The Knitting Circle Read online

  But here she was, on a cold December night, driving away from home instead of placing her collection of Nativities around the house, and hanging lights and Christmas stockings. Inside the car, she turned the heat on full blast. Its stale smell filled the car but Mary did not get warm. She shivered all the way to Big Alice’s.

  USUALLY, MARY WAS one of the first to arrive at the knitting circle, especially when she drove in with Lulu and Scarlet. She liked the settling in, the way they each gravitated toward the same seat every time, Lulu in the center of the lumpy sofa, Scarlet in the green rocking chair. Mary always sat beside Alice so she could ask for help if she needed it or simply to breathe in her clean citrus scent. Alice was the freshest-looking person Mary had ever known, as if she’d just emerged from a good hot bath.

  But tonight, with the hard rain turning to snow as she neared the coast, turning the roads slippery, Mary didn’t pull into Big Alice’s parking lot until almost quarter after seven. There weren’t many cars there, the weather too nasty even for these diehard knitters. The same white lights that always twinkled in the bushes shone in Mary’s headlights. She appreciated that Alice did not put up any Christmas decorations. Even in the store, the only sign of the holiday drawing close was that even more yarn than usual lined the shelves and baskets.

  Mary walked up the path to the door, relaxing finally when she felt its heft in her hands and heard the small sigh it gave as it opened. Stepping inside, she saw only three heads bent over piles and piles of white yarn. Alice’s own silver hair. Ellen’s soft blond ripples. And the shiny pink of a man’s scalp. The three of them had pulled their chairs into a tight circle in the center of the small room.

  “Out on a night like this?” she said. Big Alice finally looked up.

  Mary thought of the warm fire burning back home, the wine, Dylan’s hopeful face.

  “I didn’t want to”—she stopped herself before she said the truth: I didn’t want to be home—“to miss a night.”

  She felt foolish standing there without even a project in her hands. She had completed enough hats and scarves for ten Christmases, and thought tonight she might try something new, something impossibly hard that would keep her concentrating on it until Christmas had passed altogether.

  “This is Roger,” Alice said. “You know Ellen, of course. Although you might not recognize her knitting something besides socks.”

  Ellen’s cheeks flushed. “We’re trying to help Roger finish this blanket.”

  Hesitantly, Mary drew a chair into their circle. She could see now that the yarn wasn’t just white, it was different shades of white, from ivory to champagne, vanilla to eggshell. The colors ran in long curving stripes, each stripe several inches thick.

  “It’s beautiful,” Mary said.

  Roger was back at work, his long bamboo needles shaping a pinkish white stripe.

  “Roger and Michael were regulars here,” Alice explained.

  “Every Wednesday for, what? Five years?”

  “Seven,” Roger said.

  “Seven years,” Alice repeated, as if this even surprised her a bit. “And could those boys knit! The sweaters they made! I still remember the beautiful cables Michael could knit. Nothing like Michael’s cables.”

  “Why did you stop coming?” Mary asked. “Did you move away?”

  Roger looked at her, and she saw that his pale blue eyes welled with tears. “No,” he said, “no. We live just down the road.”

  “They have this eighteenth-century farmhouse,” Alice continued, “that they completely renovated. Everything perfect.”

  Roger glanced at her.

  “Everything perfect,” Alice said firmly. “And every year they gave a New Year’s Eve party that you couldn’t believe. Roger is the chef, and Michael is the baker. He always made a bûche de Noël. If I close my eyes, I can still taste it.”

  “No more parties these days,” Roger said, sighing.

  Alice reached into her knitting basket, which seemed to hold an endless number of supplies, and pulled out a pair of knitting needles, squinting at them before she handed them to Mary.

  “Get to work,” she instructed. “Cast on in this yarn. The color’s called snow. Isn’t that appropriate?”

  Mary took the yarn and the needles even as she demurred. “I couldn’t work on something this lovely. I’m not a very good knitter at all.”

  “It’s a straight knit,” Alice said. “I’ll tell you when to decrease.”

