The Knitting Circle (16 page)

“Yes, I ate there last week and the saag paneer was the best I’ve ever had.”

She scanned the room for Dylan, and when she finally found him, she joined his cluster—Alex and Vicky and a woman Mary didn’t know, peering out behind glasses and wearing a lipstick that clashed with her skin tone.

“Alex and Vicky are doing all the work themselves on the house they bought,” he said.

“Wow,” Mary said, swiping another glass of chardonnay.

“What year did you say it was built?” Dylan was saying.

“Seventeen ninety-two,” Vicky said. Smugly, Mary thought. She’d never liked Vicky. She was too tall and sharp and wore clothes that took up space—sweeping shawls and dresses with too much fabric and jewelry that jangled loudly.

“We cheated,” Mary said, “and bought one already renovated.”

“Oh,” Vicky said. Patronizing, Mary thought. But Dylan was looking at Vicky in a way that made Mary uncomfortable. As if all that clothing and hard work were admirable.

She wanted a new cluster. But when she looked around, there were fewer clusters. The party, blessedly, was breaking up.

Now Vicky was talking about Tuscany, as if no one else in the world had ever been there. Dylan kept asking questions, and the mousy woman told a pointless story about living in Florence for a year when she was in college. Finally Dylan remembered that Mary was still standing there and he said, “Shall we?”

Then she was thanking Laurie and Bob and the kind waiter who had kept her supplied with chardonnay all night. She wished she’d brought some money. She would give it all to him. Her stomach lurched slightly from eating too much bacon, but then she was out on the porch, gulping cold air, still saying thank you right until the door closed behind them.

She wanted to say something mean to her husband about flirting with that snob Vicky. Had he always flirted like this at parties and she’d had too much fun to notice? Another couple from the party, a couple Mary didn’t recognize, were laughing and reliving something someone had said. They kept repeating the same phrase over and over and then laughing, really hard. They were parked right behind Mary and Dylan, and while Mary waited for Dylan to unlock her door, she watched that other happy couple get into a canary yellow Mini Cooper.

“Great car!” Dylan said.

The woman, all honey blond hair and a big smile, leaned out the car window as it began to pull away.

“I know!” she said. “We’re lucky! No kids!”

Then the car zoomed past them and disappeared around the elbow of the road. Mary watched them go, those lucky childless people.

MARY COULD NOT think of how to write these small two-hundred-and-fifty-word pieces Eddie wanted her to write. She’d eaten lunch at the Indian restaurant, twice. She’d sat in on classes at the French-American School and watched inner-city teenagers asking for directions to “la Gare du Nord” and ordering “
bifteck avec petits pois et pommes de terre
.” She’d tried to make sense of these things.

It was far too cold to walk around the city, even with all the layers she was wearing. All she could do was sit and stare at the blank computer screen with the file name
Indian Lunch
, mocking her.

“Got a minute?” Eddie said from her doorway. He was holding a pile of books.

Quickly, she exited the file. “Well,” she said, feigning busyness, “one minute.”

Eddie had on that argyle sweater again and it was starting to smell of wet wool. He pulled up a chair and sat backwards on it, draping himself over the orange vinyl back; it was a school cafeteria castoff.

“So,” he said, drumming his fingers on the chair, always a bad sign. “Jessica wants reviews.”

“Reviews of what?” Mary said, misunderstanding. Then,

“What? You mean she wants to
write
reviews?”

Eddie shrugged, which meant yes.

“
I’m
the reviewer,” Mary said. “Hers aren’t even any good. I’ve read them. She called David Mamet a feminist. Come on, Eddie.”

“The thing is, Jessica—”

“She covers City Hall. Hard news. Politics. It suits her charming personality.” Mary narrowed her eyes. “Jessica really wants it?”

Eddie shrugged, which meant yes.

Mary sighed. “Can I ditch the French-American School piece then? Do just books and restaurants?”

Eddie handed her the pile of books. “This is a month’s worth.”

“Good,” she said.

Eddie slapped the back of the chair and got up to leave.

Mary watched his back as he walked away. The only problem was, she actually had to read these things now.

