The Knitting Circle Rapist Annihilation Squad (2 page)

Brigitte stops suddenly and pulls away. “Is grinding your
hips part of the choreography?”

“Oh, yes! It's all part of unleashing your butterfly!”

“Well, I can feel your caterpillar, and I don't like it.”

Riversong leans to her ear and says softly, beseechingly, “My caterpillar needs to be in a cocoon. Your soft, warm cocoon.”

“What?”

“Your butterfly needs to spread her wings. Let's fly together!”

Brigitte laughs. “Riversong, I could never be attracted to someone who mixes metaphors.”

He says earnestly, “My love knows no grammar. I want you.”

“When I was a little girl,” she responds, “I wanted a pink pony. I didn't get that either. I'm flattered, kind of, but I'm leaving now.”

Riversong spins her around and pulls her body against his.

She pushes him away and starts walking toward the door. She hears him behind her and walks faster, then begins to run. He chases her around the mirror-lined room, into the prop room, and back out to the dance floor. The scarves around his neck flap furiously behind him. He reaches out and almost catches her, but she slips away. Finally he corners her near the front door and shoves her against a wall.

She struggles in his arms and says, “Stop it this instant!”

He and his mustache say together, “Never! I listen only to la Huerta! Listen to your heart, Brigitte! Your mouth says
no,
but your la Huerta says
oui, oui!”

“No. My whole body is saying
no.
No, Riversong, no.”

“It takes more than mere words to stop this runaway freight train of love.” He reaches down and pulls a ridiculously bejeweled dagger from his boot. It looks like a souvenir from
Disney World, but it's sharp. He points it at her, and she can tell he knows how to use it.

“You're not leaving,” he says.

Brigitte stares at him a long time, then asks, “Is that how you want it?”

His mustache hides the movement of his lips as he says, “No, my dear, that's how you want it.”

“I'm not choosing this.”

“Yes, you are.”

“This means that much to you? This is how you want it?”

“This is how I'll take it.”

Brigitte looks down. She sees her tote bag on the floor slightly behind him and to one side. The top is open, and the knitting needles are barely visible. “So you're going to take it?” she says.

“Oh, yes.”

He kisses her forcibly. After a moment she stops struggling and reluctantly puts her arms around her assailant.
⁴
Riversong
closes his eyes in ecstasy, murmurs, “Much better. You like, no?”

Tightening her grip on Riversong, Brigitte stretches out her right leg and uses her toe to snag the handles of her bag on the floor behind him. She raises it with her foot, reaches around him with her left hand to get inside, and pulls out a knitting needle. Riversong gyrates against her, delighted with the apparently enthusiastic contact. With a sudden scream and a move reminiscent of
Dial M for Murder
(she, being a rabid fan of classic film, cannot help but notice), she stabs him.

His eyes widen in disbelief. The leonine mustache twitches its final twitch. That is all. Well, perhaps a final gurgling noise or two, which are over quickly and barely worth mentioning. Riversong falls, a knitting needle piercing his la Huerta.

Brigitte stands over Riversong's body and looks at it impassively for a few moments. She sighs. “No, Riversong. I no like.”

She tugs the knitting needle from his body, wipes the blood onto one of his scarves, and slides the needle back into her tote bag. She walks to the door and uses another scarf to wipe her fingerprints from the knob and then to turn it. She peers out, looks both ways, and lets the door click shut behind her before walking briskly back to the bus stop.

Brigitte wearily enters her house, closes and locks the door, flicks on a light, and tosses her tote bag onto a chair. She sighs heavily and sinks onto the couch, then suddenly leaps up to race to the window and scan in both directions before firmly shutting the curtains. She paces back and forth, unsure what to do.

In the bathroom, Brigitte looks in the mirror and sees tears forming in the eyes of the woman in the glass. She blinks them away, forces her face to relax. She keeps looking. Slowly her
mouth begins to form a smile.

She walks back to her living room, sits down, and dials a number on the phone.

