The Knitting Circle (22 page)

“I’m not sure I want to have this conversation while I’m naked,” she said.

He nodded, but didn’t leave.

“So,” Mary said after a moment, “you’re having an affair. You’re having an affair with Denise.” The woman’s face floated across Mary’s mind and she closed her eyes tight against it.

“Not an affair exactly.” Dylan cleared his throat. “I haven’t slept with her,” he said.

“Yet,” Mary said, opening her eyes to look right at him.

“Yet,” he said.

“You’re at what?” she asked him. “The groping stage? The making-out-in-the-car-and-stopping-yourself-before-you-do-anything-more stage?”

“Yes,” he said.

Mary swallowed hard. “You’ve groped her?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Wow,” Mary said. “You’re not even denying it.”

She didn’t know what to say next.

“I can’t lie to you. I love you,” he said, and Mary laughed.

“Obviously,” she said. “I mean, kissing and groping another woman is always a sign of love for your wife.”

“She’s happy,” he said.

“Happy about what?”

“No,” Dylan said. “Just happy. She comes to work every day and she looks good and she smells good and she’s smiling. When I talk to her, she tells me happy things. Like something funny about her dog. Or about her garden or, I don’t know. She’s just happy.”

“Good for her,” Mary said. The water had turned cold and she was starting to shiver. “I guess her little girl didn’t die. It’s easy to be happy when you haven’t lost everything.”

“I know,” he said.

“I’m sorry I’m not happy enough for you,” Mary said, her teeth chattering now.

“It’s just good to be with someone who doesn’t have a clue. Who is just fucking happy.”

“I want to get out of the tub now,” Mary said. “And I don’t want you in here. Okay?”

He nodded again, but he still didn’t leave.

“Dylan?” Mary said.

“I won’t see her anymore,” he said. “If that’s what you want. I mean, it’s not anything. We haven’t even slept together.”

“Could you go now, please?” Mary said.

He stood. The ass of his pants was wet. Mary waited until he’d gone, closing the door behind him. Then she got out of the tub and dried off, rubbing the towel hard on her skin. She wondered if he would still be here, in the house, when she came out. She wondered why she felt so numb, like something inside her had grown cold, or disappeared altogether.

When she opened the door and stepped out, she saw the glow of the television, the back of Dylan’s head. He was still here. Mary went to the sofa and sat beside him, not too close. Larry King was interviewing the parents of a woman who had been murdered by her husband.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Mary said.

She said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy again. If it’s happy you want, you’re probably in the wrong place.”

The woman’s parents were crying now. Mary couldn’t watch them anymore. She got up to go to bed.

“I don’t want to leave,” he said.

“I don’t care,” Mary told him. “I wish I did.”

She lay in bed, still hearing the dead woman’s parents crying. In movies, the wife finds out about an affair and cries and throws things. But here she was, unable to do anything. She remembered that morning when Scarlet called to tell her that the Sit and Knit had burned down, how she had wondered what more she could lose. Now she saw that she could, truly, lose everything.

“IT’S A STITCH a month,” Alice was explaining on the telephone. “In a year you have a blanket.”

“Okay,” Mary said.

It had been three days since Dylan had told her about his happy girlfriend. Mary hadn’t gone to work since then. She and Dylan had eaten mostly silent dinners together. They had played a game of Scrabble. He’d slept in the guest room.

But tonight, the third night, dinner had come and gone and Mary was sitting alone knitting the fingerless gloves she was making everyone for Christmas. It was still raining out, but now the rain was mixed with snow so that when Mary looked out the window it sparkled in the streetlight.

“And by then,” Alice was saying, “we’ll be in the new Sit and Knit.”

“Great,” Mary said.

“We’ll meet on Wednesday,” Alice said. “The usual. But we’ll meet at Beth’s house. She’s under the weather and it will be easier if we all go there.”

“A stitch a month,” Mary said. “Beth’s house. Wednesday.”

Alice paused. “Honey?” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m not happy,” she said.

“No,” Alice said.

“But I’m glad we’re meeting. That’s a sign of good things to come.”

