The Knitting Circle

by Ann Hood

  Alice sighed.

  Scarlet turned down the curvy road that led to the store. “It’s your magic formula, Alice, and don’t pretend you don’t know that.”

  When they saw the black and charred wood that just yesterday had been the store, they all gasped. One patch of roof remained, but topless now, the sun poured over what was left, illuminating how much Alice had lost.

  “Oh dear,” Alice said.

  They got out of the car and stood in front of the shell of the building, squinting into the sunlight.

  “I opened this shop in 1974,” Alice said, folding her arms across her chest. “Thirty years. Can you imagine?” She forced a laugh. “My longest relationship.”

  Slowly she moved toward the store, stepping almost gingerly over what used to be the porch, and through the frame of the door.

  “Oh dear,” she said again.

  Scarlet and Mary followed. Walking over the burned boards, Mary remembered the day a year ago she had stood here empty-handed, frightened. And how Alice had let her in.

  Already Alice was looking through the rubble, moving things aside, busy.

  “I need to make a list,” she said, reaching into her pocket and retrieving a small notebook with a pencil tucked into its wire edge. “Brooms. Garbage bags. Boxes, in case we find anything to keep.” She wrote as she spoke.

  Scarlet had disappeared into what had been the main room. But now she joined them, grinning. “Buttons!” she said. “Dozens and dozens of perfectly good buttons.”

  “Thank God for plastic,” Alice said.

  “DID YOU KNOW that knitting is hot?” Mary asked Eddie. She was leaning against his office door and he was at his desk, frowning up at her.

  “I know that certain employees do it when they should be working,” he told her.

  “Celebrities knit.”

  “Uh-huh,” Eddie said. He had on an Italian soccer shirt, all bright yellow and black polyester.

  “There are knitting cafés and knitting/yoga classes and someone even told me there were knitting pubs.”

  Eddie raised one eyebrow, a skill he loved to show off.

  “In Canada,” Mary added.

  “Ah,” Eddie said.

  “I could write a piece about it.”

  “No,” Eddie said. “But thanks for the offer.”

  “I could examine why it’s so hot now—and it is, even though you haven’t noticed—and the benefits of knitting and then do a roundup of the best knitting shops here.”

  “Is there any evidence for this big trend? Or is this just your own marvelous but narrow point of view?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” Mary said, and handed him her files of research.

  “Is that review of El Coyote in here somewhere?” Eddie said.

  “El Coyote is the worst Mexican restaurant in the world,” Mary said. “They serve hamburgers.”

  “So it’s in here?”

  “No.”

  Eddie shook his head.

  “Fine,” Mary said. “Give it to Jessica. Let her go and eat bad bottled salsa and stale chips at El Coyote.”

  “You haven’t even gone yet, have you?”

  “You know me too well, Eddie.”

  Jessica appeared beside Mary. She had done something weird with her hair so that it flipped up at the bottom.

  “Eddie,” she said, “we need to talk. You know, alone?”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Eddie said before going into his office with Jessica. “Go to El Coyote tonight, give it to me tomorrow, and I’ll think about it.”

  “What kind of deal is that?” Mary said. Jessica smelled of some spicy perfume that made Mary slightly dizzy.

  “Otherwise I’m not going to read facts about knitting at all,” Eddie said.

  “Knitting?” Jessica said. “That’s the hottest thing in New York. My cousin lives there and she goes every Sunday to a knitting group. Sox and Lox. Not that we have anything like that around here.”

  “Thank you, Jessica,” Mary said, wiggling her fingers goodbye at Eddie.

  “El Coyote,” he called after her.

  As Jessica pulled the door shut, Mary heard her say, “I love that place, Eddie. You know I do.”

  Mary stopped right where she stood, between Holly’s desk and Eddie’s office. Holly’s head was moving in time to whatever her pink iPod mini was pumping into her multipierced ears. Mary stared at Eddie’s closed door. Shit, she realized, Eddie is sleeping with Jessica.

  “DINNER?” DYLAN SAID. “Tonight?”

  Mary swiveled her chair in a slow circle, the phone crooked between her cheek and shoulder.