  Ellen nudged Mary gently with her knee. “It needs to get done tonight,” she said softly. “You can only help.”

  One of the things Mary always had trouble figuring out was how much of a tail she needed to cast on and not run out. She guessed wrong and had to undo all the cast-on stitches. Then wrong again. Once more her mind drifted back home. By now Dylan might be asleep, despite his promise to wait up. Despite that strong kiss he’d left her with. The other night, he’d blurted, “Maybe we should try and have another baby.” Before Mary could answer, he’d said, “Forgive me. I could never do that. Never.” “I’m too old anyway,” Mary had said, even though she didn’t know if that was true or not. Every week she read in People magazine—the only thing she ever read—about actresses in their late forties having babies, twins and then even another baby after that. The thought had crossed her mind. But she’d dismissed it as foolish, as desperate.

  “Two inches a stitch and you can’t go wrong,” Roger said.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  They sat knitting as the snow fell outside and the small white lights twinkled in the bushes. From time to time Alice spoke, remembering a cake Michael had made for her birthday one year, or the lilac bush they planted in her yard. “French lilacs,” she said. “So lovely.”

  DYLAN DID WAIT up for her, even though it was almost midnight before she slipped into bed beside him.

  “I thought you’d be early,” he said.

  She repeated what Ellen had whispered to her while Roger and Alice folded the beautiful white blanket and carefully wrapped it in shiny red paper.

  “A man was there making a present for his dying lover. He won’t live until Christmas, so he sat at Big Alice’s all day and into the night making this extraordinarily beautiful blanket to give him tomorrow.”

  Dylan took her hand in his.

  “I wanted to tell him that someday he would be walking down the street and realize that time had finally passed and that he was all right. It’s what people keep telling me will happen. But I’m not sure it’s true.”

  “Honestly,” Dylan said, “I wonder where this will all lead.”

  Mary tugged her hand away. “Where what will lead?” she said.

  “Without Stella, it’s hard to remember who we are.”

  She considered this. “Or who we should be now.”

  Mary waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

  Then she told him what Ellen had said in the snowy parking lot.

  “Tomorrow,” Mary said, “I learn how to make socks.”

  Part Four

  SOCKS

  “The history of the humble sock is a long and interesting one….”

  —NANCY BUSH, Folk Socks: The History and Techniques of Handknitted Footwear

  7

  ELLEN

  ON CITY STREETS or navigating subway systems, Mary could find anything. The Paris Métro, the London Underground, the canal-crossed alleys of Amsterdam. But Providence, this city where she still felt like a visitor, remained a mystery.

  The sky was a flinty gray, cloudless and flat. The familiar landmarks—historic streets, the run-down buildings of the downtown area, the jumble of highways with their endless construction—vanished as she headed toward the Armory District. Here, bodegas sat at corners, boarded-up buildings overshadowed newly renovated Victorian houses painted happy shades of purple and yellow and green, and the fortress-like Armory, empty and eerie, dominated.

  Mary glanced at Ellen’s address, scrawled on the back of the receipt from the yarn an
d tiny number one needles she’d bought to make the socks. The yarn miraculously created a complicated pattern of stripes and zigzags no matter how loosely it was knit. “You’ll be amazed,” Ellen had promised in her soft, nervous voice.

  The streets were empty. Mary hesitated in front of a pale pink house with bright blue trim. Across the street was a park, also deserted except for a young black teenager, his head covered with a white piece of cloth tied kerchief-style and the hood of his sweatshirt. He paced. The wind blew hard, sending small gusts of dirt and random litter into brief spirals. Mary thought of Lulu’s story, and shivered.

  Ellen, with her vintage dresses and sweet face and Ziploc bags of yarn and half-knit socks, did not fit into this landscape. Although Mary seldom came to this part of the city, she knew that it attracted young hipsters boasting tattoos and piercings, or newly married couples with small down payments investing in the hope that the neighborhood would come around. Holly lived here somewhere, Mary remembered. And yesterday Eddie had called to tell her about a new breakfast place nearby. “You could go and try it out,” he’d said hopefully. But despite a few trendy stores that sold Swedish housewares and funky jewelry, more people moved out than in, overrun by drug dealers and muggings.

