The Knitting Circle

by Ann Hood

  Part Five

  A GOOD KNITTER

  Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and a slightly below-average intelligence. Of course, superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.

  —ELIZABETH ZIMMERMANN, Knitter’s Almanac

  9

  HARRIET

  IN MARCH, MARY and Stella had found the tips of purple crocuses in the garden and a blanket of myrtle and then chives began to grow with abandon. They’d made skinny bouquets of myrtle and chives and placed them around the house in bud vases. They had planned a surprise birthday dinner for Dylan: plain pasta with butter and freshly grated parmesan cheese, Stella’s favorite. To Stella, surely that was everyone’s favorite dinner. Naïvely, they had moved through March and April like those stupid crocuses—showy and blinded by the sunshine, bursting forth into disaster.

  Last year, spring had been unusually warm. Hot, really, with temperatures in the eighties. They’d worn shorts and sundresses and flip-flops. Stella wore her hair in a ponytail, her neck glistening with sweat. But this year it rained. It rained and rained, the air bone-chillingly cold. The crocuses stayed hidden. The trees remained bare. It was as if the world was mourning Stella too, Mary thought.

  Mary made herself go to the office every day. Her rain boots slogged through small floods at each curb, the hood of her slicker dripping rain onto her glasses. She’d say hello to Holly, then slip into her office and try to read. It took Mary three times as long to read even one page. She was aware of her slowness, of her brain struggling to make sense of each sentence. She highlighted sections in bright pink, and turned down the corners of pages, hoping that somehow she would write something coherent. This made her laugh—she used to strive for intelligent, even brilliant. Now she would be satisfied with a review that at least made sense.

  In the middle of all this—March, rain, the calendar ticking off days toward the first anniversary of the worst day of her life, Eddie came in and ordered her out to lunch.

  “A new restaurant,” he said, folding money into her hands.

  “Take your husband. Have a martini.” He added more bills.

  “Hell,” he said, “have two.”

  She closed the book she was reading and took her slicker from the hook behind her door.

  “I suppose there’s a catch?” she said.

  “Oh, sure,” Eddie said. Despite the cold weather, he’d started wearing his spring wardrobe, a series of faded T-shirts from long-ago rock concerts. “I’ll need a restaurant review. Soon,” he added.

  “No one wears Ramones T-shirts,” Mary muttered. Her waterproof boots were damp inside.

  Eddie said, “I’m piling on work to help you.”

  “I know,” she said. “Someday I’ll be grateful.”

  “Don’t come back after lunch,” he said, walking out beside her. “Go home and read.”

  MARY WOULD KNIT a sweater for Dylan’s birthday.

  “An easy one,” she had told Alice.

  Alice looked through a pile of patterns, shaking her head.

  “Aha!” she said finally. “Even you can do this one.”

  But apparently she couldn’t, because it was clear to Mary already that she had messed it up. Worse, Alice was away.

  “How will I fix all the mistakes I’m going to make?” Mary had asked her.

  “Call Beth. Or better, Harriet. She can knit a sweater with her eyes closed.”

  Reluctantly, Mary dialed Harriet’s number.

  “Well,” Harriet said, “if Alice said to call me, I suppose you can come by. But only for a minute.”

  Mary’s stomach ached by the time she got to Harriet’s house in Barrington, a twenty-minute drive from Providence, through a clogged Main Street and twenty-five-mile-an-hour curving roads. But she’d done something wrong and she couldn’t figure out what. No one had warned her that knitting a sweater, unlike scarves and hats, required reading a complicated pattern, or any pattern at all.

  She pulled into the driveway and tried to calm herself. The house was a rambling ranch-style, built in the early sixties. Mary glanced around. The whole neighborhood was from the same era. It was like stepping back in time. The two-car garage, the bluestone front walk, the black shutters on each window. Then a frowning Harriet answered the doorbell, and showed her into a gold wall-to-wall-carpeted living room with off-white furniture.