BEFORE SHE LEFT work to pick up Scarlet and Lulu to go to knitting on Wednesday, Mary tore off the top page of her new-word-a-day calendar and saw that March was winding down. Too soon it would be April and then it would be one year since Stella died. Someone had sent her a note right afterward and all it had said was,
April truly is the cruelest month then
.

Sighing, Mary turned off all the lights and locked up, something she did almost every night, not because she was working so hard, but because it was so hard to get any work done. She locked the door that led out and walked to her car, the sensible station wagon. A mother’s car. Maybe she would sell it and get her own canary yellow Mini Cooper, and ride around, laughing into the wind. “I can have this teeny tiny minicar because I have no kids,” she’d tell women who drove station wagons and minivans and SUVs for hauling children. All those fucking lucky women.

Part Five

A GOOD KNITTER

Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and a slightly below-average intelligence. Of course, superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.

—ELIZABETH ZIMMERMANN,
Knitter’s Almanac

9

HARRIET

IN MARCH, MARY
and Stella had found the tips of purple crocuses in the garden and a blanket of myrtle and then chives began to grow with abandon. They’d made skinny bouquets of myrtle and chives and placed them around the house in bud vases. They had planned a surprise birthday dinner for Dylan: plain pasta with butter and freshly grated parmesan cheese, Stella’s favorite. To Stella, surely that was everyone’s favorite dinner. Naïvely, they had moved through March and April like those stupid crocuses—showy and blinded by the sunshine, bursting forth into disaster.

Last year, spring had been unusually warm. Hot, really, with temperatures in the eighties. They’d worn shorts and sundresses and flip-flops. Stella wore her hair in a ponytail, her neck glistening with sweat. But this year it rained. It rained and rained, the air bone-chillingly cold. The crocuses stayed hidden. The trees remained bare. It was as if the world was mourning Stella too, Mary thought.

Mary made herself go to the office every day. Her rain boots slogged through small floods at each curb, the hood of her slicker dripping rain onto her glasses. She’d say hello to Holly, then slip into her office and try to read. It took Mary three times as long to read even one page. She was aware of her slowness, of her brain struggling to make sense of each sentence. She highlighted sections in bright pink, and turned down the corners of pages, hoping that somehow she would write something coherent. This made her laugh—she used to strive for intelligent, even brilliant. Now she would be satisfied with a review that at least made sense.

In the middle of all this—March, rain, the calendar ticking off days toward the first anniversary of the worst day of her life, Eddie came in and ordered her out to lunch.

“A new restaurant,” he said, folding money into her hands.

“Take your husband. Have a martini.” He added more bills.

“Hell,” he said, “have two.”

She closed the book she was reading and took her slicker from the hook behind her door.

“I suppose there’s a catch?” she said.

“Oh, sure,” Eddie said. Despite the cold weather, he’d started wearing his spring wardrobe, a series of faded T-shirts from long-ago rock concerts. “I’ll need a restaurant review. Soon,” he added.

“No one wears Ramones T-shirts,” Mary muttered. Her waterproof boots were damp inside.

Eddie said, “I’m piling on work to help you.”

“I know,” she said. “Someday I’ll be grateful.”

“Don’t come back after lunch,” he said, walking out beside her. “Go home and read.”

MARY WOULD KNIT a sweater for Dylan’s birthday.

“An easy one,” she had told Alice.

Alice looked through a pile of patterns, shaking her head.

“Aha!” she said finally. “Even you can do this one.”

But apparently she couldn’t, because it was clear to Mary already that she had messed it up. Worse, Alice was away.

“How will I fix all the mistakes I’m going to make?” Mary had asked her.

“Call Beth. Or better, Harriet. She can knit a sweater with her eyes closed.”

Reluctantly, Mary dialed Harriet’s number.

“Well,” Harriet said, “if Alice said to call me, I suppose you can come by. But only for a minute.”

Mary’s stomach ached by the time she got to Harriet’s house in Barrington, a twenty-minute drive from Providence, through a clogged Main Street and twenty-five-mile-an-hour curving roads. But she’d done something wrong and she couldn’t figure out what. No one had warned her that knitting a sweater, unlike scarves and hats, required reading a complicated pattern, or any pattern at all.

