Читать книгу The Knitting Circle: The uplifting and heartwarming novel you need to read this year - Ann Hood - Страница 13

In three days, Mary finished her second scarf. She draped it over a chair at the kitchen table for Dylan to see as soon as he got home. Her fingers followed the stripes of color down the length of the scarf. It would look good with tassels, she decided. If she went back to the knitting circle she would ask Alice how to make tassels, and how to attach them.

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.”

“Like where?”

Mary blushed. “I don’t know. France, maybe.”

Scarlet nodded but didn’t reply. She had removed the ornate shade from the table lamp to give them more light, and that bright bulb showed something in her face that Mary could not identify. A sadness, perhaps. No, Mary decided. Regret.

After a time Scarlet looked up from her knitting and right at Mary. She was using very large needles and her sweater had already begun to take shape while Mary’s scarf still seemed small and new.

“Everyone has a story, don’t they?” Scarlet said. “Mine is about bread and the sea and, you’re right, about France.”

Mary held her breath for a moment, her needles poised. Then Scarlet began to speak, and Mary exhaled, put her needles together with a soft click, and listened.

“I was always good with my hands,” Scarlet said. “Even when I was little, I liked to touch things. I used to carry a stuffed dog everywhere with me. Pal, I called him. I rubbed away the fabric on one of his ears. And I rubbed holes into all of my blankets. I loved the feel of fabric in my fingers. It brought me … not joy, exactly, but … comfort. Yes, comfort.”

Scarlet paused, lost in thought.

“The first time I baked bread,” she continued, “I knew this was something I could do for the rest of my life.”

She took a breath, then continued.

“I was a terrible student. An art major only because I liked textiles and ceramics and it didn’t require a lot of reading or tests. Mostly, I smoked pot and had sex with other art majors. The summer after I graduated from college, I needed a plan or my parents were going to make one for me. So, out of the blue, I said that I wanted to live in France. Before I knew it, everything was set. My father knew a professor in Paris, Claude Lévesque, and he arranged an au pair job for me with Claude’s family. Claude and his wife Camille had two daughters, Véronique and Bébé.”

Mary thought of her own father, an insurance salesman who, other than his clients, seemed to know nobody. He moved through the world alone, circling her mother and Mary, a shadowy, quiet man.

Scarlet said, “They sent me pictures in a big envelope that one of the children had decorated with a border of flowers drawn in pen and ink. I wondered where I could get my pot in Paris and what I would do with the children and if they spoke any English. Their faces in the photographs seemed blank and uninteresting. The mother looked severe. But the father, Claude, looked like Gérard Depardieu, a big hulking guy with a bulbous nose and unkempt blond hair. Sexy and French.

“I left for Paris right after Christmas. When the plane was landing I looked out the window at the gray overcast city still lit up and something settled in me. I knew somehow that this was really where I belonged and that I would never leave.

“I know it sounds like a schoolgirl’s fantasy, but when I met Claude I knew that I would be with him somehow, that we would be connected forever. The wife, Camille, was not stern like in her photograph. She was actually quite pretty. A petite woman with that style that Parisian women have. I remember her coat was tangerine, and thinking how odd that would look in Cambridge among all the ugly L.L. Bean down coats everyone wore there. Her blond hair pulled back in that perfect knot, and her eyes always lined in black, and her skinny legs in their black stockings beneath that coat. She was aloof, and she smoked too much, but she wasn’t stern.

“The children were fine and we took to each other right away. I taught them how to knit, and we made blankets for their dolls and little hats for their stuffed animals. I would walk them to school and then go to French lessons for two hours and then run errands for Camille. I was alone in the apartment, a cramped two-story place in the twelfth arrondissement filled with really ugly antiques, until two o’clock, when I went to pick up the girls at school.

“At first I stayed in my room and watched television. But before long I began to wander the streets. I had a pass for the Métro and I would ride it all over and then get out and walk around, into cheese shops and pâtisseries and vintage clothing stores. One day I ran into Claude in the Latin Quarter. He was sitting having a carafe of wine at a café and he motioned for me to join him. We spoke to each other in English, which felt very foreign to me, and exotic. Claude spoke fluent English. Camille did not speak any English, and the children studied it in school but spoke it badly.

