The Knitting Circle

by Ann Hood

  She let her yarn drop gently into her lap and looked out the window.

  Mary touched Lulu’s arm lightly. “Did something happen to him?” she asked.

  Lulu shook her head. “Something happened to me,” she said.

  Mary waited.

  “Did I tell you about the dogs?” Lulu asked suddenly. She picked up her needles and began again. “He had two. A chocolate Lab and a bichon. Mutt and Jeff. He had rescued them both from the pound. Mutt, the Lab, had scars all over his body. Like he’d been crucified. And Jeff had bald spots everywhere. His hair simply didn’t grow in places. Ugly, scruffy, marvelous dogs. Both of them.

  “I used to get up early and walk them over to Washington Square Park, to the dog run there. You know how the city is really early in the morning? Kind of empty. And so beautiful. The sun just coming up shines on the buildings in a different way. It positively illuminates them. On the way back, I’d pick up a Times and I’d have the paper in my hand, and I’d be going down Bond Street, and the sun would hit our building just so, like a blessing. And I would think that I was the luckiest person in the world. The happiest, luckiest person in the world.

  “I’d step over all the Chinese take-out menus inside our dingy foyer and get in the creaky freight elevator that always smelled like Indian food, and step out on the third floor and pull the heavy elevator door open and then I would stop. I could smell the espresso that Smitty was making. I could smell us, our smells. They smelled so beautiful.

  “This one morning I decided to walk east instead of west. Why did I do that? I have gone over and over that in my mind and I still don’t know. Was I bored with my little routine? Did I need something over in the East Village? I just stepped out the front door with both dogs on their leashes, and instead of turning left, I turned right. I remember thinking that I would go over to Tompkins Square Park for a change. Near my old apartment.

  “But this is important for you to understand. I was completely happy with my life. I liked filling out forms that asked if I was married, and checking off Yes and writing my husband’s name down as next of kin. I wore the fattest gold wedding band you’ve ever seen, and I brandished it whenever I could.

  “And by this time I rented a teeny studio on Elizabeth Street and I was making my own glass there.”

  Lulu paused in her story. “Do you know about Venetian glass?” she asked, but before Mary could answer, Lulu continued. “People think of it as the elegant shapes from the sixteenth century, but typically it’s made in more unusual shapes that combine a lot of different styles.” She pointed to a lamp beside the table. “Like this. See spouts and handles? And these blobs? They’re called prunts.” Gently, she ran her fingers over the base of the lamp. “They’re just decorative, but I always use them.”

  The room grew quiet until Lulu spoke again. “Smitty made documentary films. And he got a grant to make a film about Virgin sightings around the city. Like in Queens in this phone booth a weird stain appeared on the glass and people thought it looked like the Virgin Mary and they would line up to pray to this phone booth.

  “We would go together on the subway to all of these places. This woman in Washington Heights made tortillas and everyone saw the Virgin’s face in them. Things like that. He’d talk to people and film them holding their children. Sick children and deformed children. They would rub them against the phone booth or press the tortillas to their cheeks.

  “This was what our life was like. Crazy and wonderful. Eight years together and we still sat up all night talking to each other. Smitty wanted a baby. He was starting to talk me into it. He created this next life, you know. Smitty, Lulu, Baby. He liked common names. Jane, he’d say. But I would spin fanciful names. Iris, goddess of the rainbow. Indigo? I’d say.

  “When I was alone in the loft I would try to imagine it. A baby crawling across the floor. A baby in our bed. At first I couldn’t see it, but slowly it began to make sense. We’d been married eight years. We should have a baby. And it would be the most special baby ever born.

  “That morning when I left the apartment and for no reason turned right instead of left, I had been off the pill for two months. Maybe that’s what I was thinking. In my memory I wasn’t thinking anything at all. I simply stepped outside and turned right.

  “It was dark still. February. Cold. We’d had a big snowstorm a few days earlier and you know how snow gets in the city after a few days. Dirty. Black. Chunked with ice. I walked slowly east. I remember wishing I had worn a hat. It was so cold.

