Knitting Page 2

Jack’s illness had been totally unexpected. A walker, climber, swimmer, always the fitter of the two, Jack had collapsed when they were on vacation, dawdling pleasantly at Sydney’s Circular Quay. After it became clear that he was seriously ill, Sandra hired cleaning help for a while, but she found it more intrusive than useful, feeling she must tidy for the cleaner, embarrassed by tissues in the wastebasket and toothpaste on the vanity. Jack, more relaxed, said, “That’s her job. We pay her to clean up our mess!” Sandra could never shake the sense that she was being spied on, that her personal details were laughed over in some cleaning women’s union. As Jack grew thinner and more and more fatigued, Sandra resented any intrusion on what she knew must be their last days together. Three weeks before Jack died, she terminated the cleaner’s services and moved their bedroom downstairs to the dining room, with the French doors open to the deck and the sun.

  The house needed cleaning now, but what was the point? Who would ever see? She should do some shopping too, but there were a few stalwarts in the cupboard: baked beans, packaged soups, a can of corn.

  She turned over and felt for Jack’s pajamas under his pillow. She still hadn’t washed them, though after all these months they couldn’t really smell of him. It was simply the fabric, the worn flannel, the sense of his touch. Her sharp practical side told her to get out of bed and throw everything in the washing machine, Jack’s pajamas included. That self was loud and necessary: it got her through work, it prepared lectures, it kept people at bay. But the real strength, Sandra knew, was with her other self, the soft sad one, the one that was allowed out only on weekends, the self that would keep her in bed until well after lunch.

  She turned her face into the pillow. On the walls around her bed the feathers strained upward toward light.

  SEVERAL suburbs away from Sandra’s two-story stone house, Martha lived frugally in a small flat just beyond the parklands. Malcolm, her brother, had helped her buy it, a few years before the young and beautiful discovered how good it was to live so close to the city, within walking distance of work, shops, restaurants, and clubs. Martha was an orderly woman, though something about her, the way she shrugged her shoulders into her cardigan or tied her laces in floppy bows, may have suggested looseness, a lack of personal discipline. People would have been surprised, given first impressions, to enter Martha’s kitchen and see the angle of her cutting board, just so on the counter, the shininess of her neat cutlery stacks in the second drawer, the ball of string secured with a red rubber band, the box of old waistband elastics pinned neatly into themselves.

  In the evenings Martha listened to Radio National, to the news and concert music she liked, though she couldn’t have said why. Even difficult music had a pattern to it if you listened hard enough. Until three weeks ago she had had a portable TV, but she had spontaneously given it to an Iraqi refugee family who had moved in two doors up, so the kids could watch Play School and the parents could learn English. She missed the hospital soaps, but never mind; she’d get another TV sometime. If there was a program she particularly wanted to see, she could always take her knitting in to Mary Sherbet next door. Mary Sherbet was always glad of company.

  Meanwhile she had plenty to do. She had begun working on a hot pink nylon toilet-roll cover and had almost finished a tea cozy. The nylon was unpleasant to work; although Martha took a certain delight in the shocking effect of the hot pink, her hands recoiled from the harsh touch of the synthetic yarn. The tea cozy was better, a sturdy wool with a tight twist, but a little wiry, nonetheless. It wasn’t quite finished; she hadn’t sewn it up or darned in the loose ends. Sewing up was a boring job; she would do that another day when she had company to help the time pass more quickly.

  Three weeks ago she had begun a silver-gray shawl, cashmere and wool, soft and lacy as cobweb. Working on this made her hands happy, and her heart too. She wondered who the recipient would be—she rarely knew when she started a garment. Experience had taught her that the owner would soon appear one way or another.

