Ski Lesson

She is walking along the corridor between the church and her room in the convent when she hears someone yell, “Run for cover motherfucker!” It’s not the command that alarms her—nothing so exciting ever happens to her—but rather the voice carrying those profane words: it is childlike. Sweet, even. She stops at a window, and keeping herself out of sight, peers carefully outside. Across the street, in the parking lot of the old parochial school, is a boy with his back to her. He crouches behind an improvised snowbank, his bare hands hurriedly packing snow into tight spheres. He has amassed a meager pile (half-a-dozen at most) when a grapefruit-sized ball rips through the top of the bank, barely missing his unprotected head. She touches the window and opens her mouth to shout something helpful, or, perhaps, a reprimand, but nothing comes out. 

The boy crams the snowballs into his pockets and shouts in that same cherubic voice, “You’re going to die, motherfucker!” In a heroic blaze, he leaps from behind the bank and charges his friend, a fat boy who turns and races away, a game of violent tag ensuing, the boys whooping and cussing and eventually tumbling momentously down a far hill and out of sight. 

“My, it’s frigid,” comes a voice from behind. Agnes finds she has opened the window and is standing fully framed in the pane, snow drifting in and melting into clear glass beads on the sill. She doesn’t remember opening it.

“Sorry, sister.” She pulls the glass shut, and the woman continues down the dim hallway. 

She tries but cannot remember a time when she herself was in a snowball fight. Her youth is distant, too distant to remember clearly, like a part of a novel she once read and has since forgotten. The days now fuse together like one interminable chapter, predictable tasks stacking up to make the day: prayers and tidying up, scrubbing vegetables, sitting in holy contemplation or appearing so. It has been that way for longer than many live at all, and she is tired. Had things turned out differently, he might have been family, the foul-mouthed soldier of the schoolyard battle. She had wanted that, once. But that had been a different time. 

For hours afterwards, she struggles with her memory, trying to recall a day, any day, something—anything— specific: a snowball fight, a winter meal, the name of a friend from school. Anything from those crystalline childhood years. Her memory is dim and murky, and the harder she searches, the murkier it becomes, like groping for a dropped coin in a creek bed, its slimy mud floor disturbed and swirling more and more with each pass. This unnerves her, and she grows suspicious of the few scenes that do come back. She knows, for example, that she and her brothers went sledding on the corner hill where the shoulder of the road dropped down to flat fields of soybeans below; but she knows this as she knows she was born on a rainy morning in June—her mind has knit the scene from the strands of what she’s been told by others. She cannot say it is her own. 

Later that afternoon she finds herself at the window again, watching the students file onto waiting busses. There is a smaller bus, a grimy white bus with a hand-written paper sign in the window: Ski Club. This is the spark.

A couple days later, she speaks to the principal of the school, a spindly, red-nosed man in a wrinkled suit, who is enthused by Agnus’s request to attend the next ski trip. He asks carefully if she has ever been skiing. She lies, says that yes, she has. She uses the phrase “in my day,” as though any day had ever really been hers, and she feels ridiculous, then exhilarated by the lie: it is not something she does. He suggests the students help her rent skis and guide her to the safer hills. He is worried about her age but covers it up with compliments about her “vim and vigor,” her “go-get-em.” His office smells like stale cigarettes, and she hopes he will soon stop; she has never developed the proper etiquette for chitchat, especially concerning herself. She thanks him abruptly and leaves with a silly little bow. 

The day of the trip, she watches from the dingy window as the bus leaves the town behind, its dirty slushbanks and stained beige buildings giving way to soft swells of snowy hills like mounds of clean white linen. The farther they drive, the taller the hills grow, tangles of leafless trees sprouting from their tops, rough golden cliffs torn from their sides. They are far from mountainous, but their steep slopes make Agnes tense. She smooths her wool skirt and runs her fingers repeatedly along the gilded edges her pocket Bible.