“We began to meet on Tuesdays, which was his free afternoon. Together we explored the city, speaking English like it was our own secret language. Then I would go and pick up the children, and once the weather turned warm we would go to the park and ride the carousel. At home I helped make dinner and ate with the family and helped to clean up and give the children their baths and then I went to my room. Claude ignored me during this part of the day. Our few hours together on Tues-days seemed like a dream, unconnected to anything else that happened.

“This continued for two years. The schedule like that and the Tuesday meetings. Over time I lost my baby fat and I began to dress like the women I saw on the streets. I grew my hair long. I stopped taking my French lessons because I was fluent really. So my free time was plentiful. I befriended a baker named Denis. His family owned one of the oldest bakeries in the city, and I would go there for my favorite baguette to nibble while I strolled.

“Soon Denis and I became lovers. He was a distracted young man, careless with everything except bread. But we would go dancing and to his small flat above the bakery and I felt very romantic, not in love with Denis, but romantic. Perhaps in love with the city and this simple life I led there. Sex with a handsome Frenchman! Fresh baguettes and wine in bed! His hands always had flour in the creases and I would trace them, pretending I could see into the future.

“One night I said, ‘Teach me to make that bread I love.’

“So we went downstairs and he showed me. Watching a man knead dough and create bread from just flour and water and yeast is the sexiest thing imaginable. Because he had to be at the bakery at four a.m. to begin baking the bread, he always brought me back to Claude and Camille’s around three. But this morning I stayed and made the bread with him. It was as if my hands had finally learned what they were meant to do. I could feel the change as I worked the dough. How it grew less sticky. How it took new forms and properties. When I got home it was almost six and I was giddy. I would be a baker. I was meant to be a baker.

“I had forgotten that Camille and the girls had gone to meet Camille’s parents for a weekend in Brittany, on the coast. So when I quietly entered the apartment and found Claude sitting there, obviously awake all night, I thought something terrible had happened.

“I even forgot to speak English. I began to tell him, in French, about my discovery, how I had to find a baker to apprentice with. My hands tingled from the feel of the dough in them.

“ ‘Rouge,’ he said—privately, that’s what he always called me; he didn’t think Scarlet suited me. This name, he told me, it’s too ridiculous— ‘I thought something terrible had happened to you. I thought you had been killed or hurt.’

“His English sounded, oddly, harsh.

“Je suis désolée,” I said.

“He covered his face in his hands and began to laugh. ‘I think you’ve been savagely murdered and all the while you’ve been baking bread.’

“I didn’t see what was funny. But I forced a smile. I caught a glimpse of myself in the oversized mirror and saw that I was covered with flour.

“As if he read my mind, Claude said, ‘You have flour everywhere.’

“And he got up and walked over to me and began to brush the flour from my sweater and my hair and my arms. That was when it began, the thing I knew would happen. I have wondered many times over the years how I knew with such certainty that this man and I were to be linked forever. And I have never been able to find an answer. I was so young when I arrived in Paris. And unsure of so many things. Yet this one thing I knew absolutely.

“That weekend, with Camille and the girls away, we made love in that particular way that new lovers have, as if nothing exists outside each other.

“This was long ago now. Twenty-two years. What I remember is Claude making us an omelette and how we ate it in my bed, cold. I remember how thoughts of running away with Claude began to fill my mind. I remember how on Sunday afternoon he held my face in his hands and said, ‘You know you must leave here, Rouge. We cannot be like this with Camille and the girls.’

“He didn’t mean, of course, that I had to leave right then. But that is what I did. I packed my suitcase, the same one that I had arrived with two years earlier, and I left that apartment with Claude’s fingerprints and kisses all over me. It was raining, a warm rain that diffused the lights of the city. Like the blurry colors of a Monet painting. Like tears. I went to the only place I knew to go: the bakery.

“Denis took me in. I told him I had fallen in love with someone, that I needed a place to stay for a while. He said something like, ‘C’est dommage,’ nothing more than that. I slept on his sofa and helped to bake the bread. And I began to meet Claude in his office in the afternoon, where, on a scratchy Persian rug, we would make love to the sound of a typewriter pounding in the office next door and students rushing down the hall, arguing or worrying or laughing.