  This was it. Number 74. The boy in the park squinted at Mary as she climbed from her car and locked it, then checked to be sure it was indeed locked. Her mind drifted, as it often did, to San Francisco, to the view of bright blue sky and the nearby bay that used to greet her every morning as she left her apartment in North Beach. The streets smelled of baking bread, strong coffee, salt air. Thinking of this made her nose twitch against the bracing cold and strong odor of garbage.

  Up the stairs to the front door, and just as Ellen had described, Mary found three doorbells, none of them marked. “Ring the middle one and wait for me to buzz you in,” she’d said.

  Mary pressed the buzzer, and waited. It was 10 a.m., exactly the time she’d been told to come. Even with getting lost and circling the park twice before finding the house, she’d managed to arrive on time. She marched in place to keep warm. She rang the buzzer again. The windows in the bottom apartment were decorated with press-on snowflakes, already peeling.

  When the buzzer finally did ring, she grabbed the doorknob and quickly yanked the door open. Inside, the smells of gas and cabbage. A dark hallway with scuffed parquet floors. The stairs were covered in cheap dark green carpet. An open door awaited her at the top and she moved toward it, the way she moved toward everything these days, slowly, as if walking through gauze.

  “Hello,” Mary called. Then, when she got no answer,

  “Hello?”

  “Back here!”

  Mary stepped inside, into a living room filled with musical instruments. A cello, a fiddle, two banjos. Other stringed things Mary didn’t recognize. She had to step over them to move in the direction of the voice that had called to her. More instruments lined the wall that ended at the kitchen, a small ugly room with ancient appliances in avocado green and a strange collection of plastic hoses, measuring cups, and bottled water. Through the kitchen and down a dark hall with closed doors, and then finally, at the end, a smattering of light, an open door.

  “I made it, Ellen,” Mary said.

  But when she walked into the room at the end of the hall she found not Ellen, but a young girl in a hospital bed and a boy in a chair beside her.

  “Oh,” Mary said, stepping back.

  The girl smiled. She was fourteen or fifteen, with long pale blond hair, sunken cheeks flushed red, and two thin tubes snaking into her nose. Mary recognized the gurgle of an oxygen tank, the smell of sickness, and she stepped back even farther.

  “I’m Bridget,” the girl said. “You’re looking for my mom?” She rolled her eyes. “She always does this. She forgets to tell me someone might show up. I mean, I could have put twinkly lights on my oxygen or something.”

  “She was going to help me make socks,” Mary said, struck dumb to find herself in the very place she most hated to be—around a sick child.” Ellen hadn’t mentioned a daughter, she was certain of that. Certainly not a sick daughter. She held up her bag. Knitting needles lay in the girl’s lap, and a long train of sparkly yarn.

  “Socks,” Bridget said, rolling her eyes again. “They’re impossible, you know. I’m making the world’s longest scarf.” She held it up for Mary to see.

  “Pretty,” Mary said, wanting to flee.

  “Have you ever heard of Sadako?”

  Mary shook her head no.

  “Really? She’s this amazing girl who survived Hiroshima. You know, the A bomb? Only to be struck with this horrible deadly cancer. I guess a lot of survivors got it. From the radiation. So her friend decided that if she made a thousand cranes out of origami, Sadako would live, despite all odds. So all of her friends, and then all these Japanese schoolchildren, and eventually the whole world started making origami cranes. But they didn’t reach a thousand and she died. I can’t do origami so I’m knitting this scarf until it’s a thousand feet long.” She lay back, out of breath, and closed her eyes. “Jeb, how many miles are a thousand feet?” she said without opening them.

  “I don’t think it’s any miles. I think a mile is like five thousand feet,” the boy said. His hair was dark and curly; beneath it his eyes shone green above a narrow face.

