The Sisterhood of the Dropped Stitches

by Janet Tronstad

That just happened a minute ago, so I now have a few minutes to write in this journal. Usually I just note things here and there, but my conversation with Lupe has struck a few chords with me. If I’m not careful, I’ll write a whole editorial right here and now about how much daughters need to have their fathers around.

  If you could have seen the longing on Lupe’s face, I wouldn’t even need to write a word for you to agree with me. She likes the cap I gave to her, but, even that does not make her eyes sparkle with complete joy. Talking about her dad has made her lonely.

  Thinking about my dad has made me feel lonely, too. Especially because I can look out over the baseball field here and see Lizabett with her smiling confidence in my father and Quinn, who really believes my father had car trouble this morning. It’s as if they know a man who doesn’t exist.

  The way I have coped with my father during all the years since I got cancer is that I expect nothing from him. Zero. Nada. If I expect nothing, I am never disappointed. And, then, if he does come by the diner to see me, I can be pleased because it is something instead of nothing.

  If he gives me a half hug instead of a full hug, I can be happy.

  I’m not sure I can continue like this, though.

  Something about writing this journal is making me less content with the way I used to handle things. Maybe when I see it all written out in black and white, I see how very small our contact has been all along. Even prisoners are allowed some visits with their families. My dad could be in prison like Lupe’s and spend more time with me than he does.

  There’s not much more to say to that, so I look up just in time to see Lizabett hit the ball. Wham—right over to the right field. And she’s off and running to first base. I can hear Quinn cheering louder than anyone else. The game should be over in a few minutes, and then Quinn is planning to take me out for coffee.

  I have already decided that I am not going to count coffee with Quinn or the walk in the dark to look for Carly’s cat last night as dates toward my goal. It feels a little pressured and contrived to go out on dates just to meet a goal, and I want this thing with Quinn to be its own thing. If I’m going to date a guy just to meet a goal, I’d rather it be some stranger who isn’t my friend.

  Becca isn’t going to understand this, of course. Maybe if I can find a place for Lizabett’s ballet troupe to give their performance, Becca will forgive me. At least we will meet that goal. And there’s nothing that says I can’t get three dates yet. After all, I haven’t really turned on my charm. Who knows what might happen?

  Speaking of romance, here comes Carly now. She and Randy just got to the park, and Carly’s walking toward me looking as if she’s lost her last friend. I see Randy walk over to the bench where Quinn’s team is sitting.

  Watching Carly walk toward me reminds me that I should tell you again what a beautiful day it is here. It is February and so the air is clear—we have enough Santa Ana winds to blow the smog away. The grass here in the park is that deep mature green that says the park is well-tended year-around. I think the grass was mowed this morning, as it still has that cut-grass smell.

  “How’s it going?” I ask Carly.

  She plops herself down on the bench next to me. “Sorry we missed most of the game.”

  “No problem. The blue team is ahead four to three.”

  I notice Carly hasn’t answered my question about how things are going. “Did your cat come down from the trees?”

  “Almost,” Carly says. “Randy thinks we need to get one of those little boxes and put a can of tuna in it tonight—you know the boxes where a door slams down while the cat is inside and eating?”

  “That might work.”

  “I couldn’t do that to my cat.” Carly turns to me with horror on her face. “No one should be boxed in.”

  “But it would be for Marie’s own good. So that she can go back inside where she’ll be warm and safe.”

  “I don’t think Marie wants to go inside.” Carly says. She sounds forlorn. “Some things just aren’t meant to be.”

  “Well, your cat can’t stay outside forever. What does Randy think?”

  I see tears start to form in Carly’s eyes. She blinks them back quickly. “What does Randy know?”

  I don’t like the look on Carly’s face. She is clearly upset about something. “Did Randy say something to you that upset you?”

  Carly smiles. Well, it’s not a real smile, but it shows all her teeth, and I know she means it to be a smile.

  “Because if Randy did say something,” I continue, “we don’t have to hang around with him, you know—none of us do.”

