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Authors: Ann Hood
The Knitting Circle
More praise for Ann Hood and
The Knitting Circle
“One can only admire Hood for the effort she takes in this book to describe an insupportable grief…. Undeniably real. The lesson—that being willing to share our stories, we learn how to live—cannot be dismissed.”
—Julie Wittes Schlack,
Boston Globe
“Though every sentence is steeped in heart-wrenching sadness, Hood conveys the positive power of knitting and its ability to rescue us in our darkest hours.”
—Cheryl Krementz,
knitsimple Magazine
“[Hood’s] attention to craft and her experience as a novelist—and journalist—make for an intelligent, moving read in which knitting is the tie that binds these women together and helps them to heal…. Hood has done a most difficult thing, and she has done it successfully: She has taken her life and transformed it into art.”
—Barbara DeMarco-Barrett,
Pages Magazine
“[Hood’s] portrait of Mary’s grief is so real and so raw. The unpredictable arc of it…gives Mary’s grief a three-dimensional humanity that a less familiar portraitist might have missed…. The prose of
The Knitting Circle
is clear, even as Mary’s perspective is clouded by heartbreak, and the pace of the story is just right.”
—Beth Schwartzapfel,
Providence Journal
“Writer Ann Hood has written seven previous novels, and it shows in her strong writing and Mary’s precisely rendered mourning.”
—Yvonne Zipp,
Christian Science Monitor
“The strength of the novel is in the painfully realistic portrayal of the stages of mourning, and though there’s a lot of knitting…the terminology’s simple enough for non-knitters to follow and doesn’t distract from the quick pace of the narrative.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Hood’s words…pull you along, like a knitting pattern, one mesmerizing, settling click at a time, stitch by stitch, row by row, until you find yourself with something solid and real.”
—Peggy McMullen,
The Oregonian
“This book is rich in sensory detail…. This book shines a light on women helping each other and the world one stitch at a time.”
—Jan Marin Tramontano,
Albany Times Union
“Ann Hood can really write, and the groundings of this book and the insights within it come sadly and powerfully from a place other than the writer’s imagination…. Each woman’s story is compelling in its own way. There’s none of the ‘and you thought you had it bad’ here. One woman’s grief doesn’t under-cut any other’s. They are all afforded their own due respect.”
—Rita Giordano,
Philadelphia Inquirer
“It is a testament to Hood’s power as a writer that the reader is drawn in and touched by each character’s tale.”
—Dan Pope,
Hartford Courant
“Beautiful language and convincing characters make it a worthwhile read…. Hood draws her characters sympathetically if unsparingly.”
—
Library Journal
THE KNITTING CIRCLE
ALSO BY ANN HOOD
Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine
Waiting to Vanish
Three Legged Horse
Something Blue
Places to Stay the Night
The Properties of Water
Ruby
Do Not Go Gentle
An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life: Stories
THE KNITTING CIRCLE
Ann Hood
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK • LONDON
For knitters
For friends
Copyright © 2007 by Ann Hood
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hood, Ann, 1956–
The knitting circle /Ann Hood.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-06713-2
1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Knitting—Therapeutic use—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.0537K55 2007
813'.54—dc22 2006032223
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
CONTENTS
PART THREE
KNIT TWO TOGETHER (K2 to g)
PART SEVEN
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
PROLOGUE
Daughter, I have a story to tell you. I have wanted to tell it to you for a very long time. But unlike Babar or Eloise or any of the other stories that you loved to hear, this one is not funny. This one is not clever. It is simply true. It is my story, yet I do not have the words to tell it. Instead, I pick up my needles and I knit. Every stitch is a letter. A row spells out “I love you.” I knit “I love you” into everything I make. Like a prayer, or a wish, I send it out to you, hoping you can hear me. Hoping, daughter, that the story I am knitting reaches you somehow. Hoping, that my love reaches you somehow.
Part One
CASTING ON
To knit, you have to have the stitches on one needle. “Casting on” is the term for making the foundation row of stitches. Once you have cast on, you are ready to knit.
—NANCY J. THOMAS AND ILANA RABINOWITZ,
A Passion for Knitting
1
MARY
MARY SHOWED UP
empty-handed.