“Nick,” she whispers.

Nick cheerfully replies, “Why are you whispering? Do you have a special guest?”

Brigitte whispers, “Why am I whispering?” Then she says in a normal voice, “No reason. Why indeed? What are you doing?”

“You caught me at a very busy time. I'm choosing between watching
Gone with the Wind
for the twenty-sixth time or
Casablanca
for the thirty-fourth.”

“Come over. I can do better than that.”

“Better than Rhett and his ill-fitting dentures? Better than the thrill when Ingrid Bergman says, ‘Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time'?”

“Better than both; I guarantee. I've had a rough day. Please come and take my mind off my troubles.”

“What happened, sweetheart?”

“No discussions, honey. It's something I can't think about right now. If I do I'll go …”

They say together, “… crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.”

They both laugh.

Brigitte says, “What I need right now is distraction.”

Nick says, “So that you can forget for one night that the problems of a few little people don't amount to …”

They say together, “… a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

They both laugh again.

“Sit tight, Brigitte,” Nick says. I'll be right over.”

Nick hangs up the phone and starts to get dressed, strutting around as he hums Hot Chocolate's “You Sexy Thing.”
He spritzes cologne into the air and walks through the mist. He combs his hair, smiling at himself in the mirror. He looks down at his crotch and says, “Big Louie, if Brigitte and I weren't already such good friends, I'd say this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Meanwhile, Brigitte sits with her hand on the phone, half-smiling, humming the same song. She stands, changes her clothes, then brushes her hair.

At first Brigitte didn't tell anyone, not even Nick, what she had done. For weeks she was terrified the police would arrest her, but Riversong had, for obvious reasons, made no record of her visit that night. Brigitte was never visited by the police, much less questioned. She carried on with her life as usual.

The next step in the revolution took place several months later. It was accompanied by the smell of cheese. Smoked mozzarella, to be exact.

Every Thursday night Brigitte and five other women gather in the back room of a cheese factory for their knitting circle meetings, not to plan revolution, but rather to talk and knit and plan their next group trip to Daisy's Craft Barn to pick out more yarn. They started meeting at the cheese factory because it was the only appropriate public space they could find that would let them use a room for free.

A couple of years before, they had met for a time in a back room at a rescue center for cats, but even though they were all animal lovers, they found that the smell of cat urine began to permeate their yarn. And who wants to wear a sweater that smells of pee?

After that they met for a few months in the basement of
a fundamentalist church. That tenancy had ended one evening when one of the church elders just happened to be kneeling outside one of the doors to their meeting room, and just happened to have his ear pressed against the door when Marilyn, fourteen at the time and not normally a member of the group, asked Brigitte why she'd never had any children.

Brigitte responded that she'd never wanted any, and so she had taken great care to always use various forms of protection, which she would be delighted to describe in detail and recommend or disrecommend to Marilyn if she was in need of such information.

Red-faced and mortified, Marilyn said of course she didn't have any
need
for it. She was just curious. But had Brigitte's protection ever failed?

Brigitte said, “Yes, once.”

“What happened?”

“I ran down to Baby-B-Gone faster than you can say, ‘Not every ejaculation deserves a name.'”

The eavesdropping elder, unable to contain his righteous fury, burst into the room and banished the evil women from his church.

After that they heard of a Satanist church offering a free room for use. Since they were just going to knit anyway, they didn't much care what sort of church it was, so long as it had a free room. But when they arrived for their first meeting at the “church,” they found it was in fact a sixteen-year-old-boy's basement in his parents' home, “complete” with black light, black bean-bag chairs, and the boy's original drawings of Led Zeppelin posters. When the boy said they looked best under black light, Brigitte wondered, but was kind enough not to say in his presence, if they wouldn't look even better under no
light at all. After that came a succession of dusty back rooms behind failed storefronts: wedding stores that seemed to fail as often as the marriages themselves; a second-hand store started by someone who'd lost her job in the failing economy and who thought it might be a brilliant idea to reopen a second-hand store started by someone else who'd lost her job because of the economy and who then lost the second-hand store; and a small, dirty, noisy room behind a chocolate factory. They put up with the crowding, the filth on the floor, the spider bites, and even the occasional fright by a rat in exchange for their ability to spend a few hours a week swimming in the smell of pharmaceutical grade chocolate: one week dark, the next week milk, and semisweet the week after that. But even chocolate couldn't help them rationalize staying after they overheard the owner yelling at his daughter for a bookkeeping mistake, calling her stupid, and then hitting her. He kicked them out after they turned him in to the police.

