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The phone rang and Mary let the machine pick up.
Her boss’s voice filled the room.
“Hey, Mary, it’s me, Eddie,” he said. “Just, you know, checking in.”
As Eddie talked, Mary set the table for dinner. Two plates, two napkins, two forks, two wineglasses. Even after all these months this simple act made her gut wrench. That third seat—Stella’s seat—empty.
“So there’s this truck driving around town selling tacos,” Eddie was saying. “Or empanadas. Something. And I was thinking, you could maybe find this truck and eat some tacos, or whatever, and write about the experience.”
“Shut up, Eddie,” Mary said to the answering machine.
“I don’t know, Mary,” Eddie said, his voice soft. “Maybe it would help a little.”
Her mouth filled with a sharp metallic taste and she swallowed hard a few times.
“The thing is,” Eddie continued, “I know you’re standing right there listening to me and I just wish you would pick up the phone or go and eat some empanadas or something.” He waited, as if she might really pick up the phone. “Okay,” he said finally. “Call me?”
At the sound of him hanging up, Mary said, “Bye, Eddie.”
The faces of the women in the knitting circle floated across her mind. She liked that they were strangers, that her story, her tragedy, was unknown to them. And, she realized, their stories were unknown to her. For all she knew, they each held their own secret; they each knit to … what had Scarlet said? To save their lives. To them, she was a knitter, a woman who could make something from a ball of yarn. Her friends would never believe this of her. Once, out of frustration, her friend Jodie had come over and sewn on all of Mary’s missing or loose buttons. “Hopeless,” Jodie had called her. It had been weeks since Jodie had even called. Like many of her friends, Jodie had run out of ways to offer comfort.
Mary heard Dylan’s key in the door and ran to meet him.
“What a welcome,” he whispered into her hair.
She held on to him hard. She hated being alone now, and she hated her neediness.
“Smells good,” Dylan said.
“Me?” Mary said, flirting. “Or dinner?”
“Both,” he said.
“Can you believe it?” she said, walking to the stove. “Eddie wants me to chase some food truck around town.”
“And?” Dylan said too hopefully.
“And write about it,” Mary snapped. “As if I could write about the importance of a taco,” she muttered.
She plucked a strand of spaghetti from the boiling water and bit into it, testing. She tried not to think of Stella standing at her side, her pasta tester, the way she would bite into a strand and wrinkle her nose with seriousness before pronouncing it was almost ready. “Two more hours,” she liked to say.
“It might be fun,” Dylan said, but she could tell his heart wasn’t into having this argument again. It had become a pattern with them, his frustrated urging for her to go back to work, her anger at him for being able to work at all. A few times it had grown into full-blown fighting, with Dylan yelling at her, “You have to try to help yourself!” and Mary accusing him of being callous. More often, though, it was this quiet disagreement, this sarcasm and misunderstanding, the hurt feelings that followed.
Mary sighed and drained the pasta, stirring in the sauce she’d made—onions, crushed tomatoes, pancetta. As she grated cheese over it, Dylan opened a bottle of wine.
“I can’t get used to it,” Mary said, turning her attention to the salad, drizzling olive oil over the greens and sprinkling sea salt. “The silence.”
Dylan stood, head bent, while she struggled to explain how the kitchen, the house, the world felt to her without Stella in it. But finally she shrugged, and finished dressing the salad. Words, her livelihood, her refuge, even at times her salvation, were now the most useless things in the world. Dylan couldn’t understand that.
Stella would be singing while Mary finished making dinner. Or she would be showing off her work brought home from kindergarten that day. She would ask for an apple, sliced and peeled, to nibble. She would ask for a cup of water. She would make noise. Guiltily Mary remembered her impatience with these distractions. How could she have grown impatient with Stella?
Mary heard her loud footsteps as she brought the food to the table. The screech of the chair as Dylan pulled it away from the table. Mary’s own sigh.
“Your latest creation?” Dylan said, motioning to the scarf.
He was trying to move past the awkwardness. She knew that, but she still smarted from it.
“How’d you make that pattern?” he asked, impressed.
“It self-stripes as you knit.”
“My wife, the knitter,” he said.
Mary was acutely aware of the sounds of chewing, of forks on plates, of their breathing.
“I wonder about those women,” she said after a time, softening. “At the knitting circle.”
“What about them?” Dylan said.
“You know, who they are. There’s this one woman, Beth. She’s so rigid. Hair in place. Clothes pressed. Lipstick. Apparently she does everything perfectly.”
Mary didn’t mention the few facts she had gleaned about Beth. The four children in matching sweaters who smiled out of a posed studio photograph she’d passed around. Four children! Mary had thought, shuddering at that abundance, that good luck.