  “Bad Mexican,” she said. “What could be better?” She thought of La Rondalla, her favorite Mexican place in San Francisco, and sighed.

  “I have this work thing,” Dylan said, unconvincingly.

  Mary frowned, an uneasiness settling in her. “Come to think of it,” she said, “I haven’t had dinner with you in a week. More.”

  “Work,” Dylan said. “It’s crazy.”

  From down the hall, she heard Jessica laughing.

  “Go back to the office after dinner,” Mary said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Great. I’ll meet you there.”

  Jessica walked by, wearing a bright orange coat that made her look like a pumpkin. She smiled at Mary. Mary didn’t smile back.

  She had read a statistic somewhere, in all the books and brochures she’d received since Stella had died, that fifty percent of couples who lose a child get divorced. Her own marriage had still felt new and uncertain when Stella was born. Dylan, in many ways, remained a stranger. His bright optimism made her cranky. So did his fastidiousness. She liked to spend weekends reading, making love, cooking decadent meals; he liked to wash the windows and take vigorous hikes. Sometimes she used to lie in bed, dreaming of her old life in San Francisco while Dylan vacuumed outside their bedroom door.

  But when Stella was born, everything shifted. Together, they marveled at her for hours. As she got older, they both spent Saturdays at the RISD Museum with her, or at the corner playground. There wasn’t time for their differences. There was just Stella.

  Without her, where were they? Mary wondered. They both moved zombielike through their days, their marriage. They still found comfort in each other’s bodies, but now Mary worried that in her daze of grief, she had not even noticed her husband moving away from her.

  EL COYOTE SMELLED like onions and Lysol. Mary saw the familiar back of Dylan’s head, the small stripe of skin between his dark curls and white button-down collar as he bent to study the menu. The menu itself was large and plastic. And sticky, she thought as she took one from the waitress and sat across from her husband. Her heart was beating hard. When he looked up and smiled at her, it sped up even more, filling her chest and throat. She loved him. In that instant she was more certain than ever.

  “You,” he said, pointing a tortilla chip, “are going to hate this place.”

  The menu described everything in great detail, even spelling the pronunciations phonetically: quesadilla (kay-sah-dee-ah). Green and red chile peppers with faces danced across the menu. Some of them even wore sombreros.

  “Ugh,” Mary said.

  Dylan reached across the table and placed one of his hands over both of hers, casually. Everything’s okay, Mary told herself. He was whistling through his teeth. Nothing was on his mind, she decided, except which bad combination platter to order.

  She almost confessed her fears. Instead, she said, “Eddie is fucking Jessica. Can you believe it?”

  Dylan didn’t look at her. “Who would ever sleep with Eddie?” he said.

  “Who would sleep with Jessica?”

  “Eddie is not an attractive man,” Dylan said.

  “Jessica’s a bitch! She likes this restaurant,” Mary said. That nagging sense of unease had returned. “Would you sleep with Jessica?” she asked him.

  Finally, he lifted his eyes. “I’m married,” he said.

  DYLAN WENT BACK to work a
fter dinner. For a crazy minute, Mary considered following him. The thought embarrassed her, and she went home, her stomach rumbling from the bitter taste of bottled enchilada sauce.

  The last thing she wanted to do was talk to her mother. But when she sat down to knit, the phone rang and her mother’s voice was on the other end.

  “I’m going to Guanajuato for the weekend,” her mother said,

  “so we won’t talk before you get here.”

  “Mom,” Mary said, “I’m not coming. I told you that.”

  “Nonsense! You have to come.”

  “I have work,” she said. Even if she wanted to go, which she did not, she could never leave Dylan now, with these suspicious, ridiculous thoughts jamming her brain. “I have a husband.”

  “I so wanted to spend some time with you,” her mother said.

  Mary put down her knitting, surprised. Since Stella had died, she had not seen her mother at all, except for in those first horrible days right afterward. Even then, she had stayed in the background, allowing others to comfort her, to cook food and answer the constantly ringing doorbell and phone.

  “Are you all right?” Mary asked.

  “Of course,” her mother said, disappointed. “It just seemed like time for us to have a visit.”

