The Knitting Circle

by Ann Hood

  “I dried myself, and put on a summer dress and sandals and walked outside, calling my babies to me. I kneeled down in the wet grass and opened my arms, hugging them, holding on, not letting go. Until Caroline said, ‘Mama! Let’s make lemonade!’ And Nate said, ‘Mama! Can we have hot dogs on the grill for supper?’ I let them go then. I had to. They were squirming, moving away from me. Then I lifted my face and looked up at the cloudless sky.”

  There was silence. Then Beth mumbled something Mary could not make out. Her breath rasped in her chest and throat, and she frowned against it.

  Mary walked out of the room as quietly as she could. Downstairs, Tommy was in the kitchen pouring teriyaki sauce on chicken breasts.

  “She’s sleeping?” he asked.

  Mary nodded.

  “Thanks for coming today,” he said. “Some people, well, it’s too hard for them to see her like this.”

  Mary watched him as he began to tear lettuce leaves and toss them into a salad bowl.

  “Once she recovers from this latest surgery…” he said. But he didn’t finish the sentence.

  He began to slice plum tomatoes into quarters, frowning as he worked.

  “I forgot something,” Mary said.

  She went back upstairs, and into Beth’s room. Kneeling beside the bed, she whispered Beth’s name.

  Beth’s eyes fluttered open. She smiled, a little confused. “Have I slept a long time?”

  “No,” Mary said.

  Relieved, Beth closed her eyes again.

  Mary lightly touched her shoulder. “Beth?”

  Her eyes fluttered open again.

  “Do you and Tommy ever…you know?”

  “Back to that, huh?” Beth said. She shook her head no. “Not lately. But when we can, we will.”

  “When you do, you should get on top, and lean back a little and move up and down. That’s the best way.”

  Beth’s feverish eyes sparkled at Mary. “It works?”

  “All the time,” Mary said.

  Beth closed her eyes. “I’ll let you know,” she mumbled.

  Mary watched as she faded back into sleep, before she went downstairs again.

  Tommy was slicing cucumbers into thin rounds.

  “All set?” he said.

  “All set,” Mary told him.

  She gathered her coat and hat and mittens. Something caught her eye on the wall behind him. Six turkeys, drawn from hands of all different sizes, the fingers all brightly colored feathers, the thumbs smiling turkey faces. Beneath them, in perfect calligraphy, Beth had written each of their names, the children’s and hers and Tommy’s.

  Tommy saw what she was looking at.

  “Beth,” he said, his voice so full of love and pride that Mary had to turn from him, and from those six happy turkeys.

  14

  THE KNITTING CIRCLE

  THE WEDDING INVITATION was hot pink. The wedding was on Valentine’s Day. Come watch Jessica and Eddie get hitched! There was a vague country western theme about it, a choice of ribs or chicken for dinner, a reference to a band with the word “Rodeo” in its name. Mary fought a desire to toss the thing in the trash.

  But when she glanced over at the growing mountain of trash—neatly bagged, she reminded herself, but trash just the same—she decided it would be futile. Instead, she squeezed it into the drawer where her unused ticket to Mexico still lay, along with ten-dollar-off coupons at Old Navy, offers for new credit cards, notes she should have answered months ago.

  Sometimes, she heard the answering machine picking up, the voices of her worried friends in San Francisco and here in Providence telling her they were thinking of her, just checking in on her. Dylan called, sounding almost sheepish. He wanted to meet for coffee, or to take a walk, or something. Once he even choked out an “I miss you.” Connor called too, twice. The first time just to be sure she’d made it home all right. The second time was more of a goodbye call. “If only we’d met at a different time. Like in a few years,” he’d said. Mary smiled, knowing what had happened between them had been necessary, but it was over. Like all the others, when his message ended, she pressed the delete button.

  Her life grew smaller still. She slept on the sofa under a fleece blanket that also smelled slightly sour, the television blared ads for unneeded kitchen appliances all night. She knit on the sofa too, and ventured downstairs only to make coffee. Or used to, until she broke the glass carafe. That sat in the sink, amid spilled grounds and broken shards, empty cartons of ice cream, the remnants of some pasta from several days ago.