“We’ll see you there,” Alice said. “On Wednesday.”

Dylan came home very late. Mary heard him come in, and when he stood in the doorway of their bedroom she pretended to be asleep. The next night, when he came home even later, she was waiting for him.

“Let me guess,” she said, her throat dry and aching. “You’ve moved past groping.”

“I’m thinking,” Dylan said, “that I should move out.”

That numb spot vanished. Emotion rose in her, hot and enormous. Here it comes, Mary thought. Even as she cried, she thought it amazing that a person never ran out of tears.

Part Seven

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN

I thought it would never do to present myself to a gentleman that way; so for want of kids, I slipped on a pair of woolen mittens, which my mother had knit for me to carry to sea…

—HERMAN MELVILLE,
Redburn

13

BETH

THE PATTERN WAS
called “textured rib.”

Bottom border: K 6 rows.

Row 1: K3, (p2, k2) 12 times, k1.

Row 2: K5, (p2, k2) 11 times, k3.

Row 3: K3, p46, k3.

Row 4: K.

Repeat rows 1–4 until block measures 12
".

Top border: K 6 rows.

Alice brought large loops of vivid-colored yarn, spun and hand dyed by women in Uruguay. The knitting circle, hungry to knit together, to knit something new, dropped their hands into the wool as if it were jewels, something precious to hold. Even the names of the colors were exotic—jungle, lava, wildflowers, flame.

Mary picked up a skein, felt the way each thread moved from thin to thick and back, making an uneven diameter that stretched like the awkward lines of back roads on a map. Looking around at the women choosing a skein to begin, Mary remembered her first night at the knitting circle, when each of them had been a blank to her. Now those blanks were filled in. There was Scarlet, her long red hair pulled back today in a low ponytail, in an ivory sweater with one thick cable running up the front and faded jeans over an old pair of Frye boots. The soft lines etched around the corners of her eyes and mouth were the only sign of the tragedy she held inside her.

And Lulu, spiky platinum hair topping black roots, plucked at some yarn, her eyes darting over it. She discarded one, picked up another, plucking at the wool. These nervous habits and the sense of discomfort with her surroundings probably came from what had happened to her back in New York. Even when she smiled at Mary, like now, the smile was tight and quick, as if it might hurt.

“Flame,” Lulu said, brandishing the bright orange yarn.

“Hubba-hubba.”

Lulu’s urban bravado usually made Mary smile, but today she winced. She turned back to the yarn, the hot pinks and electric blues and maraschino cherry reds.

“I like all these whites,” Ellen said. “So many shades of white.” Her fingers lightly skimmed several skeins, all white: the blue-white of ice, the stark white of snow.

Mary knew that Ellen’s daughter was not doing well. On the way here, Scarlet had said she was in bed now, waiting.

“For?” Lulu had asked.

“A heart,” Scarlet had said simply, and Mary’s own heart had gripped tight on itself.

“You like the reds?” Alice asked Mary, her voice painfully kind, as if she knew that Dylan had moved out, that Mary really had nothing.

Mary looked down at the yarn she was holding. Poppy. “I guess so,” she said.

Alice held another shade of red against the one in Mary’s hand. She studied them, nodded, and added a third.

“In three months,” Alice said, “you’ll have three squares done. A row.”

And three months will have passed, Mary told herself. Poppy, Cherry, Brick. The colors sounded like characters from a soap opera: Brick leaves Poppy after their daughter Cherry dies. Tears welled up in Mary’s eyes. She pretended to care about the blanket that these squares would become, these colors.

But Alice saw through her. She squeezed her hand and whispered, “If you ever need to talk.”

Mary nodded again, felt Alice waiting beside her, but she didn’t look up again until she heard the soft shuffle of her slippered footsteps walking away. She could not tell anyone that Dylan had moved out, that she was left with nothing.

The yarn needed to be rolled into balls. Mary took it into another room and sat there alone, mindlessly winding it. From somewhere she heard voices, the clatter of dishes. Beth’s house, in a subdivision not far from Harriet’s, was an ordinary center-hall colonial: white with black shutters, a brambly wreath dotted with orange berries hanging on the front door. Nothing at all special. Mary took some comfort in this, the dullness of Beth’s surroundings.

