The Sisterhood of the Dropped Stitches

by Janet Tronstad

  So, no, I didn’t want to be around people.

  I didn’t have any pictures of people on my desk. I’d thought at one time about putting a picture of me and Mom on the desk, but I worried that sometime, when Dad stopped in to watch a game, he would want to see my office. If that happened, I didn’t want him to see a picture of me and my mom sitting there without him.

  I did have one picture, taken when I was about ten, of the three of us together. I had framed it and put it on my desk for several days when I first set up my office, but I was even more uncomfortable with that one because it seemed desperate to have to go back that many years to find a picture of us all together and smiling. So I put the picture in my bottom drawer and it’s been there ever since, sitting next to the old stapler that doesn’t work anymore.

  These days I’m not exactly hiding from people in my office, but I’m not out there meeting anyone, either.

  Maybe it is time for some changes.

  I look in the mirror on the back of the door. It’s a plain mirror with cardboard backing and a metal rim around it. The first thing I see is my hair sticking out from under my baseball cap. My hair grew back a long time ago, and while it is fine instead of coarse the way it used to be, it’s good, healthy brown hair. I used to love having long hair, but now I keep it short. Half of the time, I chop away at it myself. It hardly seems to matter if it’s styled or not when I usually wear a baseball cap over it.

  I love my baseball caps.

  The caps were as close as my dad and I came to talking about the effects of the chemo. He never said anything when he gave me the caps, but every few months or so he’d show up with a new one and put it on my head. Even though he never gave me much of a hug after giving me the cap, I always felt better—as if maybe the cap was his way of saying he cared about what I was facing with the chemo.

  My hair is doing fine now, but I keep wearing the caps.

  Maybe I am stuck in cancer-defense mode. Maybe I do need to take more chances in life, including meeting more men.

  I meant what I said to Becca and Carly about feeling fine about my body now. But that doesn’t mean my body hasn’t changed some. I’m still not sure about me and men in any intimate sense. Maybe I have been reluctant to date.

  I think about all of that for a minute, and then I take off the baseball cap I am wearing and lay it on a corner of my desk. My hair is flat, of course, but I use my fingers to comb through it a little in front of the mirror on my door. I never thought I’d feel so strange without a cap on my head.

  I look at myself again in the mirror. My hair doesn’t look great, but it doesn’t look as bad as I thought it might. It wouldn’t hurt to wear some lipstick, either. My lips are thin, but if they have some color, they won’t get lost in my face. I look in my top desk drawer. I find a tube of lip gloss and put that on my lips. It doesn’t give them any color, but it does make them look a little fuller.

  I’ll need to stop by the mall soon and get some lip liner—it wouldn’t hurt to get some eye makeup, too, since my eyes will be more noticeable if I give up the baseball caps.

  And, of course, there’s moisturizer and foundation. It didn’t seem worth the trouble of worrying about moisturizer when I was sick, so I gave it up. But now that old age is a possibility again, I should think about it. I look at my face closely in the mirror. I see two lines that could be forming beside my eyes. I need to get some moisturizer and start using it.

  I stare at my face, looking for more fine lines, for a while. Then, I tell myself I can’t spend the whole afternoon looking in the mirror.

  I sit down at my desk and get to work. I finish doing the bookkeeping for the diner, and then I eat a sandwich.

  I take my time, but I’m still the first one to the meeting room.

  Usually, during the Sisterhood meetings we’re so busy we don’t notice the people out front in The Pews eating and laughing and having a good time. There are wood floors throughout the diner so a person does hear footsteps when other people walk around. I can usually gauge the number of customers in The Pews by the noise level. But generally we don’t care if a party is going on outside; we in the Sisterhood have our own thing going on inside our room.

  There are French doors leading from the main room to the back room, and those French doors have windows. The doors don’t stop all of the noise, but they do give us a feeling of privacy. There are gauze curtains we can draw over the French doors if we want, but we usually just leave the windows clear.

