Knitting Under the Influence (33 page)

II

O
ne day at the end of February, Sari stopped by her parents’ house to ask her mother if she could throw a small brunch for her friends there on the following Sunday. “My apartment's too small to have more than one or two people over,” she said. “And I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I’ll do all the work and clean up afterward. All you'll have to do is sit and eat.”

“I’m not sure if all that commotion will be good for your brother,” Eloise said.

“There won't be that many of us,” Sari said. “And he can always go into the other room to watch TV if he feels overwhelmed.”

“It'll be fun,” said Jason, who had come with her.

“Will you be there?” Eloise said.

“Of course,” he said. “I go wherever Sari goes. Plus it's always a pleasure coming to see you. And I make a mean mimosa, Eloise. Just wait till you try it.”

Eloise smiled and gave in.

The second they were in the car, Sari said to Jason, “You should be ashamed of yourself. ‘It's such a pleasure seeing you and I make a mean mimosa.’ You manipulative little—”

“You love that I can get your mother to do whatever I want.”

“I’m counting on it,” she said with a grin, and he leaned over and kissed the grin right off her face and made it go down deep where it meant something.

So a week later there they were at Sari's house—the three knitting friends and David Lee and Jason and Zack. Sari had brought all the food—fruit, bagels and muffins, and, of course, champagne and orange juice to make mimosas—and they all lingered at the table for a while, lazily chatting, except for Sari's dad, who had disappeared into the bedroom as soon as he was done eating, and Charlie, who ate a couple of bagels and then went to watch TV.

“How are your sisters doing, Kathleen?” Eloise asked. “The twins?” She was on her best behavior, playing the gracious hostess.

“They're okay,” Kathleen said. “They had kind of a big fight recently, but they're doing better now. For a while, they weren't even talking to each other. They're back to talking now, which is a good thing since they're in preproduction on a new movie, but they're not the friends they used to be.”

“So they're going to keep working together?” Lucy asked.

“They don't have a choice,” Kathleen said. “They're a gimmick. Which means they're stuck together, no matter how much they might come to hate each other.”

“That's the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard,” David said.

“Tell me about it,” Kathleen said. “In the end, I may be the lucky one of us three—I mean, I may not be famous, but at least I’m my own person.”

“Says the girl who's going back to work for her sisters,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, I know,” Kathleen said with a sigh. “I ran out of options. And money.”

“What kind of work will you be doing for them?” David asked.

“Same as I used to,” Kathleen said. “Sort of in-house assistant to their PR person. You know, planning parties and making phone calls and stuff. It was actually kind of fun. Best job I ever had.”

“You've only ever had two jobs,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, and this one was the better one.”

“Are you all moved out of your apartment yet?” Sari asked, looking up. She was holding Zack on her lap, trying to get him to taste a slice of melon.

“Sort of. I’m basically living at the McMansion these days, but I still have some stuff over at the apartment.”

“You should go get it,” Sari said. “Time to just be done with that place and everything that goes with it.”

“I know. I just can't seem to get myself over there.” Their eyes met. “I’ll do it,” Kathleen said. “Soon.” She balled up her napkin and dropped it on the table. “Excuse me.” She rose from the table and left the room.

Jason said, “May I pour you another mimosa, Eloise?”

“Thank you, darling.” She held her glass out to him. “You were right, by the way. These are absolutely delicious.”

There was a giggle from the other side of the table and they all turned. Sari was playing a game with Zack—she'd offer him a grape, and then, when he'd open his mouth to eat it, she'd pull it away and pretend to put it in her own mouth. Zack found it all hysterically funny. It was hard to watch them and not smile. So they all smiled and then Lucy said, “Oh, hey, did I tell you guys we're looking at houses?”

“Wow.” Sari stopped playing for a moment, her hand paused in midair. “You can afford a house?”

“Not to buy—just to rent. We want a yard so we can get dogs.”

“Dogs?” Jason repeated. “Plural?”

“Two of them. Preferably siblings from the same litter. So they'll have company even if we have to work late.”

“Don't you have three cats already?” Sari said. “Every time I talk to you, it's like, ‘Got another one.’ I’m going to start sneezing just at the sight of you pretty soon.” Zack tugged at her hand and pulled it toward him, pretending he was going to eat the grape, then shoved the hand back in the direction of Sari's mouth. She laughed and said, “Good playing, Zack.”

Her mother said, “Sari's always had bad allergies.”

“Well, allergies aside, as far as I’m concerned you can't have too many pets,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, you can,” Sari said.

“Not if you're rescuing them from a shelter.”

“They still poop, even if they're from a shelter.”

“Excuse me,” her mother said. “Not at the dinner table.”

“Is poop a bad word?” Sari said. “I thought I was being
polite.”

“What about becoming a vet?” Jason asked Lucy. “Didn't you say you were thinking about that?”

“Yeah, I was—for about two seconds. I’d really rather do research. I like what I do. So I’m just going to keep rescuing pets one at a time and get all my animal ya-yas out that way. Will you all excuse me a moment?”

“Of course,” Eloise said, and Lucy got up and left the room.

“Hey, Mom,” Sari said quickly. “I told you that Jen's pregnant, right?”

“Jen who?” asked Eloise, watching as Jason topped off her glass again.

“My friend from college. Kind of frizzy-haired and short?”

“Look who's calling somebody short,” Jason said. He was over a foot taller than Sari.

“Oh, yes,” Eloise said. “She came with you once to visit. She brought laundry.”

“No, actually,
I
brought laundry but I told you it was hers so you wouldn't get mad at me. Anyway, she just found out she's having a boy.”

“Life's greatest adventure,” Jason said.

