The Knitting Circle

by Ann Hood

  HER HANDS NEEDED to do it. It was as if the movement of the needles coming together and falling apart took away the horrible anxiety that bubbled up in her throughout the day. Just when Mary began to consider the challenge of tassels, her mother called.

  “Sometimes I miss the leaves changing,” her mother told her.

  “Those gorgeous colors. The cactus are beautiful in their way, but still.”

  “I’ve done it,” Mary said reluctantly. “I’ve learned to knit.”

  “Ah,” her mother said. “So Alice called.”

  When Mary didn’t reply, her mother said, “It’s good, isn’t it? They say to some women, religious women, each stitch is like a prayer.”

  Mary had no interest in discussing spirituality with her mother. “How do you make tassels? I’ve made this scarf and I think tassels would really complete it.” Plus, Mary added to herself, I’m about to lose my fucking mind and I think if my hands stay busy it will help and I’ve even thought about sitting here and knitting scarves until I die.

  “Simple,” her mother said. “Take some leftover yarn and cut it all the same length and then make bundles of three or four of those. Tie them along the hem in good strong knots.”

  “How many, though? How close together do I tie them?”

  “Be creative, Mary. Do whatever suits you.”

  Mary frowned, eyeing the hem of her scarf.

  “I have Spanish at eleven,” her mother said. “Better go.”

  “Right,” Mary said.

  ONE DAY, A few months after her mother had stopped drinking, Mary came home from school and found her sitting on the sofa rolling yarn into fat balls. By this time, her father had started to recede from the family, as if once her mother stopped drinking he no longer had a role there. When Mary left for college, her parents got divorced, but their separation from each other began before that.

  “You’re knitting?” Mary said.

  “I used to knit socks and hats for the GIs,” her mother had explained.

  “What GIs?”

  “During World War Two. Betty and I would walk down to the church and sit with all the other girls knitting. It was very patriotic.”

  “So now you’re going to sit here and knit all day and send socks to soldiers in Vietnam?”

  “Babies,” her mother said softly. “I’m knitting hats for the babies in the hospital. The newborns,” she said, holding up a tiny powder blue hat.

  For the rest of that year, small hats in pastel colors piled up everywhere, on end tables and chairs and countertops. Then they would disappear and her mother began new piles. Eventually she knit striped hats, and white ones flecked with color, and then zigzag patterns.

  “She’s lost her mind,” Mary whispered to her best friend Lisa.

  Lisa could only nod and stare at all the tiny hats everywhere.

  MARY LOST HER virginity in her bedroom while her mother sat downstairs knitting hats for babies she did not know. Every afternoon that spring, Mary and her boyfriend Billy had sex on her pink-and-white-striped sheets, Billy turning her every way he could, entering her from every direction, kissing every part of her, while her mother sat, oblivious, and knit those stupid hats.

  Sometimes Mary imagined that she could see through the hardwood floor, past the ceiling, into the living room where her mother sat surrounded by yarn. Maybe, Mary thought, her mother was only capable of loving one thing at a time. There had been her father at some point, she supposed. And then the drinking. And now this, knitting. But Mary couldn’t help wondering why she had never been her mother’s obsession. Nothing Mary had ever done—playing Dorothy in the third-grade production of The Wizard of Oz, getting straight A’s her entire sophomore year, winning her school’s top literary prize—nothing, had ever earned her more than halfhearted praise from her mother. “You’ll go far,” her mother liked to say. She’d make her toads-in-the-hole for breakfast and call it a celebration.

  While her parents watched The Fugitive, Mary took Billy upstairs to her room. As she unbuttoned the five buttons on his jeans, he whispered, “I don’t know, Mary. They’re both downstairs.”

  She kneeled in front of him, taking him into her mouth. From downstairs, she heard David Janssen searching for the one-armed man. Her mother would be knitting without even glancing down at her stitches. Her father would have Time magazine opened in his lap. Billy groaned and Mary yanked her head away. Already her mind was far from here, from the tiny hats and her mother’s glazed stare and her father’s impenetrable front. She could imagine her future, bright and near.

