The Knitting Circle

by Ann Hood

  “That sounds good,” Mamie said, smiling.

  Saul took a small notebook from his shirt pocket and scribbled in it. “How about some chocolate?”

  “Not yet,” Mamie said. “The tamales will be good.”

  “Just tamales?” he said, the pencil poised in midair.

  “For now.”

  He pinched her cheek affectionately. “You scared the living daylights out of me, Mamie,” he said, his voice softer.

  “But I’m still here!” Mamie said.

  “Mary, you’ll stay with her while I go get those tamales?” Saul said.

  “Of course,” Mary said.

  “Good girl,” he said. “Don’t look so I can smooch your mother.”

  “What?” Mary said.

  But Saul was already bending over and kissing her mother right on the lips.

  As soon as he was out the door, Mary said, “That guy’s your boyfriend?”

  Mamie shrugged. “Friend, boyfriend. Whatever. I’m getting a little tired of him, actually.”

  “He kissed you!” Mary said.

  “I’m sorry I have a life,” Mamie said. “A nice life, finally.”

  “You could have had a nice life with us, when I was a kid, you know,” Mary said.

  Mamie studied her daughter’s face.

  “Say something,” Mary said.

  “I wanted you to come,” she said.

  “All right, I know. I’m a bad daughter. You finally decided you wanted me to come and I didn’t. But you have no idea the hell I am going through.”

  Mamie patted the bed beside her for Mary to sit there.

  “I do,” she said quietly. Mamie patted the bed again. “Come here,” she said.

  Reluctantly, Mary got up and sat beside her mother on the bed.

  “I always got everything I wanted,” her mother said.

  “I guess so,” Mary said.

  “I did. I was beautiful.”

  “Like Grace Kelly,” Mary said.

  Mamie laughed. “A beautiful girl walks into a store or onto a train or anywhere, and people want to help her. I learned that early. I figured it out and I used it and I had a lovely spoiled life.

  “Men? I could have any man I wanted. It was actually boring it was so easy. I sailed through life on my beauty. I was smart enough. I was nice enough. I knew how to have fun. But it was being beautiful that got me places. Violet and I spent a summer abroad and we got absolutely anything we wanted. Champagne. Jewelry. Steak dinners. Chanel perfume. Anything. All I had to do was pay attention to a man and we were set. ‘You are my greatest asset,’ Violet said. We both knew it.

  “American men were afraid to try to have sex with me. Don’t blush, Mary. Do you think I didn’t know what you and that foolish boy were doing in your bedroom when you were in high school? Sex is a natural thing, Mary. But these American boys were afraid of me. So when Violet and I went to Europe, I thanked these men appropriately. Having sex with an Italian is something one remembers her entire life. Oh, pardon me, maybe you’ve had sex with an Italian, Mary?”

  “Mom!”

  “We finally have a girl-to-girl chat and you’re embarrassed?”

  “Fine,” Mary said. “No, I have never had sex with an Italian.”

  “Well, you must. Violet was so mad at me. We laugh about it now but she was an absolute prude. She flirted and kissed, but she honestly believed in being a virgin on her wedding night. I, on the other hand, slept my way across Europe.”

  “Mom! Do they have you on some kind of drugs or something? Honestly. I don’t want to know.”

  Her mother laughed. “When we got back, Violet was sure no one would marry me. We finished our senior year at Mount Holyoke, and it’s true I was one of the few who wasn’t even pinned, never mind engaged. But then I went to that dance with Violet, and her brother was there with your father.”

  “Did he know about your European trip?” Mary said sarcastically.

  “He said to me, ‘I never date beautiful women. I admire them. But I would never marry one.’ And of course right then I knew I would have to marry him. After all, I always got what I wanted. It didn’t take long either. You know, we hardly knew each other. I thought that was a good thing. All of my friends had proper courtships, and long engagements. But once I got your father to fall in love with me, that was it. We got married. It all happened so fast. Nineteen fifty-two. Right before Christmas. And I was pregnant by Easter.”

  “Mom,” Mary said, “why don’t you sleep? I think the drugs are making you loopy.”