  “I walked up Avenue A. No one was out. Too cold. Too dark still. After a few blocks a drunk walked right into me. He bowed, took off this funny stocking hat that he had on, and apologized. Bowing all the way down the block. God, I thought, I love this city.

  “There were people in the park. I remember that. A small group, maybe four or five, huddled together. To keep warm, I guessed. I didn’t pay them any mind and they didn’t seem to notice me at all. I sat on a bench and let the dogs off their leashes to run. I wished I’d brought something to read. I remember looking across the street at the bodega on the corner and thinking about getting a newspaper. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that group. They were kids. Kids without hats, like me. They had hoods pulled up over their heads. I remember that. But this was all in an instant. I stood to go buy a paper, the group seemed to split up. The dogs were chasing a plastic bag caught in the wind.

  “That’s it. That’s the last second of my life.”

  Lulu looked directly at Mary.

  For the first time, Mary noticed the scars on Lulu’s face. Long and thin, they snaked down her jaw to her neck. More were partially hidden by her spiky bangs. Mary’s hand impulsively shot to her mouth.

  “They raped me right there and left me for dead. Everyone told me it’s a good thing I don’t remember any of it,” Lulu said.

  “You know what’s strange? The one boy, the ringleader, he took Jeff, the little bichon. He took him home. When they arrested him, there was Jeff, in a little dog bed with toys and rawhide bones.”

  The Tompkins Square Dog Walker, Mary thought. The story had been all over the news, even in San Francisco. First, the discovery of the body. Then the search for identification. Then the reports on her condition, every day for months. No one—not doctors, not her husband, no one—expected her to live. Then one day, the announcement that she was going to make it. Months passed and the story grew smaller. Tompkins Square Dog Walker released to rehab center.

  Then the story made headlines again, the arrests of those boys, the grim details of the attack. At their arraignment, the boys had looked smug. They had been out all night, they said. They were bored.

  “It’s like it happened to someone I don’t know,” Lulu said. “I had twenty-seven operations. To repair my jaw. To fix my skull. My nose. Dental surgery. Plastic surgery.”

  Now emotion ravaged her face. Her eyes were shiny with tears; her cheeks and eyebrows grew furrowed; and a small muscle under her left eye twitched rhythmically.

  “In the hospital, I used to imagine that when I walked back into my life, it would still fit. I would close my eyes and picture myself in our apartment, the way it used to be. I could almost feel Smitty’s leg draped over mine, the softness of our sheets and the smell of the laundry detergent our cleaner used. Or the spitting sound of that espresso maker. Or the way the light came in at different times of day, how it spread itself on the table first, so that when we sat there and ate breakfast we were always warm.

  “But the loft was gone. We had to sell it to pay for the surgeries. Even that stupid oversized espresso maker was gone. Smitty rented a studio apartment in Chelsea. He bought real furniture—a chair with a sofa. This coffee table.” She nudged it gently with her foot. “And he built a loft bed with a desk underneath it, all very orderly and neat. He had this little round table, the kind you see in an ice cream parlor.

  “That’s where he took me. We drove in a friend’s borrowed station wagon from the rehab place in New Jersey t
o this strange apartment. The building had a little foyer that smelled like disinfectant, and an elevator that opened and shut on its own. I still had trouble walking then. I was using a walker, and so I had time to take it all in. The mailbox with the name Smith on it. The speckled floor. Then the elevator took us up to the fourth floor, and when we stepped out, Smitty scooped me up in his arms, wrestled some keys out of his pocket, opened this door with the number 4F on it, and said, ‘Welcome home, Lulu.’

  “Home to a place I’d never seen, with nothing of ours in it. I know how heartbroken he was when he sold our things, when Cat Stevens died, when he left the neighborhood we had both loved so much for the one that felt, as he said, neutral. He was so tender, my husband. He helped bathe me. He clipped my toenails and dyed my hair. At night he held me while I slept. Without drugs there would be no sleep. Because of the pain. Because of my fear that I would remember something if I fell asleep. So I took a handful of pills, washed them down with vodka, and just before I fell asleep, I would hear the sound of a plastic bag caught in the wind.”