  IT TOOK MARY almost the entire next morning to do the tassels, but when she finished she decided to go to Big Alice’s and buy more yarn. The idea that these scarves were becoming like those long-ago infant hats her mother made occurred to her. But she was different, she told herself. She would give them as Christmas gifts. Mary earmarked the striped one for Dylan’s niece, Ali, who went to college in Vermont and certainly needed scarves. The first one she would keep for herself; Alice had said you should keep the first thing you knit.

  Satisfied with her practicality, she entered the store. The smell of wool comforted her, the way the old-book-and-furniture-polish smell of libraries used to. Mary could still remember how the ball scene in Anna Karenina had helped calm her after one of her mother’s tirades; how Marjorie Morningstar’s kiss under the lilacs had let her forget her own broken heart one summer; how Miss Marple used to make her smile.

  Now here she stood in a knitting store, and that same sense of safety, of peace, filled her. The store was crowded, but Mary spotted Scarlet’s red hair across the room. She had on a green shawl with elaborate embroidery and long fringe wrapped around her, and beneath it she wore a startling fuchsia turtleneck.

  Scarlet turned, her arms filled with a dozen or more skeins of fat loopy yarn in shades of beige and rust and white. Her eyes crinkled at the sight of Mary.

  “Told you,” Scarlet said.

  “I admit it,” Mary laughed.

  Scarlet dropped her yarn on the counter and made her way over to Mary. “You need to learn how to purl and you look like you need a cup of coffee.”

  “Coffee, yes,” Mary said. “But purling still seems…unnecessary.” Already she was eyeing a variegated yarn in moss green with gold and red and orange pom-poms woven throughout. It made her think of autumn. Hesitantly, she lifted a skein.

  “That yarn is fun to work with. It makes a great child’s sweater,” Scarlet said, pointing to a small sample hanging up.

  Mary swallowed hard and managed to shake her head.

  “It also makes a great scarf,” Scarlet said easily. “But not for purling. Let’s pick out some multicolored yarn and get us that coffee. I make a café au lait that, if you close your eyes, will make you think you’re in France.”

  Relieved, Mary followed Scarlet’s soft green shawl through the crowded store, toward her next lesson.

  MARY SAT AT the counter that separated Scarlet’s living area from the kitchen in her loft in an old jewelry factory. The walls were brick and the ceiling had steel beams across it. Below the wall of windows city traffic inched toward the highway.

  Scarlet handed Mary a yellow ceramic bowl of café au lait. “Let’s sit on the sofa where the light’s better,” she said.

  Mary’s yarn was pink and yellow and blue. A funny tangle of Stella’s favorite colors, she realized as she watched Scarlet cast on for her and the colors revealed themselves.

  “Knit two stitches,” Scarlet said.

  She smelled of sugar and the sour tang of yeast. Up close like this, Mary saw pale lines etched at the corners of her mouth and eyes.

  “Remember when you purl it’s tip to tip,” Scarlet said, pulling the loose yarn in front. “The tip of this needle goes here and they form an X, see?”

  Scarlet purled two stitches and then turned it over to Mary. “Knit two, purl two,” she said. “It’s tedious as hell, but when you finish that scarf you’ll be an expert purler.”

 
; Mary knit two easily, then hesitated.

  “Tip to tip,” Scarlet said, picking up her own knitting.

  When Mary successfully purled two stitches, Scarlet said, “I knew you could do it.”

  They knit in silence, the clicking of the wooden needles the only sound except the traffic below. Scarlet’s apartment was like a slice of Provence. Everything in soft yellows and blues with splashes of red, the wooden tables rough-hewn and worn, with drips of wax from candles and rings left from wet glasses. Mary imagined exotic men here, good red wine, the smells of a daube simmering on the stove, and pungent cheese and olives on this coffee table.

  “How did you end up in Providence owning a bakery?” Mary asked. “You seem like you belong somewhere entirely different.”

  “Like where?”

  Mary blushed. “I don’t know. France, maybe.”

  Scarlet nodded but didn’t reply. She had removed the ornate shade from the table lamp to give them more light, and that bright bulb showed something in her face that Mary could not identify. A sadness, perhaps. No, Mary decided. Regret.

  After a time Scarlet looked up from her knitting and right at Mary. She was using very large needles and her sweater had already begun to take shape while Mary’s scarf still seemed small and new.

