Knitting

by Anne Bartlett

  It was utterly ridiculous to be so tense. It was only Martha.

  Only Martha. Only Martha with her thick, warm body, her big bear hugs, her soft shawls and socks and scarves that tangled into you in spite of yourself. Big soft Martha, with no protection except her soap-smelling skin, open and vulnerable to Sandra’s hard glass edge.

  Sandra waited for the roses, for their shredded petals and thorny stems.

  Martha was close now. Sandra could see a blur of deep red steadily advancing out of the corner of her eye. But Martha did not stop or acknowledge her in any way. A rose petal landed on the back of one of Sandra’s clenched hands, another on her knee. She stared at her hand, the dark red on her white skin, the petal with its own tiny veins radiating toward the outer edge, the strong sure curve of it. Harmless, after all. She held it, soft and smooth, against her upper lip, crushed it to inhale its sweetness. Ashes of roses. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

  She could hear Kate whispering as she administered the communion cup. Then it was next to her in Kate’s large hands, proffered. Sandra saw Kate’s bruised thumb, the nail already black.

  “Drink deeply of the cup, Sandra.”

  Sandra hesitated, then took the chalice. The hot blood of life.

  The chalice was cold at her lips, the taste rich and sweet. But then unexpected heat, fire pouring down her throat to her empty belly, as though she were drinking molten metal. The fire spread, radiating outward, burning, consuming, spreading in a great conflagration, taking hold of her torso, licking down her arms and her legs. She felt herself give way before it, bow to the white-hot heat. She was paper, she was grass, she was a flaming tree. She was glass melting in the furnace.

  SANDRA had lost track of the service. What came next? Rose petals were everywhere, but when she looked up again, she found herself focusing on the bare rose sticks unceremoniously pushed back in the vase.

  She stared at them. Stripped, beaten, dead. What had been, what might still be if someone took those spiky dead things and planted them in good soil.

  Sandra began to weep then, discreetly at first, hot tears in her tissue, but the tissue was totally inadequate. She groped blindly for her bag. The tears kept falling, running out of her eyes, squirting down her face. Her meager supply of tissues was soon used up. She put her head in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking and she was making unfamiliar noises.

  The service was over. People began to move and leave.

  Inside Sandra a dam still swelled until she could no longer hold it back. She kept her head down, sobbing in earnest now, water streaming out of her, bursting from her eyes and nose and mouth, great gouts of it, an unstoppable flood. “Bawling her eyes out”—that’s what they used to say at school. She was bawling her eyes out, and she hardly knew why. Her tears were making little marks on her skirt. Her makeup must have washed off long ago.

  A woman came and sat next to her, close, shoulder to shoulder, and waited patiently while the tears subsided, but Sandra couldn’t look at her; she couldn’t look at anybody. This is what other people did in those other churches, the emotional ones, where they lost control of themselves and had strange ecstatic looks on their faces. Sandra didn’t feel ecstatic. She felt acutely embarrassed, and wet. Behind that, part of her was reeling away into some strange and unfamiliar orbit.

  “Here,” said Martha’s voice. A neatly ironed hankie, old-fashioned soft cotton with a lace edge, was pushed into Sandra’s hand.

  “Thanks,” said Sandra, mopping at her face.

  “We’re having buns out the back.”

  “Thanks,” Sandra said again, not looking at Martha, but glad of a hedge against someone more inquisitive.

  “Do you want me to bring you coffee and a bun?”

  “No.” Sandra wiped the back of her hand across her nose like a child. Nearly everyone had gone now. She stood up, still avoiding Martha’s eyes.

  “I think I’ll just go home, if you don’t mind. I’ll catch up with you later.” She walked quickly to her car.

  LATER that afternoon, warm from soup and toast and her heated house, Sandra turned on the computer, opened her e-mail program, and clicked on the folder called Jack. Time for the plunge. The window opened, showing all his messages from the year before he died, interchanges while they were both at work, an ebb and flow of conversation, some of it meaningless now without context. Iceberg tips of their relationship.