  “I remember it,” Mary said. “From the papers. On the news.”

  Lulu nodded. “I was a very important story. My survival. Inspiring.” She shuddered.

  “I couldn’t stay,” Lulu said. “You can understand that, can’t you? Lulu Smith was killed in Tompkins Square Park that morning.”

  Mary nodded.

  “An old friend from that first glassblowing class was teaching at RISD. She got me an adjunct thing. Introduction to Glass. I became this person.” Lulu gestured to herself, her hands taking in her whole scarred self. “Lulu Peterson. I teach a class every semester. I make my own glass. I knit. That’s what I am. I’m afraid of things. The dark. The sound of wind. Footsteps in a hallway. Leaves rustling in trees. Voices I can’t identify. Being out there alone.”

  Mary understood. After Stella died, the grocery store, the gas station, even her own backyard held danger.

  “I don’t go out to eat or anything unless Scarlet takes me,” Lulu was saying. “And when we get back she unlocks my door and steps inside and turns on the lights and walks around checking the apartment. Sometimes she spends the night because I cannot be convinced that no one is waiting to hurt me.”

  “I never let my daughter eat a hamburger,” Mary said. “I was so worried about E. coli. I remembered all the stories, from fast-food restaurants, and outdoor barbecues. Children dying. Then this bacteria enters her body and kills her.”

  “Oh, Mary,” Lulu said, her voice cracking. “All I can do is this for you.” She inched closer to Mary and examined the hat.

  “Look at what you’ve made.”

  Mary nodded, the tears hot in her eyes.

  “I’ll teach you patterns too,” Lulu said, her own eyes wet with tears. “Snowflakes. Horses. Ducks. You have to concentrate so hard when you do them that you have no room for anything else.”

  “Snowflakes,” Mary said. “That would be good.”

  “When I first got here, I asked my friend at RISD where I could get yarn. She told me to call Big Alice. I told her my story. I told her everything. Next thing I know, I’ve joined the knitting circle. Ellen was there then. Alice. Roger. You know Roger? A few people who’ve moved away. Or moved on. When the knitting circle ended, Alice drove me all the way back home. One of those nights, I was getting out of her truck with this big bag of yarn when I met Scarlet. She lived in the building too, and eventually I got her to join the circle too.”

  Lulu paused.

  “You know rosary beads?” she said. “Knitting is like that. One stitch is like a prayer, just like each bead is a prayer. It’s perfect for contemplation.”

  “Or escape,” Mary said.

  Lulu smiled sadly. “We can’t escape, can we? But we can knit.”

  6

  THE KNITTING CIRCLE

  MARY USED TO drop Stella off at school and then drive to the Coffee Exchange. She always saw someone there she knew. Another mother from Stella’s school. Stella’s ballet teacher. One of their babysitters. Soon she would be table-hopping, getting coffee refills, her newspaper unread. Sometimes she would see a group of women, all with children who played with or took a class with or went to school with Stella. Then they would sit for too long and talk about their amazing children.

  Since Stella died, Mary avoided the Coffee Exchange, where all those women still sat—that’s how she imagined it, all of them right where she’d left them the morning before Stella got sick.

  But this morning, Mary awoke and decided that she would go for coffee. Not to the Coffee Exchange; she would never go back there. But across town to Rouge, where the café au lait tasted the way it did in France and the croissants were rich with butter. Where, Mary thought, she might see Scarlet.

  It was a cold day. The pewter sky held the promise of snow. But inside Rouge was warm, from the ovens and the heat that hissed from old radiators and from all the people crowded at the small tables.

  “Aren’t you Mary?”

  Mary twisted her neck to see who was talking. Squeezed into the table right behind her sat a vaguely familiar woman. Her long dirty blonde hair was pushed off her face by a scrap of faded floral fabric. A half-eaten croissant on the white plate before her, ignored for the complicated handiwork the woman held in her hands.

  “I’m in the knitting circle,” the woman said in a soft southern accent. “Ellen.”

