Book Look: Hitch, edited by Stephannie Tallent

An ordinary knitter wakes up one morning. It’s not a special day; just a typical get-dressed-and-head-out-to-work day. She walks outside and sees a cluster of black birds hovering overhead in a frenzy, their raucous caws sending chills up her spine.  She pulls her Bodega Bay Stole closer, shaken by the fact that the bird motifs of her shawl so closely mimic the wings of the screaming birds…

She walks more quickly down the street, still keeping a nervous eye skyward. As she passes the movie theater, she notices a striking movie poster with vivid red lines: it’s a showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

For a moment, the jarring lines of the poster have her spellbound; then she makes a mental note to wear her shawl with the red-and-white jagged lines tomorrow and turns into the train station in the next block.

The train’s on time and she steps into a car. As she takes her seat, she catches a glimpse of a blonde woman out of the corner of her eye. She looks — wait — she looks a lot like me! the knitter thinks, then shrugs off her suspicion.

“They say everyone has a doppelganger,” she thinks. “And so what if she’s wearing a textured red capelet like the one I have?”

She tries to read the newspaper as the train chugs along, but she feels unsettled. She catches the eye of a man sitting across from her.

Idly she admires the thin stripes of his sweater, which reminds her of Cary Grant’s sweater in the opening scenes of To Catch A Thief. “I’ll have to see if that movie’s on Netflix,” she thinks. Her stop is next and as she waits by the door, the man, too, gets up and stands behind her. The train begins to slow and the doors open, when she suddenly feels a push between her shoulder blades. She screams.

“Sorry, lady,” the man says, “I slipped and accidentally pushed you.”

She doesn’t reply.

“Are you okay?” he adds.

By now the train has stopped and she darts out, glancing backward at the man, then hurrying along. Did he really slip? or was he trying to push a stranger on the train? She was sure he pushed her, but now she feels a shadow of a doubt.  Her hands feel cold, like that time that she spent too much time staring out her  rear window at the people in the apartment across the way. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a pair of colorful gloves, one of her best F.O.’s yet.

She heads for her usual coffee shop, navigating around the crush of people on the busy city street. “Oof!” she exclaims as a man barrels into her. She feels a sharp pain in her side and for a moment, she thinks she’s been stabbed. She looks down and feels faint; her side is red.

She shakes her head, annoyed by her own hysteria. “I’m turning into a psycho!” she berates herself. Her side is red because she wore her red cardigan today, the one with the sweet columns of lace by the buttonbands. Shaking off her anxiety, she skips the coffee shop and turns toward her office. On the way up, she meets her boss in the elevator. “How are you, Mr. Thornhill?” she greets him.

She’s always wondered why his name sounds so familiar; he’s so suave and good-looking, though, like a 50s Hollywood movie star, that she reverts to her usual daydream of getting him in a Three-Second Kiss.

She gets into the elevator, idly noticing the cable-knit sock socks of the man standing next to her. The trailing cable pattern looks like a rope —

when the elevator lurches to a halt. The man in the cabled socks turns to her, a strange gleam in his eye. “Has anyone ever told you you look like Tippi Hedren?” he says, a quiver in his voice.

He steps closer and closer, his hands reaching her neck and everything goes black-and-white, except for a flash of red:

She wakes up, the scream still in her mouth.

“It was all a stupid nightmare,” she tells herself. She looks over at the beret she was knitting before she went to bed.

“I should know better than to stay up too late knitting,” she tells herself. She heads to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. It’s just a typical get-dressed-and-head-out-to-work day….

Hitch: Patterns Inspired by the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Stephannie Tallent (Cooperative Press 2013; PDF copy only available for $16.95, printed copy + PDF for $29.95 through the link)
29 patterns for mostly women’s sweaters and accessories (one man’s sweater; no kids’ items)