The Knitting Circle

by Ann Hood

  “I understand,” her mother said. “But running away for a bit won’t erase anything. It will just take the edge off a little. I remember that trip your father and I took—” she began.

  But Mary didn’t care about some long-ago vacation, or about her mother’s philosophies on loss.

  “Mom, you don’t know anything about it,” Mary interrupted.

  “This was a long time ago,” her mother continued. “Before you were born. We went to Key West. And we walked on those little streets with all the palm trees—”

  Her mother sighed, then spoke again.

  “Cuba. Havana, Cuba,” she said. “I hear it’s time to go to Cuba.”

  “Thanks,” Mary said. “That’s really great advice.”

  A few minutes after she’d hung up, the phone rang again.

  “You can’t take your knitting on the airplane.”

  “Mom?” Mary said.

  “In case you go to Cuba. They don’t allow you to bring the needles on board anymore.”

  “I’m not going to Cuba, Mom,” Mary said.

  “Mrs. Earle said that they let you bring circular needles. But you’re not working on those yet, are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mary said. “I’m not flying anywhere.”

  Lying in her bed Halloween night, Mary imagined flying somewhere. She thought of Stella last Halloween, a perfect fairy, all sparkles and tulle. And then she thought of herself, so earthbound, so stuck.

  WHEN HER MOTHER called again, Mary was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, willing herself to take off, to actually burst through the roof and into the sky.

  “I’ve been thinking about Thanksgiving,” her mother said. “I don’t want to make it worse for you. It’s going to be bad. I know that. And for the life of me I know that I can’t make it any better. Stay with your husband. I’ll barge in on Saul and his family. Next year will be a whole other story.”

  “That sounds great,” Mary said. “Have fun.”

  She hung up the phone and stared hard at the ceiling, as if she could by sheer force break a hole in it and see all the way up to the sky.

  ON THANKSGIVING MORNING they drove to Dylan’s sister’s house in Connecticut. The night before there was enough of a snowfall to leave a perfect dusting on the yards and trees of Sara’s neighborhood. The houses, set back from the street, emitted warm yellow light from inside, and lovely puffs of smoke from the chimneys. A few had already strung small white Christmas lights around their doors and windows, and these twinkled in the gray afternoon.

  “It looks like a movie set,” Mary said, hating it here.

  “Yeah,” Dylan muttered, “a horror movie.”

  She thought of Beth from knitting. This was where she would live. She and her four matching children, her Stella.

  They pulled into the driveway behind Sara’s Volvo wagon. One like it sat in every driveway here. Sara had an annoying habit of referring to her things by brand—the Volvo, the Saab. Her purse was the Kate Spade; her shoes were the Pradas, the Adidas, the Uggs.

  Sara stood on the front steps, dressed head to toe in camel, ready to pounce on them.

  “Hey, you two,” she said. “Can you believe it? Snow on Thanksgiving? I had to pull my Uggs out of the attic.”

  She hugged them both in turn, firmly, the kind of hug Mary had come to learn was meant to express sympathy.

  Fires roared in each fireplace of each room they walked through. So perfect was each fire that Mary concluded they must be gas, not real wood ones. But then a log crackled and sent blue sparks against the screen. Maybe the fires were the only real things here.

  In one of the living rooms—Sara actually had three rooms that could be living rooms, all with carefully arranged sofas and love seats and overstuffed chairs, and small tables with magazines neatly lined up, or large books about amusement parks and Winslow Homer—stood Sara’s husband, Tim, and their two teenage sons, Timmy and Daniel, along with another family, who looked like carbon copies of them. Except Liz and Dave also had an unhappy-looking daughter, Sylvie, who stood alone sullenly eating miniature quiches.

  “Ali’s with her roommate,” Sara told Mary conspiratorially. She said everything conspiratorially. “In Virgin Gorda. Poor thing, right?”

  “Wow,” Mary said stupidly, which was how she said everything, she realized. “Virgin Gorda.”

  “Get these two a Tanqueray and tonic,” Sara told Dave, after introductions.

  “You bet,” Dave said in his overeager voice. He sold something Mary could never remember. Pharmaceuticals?

  The boys all stared at their loafers, so Mary went to stand beside Sylvie.

