The Knitting Circle (27 page)

THE NEWS AT the next stitch-of-the-month club was that Bridget was coming home from the hospital that weekend. Last month, Alice had taken donations and made up a knitting basket for her: soft pastel yarns and a variety of needles, a measuring tape shaped like a woolly sheep, and a simple pattern for a hat. Scarlet and Alice had delivered it to the hospital themselves, and reported that Bridget looked healthy, healthier than she’d ever looked. Ellen was, of course, exhausted, but her cautious optimism could not be hidden.

Now Bridget was coming home with a good prognosis. The transplanted heart was pumping as if it were her own, and she could breathe easily, even doing light exercise.

In between working on this month’s stitch, the chevron, everyone discussed a welcome-home party for Ellen and Bridget. When they chose a date, Mary lied and said she couldn’t make it.

“We’ll reschedule then,” Alice said, opening her appointment book again.

“No, no,” Mary insisted. “I’m so crazy with work. You’ll never get there if you wait for me.”

She didn’t look up into their silence. With her head bent and her focus on her knitting, Mary could avoid considering how ungracious she had become. The world around her was full of babies about to be born, daughters whose lives got saved, triumphs over adversities. Mary carefully paid attention to the row she was knitting.
Knit five, purl four, knit two
…

THE DAY OF Bridget and Ellen’s welcome-home party, Mary drove an hour south to the small seaside town of Westerly. A movie theater had opened there a few months earlier that showed old movies and served soup and panini, wine and espresso. She’d been meaning to review it, and by going today she felt slightly less guilty for avoiding Ellen.

Mary glanced at her watch and saw she was just on time. She hurried inside, ordered a mozzarella and tomato panini and a beer, then entered the already-dark movie theater. Although Mary had expected to be alone at a matinee on a sunny afternoon, there was only one empty table. She sat and began to eat her sandwich just as the screen came down and
Mrs. Miniver
began to play.

By the time the credits rolled, Mary had fallen in love with the place. What a comfort to escape into a darkened theater for an old movie. She watched the faces of the people as they left and knew they felt the same way. Back in the lobby, she waited in line for dessert and coffee beside a tall, balding man who—like Mary herself—was still teary from the film. He saw her watching him and shrugged apologetically.

“I can cry over anything,” he said.

Mary studied his face a moment, finding him familiar. “I think I know you,” she said finally.

He shook his head. “I just moved down here. I’m opening a knitting store across the street.”

“Knitting?” she asked.

“Men knit, you know,” he said, his blue eyes sparkling. Fishermen invented it from the knots they used to repair their nets.”

Mary took a step back to better see his face. “That’s how I know you. From Big Alice’s.”

His smile froze, then disappeared.

Mary put her hand on his. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was there that night you finished the blanket.”

“Ah,” he said.

“Roger, right?”

By now they both had their desserts and coffees. Roger motioned to an empty café table. “Want to sit awhile?”

“I do,” Mary said.

Roger pointed across the street. “My store,” he said. “The Sit and Knit Two. Alice is my not-so-silent partner.”

“I had no idea,” Mary said, surprised.

“She knew I needed to get away, to do something different. After what happened, all I did was sit at home and knit. I have a lot of sweaters, let me tell you.”

When they finished their desserts, Roger suggested a walk by the river that flowed noisily behind the theater.

“I bought that building,” he continued as they walked, “and spent the winter making the upstairs livable, and now I’m getting ready to open the store.”

Mary pointed toward her car. “This is me,” she said.

“Matinees every Thursday,” he said.

“Maybe I’ll see you next Thursday then,” Mary told him.

Roger grinned at her. “See you then,” he said.

THE NEXT THURSDAY, after
Tea and Sympathy
, Mary told Roger about avoiding Ellen.

“Me too!” he said. “God knows I wanted that child to make it. But then I felt so riddled with jealousy that I can’t bear it. I sent an overly extravagant flower arrangement. It had guilt written all over it.”

“So did I!” Mary admitted.

Roger wagged his finger at her. “We’re transparent.”

“Ellen’s going to be at the next stitch-of-the-month meeting. I have to visit before then,” Mary said.

Roger leaned close to her. “We’ll go together. What do you say? Two brokenhearted cowards.”

Mary saw that he had tears in his eyes. “All right,” she said.