  “I’ll use the ticket another time,” Mary said. “Okay?”

  Her mother was uncharacteristically silent.

  “How about at Thanksgiving?” Mary said. “You were right. It would be better to get out of here for the holidays.”

  “That’s fine,” her mother said.

  “Have fun in Guadalajara,” Mary said.

  “Guanajuato,” her mother corrected.

  After they hung up, Mary remembered she had wanted to tell her mother about the fire at the Sit and Knit. But when she called back, an answering machine picked up, her mother’s voice telling her in Spanish that she wasn’t available.

  MARY PANNED EL COYOTE and Eddie gave her the assignment to write an article about knitting.

  “See?” he said, leaning back in the chair at his desk. “You help me. I help you.” He was growing one of those funny beards that just hang off the chin. Mary wondered if Jessica liked facial hair.

  “That hair on your chin looks silly,” Mary told him.

  “Some women find it sexy,” Eddie said.

  “Aha!” Mary blurted.

  He scowled at her. She could tell cold weather was coming because he was wearing one of his pilled, too-tight argyle sweaters.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie asked her.

  “Just aha,” she said.

  “You don’t know anything,” Eddie said, hunching over his typewriter.

  “That’s what you think,” she said, standing to leave.

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “What do you think you know?”

  She grinned and walked out.

  ALICE HAD AGREED to talk to her about knitting for the article. And to help her make the thumbhole on the fingerless gloves she was knitting. In the car on the way to Alice’s house, Mary kept thinking of Eddie’s face, and laughing to herself. Hadn’t he once told her, “You don’t shit where you eat”? That was back when a RISD graduate student interned one summer. Too skinny, with her hair pulled into two blunt pigtails at the nape of her neck, the girl had driven Eddie crazy. “Go out with her already!” Mary had told him, after weeks of hearing him go on about her talent, her intricate tattoos that snaked up both arms, her big clunky shoes. “You don’t shit where you eat,” he’d said sadly each time. Victoria. That was her name. Mary wondered if he had ever seen her after that summer. She wondered why he had broken his own rule now. With Jessica, of all people.

  The ocean appeared in the distance, and Mary turned down the dirt road that led to Alice’s small shingled house. Strange that Alice lived way out here alone. She didn’t strike Mary as a lonely person. Just private, Mary supposed. Still, there was no town nearby. No neighbors, except the family who spent summers in the only other house on the road. Once, Alice had told her that she used to raise chickens that laid colored eggs. But they were too much trouble, Alice had said. I like to be by myself, doing what I want, when I want, she’d explained.

  As soon as Mary pulled up the crushed-seashell driveway, the door to Alice’s house opened and she stepped out. She wore her usual practical skirt and hand-knit cardigan, this one a periwinkle blue. Mary saw that she had on her trademark pink slippers; her gout must be acting up again. Her white hair was pulled back into a loose bun, and stray hairs fell down her neck. She tugged at those often when she talked.

  Mary stepped from the car, remarking on the glorious day. It did feel glorious too. The week before had been a hellish week of hard rain, the remnants of a hurricane. Fitting, Mary had thought, for the week of Stella’s birthday. But the storm had passed, and now the sun shone extra bright on the turning leaves.

  “I grew up in London so I find the rain comforting, you know,” Alice said, ushering Mary inside. “Always have.”

  The house was small, with too much furniture and too many knickknacks—porcelain cats and glass clowns and needlepointed everything. On a small side table Alice had set out tea, complete with small silver sugar tongs for the hard brown cubes. The teacups and saucers were bone china in a dainty pink floral pattern. A silver platter held small round scones, strawberry jam, clotted cream.

  “Your mother loved coming here for tea,” Alice said. “So I thought you might enjoy it too.”

  “My mother?” Mary said, surprised.

  “She learned to knit sitting right in that chair,” Alice said, pointing to an overstuffed powder blue chair with a needlepointed footstool in front of it. Alice sighed. “But that’s another story, isn’t it?”

