the rope knotted yet a couple degrees closer to the sun.
So much to consider. What to tie. How to fasten. The angles to look at. Setting them free.
One late summer evening, we were allotted five minutes. Just five, to embrace and plant kisses, to smooth or ruffle wayward hair. There was so much I wanted to impart: words that would inspire, keep her safe, relay, somehow, my ineffable love. But my throat could muster only thin fragmented strands.
Then we were parted. Students to the fieldhouse, parents to their cars. I wiped my face against the seatback, a clump of wet tissues twisted in my hand. As I pulled away from campus, I caught a glimpse of her walking against an indigo sky.
Together, once, we’d wandered curvilinear halls. The colors were like golden sand, and the air felt hushed and sacred. One exhibit displayed an Inka quipu. Its knots bespoke a mysterious tongue. Centuries old, it was so fragile that if we touched it, the fibers would turn to dust. Once, there had been thousands, all over the Andes. When the Conquistadors came, they set them afire.
I imagine grey smoke rising above the flames, above the mountains, above the clouds, panning out into new configurations, covering us all.
THE END