  I like looking through the door’s windows and seeing the shine of the brass rack hanging from the ceiling over the mahogany counter. The rack holds two hundred water goblets and other glasses. The glasses gleam in the soft light that comes from the electric sconces on the walls and the Tiffany lamps that hang over the tables.

  The windows we see through to the outside also let the customers out there look in at us. I’ve wondered once in a while what the people at the counter think about the five of us sitting around the table in the back room with our heads bent over our knitting. The table and chairs are all antique oak pieces. The walls have delicate ivory wallpaper with embossed gold drawings on it. There’s a grandfather clock in one corner, and several green plants on a stand in another.

  Uncle Lou redecorated the room when we first started meeting in it all those years ago. Before that time, it had an old pool table and television in it. He thought it should be more like a living room for us.

  We’ve never even considered meeting anywhere else, although some of the Sisterhood have to drive for an hour or so to get here.

  We have a ritual with our meetings. We greet each other when we arrive, but we don’t talk much at first. We knit for a half hour or so—that quiets our nerves. It’s almost like meditation. Then we have a quote if anyone has brought one. And then we open everything up to talk.

  This order of things has taught us the value of silence.

  Tonight, though, we don’t start with silence.

  “Your hair,” Carly says with a smile when she looks at me. “I can see it.”

  Carly and Becca both come into the room with shopping bags. Rose is already seated at the table, and I see Lizabett coming in the outer door to the diner.

  “It’s pretty flat,” I say. To tell the truth, since I took off my cap an hour ago, I’m beginning to worry that my hair isn’t bouncing back like it used to. There’s no lift to it. Maybe my hair has been permanently flattened because of me wearing caps for so long. I have my knitting in my hand, and I put it down on the table so I can go give everyone a hug.

  “A good trim will take care of that,” Becca says as she hugs me.

  “Her head has a nice shape for short hair,” Rose adds from where she sits at the table. Rose doesn’t make it to all of our meetings, but we love it when she comes. She puts down her knitting, too, and stands to greet everyone.

  Becca hugs Rose, while Carly gives me a hug. “Your hair’s a good color.”

  Lizabett opens the French doors and steps into the room just then. There is a burst of noise from outside when she swings the door wide and relative silence when she closes it.

  “Look at her hair,” Becca says to Lizabett.

  I reach out to hug Lizabett, and she tells me how nice I look.

  Pretty soon everyone has hugged everyone else.

  Then Carly sits down and pulls out her knitting needles. The rest of us follow her lead.

  Over the years, the tools we use for knitting have changed. When we first started with our thick #19 needles, we were all so scared about our lives we could barely get the needles to do anything we wanted. In those days, I literally forced myself to think of nothing else except the needle in my hand and the stitch I needed to make.

  Before long, I realized what a gift it was to be able to concentrate on knitting. It was the only time in my life back then that I didn’t worry.

  Now we all use different kinds of needles and don’t even think about our hands. We use this time to focus on the group. Th
ere’s something satisfying about looping the yarn around just so. The rest of our lives might be messy, but it makes us all feel good to see our progress with our knitting needles. It’s easy to see when we drop a stitch, and we know that if we follow the patterns, our stitches will make what we want them to make.

  There are not a lot of decisions to be made when we’re knitting and, because of that, we all relax.

  We have different skeins of yarn on the table.

  I’m making a scarf from a heavy gray fisherman’s wool for Uncle Lou’s birthday next month. It’s a surprise. He thinks I’m making the scarf for my dad for Christmas. When Uncle Lou brings in the tea—which he hasn’t done yet tonight—he always says what a manly color the gray yarn is and how fine it will look around some gentleman’s neck at Christmas. Then he winks at me and says he’s noticed how well it would go with my dad’s eyes. I just smile at him mysteriously and say it’s a surprise.

  I’m not the only one who’s knitting something unusual.

  Becca, as you know, has that red mohair yarn, and she says it’s a sweater for herself. But it’s larger than she wears, especially in the shoulders, and I’ve wondered if it’s not for some guy she knows.

