The Sisterhood of the Dropped Stitches (2 page)

The bad part, of course, was that I would have
liked to have both of my parents with me when I faced the cancer. I never did have the courage to ask Mom if she'd told Dad about my cancer before he decided to leave. I never had the courage to ask him, either. I just told myself he couldn't have known when he left.

At least I still saw my dad after he moved out of the house. Uncle Lou is Dad's older brother, and so Dad would come by the diner every few months to watch sports on the big-screen television we have. Baseball was his real passion, but he watched football, too. On those nights when my dad would come by, he and I would have a cup of coffee and cheer his team to victory. Usually, he'd have a baseball cap for me from some team. He'd put the cap on my head and give me an arm-around-the-shoulder bit of a hug.

Anyway, I didn't want to take sides in the argument my parents were having, so even though I had gone to church a few times with my mother before my dad left, I didn't want to go to church with her after he left just in case he ever asked me about it. I didn't want him to think I'd chosen Mom over him.

And, if I wasn't going to go to church for real, I didn't think it was exactly fair to go to church for some kind of counseling. Besides, I had gotten cancer not long after Mom became a Christian, so I wasn't feeling too kindly toward God anyway.
Wasn't He supposed to take care of people who said they were Christians? Shouldn't He have taken better care of me since Mom prayed for me and she had joined up with Him? It didn't seem fair.

But I couldn't keep all of my angry feelings inside.

So, I talked to Rose, a student counselor at the hospital. Rose was the one who first decided the four of us—me, Carly, Becca and Lizabett—needed to be in a group together. She said we should be like normal teenagers and have a club.

I remember wondering at the time just how normal she expected us to be when we were all staring death in the face. Rose had been an elementary school teacher for some years before she went back to graduate school, so she was prepared for life. Still, she looked as scared as I felt.

I suspected comforting me was worse for Rose than comforting her usual clients, because she and I had become friends in the weeks I'd known her. I had to become close to her. She was my rock. I talked to her about the things I couldn't talk to my mom about. I needed Rose. But that didn't stop me from telling her I didn't want to belong to any stupid cancer group.

“Cancer? Who said anything about a cancer group?” Rose said after a brief pause. “No, no, I'm talking about starting a knitting group. Lots of people knit these days.”

I know the knitting idea just flew into Rose's head when I was so stubborn about joining a cancer group. But once she said it, the whole thing seemed to take root. Apparently, her farm-raised grandmother had taught Rose how to knit, and she was happy—maybe even relieved—to teach us. She told me later she was glad she could do something concrete with her hands to help us.

Rose's grandmother was fond of old sayings and quotes, so Rose decided one of us would bring a quote to each meeting in case we ran out of things to talk about while we sat there tangled in all of our yarn.

I had been telling Rose about the grill guy for the twentieth time when she thought of having a club. I soon learned that not being able to date some guy was the least of my troubles. I'm not sure how I would have gotten through all the chemo and the scared feelings without the Sisterhood. Before long I would have knitted those scarves with my teeth if I'd had to just so I could keep meeting with the Sisterhood.

This was almost six years ago, and we all made it.

Let me repeat that. We all made it. Three cheers. I still feel good every time I say that.

The prognosis for all of us was different, but five years was the longest time any of us had needed to wait to become officially Survivors. There hasn't been a week in all that time when we've considered
stopping the Sisterhood for more than a holiday break. If it's not Thanksgiving or Christmas, every Thursday the five of us meet in The Pews—that's the name of my Uncle Lou's diner. We sit at the big table in the back room and knit.

These days, one of my favorite times is when someone brings a quote to the Sisterhood meeting. I think it was the quotes that made us turn so reflective that we decided to set some goals last year. Reaching the five-year mark was such a major thing—I can't even describe it. We couldn't think of anyway big enough to celebrate, so Rose suggested we all make a special goal for the next year—something that would show we were taking our lives back.

All I can say about those goals is that I wish I hadn't gotten caught up in the optimism and foolishly made a goal about dating. I should've known that female-male attraction can't be goaled into being. Finding the right guy to date—someone who really curls your toes, as Rose would say—should never be part of anyone's must-meet annual goals. Love doesn't work on a schedule.

