The Knitting Circle

by Ann Hood

  “I hope this isn’t what your life is, Mary,” her mother said.

  “Not doing anything at all day after day. Not staying connected to the world or people or—”

  “My daughter died, Mom, and I don’t give a shit about what day it is.”

  “I know,” her mother said.

  “You don’t know, okay? So stop trying to help me. Please. Stop.”

  “Listen, honey, I could come up there for Christmas,” her mother said.

  The chef was putting the salsa on lamb chops of all things.

  “Don’t do that,” Mary said. “I don’t have the…” The what? she wondered. Stamina? Energy? Patience? “…the holiday spirit,” she said finally.

  “On the Weather Channel the whole Northeast is one big blue cold front coming in from somewhere freezing. You and Dylan can go somewhere warm and get away from all the cold weather and the commercialism of the holiday. My friend down here, Kay? You’ve heard me speak of her?”

  “I’ve got to go,” Mary interrupted. “I’m making this really complicated dinner. Lamb chops with a peach and ancho chile salsa. You have no idea.”

  Her mother was quiet for so long that Mary thought perhaps her mother had hung up on her. But then she said, “I know, Mary-la. I know.”

  When she was very young, her mother would whisper this name to her. Mary-la, her mother had said, her first small offering of comfort since Stella had died.

  MARY WOKE TO a chef telling a woman why her coq au vin never turned out right. He was going to help her. “This,” he told her, “is Food 911.” If only there was Grief 911, Mary thought. A number to call where a handsome energetic man would come to your house and explain everything you’d been doing wrong. Then he would fix your grief, your broken heart.

  Wait. Someone had come. Mary squinted her swollen eyes to find Dylan standing at her side, his overcoat covered with a light dusting of snow.

  “Uh-oh,” Mary said.

  “You don’t get up at all?” he said, his face crumpled with worry.

  She pointed to the TV. “That man makes house calls,” she said. “He fixes cooking disasters.”

  Gently, Dylan took the remote from her and clicked off the television.

  “Eddie called me at the office.”

  Mary licked her lips, shrugged.

  Dylan reached into his pocket and pulled out two airline tickets.

  “Oh, dear,” Mary said. “Did my mother call you too?”

  “No, I thought of this all on my own.” Dylan sat beside her on the bed. “I asked myself where was a place that made you happy and right away I thought: San Francisco. When I met you, you told me you could never live anywhere else.”

  “And here I am,” Mary said. “Happy as a clam.”

  “I need to feel happy again,” Dylan said. “I can’t go on feeling like this.”

  Mary shrugged, wanting to give him that happiness, but unable to do it.

  “We leave on Friday. Stay through New Year’s.”

  Mary allowed this fullness in her chest to rise. “Thank you,” she said.

  “When we come back, this fucking year will be over,” Dylan said.

  Mary closed her eyes, let him cradle her in his arms, and tried to see it: the view from that hill. Blue sky. Sparkling bay.

  BEFORE THEY LEFT, Dylan talked Mary into going with him to a grief group. Dylan had gone alone a few times, and come home red-eyed and exhausted, full of sad stories of loss. Children who fell out of windows, died without explanation, grew into adulthood only to die of heart attacks or cancer or an accident at work.

  “How is this supposed to make me feel better?” she’d said.

  But now, the promise of escape in a few days, of a New Year ahead, and her husband’s growing frustration with her, made Mary agree to go.

  Oddly, the group met in the very hospital where Stella had died. Driving into the parking lot, Mary did not see the glow of the streetlights or the security guard watching the cars. Instead, she saw herself, sitting beside her daughter, telling her, foolishly, that she would be all right.

  “I can’t go in there,” Mary told Dylan. “Who has a grief group in a hospital?”

  “Once you get inside it’ll be fine,” he said.

  Wasn’t that what she had believed just eight months ago when she lifted Stella into her arms and walked through those automatic doors for help? Then, thirty-six hours later, she’d walked out empty-handed, and nothing had been fine since.

  Still, she let Dylan lead her through those very doors. Mary glimpsed a child on her mother’s lap, head resting against her chest; a boy crying; a toddler screaming; a woman with an infant in her arms.

