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,