  How was your seminar? Thinking of you.

  Lunch with Spack. Love to you, he said.

  A giant slog today. Bored. Kangaroo Island for the long weekend?

  This morning one of my students came and asked for an extension. She’s only 19. Her partner had suicided. She wept and wept in my office and I found some tissues. Young enough to be our daughter, and I wanted to put my arms around her but protocol persists. What would you have done with one of your young men? The same I suspect. Sometimes I wish we had adopted kids. All this love with nowhere to go.

  Was she game to see what she had written him? She opened Sent/Jack. 349 messages.

  No time to shop. Please pick up attached list for our curry night with Kate and Tony. Any coriander left in the garden? I’ll have to make it tonight, my only free night. Or do you want to cook?

  Dear Jacko Can’t find the parking fine. Did you pay it already?

  Hot flash score = 32. Male menopause must be a breeze.

  Two students were at it in the stairwell and the VC, taking a shortcut, found them. Brightened us all up.

  Oh Jacko! Such a lovely day we had yesterday. I keep thinking of that big basket of glowing peaches. Thank you, thank you. All my love, X

  Holidays, shopping lists, days shared, love and kisses. She had loved him. She had loved him. She must remember that.

  September

  IT WAS THE FIRST DAY of spring.

  The garments were mounted, the spotlights were on, the speeches would soon begin. The crowd at the exhibition milled around, laughing and smiling, nodding as they pointed to items in the catalogue. The mood was set by the extraordinary orange horse in the foyer, Martha McKenzie’s current work in progress. Sandra had written a snappy little piece about twentieth-century horses, tying it to the Light Horse Brigade and the war comforts. It was stretching the connection, she knew, but the horse was a crowd-pleaser, especially for those jaded by too many Friday-night openings.

  Martha and Cliff stood in a corner by the kitchen door, mesmerized by the bright lights, the elegance of the crowd, and the transformation of Martha’s knitting into magnetic works of art. The wooden floorboards of the church hall gleamed golden. It doesn’t look like a church hall at all, thought Martha, but like a proper gallery.

  “Looks great, Mattie,” said Cliff. He might have been referring to her work, but they were both watching Sandra talking to Kate. Sandra was laughing and wearing high heels, a tight green dress, and plenty of makeup. Glittering, Martha said to herself, Sandra is glittering.

  “Don’t stare, Cliff,” she said, but she was telling herself, too, as she righted her wine glass, which had tipped to a precarious angle.

  A man wearing a dark gray shirt came in. Martha recognized the body before she saw the face; the set of the shoulders and the neatly contained walk brought instant recall from her memory bank. She had once studied him closely. Now he was different, diminished, an aging psychiatrist out of context, pretending to examine a baby’s layette in the middle of a church hall.

  She hadn’t seen him for thirty years, but it was him, all right, same size and shape, his hair barely gray, a trim little man with a smallish head. The beard was gone, but he still smiled that silly half smile.

  She excused herself from Cliff and went to the kitchen to find a plate. It took her a while to find the particular plate she wanted. She piled it generously with assorted breads and cheeses, slices of pickled red pepper and marinated eggplant. Everyone else was using paper napkins, taking tiny portions, mere nibbles, even though it was almost dinnertime. It was wonderful food, she had never seen
such food in her life. Why weren’t they enjoying it more?

  As she approached him she saw that the piercing dark eyes that had frightened her so much no longer knew who she was.

  “Here you are, sir,” she said. “I got this for you.” She smiled broadly and thrust the plate at him. She remembered from hospital gossip that his wife’s name was Marguerite, that she had ebony hair and red lips like Snow White.