“I’m certain she has one of those houses, those center-hall colonials with the big square rooms and window treatments.” She flushed, embarrassed. “God,” Mary said. “Listen to me. I hardly know the woman. I hate her because she has so … so much.”
“I do it too,” Dylan said. “When I see a father walking with his little girl on his shoulders I want to yell at him. How could he have this privilege? This blessing?”
His voice trembled and Mary touched his hand lightly. Who are we becoming? she wondered.
After a moment, she said, “You know that great bakery? Rouge?”
“With the really buttery croissants?” Dylan said. “And those special things? What are they?”
“Cannelles,” she said. “The owner’s in the knitting circle. Scarlet. She’s lovely. Long red hair, like … like …” She’d show him, Mary thought. She was a writer after all, surely she could come up with a good description. “Like rusty pipes,” she said finally.
“Rusty pipes?” Dylan said, grinning. “That sounds very lovely.”
Mary slapped his arm playfully. “It is lovely. And she has these cheekbones. Real style. She must have lived somewhere fabulously sophisticated.”
Dylan put his hand to her cheek. “You’re lovely,” he said softly.
Mary let him pull her close. Whenever they kissed, she wanted to cry.
“Holly left us cupcakes,” she whispered when their lips parted. “A dozen of them. She colored the frosting toxic orange.”
“Later,” Dylan said.
They left the half-empty plates on the table and together went upstairs to bed.
Her hands needed to do it. It was as if the movement of the needles coming together and falling apart took away the horrible anxiety that bubbled up in her throughout the day. Just when Mary began to consider the challenge of tassels, her mother called.
“Sometimes I miss the leaves changing,” her mother told her. “Those gorgeous colors. The cactus are beautiful in their way, but still.”
“I’ve done it,” Mary said reluctantly. “I’ve learned to knit.”
“Ah,” her mother said. “So Alice called.”
When Mary didn’t reply, her mother said, “It’s good, isn’t it? They say to some women, religious women, each stitch is like a prayer.”
Mary had no interest in discussing spirituality with her mother. “How do you make tassels? I’ve made this scarf and I think tassels would really complete it.” Plus, Mary added to herself, I’m about to lose my fucking mind and I think if my hands stay busy it will help and I’ve even thought about sitting here and knitting scarves until I die.
“Simple,” her mother said. “Take some leftover yarn and cut it all the same length and then make bundles of three or four of those. Tie them along the hem in good strong knots.”
“How many, though? How close together do I tie them?”
“Be creative, Mary. Do whatever suits you.”
Mary frowned, eyeing the hem of her scarf.
“I have Spanish at eleven,” her mother said. “Better go.”
“Right,” Mary said.
One day, a few months after her mother had stopped drinking, Mary came home from school and found her sitting on the sofa rolling yarn into fat balls. By this time, her father had started to recede from the family, as if once her mother stopped drinking he no longer had a role there. When Mary left for college, her parents got divorced, but their separation from each other began before that.
“You’re knitting?” Mary said.
“I used to knit socks and hats for the GIs,” her mother had explained.
“What GIs?”
“During World War Two. Betty and I would walk down to the church and sit with all the other girls knitting. It was very patriotic.”
“So now you’re going to sit here and knit all day and send socks to soldiers in Vietnam?”
“Babies,” her mother said softly. “I’m knitting hats for the babies in the hospital. The newborns,” she said, holding up a tiny powder blue hat.
For the rest of that year, small hats in pastel colors piled up everywhere, on end tables and chairs and countertops. Then they would disappear and her mother began new piles. Eventually she knit striped hats, and white ones flecked with color, and then zigzag patterns.
“She’s lost her mind,” Mary whispered to her best friend Lisa.
Lisa could only nod and stare at all the tiny hats everywhere.
Mary lost her virginity in her bedroom while her mother sat downstairs knitting hats for babies she did not know. Every afternoon that spring, Mary and her boyfriend Billy had sex on her pink-and-white-striped sheets, Billy turning her every way he could, entering her from every direction, kissing every part of her, while her mother sat, oblivious, and knit those stupid hats.
Sometimes Mary imagined that she could see through the hardwood floor, past the ceiling, into the living room where her mother sat surrounded by yarn. Maybe, Mary thought, her mother was only capable of loving one thing at a time. There had been her father at some point, she supposed. And then the drinking. And now this, knitting. But Mary couldn’t help wondering why she had never been her mother’s obsession. Nothing Mary had ever done—playing Dorothy in the third-grade production of The Wizard of Oz, getting straight A’s her entire sophomore year, winning her school’s top literary prize—nothing, had ever earned her more than halfhearted praise from her mother. “You’ll go far,” her mother liked to say. She’d make her toads-in-the-hole for breakfast and call it a celebration.
