The Knitting Circle (31 page)

He pressed Mamie’s hand, a bit too tenderly, Mary thought. Where was that other, hairy doctor anyway?

“Mina will take good care of you, Mamie,” he said. He took the clipboard that hung from the back of the wheelchair and perused it. “Everything looks fine,” he said. “I hate to let you go, but I’m afraid that I will have to release you soon.”

“How soon?” Mary asked impatiently.

The doctor straightened and adjusted the knot of his tie.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“How soon will you release her?” Mary said.

The doctor glanced down at her mother, raising his eyebrows.

“My daughter,” Mamie said. “Mary.”

“I would never have guessed,” the doctor said, surprised.

He extended his hand and shook Mary’s authoritatively. She thought of how tenderly he had held her mother’s hand, how sweetly he had spoken to her.

“Your mother is recovering beautifully,” he said in a doctorly voice. “She can resume normal activities over the next few weeks. Of course, we’ll keep a very close eye on her,” he added in a softer tone.

Once again, the doctor pressed her mother’s hand into his own, then bid them
adiós
before walking away, his stride confident, the stethoscope swinging.

“What is wrong with you?” Mary hissed as she followed the wheelchair toward the lab. “Flirting with the doctor like that?”

“Why are you so angry?” her mother said just before the technician shoved the wheelchair through the doors.

The doors swung shut lazily. Mary watched her mother disappear through the fingerprint-smudged Plexiglas. A small turquoise vinyl sofa was pushed into a nearby alcove, and Mary dropped onto it.

Her mother was right. She was angry. Not about the flirting. Her mother always flirted, with policemen and gas station attendants and waiters and valets. The power of her beauty had not diminished with age. In a way, it had intensified. Her voice had grown more sultry over time, her body was even leaner and tighter than when she was younger.

Now that it was clear her mother would survive, Mary was beginning to absorb the story she had told her that first day. Anger that had been dormant in her for her entire life came to the surface. Her mother’s aloofness, her chilly love.

She wondered about this other mother, a woman who had loved another child with warmth and enthusiasm. She tried to put a face to this child, her lost sister. But only her mother’s face came to her.

She heard the whoosh of the doors opening and the rattle of wheels.

“I have been poked for the final time,” Mamie announced triumphantly.

Mary looked over at her mother. She wanted to hate her. But somehow couldn’t. Mary got to her feet and walked over to the wheelchair, already on its way back down the corridor.

“Great,” Mary said without conviction.

But her mother was too far ahead to hear her. Quickly, Mary hurried to catch up, chasing the golden back of her mother’s head.

MARY STAYED IN Mexico for two more weeks. She took her mother home from the hospital and got her settled into her crooked little house with the bright blue door. She opened that door over and over through the course of a day as her mother’s friends arrived with colorful bouquets of flowers, baskets of tamales, presents of hammered tin and
milagros
of hearts in all sizes. Finally she could go back to her own life. She had made decisions while she was here. She would ask Dylan for a divorce. She would sell their house and move to an apartment, something the right size for a woman living alone.

It did not make Mary happy to know what she had to do now. But it was time. Despite drinking and knitting and fleeing to Mexico, her mother had never moved through her grief. She had simply avoided it. Mary refused to do the same.

At the airport, she and her mother sat and drank coffee as they waited for Mary’s flight to board. Mamie looked even healthier than she had before her heart attack.

Her hair was pulled back into its usual chignon, neat and blond and lovely. Her blue eyes twinkled again, and the silver jewelry at her neck and ears made her skin glow. The waiter admired Mamie openly, bringing her a small plate of cookies dusted with powdered sugar, smiling at her warmly.

“You look great, Mom,” Mary said.

“I feel pretty damn good,” Mamie said, grinning at the waiter.

A staticky voice called for the boarding of Mary’s plane.

“That’s me,” Mary said, relieved to finally be going home.

Mary stood, but her mother reached for her across the table, the powdered sugar dusting her hand.

“There is so much I want to explain,” Mamie said.