  Somewhere in her mind, Mary remembered a warning from just after Stella had died. Once the shock wears off, the real depression begins. Was that what was happening to her? She had left Beth’s with an overwhelming sense of how unfair life was. Even the cliché of that thought had not diminished her feeling of giving up. If she could lose her own daughter, if Beth’s young kids could lose their mother like this, if Bridget could die while waiting for a new heart, what was the sense of anything?

  Somehow Mary still dragged herself to the office every day. Not early. Not even close to on time. But she showered and dressed, and until the coffeepot broke, gulped down some coffee, even a piece of toast. She managed to sit at her desk, staring at her computer screen, compulsively researching knitting. When Eddie poked his head in, frowning and concerned, she always threw a new fact at him.

  “Did you know that in the Aran Islands families developed their own patterns for sweaters so that drowned fishermen could be identified?” she’d say brightly.

  “Uh-uh,” Eddie would say, frowning even more.

  Then she’d pretend to get back to work, her files on knitting growing fatter with facts about cultures that used knitting to express grief or oppression.

  “How does this fit into the piece you’re doing about knitting here?” Eddie asked her after she gave him a lengthy explanation about knitting and the Incas in Peru.

  “You’ll see,” she’d say, forcing a smile.

  Jessica smirked. She was hanging in the doorway of his office, like a snake. “Maybe you should write a whole book about this stuff,” she said.

  Later, Mary walked in as the two of them ate lunch at Eddie’s desk, Jessica perched on one corner, her long legs folded up like origami. Couldn’t the woman simply stand up or sit down? Why did she have to drape herself over everything?

  “In Riga,” Mary said, popping her head in the office, “they knit celebratory mittens for weddings.”

  Eddie’s office smelled so much like soy sauce, Mary felt thirsty.

  “Great,” Eddie said.

  Jessica looked down, embarrassed, her chopsticks poised like daggers.

  Mary tapped her folder on Latvia. “Good stuff,” she said.

  A person who had really, finally, lost it wouldn’t be able to learn so much, to Google so long, to follow the links and paths that led her around the world of knitting. Would she?

  THE CHEF BOBBY FLAY was cooking dinner for all the firemen in a fire station in the Bronx. The Food Network showed this same episode all the time. Yet Mary still watched as Bobby Flay shopped on Arthur Avenue for good Italian groceries, and spiced slabs of steak, and kidded with all the firemen.

  The sound of a bell ringing seemed to fit right in with the noisy Bronx background. Mary burrowed deeper under the sour fleece blanket. She imagined the steps involved in actually doing laundry: the gathering of the clothes from various floors, the separating of colors and whites, the measuring and pouring of the detergent, and choosing the load size, the water temperature, whether these clothes needed a gentle or vigorous washing.

  It was too much. Today she had worn to work a pair of denim overalls that had gotten her through more than half of her pregnancy and, beneath them, an old fraternity T-shirt of Dylan’s with a picture of a drunken man in a hammock and Greek letters across the top. They were all clean, which is what she pointed out to Jessica when she looked at Mary in disgust.

  That bell rang again.

&nbs
p; “Mary?” someone called from inside the house.

  Mary wondered if she could hide somewhere, feign sleep or a coma or worse. Who walked right inside someone’s house, anyway?

  “Mary,” the woman said again, closer.

  Mary heard footsteps climbing the stairs. She closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, Scarlet was standing in the center of the living room, looking around, horrified. Yarn, empty bags of microwave popcorn, scattered mail covered the floor. And there was Mary herself, in those overalls, wrapped in that blanket.

  “I’ve been working really hard,” Mary managed to say, even though her voice seemed stuck in her throat. “On a piece about knitting,” she added. “Maybe it’ll even be a book. That has been suggested to me.”

  “Oh, honey,” Scarlet said, crunching her way over the popcorn bags and catalogues on the floor to the sofa.

  “Did you know that a year or even longer after you lose someone you love, you can take a turn for the worse?” Mary heard herself saying. “Yes. It’s true. The shock wears off and some people get even more depressed.”