Trust me on this. Let me tell you how Becca set her goal. She has always wanted to become a lawyer. She was already taking some prelaw classes at UCLA, so she set her goal as being chosen to be an intern with this local judge for next summer. That's a perfect goal—it's a clear step in a clear direction. The judge always selects two prelaw students to
work with her from June to September. It's apparently a big deal because the judge is one of the best, according to Becca, who knows those kinds of things.

Getting that internship is a sensible goal, and Becca says she's sure to get it, given her grades and references. Her grandfather knows someone who knows the judge and is willing to put in a good word for her. Becca called, and the judge's law clerk is sending the acceptance letters out this week, so Becca will get hers in plenty of time for our Sisterhood deadline of next Thursday.

If it was me, I wouldn't be so confident, but Becca gets what she wants, and I have no doubt she'll get this.

If I weren't so happy in my job as Uncle Lou's partner, I would have chosen a goal to advance my career, as well.

Not that all of our goals are about jobs.

Carly decided to get a Maine coon cat. She'd always wanted a cat, she told us, but she couldn't get one because she's allergic to cats. The Maine coon cat, however, is a purebred that has different dander than other cats or something. Anyway, it has the long hair Carly likes but is still okay for people with allergies.

At first, I was skeptical. I couldn't imagine Carly having any animal with coon in its name. I mean, Carly is just so classy. But then Carly told us that this
particular breed of cat is said to be descended from six house cats that Marie Antoinette sent to Wiscassett, Maine, when she was hoping to escape from France during the French Revolution.

Isn't that something? The cats were to be there to welcome Marie when she made it to the New World. Now that sounded more like Carly. She likes movie stars and royalty. She'll love having a cat whose ancestors had waited for Marie Antoinette.

Of course, the cat was not cheap. It cost Carly two thousand dollars, and it took her months to find one. In fact, she just got her cat a week or so ago. She had to fly to Seattle to pick it up.

I was happy for Carly when she met her goal. I even sent her home with a small piece of fish from the diner after our meeting last week.

Carly was the first one to meet her goal.

When we set our goals, Lizabett surprised us by saying she'd always wanted to perform in a ballet, twirling and dipping around onstage in a costume. Her eyes lit up just talking about it. Her leg had healed just fine after the surgery removing her tumor so, of course, ballet had to be her goal. She'd signed up for classes before the month was out at a community dance studio over in Sierra Madre.

Lizabett is performing next Wednesday in a production the studio is doing of
Swan Lake.
When the performance date was first being discussed, Lizabett told the other ballet students about her goal and they
voted to move the production forward a few days so she could meet it. She's so excited. She showed us a picture of her costume last week—it's all white net and froth. She'll look adorable on stage.

Next Thursday is the date when the goals are due to be completed, and I'm the only one who hasn't done what I'd said I would do. You would think I would get some extra credit for writing up this description of how we started the Sisterhood, but no one seems willing to let me slide on my goal. And I haven't even come close to meeting it.

My goal is to have three dates with a man, or men, I could see myself with long-term. Carly suggested the long-term addition, and I know now I shouldn't have listened. Carly gets asked for so many dates she can be picky about long-term attraction.

I'm not Carly. If men ask me out, it's obviously not about looks. I have to rely on my personality here. My skin is not spotty, but its color is uneven—I don't have the English skin that's like fine porcelain; mine's more like thick white crockery that's been given a sturdy glaze. Plus, my lips are too thin and my cheekbones are not pronounced enough for real beauty.

Not that I'm a wreck, by any means. I look wholesome, but I'm certainly not Rose Queen material as Carly is. The point being that I need to count all of my dates—long-term and short-term and anything in between.

Even at that, I wasn't worried when I first set the goal, because a year is a long time. How could I have known I'd procrastinate? The problem was, I didn't want to be on a manhunt. I just wanted it to happen, you know?

I think it was all the philosophizing with the quotes that wore down my good sense to the point that I even made this kind of a goal. The others brought in some quotes that made a person think anything was possible if the whole group worked on it. After we'd been bald and scared together, we didn't have any barriers left. Once we'd reached our five-year marker, anything seemed possible. I'm lucky I didn't vow to become an astronaut and fly to the moon.

