The Knitting Circle (13 page)

Mary pushed her chair back with a loud squeak. “I’m sorry,” she said, though she wasn’t sure what exactly she was sorry for. With her head bent to avoid all of those eyes on her, Mary quickly left the room.

The hospital walls, with their brightly colored tiled murals made by children—Marika, age 4, and Sally, age 7—seemed to mock her loss. When she finally made it to the car, she was crying so hard she couldn’t even unlock the door. The pamphlets in her hand looked childlike.
Don’t Make Changes for One Year. Don’t Push Yourself. Don’t Take Long Trips as a Way to Heal; You Always Have to Come Home Again
.

The hard awful truth was that they needed their daughter back. Escape was just the thing for them. Four months after Stella died in this very building, she and Dylan were on an airplane to Italy where, jet-lagged, she had finally slept. In Italy, she did not see Stella’s fingerprints on everything. It was as if she’d come to a pure place, with ridiculously tall sunflowers reaching upward and the safe refuge of plane trees overhead like a mother’s arms, enveloping her.

“MARY? IT’S ELLEN,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “From knitting?”

Mary frowned. She did not want to speak to Ellen. She wanted Ellen and Ellen’s sick daughter to disappear.

“This is a bad time,” Mary said. “We’re getting ready to go away for the holidays and I’m kind of crazy.”

She was, in fact, packing.

“I just wanted to apologize for the other day. You came all that way and—”

“No, no,” Mary said. “No problem. But I’ve really got to go—”

“I thought I’d see you at knitting on Wednesday but when you didn’t come I figured I’d just call and apologize and set up another date.”

Mary thought of Ellen’s daughter, knitting a thousand-foot-long scarf to ward off death. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, “I’ll give you a call when we get back.”

“Okay,” Ellen said.

She sounded like she might keep talking, so Mary said,

“Great! Bye!” and hung up. Her heart was pounding. There was no way she was going to call Ellen. No way.

FOR THOSE TEN days in San Francisco, Mary pretended to be happy even though she felt like she’d left something important behind. The ache hummed through her body. At night she’d wake up, startled and confused, the hotel room disorienting her, and she’d think: Where’s Stella? And then she’d remember and sit up, awake, missing her daughter, that humming reverberating deep, deep inside her.

Dylan urged her to call her old friends, but instead Mary avoided them. Some of them had come out to Stella’s funeral, and the blur of their tearstained faces, their stunned looks, made Mary never want to see them again. The ones who hadn’t come, she couldn’t think of what she would say to them. She wasn’t angry that they didn’t fly across the country. Instead, she felt like she’d lost them too somehow. Was she expected to talk about what had happened? Was she expected to act a certain way?

Back in Providence, a few weeks after Stella died, Mary had been putting gas in her car at the corner station when a mother from Stella’s school pulled up at the pump beside her.

“Mary?” the woman said. She had seemed surprised that Mary was standing there, getting gas for her car.

“Hello, Jill,” Mary had said.

But Jill could do nothing but stare, as if she was taking inventory. Shoes. Pants. Shirt. Face. Hair. What was she looking for? Mary felt that she too was expected to disappear, along with Stella. But her car still needed gas. She still needed things out in the world.

“I think about you every day,” Jill finally said.

“Thank you,” Mary said.

“If Laci had died, I wouldn’t even be able to stand up.”

“Yes you would.”

“No. I don’t know how you can do it.”

This happened over and over. Women in the supermarket, in the post office, staring at her as if she should not be alive herself. And Mary expected that her old friends here would be the same. Except April. April had flown out for the funeral and stayed, holding Mary’s hand, answering her phone, even somehow making her laugh. She’d come back a few months later and done the same, sorting unpaid bills, forging Mary’s name on checks, and writing thank-you notes.

On New Year’s Eve they accepted April’s invitation to dinner at her house. “Just the four of us,” April had promised. What Mary had not thought about was that April had a daughter now, a three-year-old named Cassie. When Mary and Dylan walked into April’s apartment on Dolores Street, the first thing, the only thing, Mary saw was Cassie.

Since Stella had died, Mary had broken down over the distant sight of a little girl with hair the same color as Stella’s. She’d had to leave the supermarket more than once simply because a little girl sitting in the grocery cart had smiled at her a certain way. But what really slayed her was a little girl’s hands. The dimpled knuckles, the pink fingernails. How could she spend an evening here and not see Cassie’s hands?