On arrival, she looks out on the nearly empty parking lot, the light poles still wrapped in glittering red and green holiday ribbon despite it being February. They disembark, she last of all, and she follows the students through the entrance to the log chalet where she wipes fat grains of salt from her boots. Two twin-like young men in puffy blue and black jackets greet them from behind an oak counter—most of the students ignore them, involved in their own conversations, and file around the counter through the door beyond. Agnes is soon left alone, still clutching her pocket Bible to her chest. She hopes the two men cannot see it—it is very small. 

 Agnes had always been uncomfortable under the gaze of others, and for this, being a nun was actually helpful—it made her predictable and discouraged others from looking further or getting to know her. But here, she feels too visible, like a fugitive in a spotlight. She can’t just stand there, but also cannot quite fathom what the two men are for. So she makes a sudden decision and begins walking with feigned confidence in the direction of the students.

“Hello,” one of the men says in her direction. She freezes in position. “Can I help you with something?” For a moment she ponders what that help might entail. She decides to cast a broad net.

“Yes,” she says. His name tag says “Chris.”

“Are you here with the students?” 

“Yes,” she says, brushing something imaginary from her forehead.

“Would you like to wait for them somewhere comfortable?” he asks.

“No,” she said, but quickly reconsiders. It would be easier, really, to go down this offered path: she would be led to a comfortable chair, probably somewhere near a hearth where she might be offered coffee and perhaps a cookie or some prepackaged snack. She would sit there, toasting her toes by the fire, absorbing the generic jazz wafting amongst the log beams, then bundle back onto the bus together with the students. She would listen to their happy banter, their teenage gossip, before returning to the familiar confines of her room. It would be easy, pleasant even. She could even return another time, try again, consider this reconnaissance and call it a success. 

“Sorry?” The young man waits.  

“No,” she decides. “I’d like to ski, actually.”

Some time later, after she has been fitted for boots and clicked into her long smooth skis, Agnes finds herself alone outside the chalet, facing an unfamiliar view. Rising from the earth before her is a cluster of hills, slick with snow packed so hard against their surfaces they look like plastic. Thick black poles climb up their slopes, suspended from which are tiny wire seats swinging like pendants in the air, one or two transporting the tiny silhouettes of skiers, their poles and skis dangling perilously in the empty sky. An image of herself thrashing crazily in the air before being skewered by a pine tree plays in her mind. She feels hollowed by fear. 

Chris has asked her to meet him at the foot of the smallest hill for an introductory lesson, free of charge. The lonely mound stands off to one side, barely a hill, its incline so shallow the top is no higher than the chalet itself.

 To her disappointment, however, the slope is an even match for her, in part because of the tow-rope, a frightening apparatus that pulls her briskly to the top after several futile attempts. Chris meets her there, scaling the incline with momentum alone. He shows her how to bring the tips of her skis together in a V-shape to control her speed and prevent herself from careening down the slope to her death or indignity. In this way, she progresses slowly downwards toward him as he skis effortlessly backwards in front of her, arms outstretched like a strapping, stubbled Jesus, ready to catch her. She feels cared for—but not in the way she is accustomed to, as though someone had written “handle with care” on her forehead. She likes it; he is handsome, and this she finds motivating. She smiles, thinking of slipping on purpose. “Are you okay?” he asks when they reach the bottom. 

“Yes. No. I’m fine.” She blushes, a feeling so unfamiliar it’s almost new. “I’m not going in one of those swinging baskets,” she says, and pokes her pole in the air towards the lifts. 

She is led to a second hill, a taller one also with a tow-rope. Chris asks if she wants assistance, and she startles herself by declining. At the top, she starts to wonder what she is doing, honestly, an old woman, sending her frail bones shuttling down the side of a hill with nothing but two hollow metal sticks to keep her from crumpling like a pile of dirty laundry at the base. It’s madness, really. A small wonder someone hasn’t tried to stop her yet, but perhaps, she thinks, no one really cares. There comes a time when one should carry on with life as it is, a point when one should make peace with the life they’ve had, even if they can’t remember it very well, or at least not in technicolor detail. There, at the top of the slope, she wonders if she should just give up.