She pulled into the driveway and tried to calm herself. The house was a rambling ranch-style, built in the early sixties. Mary glanced around. The whole neighborhood was from the same era. It was like stepping back in time. The two-car garage, the bluestone front walk, the black shutters on each window. Then a frowning Harriet answered the doorbell, and showed her into a gold wall-to-wall-carpeted living room with off-white furniture.

“Let me see it,” Harriet said, holding out her hand. “That’s the garter stitch!” she said, disgusted. “You were supposed to do stockinette.”

Mary frowned. “I thought I did.”

“It’s not rocket science,” Harriet said. “It’s knitting.”

Mary chastised herself for going to Harriet’s at all. If she’d looked at it long enough, surely she would have figured out what she’d done wrong all by herself.

“You knit your purls and purled your knits,” Harriet said in disgust. She picked up the six inches of ribbing Mary had spent all afternoon doing, and unraveled it.

“Stockinette. Knit a row. Purl a row,” Harriet said. She handed the yarn and needles back to Mary. “Not rocket science,” she said again.

The bunched-up yarn and needles felt awkward in Mary’s hand, and without warning, she started to cry.

“What’s this?” Harriet said, taking a step away from Mary.

“It’s only knitting.”

“My daughter,” she said. She gulped again. “My little girl,” she began, and then she gulped some more. “I lost her,” she said,

“and the strangest things set me off.”

Somewhere, a clock ticked loudly.

“I just want to be able to do this. To make this sweater for my husband’s birthday.”

“You can do that,” Harriet said.

“I can’t even do fifteen inches of stockinette stitch without messing up.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Harriet said. She gathered the yarn from the floor and expertly wound it into a ball. “Get up now,” she said, offering her hands to Mary. “Come on. Up,” she said when Mary hesitated.

Her hands were soft and cool. Lotioned hands. Pampered hands.

“Knit one row. Purl one row,” she said.

“Got it,” Mary said.

She heard the door close firmly behind her as she walked down the hedge-lined path to the car.

EDDIE APPEARED IN her office doorway.

“Do we just knit in here?” he said. “Or do we actually write?”

Almost relieved, Mary tossed her knitting onto her desk. “It would be easier to learn Italian,” she said.

“Easier than knitting?” Eddie said. “Now you’ve got me worried.”

“You try it,” she muttered.

Eddie loomed in front of her in his The Who T-shirt. “How about that review of Funky Duck?”

“Is that due already?” she said, feigning surprise. Inside she grimaced. She hadn’t even been to Funky Duck yet, a take-out duck restaurant on the West Side.

Eddie frowned. “Jessica said it’s great.”

“I hear you,” Mary said.

“Have you ever noticed,” Eddie said as he left her office, “that people say that when they aren’t really listening?”

She should get up right now and drive to Funky Duck. She should order take-out duck, whatever that was, and she should eat it and take notes about it. Her eyes drifted toward the pattern for the sweater.

“Can you try a little?” Dylan had said to her the night before when he came home and found her watching
Survivor.

“This is me trying,” she’d told him.

He stood there a moment before getting back in his car and driving away. When he came back hours later, smelling of cigarette smoke and beer, she’d whispered, “I’ll try to try? How’s that?”

“TAKE-OUT DUCK FOR dinner,” Mary said, offering Dylan the greasy bag with the strange red line drawing of a cleaver chasing a frightened duck on it.

“It’s almost eight o’clock,” he said.

“I got sidetracked,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows, waiting.

“I was knitting and there was this instruction, slip stitches to holder, and I couldn’t figure it out. Honestly, knitters should be breaking codes for army intelligence.”

Mary considered telling him how Harriet had told her, “A stitch holder, for Christ’s sake! A thing that holds stitches! A plastic thing! Whoever told you you could knit anyway?”

But Dylan’s face had that look on it, that look of disgust and disappointment. Grumpy, she took the bag from him and began to lay the pieces of duck out on a platter.

“Now you know how I feel when you come home late without calling,” she muttered. Which, she reminded herself, was happening more and more lately.

“Hey,” he said, holding his arms up as if in surrender, “I’m working.”