The Knitting Circle Rapist Annihilation Squad (3 page)

Jasmine asks, “Never?”

Gina snorts in derision. “Did they in your case? Rapists never get what they deserve.”

“Who do you call when the one who did it
is
a cop?” asks Suzie.

No sound except for the needles.

Suzie says, “Anybody in this room whose rapist went to jail, raise your hand.”

All knitting stops. They look at each other. No one raises her hand. Knitting resumes.

Gina says, “I used to work at a rape crisis center. Guess what percentage of rapists spend even one night in jail.”

Jasmine says, “Half?”

Gina snorts again, “Try six percent. They almost always get away with it.”

Christine shakes her head. “That's just not right. Somebody needs to do something!”

Suzie shakes her head, too. “Good luck. That will never happen.”

No one speaks while they knit.

Another group of women might have let it drop there. Another conversation might have ended the way so many conversations like this end—
somebody should do something, but nobody ever will, and that's a sad fact of life, so let's adjust to it the best we can.

The women knit quietly for several minutes. Then Suzie says, “My mom always tells me if you want to get something done right, you've got to do it yourself.”

The clicking of needles stops as they digest this. Brigitte smiles to herself. The clicking resumes.

Christine hesitates before saying thoughtfully, “I read a book about village life in China under Mao, right after the
revolution. Women formed patrol groups, and when they saw a man beating a woman they dragged him out of the house and beat him up. If he was caught doing it again they increased the punishment. Wife-beating stopped very quickly.”

The women let their knitting fall to their laps. Only Brigitte keeps knitting calmly, smiling.

Christine continues, “And more recently, the Gulabi Gang in India has been doing the same thing. Can you imagine several hundred women in pink saris chasing men who beat women?”

The women smile broadly.

Jasmine asks Christine, “What do they do when they catch them?”

“Well, they don't give them candy kisses, I'll tell you that much. Oh, and they also beat police who steal from or falsely accuse the poor.”

“That's the coolest thing ever,” Jasmine says.

“Why don't we ever take justice into our own hands like that?” Suzie says.

The women stare at the walls, the ceiling, the floor, a few inches to the side of each other—anywhere but into each other's eyes.

Finally, Brigitte says, “Um. I did.”

The women look at her in shock.

Christine gets a sly look in her face and says, “Spill it, sister.”

Brigitte spills the story of stopping her mustachioed attacker.

Suzie asks, “Weren't you scared?”

“Of course. That's why I did it.”

Jasmine asks, “Do you think you might get caught?”

Brigitte looks at each of them and says, “Not if you don't tell.”

They both use their knitting needles to cross their hearts. Everyone else in the room nods grimly.

Finally, Suzie begins to giggle. When everyone looks at her she asks, “What did you do with the weapon? Are you using it right now?”

Gina sputters, “That's disgusting!”

Everyone stares at her.

She explains, “It had his blood on it. Who knows what nasty disease she could have caught!”

They laugh, all except Gina, who digs in her purse for an alcohol wipe, then gingerly takes Brigitte's knitting needles and sterilizes them before returning them to her.

Suzie pantomimes putting needles on her head, says, “She could have mounted his head on the wall, with two knitting needles for antlers.”

Jasmine catches the fever: “We could all become big game hunters!”

Suzie: “Have a contest!”

Jasmine: “Go on safaris!”

Suzie: “Issue licenses and set bag limits!”

Gina stops laughing and says sharply, “No!”

“Absolutely not,” says Brigitte, in an even stronger tone.

Everyone looks at them, wonders why they're spoiling the fun.

Gina says, “No licenses. No bag limits.”

Brigitte adds, “It's got to be open season.”

Everyone laughs. Knitting resumes.

Finally, Gina asks, “So what are we going to do about that school counselor?”

1
Translation: I'm horny as a toad in heat, and even the vulnerable young ones in class have turned down my sexual advances.