  It had never occurred to me in all of the years since I met Randy that he might be a mean person. Wouldn’t that be something if I spent all that time back then whining about a missed date with an unpleasant guy?

  “He’s not mean,” Carly says. “He’s actually a very nice guy.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I say.

  My attention is taken away from Carly when I hear another cheer. Someone on the blue team hit the ball way out into right field. I stand up to shout and clap like everyone else is doing before I see that the player who hit the ball like that is Becca. “Go, Becca, go!”

  As I stand up, the journal falls to the ground in front of our bench. Carly bends over to pick it up. “Mind if I write a little?”

  “Be my guest,” I say, and decide Carly might like some time alone while she writes. “I’ll go give Becca a hug.”

  Hi, this is Carly. I have to talk to someone, and I can’t tell anyone in the Sisterhood about this so I’m going to tell you. Once I write this down, I’m going to double-fold the pages back and clip them together somehow. Warning—if anyone in the Sisterhood has managed to read this far, you need to stop right now! No peeking.

  And the rest of you who are reading this have to promise not to tell anyone else what I’m going to tell you now.

  I don’t know what to do. We don’t have any rules in the Sisterhood about dating, but we should. No Sister should be allowed to date another Sister’s boyfriend—or even potential boyfriend. It’s just not right. Besides, I wouldn’t hurt one of the Sisters for all of the dates in the world, and two women going after the same man is bound to hurt somebody big-time.

  My problem is that Randy—Marilee’s grill guy—asked me out. And not on a date like getting together for a cup of coffee or even a movie. Those kinds of dates might not really be dates at all. What Randy invited me to do was to have dinner with him at The Dining Room in The Ritz-Carlton Hotel here in Pasadena. That’s one of the most expensive restaurants in all of Pasadena. There’s no mistaking that for anything but a date.

  That place is my aunt’s kind of place—elegant and dripping in crystal. It has entrées like sautéed monkfish and poached lobster with desserts like toasted meringue and lavender cream. I know because my aunt has bragged about eating there. It is a hundred dollars to eat there—per person. Gourmet magazine voted it one of the World’s Best Hotel Dining Rooms.

  My aunt would die if I went there on a date.

  Of course, she can never even know it was an option. I’m not going to tell anyone about that invitation. I wish Randy had never asked me. I was having a good time with him, waiting for my cat to come down out of the tree. And then he had to spoil it all by asking me out.

  You know I can’t date Randy. He’s Marilee’s grill guy. She saw him first. She might even love him now that she’s had a chance to get to know him again. I’ve noticed she has a dreamy look about her sometimes when she’s writing in this journal and, when I see her like that, I wonder if she’s writing about how nice the grill guy is even after all of these years.

  Marilee deserves the grill guy. She’s smart. And funny. And brave. I’m not going to stand in the way of her happiness. Who am I kidding? A guy like Randy isn’t for me anyway. I’ll tell you why sometime, but for now I’ll just say there are big reasons. So I told Randy he had to ask Marilee out and not me.

  Ah, well. I hope my cat
climbs down out of those trees soon. I have a feeling I’m going to need something to hug before this is all over. Randy hasn’t talked to me since I suggested he ask Marilee out.

  Sometimes life just doesn’t work out the way anyone thinks it should.

  I’m going to say goodbye now and fold these pages over so many times there will be no chance they’ll ever be opened by mistake. I wonder if I can find a stapler somewhere.

  I look out to the park, but all I see are dozens of kids milling around in their blue and red T-shirts. The ball game must be over. I wonder what the score is. I see Randy over there carrying water bottles with Quinn.

  Randy doesn’t look brokenhearted the way you would think a guy would look if a woman he was really interested in said she wouldn’t go out with him. Not that I want him to break down in despair or anything, but it does seem a little cold to look quite so cheerful, don’t you think? I’m not sure how I feel about that.