  “This way,” Dylan said, guiding her by the elbow in the opposite direction.

  The elevator door opened and there was a folding table covered in pamphlets and officious-looking women bustling around with sign-in sheets, name tags, and smiles.

  Soon, she was signed in and name-tagged and handed pamphlets. Getting Through the Holidays. The Worst Loss of All. A Broken Heart Still Beats.

  “Some of us,” one of the women said, “write the name of our child on our name tag.” She pointed to her own. Frannie, it said. Then, beneath it, Sabrina.

  Mary did not want to write Stella’s name on this name tag. But the woman seemed to be waiting for her to do just that.

  “Thank you,” Mary mumbled, and walked away.

  Frannie, as it turned out, ran the meeting. She smiled and welcomed everyone, and then explained that they were going to go around the circle and each say their child’s name and age and how they died.

  “I’m leaving,” Mary whispered to Dylan.

  “Ssshhh,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

  An Asian woman was crying and telling a complicated story in broken English. Then an older man started talking about the daughter he’d cared for with Lou Gehrig’s disease and he too started crying. Frannie nodded and passed boxes of Kleenex. Crying parents talked about mistakes they’d made: missing the signs of drug abuse, not checking if a car seat was buckled in properly, leaving their child alone for just five minutes.

  And then without warning everyone was looking at her. She couldn’t speak.

  “Our daughter Stella,” Dylan was saying, “was five years old.”

  Mary pushed her chair back with a loud squeak. “I’m sorry,” she said, though she wasn’t sure what exactly she was sorry for. With her head bent to avoid all of those eyes on her, Mary quickly left the room.

  The hospital walls, with their brightly colored tiled murals made by children—Marika, age 4, and Sally, age 7—seemed to mock her loss. When she finally made it to the car, she was crying so hard she couldn’t even unlock the door. The pamphlets in her hand looked childlike. Don’t Make Changes for One Year. Don’t Push Yourself. Don’t Take Long Trips as a Way to Heal; You Always Have to Come Home Again.

  The hard awful truth was that they needed their daughter back. Escape was just the thing for them. Four months after Stella died in this very building, she and Dylan were on an airplane to Italy where, jet-lagged, she had finally slept. In Italy, she did not see Stella’s fingerprints on everything. It was as if she’d come to a pure place, with ridiculously tall sunflowers reaching upward and the safe refuge of plane trees overhead like a mother’s arms, enveloping her.

  “MARY? IT’S ELLEN,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “From knitting?”

  Mary frowned. She did not want to speak to Ellen. She wanted Ellen and Ellen’s sick daughter to disappear.

  “This is a bad time,” Mary said. “We’re getting ready to go away for the holidays and I’m kind of crazy.”

  She was, in fact, packing.

  “I just wanted to apologize for the other day. You came all that way and—”

  “No, no,” Mary said. “No problem. But I’ve really got to go—”

  “I thought I’d see you at knitting on Wednesday but when you didn’t come I figured I’d just call and apologize and set up ano
ther date.”

  Mary thought of Ellen’s daughter, knitting a thousand-foot-long scarf to ward off death. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, “I’ll give you a call when we get back.”

  “Okay,” Ellen said.

  She sounded like she might keep talking, so Mary said,

  “Great! Bye!” and hung up. Her heart was pounding. There was no way she was going to call Ellen. No way.

  FOR THOSE TEN days in San Francisco, Mary pretended to be happy even though she felt like she’d left something important behind. The ache hummed through her body. At night she’d wake up, startled and confused, the hotel room disorienting her, and she’d think: Where’s Stella? And then she’d remember and sit up, awake, missing her daughter, that humming reverberating deep, deep inside her.

  Dylan urged her to call her old friends, but instead Mary avoided them. Some of them had come out to Stella’s funeral, and the blur of their tearstained faces, their stunned looks, made Mary never want to see them again. The ones who hadn’t come, she couldn’t think of what she would say to them. She wasn’t angry that they didn’t fly across the country. Instead, she felt like she’d lost them too somehow. Was she expected to talk about what had happened? Was she expected to act a certain way?