  “What grade are you in now?” Mary asked, finding comfort in the superfluous gesture. “Eighth?”

  “Sixth,” Sylvie said between mini quiches. “I did junior kindergarten so I’m like a year older than everyone else.” She moved on to a platter of dates wrapped in bacon.

  “Do you know about this?” Liz asked Mary. “It’s a wonderful way to build self-confidence and self-image. They do a year between kindergarten and first grade, working on social skills and reinforcing basic learning skills. Then they get into first grade and they are at the top of their class. Honestly, it’s the best idea ever.”

  Mary nodded politely and gulped at her gin and tonic. Here was where she should feel smug at how self-confident Stella was. And smart. A kid who knew her own mind. A kid who sailed through kindergarten, printing her letters perfectly, writing her numbers just so, and coloring maps of South America and China in bright colors.

  Tears stung Mary’s eyes and she turned, pretending to admire a painting that hung over the fireplace.

  Mary turned from the painting and sighed. Sylvie was standing with the boys now. When Mary moved toward them, they all stopped talking.

  “Your daughter died,” Sylvie said matter-of-factly.

  Her brother Davey elbowed her in the ribs.

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  “How?” Sylvie asked, her lips shiny from grease.

  “Meningitis,” Mary said. She hated the word, the way it sounded in the stillness.

  “Brad Pitt had meningitis and he didn’t die.”

  “There are different kinds,” Mary said. “Stella had a bad kind. The worst kind.”

  Sylvie narrowed her eyes. “In school, in science, they said that antibiotics can treat anything.”

  “Sylvie,” Davey hissed.

  “They did!”

  “Not this,” Mary said. She remembered how a nurse had told her that some children lived but were blind or deaf or paralyzed. Ravaged, she had said. The disease ravaged them.

  Sylvie nodded solemnly, considering.

  The boys squirmed uncomfortably.

  “That’s so sad,” Sylvie said softly.

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  When Sara appeared a few minutes later to call them to dinner, Sylvie took Mary’s hand in her own soft sweaty one and walked with her to the dining room.

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY morning, the phone rang early. Mary was absently swishing water in the coffeepot.

  “So you made it!” a voice said.

  Mary frowned and didn’t answer.

  “Through Thanksgiving,” the woman continued.

  Mary hesitated. “Well,” she said.

  “What a dope I am,” the woman said. “I expect everyone to recognize my voice immediately. It’s Lulu. From knitting.”

  “Lulu,” Mary said, surprised.

  “I was thinking about you,” Lulu continued. “The holidays suck. And I know Christmas is lurking. I always go away for Christmas. Are you going away?”

  “I don’t think so,” Mary said.

  “You should! Somewhere warm. That’s what I do. I get on a plane and head south. Palm trees. Rum. Turquoise water.”

  “That sounds pretty good,” Mary said. She glanced out the window at yet another gray day. The wind whistled menacingly. They were in for a bad winter; everyone said so. “My mother suggested Cuba.�
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  “Cuba? That’s, like, illegal, isn’t it?”

  “Not according to my mother,” Mary said.

  “I’m sitting here instead of at my glass studio and I’m getting ready to knit hats. That’s what I’m making everyone for Christmas this year. Hats. And I thought you should come over and knit hats too.”

  “Hats sound so complicated,” she said.

  Lulu laughed. “So easy! In five hours you can make five hats. Christmas shopping done and you can spend your days reading travel brochures and booking your airline tickets to Havana.”

  “I was going to sit here and watch bad morning television, but your offer sounds pretty tempting,” Mary said.

  “Downstairs from Scarlet,” Lulu said. “I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

  EVERY PLACE THAT Scarlet’s loft was soft and warm—furniture, colors, lighting—Lulu’s was hard. A mishmash of flea market bargains and sidewalk finds, everything Lulu owned had a story.

  “This table was sitting on Prince Street. Just sitting there! I picked it up, hailed a taxi, and took it home.” She tapped the turquoise-and-yellow-speckled top affectionately. “Vintage thirties,” she added.

  Lulu plopped on the red velvet couch. “I love my junk,” she said, patting the worn cushion beside her.

  Mary sat down, adjusting herself to find a comfortable spot.