  This is Marilee again. I’m glad to see Carly wrote her heart out again even if it is highly secretive—I had to cross my heart and promise not to look at any of the pages no matter what. I don’t know what the secrecy is for—I know she’s still worried about her cat. I hope we find that beast before too much more time goes by. As I’ve said earlier, Carly tends to be a worrier, and I don’t like to see all this tension on her face.

  At least she went over to give Becca a congratulatory hug so she’s not still sitting on the bench here bemoaning the fact that her cat won’t come home.

  I, of course, plan to sit here and bemoan entirely different things. My problem is I don’t know what to do with myself now. Quinn had said he wanted to take me out for a cup of coffee after the game, but I’m not sure if he means to invite everyone else, too, so I don’t want to go running over to Quinn looking as though I’m expecting something special. Because I’m not.

  The number of people at the table can make a big difference in whether this is a date or not and I want to be cool about it all until I see if Quinn is collecting other people for coffee, as well. Right now, he’s talking to Becca, so you never know.

  You may know what to do in this situation and think I’m being silly, but I have been out of the dating game for years and I am just beginning to realize how complicated this whole dating thing is. There is something to be said for arranged marriages, although, believe me, I’m not saying we should go there. It’s just that dating is so hazy it’s sometimes hard to know if one is out on a date or if one is just passing the time with a guy who thinks you’re a buddy.

  The only clue as to whether something is a date or not, that I have noticed, is that both people turn their cell phones off when they are on a real date. If they are just friends going out, each of them will take calls from everyone else.

  I see Quinn walking toward me now. Of course, I can’t see whether or not his cell phone is on. And, unless someone calls him, I will never know whether it is on or off.

  Anyway, I have to go. I’ll write more after the coffee. Wish me luck.

  Oh. Lizabett has joined Quinn as he’s walking toward me. I love Lizabett like a sister—well, she is my sister in a way. But I hope I can have some time alone with Quinn just to see if this having coffee together even feels like a date. I wouldn’t hurt Lizabett’s feelings for the world, but I wonder if she’d like to write some in the journal while Quinn and I have coffee. She seems to like doing that. That doesn’t sound as if I’m putting her off, does it? I hope not.

  Hi, this is Lizabett. It seems that everybody has been folding back their pages in this journal for a while now. Pretty soon you will be the only one able to read it. It’s for sure no one in the Sisterhood will be able to read the whole thing. Of course, I can’t complain because I’m going to fold my pages back, too.

  I’m sitting at a table in this coffee shop in Altadena called the Coffee Gallery. They call it a gallery because they have paintings on the walls that are for sale and they serve Italian sodas as well as tea and coffee. I’m sitting at a table at one end of the coffee place and Quinn and Marilee are sitting at the other end. There are lots of plants around and the tables are old wood ones. I told Quinn and Marilee I wanted some space to think and write in the journal. They bought it, so I’m back here trying to look literary.

  You already know I am excited that the two of them seem to be hitting it off. I can hear them laughing now. Quinn needs to laugh more.

  I should apologize about what I wrote about Quinn before—about him hovering over me and condemning that theater in Sierra Madre just so I wouldn’t perform and worry him. He wasn’t the one who closed the place—you might know that by now. Marilee’s father is going to ask his general manager if we can put the production on in their car showroom.

  My life is actually going pretty well since it looks as if the ballet production will go on. I’m going to try to look a little tormented, though, just in case Marilee glances back here and wonders why I’m not writing anything down in the journal. When everything is good, there’s not much to say. Oh, Quinn is laughing again—a belly laugh this time.

  I would love to have Marilee as a sister-in-law. I’m going to keep my cool and not presume too much on what will happen, but they do seem to be getting along quite well. I wish you could see them. Ah, there’s another laugh.

  Chapter Ten

  Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.

  —Helen Keller

  We knew we were recovering from our cancers when we started to long for the sun and the sand. Becca brought in a boom box and a CD with the sounds of the ocean when she brought in this quote. Too much sunshine might cause cancer, but to us, that night, sunshine meant life. We all talked about our favorite places to go to the beach around here. Becca liked the Santa Monica pier. Carly talked about Dana Point. Lizabett voted for Malibu. I liked them all.