  “I don’t think so. I feel quite all right. Just tired. And happy you’re finally here.”

  “But Mom,” Mary said, “you didn’t get pregnant for seven years. I was born in ’59.”

  Mary could not remember the last time she saw her mother cry. Maybe it was back when she was drinking and had those angry rages. Or maybe she had cried when Stella died and Mary simply hadn’t noticed. But she was crying now. Not sobbing. Just tears falling down her cheeks.

  “This is what I’ve been wanting to tell you. Why I needed to talk to you,” Mamie was saying. “In those days, they took your pee, your urine, and they injected it into a rabbit, and if the rabbit died you were pregnant. Isn’t that silly? It was right before Easter and your father would come home every day and ask me,

  ‘Did the rabbit die?’ and I’d say, “The doctor still hasn’t called.’ But I knew I was pregnant. ‘How do you know?’ he asked me, and I said, ‘Because I want to be pregnant.’ How naïve was I? Then the doctor called, and I said, ‘The rabbit died, right?’ And he said, ‘You’re absolutely right, Mrs. Baxter. The rabbit died. And by Thanksgiving you’ll have a beautiful baby.’ Do you know what I said, Mary? I said, ‘I know.’ That’s how smug and confident I was. I said, ‘I know.’

  “I had the best pregnancy. I bought all of these maternity clothes with matching hats and shoes. Your father, unlike other husbands, thought that I was even more beautiful pregnant. He snapped so many pictures of me. He even took some very racy nude ones, very artsy, you know, with me cradling my stomach, or my arms folded over my breasts. Tasteful. He said that I was so beautiful pregnant that we should have a dozen children. But I told him, no. I wanted just one. So that I could absolutely adore that child. I didn’t want to share my affection. I couldn’t.

  “All of my friends were throwing up and fainting, but I never felt sick even once. Everything was perfect. Thanksgiving morning I woke up and my water broke and four hours later she was born. My mother had told me, ‘Mamie, if it’s a girl you must name her Mary. Every generation has a Mary in our family.’ She was Mary Wall but she went by Polly, and my grandmother was Mary Irons, but she went by Maisie. And of course I was Mary Baxter. Mamie. I was so spoiled, so certain of everything, that I said, ‘I’m going to name her Susan. Susan is a beautiful name, not old-fashioned like Mary.’ So we named her Susan.

  “God help me, Mary, in my darkest hours I wondered if she was cursed because I broke the tradition. Isn’t that ridiculous? But you know how your mind works. If I had only done this thing instead of that, she would still be here.”

  “You had a child? Before me?”

  “That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you, Mary. About my Susan. After Stella…I thought I would lose my mind for you, because I knew the pain of losing a child like that. And I couldn’t bear to watch you go there.”

  “What happened to her, Mom?” Mary said. She was crying too now, even as she wiped the tears from her mother’s face.

  “She was three years old. So beautiful. And smart. I would buy us these mother-daughter outfits, for special occasions, you know. Not every day.

  “This one day, it was a beautiful summer day and I took her to the park, and she played with other children there. In the sandbox, and going down the slide. I always wonder if we had stayed home, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten it.”

  “What?”

  “Polio. The thing we all were so afraid of. I never thought it would happen to me
. To Susan. That night we went for ice cream, and she wouldn’t eat hers. She said she was too tired. She ordered raspberry, in a cone. And she sat there holding that cone, with the ice cream melting all pink down her arm. I reprimanded her for that. ‘Don’t be so messy!’ I said. I hate that I said that to her.

  I threw the ice cream away and we walked home, except she said her legs were too tired so your father carried her, up on his shoulders. ‘Isn’t she getting too big for that?’ I said, and Susan said, ‘I’ll never be too big.’ Can you imagine that? Like she knew something.