  “The coffee table’s nice,” she said. Mission style with a gleaming dark wood surface.

  “That was my ex-husband’s,” Lulu said.

  The thing about Lulu, with her spiky hair and skinny body and quirky clothes and furniture, was that Mary forgot that in fact Lulu was probably in her late thirties. Something about her—her fragility, maybe—made her seem much younger.

  “I didn’t know you were married,” Mary said.

  “Nine years.” Lulu smiled wanly and began to cast on to a pair of circular needles. “A lifetime ago.”

  She grew quiet for a moment.

  “You can make whole sweaters on these things,” Lulu said finally. “Except sweaters are boring. Hats are fast and hypnotic. Good therapy.”

  “I need that,” Mary said softly.

  Lulu didn’t look up. “I know,” she said. “So do I.”

  “I reinvented myself, you know,” Lulu said a little while later.

  “I used to be Louise Peterson, child of suburban Chicago, mall aficionado, private school snob.”

  Mary laughed. “This story is not true,” she said. On the circular needles, the hat took shape quickly. Its brim rolling perfectly as the stitches added up.

  “I have pictures to prove it,” Lulu said. She went to a bright blue chest of drawers that had once been painted red and another time green; both colors showed through here and there. The drawer stuck and Lulu gave it a hard tug. Once it opened, she dug around a bit before producing a shoe box decoupaged with pictures of Manhattan that had been cut from magazines.

  Sitting cross-legged on the couch beside Mary, Lulu opened the box and held up a picture of four teenage girls, all with Dorothy Hamill haircuts and identical blue and green plaid uniforms—kilt, kneesocks, polo shirt.

  “I don’t even know which one is me for certain,” Lulu said.

  “Looking like everyone else was the key to my youth.”

  “Meet Louise Peterson,” Lulu said. “Age sixteen.” She pointed to the next picture. “The prom,” she said. “The date,” she continued, tapping on the tuxedoed boy. “Lost my virginity that night. We all did. We made a pact to get it over with. After all, we had been with these boys since forever. We had plans to keep dating them through college—University of Michigan, all of us—and marry them and live happily ever after.

  “Our lives were so set, so predictable,” she said, studying the third picture. It was her senior picture, cut from a yearbook. “I pretended, you know. I wore the Izod shirts and the Fair Isle sweaters and I walked around the mall for hours and hours trying on earrings and lip gloss. Then I’d go home and cut out these pictures of New York City from magazines.

  “Eighteen years old, my acceptance to the University of Michigan sitting on my desk in my pink and white bedroom, my spot as the fourth girl in a suite with my friends in the freshman dorm secured, I got into my little Ford Pinto and drove east. Neatly folded in my drawers back home were all my snowflake sweaters with their matching turtleneck shirts, my tightly wound spools of hair ribbons in every color, one entire drawer of alligator shirts.

  “I arrived with my belongings in one American Tourister soft red suitcase and one thousand dollars—my life savings from a summer job at the ice cream parlor in my local strip mall. I parked the Pinto on St. Marks Place, stepped into the heat and stench of a late August New York City afternoon, and I knew I would never leave.

  “That’s when I became Lulu.”

  Lulu paused to pick up her knitting needles. The yarn she was using was soft aqua mohair. Small pieces of fluff floated in the air as her needles flew.

  “I knew I would never leave,” she said again. “I managed to get this place, a railroad flat with a tub in the kitchen on the third floor, across the street from a crack house. I loved that place. For fun, I spray-painted the floors. Kind of like my hair, I kept changing the colors.

  “Manuel, my bodega guy, the guy who guarded the crack house, even the crazy guy who walked seven dogs on leashes made of clothesline knew my name. All those years growing up back in Illinois, no one really knew me, you know? I used to get a Slurpee on the way home from school every day at the same 7-Eleven and the same girl used to sell it to me and she never once recognized me.”

  Lulu added brown yarn and stripes began to appear. Aqua. Brown. Aqua. Brown. She was a fast knitter. Her hands seemed to fly as she knit.

  “I bought a bike from a guy in Tompkins Square Park. An old red bike. And I put streamers on the handlebars and I rode that bike everywhere. It got stolen about a million times but I always found it again. One time I chased this guy all the way to Broadway to get that bike back.