April bustled into the room, dressed in a black sparkly minidress with a turquoise boa, her arms outstretched for hugs.

“We’ve got champagne and gorgeous hors d’oeuvres and tenderloin for dinner. I’ve spent a fortune.”

Mary managed a smile, and it was as if April knew.

“And I’ve found a babysitter on New Year’s Eve,” she said, putting her hand on Mary’s arm. “The last one in the entire Bay Area, I’m sure.”

Mary found her way into that hug.

STARING OUT THE airplane window as they headed east, toward home, Mary thought of a new year without Stella. Sighing, she pulled down the shade on the window, blocking out the endless clouds. Dylan snored lightly beside her. A new year, Mary said to herself. She took the airsick bag from the seat pocket and wrote those three small words on it. Then she made a list. Go back to work. Read a book. Learn to knit socks. She crossed this last one off, then wrote it again, adding: Maybe. Dylan stirred, readjusted himself, then began to snore again. Mary picked up the knitting in her lap, and continued.

THE FIRST DAY back home, she woke up and took a shower and pulled on her Betsey Johnson miniskirt with the big pink buttons and her snow boots and her baggy black winter coat with the hot pink scarf and hat she’d knit. She walked to the Coffee Exchange and got a large latte to go. She walked the ten blocks to the office, navigating unevenly shoveled sidewalks and mounds of snow and patches of ice to get to the old jewelry factory that housed the newspaper. She walked in and everything, even eight months later, was exactly the same.

Mary stood just inside the door and took it all in. Holly was working at the computer, the phone headset attached, her black Buddy Holly glasses already slipped to the tip of her nose. Steam from some organic tea rose from a cup at her elbow, sending the smell of dirt and grass and something spicy into the overheated front office.

Behind the glass doors, Mary saw Eddie pacing in his office, his Kramer hair bouncing as he moved, his stomach straining against a worn argyle sweater. He was pacing in front of Jessica, one of the feature writers, who always missed deadlines, refused to rewrite, and swore like crazy. Jessica turned men on with her dirty language and tall, too-skinny body. She kept her hair cut close to her head, and wore frighteningly oversized jewelry. Jessica was from Texas, and after she told one of her stories about how ballsy she was, she always said, “Don’t y’all mess with Texas!”

There was the mural of an old-fashioned newsroom with comic book characters that one of Eddie’s ex-girlfriends had painted.

Holly glanced up at her. “Whoa,” she said. “Look what the cat dragged in.” Holly always spoke at a slower speed than the rest of the world, and hearing her voice made Mary smile.

Mary walked past Holly and over to Eddie’s office. Tapping on the door to get his attention, Mary wiggled her fingers at him when he finally stopped pacing long enough to see her there.

Eddie grinned and motioned her inside.

His office, with its familiar smells of ink and carbon paper and Wite-Out—Eddie still preferred a typewriter to a computer—made Mary feel like she had come home. She put down her latte and went to give Eddie a hug. He hugged her back, his sweater scratchy against her cheek.

“Enough frivolity,” Eddie said. “I’m putting you right to work.” He handed her assignment sheets. “A new Indian restaurant in Downcity that’s open only for lunch. A show opening at the RISD Museum on the male nude. And what about this French-American School? Who goes there anyway?”

“French-Americans?” Mary said.

“Ha-ha,” Eddie said. “Now get to work.”

Jessica, looking bored with Eddie and Mary and life, stood slowly. “I’ll be at City Hall,” she said, “if anybody needs me.”

Mary followed her out of Eddie’s office and then walked into her own. Everything was different and everything was the same. Someone had taken down all the pictures of Stella and brought them to Mary months ago, leaving the walls blank. Her desk was empty, with a thin layer of dust where her notes and press releases and memos used to crowd each other. Even her screen saver of Stella blowing bubbles had been replaced with a new one of tropical fish, endlessly swimming.

Mary turned on the radio to the all-news station, a habit that drove everyone in the office crazy. How can you write or think while all these people are talking? Holly used to say. She preferred Cold Play or the White Stripes pouring from her iPod; Eddie played Dean Martin and Bing Crosby records on a beat-up phonograph; Jessica liked country. The writers created their own world in their tiny office. Even now, Mary could hear the babble of different music beyond her own office.