  Mary wished Alice would say more, but instead she busied herself fixing them each a cup of tea, preparing the scones just so, and settling Mary in that same powder blue chair. Alice sat on its pale pink twin, stretching her feet on the footstool there, also needlepointed with a picture of birds.

  “So you want to know how it all began,” Alice said after she’d blown on her tea, then sipped it daintily.

  Mary clicked on her tape recorder. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said.

  Alice sipped again, then said, “Did you know that knitting is one of the most ancient forms of handiwork? They found knit socks in Egyptian tombs. You can see them in the British Museum. In the Middle Ages, before the invention of the spinning wheel, girls used drop spindles that allowed them to spin even while they were watching their flocks, or simply walking. There are seventeenth-century woodcuts that show this. All of these aproned young women outdoors, knitting.”

  “So that’s why you learned?” Mary prodded. “Girls were taught to knit.”

  Alice laughed. “I’m not quite as old as the seventeenth century.” She nibbled her scone. “Are these too dry?” she asked.

  Mary hadn’t touched hers yet. She took a bite, savoring the sweetness of the jam with the slight tang of the cream. “It’s delicious,” she said. “Not at all dry.”

  “They’re meant to be a bit dry, aren’t they?” Alice said. “You go to a café here and what they pass off as scones is awful. Lemon goop or icing, even maple flavoring.” She shook her head. “One thing the British get right. Scones.” She lifted her teacup again. “And tea,” she said, taking a satisfying sip. “Now. Where were we?”

  “You were about to tell me how you learned to knit. As a little girl?” Mary prodded.

  “So you would think. But I had three older brothers, all of whom played football. Soccer, as you call it. And all I wanted to do was play football with them. My mother grew so tired of mending the knees of my stockings! You have no idea. I would come home bloody and bruised. And triumphant. I beat the dickens out of those boys most of the time. And I would be coming down our street just when the streetlights were being lit, my skirt hem unsewn, the knees torn from my stockings, my hair wild, half in and half out of the careful braids my mother worked so hard
on, and I’d have a big welt on my cheek, a little dried blood over my eye, and coming in the opposite direction were all the girls in my form who took dancing lessons from Mrs. Fish in the flat next door to us. We’d be eating dinner and the sounds of Mrs. Fish on the piano and all those girls dancing would fill our kitchen and drive my mum mad. ‘What is wrong with you, Alice, that you cannot be over there learning to dance with all the other girls?’ she would say.

  “Then one day I came home from the football field, I must have been eleven or twelve years old, and my mother was waiting for me with a small case with a zipper closing. She unzipped it and pointed to the objects inside, naming each one. A tapestry needle. A yarn holder. A tape measure. ‘But what do I need with all this?’ I said, nearly in tears. ‘It’s for knitting. You will take this kit and go next door where Mrs. Fish will turn you into a lady. God knows I’ve tried without any success.’

  “So every afternoon I went reluctantly to Mrs. Fish’s flat to learn to knit. In the distance I could hear the boys playing football, making me even more miserable.

  “That first afternoon, she sat me down, looked straight at me with her watery eyes, and said, ‘Wool, of course, is the soft fleecy coat of the sheep.’ I didn’t even try to stifle my snort.

  ‘Mrs. Fish,’ I told her, ‘I am a girl who already knows every country on the continent of Africa.’ I was obsessed with Africa, and I was certain I would go to live there as soon as I possibly could. Mrs. Fish ignored me completely. ‘After the wool has been through many refining stages of spinning and dying,’ she continued, ‘it is called yarn, and it is ready for our needles.’ ‘Can you correctly place the Belgian Congo on a map of Africa?’ I challenged her. ‘Or Rhodesia?’ She handed me a hank of scratchy yarn the color of oatmeal. ‘Winding a ball correctly is the first thing we shall cultivate,’ she said. I stared down at the pile of yarn in my lap. Africa, I’m afraid, seemed very far away.

  “I began to wrap the yarn, but Mrs. Fish stopped me. ‘Never wind the wool tightly,’ she reprimanded. ‘This destroys the life of the yarn.’ She positioned my hands just so. ‘The strands should pass over all four fingers and thumb of this hand, while this hand guides the wool from the skein.’