  Knitting was the one thing Martha could do better than anyone else. Until quite recently she had knitted for a nationally known designer, making one-of-a-kind patterns for the rich and famous, but the pay had been meager, the patterns complex, and she had been under continual pressure to complete garments quickly for a demanding market. Martha had enjoyed the work at first, the affirmation of being one of the few chosen from among the hundreds of knitters who had sent in sample swatches, but after a few years the careful pleasure she cherished in her knitting had leaked away. She began having violent nightmares about knitting needles and crochet hooks, and woke tired and dispirited. Her body ached. It was hard to do anything; her knitting had become mechanical, she felt like a robot. Eventually, with a desperate effort motivated by a terrible fear of another spell in hospital, she gathered all her courage into one phone call and announced her resignation. The designer, angered at losing her best knitter, argued, cajoled, and eventually offered more money, but Martha wouldn’t budge.

  “No, I’m knitting a shawl. And I want to make a tea cozy.” The designer did not hear the desperation.

  “A tea cozy! With your talent!”

  “Oh, it takes some talent. I’m making up the pattern myself. It’s in the shape of a cottage, with a blue front door, and two little knitted people leaning out the window. And I’m also knitting a pink nylon toilet-roll cover.” Martha’s agitation made her feel like vomiting. The words tumbled out of her mouth like stitches pulled from the needle.

  The designer had choked with rage.

  “Oh, Martha, what a waste! Martha, Martha! All the famous people lining up for your garments because they are so well made and so well finished! Nobody finishes as well as you.”

  “I know. That’s what I’m doing now. Finishing. Goodbye.” Too afraid to talk longer, Martha had hung up and stood breathing hard by the phone, resisting the urge to lift the handset, to apologize, to offer back her services. She hated to disappoint people. Disappointing people was hard and terrible work, and she hoped she never had to do it again. For the next two hours she had lain on the bed, practicing slow breathing, until she felt calm enough to go to her workroom and get out her pattern books.

  Martha rarely knitted a pattern as it was written, though once she had decided on what was needed she liked to get it perfect. She hadn’t yet finished the shawl, but she liked to read while she knitted, and now that the shawl was almost done it was time to think ahead for the next item, though she had no ideas yet.

  After dinner Martha brewed her pot of tea and took out the new knitting magazine to read while she finished the last few rows; the shawl pattern was knitted into her brain now. The tea cozy was to put away against Christmas, a gift for her brother’s wife, who had a teapot collection. The toilet-roll holder was a special request from Mary Sherbet. Mary Sherbet could knit—Martha had helped her learn so that she would have something to do with her hands when she gave up smoking—but this pattern was still beyond her. Martha didn’t like either the cozy or the roll holder, but at least they were gifts of love.

  FOR once Sandra started her Saturday early. She needed to buy a new dress for the reunion dinner. She hadn’t bought anything since before Jack had died, and it was about time she made an effort. In fact she hadn’t worn a dress since Jack died. The dresses had stayed in their wardrobe, lined up like ghostly versions of a different self. All winter she had lived in three pairs of pants—jeans, black go-anywheres, and track pants. She hadn’t worn any jewelry either, except her engagement and wedding rings. She’d kept her hair cut—her job demanded some attention to appearance—but her makeup was minimal.

  She didn’t go out much these days. One night, samba playing, midnight again, she had waxed her legs and painted her nails bright red. She had drawn red bow lips on her mouth to match her nails and colored them in with a lipstick called Seduction, then gone to bed in her black negligee and lain on the white sheet flat on her back, legs together and hands palm down on the mattress. She had gone to sle
ep and dreamt she was crying, and when she woke the pillow was wet. The next morning she saw her smeared red lips in the mirror, looked down at her fingernails in disgust, and spilled the polish remover in her angry hurry to dissolve whatever it was that had got into her the night before.

  But that was weeks ago, and she had given herself a talking-to. It was a nice day, it was time to buy a dress, and never mind how you feel, the world hasn’t come to an end after all, so you might as well get on with it. Today at least.