  Scarlet was looking her right in the eye. “We need to get you cleaned up, and then to clean up around here a bit, and then have a good long talk. Okay?”

  Mary laughed. “Don’t be silly. I go to work every day, you know. I’m fine. Sure, I’m not the best housekeeper, but that’s because I’m so busy.”

  “Where’s your husband?” Scarlet asked gently.

  “Oh, that.” Mary laughed again. “He moved out.”

  “What? When?”

  “Let me think, uh, that was before Thanksgiving.”

  Scarlet was starting to look worried. “You’ve been here alone for two months?”

  Mary pushed on her temples with her fingertips. “I guess so.” She blurted, “Except I went to Maine and I had this affair, I guess you’d call it.”

  “That’s okay,” Scarlet said, her voice soft and soothing.

  “Hell, if your husband left, right?”

  “For another woman. A happy woman.” Mary could feel the tears pouring out of her, but somehow they seemed disconnected from her.

  “You know, honey,” Scarlet said, “your door was wide open. I think you forgot to pull it closed behind you. I was just coming by to see if you wanted to go to knitting with me.”

  “The stitch-a-month. Dashes?”

  “I think so,” Scarlet said, getting to her feet. She began to pick up the things that littered the floor. “That’s all right,” she said. “We can catch up. We’ll do dashes on our own this month and then next month we’ll go with everyone else. Okay?”

  Mary closed her eyes, still feeling that rush of tears. Around her, Scarlet moved, quietly cleaning.

  MARY WAS SURPRISED when she woke up and saw bright sunshine and fresh snow. The house smelled yeasty, like freshly baked bread, and of flowers and laundry detergent. The television was turned off, and a quilt she didn’t recognize was over her, squares of ivory and white and pale pink, each square tied at the corner with a bit of ribbon or lace.

  “Hey there, Sleeping Beauty,” Mary heard, and she turned to see Lulu in the doorway holding a tray with three mugs of coffee and the cinnamon rolls you could only find at Rouge. Lulu put the tray on the coffee table. Mary saw that her weeks of clutter had been cleared. She caught a whiff of the faint scent of lemon furniture polish.

  “Tell me my whole last year has been a dream,” Mary said, taking one of the mugs and sipping.

  “I wish I could, baby doll,” Lulu said. “You slept something like nineteen, twenty hours.” She sat beside Mary on the sofa.

  “When I first got out of the hospital,” Lulu said, “all I did was sleep.”

  “Beats the real world,” Mary said.

  Lulu took Mary’s hand in her own and squeezed.

  “Feeling better?” Scarlet asked from the doorway, a basket of freshly washed and folded laundry balanced on her hip like a baby.

  “A little.”

  “The real world got to her,” Lulu said.

  Scarlet put the basket down and kneeled beside Mary.

  “After Bébé drowned, my therapist told me that grieving is very hard work. It’s exhausting. I remember feeling like my body was made of lead. I would look at a stairway, or down a street, and know that I could not make it to the end.”

  Without warning, an image of Dylan came to her: minutes after Stella was born, and he was watching Mary hold their newborn daughter. She had never seen such happiness on a man’s face before.

  “I have nothing left,” Mary managed to say.

  Lulu grabbed her by the forearms. “Don’t say that. You do. I know what it’s like to lose everything, to feel so hopeless. But you have to keep going.”

  Mary let herself be wrapped in Lulu’s arms.

  “He left me for someone else,” Mary said into the warmth of Lulu’s shoulder.

  AT NIGHT, IT snowed. But every morning the sun emerged and glistened on the bright whiteness that covered everything. The trees shone with ice. The air stayed crisp.

  Mary called in sick for the last two weeks of January. She RSVP’d Yes and Ribs to Eddie’s wedding. At home all day, she baked banana bread and cranberry bread and froze the extras, lining her freezer with the silver-foiled loaves. She bought a new coffeemaker. She ordered Major Dickason’s Blend coffee from Peet’s in San Francisco. She put her yarn in plastic bins and labeled the bins with a magic marker. She cleared her answering machine of all those messages: her mother chastising her for not calling, for not using that ticket to go to Mexico and visit; her friends checking on her from San Francisco, from here in Providence, and her knitting friends; even Connor called several times from Maine, his voice strange to her ears. She pressed the delete button and watched the blinking red light finally come to rest.