  “Size one needles, right?” Mary said, remembering her now.

  “Socks!” Ellen said, brightening. “I like them because you have to keep changing what you’re doing. Stockinette, then several inches of garter, then it’s time to turn the heel, which is absolutely crazy to do, and then more garter until you have to do the toe and the Kitchener stitch. Plus people love them. They’re so warm and beautiful.” She blushed, and shrugged.

  “I don’t think socks are for me,” Mary said.

  “I spend so much time waiting that they keep me busy, you know?” Ellen said, still red-cheeked.

  “What do you do?” Mary asked.

  “I teach music. Part-time, at the music school. I can’t do a full-time position.” She glanced away again. Then looked up and smiled, gathering her things as she rose to leave. “See how neatly they fold up,” she said. She collapsed the four thin needles and stuck them and her yarn into a Ziploc bag.

  “Off to teach now?” Mary asked.

  Ellen shook her head. “I’m cheating. I’ve had a dreadful few days and I’m sneaking off to the movies.”

  Mary surprised herself by blurting, “Maybe we could go together sometime.”

  Ellen looked surprised. “My schedule is tight,” she said awkwardly. “But I’ll see you Wednesday night, right?”

  “Of course,” Mary said. “I’m sorry.”

  But Ellen was already pushing her way through the crowded café, her head bent, her bag held close to her chest.

  Mary watched her as she walked across the parking lot to her car. From where she stood, it looked as if Ellen was crying. It must have been the glare from the bright winter sunlight on the tall window.

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT BROUGHT an icy snow and high winds. Dylan lit a fire in the living room fireplace and put the McGarrigle Sisters on the CD player.

  “Remember that trip to Nova Scotia?” he said, pouring himself a glass of merlot and settling onto the sofa.

  “That church hall,” Dylan was saying, “and the strawberry shortcake? The fiddle music?”

  “I got pregnant that night,” Mary said.

  That trip, driving together all the way to Nova Scotia and beyond, to Prince Edward Island and the small red house on top of a red cliff overlooking a rocky beach. Two weeks of sun and vistas of the Atlantic Ocean. It had seemed impossible that England lay on the other side. That anything did. For Mary and Dylan those two weeks were spent driving, buying homemade pies on the roadside and eating them with their fingers; sex in the morning, sleeping late, groggy sweet breakfasts; digging for clams in the afternoon; evening meals
of briny chowders cooked in big pots; then evening stargazing or dancing to fiddle music in the church basements; then more sex, sunburned and beery, the falling together.

  “Don’t go with the knitting ladies,” Dylan said. “Stay here with me.”

  Six o’clock and already dark outside. The wind rattled the old windows; the icy snow pinged against the glass. Scarlet had the flu and was staying home in bed. Lulu wouldn’t go without Scarlet. But Mary needed yarn. She had used all she’d bought knitting scarves and hats. She needed the rhythm of the needles catching stitches. Needed the sound of one needle clicking against the other. Needed the way it felt like prayer, how her mind could grow calm as she counted: k1, p1.

  “I’ll be back early,” she said. “The weather’s so awful.”

  She saw the disappointment in Dylan’s face, but still she put on her down coat and one of the scarves she’d made and the hat that matched it, and then she kissed her husband lightly on the lips.

  “Don’t go to sleep,” she said softly. “Wait up for me.”

  She said it like a promise. Dylan pulled her close and kissed her for real. A surge of passion shot through Mary and she realized that Dylan did not kiss her very much anymore. Dylan had already turned away from her. He had opened a book, one of the histories he had taken to reading these past months, stories of warriors and victors.

  As she walked outside from the warm house, the sidewalk was slippery and for a moment Mary considered turning around. But then she thought of all the days ahead, the lonely hours stretching before her in that house. She should be making sugar cookies, letting Stella cut them into stars and bells and sprinkling red and green sugar on top. She should be hiding presents in her office closet, bags of paints and bottles of sparkly nail polish and colorful hair ornaments and boxes of beads and all the things that would make Stella happy on Christmas morning.