  “I gave her a nice bath and then I put her to bed with some children’s aspirin. Your father thought she felt warm. He thought maybe she had a cold. ‘You don’t get colds in summer,’ I said. It was later, sometime in the night, that I woke and heard her crying. I went to her room and touched her forehead and she was burning with fever, and her hair and her nightclothes were drenched with sweat. I called for your father to get the doctor. But when he came in, he said, ‘Let’s take her ourselves to the emergency room rather than wake the doctor.’ We bundled her in dry clothes and we got in the car. I was holding her on my lap. And something happened. I’ve never been able to quite explain it. But there was an instant when something changed and I screamed for your father to pull over. He did, and I looked in her beautiful face and I saw right away that she was gone. My Susan. The most unthinkable thing in the world had happened, and it had happened to me.”

  Mary was crying harder now, her face resting on her mother’s stomach, her mother stroking her hair.

  “I was sent away for a little while. To a sanitarium, they called it. A fancy nuthouse was what it was. They told me the best thing for me would be to have another baby, straightaway. This time, it took years for me to get pregnant. I felt as if all my luck was gone. Used up. The only thing I still had, ironically, was my beauty. And it meant nothing. Eventually I did get pregnant, of course. And I had you. But God forgive me, I never had joy again. It died with Susan. And this is for you to forgive someday, Mary. When I realized I wasn’t going to feel that joy, that something had died in me, I resented you. I resented your laughter and your love for me.

  “I used to make your father a martini every day when he came home from work. Since we were first married, I’d mix it for him. And one day I made the martini and I looked at it and I understood that it offered me an escape. I’d been drunk before. I loved the feeling, the fogginess, the numbness. So I drank that martini straight down. You were five or six, and you came in with a drawing of our house. That martini made me able to smile at you and look at your drawing and tell you it was wonderful.

  “It’s like I woke up ten years later and you had grown up and your father had grown distant and I had grown older. Ten years, in a fog that enabled me to stay alive. I drove down to a church where they had AA meetings and I stood up and I said, My name is Mamie and I am a drunk. That night they assigned me to a sponsor, a British woman who owned a knitting store.”

  “Alice,” Mary said.

  “The next week, after the meeting, she invited me to her house for tea. I went because I was desperate. She sat me in a chair and she handed me two knitting needles and a ball of yarn. I had knit as a young girl. But I didn’t remember how exactly, so she showed me. While I knit, she told me her story. That day, I just listened. But I went back every week. And after a few months, while the two of us sat knitting, I said to her, ‘You know, I used to always get everything I wanted, because I was beautiful.’”

  18

  THE KNITTING CIRCLE

  MARY STAYED WITH her mother over the next few weeks, through blood tests and stress tests and echocardiograms.

  Sitting in a wheelchair, her hair loose around her and her skin still pale, her mother looked oddly young, and beautiful. She watched the flurry of activity around her. She smiled up at a doctor who walked past, his stethoscope swinging with authority. But he paused when he saw her.

  “Are you still here, Mamie?” he said, grinning beneath his Don Ameche mustache.

  “Trying to leave,” she said. A flush of pink dotted her cheeks as she flirted with the doctor. “Want to take me home with you?”

  The doctor chuckled. “Of course I do,” he said. “But my wife wouldn’t be very happy.” He leaned in close enough for Mary to smell the tobacco on his breath.

  A sullen technician appeared, shuffling up to them. She spoke in Spanish to the doctor.

  He pressed Mamie’s hand, a bit too tenderly, Mary thought. Where was that other, hairy doctor anyway?

  “Mina will take good care of you, Mamie,” he said. He took the clipboard that hung from the back of the wheelchair and perused it. “Everything looks fine,” he said. “I hate to let you go, but I’m afraid that I will have to release you soon.”

  “How soon?” Mary asked impatiently.

  The doctor straightened and adjusted the knot of his tie.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “How soon will you release her?” Mary said.

  The doctor glanced down at her mother, raising his eyebrows.

  “My daughter,” Mamie said. “Mary.”

  “I would never have guessed,” the doctor said, surprised.

  He extended his hand and shook Mary’s authoritatively. She thought of how tenderly he had held her mother’s hand, how sweetly he had spoken to her.

  “Your mother is recovering beautifully,” he said in a doctorly voice. “She can resume normal activities over the next few weeks. Of course, we’ll keep a very close eye on her,” he added in a softer tone.

  Once again, the doctor pressed her mother’s hand into his own, then bid them adiós before walking away, his stride confident, the stethoscope swinging.

