Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

Sometimes I couldn’t help studying them, these images of the people who had come before me. Maybe one of them would have looked in my eyes and recognized something—whatever it was that was weighting my movements right now. Or maybe they all would have recognized it; maybe I was simply a link in a chain, destined to become just like the others and someday have children who were just like me.

I could never have foreseen, then, that everything I’d ever known was about to change so completely, that the stranger’s arrival was already reaching into the future to alter everything I’d thought I understood, like cracks spreading through glass before it gives way, showing us something behind it we’d never expected to see.

There was something I would always remember about the way the light had slanted through the kitchen of the house I’d shared with Amos, falling across me as I stood at the window, sometimes with the radio on but usually in silence. It was so warm, so solid-seeming, drawing out the essence of everything. It turned the wildflowers into stained glass, the dirt road into copper, the wheat fields into a rippling green sea. The house felt close and alive, not like the decaying box with dirty walls it really was. Every afternoon, I stood there, observing the small changes in the landscape, filling myself with the quiet before Amos returned from work. I couldn’t have explained what I felt in those moments, or why I came to see them as so vital, a brace that held me up, reminding me that I was real, that I was there, that there was some part of my mind that no one else could reach, even if I myself chose not to go there just yet. I just knew that I treasured them, these minutes when I felt suspended in a beam of light, part of it, something more than myself and something less.

We were happy in the house, or so I told myself. It wasn’t just the first place we’d owned, but also the first one where we’d ever lived together; I’d been at school with Beth until then. I’d never seen Amos as excited as he was when he held the deed in his hand, his signature still fresh. His smile had been broad and his face had looked as though it were lit up from within; he’d embraced me so hard he’d almost lifted me off the floor. Now, he murmured into my hair, we were finally a family. A real one.

He had never really wanted me to go to school. Even so, he had let me do it—something for which I’d been grateful, telling myself what a generous and understanding husband I had. I had liked college—loved it, even—although I’d never had more than a vague notion of what I was doing there. I’d taken a physics class in high school with a teacher I’d liked, a short, round man with a contagious love of his subject, who told me so many times I was good at it that I almost came to believe him. I let him talk me into sending off some college applications, writing that I would be a physics major even though I didn’t actually have the faintest idea what that would entail. I was behind on the math; in Centerville, trigonometry had been the highest class we could take. Still, I had a dim sense that I should do what I enjoyed. So, after my first year was out of the way, I buried myself happily in darkened labs, calculating, adjusting, figuring the inner workings of the world. Thousands of others had done the same before me, I knew, but I didn’t care. It was all new to me.

Somehow I fumbled my way through three years, directionless but awed, invisible to everyone around me but soaking it all in nonetheless. For me, these years were an adventure, one I would never have dared to hope for. I couldn’t escape the sense that I didn’t deserve it, but I did the best I could, naive and overwhelmed and, in my own way, terrifyingly in love with it all.

Meanwhile, Amos’s silences grew longer and longer when I came to his rented room in Mechanicsburg, a cramped bedroom in a faceless house that was identical to all the others on the street. I was careful never to tell him anything about school; somehow, the sight of his dusty hands and tired slump made me understand that I shouldn’t, that it would sound frivolous, or as if my life were moving on without him. Although he never said so, I knew he blamed himself for not having done well in high school, for having put himself in the position of being less educated than his own wife. He was intelligent but suffered from some kind of reading problem, something that had never been diagnosed but made his progress through even a short item in the valley newspaper noticeably slow. I did my best to show him that I not only respected him anyway, but very nearly worshipped him, that I knew the book smarts I was gaining were less important than the actual smarts that came from being out in the world the way he was, living the life he lived. The things he said seemed to me to have a kind of plainspoken wisdom, and I began to quote him whenever I was asked for an opinion about anything. When I was around him, my sentences ended with little laughs, as if to show him that I didn’t take myself too seriously. The last thing I wanted to do was say something that angered him or made him think I cared about myself more than him.

I knew what was coming—I must have—even though I pretended I didn’t. Still, when it happened, I was unprepared.

“I need a wife who’s here with me,” he said one day, sitting on the edge of the bed, his face turned toward the window. A plume of cigarette smoke uncurled above him, and there was sorrow in his posture. “I can’t help it. I just do.”

I stood looking at him, my backpack dangling heavily from one hand. My stomach dropped into my shoes.

“I need us—” he said slowly, “I need us to be a family.” Leaning forward, he stubbed out his cigarette, studying the dead end of it before turning to look at me. His voice was gruff but vulnerable, determined but tinged with regret. “I’m sorry I feel that way. I know how much you enjoy being down there.” The expression in his eyes was withdrawn, as if he expected to be hurt, had prepared for it. “If you really want to go on the way we’ve been going on, you might be better off without me.”

“I’d never be better off without you,” I said. Then, in a rush, “And I don’t enjoy it. Not as much as I enjoy being with you, anyway.”

“I’m not so sure about that.” Resting his chin in his hand, he watched me, as if expecting to read something in the way I looked back at him, the way I breathed, the way I stood.

“If I asked you to leave that place, and come up here and be with me, would you?” he said finally. A moment passed, and he cleared his throat. “If it was important to me?”

A long silence followed. There was an unfamiliar sensation in my chest, a kind of tightening. As I gazed down at my hands, still gripping the backpack, I saw that the nails were white from pressure. But I knew there was only one right answer to the question.

“Of course,” I said.

I threw myself into my studies for a few more months, hunching over a table in the library for hours, absorbing as much as I could, working on papers every night while Beth looked on, puzzled at this sudden, frantic activity.

“You’re leaving,” she said one day, in a tone of disbelief.

“Yeah,” I said cheerfully, although I couldn’t look at her.

“But you like it here,” she protested. “You like studying. You love physics.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to sound careless, “I do, but the math’s getting too hard. It was never really a good idea.”

“What do you mean? You got a B+ in that linear algebra class.”

“A B+ isn’t really anything to rave about. Besides,” I added, “what was I really going to do with a physics degree, anyway?” I was echoing the imaginary Amos who spoke in my head, and perhaps it was this that made her lose patience.