Usually that kind of soaring enthusiasm is a good thing, but lately—well, at least since the big Thursday is coming up so fast—I've begun to wonder if some of those in the Sisterhood haven't grown
too
supportive of seeing me actually meet my goal. They keep saying Friday, Saturday and Sunday are all excellent date nights. I'll be doing good if they don't hurry me out of our meeting tonight with orders to find some man on the street to have coffee with me before the diner closes.

Come to think of it, there is that coffee place down the street in De Lacey Alley. There might be a busboy there who will sit down at a table with me and have a cup of coffee if I pay the bill. I wonder if that would count?

We make too much of dates in our culture anyway. In some countries, just giving a man a look would be equivalent to a date—and I've certainly
looked
at men in the past year. Don't you think that should count for something?

C
arly brought this quote to the Sisterhood one day when we were all feeling discouraged. Carly thought the queen said it when England was at war. Carly isn't keen on war, but she, of course, always picks quotes from the royals and movie stars. I wonder sometimes why she doesn't get an agent and try to get on the big screen.

Carly would be a beautiful movie star. Besides, it would give her something to do with her days—not that she isn't already doing profitable things. She has her charities, and she's taking one or two Interior Design classes from some private school. Really, I
suspect she's just marking time until she marries some nice, rich man who can support her in her San Marino lifestyle.

But until she gets married, I worry that Carly worries too much about the rest of us. Does that make sense? She just seems to take everything to heart.

 

Okay, so Carly's right—I have to admit I have over thirty baseball caps and have never played the game. I've watched enough games with my dad, though, so in a way, I've earned the caps. I think Carly should take that into account instead of standing beside Becca in The Pews, looking at me in that patient way she has where she waits for the other person to connect all the dots.

I hate dots.

I am getting ready to tell the two of them I'll take them to Victory Park and see if we can find a baseball game if they're so determined that I get more involved in life, but I know they aren't here about baseball or about my caps.

Carly seems willing to stand there and let me work on connecting the dots, but Becca is clearly ready to burst. Dots are too slow for her.

“You're never going to meet any men unless you stop hiding out here!”

Becca makes her pronouncement and flings her backpack down on the top of the counter. I wince,
even though I know the backpack is too light to do any damage. The mahogany counter is Uncle Lou's pride and joy. It almost kills him to let people eat their sandwiches at it; but since The Pews is an upscale hamburger diner, he has no choice about letting paying customers put their elbows on the counter.

The backpack is another matter, even though I know it is too soft to do any damage and Becca is a particular favorite with Uncle Lou because she watches football with him on the diner's television most Monday nights during the season—better than that, she actually understands the game and can argue with him about the strategies of the teams.

“Not that you shouldn't still work here—The Pews is great.” Becca amends her opinion. “It's just that you need to meet more men someplace.”

“If you look around here, you'll see men.” I sweep the place with my arm. It is relatively empty except for a couple of regulars who don't even bother looking up from their coffee. These regulars might be in their sixties, but they are definitely men. They even have beards.

It is obvious that the reason Becca has come early today is to talk to me about the men I haven't met and the dates I haven't had—which, believe me, can be a long conversation. Carly, on the other hand, probably came to temper Becca's enthusiasm.
Carly's the peacemaker in our group, and is never willing to see the rest of us quarrel.

Speaking of which—the Sisterhood will be meeting in a few hours. Uncle Lou keeps a running reservation for the group in the back room of The Pews for Thursday nights from seven to ten. He even usually brings us cups of herbal tea and biscotti and makes a big deal about it being on the house. Everyone should have an Uncle Lou in their life.

Of course, Uncle Lou isn't here right now. It's four o'clock in the afternoon, and he is out following some lead on a temporary grill operator. I don't know what kind of a genius he's lining up. Only a few people have experience in old grills like the one we have. Uncle Lou was a little vague about where he was going, but that is Uncle Lou's way. He doesn't like being bothered with details and schedules.