  IN A moment between conversations, Sandra looked for Martha. There she was, offering a man a plate of food. She was wearing a finely knitted swing jacket that Sandra had never seen before, a perfect fit and flattering to her full figure, with twined intarsia roses down each side of the front and asymmetrically placed around the neck and across the sleeves. The rose pattern was not large, and on someone else the jacket might have looked hopelessly old-fashioned, but on Martha tonight it was just right, bohemian and beautiful. She wore no makeup, but her face was soft and shining, with spots of color in her cheeks. Her hair was up, though wisping undone here and there. Martha caught Sandra’s eye across the shoulder of the man in the gray shirt and winked.

  “Do I know you?” Dr. Gladstone asked.

  “I might have met you many years ago,” she said, re membering the slumped circle, the vacant eyes, the erratic behavior. How little he had understood.

  “What, at some conference?”

  “Maybe.”

  Martha knew his style of conversation. She saw that his eyes were still small and narrow, that the half smile still masked power tricks. She knew that when he wanted to close the conversation he would take her arm just so and squeeze it gently before moving away. They were about the same height, and she looked back at the dark eyes as hard as they looked at her.

  “Do you know the exhibitors?” he asked, juggling the old patterned china plate into his left hand.

  “Yes,” said Martha, “I do.”

  “I don’t know anything about this kind of thing, but my wife says it’s very fine work.”

  “Yes. The knitting’s not bad, but the brains behind it is Sandra, Sandra Fildes. That woman over there.” She pointed. “The one in the green dress. Some of these pieces are original; others are historically authentic reconstructions. All are linked with a rich counterpoint of text.” A quote from the brochure, unopened in his hand. He looked impressed.

  “What’s your line of work?” Martha asked boldly.

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “Oh,” said Martha. “A GP?”

  “No.” He laughed. “Don’t collapse on me. I wouldn’t know what to do. I’m a psychiatrist.”

  “Well, fancy that.” Martha paused. “But if I had a mental illness, you could fix that?”

  “There are a lot of variables,” he said warily. “But we would try. There are some wonderful drugs these days.”

  Martha leaned forward and took hold of his arm above the elbow, gently but firmly.

  “See your plate, doctor? It’s a bit cracked—there, by the pink rose under the eggplant.” She took hold of the opposite edge between her thumb and forefinger, so he couldn’t let go without it falling, and twisted it around so he could see the crack.

  “Do you reckon you could mend that?”

  He was not comfortable, but he tried to humor her. “I don’t think so. Once cracked, always cracked, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah,” said Martha. “And what about cracked people? Crackpots?”

  He looked at her then, hard, but there was still no recognition in his eyes.

  “I mean,” Martha went on, “it’s still a good plate. Quite pretty, really. You didn’t even see the crack at first. You only saw the food on it.”

  “Do I know you?” He took a step backward.

  “No, I don’t think so. See, if you concentrate on the crack, you’d never use it. You might even chuck it in the bin. But it’s still pretty, and it’s still useful. And anyway, the crack means it’s got a story to tell.”

  He glanced around.

  “Do you know, doctor?” She stepped back again. “I reckon doctors should listen to their patients.”

  Her hand was still on his arm, but he laughed a little. “Of course,” he said. “The patient’s perception is very important.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that. Do you know—” Martha paused. She didn’t need to justify herself to this little man. Just as he moved to disengage himself, she tightened her grip momentarily above his elbow, then gave him a little push in the direction of the drinks table.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Gladstone. I just remembered, I’ve left someone stranded in the kitchen. Please go on and enjoy yourself.” From the corner of her eye she saw him scoop up a glass of red and disappear into the crowd.

  Back by the kitchen door Cliff was leaning against some shelving like a multicolored question mark. He was wearing the knitting-machine vest over an electric blue shirt. His aftershave was overpowering.

  “So who’s the competition?” asked Cliff.

  “Not my type,” said Martha.

  “You say that about everybody,” said Cliff. “But who is he?”

