21.

“What if it’s a girl?” Vanessa turned to me while we were stopped at a red light on our way to Stash, a knitting store on Charlton Street. “I envy you.”

“Yeah, you envy me,” I said. “You envy the looks Mr. Kushman gives me throughout the entire forty minutes of calculus, like I’m all woman now.”

“Ew!” she yelped.

“I think it’s a boy,” I said, changing the subject. I pictured a baby in a yellow undershirt that snapped under the crotch. A baby rolling around on the lawn, on the mildewed quilt that hung on a nail in our shed on Charter Island.

“I wonder what it will say to you, the boy,” she said. “What will it say?”

“They don’t talk right away,” I said, holding her back against the curb as a taxi whizzed past us.

“Of course not,” she said. “But imagine him saying, ‘That skirt looks so nice on you,’ or ‘Don’t wear that lipstick, Mommy,’ or ‘I’m tired, Mommy,’ or ‘I love you more than my Thomas trains, Mommy, I love you, I love you, I love you, Mommy.’ ” Vanessa’s head bobbed and swayed like a belly dancer’s. “Could you just?”

“Maybe I should turn the scarf into a blanket for it,” I said.

“Or you can start something else for it.”

“What do you think it would like?” I asked.

“It could use a lot of things—a blankie, some sockies, you name it, it could use it.”

“It,” we both said, doing our Madonna blinks at each other.

A cowbell jangled over our heads when Vanessa opened the door to the yarn store. A pale-faced woman in a tie-dyed thermal shirt looked up from her computer.

“Those bells are loud,” she said dryly.

Vanessa strode across the white floor, her rubber biker boots clomping as loudly as rubber could. “Hi, we want to buy some yarn.” She popped the gum she was chewing.

The woman got up slowly from her stool and walked around the desk, her faded black cargo skirt trailing threads from the hem.

“Are you starting something or do you need to replenish?” she asked, sticking a pencil behind her ear.

“Replenish,” Vanessa said. “I’m making something for her baby. It’s a secret.” The woman arched her eyebrows at me, more in benign surprise than disapproval, and I felt what it was like to be pregnant, out in the open, for the first time. It still seemed like it was happening to someone else.

“How should we do this?” she asked Vanessa. “Do you want to whisper it to me?”

“It’s okay, I’ll go over here,” I said, walking to the opposite corner and seeing the table of thin, glossy, hardback books. Leona’s Big Book of Caps. The World’s Coolest Socks. There was another woman sitting in an office in back with straight, reddish purple hair and severe bangs. She was knitting something tartan, and Jimi Hendrix was playing on her computer.

“Ella?” the woman in the cargo skirt called to her.

“Yes?” Ella called back, not looking up.

“Do we have any more skeins of Mongoose Forty-Four?”

“Skeins.” Vanessa smirked at me from across the room. “I love that word.”

Ella glanced at the ceiling in the office. “It’s on order. I’d give it another month.”

“Shit!” Vanessa pouted.

The woman looked over at me and whispered something to Vanessa.

“I know,” Vanessa said. “I could do that.” I looked away. The walls were lined with little box-shaped shelves filled with yarn, and by the window there was a big wooden spinning wheel with a crank that looked very old.

“I’m considering just showing you so you can have a part in this decision,” Vanessa called, being overly serious. “I’m at a crossroads and may need to change tacks.”

“Okay, so show me.” I shrugged and walked over.

She pulled it out of her bag and held it up. It was the same beige yarn she had shown me the day she taught me to crochet in her room, only now it was half of a hat.

“I thought you were making a sweater,” I said. That day in Vanessa’s room seemed like a million, trillion years ago.

“I undid it. I thought it would be a cool baby hat. I’m going to make a tiny brim in front, so it’s kind of trucker. Except now I need to do the top in a different color. I don’t want to wait a month. What about a light green?” She swiveled the unfinished hat around on her fingers. “You don’t like it.”

“No,” I said. It was hitting me hard at that moment that I would soon have a tiny infant who I would have to feed and change and be responsible for every second of every day for the rest of my life. The room went a little foggy. “It’s cute. I love it.”

Vanessa turned to the woman.

“So if I go with the green, how do I do it?”

“Just finish the row and switch.” The woman blinked. “You pull the new color through the loop. You know how to do that, right?”

Vanessa nodded, but I could tell she was too proud to admit she didn’t know how to do it.

“If you have a little yellow left, you could do the very top in a little gather, or you could do a little pom-pom. Up to you.”

“Hmmmm, cunning,” Vanessa said, stealing a glance at me. “But I don’t think the baby will be the pom-pom type. Do you, Thee?”

“Hard to say,” I said, watching the woman walk over to the green shelf. She was maybe ten years older than us, and she inhabited the room in the way that a place becomes a part of someone after they’re in it for a long time. It was the same way Mom was at Fiona’s. Like she owned it and it owned her, too. There was something about this woman, something funny. That bell is loud. I looked back at the beige nubs of yarn on Vanessa’s needle. There was a tiny hole near her hand.