While her parents watched The Fugitive, Mary took Billy upstairs to her room. As she unbuttoned the five buttons on his jeans, he whispered, “I don’t know, Mary. They’re both downstairs.”
She kneeled in front of him, taking him into her mouth. From downstairs, she heard David Janssen searching for the one-armed man. Her mother would be knitting without even glancing down at her stitches. Her father would have Time magazine opened in his lap. Billy groaned and Mary yanked her head away. Already her mind was far from here, from the tiny hats and her mother’s glazed stare and her father’s impenetrable front. She could imagine her future, bright and near.
It took Mary almost the entire next morning to do the tassels, but when she finished she decided to go to Big Alice’s and buy more yarn. The idea that these scarves were becoming like those long-ago infant hats her mother made occurred to her. But she was different, she told herself. She would give them as Christmas gifts. Mary earmarked the striped one for Dylan’s niece, Ali, who went to college in Vermont and certainly needed scarves. The first one she would keep for herself; Alice had said you should keep the first thing you knit.
Satisfied with her practicality, she entered the store. The smell of wool comforted her, the way the old-book-and-furniture-polish smell of libraries used to. Mary could still remember how the ball scene in Anna Karenina had helped calm her after one of her mother’s tirades; how Marjorie Morningstar’s kiss under the lilacs had let her forget her own broken heart one summer; how Miss Marple used to make her smile.
Now here she stood in a knitting store, and that same sense of safety, of peace, filled her. The store was crowded, but Mary spotted Scarlet’s red hair across the room. She had on a green shawl with elaborate embroidery and long fringe wrapped around her, and beneath it she wore a startling fuchsia turtleneck.
Scarlet turned, her arms filled with a dozen or more skeins of fat loopy yarn in shades of beige and rust and white. Her eyes crinkled at the sight of Mary.
“Told you,” Scarlet said.
“I admit it,” Mary laughed.
Scarlet dropped her yarn on the counter and made her way over to Mary. “You need to learn how to purl and you look like you need a cup of coffee.”
“Coffee, yes,” Mary said. “But purling still seems … unnecessary.” Already she was eyeing a variegated yarn in moss green with gold and red and orange pom-poms woven throughout. It made her think of autumn. Hesitantly, she lifted a skein.
“That yarn is fun to work with. It makes a great child’s sweater,” Scarlet said, pointing to a small sample hanging up.
Mary swallowed hard and managed to shake her head.
“It also makes a great scarf,” Scarlet said easily. “But not for purling. Let’s pick out some multicolored yarn and get us that coffee. I make a café au lait that, if you close your eyes, will make you think you’re in France.”
Relieved, Mary followed Scarlet’s soft green shawl through the crowded store, toward her next lesson.
Mary sat at the counter that separated Scarlet’s living area from the kitchen in her loft in an old jewelry factory. The walls were brick and the ceiling had steel beams across it. Below the wall of windows city traffic inched toward the highway.
Scarlet handed Mary a yellow ceramic bowl of café au lait. “Let’s sit on the sofa where the light’s better,” she said.
Mary’s yarn was pink and yellow and blue. A funny tangle of Stella’s favorite colors, she realized as she watched Scarlet cast on for her and the colors revealed themselves.
“Knit two stitches,” Scarlet said.
She smelled of sugar and the sour tang of yeast. Up close like this, Mary saw pale lines etched at the corners of her mouth and eyes.
“Remember when you purl it’s tip to tip,” Scarlet said, pulling the loose yarn in front. “The tip of this needle goes here and they form an X, see?”
Scarlet purled two stitches and then turned it over to Mary. “Knit two, purl two,” she said. “It’s tedious as hell, but when you finish that scarf you’ll be an expert purler.”
Mary knit two easily, then hesitated.
“Tip to tip,” Scarlet said, picking up her own knitting.
When Mary successfully purled two stitches, Scarlet said, “I knew you could do it.”
They knit in silence, the clicking of the wooden needles the only sound except the traffic below. Scarlet’s apartment was like a slice of Provence. Everything in soft yellows and blues with splashes of red, the wooden tables rough-hewn and worn, with drips of wax from candles and rings left from wet glasses. Mary imagined exotic men here, good red wine, the smells of a daube simmering on the stove, and pungent cheese and olives on this coffee table.
“How did you end up in Providence owning a bakery?” Mary asked. “You seem like you belong somewhere entirely different.”
