“Yes,” I said finally, not turning around.
“Oh, hey, how about that. What is it?”
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“I said, what is it? Tell us what you think it means.”
I looked up at the fan that whirred over the grill, sucking the smoke away, up through the ceiling. The handle of the spatula was splintered, and I could feel a sharp piece digging into my palm. The meat kept bubbling, collapsing outward, browning.
“It’s someone who digs in the ground,” I told the fan. “Looking for artifacts.”
“There you go!” the man said, laughing and clapping his hands together, the gray-blue jacket making a slippery sound. “‘Someone who digs in the ground.’ Let’s go see if we can do a bit of digging in the ground, gentlemen.”
I handed them their burgers without a word.
When they were gone, I closed the front door and leaned back against it. My eyes began to fill, the ice cream case becoming a bright blur, the letters of the menu board indistinct. I wiped my face roughly and held my breath. This was stupid. I had no reason to cry, and I wouldn’t.
I wanted to go back outside, to look that man in the face and tell him to fuck off.
But I didn’t.
As I stood there, watching the last bits of meat on the cooling grill turn black, there was a knock. Reluctantly, I opened it to find Martin on the other side.
“Hey, what’s up? Why’s the door closed?”
“Nothing.” I moved to my side of the counter and busied myself with cleaning up. When I trusted my voice, I said, “Could you find him and tell him it’s fine?”
Martin was leaning on the Formica. “Him? Who, Danya?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, sure. What am I saying is fine?”
“Nothing.” I pulled out the mop and began swiping at the drops of oil on the floor.
“Oh, well, ‘nothing.’ Excellent—glad to hear it.” He nudged aside the plastic display jar of Slim Jims. “Is something up? Did those guys bother you?”
“You saw them?”
“I heard them. Would’ve been hard not to—that was quite a commotion for our little neck of the woods.” He reached for a napkin and began folding it origami-style, pressing the creases with his thumb, the tendons in his skinny arms twitching. “Seriously, though, did they do something they shouldn’t’ve? You’re looking a little edgy.”
“I don’t need to be told how I look.”
He paused in place. A moment passed.
“Sorry,” he said finally. “Well, if you need anything, you know where I am. And I’ll pass along the message.”
Patting the counter, he looked at me as if he might say something else, but he didn’t. I heard his whistle and the creak of his steps as he crossed the porch, and then there was silence again. I pulled my hair back from my face, tugging until it hurt and holding it there, then let it drop.
A few hours later, at my grandmother’s house, I held a sheet of paper with numbers hastily jotted on it. Even with in-state tuition, they added up to five thousand dollars per semester. My earnings at the store were barely above minimum wage, and even if I took a different job—I closed my eyes and slid the paper into a drawer, looking out the kitchen window at the deserted railroad tracks.
It would never work.
When the night came, I opened some soup and ate it standing up, spooning it directly out of the can, cold, while I gazed out the window. My grandmother was asleep in her chair, her head tilted back, her hair a gray halo around her face.
I tucked a blanket around her and turned off the TV whose muted images flashed in the background, reflected in the family photographs that hung on the walls. One of them was of my grandmother herself, her high-school graduation picture, sepia-toned and soft-focused, showing a girl with an open face and graceful smile.
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 ne
ver 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.
“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.
3
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 bo
x 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.”
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