The Knitting Circle (11 page)

“I’m in the knitting circle,” the woman said in a soft southern accent. “Ellen.”

“Size one needles, right?” Mary said, remembering her now.

“Socks!” Ellen said, brightening. “I like them because you have to keep changing what you’re doing. Stockinette, then several inches of garter, then it’s time to turn the heel, which is absolutely crazy to do, and then more garter until you have to do the toe and the Kitchener stitch. Plus people love them. They’re so warm and beautiful.” She blushed, and shrugged.

“I don’t think socks are for me,” Mary said.

“I spend so much time waiting that they keep me busy, you know?” Ellen said, still red-cheeked.

“What do you do?” Mary asked.

“I teach music. Part-time, at the music school. I can’t do a full-time position.” She glanced away again. Then looked up and smiled, gathering her things as she rose to leave. “See how neatly they fold up,” she said. She collapsed the four thin needles and stuck them and her yarn into a Ziploc bag.

“Off to teach now?” Mary asked.

Ellen shook her head. “I’m cheating. I’ve had a dreadful few days and I’m sneaking off to the movies.”

Mary surprised herself by blurting, “Maybe we could go together sometime.”

Ellen looked surprised. “My schedule is tight,” she said awkwardly. “But I’ll see you Wednesday night, right?”

“Of course,” Mary said. “I’m sorry.”

But Ellen was already pushing her way through the crowded café, her head bent, her bag held close to her chest.

Mary watched her as she walked across the parking lot to her car. From where she stood, it looked as if Ellen was crying. It must have been the glare from the bright winter sunlight on the tall window.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT BROUGHT an icy snow and high winds. Dylan lit a fire in the living room fireplace and put the McGarrigle Sisters on the CD player.

“Remember that trip to Nova Scotia?” he said, pouring himself a glass of merlot and settling onto the sofa.

“That church hall,” Dylan was saying, “and the strawberry shortcake? The fiddle music?”

“I got pregnant that night,” Mary said.

That trip, driving together all the way to Nova Scotia and beyond, to Prince Edward Island and the small red house on top of a red cliff overlooking a rocky beach. Two weeks of sun and vistas of the Atlantic Ocean. It had seemed impossible that England lay on the other side. That anything did. For Mary and Dylan those two weeks were spent driving, buying homemade pies on the roadside and eating them with their fingers; sex in the morning, sleeping late, groggy sweet breakfasts; digging for clams in the afternoon; evening meals of briny chowders cooked in big pots; then evening stargazing or dancing to fiddle music in the church basements; then more sex, sunburned and beery, the falling together.

“Don’t go with the knitting ladies,” Dylan said. “Stay here with me.”

Six o’clock and already dark outside. The wind rattled the old windows; the icy snow pinged against the glass. Scarlet had the flu and was staying home in bed. Lulu wouldn’t go without Scarlet. But Mary needed yarn. She had used all she’d bought knitting scarves and hats. She needed the rhythm of the needles catching stitches. Needed the sound of one needle clicking against the other. Needed the way it felt like prayer, how her mind could grow calm as she counted:
k1, p1
.

“I’ll be back early,” she said. “The weather’s so awful.”

She saw the disappointment in Dylan’s face, but still she put on her down coat and one of the scarves she’d made and the hat that matched it, and then she kissed her husband lightly on the lips.

“Don’t go to sleep,” she said softly. “Wait up for me.”

She said it like a promise. Dylan pulled her close and kissed her for real. A surge of passion shot through Mary and she realized that Dylan did not kiss her very much anymore. Dylan had already turned away from her. He had opened a book, one of the histories he had taken to reading these past months, stories of warriors and victors.

As she walked outside from the warm house, the sidewalk was slippery and for a moment Mary considered turning around. But then she thought of all the days ahead, the lonely hours stretching before her in that house. She should be making sugar cookies, letting Stella cut them into stars and bells and sprinkling red and green sugar on top. She should be hiding presents in her office closet, bags of paints and bottles of sparkly nail polish and colorful hair ornaments and boxes of beads and all the things that would make Stella happy on Christmas morning.

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 and 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.