  But Becca hasn’t mentioned anyone, and she would tell the world if she was dating; not because she would be bragging, but simply because she believes in telling things the way they are. She wouldn’t even think of keeping a secret like that from us. Besides, mohair isn’t the yarn one would use for a man’s sweater, so I must be imagining things. Either that or Becca is unaware of what she’s doing. Now that’s a thought.

  Anyway, Rose is making an afghan for an elderly cousin of hers who lives on a farm in Upper Michigan. The afghan dips and sways and is being made out of an extra-weight brown and green yarn. Rose is using a tight knit so the afghan will be warm in those cold winter blizzards that people have in that area.

  Carly is knitting a cream-colored scarf with some kind of delicate yarn. The whole thing feels almost like velvet.

  Lizabett is—or has been—knitting herself a pink hat out of a lightweight yarn. I think it might be something to wear when she practices her ballet, but she hasn’t said what the hat is for yet.

  Something is wrong with Lizabett tonight. She has already dropped several stitches and she keeps looking through the windows in the French doors as though she’s expecting to see something out in the main part of The Pews.

  I’m not the only one who notices that Lizabett is not herself. I see some of the others glancing thoughtfully at her, as well. One thing I have learned about Lizabett, however, is that she is private—probably the most private one of us all. I think it comes from having all of those outgoing brothers around when she was growing up.

  “How’s the pattern coming?” Rose finally asks as Lizabett sets down her knitting needles in frustration. “We can adjust it if it’s not working.”

  “It’s not the pattern,” Lizabett says as she bites at her lip.

  “If you’re hungry, I could go fix you something.” I say, wondering if maybe Lizabett skipped dinner.

  We all hear an increase in the noise level out at the main counter, but Lizabett is the first one to look up to see what is happening.

  “I wonder if that’s the grill guy,” Becca says as she stands up to look out the windows into the main room.

  “Your grill guy?” Lizabett turns and looks at me with something like horror on her face.

  I guess I hadn’t quite realized how much I’d talked about that poor guy. “He’s not my grill guy. He’s just someone who worked the grill in the diner here the summer I got my diagnosis.”

  “But he’s here?” Lizabett squeaks out another question. “Now?”

  “I think so,” Becca says. “That must be him.”

  We always keep the lighting a little dim in The Pews, but we never go really dark with it. Becca keeps looking out that glass as if she can’t quite make out what she’s seeing. “Wait a minute. Those guys are in uniforms.”

  “Well, it’s not the grill guy then. But it’s no big deal,” I say. The Pews is located in Old Town Pasadena. The police station isn’t that far away, and the officers frequently come in to get something to eat after their shifts. “You’ve seen cops here before.”

  “Yeah, but not ones coming back here,” Becca whispers as she quickly moves to her chair.

  I don’t see how Becca can think the men walking toward the French doors haven’t already seen her.

  “They’re not supposed to—” Lizabett says as she bites at her lip again. “That is—I told them—”

  I take my eyes off of Becca and look at Lizabett. Lizabett wears her hair long, and when she hangs her head down, it’s hard to see her face.

  “You know these cops?” I ask Lizabett. If anyone else were acting so flustered, I would think one of the cops had written her a speeding ticket. But Lizabett would never speed.

  “They’re not cops,” Lizabett says. The color is still high on her face, but she does lift her head and look at us. “They’re firefighters. They’re my brothers. I thought since you only have a week left to meet your goal—”

  “What?” I am astonished. Lizabett is matchmaking for me. I would expect that from Becca and Carly, but not from Lizabett.

  “Way to go,” Becca says as she gives Lizabett the thumbs up signal. “We’ll get Marilee to her goal yet.”

  “I didn’t know the grill guy was coming back,” Lizabett whispers to me in soft apology as the French doors start to open. “I wouldn’t have asked my brothers if I thought your grill guy was coming back.”

  “He’s not my grill guy,” I say.

  “Oh,” Becca says quietly.

  The door fully opens, and I can understand why Becca is now speechless.