“I wouldn't mind being a grandmother,” Eloise said. “I always thought I would be by my age. But God had a different plan in mind.” She sipped delicately but effectively at her drink.

As soon she put her glass back down on the table, Jason refilled it. “My mother hasn't taken to the grandparent thing all that happily,” he said as he poured. “The day she found out Denise was pregnant, she scheduled a facelift.”

“Think of how great she'd look if you'd had more kids,” David said.

“As it is, there's not a wrinkle on her.”

“Zack's getting a little restless,” Sari said, standing up with him in her arms. “I’m going to take him on back so he can watch some TV with Charlie. Excuse us.”

Her mother turned toward Sari as if she were about to say something, but just then David said, “So, Eloise, Lucy told me this is the house that Sari grew up in. How long have you lived here exactly?”

Eloise swiveled back to him, and Sari and Zack slipped out of the room.

“Let's see,” Eloise said, pursing her lips. “Sari's what? Twenty-eight? But we haven't been here her whole life—for the first few years, we rented a little bungalow in Westwood. But once the kids were a little older and we had some money saved up, we found this house and fell in love with it. That must have been about twenty-three years ago. We had to stretch to buy it back then, but I really think it was the best investment we could have made.”

“Absolutely,” David said. “Even just looking at houses to rent, I can't believe how expensive real estate has gotten in Southern California.” There was a noise in the hallway. He raised his voice slightly. “This mimosa is really good. I don'teven know what's in it. How do you make a mimosa, anyway, Jason?”

“You just mix champagne and orange juice,” Jason said, more loudly than was necessary given that David was sitting right across from him. “The trick is to get the proportions right. Not everyone agrees what those are.”

“Interesting,” said David.

“You don't want too much orange juice,” Jason said. “But then you don't want too much champagne. May I fill your glass, Eloise?” She nodded, and while he was filling it, Jason said, “Hey, David, I’ve never quite understood the kind of research you and Lucy are involved with. Could you explain it in detail to me?” David proceeded to do his best. Neither man seemed to notice that none of the women had come back into the room.

But Sari's mother did. It took a while, but she did. She looked around the table and interrupted David's rather lengthy discussion of the adrenal gland in
Rattus norvegicus
to say suddenly, “What's going on? Where is everyone?”

“What? We're not enough for you?” David said jovially, indicating himself and Jason. “Guess I’ve been a little boring, going on about all my experiments and everything—”

“No, no, not at all,” Eloise said absently. “But where are the girls? Why aren't they at the table anymore?”

“Oh,” Jason said, “you know the way those three are. They probably started talking about something and forgot to come back in.”

“Or else they're knitting,” David said. “Those girls and their knitting—it's not a hobby, it's an obsession.”

“Ha,” said Eloise. She patted her hair carefully, even though there wasn't a strand out of place. “You're probably right.”

Actually, for once the girls
weren't
knitting, and the men knew it. But their job was to keep Eloise distracted. It was all part of THE PLAN, which had been hatched several weeks earlier at a Sunday knitting circle when Sari mentioned that she had taken Jason to meet her family, and her mother had fallen all over him.

“I’ve never seen her like that before,” Sari said. “She was civil all night long. The second she'd start going off into one of her insane rants, Jason would smile at her and change the subject, and she'd just let him. It's a little weird—I mean, she was practically
flirting
with him—but I’m going with it. Makes it much easier to be around her.”

Lucy bent over her work, her brow creased. She had finished the hat a while ago and was now knitting a mouse toy for David the kitten. She knit for another minute in thoughtful silence, and then she looked up. “Hey, Sari?” she said. “I have an idea.”

And that's when they decided to kidnap Charlie.

Toward that end, the girls had quietly slipped away from the table one by one—or two, in Sari's case, since she was carrying Zack in her arms—and reconvened in the family room.

Sari sat down next to Charlie, with Zack perched on her knee. “Hey, Charlie?” she said. “I’m going to take you out, just for a little while. I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

“I don't want to go,” Charlie said, staring at the TV.

“There'll be ice cream,” she said.

That got his interest. Charlie liked ice cream. “What place?”

“Ben & Jerry's.”

He absorbed that. “Can I have hot fudge?”

“Absolutely.”

“I want to eat it here.”

“No,” Sari said. “We have to go out to get it.”

“You go.”

“You have to come with me.”

Again, he thought for a moment. “I don't want mint ice cream,” he said. “That's spicy.”

“No mint,” Sari said. She squeezed Zack. “How about you, kiddo? You want ice cream?”

“You want ice cream,” said Zack, who was prone to be echolalic these days.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Sari handed Zack to Kathleen, flicked the TV off with the remote, and held her hand out to Charlie. He took it and she hoisted him—with some difficulty—to his feet. “Let's go,” she said.

“Hey, look,” Kathleen said to Lucy as they moved toward the door. “I’m holding a baby. Do I look like a total mom?”

“Just don't drop him,” Lucy said. “And he's not a baby. He's a kid.”

“Oh, what's the difference?” Kathleen said. They followed Sari and Charlie out of the family room, then crept quietly through the house to the front door. They could hear the men desperately chatting away to Eloise in the dining room.

“Listen to them,” Lucy whispered to Kathleen. “Aren't they good guys?”

“Sure, rub it in.” Kathleen shifted Zack over to her other hip. “You and Sari have the best boyfriends ever and I have no one in my life. Are you happy?”

“Deliriously,” Lucy said. “Thanks for asking.”

Charlie hesitated at the front door. “Just ice cream, right?” he said suspiciously. “No doctor?”

“No doctor,” Sari said. “Why? Do they bribe you with ice cream when they take you to the doctor?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“No doctor, no mint ice cream,” Sari said. “Just lots of hot fudge and a friend.”