“But not next week. Next week is
The Days of Wine and Roses
. We can’t miss that.”

“All right,” Mary said again.

“You’ll stay for dinner afterwards,” Roger told her.

Mary took a breath and then said, “Since my husband moved out to pursue a happier life, I happen to be free for dinner.”

“Oh, honey,” Roger said.

“It has to start getting better, right?”

“It already has,” Roger said.

THE WALLS OF his loft were the purple of eggplants, and religious folk art hung from them: oversized silver
milagros
, ornate paintings of the Black Madonna, heavy wooden crucifixes and bright
retablos
.

“We collected them,” Roger explained. He was mixing a pitcher of Cosmopolitans—“the best ones you’ve ever had,” he’d told Mary. “We traveled in Mexico quite a bit. Central America. Peru. His Spanish was excellent.”

Mary took the frothy pink cocktail he offered her.

“Is it the best you’ve ever had?” Roger said.

“The best,” she agreed.

Roger flopped onto the red velvet couch. “Wasn’t Lee Remick so beautiful? So tragic?”

“Those Brandy Alexanders,” Mary said, shaking her head.

“They did her in.”

“That’s what I should have made,” Roger said. “In honor of the movie.”

“No, this is perfect,” Mary said. “May I tell you how awful it is to work with two pregnant women and one expectant father?”

Roger refilled their martini glasses, then leaned back into the cushions. “Every time I see two men walking down the street together, I want to run them over. Honest, I do.”

Mary considered a moment, then she asked him, “But you’re okay, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “But sometimes I curse even that.”

Mary went and sat beside Roger on the couch. Its cushions were so soft they seemed to swallow her up. “I have thought that too,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be better to be with Stella than alone here without her?”

“We don’t get to choose,” Roger said.

“Dylan chose,” Mary said. “He chose to leave me.”

Outside the apartment’s large bank of windows, it had grown dark. But he made no move to turn on any lights other than the small lamp beside the sofa and the soft globe light still on in the kitchen.

“Do you think there’s anything afterwards? Heaven or anything?” Mary asked.

“I don’t know,” Roger said. “I want there to be. But I just don’t know.”

“I want there to be too,” Mary said.

It was one of the things she feared most, that Stella was simply gone forever. She would not ever again hold her daughter, or see her soft round face. In the hospital, she remembered praying for Stella to call out to her, to say “Mama.” And Stella had said it. She squeezed her eyes shut against the memory.

“Have you done the medium route?” Roger said, his voice returning to its playful self.

“No. A friend wanted to take me once, but I just can’t buy it. You?”

“Alice came with me once. ‘Rubbish,’ she said before it even started. ‘A bunch of rubbish.’” Roger sighed. “I suppose it was,” he said.

Mary held out her glass and he got up to refill them.

“Okay,” Mary said, “here’s a totally sexist question.”

“How did I ever start to knit?” he laughed.

“You are the only man I’ve ever seen knitting,” she told him.

“Being homosexual isn’t a good enough reason?”

She shook her head.

“I learned probably for the same reason you did. To save my life.” He rubbed at the stem of his martini glass absently. “We had these few idyllic years. Gave up our tiny tiny apartment in the West Village and moved to this eighteenth-century farmhouse. Totally restored it. Opened a nursery. The plant kind, not the kid kind. Made friends. Like Alice. And we had fabulous dinner parties on our big wooden table with white candles dripping wax on it and good wine. People still talk about our New Year’s Eve party. We used to say that we felt like we were living in a Ralph Lauren catalogue.

“Then he goes for a routine physical and we’re not even worried. I mean, if you were a gay man in New York City in the eighties, you have had your AIDS test, believe me. That was part of our charmed life. That we had escaped it somehow. Then one night I’m standing at the stove making spaghetti carbonara. I’ve got the pancetta browning and the spaghetti cooking, I’m working on a big glass of a very nice Barbera, and the light from the garden is coming in the window just so that it casts a small glow on him at the table. The phone rings. He leans over and picks it up. And zap! our life ends.

