Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

“Well, gee, I don’t know,” she shot back with uncharacteristic sarcasm. “Be a physicist?”

I laughed. “No way. You need a Ph.D. for that.”

I had played my trump card. It went without saying that no woman whose husband only had a high-school diploma would ever dream of getting a Ph.D. It would be like castrating him.

She had looked at me, furious but helpless, unable to find her way around the solid walls of valley logic that encircled us both.

I never quite admitted to myself that I hadn’t wanted to drop out, that whenever I thought about it, it gave me a strange twisting feeling that I was too young to know was regret. I couldn’t have admitted that, because admitting it would have meant admitting other things, too. Instead, I pushed the nameless feeling away and told myself that I had done the right thing. That this was what love meant.

And so we moved to Centerville, not far from my parents, because it was the only area where we could afford to buy a house on Amos’s salary. It was a drab little place on a back road, barely more than an old hired hand’s shack, but I kept it neat and lined the shelves with books and trinkets we picked up at yard sales. Our lives came to resemble scenes from a play, a montage from one of those reassuring but dull daytime TV shows I sometimes watched when the cleaning was done. I packed Amos’s lunch in the morning, sometimes standing in the doorway to wave as he pulled away in the truck, the only vehicle we owned. I washed the curtains and the walls; I settled into a chair to read; I made a cake—my first one—on the only occasion when Beth came to visit, glancing around her with a careful look, as if she were afraid I could read her thoughts. I vacuumed the carpet, humming to myself and stealing looks at the phone on the wall, vaguely hoping it would ring even though I could hardly imagine who would call. I sat on the sofa and watched the second hand make its slow turn around the clock; I slid casserole dishes in and out of the oven; I dusted the corners. The houseplants flourished, then died from overwatering. Amos would come home, sometimes happy, sometimes silent, always exhausted. I lived for the days when he would walk into the kitchen and put his arms around me, not saying anything, but sharing himself with me, burying his nose in my hair, making me feel as though standing there quietly with him was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

When we’d moved in, I’d slid my remaining textbooks and papers into a closet from which they’d eventually disappeared, although I never knew exactly where they’d gone. In the same way, I slid my memory of my time in school—that other place, the other Kathleen who had existed there—into a corner of my mind where I never had to look at it, just as if it had never been. Whenever I brought it out, it shone in my eyes, too bright, too hopeful. So in the end, I left it where it was, until finally it was buried so deeply under other things that I never even thought to look for it anymore.

I had become what I’d always expected to be: a wife. In the end, I found it hard to imagine what else I could have been.

And yet, I would stand at the window, feeling somehow as though the person I had been, some essential part of myself, were floating away, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it. It spun itself out from the center of me like the unwinding string of a kite, receding farther and farther, growing smaller and smaller against the sky.

Deep down, I knew I shouldn’t let it go. But I never imagined how dangerous my life would become when it was gone.

The coffee machine hissed and burbled as I crumpled the new sheet of paper in frustration, tossed it into the trash can, and sighed. No matter what I did, I still couldn’t make the numbers add up. Tuition, groceries, gas, car insurance. I didn’t factor in the cost of the pills, since—no matter what the nurse in the hospital had seen fit to imply—they were temporary and I would be giving them up as soon as I was ready. Even so, I couldn’t make it work. I could take out a loan, maybe, but I knew I didn’t want that—to be a hostage to the government, or the banks, or whoever it was who was in charge of such things. Even if Beth paid the rent, even if I took a part-time job, there was simply no way to do it. Besides, what I had said about my grandmother was true. Whether she admitted it or not, she needed me.

There was a rapping sound, and I looked up to see the stranger’s face on the other side of the door, surrounded by the early morning light. The knob twisted, and he stuck his head in.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“Well, obviously. Since when do you ask?”

The rest of him slipped through the crack in the door. I could see now that he was holding a wide, battered-looking gray box in his hands.

“What’s that?”

He stepped forward, removing his hat, and slid the box onto the counter. After rubbing his hands together and blowing on them—it had grown cold again—he opened the box to reveal two jumbled rows of plastic figures.

“Chess,” I said, surprised.

“Yes,” he replied, suddenly beaming, as if he couldn’t help himself. “I found it in the game room. Would you like to play? I thought you might enjoy it if I taught you.”

I picked up one of the knights and held it in my palm, examining the proud, chipped horse’s head. The white had yellowed to the color of ivory, and I ran a thumb over the mane, turning the piece over to look at the felt on the bottom. “You must really be dying of boredom up there.”

“Not ‘dying.’ I mean, it’s not terminal.” Sorting through the pieces with his slim fingers, he darted a look at me to see if I’d appreciated his joke. “Really, I just like to play. We used to have a chess set in my office, in one of the back rooms. The other lawyers and I would play all the time. Some days, it was all we did.”

“Okay,” I relented, touching the folded game board. “You don’t need to teach me, though.”

“Oh—you know how to play?”

“Well, sort of. My grandfather taught me a long time ago.”

“That’s wonderful.” His face was radiant. “Was he very good?”

“I don’t know. He learned in the army. Good enough to win cigarettes off the other guys, I guess.”

The stranger dragged the other stool out of the closet and began setting up the board. One of the bishops was broken in half, and a missing pawn had been replaced by a nine-volt battery. He pinched the heavy rectangular lump between his fingers and looked at it in consternation.

I took it from him and put it on the board. “Well, what did you expect? This is how rednecks play chess.”

He gave me a surprised look, one that quickly turned to sternness. “You’re not a redneck.”

I laughed, wondering who had taught him the word. “Yes, I am, but I don’t care. It’s been a long time since I cared about other people’s judgment.”

He pursed his lips, looking, for a brief moment, not unlike my grandmother.

“You’re not that thing,” he said. “Here, you can be white and I’ll be black. Do you know some good openings?”

“I used to. One or two, anyway. I’ll have to see if I can remember.”

After staring down at the board for a moment, I nudged a pawn forward. He did the same, and before I knew it, we were off. He beat me easily, but as we traded moves, the feel of the game—that way of thinking into the future, maneuvering based on invisible possibilities—began to come back to me.

“Again?” he asked when we’d finished.

For the first time since I’d met him, I thought, he looked genuinely happy.

“Yeah. I can’t let you get away with that.”

We put the pieces back in their neat rows and started over. It was all so quick, so absorbing, that I almost forgot how impossible the whole thing was: me, him, sitting together in this place as if there were nothing unusual about it at all. I looked up from the board at his lowered head, his expression of concentration, and was about to say something—to ask him, somehow, about the fact of his being here—when he broke in unexpectedly.