The Knitting Circle (30 page)

“I’ll get some out of the bathroom,” she said when she couldn’t find any.

“Not from the tap, Mary,” her mother said. “You’re in goddamn Mexico.”

“You sure sound like yourself,” Mary muttered.

Her mother squinted out at her. “Isn’t that a bottle of water right there?”

Mary poured some into a paper cup and held it to her mother’s lips to drink.

“So,” her mother said when she was done, “they accepted the ticket?”

Mary nodded.

She sat back down and the chair hissed. Even though it happened each time, Mary giggled, out of relief perhaps.

“Don’t be so silly,” her mother said.

“Violet was here,” Mary told her.

When she didn’t answer, Mary continued. “I remembered her name from a long time ago. Remember how I always used to ask you about your wedding? And you told me that you met Dad through Violet Addison’s brother?”

Mary stared down at her mother. She had gone back to sleep.

“HELLO, BEAUTIFUL!”

Mary knew immediately it was Saul Byrd standing in the doorway shouting. He held a big bouquet of flowers and did a fancy dance step toward her mother.

“Saul!” her mother said, suddenly awake.

Mary had read three
People
magazines from 2001, the only English-language magazines she could find, while her mother slept. Bored, she’d even done the crossword puzzles in the back.

“You look so good,” Saul said. Then he noticed Mary. Immediately, he gave her a hug. He smelled like pipe tobacco and hair tonic.

“You’re not at all what I expected,” he said. “I thought you’d be blonde. Like your mother!”

“She looks like my late husband,” Mamie explained. “He had that same mouth.”

“Thanks for arranging everything,” Mary told Saul.

“What do you need?” he asked her mother. “Those tamales you like? The ones María Domingo makes?”

“That sounds good,” Mamie said, smiling.

Saul took a small notebook from his shirt pocket and scribbled in it. “How about some chocolate?”

“Not yet,” Mamie said. “The tamales will be good.”

“Just tamales?” he said, the pencil poised in midair.

“For now.”

He pinched her cheek affectionately. “You scared the living daylights out of me, Mamie,” he said, his voice softer.

“But I’m still here!” Mamie said.

“Mary, you’ll stay with her while I go get those tamales?” Saul said.

“Of course,” Mary said.

“Good girl,” he said. “Don’t look so I can smooch your mother.”

“What?” Mary said.

But Saul was already bending over and kissing her mother right on the lips.

As soon as he was out the door, Mary said, “That guy’s your boyfriend?”

Mamie shrugged. “Friend, boyfriend. Whatever. I’m getting a little tired of him, actually.”

“He kissed you!” Mary said.

“I’m sorry I have a life,” Mamie said. “A nice life, finally.”

“You could have had a nice life with us, when I was a kid, you know,” Mary said.

Mamie studied her daughter’s face.

“Say something,” Mary said.

“I wanted you to come,” she said.

“All right, I know. I’m a bad daughter. You finally decided you wanted me to come and I didn’t. But you have no idea the hell I am going through.”

Mamie patted the bed beside her for Mary to sit there.

“I do,” she said quietly. Mamie patted the bed again. “Come here,” she said.

Reluctantly, Mary got up and sat beside her mother on the bed.

“I always got everything I wanted,” her mother said.

“I guess so,” Mary said.

“I did. I was beautiful.”

“Like Grace Kelly,” Mary said.

Mamie laughed. “A beautiful girl walks into a store or onto a train or anywhere, and people want to help her. I learned that early. I figured it out and I used it and I had a lovely spoiled life.

“Men? I could have any man I wanted. It was actually boring it was so easy. I sailed through life on my beauty. I was smart enough. I was nice enough. I knew how to have fun. But it was being beautiful that got me places. Violet and I spent a summer abroad and we got absolutely anything we wanted. Champagne. Jewelry. Steak dinners. Chanel perfume. Anything. All I had to do was pay attention to a man and we were set. ‘You are my greatest asset,’ Violet said. We both knew it.

“American men were afraid to try to have sex with me. Don’t blush, Mary. Do you think I didn’t know what you and that foolish boy were doing in your bedroom when you were in high school? Sex is a natural thing, Mary. But these American boys were afraid of me. So when Violet and I went to Europe, I thanked these men appropriately. Having sex with an Italian is something one remembers her entire life. Oh, pardon me, maybe you’ve had sex with an Italian, Mary?”