Of course, that's why he turned that part of the business over to me years ago. I may not be in the front part of the diner all the time, but I don't think it's accurate to say I don't meet people.

“I'm not hiding. There are 235 people who come through these doors on an average day. I know. I do the books.”

The diner has a whole row of windows that look out over Colorado Boulevard. This is “the street” in Pasadena since it is the one that the Rose Parade goes down on the beginning of every year. Uncle Lou has
had some sort of restaurant on this spot along the parade route since long before any of the upscale restaurants that now crowd the street opened their doors.

“We're just a couple of blocks away from Kevin Costner's restaurant,” I say. That always distracts Carly. J Lo's sister has a place, too, but I don't add that. “This is a happening place.”

I started waiting tables at Uncle Lou's when I was in high school. For the past six years, I've worked here full-time and I've multiplied the income from the diner five times over. I added avocado to the menu, antique pews to the decor and college students to the waitstaff. Then I changed the name from Lou's to The Pews, and it became a trendy place, but not so trendy that Uncle Lou lost his regulars. It was a brilliant compromise between old and new.

This past year Uncle Lou made me a partner, and now he goes around saying he is so rich he's thinking of retiring early. I do the books, so I know he can do it. Not that he ever will. He loves this diner. This year, though, he is planning to take a vacation for the first time in years—that is, if he can find someone who can handle that grill while he's gone.

I should have learned how to use that particular grill years ago, but Uncle Lou is a bit of a sexist when it comes to the grill. He says the old thing gives off too much heat for a woman and it's a job for a man.

What he doesn't say is that our grill at The Pews
is ancient and temperamental and should have been replaced years ago. Uncle Lou is attached to the thing, though. He swears the new grills don't work as well—something about it being hot and steady at the same time instead of just one or the other.

But that isn't why Carly and Becca are here. I look up at them to see if they're still stuck on their topic. They are.

“…in the back room. You do the books in the back room,” Carly points out gently when she sees my attention is back with them.

“It's not a back room, it's an office.”

Becca rolls her eyes. Carly's approach is always too subtle for her.

“It's not even the
front
back room, where somebody might see you. It's the room behind the back room,” Becca grumbles. “You might as well be home in your pajamas for all the people who see you.”

“I don't think I need to be on display. I don't want to be obvious about this meeting-a-man thing anyway. Besides, I'm up here tonight taking orders. You don't get more visible than that. In fact, if Annie doesn't get here soon, I'll miss our meeting and be on view up here all night.”

Annie is one of The Pew waitresses. Chrissy is the other waitress, but she isn't due in tonight.

“That's not the same,” Becca says. “You need to do something.”

“We have ads out so we can hire some more waitresses.”

“Then you'll never leave your office,” Becca says as she sits down on one of the bar stools at the counter. The bottoms of the bar stools are brass-plated and give the whole place the kind of class it needs to match up with the mahogany counter. Becca moves her backpack off the counter and swings it down to her feet. Red mohair yarn sticks out of one of the side pockets.

I smile when I see the yarn. Mohair is hard to knit with because it can get all tangled up. “You always do need a challenge.”

“I just feel like we've come so far,” Becca says. “Too far to give up now. You were so brave with your surgery, and the follow-up treatment went well, too. You need to get past everything and meet a nice guy. And now's the time. You're the only one who might not meet your goal.”

I know Becca wants to just pound through any obstacles. That's what we did when we were all so sick. She helped me get through my partial mastectomy and the reconstruction that followed. I, more than any of the others, owe her for her determination. It kept me going through some dark days. It upheld me back then even though it feels like overkill now.

I reach for one of the cloths I use to polish the counter and give the counter a few rubs. “If it makes
you feel any better, I'm fine with my body. I'm not holding back. Besides, the surgeons did such a good job, you can hardly tell I had surgery. And I'm not a recluse. A person can't be a recluse on Colorado Boulevard. Thousands of people walk down this street every week—more if you're talking the Rose Parade.”

Becca took one of the other cloths and began to rub the counter, as well. “A person can be a recluse anywhere if they want to be one. When was the last time you went anywhere that wasn't for work?”