“I went on this way, in a happy blur, for a month or so. Summer came and I learned to bake croissants and pain au chocolat, the intricacies of butter and dough, the delicate balance of sweet and sour. I did not ask about Camille, though I did inquire about the children, who I missed sorely. Especially the little one, Bébé. By this time she was eight, but small like her mother, with that fine hair that tangled easily and skin so fair that the pale blue veins shone just beneath. She carried a doll, Madame Chienne, everywhere with her. A rag doll that was loved away in spots, like my own dog Pal. Véronique was more polite, but less imaginative, and though I got on well with her, it was Bébé whom I adored. Claude brought me pictures that she’d drawn, and read me little stories she wrote. And I suppose in my fantasy of Claude running away with me to a place with golden sunshine, Bébé came too.

“Denis wanted me to go to a small village near Marseille to apprentice with an old man who Denis himself had worked with. This man, called Frère Michel by everyone, was famous all over France for his cannelles, the small sweet cakes made by nuns in the fourteenth century with vanilla bean and rum and egg yolks. They are made in special fluted tulip-shaped molds, and Frère Michel still used the wooden ones his own grandmother had used.

“I thought, I must go and take Claude with me. The only image I had of the south of France was one I had invented from van Gogh paintings and travel posters that hung in a travel agency window near the bakery. I could imagine walking through fields of towering sunflowers with Claude, or wandering the Roman ruins together. I could imagine the two of us plunging into the blue sea naked, then drying in the hot sun on pink rocks. But I could not see myself without him.

“So I let Denis talk about Frère Michel and cannelles, nodding as if I was considering the offer, until the day I realized that I was most certainly pregnant. On this particular morning, I awoke sweaty and suffocating in the hot apartment, and I felt a flutter, like a butterfly had burst from its cocoon and set off in flight. I put my hand to my stomach and my butterfly fluttered against it.”

Instinctively, Mary paused in her knitting and placed one hand on her own belly, as if she could feel that familiar fluttering, the first sign of a baby there. She remembered lying in bed with Dylan and gasping slightly, taking his hand and pressing it to her stomach.

She nodded at Scarlet before she picked up her knitting needles once again.

“My first impulse was to go immediately to Claude. At this time of the morning he would be teaching, and I got up quickly to dress and meet him at his classroom with the news. The happy news. On the bus to the university I made a plan in which we went together to the south, and we lived in that small town near Marseille, and I baked cannelles and madeleines, and Claude wrote the book he always talked about writing, and there in the plan was a little girl, not unlike Bébé. And a small house near the sea. And almond trees, and olive trees, and wild fennel.

“But as I raced up the stairs to the building where he taught, something struck me and sent a shiver through me even on such a relentlessly hot day. I remembered clearly when I’d had my last period, and it was back in June on an evening when Denis and I were still lovers. I sat hard on the steps, feeling the heat of the sunbaked stone through my thin dress, forcing myself to think. But I knew that had been my last period, and that two weeks later I had slept with both Denis and then, in that first weekend together, Claude.

“That flutter rose in me again, this time filling my throat with bile. Around me, students rushed, carrying armloads of books, speaking French and German and Spanish. I could smell their sweat and their cigarettes, and again I tasted vomit.

“I don’t know how long I sat there before a cool hand touched my bare arm. I looked up into Claude’s face. He was wearing his glasses, those funny rimless half-glasses, and his blond hair was matted across his forehead.

“ ‘Rouge,’ he said softly, ‘did I forget that we were going to meet?’

“I shook my head.

“ ‘You look so pale,’ he said, and touched my cheeks with the backs of both his hands. ‘Are you feverish?’

“I shook my head again. ‘It’s just so hot,’ I said.

“He helped me to my feet and held my elbow firmly for support. ‘Let’s get you some water, yes?’

“I let him lead me to his office. I had never been there in the morning, and I thought the Persian rug looked faded and worn in this light, that the color of the walls seemed dingy. I drank down the water he brought me without stopping, and then I immediately threw it up. Once I began vomiting I couldn’t stop. Claude grabbed the wastebasket and held it under my chin.

“A secretary appeared in the open doorway, wearing a concerned face. ‘Professor?’ she asked.

“ ‘This young girl is ill from the heat,’ Claude said. ‘She’ll be fine.’

“ ‘You have class now,’ the secretary said. ‘Shall I take her?’

“ ‘Call maintenance,’ Claude said, ‘to clean up here.’

“The secretary hesitated a moment before leaving.

“ ‘I was in the neighborhood,’ I said. ‘Silly of me. No breakfast. I just wanted to see your face.’