  “Oh, a bloke I knew years ago. Ran a therapy group. Still wet behind the ears back then. Tried to trick people into doing what he wanted for their own good. If he talked to you, he’d probably try to make you live in a house. Never had a clue, poor sausage.”

  “I am going to live in a house,” said Cliff.

  Martha raised her eyebrows.

  “I’m moving in with Joyce. You know, my sister. Her heart’s worse. She needs help with the gardening, and someone to keep an eye on her. I’m getting past camping out. Too stiff and sore in the mornings.”

  It was time for the speeches. Martha checked behind the kitchen door. Yes, the bag was still there, the new carpetbag that snapped shut like a crocodile and never let anything out.

  Tony, master of ceremonies for the evening, was enjoying himself, cracking a few jokes to the sound man, introducing himself to the minister for the arts. He beckoned Martha, but she shook her head. Tony came over to see what the matter was.

  “I don’t want to make a speech.”

  “They’ll want to hear from you, Martha. Look around you! Everyone is enjoying your knitting!”

  “I told Sandra I don’t want to speak.”

  “Well, just come over for a minute. The minister wants to meet you.”

  “Hello, Martha,” said the minister, a tall woman who extended a hand heavy with jewelry. “This is wonderful, just wonderful. All the detail! However do you find the time?”

  “I get up in the morning and I do it,” said Martha.

  The minister laughed. “Well, so do I, but I wish I could see this level of achievement for the hours I put in! Congratulations. This work is superb. You must be very pleased and proud.” She spoke to Martha for a few minutes more and then moved on. Martha went back to the kitchen to check on her bag.

  From her position by the kitchen door, Martha watched the minister open the exhibition. When Sandra finally took the microphone, Martha saw that she was glowing, that some kind of light shone under her skin. Sandra was speaking now, and the words streamed out of her mouth like music. Martha could hear them rising and falling like the sound of flowing water, sometimes slow and smooth, sometimes laughing like a waterfall. Word knitting, thought Martha, words all knitted together to warm your heart like a song. And she detected a new strand woven in with the rest, the sparkle of Sandra having fun.

  But now Sandra was saying words with “Martha” knitted into them, and people were turning around and nodding at her, Martha, and they all were smiling.

  “So I owe a lot to Martha,” Sandra was saying. “Not only for the great contribution she made in providing many of the garments for this exhibition, but because of her commitment to me as a friend.

  “Many of you knew Jack. I still miss him terribly, of course, but Martha and others have helped me see that there is a broader fabric, a larger pattern. Please come up here, Martha, so everyone can see who did this wonderful work.”
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  “Wait,” said Martha.

  “Please, Martha.”

  “I’m coming,” said Martha. “I just have to get something.” She ducked through the kitchen door and came out with the carpetbag. The crowd gave way before her as she went up to Sandra and put out her hand for the microphone.

  “I wasn’t”—she paused as she heard her own voice echo through the mike—“I wasn’t going to say anything at all. But I want to give Sandra a present, to thank her for everything. Without her this whole thing would never have happened.” She handed Sandra the carpetbag and the microphone.

  “Open it.”

  “Now?”

  Martha nodded. Sandra handed the mike to Tony, and the crowd strained to see as she unfastened the clasp and took out a large white box.

  “Here,” said Martha, putting her hands under it for support. “Now you undo the ribbon.”

  Sandra untied the blue ribbon and took off the lid. Inside was something wrapped in tissue paper. Sandra reached in and took hold of the garment as the tissue paper drifted away. From Sandra’s hands poured a length of exquisite lace knitting in the shape of a dress. Those at the front held their breath for a moment. Cameras flashed. Even those farther back could see from the lightness and elegance of the drape that this glorious white garment was the jewel of the exhibition.

  Sandra, feeling its familiar warmth, looked up in wonder at Martha’s smiling face.

  Martha took the mike back from Tony.

  “It’s the best thing I’ve ever made,” she said to the crowd. “So I think she should put it on, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely,” Tony called out. The guests laughed in assent.