  The next week Rose brought us each a large conch shell—the ones that make a sound like the ocean when you put them to your ear. We spent most of the meeting just listening to those sounds and wondering if we’d ever feel the beach sun on our skin in the same way again.

  I hadn’t thought about those shells for a long time. What made them so special for me was that I had been thinking about death and the shells seemed so alive. You might think that someone with cancer would automatically think about death, but being afraid of death and thinking about it are not the same things.

  No part of me wanted to die—I’d seen enough to know dying is a messy business—but I couldn’t help but wonder what being dead would be like. I wondered if there really could be a heaven. I didn’t want to think about whether there could also be a hell so I didn’t even ask myself that question.

  But I did wonder about heaven. Would everything be all white—maybe we’d be dropped in a desert with nothing but white sand for as far as we could see and even the sky would be bleached white? Wouldn’t there at least be color in heaven? And grass and trees? And rain?

  And what would we be when we were in heaven? Would we be bodies or would we be something all vague and wispy, like the ghosts I’d seen waltzing in the ballroom at the Haunted House in Disneyland? Would we be able to eat? Would we find anything to laugh about? I couldn’t imagine living forever with no good jokes or trees or clouds in the sky.

  I had been tempted to go to church with Mom just to see if anyone talked about heaven. I must admit that, as I got dressed to go to church on Sunday with Quinn, I was hoping someone would talk about heaven even though the urgency of knowing about it had lessened since it appeared I’d live a good, long life before I needed to worry about it all.

  I drove to The Pews around ten o’clock so I would have time to do a few things there before Quinn picked me up to go to church.

  That’s where I am now. You should see me. I have a black swirly skirt on and one of those tops with the filmy material that bunches along the center seam—you probably need to see this to know what I mean, but, trust me, it looks good, especially in the raspberry sorbet color I hav
e. I squirted mousse on my hair and used my curling iron so my hair looks as cute as it gets. I have makeup and some cool shoes on.

  I already figure my dad won’t be joining us for church despite what he said, but I’m surprised when Uncle Lou says my father is sick.

  “Well, at least he called,” I say. I notice a guilty look on Uncle Lou’s face. “He did call, didn’t he?”

  “Well, he was going to call,” Uncle Lou says. “I just beat him to it.”

  I nod. I wonder how Uncle Lou can keep making excuses for him. “I hope he at least has called his general manager to ask about using the main display floor for the ballet performance.”

  Uncle Lou shrugs. “I can put in a call to my VFW hall.” That’s the Veterans of Foreign Wars—Uncle Lou fought in Vietnam. “That floor there might be big enough.”

  “That place reeks of cigarette smoke—these are little girls in pink leotards. I don’t think—”

  Uncle Lou nods slowly. “I guess you’re right.”

  If grass were smooth, I would suggest they just have an outdoor production at the park where we were yesterday. But I doubt anyone can pirouette on grass. Besides, it might be cold by then. February weather around here ranges from fairly warm to fairly chilly. We’re in a warm spell now, but that won’t necessarily last.

  “We’re going to need to tell Lizabett pretty soon if my dad doesn’t arrange anything,” I say. I’m not looking forward to that conversation.

  Uncle Lou sighs. “Your dad wants to help.”

  I don’t even answer that. If he really wanted to, he would. Isn’t it that simple?

  The door opens and Quinn comes in, so Uncle Lou and I stop talking about my dad.

  Wow. I thought Quinn looked good in his fireman’s uniform, but he looks even better in his church clothes. He’s wearing tan Dockers and a white shirt that’s open at the neck. The reason it all looks so good is that you can really tell Quinn has a tan. I know, I know, tans shouldn’t be attractive because we shouldn’t encourage people to spend that much time in the sun, but tell that to my eyeballs.