  By four o’clock that afternoon Sandra hadn’t found a dress. Even though it was still winter, every rack was unexpectedly bulging with spring stock, and she couldn’t find what she wanted. The shops would close in less than an hour, and she was hurrying to try one more shop at the far end of the street. She crossed Rundle Mall and reentered the surging crowd, only to be stopped suddenly by the sight of a red-haired woman kneeling directly in her path, surrounded by three large bags. The late-afternoon crowd parted on either side, looked with curiosity, but barely slowed down. As Sandra tried to maneuver past, she saw that lying among the bags was a pair of feet in odd socks and dirty white sneakers. The woman was trying to rouse their owner, apparently unconscious. Sandra was going to pass them by—it was no concern of hers. She took three steps past them, but then turned back. The desperate look on the woman’s face had demanded a response. She, Sandra, must have looked like that when Jack collapsed.

  So instead of buying a dress, Sandra knelt on the paving bricks and felt at the man’s throat for his pulse. His back was arched and he was shuddering, but his pulse was strong enough.

  “Let’s get him onto his side. Don’t want him to choke.” She instructed the woman to take hold of his leg, while she took hold of the old red spray jacket at the shoulder. Together they heaved him over. Now that someone had taken responsibility, a small crowd gathered to watch.

  Sandra fished in her handbag for her mobile and phoned 000. While she was giving the details, the man stopped shaking and opened his eyes, though he looked dazed and unfocused. When she finished the call, she asked the woman if she knew him. She shook her head.

  They waited a few minutes without talking. Sandra’s mind careered around in amazement, trying to absorb the fact that after so many months alone, her private life was suddenly impacted by the hurly-burly of other people’s lives. There was something disarming about this other person who had stopped to help a stranger, the woman with the red hair and the hand-knitted sweater with a picture of a farm scene on the front, who patted the man’s back and spoke quietly to his ear to tell him the ambulance was coming. When it came, Sandra listened to the paramedics’ questions, but they elicited no new information; the man had been walking along and just collapsed to the ground. The paramedics, unhurried but efficient enough, took notes and were finished in a few minutes. Sandra helped hoist the woman’s three large bags into the ambulance. They were heavy.

  As the door was closing, Sandra pulled her card out of her wallet, scribbled her home phone number on the back, and thrust it through the window.

  “Let me know how he gets on,” she said. The woman waved assent. Sandra looked around at the dispersing crowd. Plenty of people had time to stop if they didn’t have to get involved.

  SHE hadn’t bought a dress but had run home for a quick shower and gone to the dinner anyway, black pants as usual. She was the last to arrive. Everyone seemed determined to have fun, and no one treated her any differently. Perhaps they had discussed it beforehand. As usual she en joyed their differences, the cross-section of politics and preferences, the fact that no one in the group could affect even the slightest pretension without causing raucous laughter.

  She’d kept in touch with all of them but was closest to Kate. At school Sandra and Kate had been little more than acquaintances until they shared a project on feminism and became firm friends. They read Germaine Greer together in the bath and organized a secret bra-burning ceremony at two o’clock one morning, joined by the others. It was a decade late, but nobody minded that. Kate, a tall, plain girl who was well endowed and always surrounded by boys, soon discovered that bralessness was not practical, but Sandra found a new freedom that she rarely relinquished.

  Kate now ran a quilting supply shop. She was married to Tony, a businessman, and had had one child, Jeremy, after several miscarriages. With some disappointment Sandra had watched her mellow over the years. Something had happened to Kate, though it was hard to say what, exactly. She no longer needed to shout.

  The first wedding dress Kate had made was for Sandra, a gift of love and service that the young and independent Sandra found hard to accept. Years ago she had spent a semester in one of Kate’s quilting classes. Kate was a good teacher, but Sandra was no good at sewing. The fabric rucked, the seams were out of line, the thread broke, and her quilt remained unfinished.

  “I’m hopeless,” she had said to Kate, laughing and frustrated all at once.

  “Ah, but look what you do with words,” Kate had replied. “You’re so patient and methodical. Remember that time you spent half a day to get a sentence right? You nearly drove me nuts.”