  “ROW ONE,” ALICE said. “Knit three, purl four, then knit two, purl four seven times.”

  Mary bent her head, silently counting off her knits and purls. When she was finished, she looked up, waiting for more instruction.

  Lulu was frowning, counting, swearing under her breath, and pulling out stitches. Scarlet was still knitting, her fingers lifting as she counted, keeping track. Ellen’s seat was still empty, and Mary sent a silent wish to her that Bridget would get a donor soon.

  “Knit the final three,” Alice said.

  Quickly and easily, the yarn the color of persimmons smooth beneath her fingers, Mary knit the last three stitches in that row.

  She looked up again, and her eyes settled on Beth this time. Out of bed, dressed in jeans and a fisherman’s sweater, her chenille cap on her head, Beth had improved after all. As if she felt Mary’s eyes on her, Beth looked up too, straight at Mary, and grinned.

  “Mary,” she said, “that advice you gave me?”

  “Advice?” Mary said.

  “Shit,” Lulu muttered, and pulled out more stitches.

  “You know,” Beth said. “The advice.” Her eyes twinkled and her cheeks were flushed.

  Mary laughed. “Oh,” she said, “that.”

  “You were right,” Beth said. “It works. Boy, does it work.”

  “Ssshhh,” Lulu said, counting the stitches on her needle.

  Beth gave Mary a thumbs-up sign, then looked back at her knitting.

  “Row two,” Alice said, “just knit your knits and purl your purls.”

  Part Eight

  KNITTING

  What? You can’t knit in the dark? Stuff and nonsense; anybody can. Shut your eyes. Knit one stitch. Open your eyes and look at the stitch; it’s all right. Shut your eyes and knit two stitches. Open them. Shut them. Knit three stitches…

  —ELIZABETH ZIMMERMANN, Knitter’s Almanac

  15

  ROGER

  THERE WERE HEARTS everywhere. Sparkling ones dangled from the ceiling, strings of cutout chains of pink and red hearts hung on the walls, shiny red-foil hearts were sprinkled across the tabletops, and dishes of conversation hearts sat as centerpieces. Kiss me. I
luv u. Let’s I M!

  Standing amid all the happiness, all the hearts, all the possibility that weddings held, Mary wondered if she would ever again be able to recapture her own heart’s capacity for joy. Instead of opening, her heart squeezed tightly shut when Jessica and Eddie said their vows and gave each other big sloppy kisses.

  That morning, on the Weekend Today show, Campbell Brown had interviewed a research doctor who had found that stress speeds up the aging process. This is why I look so bad, Mary had decided. Lately, when she looked in the mirror, she surprised herself. Her face had grown slightly jowly, her hair had lost its sheen, and she’d gone up a full size in her jeans, mostly because her ass seemed to have spread.

  Mary grabbed another Corona from the silver tub of beer and sidled over to Holly, who stood watching Jessica and Eddie and a bunch of people Mary didn’t know doing the Texas two-step. Jessica wore elaborately designed cowboy boots under her wedding dress, and a white cowboy hat instead of a veil.

  “What do you think?” Mary asked Holly.

  “Only she could look that good dressed so stupidly.”

  Mary sighed. “No stress in her life,” she said.

  They watched the dancing some more. Then Mary said,

  “What’s in that jar anyway?”

  “Uh,” Holly said, “lemonade. Made from real lemons.”

  Mary frowned at her. “You’re drinking lemonade.”

  Holly laughed nervously.

  “At a wedding?” Mary said. All of a sudden, it was as if Mary were seeing Holly for the first time. Her face was slightly puffy, and she had breasts instead of her usual flat chest. “You’re pregnant,” Mary said, that lump in her throat back again.

  “Uh,” Holly said. “God. Well. Yes.” She grabbed Mary’s arm.

  “I didn’t want to tell you. I was afraid it would make you sad again. And you’ve seemed, not happy exactly, but less sad. You know?”

  “You don’t even have a boyfriend,” Mary said.