If she could only know that barely a month later she would be dead anyway, gone in her sleep, her body packed away in a wooden box stored beneath earth not far from the room she’d slept in most her life, maybe she would not have these thoughts. But she doesn’t know this. And so she hesitates.

The sky is a watery wash of blue, pink bleeding in around the tips of the pines, incandescent beams of late sunlight cutting her shadow from behind. It is laid out before her, her legs impossibly long, her head a small bulb several meters down. The snow sparkles all around her soft edges. She lifts a hand to wave at herself. She is enormous and alone on the blank page of the hill. It is like looking through a frosted mirror: she, a form not quite herself. 

She is unsure how to proceed—her motivation keeps getting interrupted, like a badly tuned frequency on a transistor radio. One part of her is scared, and reasonably so; but there is something else flickering inside her, a part of herself long put to bed, wrestling with her good sense, threatening to overthrow it. A similar sensation had taken hold in her first days at the convent, when the heavy fabric of her habit—which had still been worn back then—seemed to snuff her out like a candle flame. Adaptation had eventually taken hold, however, and she’d become a different soul: tame and only slightly tortured, adept at rationalization, self-effacing and spiritually anemic. 

 But now, she does not know how to accommodate this past version of herself in her aging body. One moment, she tries to convince herself she’d best be careful or she could get hurt, and the next, a fountain of electricity bubbles up and out of her throat in a buoyant laugh. She pushes her poles hard into the packed snow and is off. 

The move is impulsive, un-calculated, and she doesn’t have time to position her skis to brake against the decline. She gathers speed and is sure she will fall. The path is clear, though, the slope as smooth as felted wool, and if she bends her knees and hugs her elbows tightly in, she feels almost stable. Numbness bites at her toes, her fingertips, and her eyes water as the cold air pushes against her face. She closes them, only for a moment, but long enough to feel herself moving as if in slow motion. She sees herself from the outside, a woman in flight, streaming down the hill with the last of the sunlight.And then, just as fast, she is slowing on flat ground and Chris is there, two thumbs raised in her direction as she glides past. Inertia brings her to a halt. 

Her body unclenches, and she would like to sit down right there, but the boots keep her upright, so she stands and lets her eyelids close one more time. She feels bright inside her skin, as though her insides were made of tinsel, and her heart throbs in her ears and throat. She is simultaneously numb and frightfully alive, warmth sparkling up from below her naval like champagne. She has felt this only once before, the one and only time she was kissed. It had taken her by surprise, this kiss from a friend, a man she had known from her school days, and it had been—and perhaps still was—the single most enlivening moment of her life. Not long after, she had gone away. He had been a married man. 

“Nice run you had there!” Chris’s voice cuts through her reverie. “How’d you do?”

“Well enough, I suppose.” Agnes pokes her pole at the button that would release the boot. 

Chris squats down to help. “Put your hand here,” he says, patting the back of his shoulder. “I’ll get you out.” She places both hands on his shoulders, leans into him gratefully. “And step on out.” He holds her arm as she totters back to the chalet. He sits her down in a wooden chair and slides the boots carefully from her feet. She sits there a long time, hot pain shimmering through her toes as they defrost. It has been a long time since she’s felt even the slightest pain, and it saddens her to know this. 

Hours later, she is crossing the parking lot from the bus back to the convent when it begins to snow. It is beautiful, the big flakes like torn tissues wafting through yellow cones of streetlight, bright white against the black winter sky. It is unusually cold, in a way it rarely is anymore. As a child, on nights as cold as this one, she and her brothers had thrown maple syrup into the air—she remembers how it shattered when it hit the wooden slats of the back porch, frozen solid, hard as glass. They would eat the shards, suck on them like candy, the sweetness immunizing them from the cold. She remembers it clearly—the sound of the wind howling wraithlike through the back yard, the snot freezing in their nostrils, and puffs of white breath condensing on her lashes, blurring her vision with every blink and trickling down her cheeks like cold freshwater tears. She can almost taste the frozen candy melting its sweetness down the back of her throat. Walking through the snow, the happy chatter of teenagers behind her, she remembers. She sticks out her tongue and catches a flake.