Mary squeezed her mother’s hand briefly. “You don’t have to explain anything,” she said. She pulled the handle up on her travel bag and placed her shoulder bag on top of it, then angled the suitcase to wheel it away.

Again, the loudspeaker crackled.

Mamie rushed to Mary’s side. “I wasn’t a good mother to you. I know that. Or a good grandmother to Stella.”

“It’s fine,” Mary said.

“It’s not fine. All these years and I never got over losing her. That’s the truth,” she said.

Mamie kept pace with her as she rushed toward the line at the security gate. She took Mary’s free hand and held on tight. “I never got over her, and so I lost so much more. The joy of that little Stella. The joy of you.”

At the gate, there wasn’t a line so much as a crowd, everyone pushing forward to make their way through. Mary gave her mother a quick hug, but Mamie was not ready to go. She opened her arms and took Mary into her embrace.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me, Mary-la,” she said. “But I hope someday you can understand.” She had pressed her lips right against Mary’s ear, and after she spoke, she moved them to her daughter’s cheek and kissed her the way a mother kisses a daughter goodbye. “I love you, Mary-la,” she said.

Before Mary could speak, her mother was pushing her way back through the crowd.

Mary stood and watched her go. A woman in a bright purple dress kept jostling her to get by, but Mary stood still, watching until her mother disappeared completely. Then she joined the crowd moving toward security.

When it was her turn to place her bags on the conveyor, Mary found the neatly folded envelope her mother had slipped into her hand. She shoved it into her pocket, then collected her bags and walked hurriedly toward the plane that would take her home.

THE KNITTING CIRCLE was meeting at the Sit and Knit Two in Westerly. Roger had sent invitations to everyone for a knitting party on opening night. On her way there, Mary stopped at Dylan’s office and left him the divorce papers, small Post-its flagging all the places for him to sign.

By the time she pulled into the parking lot, everyone else had already arrived and the champagne had been opened.

Roger greeted her at the door.

“Finally home,” he said, planting a big kiss on her cheek.

Inside, she was blinded by color. Roger had arranged the yarn by color rather than brand, so that hills of orange spilled out of containers in one corner, every shade of blue dominated another, the pinks rose against one wall and the greens against another.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” she said. Her eyes settled on the familiar faces of the other women and she at last began to relax.

Mary lifted her bag and announced, “Presents!” She pulled out the yarn she’d bought in Mexico from a small group of women who raised their own sheep and spun and dyed the wool.

Soon, she was surrounded by Scarlet and Lulu and Ellen and Alice and Harriet. They hugged her and cooed over their presents.

A man stood behind Harriet, hanging back shyly.

Harriet took his arm and pulled him forward.

“This is my son,” Harriet said, her eyes downcast. “My son David. Remember? I told you about him?”

Mary smiled. “I do remember.”

“I’m going to teach David how to knit,” Roger said. “My first victim. I’ve got an all-men’s knitting class on Friday nights, and a Sunday morning knitting brunch.”

Alice shook her head. “He’s offering knitting and yoga,” she said. “How do you knit in downward dog, that’s what I want to know.” She beamed proudly at Roger. “You just need the knitting. That’s what I told him. But he’s got ideas.”

Roger winked behind David’s back. “Yes, I do,” he said.

Later, at home, Mary stood in her bedroom, remembering how she and Dylan had waited out her pregnancy in here, the two of them snuggled in this bed, reading books of names, dreaming about all that their future held. Dylan used to place headphones on her belly and play Beatles songs from his Walkman. “She’s got to love the Beatles,” he’d say. This was where newborn Stella used to sleep, in a cradle by their bed, the two of them awake all night listening to her baby sounds. Soon a new family would live here, and put their own imprints on this room.

Sadly, Mary began to undress, slipping off her shoes, shrugging out of her jacket. As she folded it, she felt the small tight square of paper she’d put in the pocket at the security gate in León.

Mary retrieved the envelope and went downstairs. In the living room, she turned on a lamp and sat, carefully opening the envelope.