  Back in Providence, a few weeks after Stella died, Mary had been putting gas in her car at the corner station when a mother from Stella’s school pulled up at the pump beside her.

  “Mary?” the woman said. She had seemed surprised that Mary was standing there, getting gas for her car.

  “Hello, Jill,” Mary had said.

  But Jill could do nothing but stare, as if she was taking inventory. Shoes. Pants. Shirt. Face. Hair. What was she looking for? Mary felt that she too was expected to disappear, along with Stella. But her car still needed gas. She still needed things out in the world.

  “I think about you every day,” Jill finally said.

  “Thank you,” Mary said.

  “If Laci had died, I wouldn’t even be able to stand up.”

  “Yes you would.”

  “No. I don’t know how you can do it.”

  This happened over and over. Women in the supermarket, in the post office, staring at her as if she should not be alive herself. And Mary expected that her old friends here would be the same. Except April. April had flown out for the funeral and stayed, holding Mary’s hand, answering her phone, even somehow making her laugh. She’d come back a few months later and done the same, sorting unpaid bills, forging Mary’s name on checks, and writing thank-you notes.

  On New Year’s Eve they accepted April’s invitation to dinner at her house. “Just the four of us,” April had promised. What Mary had not thought about was that April had a daughter now, a three-year-old named Cassie. When Mary and Dylan walked into April’s apartment on Dolores Street, the first thing, the only thing, Mary saw was Cassie.

  Since Stella had died, Mary had broken down over the distant sight of a little girl with hair the same color as Stella’s. She’d had to leave the supermarket more than once simply because a little girl sitting in the grocery cart had smiled at her a certain way. But what really slayed her was a little girl’s hands. The dimpled knuckles, the pink fingernails. How could she spend an evening here and not see Cassie’s hands?

  April bustled into the room, dressed in a black sparkly minidress with a turquoise boa, her arms outstretched for hugs.

  “We’ve got champagne and gorgeous hors d’oeuvres and tenderloin for dinner. I’ve spent a fortune.”

  Mary managed a smile, and it was as if April knew.

  “And I’ve found a babysitter on New Year’s Eve,” she said, putting her hand on Mary’s arm. “The last one in the entire Bay Area, I’m sure.”

  Mary found her way into that hug.

  STARING OUT THE airplane window as they headed east, toward home, Mary thought of a new year without Stella. Sighing, she pulled down the shade on the window, blocking out the endless clouds. Dylan snored lightly beside her. A new year, Mary said to herself. She took the airsick bag from the seat pocket and wrote those three small words on it. Then she made a list. Go back to work. Read a book. Learn to knit socks. She crossed this last one off, then wrote it again, adding: Maybe. Dylan stirred, readjusted himself, then began to snore again. Mary picked up the knitting in her lap, and continued.

  THE FIRST DAY back home, she woke up and took a shower and pulled on her Betsey Johnson miniskirt with the big pink buttons and her snow boots and her baggy black winter coat with the hot pink scarf and hat she’d knit. She walked to the Coffee Exchange and got a large latte to go. She walked the ten blocks to the office, navigating unevenly shoveled sidewalks and mounds of snow and patches of ice to get to the old jewelry factory that housed the newspaper. She walked in and everything, even eight months later, was exactly the same.

  Mary stood just inside the door and took it all in. Holly was working at the computer, the phone headset attached, her black Buddy Holly glasses already slipped to the tip of her nose. Steam from some organic tea rose from a cup at her elbow, sending the smell of dirt and grass and something spicy into the overheated front office.

  Behind the glass doors, Mary saw Eddie pacing in his office, his Kramer hair bouncing as he moved, his stomach straining against a worn argyle sweater. He was pacing in front of Jessica, one of the feature writers, who always missed deadlines, refused to rewrite, and swore like crazy. Jessica turned men on with her dirty language and tall, too-skinny body. She kept her hair cut close to her head, and wore frighteningly oversized jewelry. Jessica was from Texas, and after she told one of her stories about how ballsy she was, she always said, “Don’t y’all mess with Texas!”