2
Translation: I need a confidence-builder something fierce. And you're not half bad.

3
Translation: When one can't find quails, one eats crows.

4
“This is the moment,” Marilyn tells her students, “when the whole story turns. If this story were being told not by Brigitte or me or someone like us, but rather by Riversong or by others like him” — and here she lists off a whole string of writers and filmmakers, people like Nabokov, Miller, Lean, Kazan — “the point of the story would not be Brigitte's resistance, or how awful rape is, but rather how the woman actually wanted the man the whole time.”

Her students are inevitably befuddled by this insanity. To exemplify this insanity in storytelling emphases and purposes, she contrasts, for example, the rape scenes in
Dr. Zhivago
or
Straw Dogs
— where the woman starts by repelling the man's violent advances, but in the end pulls him close, showing that's what she wanted all along — with the rape scene in
Deliverance,
where because it is a man and not a woman being raped, the rape is not romanticized or trivialized or made to be just another form of foreplay, but rather is shown to be humiliating, violent, and violating. At no point does Ned Beatty's character pull the rapist closer, nor whisper that he loves him.

A couple of weeks later, Mary is in her kitchen mixing green enchilada sauce into ground beef for meatloaf. Her second husband, Theodore, is in the living room watching the “Believe-It-Or-Not Super-Thrill-Filled News-O-Tainment Hour.” She half listens as the newscaster details the latest tabloid-style spectacles: “Mother asks police to handcuff her five-year-old child and send him to the pokey! Believe it or not! Two middle school students were caught having sex in class! Believe it or not! Miss USA contestant almost stumbles on her gown! Believe it or not!”

Then she hears something that makes her pay attention: “Police have reported that James Noggle, counselor at Westwood High School, was found dead today in his office. He had been stabbed in the heart with a knitting needle. There are no suspects as yet! Believe it or not!”

Mary smiles and whispers, “Thank you, Christine.”

A few nights later, Suzie is in her family's living room with her parents and her nine-year-old brother. He's an okay brother, except that he still picks his nose. That is what he is doing with intense concentration as the newscaster announces, “Police have reported a second bizarre knitting needle murder. Todd Kurz, a decorated police officer, was stabbed in the line of duty last night. The following photo of the crime scene is graphic, and viewer discretion is advised. Please send all kiddies, puppies, sentimentalists, Hallmark card enthusiasts, and for entirely
other reasons, communist sympathizers from the room. Or at least cover their eyes.”

Suzie's father says to her little brother, “You heard him, Bub.”

Finger still in nose, her little brother replies, “I'm not a comminis simpa-sizer.”

Her mother reaches to cover his eyes. He removes his finger long enough to push away her hand. She wipes her own hand on a handkerchief she keeps ready for this very reason.

The television plays soft and tasteful yet still toe-tapping patriotic music—kind of like John Phillips Sousa on Valium. The photo that appears on the screen shows a police officer sitting in his patrol car, dead, a box of doughnuts and a bondage porn magazine by his side and a knitting needle stuck through his heart. A doughnut hangs from the needle.

Suzie smiles and whispers, “Thank you, Jasmine.”

Her mother says, “What did you say, dear?”

“Oh, nothing, Mother.”

Her little brother removes his finger, stares at it a moment, then puts it back in his nose.

A few nights later, Christine sits up in bed, where she's under her covers eating chocolate-covered ginger bits and watching television.

The newscaster says, “The knitting needle murderer, clearly now on a killing spree, has struck for a third time. Police report that an elderly gentleman, Enver Alcatraz, was found dead in his home dressed in an ill-fitting tuxedo. He was stabbed with a knitting needle right through his boutonniere, which was composed of red carnations. Police also report that when he was found, he was clutching a corsage, and his CD player was still
playing Neil Sedaka's ‘Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen.' The dance card of Mr. Alcatraz has, sadly, been punched for the last time.”

Christine raises her chocolate in a toast. “Ha! Thank you, Gina!”