“It took eight more years before he died. But we stepped out of that catalogue and into hell right then. Our world became T-cell counts and bottles of pills and late-night emergency trips to the hospital. One morning, early, I’m having coffee at her house after another night spent in the ER hoping they can save his life one more time, and Alice comes around the corner with these knitting needles the size of batons and this gorgeous Rowan chunky yarn and she says, ‘Just sit here and knit.’ She showed me what to do, and I sat at that table for four hours and then I had a scarf finished. My hands stopped shaking along the way and my heart stopped pounding and all I thought about was putting one needle into one loop of yarn and pulling it out.

“Next thing I know, she’s got both of us knitting. You wait in enough doctors’ waiting rooms, or spend enough hours in hospitals, and you can knit a whole fucking wardrobe. Pretty soon, we’re going to the Wednesday night knitting circle. Different people back then. But Ellen was there. Bridget was only seven or eight.

“That’s how I became friends with Ellen. She understood. I met her at the knitting circle and she had the same life as I did. Everything was about keeping the person she loved alive. Everything. But I couldn’t do it and she could. I failed.”

“No!” Mary said. “Medicine failed.”

“I’ve got to go see her,” he said. “Ellen, I mean. Talk about a lousy friend. I’ve been trying to figure out if all that time we both were helping each other through these medical emergencies and navigating these horrible conditions and watching our loved ones failing, were we expecting them both to die? Or to live? Because I keep feeling like one of us didn’t keep our promise to the other. I’m just not sure which one it is, her or me.”

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Mary said. “We’ll bring something really decadent. Expensive chocolates or champagne.”

“When your husband comes back, are you going to drop me?” Roger said.

“He’s not coming back,” she said.

“He’ll come to his senses,” Roger said.

“I won’t drop you,” Mary told him.

THE NEXT DAY, another beautiful sunny spring day, Mary and Roger drove together to Ellen’s apartment. Even her bleak neighborhood looked bright. In the park, Hmong families were having a party of some kind. Families dressed in elaborately embroidered outfits played music and ate food spread on folding tables. The sound of children’s laughter split the air. Two men walking identical pugs passed by, then a group of women pushing babies in strollers.

Mary carried an oversized bottle of Veuve Clicquot and Roger had a balloon bouquet and a box of handmade chocolates wrapped with a giant gold bow. They went inside, up the stairs, to Ellen’s door, which was slightly ajar.

Right outside it, Roger paused to hug Mary. “We are happy,” he whispered to her. “Remember that.”

Then he pushed open the door.

“Ta-da!” he shouted in his biggest voice.

Bridget came running into the room, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, healthy. She ran into Roger’s arms, giggling. Ellen came in right behind her. Mary watched her face light up when she saw that Roger had come.

“Honey,” Roger said, studying Bridget at arm’s length, “that new heart of yours has done wonders for you. Why, you’re positively gorgeous!”

It seemed to Mary that Ellen looked stunned by the turn of events in her life.

“Mary,” Roger said, “what in the world are you waiting for? Pop that cork!”

Mary let the sweet foam of champagne spill down her hands and arms, in celebration. Ellen ran to get glasses, and returned with a collection of Winnie-the-Pooh jelly jars, holding them out for Mary to fill.

“To life,” Roger said, looking directly at Mary.

“To life,” she repeated.

16

THE KNITTING CIRCLE

BY SUMMER, THE
knitting circle met in the empty new frame of Big Alice’s Sit and Knit. Without a roof, sunlight poured into the shell. The women sat on beach chairs, slathered sunscreen on their arms and faces, and knit with cotton yarn: floppy hats, light lap blankets for cool summer nights. Someone always brought a pitcher of cocktails. Someone always brought snacks. They met earlier, while the sun was still bright, and knit until dusk. Even then they sometimes stayed on, sipping the last of their drinks, watered down from melted ice, and running their fingers across empty platters for the crumbs and bits left behind.

At first, Beth arrived for these Wednesday nights with crab Rangoon or rounds of baguettes smeared with sun-dried tomatoes whipped with cream cheese. Her blond hair was short and chic, wisps of pale curls that showed off her angular cheekbones and deep-set blue eyes. She had end-of-the-year school pictures of her kids, all in their school uniforms—white shirts and blue ties for the boys; Peter Pan collars and plaid jumpers for the girls. Even Mary admired the straight parts and neat braids Beth had made. Holding the pictures, staring into a child’s gap-toothed grin, Mary remembered what a failure she had been at pigtails and braids, how slippery and impossible Stella’s hair had felt beneath her hands.