When the room at the cheese factory became available, the members of the knitting circle, still leery after the unfortunate cat pee fiasco, were concerned that their sweaters would smell like cheese. But they had nowhere else to go. Happily, the cheesy fragrance didn't seem to permeate the yarn too awful much. The only even remotely cheese-associated consequence of knitting in this room was that they all unaccountably seemed to make friends more easily with dogs, cats, and people from France.

This week the factory smells like smoked mozzarella. Brigitte is sitting next to her best friend Gina, the mother of Marilyn. In spite of, or perhaps because of, Gina's long-time closeness with the flamboyant Brigitte, she normally dresses as her opposite (in a style she terms
sensible
and Brigitte silently
labels
dowdy;
of course she is far too polite and kind to ever say this aloud). Mary, an avid gardener, favors floppy hats. Christine is famous for neatness. It is rumored she can walk through a hurricane with not one hair out of place, not because of hair spray, but from sheer force of will. And the youngest members, in their early twenties, are Jasmine and Suzie. Inseparable, these two friends nearly blind passersby with sparkle, glitter, and embellishments, from their metallic hair scrunchies to their iridescent eye shadow to the tips of their rhinestone-adorned toenails.

On this particular day, although everyone else talks happily about food, clothes, crazy relatives, politics, and so on, Mary is silent. So silent that it becomes impossible to miss. Finally, Suzie asks what's wrong.

Mary stops knitting, sits still a moment, as if deciding whether to say what she is thinking, and then says, “I'm sorry. It's just … my granddaughter was raped a couple of days ago.”

There is a moment of stunned horror, before the room fills with expressions of condolence. Oh my god! No! How terrible! Goodness! How is she?

Mary says, “As you'd expect. You know.”

“Poor thing. How awful. Oh, no,” everyone murmurs.

Brigitte asks, “Who did it?”

“The counselor at her high school.”

All faces harden. Knitting needles click very fast.

Christine says, “No!”

“That's where I went to school. I could always tell he was a creep. I could just tell,” says Suzie.

Jasmine shakes her head. “I thought he seemed nice.”

“Just because he fools some people, doesn't mean he's not a rapist,” Brigitte says.

Gina nods. “Don't I know that one!”

To which Mary replies, “You, too?”

“Not that ‘nice' guy, but another.”

Christine looks at her, her face soft. “Gina, you've been raped, too?”

“
Too?
You mean you were?”

Christine nods, lips pressed together. They each put down their knitting, get up, hug briefly, then return to their chairs.

They knit quietly for a few moments before Jasmine says, “The guy who did it to me seemed nice, too. At first.”

“Mine never bothered to pretend,” says Suzie.

Mary stops knitting. “Nor mine.”

Gina glances from once face to the next, her brow furrowed. “Wait, have we all… ?”

Silence. They all look at each other, appalled as each hesitantly raises her hand. After a moment they slowly resume their knitting.

Gina says, “It was my cousin.”

Suzie, “A cop.”

Mary, “My abusive ex-husband.”

Jasmine, “My ex-boyfriend.”

Christine, “My prom date. That was a long time ago. Later it was a priest.”

Brigitte, “A country-western singer. Afterwards he even wrote a song about it.”

The room is silent except for the clacking of knitting needles.

Christine turns to Mary and asks, “Will your granddaughter go to the cops?”

“Cops won't do anything. They never do,” Mary says.