  There was the mural of an old-fashioned newsroom with comic book characters that one of Eddie’s ex-girlfriends had painted.

  Holly glanced up at her. “Whoa,” she said. “Look what the cat dragged in.” Holly always spoke at a slower speed than the rest of the world, and hearing her voice made Mary smile.

  Mary walked past Holly and over to Eddie’s office. Tapping on the door to get his attention, Mary wiggled her fingers at him when he finally stopped pacing long enough to see her there.

  Eddie grinned and motioned her inside.

  His office, with its familiar smells of ink and carbon paper and Wite-Out—Eddie still preferred a typewriter to a computer—made Mary feel like she had come home. She put down her latte and went to give Eddie a hug. He hugged her back, his sweater scratchy against her cheek.

  “Enough frivolity,” Eddie said. “I’m putting you right to work.” He handed her assignment sheets. “A new Indian restaurant in Downcity that’s open only for lunch. A show opening at the RISD Museum on the male nude. And what about this French-American School? Who goes there anyway?”

  “French-Americans?” Mary said.

  “Ha-ha,” Eddie said. “Now get to work.”

  Jessica, looking bored with Eddie and Mary and life, stood slowly. “I’ll be at City Hall,” she said, “if anybody needs me.”

  Mary followed her out of Eddie’s office and then walked into her own. Everything was different and everything was the same. Someone had taken down all the pictures of Stella and brought them to Mary months ago, leaving the walls blank. Her desk was empty, with a thin layer of dust where her notes and press releases and memos used to crowd each other. Even her screen saver of Stella blowing bubbles had been replaced with a new one of tropical fish, endlessly swimming.

  Mary turned on the radio to the all-news station, a habit that drove everyone in the office crazy. How can you write or think while all these people are talking? Holly used to say. She preferred Cold Play or the White Stripes pouring from her iPod; Eddie played Dean Martin and Bing Crosby records on a beat-up phonograph; Jessica liked country. The writers created their own world in their tiny office. Even now, Mary could hear the babble of different music beyond her own office.

  She closed the door, sat at her desk, and read the details of her assignment sheet. Soon, she wa
s making notes, making phone calls, making appointments. At lunch in the Indian restaurant, she shared samosas and nan with the owner. Before she knew it, Holly was at her office door, saying goodbye.

  “I’m going to my yoga class,” Holly said. After Stella died, she had taken Mary to one of these classes. It was held in a hot room to help you sweat out impurities. But it had only made Mary nauseated. “Want to lock up?” Holly was saying.

  “I’m the last one?” Mary said, surprised.

  Holly nodded. “Welcome back.”

  When Mary finally did lock up and walk into the dark evening, clutching a bag of saag paneer and chicken tikka leftovers, she had to lean against the brick building and try to catch her breath. By the time she got home and reheated the food and poured herself a glass of wine, she had calmed down again. The phone rang just as Dylan’s car pulled into the driveway.

  “Mary? It’s Ellen. It’s a new year, right?” Ellen said. “Time to knit some socks?”

  And because she was trying to have a normal day, and the French-American School was over in Ellen’s neighborhood and Mary had an appointment to go there the next day, and because her husband was walking in and looking at her with such relief, and the saag paneer was green and fragrant, Mary said, “Yes.”

  “SOMETIMES,” ELLEN SAID, “my daughter tries to go to school. She has a portable oxygen tank and a wheelchair and her boyfriend Jeb takes her around all day. It exhausts her. But she wants to try.”

  Mary swallowed hard. She was sitting on the lumpy moss green sofa knitting what would eventually be the band of a sock.

  K1, p1, on size one needles. Impossible. And she would never make it if Ellen kept talking about her daughter and oxygen and illness. She willed her to stop, to just talk about this most simple act of knitting.

  Ellen had moved all the musical instruments to make room for the two of them, but the dip of the sofa made her sit too close. Mary could smell the strawberry of Ellen’s shampoo.

  “I have to let her try,” Ellen said.

  “Uh-huh,” Mary said, concentrating on her knitting. Such tiny needles. K1, p1.