  “Let me see it,” Harriet said, holding out her hand. “That’s the garter stitch!” she said, disgusted. “You were supposed to do stockinette.”

  Mary frowned. “I thought I did.”

  “It’s not rocket science,” Harriet said. “It’s knitting.”

  Mary chastised herself for going to Harriet’s at all. If she’d looked at it long enough, surely she would have figured out what she’d done wrong all by herself.

  “You knit your purls and purled your knits,” Harriet said in disgust. She picked up the six inches of ribbing Mary had spent all afternoon doing, and unraveled it.

  “Stockinette. Knit a row. Purl a row,” Harriet said. She handed the yarn and needles back to Mary. “Not rocket science,” she said again.

  The bunched-up yarn and needles felt awkward in Mary’s hand, and without warning, she started to cry.

  “What’s this?” Harriet said, taking a step away from Mary.

  “It’s only knitting.”

  “My daughter,” she said. She gulped again. “My little girl,” she began, and then she gulped some more. “I lost her,” she said,

  “and the strangest things set me off.”

  Somewhere, a clock ticked loudly.

  “I just want to be able to do this. To make this sweater for my husband’s birthday.”

  “You can do that,” Harriet said.

  “I can’t even do fifteen inches of stockinette stitch without messing up.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Harriet said. She gathered the yarn from the floor and expertly wound it into a ball. “Get up now,” she said, offering her hands to Mary. “Come on. Up,” she said when Mary hesitated.

  Her hands were soft and cool. Lotioned hands. Pampered hands.

  “Knit one row. Purl one row,” she said.

  “Got it,” Mary said.

  She heard the door close firmly behind her as she walked down the hedge-lined path to the car.

  EDDIE APPEARED IN her office doorway.

  “Do we just knit in here?” he said. “Or do we actually write?”

  Almost relieved, Mary tossed her knitting onto her desk. “It would be easier to learn Italian,” she said.

  “Easier than knitting?” Eddie said. “Now you’ve got me worried.”

  “You try it,” she muttered.

  Eddie loomed in front of her in his The Who T-shirt. “How about that review of Funky Duck?”

  “Is that due already?” she said, feigning surprise. Inside she grimaced. She hadn’t even been to Funky Duck yet, a take-out duck restaurant on the West Side.

  Eddie frowned. “Jessica said it’s great.”

  “I hear you,” Mary said.

  “Have you ever noticed,” Eddie said as he left her office, “that people say that when they aren’t really listening?”

  She should get up right now and drive to Funky Duck. She should order take-out duck, whatever that was, and she should eat it and take notes about it. Her eyes drifted toward the pattern for the sweater.

  “Can you try a little?” Dylan had said to her the night before when he came home and found her watching Survivor.

  “This is me trying,” she’d told him.

  He stood there a moment before getting back in his car and driving away. When he came back hours later, smelling of cigarette smoke and beer, she’d whispered, “I’ll try to try? How’s that?”

  “TAKE-OUT DUCK FOR dinner,” Mary said, offering Dylan the greasy bag with the strange red line drawing of a cleaver chasing a frightened duck on it.

  “It’s almost eight o’clock,” he said.


  “I got sidetracked,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows, waiting.

  “I was knitting and there was this instruction, slip stitches to holder, and I couldn’t figure it out. Honestly, knitters should be breaking codes for army intelligence.”

  Mary considered telling him how Harriet had told her, “A stitch holder, for Christ’s sake! A thing that holds stitches! A plastic thing! Whoever told you you could knit anyway?”

  But Dylan’s face had that look on it, that look of disgust and disappointment. Grumpy, she took the bag from him and began to lay the pieces of duck out on a platter.

  “Now you know how I feel when you come home late without calling,” she muttered. Which, she reminded herself, was happening more and more lately.

  “Hey,” he said, holding his arms up as if in surrender, “I’m working.”

  “So am I,” she said, the sight of the shiny grease on the duck turning her stomach.

  “Sorry,” Dylan said in a tone that let her know he was not sorry at all. “It sounded like you were knitting.”