  There stand three strong, tall men. They fill the doorway. None of them are GQ handsome, but all of them look as if they could wrestle GQ handsome to the ground and not even break a sweat doing it. Lizabett always made her brothers sound like annoying teddy bears. These are no teddy bears.

  Where do I begin? For a second, I wonder if the warm glow around them is my imagination, but then I realize that the reason they have that golden glow surrounding them is because the light is reflecting off of the stuff one of the men has in his arms. It looks like golden-white straw.

  “I brought you your wings,” the man says to Lizabett as he holds out a swath of fabric. “Since when do they put these colored fiber-optic strands on wings? They reflect like crazy.”

  “It’s a night scene, and people need to see the swans,” Lizabett says as she stands up and walks toward the man with the fabric.

  “Well, they’ll see you all over Sierra Madre in these.”

  Lizabett’s ballet performance is being held in a small community theatre in Sierra Madre. There hasn’t been a group using that theatre for several years now, so I am glad Lizabett’s dance class can use it. I bought a ticket for the production when they first went on sale.

  The man drops the fabric into Lizabett’s arms. “The guy who delivered it to Mom’s place asked her to tell you to call your ballet teacher ASAP.”

  The two men who weren’t talking to Lizabett were looking at the rest of us.

  “Call her about what?” Lizabett asks. “I already got the news about our dress rehearsal.”

  The man shrugs. “If you were still living with Mom, you would have been there when he delivered the message and could have asked him. That’s where you should be living anyway. That way Mom can look after you.”

  “I’m fine,” Lizabett says. “I can look out for myself.”

  Lizabett moved out of her family’s home last year about this time even though she needs to work a part-time job to do it since she’s going to college full-time. I could understand why her brother would worry about her, but I also understand Lizabett’s need to have some independence. All of the Sisterhood agrees on this. Just because we’ve been sick it doesn’t mean we want to live our lives wrapped in cotton balls. I plan t
o move out of my mom’s house this fall, when I will have saved up enough money for a down payment on a small condo. I’m glad Lizabett had the courage to move into her own place, as well.

  I notice that Lizabett’s wings lost some of their fiber-optic strands, and they are caught on her brother’s dark blue uniform. Her brother’s not paying any attention to his uniform, though. He’s looking around the room at everyone in it.

  It takes a minute to see the family resemblance between Lizabett and her brothers. The brothers all have dark hair, but the one who carried in the wings has clear blue eyes like Lizabett. His, of course, have dark eyelashes around them, and Lizabett has light brown ones.

  “Oh, let me introduce everyone,” Lizabett says. She is a little flushed now that everyone’s eyes are on her.

  “This is Gregory—Gregory MacDonald.” Lizabett points to the man closest to the door. He looks like the youngest of the brothers.

  Gregory nods.

  “And this is Aaron MacDonald,” Lizabett says as she nods toward the other man, who is also close to the door.

  Aaron smiles.

  “And this is Quinn.” Lizabett gestures toward the man who had given her the costume. “Quinn MacDonald, my oldest brother.”

  Quinn smiles and gives a slight nod. “Also known in Lizabett’s circles as The Old Mother Hen.”

  Lizabett blushes. “Well, you do hover.”

  Quinn grins. “I do that sometimes.”

  “Which one is the one you were telling us about?” Aaron finally says to Lizabett.

  I feel my heart stop. How mortifying is this—Lizabett must have told her brothers I have a dating goal. This will teach me to procrastinate.

  “Marilee is the one with the collection of baseball caps,” Lizabett says in a hurry. “I haven’t asked her yet if you can borrow them, but—”

  Ah, so she didn’t tell them about the goal. Thank you, Lizabett.

  Aaron smiles at me and says, “We’ve got a crisis at our station. The guys are working with underprivileged kids in Altadena—setting up a kid’s baseball team. I was hoping we could borrow your caps for our team tryouts this Saturday. Just to put on a display table with maybe a little something about the teams. It’s to inspire the kids to think about what sports can do for their lives.”