  “I waitressed at every restaurant in the Village at one time or another. I fell in love a lot. With a guy in a bad band. With a bartender where I worked. I liked long lean men. Leather jackets were good too, but not required. I learned to knit. Men all over New York City were wearing my scarves.

  “After one of these big disastrous relationships, I was riding my bike down Second Avenue and I saw this flyer about a glassblowing class. So I signed up.

  “The teacher was this guy named Michael Angelo. He was from Italy and just my type. Tall and thin with these amazing hands. Huge hands. With long fingers. He had a studio on Prince Street, in this totally empty building. I fell totally in love with him. But what I really fell in love with was glass. What heat did to it. The shapes it could take.

  “I became obsessed with him and with glass. I would go to the library and sit at the old wooden table and read about glass. My teacher made money by selling these leopard- or zebra-striped glasses to fancy stores in SoHo. Eventually he taught me how to do it and I made leopard and zebra glasses every Saturday, all day.

  “He became the guy whose main purpose was to break my heart. He lied, he cheated on me, he kept me waiting. Then one day, out of the blue, he asked me if I wanted to go to Italy with him for the summer. To Venice. The glass mecca, right? I pretended to think about it for about a week. By the time I told him I’d go, I’d already sublet my apartment and quit my job. Hell, I’d already packed my bag.

  “That summer. Definitely in the top five best summers ever. Food. Sex. Glass. That was it. The whole summer. And then we got back to New York and right back to the old pattern. The fights. The other women. So I decided, fuck Michael Angelo. I would waitress my ass off and save enough money to go back to Venice and study on my own. I worked two waitress jobs and I took Italian classes and I painted my floor and I got a cat. Cats are good. People don’t realize how loyal cats are.”

  As if on cue, a fat orange cat jumped down from the windowsill, stretched languorously, an
d draped himself over the arm of the couch beside Lulu.

  “This is Katmandu. That first cat was Cat Stevens. I loved that cat.”

  She held up her aqua-and-brown-striped hat. “Time to decrease,” she said. “On a pattern it’ll say K2tog. Knit two together.” She inserted her needle into two stitches and knit them.

  She was quiet while she finished the hat. When it was done, she put it on her head, cast on forty more stitches, in orange this time, and began to knit again.

  “Three years,” Lulu said. “That’s how long it took me to earn enough money to go to Venice. And all this time I’m pouring my heart out to this cute bartender at one of my jobs. At the NoHo Star, on Bleecker. After work we’d stay at the closed restaurant and drink and talk. Three years this went on. Every now and then we’d grab a bite to eat, but basically our entire friendship existed sitting at that bar at four in the morning drinking the bits of wine left in other people’s bottles, and talking.

  “Then right before I left for Venice, he said, ‘Maybe when you come back you’ll marry me.’ And I laughed and said, ‘Okay, sure.’ And he said, ‘Good.’ So that’s what I did. I went to Venice for a year and studied glass. And I had these little flings. But I thought about him a lot. Practically every night for three years I had talked to him and I really missed him. I sent him a lot of postcards. Every week I’d write a whole story on the back, whatever story I wished I could tell him.

  “When I got back to New York, I went straight to the bar with my bags and everything and there he was, right where I left him. ‘I’m back,’ I said. He smiled. ‘I can see that.’ ‘Do you still want to get married?’ I said. He said, ‘Absolutely.’ Three days later, City Hall, we’re pronounced husband and wife.”

  Lulu sighed, but her eyes did not stray from her knitting. In fact, she focused even harder, narrowing her dark-lined eyes and bending forward slightly.

  “Smitty. That’s what he was called. Like every other Smith in the world, I guess. But he wasn’t like anyone else. He was this big open heart. We moved into a loft on Bond Street, a real mess. A work in progress, we called it. Plaster everywhere. Sawdust. We’d spend an afternoon on Bowery, where all the restaurant supply stores are, looking for stuff. Appliances and things. Then we’d come home with like the best espresso maker ever. An industrial size thing that took us months to learn how to use. Meanwhile, we’re cooking on a hot plate because we’ve dumped all our money into that instead of a stove. God, we had fun.”