  Mary pushed her plate away. “I’m going to bed,” she said.

  “Wait!” Dylan said.

  Mary turned. Maybe they would make up, until next time.

  “Some lady dropped this off for you.” He put a peach-colored plastic thing down in front of her. “Your stitch holder.”

  “Harriet,” Mary said softly. “What a strange duck she is.”

  Despite himself, Dylan laughed, his face glistening with grease. Mary laughed too; the fight was over.

  “This is the greasiest duck I’ve ever had,” Dylan said.

  Mary smiled. “Jessica loves it,” she said. She dug around in her bag until she found her notebook. Greasiest duck ever, she wrote.

  EDDIE WAS WAITING for her when she got to work. It was the first day of spring and right on schedule the sun came out, flowers bloomed, buds appeared on the tips of trees. I will not think about how I took Stella outside every March 21 and we used to say together: Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, I wonder where the flowers is. S tog, Mary thought. S tog. Say together.

  “You hated Funky Duck,” Eddie said, opening her office door and following her in.

  “Yup,” she said. Her throat felt like she had swallowed a tennis ball. Inside that tennis ball, she knew, were endless tears.

  “Good,” Eddie said gently.

  He flashed her a peace sign—or maybe it was victory?—and left.

  When Mary and Stella had walked outside last March 21 and S tog, Stella only had three short weeks to live. Mary closed her eyes against the image of Stella pointing to the dogwood tree. “Look, Mama!” she’d announced. “It’s about to burst!”

  ANNIVERSARY: THE DATE on which an event occurred in some previous year (or the celebration of it).

  Birthday, jubilee, wedding anniversary, centennial, bicentennial, tricentennial, millennium.

  All happy words, Mary thought. Surely jubilee and jubilant were from the same root word. She scrolled word definitions and dictionaries online when she should have been writing a book review. But she could not find anything that explained what this anniversary meant to her. The opposite of jubilant. A day she wanted to forget, not to mark.

  Then Eddie was peering over her shoulder.

  “Have you ever heard of knocking?” Mary said.

  He placed his hands on her shoulders. She could smell him, cigarette smoke and mothballs.

  “You don’t need to do that today,” he said. “I’m in my office trying to decide, is it better to say something or to shut up? Is it better for you to be here, or at home? I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either,” Mary said.

  “Where’s Dylan?”

  “Work,” she said.

  “Maybe we could take a drive?” Eddie said. “Maybe a drive on a beautiful day is good?”

  Mary shook her head. “It only makes me wonder how the fucking sun can still shine. You know?”

  He squeezed her shoulders and then stepped away. “I’m thinking about her today,” he said. “I want you to know that. How she used to like to spin in my chair. And stamp the date all over her arms. I used to like when you brought her in. I would be back there, in my office, and I’d hear those little-girl footsteps and I’d grin. I would.”

  Mary turned to face him. “Thank you,” she said.

  AT HOME, THINGS were waiting on her doorstep. Plants, full and pink and ostentatious. Cards. Notes. It would be worse if no one remembered Stella. Mary understood that, and she was grateful for these offerings. But each petal, each word, broke her heart again and again.

  Inside, the answering machine was blinking. She didn’t know if she could bear hearing all those messages. She heard the sound of Dylan’s key. She splashed cold water on her face and ran her fingers through her hair. But when he walked into the kitchen and she saw his face, stricken, she was crying again, and so was he.

  “I just want her back,” he said. “I just want Stella.”

  “Let’s hide,” Mary said, wrapping her arms around him.

  “There’s nowhere to hide,” he said, his voice full of resignation. “I’ve tried all day.”

  The phone jangled. Dylan’s voice told the caller they weren’t available, then Mary’s mother’s voice filled the kitchen.

  “I am thinking about you today,” she said. “I am far away, but I am holding the three of you close.”

  Mary heard a catch in her voice before she said, quickly, “Bye.”