  “Everyone has a story, don’t they?” Scarlet said. “Mine is about bread and the sea and, you’re right, about France.”

  Mary held her breath for a moment, her needles poised. Then Scarlet began to speak, and Mary exhaled, put her needles together with a soft click, and listened.

  “I WAS ALWAYS good with my hands,” Scarlet said. “Even when I was little, I liked to touch things. I used to carry a stuffed dog everywhere with me. Pal, I called him. I rubbed away the fabric on one of his ears. And I rubbed holes into all of my blankets. I loved the feel of fabric in my fingers. It brought me…not joy, exactly, but…comfort. Yes, comfort.”

  Scarlet paused, lost in thought.

  “The first time I baked bread,” she continued, “I knew this was something I could do for the rest of my life.”

  She took a breath, then continued.

  “I was a terrible student. An art major only because I liked textiles and ceramics and it didn’t require a lot of reading or tests. Mostly, I smoked pot and had sex with other art majors. The summer after I graduated from college, I needed a plan or my parents were going to make one for me. So, out of the blue, I said that I wanted to live in France. Before I knew it, everything was set. My father knew a professor in Paris, Claude Lévesque, and he arranged an au pair job for me with Claude’s family. Claude and his wife Camille had two daughters, Véronique and Bébé.”

  Mary thought of her own father, an insurance salesman who, other than his clients, seemed to know nobody. He moved through the world alone, circling her mother and Mary, a shadowy, quiet man.

  Scarlet said, “They sent me pictures in a big envelope that one of the children had decorated with a border of flowers drawn in pen and ink. I wondered where I could get my pot in Paris and what I would do with the children and if they spoke any English. Their faces in the photographs seemed blank and uninteresting. The mother looked severe. But the father, Claude, looked like Gérard Depardieu, a big hulking guy with a bulbous nose and unkempt blond hair. Sexy and French.

  “I left for Paris right after Christmas. When the plane was landing I looked out the window at the gray overcast city still lit up and something settled in me. I knew somehow that this was really where I belonged and that I would never leave.

  “I know it sounds like a schoolgirl’s fantasy, but when I met Claude I knew that I would be with him somehow, that we would be connected forever. The wife, Camille, was not stern like in her photograph. She was actually quite pretty. A petite woman with that style that Parisian women have. I remember her coat was tangerine, and thinking how odd that would look in Cambridge among all the ugly L.L. Bean down coats everyone wore there. Her blond hair pulled back in that perfect knot, and her eyes always lined in black, and her skinny legs in their black stockings beneath that coat. She was aloof, and she smoked too much, but she wasn’t stern.

  “The children were fine and we took to each other right away. I taught them how to knit, and we made blankets for their dolls and little hats for their stuffed animals. I would walk them to school and then go to French lessons for two hours and then run errands for Camille. I was alone in the apartment, a cramped two-story place in the twelfth arrondissement filled with really ugly antiques, until two o’clock, when I went to pick up the girls at school.

  “At first I stayed in my room and watched television. But before long I began to wander the streets. I had a pass for the Métro and I would ride it all over and then get out and walk around, into cheese shops and pâtisseries and vintage clothing stores. One day I ran into Claude in the Latin Quarter. He was sitting having a carafe of wine at a café and he motioned for me to join him. We spoke to each other in English, which felt very foreign to me, and exotic. Claude spoke fluent English. Camille did not speak any English, and the children studied it in school but spoke it badly.

  “We began to meet on Tuesdays, which was his free afternoon. Together we explored the city, speaking English like it was our own secret language. Then I would go and pick up the children, and once the weather turned warm we would go to the park and ride the carousel. At home I helped make dinner and ate with the family and helped to clean up and give the children their baths and then I went to my room. Claude ignored me during this part of the day. Our few hours together on Tuesdays seemed like a dream, unconnected to anything else that happened.

  “This continued for two years. The schedule like that and the Tuesday meetings. Over time I lost my baby fat and I began to dress like the women I saw on the streets. I grew my hair long. I stopped taking my French lessons because I was fluent really. So my free time was plentiful. I befriended a baker named Denis. His family owned one of the oldest bakeries in the city, and I would go there for my favorite baguette to nibble while I strolled.