  “What is wrong with you?” Mary hissed as she followed the wheelchair toward the lab. “Flirting with the doctor like that?”

  “Why are you so angry?” her mother said just before the technician shoved the wheelchair through the doors.

  The doors swung shut lazily. Mary watched her mother disappear through the fingerprint-smudged Plexiglas. A small turquoise vinyl sofa was pushed into a nearby alcove, and Mary dropped onto it.

  Her mother was right. She was angry. Not about the flirting. Her mother always flirted, with policemen and gas station attendants and waiters and valets. The power of her beauty had not diminished with age. In a way, it had intensified. Her voice had grown more sultry over time, her body was even leaner and tighter than when she was younger.

  Now that it was clear her mother would survive, Mary was beginning to absorb the story she had told her that first day. Anger that had been dormant in her for her entire life came to the surface. Her mother’s aloofness, her chilly love.

  She wondered about this other mother, a woman who had loved another child with warmth and enthusiasm. She tried to put a face to this child, her lost sister. But only her mother’s face came to her.

  She heard the whoosh of the doors opening and the rattle of wheels.

  “I have been poked for the final time,” Mamie announced triumphantly.

  Mary looked over at her mother. She wanted to hate her. But somehow couldn’t. Mary got to her feet and walked over to the wheelchair, already on its way back down the corridor.

  “Great,” Mary said without conviction.

  But her mother was too far ahead to hear her. Quickly, Mary hurried to catch up, chasing the golden back of her mother’s head.

  MARY STAYED IN Mexico for two more weeks. She took her mother home from the hospital and got her settled into her crooked little house with the bright blue door. She opened that door over and over through the course of a day as her mother’s friends arrived with colorful bouquets of flowers, baskets of tamales, presents of hammered tin and milagros of hearts in all sizes. Finally she could go back to her own life. She had made decisions while she was here. She would ask Dylan for a divorce. She would sell their house and move to an apartment, something the right size for a woman living alone.

  It did not make M
ary happy to know what she had to do now. But it was time. Despite drinking and knitting and fleeing to Mexico, her mother had never moved through her grief. She had simply avoided it. Mary refused to do the same.

  At the airport, she and her mother sat and drank coffee as they waited for Mary’s flight to board. Mamie looked even healthier than she had before her heart attack.

  Her hair was pulled back into its usual chignon, neat and blond and lovely. Her blue eyes twinkled again, and the silver jewelry at her neck and ears made her skin glow. The waiter admired Mamie openly, bringing her a small plate of cookies dusted with powdered sugar, smiling at her warmly.

  “You look great, Mom,” Mary said.

  “I feel pretty damn good,” Mamie said, grinning at the waiter.

  A staticky voice called for the boarding of Mary’s plane.

  “That’s me,” Mary said, relieved to finally be going home.

  Mary stood, but her mother reached for her across the table, the powdered sugar dusting her hand.

  “There is so much I want to explain,” Mamie said.

  Mary squeezed her mother’s hand briefly. “You don’t have to explain anything,” she said. She pulled the handle up on her travel bag and placed her shoulder bag on top of it, then angled the suitcase to wheel it away.

  Again, the loudspeaker crackled.

  Mamie rushed to Mary’s side. “I wasn’t a good mother to you. I know that. Or a good grandmother to Stella.”

  “It’s fine,” Mary said.

  “It’s not fine. All these years and I never got over losing her. That’s the truth,” she said.

  Mamie kept pace with her as she rushed toward the line at the security gate. She took Mary’s free hand and held on tight. “I never got over her, and so I lost so much more. The joy of that little Stella. The joy of you.”

  At the gate, there wasn’t a line so much as a crowd, everyone pushing forward to make their way through. Mary gave her mother a quick hug, but Mamie was not ready to go. She opened her arms and took Mary into her embrace.

  “I don’t expect you to forgive me, Mary-la,” she said. “But I hope someday you can understand.” She had pressed her lips right against Mary’s ear, and after she spoke, she moved them to her daughter’s cheek and kissed her the way a mother kisses a daughter goodbye. “I love you, Mary-la,” she said.