The dining room, where the yarn spilled across a glass-topped table, had straight-backed chairs covered in white fabric, tied with bows at each side, as if Beth had dressed the chairs in dinner jackets.

“Beth made these,” Harriet had beamed.

Mary had to stifle a comment. No shit, she thought. They looked homemade, someone’s idea of sophistication.

The family room where she sat now had a fireplace made of brick with a short wooden mantel crowded with pictures that Mary avoided looking at. The room itself was overflowing with toys that had been shoved into corners and plastic bins, a hasty effort at order. Mary sat on a green and white plaid couch, its slipcovers probably also hand-sewn by Beth, like the striped ones on both easy chairs. On the coffee table, magazines stood in neat piles. A small dish of candy corn and a remote control dressed in a green knit cover were placed at perfect angles to each other.

Behind her, Mary could make out Harriet’s low voice. She thought of Harriet’s son and his wife, the careful control with which Harriet lived her life. Beth was the only one who still remained a blank to Mary. Perhaps this was by design, on both their parts. Mary had no desire to hear about Beth’s homemade life, her daughter Stella, the best way to bake a pie or sew a hem. And she had no desire to tell Beth—or anyone—anything about her own pathetic life.

Mary picked up her yarn, put the two still-unrolled skeins in her bag, and followed the rise and fall of the women’s voices to the living room across the front hall.

Past the polished wood of the banister and the small table where mail and keys and telephone directories all lived in their own clearly marked boxes, Mary entered the living room last. Everyone was already seated and beginning to cast on. She glanced at the colors snaking up each number nine needle: calypso and juniper, bramble and mist, autumn and jade. A rainbow of yarn.

Beth took up most of the pale blue velvet sofa, where she half lay, half sat beneath a dark green fleece blanket. At her feet, wedged into the corner at the opposite end of the couch, was Harriet. They were meeting here because Beth wasn’t feeling well. Under the weather, Alice had said on the phone.

Mary took a seat on the ivory carpet and began to cast on.

“Fifty-two stitches,” Alice reminded her.

“How are you feeling?” Mary asked her.

“Not so great really,” Beth said.

Mary looked up from her knitting, surprised. Of course, Beth was already ahead of everyone else. Her block was a good six inches long, the pattern already revealing itself with small puckers of pink squares alternating with soft valleys between them.

Harriet tsked. “She’ll be just fine,” she said. She didn’t look up. Instead, she kept knitting, her lips silently shaping the stitches:
purl, purl, knit, knit, purl, purl, knit, knit.

“CANCER,” LULU SAID in the car as they drove back to Providence.

“What?” Mary said from the backseat. She leaned as far forward as her seat belt would allow. “Beth has cancer?”

“When I first started going to the knitting circle,” Scarlet said, “she had just gotten a clean bill of health. Alice taught her to knit when she was undergoing chemo the first time.”

Mary swallowed hard. “You mean this is a recurrence?”

Lulu twisted around to face Mary. “She’s probably going to die,” she said.

“Lulu!” Scarlet scolded. “Don’t catastrophize.”

“What?” Lulu said. “You think bad things don’t happen? You think mothers with four little kids don’t die?”

“God,” Scarlet said, “I need a cigarette.”

Lulu looked back at Mary again. “Breast cancer. Metastasized.”

Mary’s hand flew to her mouth, as if to keep something back.

“She’s had what? Four good years?” Lulu said, settling back in her seat.

Scarlet rummaged in her bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

“Now you’re going to get cancer,” Lulu said.

“Stop!” Scarlet told her.

The lighter made a small popping sound. Mary watched the soft red glow at its tip as Scarlet moved it to the cigarette dangling from her lips. She inhaled luxuriously.

“We’re all going to get cancer,” Lulu muttered.

Mary sat back and watched the blur of headlights as they sped down the highway.

“Every one of us,” Lulu said.