“Claude grinned at me. ‘Go and eat some eggs and a big café au lait in a cool café and you will be your old self again in no time.’

“I stared at him, puzzled.

“ ‘And we will meet here as usual at two o’clock,’ he said, straightening his shirt and tie, gathering his books and briefcase.

“ ‘Au revoir,’ he said.

“I nodded because that was all I could manage. This was the first time we had been together and Claude had spoken to me entirely in French.

“I almost didn’t go back that afternoon. But I could not stay away. In the hours in between seeing him, I took his advice and sat in a cool café and ate eggs and toast, and I thought about this baby. I would never know for sure if it belonged to Denis or Claude. For some women, perhaps, that would not matter. They could convince themselves that the father was of course the man they loved.

“But for me, I only wanted this baby if it was Claude’s. Denis meant nothing to me. What if I had the baby and it was like Denis, distracted and lazy? Then I would know that it wasn’t Claude’s and I would have to live a charade with Claude. No, this little one would never be born.

“By the time I arrived back at Claude’s office, the secretary away at her lunch, the outer office empty, I had decided not to tell Claude anything. I would get the name of a doctor and get this done quickly, pretending that it never happened. It seemed so simple that when Claude came in I threw myself at him, tearing at his tie and the buttons on his shirt, wanting only to fill myself with him.

“He laughed softly. ‘You are revived,’ he whispered in English.

“Of course, these things are never so simple, are they? That very evening I told Denis about my situation. Not the details of it, just that I was pregnant and needed an abortion. He studied my face, as if he could find there some evidence of his own involvement in this predicament. But I remained unreadable.

“ ‘I can arrange this,’ he said finally.

“He took longer than I had hoped and it was several weeks later before he handed me a name and address on a slip of paper right before we began to make the morning’s baguettes. I took it and thanked him, but he waved away my gratitude with his hands.

“ ‘Let’s not talk about this again,’ he said.

“I was happy to oblige.

“That week, Claude and his family were away in Spain. How perfect, I thought. I had begun to read everything as a sign about who the father was. Claude’s absence during the abortion made it clear that Denis was the father. But on the very day it was to be done, as I combed my hair in preparation to leave, the phone rang and it was Claude—a sign that the baby must be his. My heart beat fast as I listened to him speak into a pay phone in a café at the beach.

“ ‘Rouge,’ he said, ‘I am miserable without you. I will never be away from you like this again. I’ll figure out a way for us to be together. Do you believe me?’

“ ‘Yes,’ I said.

“ ‘I love you,’ Claude was saying, over and over again.

“He did not stop until I said it to him.

“ ‘I love you too, Claude,’ I said, the words burning my throat.

“When it was done, I was made empty. The weight stayed on me. My hips and waist were thick, my breasts larger. But beneath that, was stone. Or worse, nothing at all. As soon as I woke from the anesthesia, I knew in my heart that it had been Claude’s child after all. The nurse gave me something to calm me, but I couldn’t stop crying.

“This new me, empty, overweight, unhappy, tried to continue life as it had been before. Denis and I baked bread in the early morning. I met Claude in the afternoons, and could hardly appreciate the changes in him. The declarations of love, the promises of a future together. One day he pinched my waist, and teased me that I was growing too fat and too happy.

“ ‘You look the way you did when I first saw you,’ he said when I pulled away from him. He made me turn back to face him. ‘That day I knew,’ he said, serious now. ‘I knew you were going to change my life.’

“ ‘I knew too,’ I said.

“Soon afterwards, after the weather had turned crisp and cool, Denis once again asked me about Frère Michel. ‘He will take you on,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t waste time if I were you. He’s very old. He won’t be around forever.’

“I looked into Denis’s face. He had flour across one cheek, and flecks of sticky dough on his apron.

“ ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘I’m ready.’

“Can you believe it when I tell you that I went a week later and I never told Claude? I saw him those last afternoons. I listened to his ideas for us to have a life together. He would pay for an apartment for me to live, and it would be ours. He would go to America to teach and I would come with him; he had done it before, why not again? Perhaps, he sighed, he would leave Camille, get a divorce, marry me.

“I said nothing. I let him make love to me as if it was not the last time. Then I went directly to pick up my bag at Denis’s apartment, and from there to the train heading south. On that train I thought about nothing. Not what I was doing. Not what I had done. During the nights before I left, I wondered how Claude and I would be linked forever. Was it through this baby who would never be born? Or was it through our love? Did love’s energy continue even after the lovers separated? These thoughts kept me awake. But once I was on the train south, my mind stopped.