  Kate’s life in her work-from-home studio seemed simpler to Sandra than her own, free as it was from academic politics and budget cuts and the demands, even occasional threats, of immature students. Kate was a gardener, an interest she and Sandra shared, but she was also community worker, former state president of Nursing Mothers, secretary of Parents and Friends, and active in a church agency to aid refugees. She rose early and went to bed early and achieved a great deal without rush or impatience.

  Kate had a steel edge to her, though. Mellow though she now was, she had, once or twice over the years, gently confronted Sandra in a way that Sandra had found surprising and difficult.

  The dinner was good, the food pleasingly presented. The wine loosened them and they laughed till the tears ran. It was good to be out with friends again.

  When she got home she was too wired to sleep, so she put on her track pants and cleaned the house. When she finally did go to bed, the last image before sleep was of the woman she had met earlier that day—her round face, unruly hair piled loosely in a bun, her pleading look transforming to a smile of relief as she realized that at last someone in all the crowd was going to stop and help. Such an ordinary, plain-looking woman, suddenly beautiful.

  THE next morning Martha sat knitting in the hospital ward with her bags at her feet, counting stitches in her head and studying the sleeping face of the man she had rescued. He wasn’t as old as she had first thought. There was no gray in his stubble, and his face, relaxed in sleep, was relatively unlined. Early forties maybe. The five other beds in the ward were full of coughing, wheezing old men. They were all watching her and pretending they weren’t. The name board over the bed said CLIFF FORD.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Who are you?”

  “Martha McKenzie.”

  He looked away, trying to think, then looked back again.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Well, you do now. You fell over in the street. Another lady and me got you into an ambulance.”

  He looked away again.

  “Thanks.”

  “Is that really your name?” said Martha. “Cliff Ford? Or is it half your name, as in Clifford? Have they left off your last name?”

  “I know not how to tell thee who I am,” quoted Cliff. “My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself. Romeo, I think.” He closed his eyes again. “Doesn’t matter,” he went on vaguely. “Don’t care really. What are you knitting?”

  “A shawl,” said Martha.

  “Who’s it for?”

  “Don’t know,” said Martha.

  “We’re two of a kind,” said Cliff, grinning suddenly. He was missing a lot of teeth. “Don’t know or care much, do we?”

  “I know plenty,” said Martha. “And I care about you. I came to see how you are.”

  “Well, I’m all right, as you can see. But I could do with some underpants. I do not
care for what I wear.” He tugged at the hospital gown.

  “I could get you some.”

  “No, no. Haven’t got any cash.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ve got money.” There was a pause.

  “Are you from the church?” asked Cliff suddenly.

  “What church?”

  “That one on Muggs Hill Road. I wrote it on the hospital form.”

  “No,” said Martha. “But I know the one. I walk down that road all the time. Do you live near there?”

  “There and everywhere,” said Cliff.

  “Do they know what’s wrong with you yet?”

  “No. Tests tomorrow.”

  “I’ll come back,” said Martha, rolling up her knitting. “And I’ll bring you some underpants.”

  “Thank you.”

  Martha picked up her bags and made for the door. At the last minute she turned and smiled at him, then hurried away. She wanted to get home, have some dinner, and finish this piece. The new owner had shown up.

  Several hours later, after knitting for nearly an hour, Martha felt her heart beginning to pound. Something was wrong with the shawl pattern, right now at the end, when she was on the third-to-last row. She had made a mistake. She should have been concentrating, not reading that magazine at the same time. She’d taken her mind off the job and now she’d made a big mistake. She could feel her forehead starting to sweat and that horrible prickly feeling at the base of her skull. It doesn’t matter, she said to herself, it’s only a bit of knitting. Calm down and work it out. But her heart was thumping away as though she’d had a big fright, and her head was getting more and more confused as she thought about all the hours she’d put into this shawl, and how beautiful it was, and how it was now ruined. And then she saw it. She’d done three purls instead of four back at the beginning of the row, and it was all right, she could fix it after all, undo one row stitch by stitch, and reknit it. It was lovely angora, this, and even though it was fine it was well twisted, so it unpicked easily.