“Mom!”

“We finally have a girl-to-girl chat and you’re embarrassed?”

“Fine,” Mary said. “No, I have never had sex with an Italian.”

“Well, you must. Violet was so mad at me. We laugh about it now but she was an absolute prude. She flirted and kissed, but she honestly believed in being a virgin on her wedding night. I, on the other hand, slept my way across Europe.”

“Mom! Do they have you on some kind of drugs or something? Honestly. I don’t want to know.”

Her mother laughed. “When we got back, Violet was sure no one would marry me. We finished our senior year at Mount Holyoke, and it’s true I was one of the few who wasn’t even pinned, never mind engaged. But then I went to that dance with Violet, and her brother was there with your father.”

“Did he know about your European trip?” Mary said sarcastically.

“He said to me, ‘I never date beautiful women. I admire them. But I would never marry one.’ And of course right then I knew I would have to marry him. After all, I always got what I wanted. It didn’t take long either. You know, we hardly knew each other. I thought that was a good thing. All of my friends had proper courtships, and long engagements. But once I got your father to fall in love with me, that was it. We got married. It all happened so fast. Nineteen fifty-two. Right before Christmas. And I was pregnant by Easter.”

“Mom,” Mary said, “why don’t you sleep? I think the drugs are making you loopy.”

“I don’t think so. I feel quite all right. Just tired. And happy you’re finally here.”

“But Mom,” Mary said, “you didn’t get pregnant for seven years. I was born in ’59.”

Mary could not remember the last time she saw her mother cry. Maybe it was back when she was drinking and had those angry rages. Or maybe she had cried when Stella died and Mary simply hadn’t noticed. But she was crying now. Not sobbing. Just tears falling down her cheeks.

“This is what I’ve been wanting to tell you. Why I needed to talk to you,” Mamie was saying. “In those days, they took your pee, your urine, and they injected it into a rabbit, and if the rabbit died you were pregnant. Isn’t that silly? It was right before Easter and your father would come home every day and ask me,

‘Did the rabbit die?’ and I’d say, “The doctor still hasn’t called.’ But I knew I was pregnant. ‘How do you know?’ he asked me, and I said, ‘Because I want to be pregnant.’ How naïve was I? Then the doctor called, and I said, ‘The rabbit died, right?’ And he said, ‘You’re absolutely right, Mrs. Baxter. The rabbit died. And by Thanksgiving you’ll have a beautiful baby.’ Do you know what I said, Mary? I said, ‘I know.’ That’s how smug and confident I was. I said, ‘I know.’

“I had the best pregnancy. I bought all of these maternity clothes with matching hats and shoes. Your father, unlike other husbands, thought that I was even more beautiful pregnant. He snapped so many pictures of me. He even took some very racy nude ones, very artsy, you know, with me cradling my stomach, or my arms folded over my breasts. Tasteful. He said that I was so beautiful pregnant that we should have a dozen children. But I told him, no. I wanted just one. So that I could absolutely adore that child. I didn’t want to share my affection. I couldn’t.

“All of my friends were throwing up and fainting, but I never felt sick even once. Everything was perfect. Thanksgiving morning I woke up and my water broke and four hours later she was born. My mother had told me, ‘Mamie, if it’s a girl you must name her Mary. Every generation has a Mary in our family.’ She was Mary Wall but she went by Polly, and my grandmother was Mary Irons, but she went by Maisie. And of course I was Mary Baxter. Mamie. I was so spoiled, so certain of everything, that I said, ‘I’m going to name her Susan. Susan is a beautiful name, not old-fashioned like Mary.’ So we named her Susan.

“God help me, Mary, in my darkest hours I wondered if she was cursed because I broke the tradition. Isn’t that ridiculous? But you know how your mind works. If I had only done this thing instead of that, she would still be here.”

“You had a child? Before me?”

“That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you, Mary. About my Susan. After Stella…I thought I would lose my mind for you, because I knew the pain of losing a child like that. And I couldn’t bear to watch you go there.”

“What happened to her, Mom?” Mary said. She was crying too now, even as she wiped the tears from her mother’s face.