She closed the door, sat at her desk, and read the details of her assignment sheet. Soon, she was making notes, making phone calls, making appointments. At lunch in the Indian restaurant, she shared samosas and nan with the owner. Before she knew it, Holly was at her office door, saying goodbye.

“I’m going to my yoga class,” Holly said. After Stella died, she had taken Mary to one of these classes. It was held in a hot room to help you sweat out impurities. But it had only made Mary nauseated. “Want to lock up?” Holly was saying.

“I’m the last one?” Mary said, surprised.

Holly nodded. “Welcome back.”

When Mary finally did lock up and walk into the dark evening, clutching a bag of saag paneer and chicken tikka leftovers, she had to lean against the brick building and try to catch her breath. By the time she got home and reheated the food and poured herself a glass of wine, she had calmed down again. The phone rang just as Dylan’s car pulled into the driveway.

“Mary? It’s Ellen. It’s a new year, right?” Ellen said. “Time to knit some socks?”

And because she was trying to have a normal day, and the French-American School was over in Ellen’s neighborhood and Mary had an appointment to go there the next day, and because her husband was walking in and looking at her with such relief, and the saag paneer was green and fragrant, Mary said, “Yes.”

“SOMETIMES,” ELLEN SAID, “my daughter tries to go to school. She has a portable oxygen tank and a wheelchair and her boyfriend Jeb takes her around all day. It exhausts her. But she wants to try.”

Mary swallowed hard. She was sitting on the lumpy moss green sofa knitting what would eventually be the band of a sock.

K1, p1
, on size one needles. Impossible. And she would never make it if Ellen kept talking about her daughter and oxygen and illness. She willed her to stop, to just talk about this most simple act of knitting.

Ellen had moved all the musical instruments to make room for the two of them, but the dip of the sofa made her sit too close. Mary could smell the strawberry of Ellen’s shampoo.

“I have to let her try,” Ellen said.

“Uh-huh,” Mary said, concentrating on her knitting. Such tiny needles.
K1, p1
.

“It’s her heart,” Ellen said, after a few minutes of welcome silence.

Mary shifted uncomfortably, glancing at Ellen’s long open face, her deceptively happy eyes. Should she mention Stella?

Ellen met her gaze. “Sometimes we go along for a bit and I can almost forget she’s so sick. Then she takes a turn for the worse and all hell breaks loose. Like that day you were here.”

In spite of herself, Mary asked, “What’s wrong with her heart?”

Ellen touched Mary’s arm lightly. “Now just knit for six inches. Pretty soon you’ll start to see the pattern emerge.” Ellen paused. “Stories are kind of like knitting, aren’t they? Everything intertwined. Everything connected.” She took a deep breath. “It’s complicated,” she said.

Ellen was young, Mary realized. It was this pain that made her seem older.

Ellen sipped her herbal tea, staring into the glass as if it held her future. Or maybe her past, Mary thought, peeking at her. As soon as she looked at Ellen, though, she dropped all of the stitches from one of the tiny needles.

“Shit,” Mary said.

Gently, Ellen took it from Mary, and carefully placed all twenty-one stitches back on the needle.

“This relaxes you?” Mary said. “Knitting on toothpicks?”

“You just knit,” Ellen said. “You’ll see.”

“What’s with all the instruments?” Mary said.

“I was a folksinger,” Ellen said, blushing. “I’ve played these instruments since I was a little girl. I grew up in Appalachia. The mountains in North Carolina. My mother taught me the guitar and the banjo. My grandmother taught me how to fiddle. My father and my uncles and my granddaddy traveled around and sang at weddings and funerals. The Brighton Boys. That’s what they were called.” She hesitated as if maybe Mary might have heard of them.

Mary shrugged apologetically.

“Anyways,” she continued, “my mother and her mother and all of us sang down in Asheville sometimes, and once we went all the way to Chattanooga to perform. I was just a little bitty thing. And shy as a coon in the daylight.”

Mary looked up again, laughing. “A coon?”

“You’d better keep your eye on your stitches,” Ellen said, taking Mary’s knitting from her again. She held it up to show her that she’d dropped a needle’s worth again.