There were two sheets of paper. The first was dated the day she’d left Mexico. In her perfect penmanship, her mother had written simply:

Mary-la, Even in my darkest days I wanted to let you know how I felt. But I have never been very good with words, like you are. I give you this now. It is what I wrote to you in one form or another every day of your young life. I offer it not for forgiveness, but for understanding. With all my love, Mom

Mary put the paper down and looked at the other one, also written in her mother’s perfect penmanship. This one was undated. It read:

Daughter, I have a story to tell you. I have wanted to tell it to you for a very long time. But unlike Babar or Eloise or any of the other stories that you loved to hear, this one is not funny. This one is not clever. It is simply true. It is my story, yet I do not have the words to tell it. Instead, I pick up my needles and I knit. Every stitch is a letter. A row spells out “I love you.” I knit “I love you” into everything I make. Like a prayer, or a wish, I send it out to you, hoping you can hear me. Hoping, daughter, that the story I am knitting reaches you somehow. Hoping, that my love reaches you somehow.

Part Ten

CASTING OFF

So you’ve knit a good, long strip and you want to get it off the needles and secure it so it doesn’t unravel. This process is called casting off.

—KRIS PERCIVAL,
Knitting Pretty

19

MARY

MARY STOOD AT
the window in her small office and looked down at the street. It was two weeks before Christmas. The bar across the street had fat colored lights strung above its windows and drooping over the door. They blinked on and off in the early evening. A lazy wet snow fell, melting before it even hit the ground. Eddie had bought some strange collection of Christmas carols and it played endlessly in the outer office. Mary could make out the Chipmunks’ nasal singing.

She had a fiber-optic snowman on her desk and it glowed eerily, changing colors with the slow creepy movement of a lava lamp. Walking past the antique shop on Wickenden Street, Mary had seen this funny snowman dripping colors across its popcornlike skin, and bought it immediately. She carried it to work, careful not to break its fake stick arms, and plugged it right in. Then she stood back to admire it. Even then it didn’t occur to her that this was her first act of celebration since Stella had died.

That came later, when she got home and dug out her Andy Williams Christmas CD. Mary put it on while she cooked a complicated stew, humming along with Andy as he sang “Winter Wonderland.” She paused. Her kitchen smelled of onions caramelizing and the crisp freshness of just-chopped carrots and celery. Small white lights twinkled in the windows. She could catch the smell of the heat that gurgled through the radiators. All that was missing, she thought, was everything else.

Mary had stood, still holding the long wooden spoon, looking at her life. Dylan had agreed to bring the divorce papers back to her quickly. No Dylan. No Stella. Instead, this new life, so different from the one she had been living.

Now she tried to count her blessings: New friends. Knitting. She faltered. The Chipmunks. The fiber-optic snowman. Mary closed her eyes and made herself remember every detail of Stella’s lovely face. Stella, she added to her list of blessings. Still, always, Stella.

“Uh,” Holly said from the doorway. “Are you like, meditating or something?”

Mary opened her eyes, her heart oddly full. “Just thinking,” she said.

“I like the snowman,” Holly said.

Holly had lost all of her pregnancy weight. Her hip bones jutted against the blue miniskirt she wore, and her skinny legs poked out beneath it. She’d stopped breast-feeding, and her breasts were small and flat again, boyish beneath her Clash concert T-shirt.

Mary frowned at Holly’s clothes. It was December and snowing and she was dressed for summer. But she didn’t say anything. Jessica was always reprimanding Holly—she hadn’t breast-fed long enough, she didn’t play classical music tapes in the car, she needed more black and white toys. All of Jessica’s ideas made Holly even wearier. Jessica and Eddie’s baby, Waylon, was only a month old but had a regular routine of stimulation. Mozart, tapes of Dr. Seuss books read aloud, scary pictures of black and white faces. Holly didn’t have to hear Mary telling her she was dressed inappropriately.

“Are you going home?” Mary asked Holly.

She felt sorry for her. Holly was in over her head. She’d imagined a playmate, not a baby. Sometimes, Mary babysat Jasper so that Holly could go out. She would come home drunk long after Mary had put Jasper to bed, her makeup smeared and her miniskirt all twisted. Mary would put her to bed too, Holly mumbling her thanks.