Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

The porch outside the store was empty, which gave me a small twinge of pleasure as I pulled into the lot. A few minutes later, I was sitting at one of the dusty tables, feet propped up on a chair, attempting to find my page. Martin, I noticed, had returned from Carlisle, a jumble of what looked like metal parts filling the back of his station wagon. I wondered if he had met the stranger yet—assuming, of course, that the stranger was still there.

The book was slow going. Even at the store, in the unbroken quiet, I sometimes found it difficult to follow the story, a fact that puzzled me. During my years in college, I had flown through books, consuming piles and piles of them, as if I were feeding them into a fire. Beth, my best friend, and I had shared a place for a while, two married women temporarily bunking away from our husbands, and together we’d devoured an almost unthinkable number of books. My husband, who was still living and working thirty miles away in Mechanicsburg, preferred that I didn’t go out, while her husband was struggling to feed and house himself and Beth on a noncom’s salary. And so we read, sometimes getting so lost in our conversations, our chance to try out ideas without anyone else there to say we were wrong, we forgot to eat the food in front of us. She was usually the one who was brave enough to say something first, and I remembered the sound of our laughter when we said something so bold we didn’t know what else to do, looking around as if somebody would surely catch us.

Today, she was one of the few people I could speak to for a long period without losing my concentration, although as the months went by I felt less and less of a need to discuss anything with anyone at all. There was something to be said, I thought, for a quiet life, for self-sufficiency.

Around noon, Martin’s wiry figure rounded the corner of the hostel, carrying an armful of branches. Waving with his free hand, he motioned for me to join him. I put the book down and mounted the hill.

“So!” he said, throwing the branches into a pile by the old stump he used for splitting wood. He was short, with a sharp, narrow face that should have been ugly but somehow wasn’t—or if it was, I had long since stopped noticing. There was something oddly magnetic about the hopeful expression he always wore, a cheerful alertness that seemed to radiate from his very skin. “You’ll never guess what I’ve got out in the trunk.”

“You’re right, I probably won’t.” I watched him pull a hatchet from his coat, testing the blade with his thumb. “What happened? Did your car eat some other car?”

“Very funny. I’m not going to tell you what it is, actually. I can tell you it’s going to be awesome when I build it, though. And I mean totally awesome. Like, phenomenal.” Bending down, he dragged a branch onto the stump and began quickly chopping it into kindling, pausing to smile up at me as he did so.

I watched him toss the handful of sticks into a pile. “But for some reason I’m not allowed to know what it is?”

“You’ll see. I mean, you can try and guess if you want, but I don’t think you’ll get it.” He picked up another branch and broke it into pieces with his hands.

I glanced up at the station wagon.

“Go ahead!” He laughed, his grin showing two gray teeth among the white ones. “Guess.”

“Guess? I don’t know. A medieval printing press.”

“What? Come on—that’s not a real guess. Try again.”

“A Ferris wheel.”

“All right, wiseacre, so you’re not going to play along. That’s okay—you’ll see it soon enough. Man,” he went on, the hatchet knocking against the stump, “I wish I’d invented this thing. I almost did! One of those blueprints I drew up last winter wasn’t far off.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, “whatever happened to that grill thing you built? The one with the old oil drum?”

“That? That’s ancient history. I raffled it off for the church last week.”

“Raffled it off?” I looked up. “After all that work?”

“Sure! Don’t worry, I’ll build another one—maybe even better. Gotta keep busy up here somehow.” He winked. “So how’s your friend?”

I handed him a branch, smelling the deep reassuring smell of black walnut. “What friend?”

“The Russian guy. The odd one.”

“Oh—good, you met him. I was worried he’d skip out without paying.” I hadn’t been worried, really; whoever he was, something about him seemed honest, although it had occurred to me that someone who had appeared so abruptly could probably disappear with just as little notice.

“No, he seems to have decided to hang out for a while. He’s hitchhiking around or something and says he’s enjoying the peace and quiet. I told him if that’s what he’s looking for, then believe me, he’s found it.” Martin straightened. “He’s a lawyer, you know. That’s what he told me.”

“Really?” I pictured the tall, threadbare foreigner standing by the door, face half hidden behind his scarf, hat in his hands.

“I wouldn’t lie to you.” Martin gathered up the split kindling and tipped an imaginary hat. “Thanks for the help,” he said, ambling back toward the hostel in his slightly bowlegged way.

“See you, Martin.” Smiling to myself, I walked back down the hill. I liked Martin, I thought: he had never once asked me a personal question, and I returned the favor. It was one of the best kinds of friendship I could imagine.

In the store, I unwrapped the sandwich I’d bought at the gas station and ate it standing up. There was an old combination radio and cassette player on top of the ice cream case, and although the radio part was useless up here, the tape deck worked fine. Picking a cassette from the pile on the hidden shelf under the counter, I opened the cracked case and nudged the volume up. A woman’s plaintive voice threaded its way through the room, accompanying me as I filled a plastic pail and reached for the mop, diligently erasing footprints and dust with swaths of water. Patsy Cline. I wrung the mop and pushed it methodically, back and forth, under the shelves, into the corners. It was warm in the store, at least, thanks to the grill and the rattling electric heater along the back wall. When I was finished, I made a fresh pot of coffee, leaning back against the counter and inhaling the sharp scent as Patsy warbled in her somehow luxuriant sadness, her melancholy pleasure. Then I refilled the pail and did the chore again, humming, letting myself drift off into the simple rhythm of it, my joints gradually loosening.

“Crazy,” I sang with Patsy, letting my voice ripple through the empty aisles while the backup singers chimed in: ah, ah, ahhhh. “I’m crazy for feeling so lonely…” The wet strands of the mop kept time.

“Excuse me, is this your book?”

I turned sharply. The foreigner was standing in the doorway, wearing the same coat, the same scarf drawn over his mouth, holding a thick hardcover before him. His eyes were bright.

I switched off the tape and looked at him guardedly, taken aback by his seeming ability to materialize out of nowhere.

“Yeah, looks like it,” I said shortly. “Did I leave it out on the porch?”

“That’s where I found it, yes.” He gazed at the cover thoughtfully, pulling his scarf down and running a thumb over the embossed letters of the title. “Is it really yours? You’re reading it?”

I bent and lifted the pail of dirty water, trying not to show that this was difficult. “Yes, it’s mine.” Then, raising an eyebrow, “Why? Do I not look like someone who would read books?”

“Oh.” He placed the volume on the counter and rubbed his gloveless hands together. “I’m sorry—that’s not what I meant. It’s just that it’s a very good book. I didn’t expect that that was what you would be reading.” He winced. “Sorry, I mean that—well, you know, it’s a Russian book, and—”