“I don’t have anything with me,” she said, and she opened her arms to indicate their emptiness.
The woman standing before her was called Big Alice, but there was nothing big about her. She stood five feet tall, with a tiny waist, short silver hair, and gray eyes the color of a sky right before a storm. Big Alice had her slight body wedged between the worn wooden door to the shop and Mary herself.
“This isn’t really my kind of thing,” Mary said apologetically.
The woman nodded. “I know,” she said, stepping back so that the door swung open wide. “I can’t tell you how many people have stood right where you’re standing and said that exact thing.” Her voice was soft, British.
“Well,” Mary said, because she didn’t know what else to say.
She never did know what to say these days, or what to do. This was in September, five months after her daughter Stella had died. That stunned disbelief had ebbed slightly, but the horrible noises in her head had grown. They were hospital noises, doctors’ voices, and Stella’s own five-year-old voice saying
Mama
. Sometimes Mary imagined she really heard her daughter calling out to her and her heart would squeeze tight on itself.
“Come on in,” Big Alice said.
Mary followed her into the shop. Alice wore a gray tweed skirt, a white oxford shirt, a gold cardigan, and pearls. Although the top half of her looked like a schoolmarm, she had crazy-colored striped socks on her feet and pink chenille bedroom slippers with red rhinestone cherries across the tops.
“I’ve got the gout,” Big Alice explained, lifting one slippered foot. Then she added, “I guess you know I’m Alice.”
“Yes,” Mary said.
Like everything else, Mary could easily have forgotten the woman’s name. She’d written it on one of the hundreds of Post-its scattered around the house like confetti after a party. But, like all of the phone numbers and dates and directions, the paper with
Alice
written on it was gone. Outside the store, however, a wooden sign read
Big Alice’s Sit and Knit
, and when Mary saw it she had remembered: Alice.
Mary stopped and got her bearings. These days this was always necessary, even in familiar places. In her own kitchen she would stop what she was doing and look around, take stock. Oh, she would say to herself, noting that the television was off instead of tuned to
Sagwa, the Chinese Cat
; the bowl Stella had made at Claytime with its carefully painted and placed polka dots was empty of the sliced cucumbers or mound of blueberries it used to hold; the cutout hearts with crayoned
I love you
’s and the construction-paper kite with its pink ribbon tail drooped. Oh, Mary would say, realizing all over again that this was how her kitchen—her life—looked now. Empty and sad.
The shop was small, with creaky wooden floors and baskets and shelves brimming over with yarn. It smelled like sweaters and cedar and Alice’s own citrus scent. There were three rooms: this small one, the room beyond with the cash register and a well-worn couch slipcovered in a pink and red floral pattern, and another larger room with more yarn and a few chairs.
The yarn was beautiful. Mary saw this immediately and touched some as she followed Alice into the next room, letting her fingertips linger a bit over the skeins.
“So,” Alice was saying, “we’ll start you on a scarf.” She held up a finished scarf. Cobalt blue with pale blue tassels. “You like this one?”
“I guess so,” Mary said.
“You don’t like it? You’re frowning.”
“I do. It’s fine. It’s just, I can’t make it. I’m not good with my hands. I flunked home ec. Really, I did.”
Alice turned toward the wall and pulled down some wooden knitting needles.
“A ten-year-old can make that scarf,” she said, a bit impatiently. She handed the needles to Mary.
They felt large and smooth and awkward in her hands. Mary watched as Alice went over to a shelf and grabbed several balls of yarn. The same cobalt blue, and aquamarine, and mauve.
“Which color do you like?” Alice said. She held them out to Mary like an offering.
“The blue, I guess,” Mary said, and the particular blue of Stella’s eyes presented itself in her mind. When she tried to blink it away, she felt tears slide out. She turned her head and wiped her eyes.
“Blue it is,” Alice said, more gently. She pointed to a chair tucked into a corner beneath balls of fat yarn. “Sit down and I’ll teach you how to knit.”
Mary laughed. “Such optimism,” she said.
“A woman came in here two weeks ago,” Alice said, dropping into an overstuffed chair and sticking her feet up on a small footstool with a needlepoint cover. “She’d never knit a thing, and she’s made three of these scarves. That’s how easy it is.”