“But we’ll go with the green, right, Thee?” Vanessa asked. “I’ll take a skein of the green, and then I’ve got to split. Have to get uptown for Miles’s thing.” She plunked a credit card down on the high Lucite counter. I reached into my jacket pocket for a tear-out from Vogue of a woman in a crocheted dress with a blue, yellow and green zigzag pattern. It was the kind of look I wanted for a new version of the crocheted bikini from the photo of me on the beach. I was still obsessed with making it, and I had that photo with me too.

Vanessa stuffed the new green yarn into her straw beach bag. “You coming?”

“I think I’ll linger,” I said.

“I’ll call you later. Byeeee.” She waved, clanging the cowbell on her way out.

It felt easier to approach the woman now that Vanessa was gone. I looked at the shelves again. Everything was arranged by color, and when you looked across the shelves, it was like looking at a very detailed rainbow spectrum, blue into teal into green into yellow, each color predictable yet surprising. I thought about zigzaggy sunburst patterns and interwoven squares in primary colors. Thinking about the crocheted bikinis made me feel like the world was opening a window into another world. I went up to the counter, where the woman was staring into her big flat-panel computer screen.

“Paper cutters, my new fixation,” she said. She turned the screen to me and pointed to a white paper cutout of a woman with a huge skirt. “There are people out there who spend hours with, like, tiny razor blades, cutting these incredibly meticulous designs. It’s just bizarre. But beautiful, right?”

I looked at the screen. The woman’s skirt had hundreds of swirls and what looked like little unicorns all over it. “Wow,” I said. She was right, it was absolutely beautiful. And a little heartbreaking. All the painstaking, obsessive effort that went into it.

“So can I help you out with anything else?” she asked, eyeing the tear-out in my hand.

“Well, I had this idea and I was hoping you could help me find a pattern, or you know, some instructions.”

I pulled out the bikini photo and handed it to her.

“Is that you?” she said, moving it closer and farther from her face.

“Yes, when I was younger, obviously. I was hoping you could help me find a pattern that, you know, looks like it.”

“Hmmm … interesting.” She studied the photo, fiddling with the green stone on the thin, black satin choker around her neck. “Was there elastic in the waist and leg?”

“Yes,” I said, distinctly remembering the feeling of rubber bands against my skin.

“I guess you could lead some kind of elastic through when you were all done.” She looked at me, considering. “Have you worked on other projects or will this be your first?”

“I’ve done a few things,” I lied. “Though this seems like it will be more complicated.”

“It will, but no biggie. I don’t have a pattern, but it’s pretty straightforward stuff. I could probably figure it out for you.”

“Really?” I asked, trying not to sound too excited.

“Sure.” She lifted the stone again and dropped it. “It’ll take me a few days. I’ll have to look at a pair of undies. What size are you? This is for you, I take it?”

“Medium,” I said. “Normally, that is. Yes, it’s for me—I’m not sure I was actually planning on wearing it. In my current state, and all.”

“You just want to re-create it,” she said. She continued studying the picture. I could tell she was intrigued by the situation: a practically adolescent pregnant girl clinging to a remnant of her troubled childhood. “Yours looks like it was more of a tube top, right? It might be nicer to do a halter.”

“I love halters,” I said.

She started sketching on her blotter. “How’s this?”

I moved behind the counter. “Is the bottom a little skimpy?” I asked.

“You want it to go higher, toward the belly button?”

“Yeah, I think so.” She kept drawing and it became clear to me. “I want it sort of big, like a pair of big, unsexy Carter’s briefs.”

“Cool.” She nodded enthusiastically. “A little weird, but cool. You sound like me. I detest thongs. I find them aggressively disgusting.”

“I just think they’d look cool sort of big and, you know, like you’re covered up.”

“Like Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn wore big undies and big bikinis. Cool!”

“Right, like Marilyn,” I said, getting excited. “Everyone wore big cover-up bikinis in the fifties, right? That’s what I want.”

She drew a little more. “That better? You could even do a cute band across the top.”

“No, I want to do zigzags.” I fished the Vogue zigzag dress out of my wallet. “Like this.”

“Ahhh. Sort of a seventies vibe.”

“Well, not obviously seventies, right?” I asked.

“No, it’ll depend on what colors you use.” She flipped a paper clip on the blotter, which was framing a calendar that had Xs marked through the days, and notes written in script with a fuchsia highlighter. She’d doodled the word Expo over and over again in the margins. “I think it could look very cool. I’ll work out a pattern. Can I hold on to the photo?”

“Sure.”

“I won’t lose it,” she said, pressing it to her chest. “Promise.”

“Wow, thanks. I’m so excited.”

“My pleasure,” she said, moving a bowl of Red Hots toward me. “That’s what yarn-store ladies are for.”