“On a whim, I had stopped at a yarn store near Denis’s apartment and bought a skein of light blue mohair and a pair of bamboo knitting needles. As the industrial cities passed my window, and cypress trees appeared beside barren fields of wheat and flowers, I knit. My hands seemed to knit away the noise that had kept me awake, to erase the questions for which there were no answers.

“My story could have ended here. In many ways, I wish it had. I arrived in the village, a village so small it is not on any map, and made my way to Frère Michel’s. People from all over France came to his bakery for his cannelles. They had perfect contrasting textures—the crunchy exterior, the almost-custard interior. The shop was filled with villagers, city people from Marseille, tourists holding guidebooks, vacationers. And Frère Michel, wrinkled, toothless, bent like a question mark. He yelled at people to be quiet, to make a better line. He threw out the ones who complained or pushed. He was a hateful man who baked heavenly pastries.

“I had my own house, a shed, really. One room with a bed and a table with one short leg and two chairs. When spring came I made a garden in the back and grew oregano and lavender, tomatoes and beans. My skin turned brown from the sun. I lost the pregnancy fat. All of it seemed long ago. I ordered more of that blue mohair yarn from the store in Paris and I kept adding on, knitting a blanket that I could eventually wrap myself in many times over.

“At work, Frère Michel screamed at me. I was an idiot. Too stingy with butter, unable to gauge when it was the proper time to take the dough for the cannelles from the refrigerator. His yelling did not bother me. He was teaching me something, after all. Cannelles are very tricky to bake. The sugar must be molten enough to form the shell, but if it’s too hot it will burn. Over time I learned that one day wasn’t enough for the dough, and four was too many. I learned to brush the old molds more generously and to whisk more firmly. I could tell by instinct when to remove the batter from the heat, or when it was too humid to bake them that day. The tourists liked to practice their English with me, despite Frère Michel’s grumblings.

“Then one day, in the dead of summer, Claude walked into the crowded shop. He was thinner, his face creased with worry. A big man, he seemed to fill the shop when he entered.

“ ‘Did you think I wouldn’t find you?’ he said quietly.

“I untied my apron and walked around the counter, through the crowd. ‘Let’s go outside,’ I said, not wanting a scene.

“Frère Michel yelled at me to come back, but I took Claude’s hand and walked with him down the crooked village street, through the field to my little house.

“ ‘I hate you,’ he said once we were inside.

“And then we were kissing each other, and it began again in a new way. He had left Camille, believing my disappearance came from a lack of trust in his promises. He had his own apartment near the university. He wanted to marry me as soon as the divorce was final, after Christmas.

“I felt I was ready to say yes. I could put what had happened behind me. We would have other children together. I would open a small shop and make cannelles and madeleines the way they did in the south. Our life together unfolded so clearly that I became gripped with happiness.

“Just like that, my simple life changed. Every weekend Claude came south from Paris and we began to make plans together. I wrote my parents that I was engaged. We would have a real wedding, we decided. My family would come from America. Frère Michel would bake our cake. Giddy with our new life, Claude decided that when he came the next time, he would bring the girls. Véronique was mad at him, he explained. But Bébé was excited and missed me. He rented a cottage on the sea and I would join them there in a week.

“I couldn’t stop speaking of our future to the regulars who came in each morning. The old women pinched my cheeks and made jokes about how rosy sex made them. Frère Michel grumbled that I was stupider than ever now that I had fallen in love.

“That Friday I took the local train to the village where Claude and the children waited for me. It was early September and the southern light had already begun to change. I arrived under a purple sky to find an eager Bébé and a sullen Véronique at the station, and Claude holding a bundle of lavender for me. I felt like a bride already, carrying the stalks of small fragrant flowers and walking hand in hand with Claude.

“Bébé chattered about her new puppy and the storybook she was writing and how she had thoughtlessly left Madame Chienne back in Paris. ‘Nothing feels right without Madame Chienne,’ she said sadly. ‘Do you think it’s bad luck to not have her with me?’

“ ‘Of course not,’ I assured her. ‘Madame Chienne does not like the sea.’

“Véronique said almost nothing. I decided to let her be angry instead of coaxing good cheer from her.