  “Drat,” Bridget said. “It would be nice to knit a mile-long scarf.”

  “Could you tell your mother I came?” Mary said.

  “She had to go to the drugstore and stuff,” Jeb explained quietly. “Sometimes things get a little worse. You know.”

  Mary found herself watching Bridget’s shallow breath, the small up-and-down of her chest, the way she’d sat and watched Stella, willing her to keep breathing. She had grown short of breath herself that long hospital night in her frantic attempts to keep her daughter alive.

  “That’s all right,” Mary said, wanting to go but unable to shift her gaze from Bridget.

  “So I’ll tell her that who came by?” Jeb was asking.

  Mary inhaled deeply. Exhaled. Finally turned away. “Mary,” she said.

  IT WAS ENOUGH to send her into her bed. Ellen had a daughter and that daughter was very sick. Mary didn’t want a friend with a sick daughter. She didn’t want to know a young girl who was going to die.

  “But maybe she’s recovering from something,” Dylan had said.

  His optimism made her angry.

  In the morning he would leave for work and she would pretend to get up. She would even get dressed, like she had somewhere to go. She would sit at the kitchen table eating toast, feigning interest in the newspaper. She would comment on a headline, or read a piece of a review to him. Sometimes he quizzed her cautiously. “So you’re going to hang out with that woman from knitting?” he’d say. Or, “So you might call Eddie today?” And Mary would nod and pretend that anything was possible. When Dylan bent to kiss her goodbye, Mary smiled up at him as if she were going to have a good day.

  From the window, she watched him drive away, a man in a suit going to his office. A man who didn’t have a clue that his wife was getting worse. A man, she thought, who could still go into an office every day and defend clients and write briefs and go to court and even have friendly cocktails with his partners after work. She watched Holly pull up and leave Christmas cookies on the front step and Eddie slide an invitation to the office Christmas party through her mail slot.

  Across the street, the neighbors had put electric candles in all the windows and they glowed bright all day. They had put a big fat wreath on their door. Not just a basic wreath, but a complicated one made of greenery and small blue berries and gold ribbon. And the house next door had the biggest Christmas tree anyone had ever seen, an obscene tree, really, with tinsel and garland and colored blinking lights.

  She couldn’t even knit. Instead, she put on the television and watched chefs on the Food Network make impossibly complicated meals. One made pudding out of mortadella. One made marshmal
lows from scratch. Mary hated these chefs, with their efficiency and creativity. They demonstrated how to core a pineapple, peel a mango, split a vanilla bean and remove its seeds.

  When the phone rang, she listened as people left her messages. “Let me take you Christmas shopping,” Jodie shouted into the answering machine. “Scratch that. It’s a stupid idea. I’m sorry.” Eddie called several times, reminding her to come to the Christmas party. “I left an invitation,” he said. Scarlet asked her to come to knitting; that was how Mary knew it was Wednesday and that she’d been in bed for almost a week.

  The next time the phone rang, Mary answered it. If it was Eddie, she would accept an assignment. If it was Scarlet or Lulu, she would agree to go to the knitting circle. The phone seemed, suddenly, important. A lifeline. A way out of bed, at least.

  But it was her mother.

  “Do you know what day today is?” her mother was saying.

  “Wednesday,” Mary said.

  “No,” her mother said. “Well, yes. But I mean the date. It’s Pearl Harbor Day,” her mother continued without waiting for an answer.

  “Pearl Harbor Day?” Mary said.

  “You know something, Mary? You mince words. You’re too particular. It’s not Pearl Harbor Day, like an official holiday or something. It’s the anniversary. Don’t you even turn on the TV?”

  Mary’s eyes drifted to her television screen where a chef was making a salsa out of strange ingredients like peaches and ancho chiles.

  “All morning it’s been Pearl Harbor this and Pearl Harbor that. Personally, I’m sick of it. Enough already.”

  “Thank you for that, Mom. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m in the middle of something—”