  LIKE A PERFECT 1950s wife, Harriet greeted her in a smart green shirtdress, belted to show her still-small waist. The gold bracelet. Low-heeled shoes. She must get her hair cut every week, Mary thought. It never seemed to grow, always staying just at chin length.

  “Let’s go where we can spread out,” Harriet said.

  She led Mary down a hallway—moss green wall-to-wall carpeting—into a large family room. Down two steps and onto the gray stone floor. Overstuffed dark red leather couches and chairs. Even the coffee table was leather, with big brass nails holding the leather down at the corners. Mary caught sight of a pool beyond the sliding glass doors, an arbor of wisteria, a patio with lots of glass furniture and a grill, also oversized.

  “We had some parties out there,” Harriet said, following Mary’s gaze. “Long ago.”

  Mary began to take out the pieces of the sweater, laying them on the coffee table. “Are these okay here?” she asked.

  “It’s leather,” Harriet said. “You can’t hurt it. Cows are outside in all sorts of weather, aren’t they?”

  Harriet had a way of making her feel small. Or young. Or both. At least she would leave here with a sweater.

  Harriet adjusted the blinds until she was satisfied with the amount of light they let in.

  “My husband and I bought it in Barcelona,” Harriet said, running her hands over the soft leather top of the coffee table.

  “Had it sent here. Our friends thought we were mad. ‘Can’t you find a suitable coffee table here?’ they all said. But George said,

  ‘No.’ It had to be this one.”

  She stood at the corner of the sofa and gently touched the side table there, a round hammered-brass top.

  “This we carried onto the plane from Morocco. The stewardess said, ‘I’m not sure I can find a home for that,’ and George said, ‘Dear, we have a home for it. We just need a place to store it until we get it there.’”

  “Are you widowed?” Mary asked, immediately regretting her boldness.

  “No,” Harriet said. “Divorced.” She smoothed her dress and went to sit beside Mary. “Let’s see what you need to do here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “There’s nothing to pry into,” Harriet said matter-of-factly.

  “I was married for twenty-five years and I’ve been divorced for fifteen. Do you read biographies?”

  “I used to,” Mary said. “I’m not reading much these days.”

  Harriet
frowned at her in disapproval.

  “I told you,” Mary said defensively. “I lost my daughter. I can barely get up in the morning.”

  “I lost my son a few years ago,” Harriet said evenly.

  Harriet had lost a child? That was why she had this tough veneer. “You know then,” Mary said cautiously. “You know how it ruins a person.”

  “Yes,” Harriet said. “I know.”

  She got up again and walked across the room to the bookshelves. Mary watched her carefully select some framed photographs from the shelves. Her heels echoed as she walked back across the stone floor toward Mary. Almost tenderly she sat again, the pictures on her lap.

  “My boys,” Harriet said, pointing to the picture on top, a black-and-white studio photograph of two little boys in sailor suits. “Danny and David.”

  “Cute,” Mary said.

  Harriet placed that one on the coffee table, standing upright facing them. “Danny’s graduation picture,” she said. “He went to Williams College. Very bright, Danny was.”

  “It sounds like you had a nice life,” Mary said. “Barcelona. Morocco.”

  “We did,” Harriet said. “I grew up right here in Barrington. On Rumstick Point. My father was a doctor, a surgeon. And my sisters and I never wanted for anything.”

  There was a tone of boastfulness as Harriet described her family’s affiliation with all of the upper-crust institutions in Rhode Island. They meant little to Mary, but she oohed and aahed appropriately, and her enthusiasm softened Harriet a bit.

  “When I married George it was one of the happiest days of my life. Even now, with all that’s happened, when I look back on that day I smile. It was November. All my girlfriends were June brides, but I wanted to wear a satin dress and to have my maids in green velvet. My dress had one hundred perfect buttons running down the back. It took my sister Viv an hour to button all of them. I was almost late for my own wedding! And I held calla lilies. White ones. I still adore calla lilies. You can’t grow them here, you know. I’ve tried. And I’ve been told that if I can’t grow something, then it simply cannot be grown.