The next week, a man sits alone on a wooden chair in the center of a large living room in a small mansion. The walls are decorated with paintings of cowboys at work and photograph after photograph after photograph of women—some beautiful, some not so, some young, some not so, some dressed, some not so—posing with the man now sitting in the chair. In the photographs the man always wears a cowboy hat. Now he wears that same hat, long white underpants, and boots with spurs. A guitar rests across his lap.

His handlebar mustache is perky. His hat rests at a jaunty (yet practiced) angle. His spurs would still jangle if he could move his feet. But he is dead. A knitting needle protrudes from each ear. Trails of blood congeal on his neck.

One of his songs plays on the turntable (although he'd put out a couple of dozen CDs, he was a purist to the end and owned only a record player):

My baby, she didn't say yes
But she didn't say no.
A little hankyspanky
And she was a-ready to go.
Stolen kisses are sweeter than gold
And stolen sexy-wexy
It never gets old.

The song reaches its end and so does the LP. Since there is no one there to turn it off, the record player makes a repeated clicking sound as the needle bumps against the end of the record. Chuk. Chuk. Chuk.

Fans of this country western singer pack a church for his funeral. Most wear all-black western-style outfits bespangled with sequins. The jangles of spurs sound like hundreds of tiny bells helping to wing the man's soul to heaven, or to some other place. Black cowboy hats are removed one by one as mourners enter the church and approach the casket, where they admire its carvings of horses and guitars, horses playing guitars, and men playing with horses. Inside the casket is the singer, now fully dressed, with his mustache even more personable and miraculous than that of the now-forgotten Riversong.

Several women from the knitting circle are also in attendance. They are not wearing black, but bright pink. And they're knitting. As they wait for the service to start, the clicking of their needles echoes in the cavernous holy space.

The priest has not yet arrived.

Time passes, and though the mourners want to pay their respects to their beloved troubadour, they also have meetings to attend, dogs to walk, partners to have sex with, people to e-mail, and in some cases special friends with whom they will combine the sex and e-mail. But the priest still fails to arrive. People begin to check their watches. Some send text messages. A few pull out laptops. A few of these make extra sure that no one else can see their screens.

Finally a deacon emerges from a back room and approaches the pulpit. He wipes the sweat from his face with an embroidered hanky. He clears his throat nervously, says, “My
deepest apologies. We can't seem to locate the, um, priest. In the meantime, since the deceased was a singer, why don't we all, um, sing a hymn? Does anyone have a suggestion?”

One of the women in pink suggests a hymn of thanksgiving.

Others, including many not wearing pink, snicker.

The deacon disguises his own laugh with a cough, then says, “Ahem, why don't we start with ‘Abide with Me'? Lenny, can you lead the mourners in song?”

Lenny, a young man who also works in the church, makes his way to the pulpit. He walks awkwardly, as though with every step closer to having to face the audience, he withdraws further inside of himself. His uncombed, slightly greasy hair falls a little more over his face with every step. By the time he gets to the pulpit his hair shields his eyes entirely. It would be easy to laugh at his eccentricities if it weren't painfully clear they were a symptom of some trauma. Standing as far as possible from the microphone, he begins to softly sing—chant would be a better word, and whisper would be even better than that. Most of the mourners join him, though without much enthusiasm. Some continue to text. A few look around furtively, then stare all the more intently at their laptop screens. The deacon retreats again into a back room.

Alone, he mutters to himself, “Where the hell is he? And where did he move the wine? If I'm going to be stuck leading this damn service, I'm sure as hell going to need a shot of the blood of Christ.”

The deacon rummages around in cabinets, looking for the wine. At last he opens the largest cabinet of all. Out tumbles the body of the priest, pierced with a knitting needle.

The voice of the deacon echoes throughout the church: “Holy fuck!”

The priest's funeral takes place several days later, and is even grander than the singer's. The church is packed with flower arrangements, wreaths, mourners, and a small contingent of women wearing pink.

The deacon is in the pulpit, and he intones somberly to the audience, to the air, and to God Himself, “Remember, Lord, those who have died, and especially remember Father Luke, whom You have called to You from this life. In baptism and holy orders he died with Christ; may he also share His resurrection.”