“I'm trying to get everything done so I can go to our Dropped Stitches meeting tonight. That's not work.”

“You know what we mean.” Carly enters the conversation as she begins to arrange the salt and pepper shakers on the tray the evening crew will use to reset the tables in an hour or so. “We're worried about you.”

All of the members of the Sisterhood know their way around Uncle Lou's place. They've even waited tables a time or two when The Pews has been busy and short-staffed.

“I'm fine, Carly. Fine. Six years fine.”

Becca grimaces as she rubs a bigger circle on the counter. She puts her whole body into the polishing motion. “If you're so fine, why haven't you met your goal?”

“Do we have to meet every single goal?”

“Of course.” Becca stops rubbing. She sounds
surprised, as if she hasn't even thought of the possibility of failure. “We've met them all so far. We can meet this one, too. It isn't like you to miss a goal.”

I know how Becca feels. She's pumped. For a long time, I had that same kind of desperate need to have everything under control. The future was so cloudy we just grabbed one goal at a time and hung on to it as we worked our way through the pain. But did that mean we had to live the rest of our lives with that same need to have everything come out the way we planned it?

“I think maybe I picked the wrong goal,” I finally say.

“It's not the wrong goal—it's the absolute right one for you.” Becca starts wiping the counter again. “Besides, you can't change goals now. You just need encouragement. We all know you'd like to start dating again. Who wouldn't?”

“I could learn Spanish instead. That's a skill I could use at the diner.”

“Maybe you could date someone who speaks Spanish,” Carly offers. She has finished the salt and pepper shakers and is working on the small bowls with red pepper flakes now.

“I'll date when I meet the right guy.” I appeal to Carly. “I'm sure you didn't just buy the first coon cat you saw when you decided you wanted one.”

“Maine coon cat,” Carly corrects me. “It's French.”

“You've had a year to look around,” Becca says
stubbornly. “Carly managed to find that French cat, and they're a rare breed. If she can find a rare cat, you should be able to find a perfectly ordinary man to have coffee with. You don't even need to ask the guy his pedigree—he can just be a guy who's single.”

“I've been busy.”

“There's nothing wrong with being selective,” Carly says just as if she hadn't heard me say I was busy. “No one is saying you have to rush out and put an ad in the paper or anything. You can take it slow.”

“But not this slow,” Becca clarifies. “You've got to get three dates in a week.”

“I can't help it if I haven't met anyone I want to date.”

“You know, the problem might be more than that,” Carly says.

I tense up. Everybody thinks I have a problem with my body since I've had my partial mastectomy, but it's not true.

“Remember how you were when you were learning to knit?” Carly says to me. “Every time you dropped a stitch, you had to unravel your yarn back to the place where you made the mistake. Even when Rose taught us how to fix a dropped stitch without going back, you always unraveled.”

“I wanted to be sure.”

Carly nods. “Maybe it's that way with you and men. Maybe you need to go back to that guy you liked
so much when you stopped dating. What was his name?”

“You mean the grill guy? I can't go back to being nineteen and all bothered by some guy who worked at the diner.”

I'm relieved this isn't about my body image, but I'm still not so sure about the direction Carly's taking. I know I did my share of wailing over the unfairness of cancer and my missed date with the grill guy, so I'm not surprised Carly remembers it. But that was a long time ago. I'm not still infatuated with the grill guy.

“Why can't you go back?” Carly asks. “Didn't you always say that it was the grill guy who made you feel there was a dropped stitch in your life?”

“Yes, but…” I shook my head. “I mean, it's not like I
knew
him or anything.”

“Sure you did. He was working the grill here, and you were waiting tables on the weekends,” Becca says. “Your shifts must have overlapped.”

“Well, of course, I talked to him, but ‘make it two burgers, with everything on them' doesn't mean we had much conversation.”

“He asked you out,” Becca says.

“Six years ago!”

“What about those eyes of his—the ones that looked like a storm cloud coming?”

“Just because I noticed his eyes, it doesn't mean I want to date him now. Why, I don't even know where he is. He could be living in Australia, for all I know.”

There is a moment's silence, and Becca and Carly exchange a quick glance.