The Knitting Circle: The uplifting and heartwarming novel you need to read this year

“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.

4

The Knitting Circle

For several weeks Mary did not go to the knitting circle. A kind of inertia took hold of her, and even though when Wednesday night neared, she thought of going, she could not get herself there. She admired Scarlet, who, after losing Bébé, after losing everything, had managed to make something of her life again. Rouge—and how that name took on such significance now, Mary realized— was always crowded. Why, Mary had written a rave review of it when it first opened, marveling at the butteriness of the croissants, the intensity of the hot chocolate. She wanted to find inspiration in Scarlet’s story, but her still-new grief kept her paralyzed.

Alone in the late afternoons, Mary tried not to think about how six short months ago she would be picking up Stella at school, watching her run down the front steps with her impossibly oversized backpack, her collection of key chains jingling. She would be swooping her daughter into her waiting arms. Trying not to think of these things, Mary picked up her needles and knit. Scarves unfolded in her lap—fat ones; textured ones; eyelash scarves made of thin strands of yarns knitted together—one glittery and multicolored and one soft and fluttery.

On warm autumn days like these, she and Stella would go to the playground on the corner. Or they would walk to the small library up the street and fall into the plump cushions in the children’s section and read. Mary remembered these things as evening approached. She remembered them, and she knit.

On one of these afternoons the phone rang and Mary answered it. Often she didn’t. She let the machine pick up and listened as friends checked in on her, offering cups of tea, afternoon movies, martinis. But on this afternoon she answered because outside her window she could clearly see her neighbor Louise, and Louise’s three children, placing their just-made jack-o’-lanterns on their front stoop. The excited giggles from those kids made Mary want to run across the street and smash those goofy carved pumpkins. Even worse: Halloween was two days away.

“It’s Scarlet,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “I thought you might want me to pick you up tonight.”

“Knitting,” Mary said.

“Six o’clock?”

Beautiful-colored leaves floated down from the tree in Mary’s yard. She watched them lift, hover, fall.

“Sometimes,” Scarlet said, “you need to get out of the house. Out of your brain.”

Mary thought of that day at Scarlet’s, of Scarlet’s story about Claude and Bébé.

“Okay,” Mary said. “See you at six.”

Dragging a comb through her tangled hair, Mary imagined sharing her own story with Scarlet. She would tell her about Dylan, and how they had found each other late in their lives; how Stella had been their one chance to make a family. Perhaps she could tell Scarlet what kind of father Dylan had been, how he liked taking Stella grocery shopping, just the two of them. He would bring a lemon to her nose and have her inhale its scent. He taught her how to tell when a melon was ripe, how to choose an avocado, how to order meat from the butcher. After Stella died, Mary took over the grocery shopping, wandering the aisles alone. The sight of a father there with his little girl safely strapped into the cart, nibbling on blueberries or crackers broke her heart. Somehow Mary believed that maybe Scarlet would understand what she and Dylan had lost.

When she thought of her, of Scarlet, she saw her in the south of France, happy. That happiness had lasted only a moment, Mary knew. It seemed to her she’d had Stella for only a moment.

Staring at the stranger in the mirror, Mary sighed. Her face was rounder, her hair duller, her eyes flat. It was another person who used to like what she saw when she looked in a mirror, who playfully added mascara to her lashes and sparkly blush to her cheeks. Mary dug around in her cosmetics bag until she found the hot pink tube of mascara inside. But it had caked from lack of use, and she couldn’t find her blush at all. Who was she kidding? she thought. She looked bad, she felt bad, and she was not ready to talk about any of this to anyone. She had paid a grief counselor a hundred dollars a week for almost two months and all Mary did was sit and cry, which was what she did at home for free.