“She was three years old. So beautiful. And smart. I would buy us these mother-daughter outfits, for special occasions, you know. Not every day.

“This one day, it was a beautiful summer day and I took her to the park, and she played with other children there. In the sandbox, and going down the slide. I always wonder if we had stayed home, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten it.”

“What?”

“Polio. The thing we all were so afraid of. I never thought it would happen to me. To Susan. That night we went for ice cream, and she wouldn’t eat hers. She said she was too tired. She ordered raspberry, in a cone. And she sat there holding that cone, with the ice cream melting all pink down her arm. I reprimanded her for that. ‘Don’t be so messy!’ I said. I hate that I said that to her.

I threw the ice cream away and we walked home, except she said her legs were too tired so your father carried her, up on his shoulders. ‘Isn’t she getting too big for that?’ I said, and Susan said, ‘I’ll never be too big.’ Can you imagine that? Like she knew something.

“I gave her a nice bath and then I put her to bed with some children’s aspirin. Your father thought she felt warm. He thought maybe she had a cold. ‘You don’t get colds in summer,’ I said. It was later, sometime in the night, that I woke and heard her crying. I went to her room and touched her forehead and she was burning with fever, and her hair and her nightclothes were drenched with sweat. I called for your father to get the doctor. But when he came in, he said, ‘Let’s take her ourselves to the emergency room rather than wake the doctor.’ We bundled her in dry clothes and we got in the car. I was holding her on my lap. And something happened. I’ve never been able to quite explain it. But there was an instant when something changed and I screamed for your father to pull over. He did, and I looked in her beautiful face and I saw right away that she was gone. My Susan. The most unthinkable thing in the world had happened, and it had happened to me.”

Mary was crying harder now, her face resting on her mother’s stomach, her mother stroking her hair.

“I was sent away for a little while. To a sanitarium, they called it. A fancy nuthouse was what it was. They told me the best thing for me would be to have another baby, straightaway. This time, it took years for me to get pregnant. I felt as if all my luck was gone. Used up. The only thing I still had, ironically, was my beauty. And it meant nothing. Eventually I did get pregnant, of course. And I had you. But God forgive me, I never had joy again. It died with Susan. And this is for you to forgive someday, Mary. When I realized I wasn’t going to feel that joy, that something had died in me, I resented you. I resented your laughter and your love for me.

“I used to make your father a martini every day when he came home from work. Since we were first married, I’d mix it for him. And one day I made the martini and I looked at it and I understood that it offered me an escape. I’d been drunk before. I loved the feeling, the fogginess, the numbness. So I drank that martini straight down. You were five or six, and you came in with a drawing of our house. That martini made me able to smile at you and look at your drawing and tell you it was wonderful.

“It’s like I woke up ten years later and you had grown up and your father had grown distant and I had grown older. Ten years, in a fog that enabled me to stay alive. I drove down to a church where they had AA meetings and I stood up and I said, My name is Mamie and I am a drunk. That night they assigned me to a sponsor, a British woman who owned a knitting store.”

“Alice,” Mary said.

“The next week, after the meeting, she invited me to her house for tea. I went because I was desperate. She sat me in a chair and she handed me two knitting needles and a ball of yarn. I had knit as a young girl. But I didn’t remember how exactly, so she showed me. While I knit, she told me her story. That day, I just listened. But I went back every week. And after a few months, while the two of us sat knitting, I said to her, ‘You know, I used to always get everything I wanted, because I was beautiful.’”

18

THE KNITTING CIRCLE

MARY STAYED WITH
her mother over the next few weeks, through blood tests and stress tests and echocardiograms.

Sitting in a wheelchair, her hair loose around her and her skin still pale, her mother looked oddly young, and beautiful. She watched the flurry of activity around her. She smiled up at a doctor who walked past, his stethoscope swinging with authority. But he paused when he saw her.

“Are you still here, Mamie?” he said, grinning beneath his Don Ameche mustache.

“Trying to leave,” she said. A flush of pink dotted her cheeks as she flirted with the doctor. “Want to take me home with you?”

The doctor chuckled. “Of course I do,” he said. “But my wife wouldn’t be very happy.” He leaned in close enough for Mary to smell the tobacco on his breath.

A sullen technician appeared, shuffling up to them. She spoke in Spanish to the doctor.