“In the morning, we hiked the mile or so to the beach. The hike was arduous—the path was rocky and the sun was hot. When we finally arrived, we put our blankets under the shelter of a cove of rocks, and prepared for a swim. Almost immediately, Claude realized that we had forgotten to bring the lunch he’d so carefully prepared; he wanted everything to be perfect and he’d gone into town early for fresh bread and to choose good meats and fruit at the outdoor market there.

“ ‘We’ll go back to the house for lunch,’ I said. ‘It’s no big deal.’

“ ‘No, no,’ Claude insisted, ‘we must have a picnic here, and swim to that sandbar, and stay until late.’

“He stood and put on his funny Indiana Jones hat. Like all Frenchmen, he wore a tiny Speedo bathing suit and his stomach hung over it slightly.

“ ‘You look funny and beautiful,’ I told him.

“He explained to the girls that he would be back with lunch and then he kissed me hard on the lips. I heard Véronique mutter as she pulled away from him.

“ ‘She’ll have to get used to it,’ he told me. He kissed each girl on top of her head and began the hike back.

“ ‘Papa!’ Bébé called after him. ‘I’ll collect sea glass for you!’

“ ‘Wonderful!’

“The three of us swam for a long time in the cool water. We could see our legs and toes flapping about beneath it, and hundreds of small fish swimming around us. Even Véronique enjoyed our time in the water. Then, feeling lazy, I stretched out on one of the hot rocks and closed my eyes.

“I woke to find Claude kneeling beside me with the backpack of food at my feet.

“ ‘Rouge?’ he said. ‘Where are the girls?’

“I sat up slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, scanning the beach. ‘Isn’t that Véronique down there?’ I pointed.

“ ‘Yes,’ he said, relieved.

“He opened the backpack and spread the cloth, and the food, and took out a bottle of white wine. I watched as Véronique made her way back to us.

“ ‘Funny,’ I said, standing. ‘I don’t see Bébé.’

“Claude got to his feet and yelled to Véronique. ‘Where is your sister?’

“ ‘I can’t understand you,’ she yelled back. ‘Speak French!’

“Claude began to run toward her, and I followed close behind.

“ ‘Ta soeur!’ he yelled.

“ ‘She was there, looking for sea glass,’ Véronique said.

“We looked at where she pointed. A small cove now filled with water from the tide.

“ ‘Bébé!’ Claude called, racing down the beach.

“Was it a premonition of tragedy that I had that first time I saw Claude and knew that we would be linked forever? I can’t say. But the little one, Bébé, was gone and I was to blame.

“They found her washed up on another beach the next morning. We don’t know what happened because it happened as I slept.”

“Oh,” Mary said, and it sounded more like a moan than a word. Her heart seized in on itself as she thought of this other lost child, and she said, again, “Oh.”

“We never discussed what happened next,” Scarlet said. “I simply came back to the States, alone. He blames me, of course. Why shouldn’t he? I’m guilty. I didn’t watch his daughter and she died. I can never make that right. The guilt used to keep me up at night. It used to drive me crazy. I would try to rewrite that day, that morning. In this version, I would make myself stay awake. We would build sand castles, Bébé and I, with elaborate turrets and moats filled with seawater. And Claude would come back to the beach with our lunch, and we would eat it together, all four of us. And we would swim in the ocean and grow brown under the hot sun. And we would fill our bucket with shells and sea glass. And we would live happily ever after.

“But, of course, then morning would come and I would be left with the real story and the awful true ending.”

The day had turned to dusk. Outside Scarlet’s wall of windows the sky was slashed with violet and lavender. Mary had dropped a stitch early on, and a run of emptiness climbed up the center, cutting through the happy wool like a scar.

“I know about your daughter,” Scarlet said. “I remember reading it in the paper. Meningitis, right?’

“Yes.”

“We have this in common,” she said softly.

There was a small silence. Then Mary said, “Her name was Stella.”

Neither of them was knitting anymore.

“I’ll show you,” Mary said, her voice shaky.

She opened the bag at her feet and from it took the picture of Stella she carried everywhere with her. It wasn’t the most recent photo, or even the most beautiful. It was just the one that looked the most like Stella, her head cocked, smiling broadly, her eyes bright beneath her tangled hair.

Scarlet’s breath caught.

“Yes,” she said finally. “Lovely.”

They sat side by side, and watched the sky grow dark.