  “Soon Denis and I became lovers. He was a distracted young man, careless with everything except bread. But we would go dancing and to his small flat above the bakery and I felt very romantic, not in love with Denis, but romantic. Perhaps in love with the city and this simple life I led there. Sex with a handsome Frenchman! Fresh baguettes and wine in bed! His hands always had flour in the creases and I would trace them, pretending I could see into the future.

  “One night I said, ‘Teach me to make that bread I love.’

  “So we went downstairs and he showed me. Watching a man knead dough and create bread from just flour and water and yeast is the sexiest thing imaginable. Because he had to be at the bakery at four a.m. to begin baking the bread, he always brought me back to Claude and Camille’s around three. But this morning I stayed and made the bread with him. It was as if my hands had finally learned what they were meant to do. I could feel the change as I worked the dough. How it grew less sticky. How it took new forms and properties. When I got home it was almost six and I was giddy. I would be a baker. I was meant to be a baker.

  “I had forgotten that Camille and the girls had gone to meet Camille’s parents for a weekend in Brittany, on the coast. So when I quietly entered the apartment and found Claude sitting there, obviously awake all night, I thought something terrible had happened.

  “I even forgot to speak English. I began to tell him, in French, about my discovery, how I had to find a baker to apprentice with. My hands tingled from the feel of the dough in them.

  “‘Rouge,’ he said—privately, that’s what he always called me; he didn’t think Scarlet suited me. This name, he told me, it’s too ridiculous—‘I thought something terrible had happened to you. I thought you had been killed or hurt.’

  “His English sounded, oddly, harsh.

  “Je suis désolée,” I said.

  “He covered his face in his hands and began to laugh. ‘I think you’ve been savagely murdered and all the while
you’ve been baking bread.’

  “I didn’t see what was funny. But I forced a smile. I caught a glimpse of myself in the oversized mirror and saw that I was covered with flour.

  “As if he read my mind, Claude said, ‘You have flour everywhere.’

  “And he got up and walked over to me and began to brush the flour from my sweater and my hair and my arms. That was when it began, the thing I knew would happen. I have wondered many times over the years how I knew with such certainty that this man and I were to be linked forever. And I have never been able to find an answer. I was so young when I arrived in Paris. And unsure of so many things. Yet this one thing I knew absolutely.

  “That weekend, with Camille and the girls away, we made love in that particular way that new lovers have, as if nothing exists outside each other.

  “This was long ago now. Twenty-two years. What I remember is Claude making us an omelette and how we ate it in my bed, cold. I remember how thoughts of running away with Claude began to fill my mind. I remember how on Sunday afternoon he held my face in his hands and said, ‘You know you must leave here, Rouge. We cannot be like this with Camille and the girls.’

  “He didn’t mean, of course, that I had to leave right then. But that is what I did. I packed my suitcase, the same one that I had arrived with two years earlier, and I left that apartment with Claude’s fingerprints and kisses all over me. It was raining, a warm rain that diffused the lights of the city. Like the blurry colors of a Monet painting. Like tears. I went to the only place I knew to go: the bakery.

  “Denis took me in. I told him I had fallen in love with someone, that I needed a place to stay for a while. He said something like, ‘C’est dommage,’ nothing more than that. I slept on his sofa and helped to bake the bread. And I began to meet Claude in his office in the afternoon, where, on a scratchy Persian rug, we would make love to the sound of a typewriter pounding in the office next door and students rushing down the hall, arguing or worrying or laughing.

  “I went on this way, in a happy blur, for a month or so. Summer came and I learned to bake croissants and pain au chocolat, the intricacies of butter and dough, the delicate balance of sweet and sour. I did not ask about Camille, though I did inquire about the children, who I missed sorely. Especially the little one, Bébé. By this time she was eight, but small like her mother, with that fine hair that tangled easily and skin so fair that the pale blue veins shone just beneath. She carried a doll, Madame Chienne, everywhere with her. A rag doll that was loved away in spots, like my own dog Pal. Véronique was more polite, but less imaginative, and though I got on well with her, it was Bébé whom I adored. Claude brought me pictures that she’d drawn, and read me little stories she wrote. And I suppose in my fantasy of Claude running away with me to a place with golden sunshine, Bébé came too.