The Beginners (14 page)

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Authors: Rebecca Wolff

BOOK: The Beginners
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16.
 
A
t the Endicotts’ we woke hot and dehydrated into a newly sunny morning, and decided to make a day of it. We landed at the mill with a blanket and some cans of soda and packaged snacks grabbed from the cupboard. I don’t know how the hours passed exactly, but before we knew it the mosquitoes were out in full force, the sun was getting low. It was time to seek shelter.
Although I had felt a great deal of relief at being in Cherry’s aggressively familiar company, it just seemed right—or at least it did to me, and I had the force to carry us both—that we should drop in at the Motherwells’, and, once there, that we should stay for dinner. Cherry didn’t protest. I was quite hungry, a little weary, and sun-dazed, and from the look of her, her glazed eyelids, her plush cheeks, Cherry shared my somnambulance. We wore our minimalist summer uniforms: T-shirts, cutoffs, sneakers. I didn’t even have underwear on. I don’t know about Cherry.
Dinner was in the making, and while Theo stood, cooking, we three sat around the kitchen table, drinking something Raquel called “sangria” but which tasted like a lemony fruit punch, in the path of the cross-draft created by the screen door and the open window. Cicadas made noise in the bushes; pretty soon moths and beetles would beat against the screens. We got to talking about dreams: Cherry offered up, shyly, some small comment about her own recent night terrors.
“What?” Raquel pounced. “You mean the kind that wake you up, shivering and sweating? Do they go away once you’re awake? Or are you still afraid, even after? I think the most interesting part is after you wake up, seeing how long it takes for that fear to recede. I once dreamed I had no face, or rather that my face was plastic, was constantly shape-shifting, cycling in no particular order through all the stages of my life, from infancy through great age. All the next day I felt unsure of my own aspect, and didn’t know how to move my lips or even blink my eyes.”
I could see that Cherry was uncomfortable with Raquel’s attention. She made no reply, and even leaned back in her chair, as though to remove herself. She fanned herself with a drooping hand, and took a gulp of her drink.
“Rough night for a young mind,” Raquel finally said, laughing a little. Always compelled to break tension, narrative or otherwise.
“Very interesting.” Theo turned to us from the counter and spoke with an air of finitude, as though it was to be the last word on the subject, but then, just as quickly, he resumed speaking. “It puts me in mind of that Zen koan; the one about faces. Of course the thing about a koan is that it brooks no explanation; you must say no more after you say a koan.”
“Well, then, everything is a koan, in that case. Come on, spill it.” Raquel’s hair was piled up on top of her head and the green shirt she wore increased her resemblance to some lizard, basking in the black sun on a black rock.
“I’m sure you’ve heard this one before . . .”
“No introductions, please!”
Theo smiled, came over, and placed his hands, palms up, on the table, as though holding a book open.
“What, then, is the face you wore before you were born?” His voice lilted, as though he really expected an answer.
Raquel leaned back from the table, eyes closed like someone who has just swallowed the sacrament. “You know,” she said, “in every pile of horseshit there is a teaspoonful of truth. Why, just the other day Ginger said to me”—and here she turned to Theo and waved her hand in my direction—“that I look like I mean everything I say, just like other people do. That my facial expressions are remarkably open. That in fact I’m as legible as an open book!”
I was a little taken aback by this interpretation. What I had said (although, on second thought, I could not remember having actually spoken it to her, but just thinking it) was that it seemed to me like she said everything she thought, but that she thought only of what to say. It also seemed to me—though I would never have said this out loud—that she was as proud as a queen of her malaise, and that her disaffection found an equal only in her corresponding desire to be “read like a book.” It occurred to me as an ultimate irony of Raquel’s situation if she were, in fact, a telepath.
“Cherry.” Raquel addressed my friend like a preschool teacher would a problem tot. “Why won’t you tell us what is in your dreams? It’s the most interesting thing there is to tell.” Cherry smiled a little, weakly, I thought; said, “I’m too hungry.” Indeed, I was famished. Theo took down a stack of plates from the cupboard. I stood up to help him set the table, but Raquel motioned me to sit down again. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “He loves to do that sort of thing. Makes him feel humble and centered. Listen,” she said, as I sat down. “If Cherry won’t tell hers, as host I feel as though I should offer one of mine. But the sad truth is that I never remember my dreams. They’re as mysterious to me as they are to you. You can’t imagine my dreams, can you? The next best thing, then, is for me to tell you your dream.” Cherry shifted a little in her chair, rested her cheek in her hand. I wondered if she had the same achy headache that had embraced my skull. Too much sun, not enough of anything else. I wondered, too, if she had noticed that, in fact, Raquel had told us one of her own dreams not ten minutes before. Or had I heard her wrong. Maybe it was a daydream.
 
 
“LET ME SEE, how to begin. You arrive at a house, an old country house, maybe it’s on a farm. It’s on a slight hill; the fields all around it are incredibly green, an unnatural, sort of acid green. The sky seems to be the only boundary. In all directions the horizon line is just sky meeting field. There is a dry rutted lane, with dusty grass growing up in the middle where wheels never go.
“You have arrived at this house, in the hot midday sunshine, to see your best friend. He is a tall man, all dressed in black like a brother in a religious sect. The Shakers, or the Mennonites. His beard is long and brown, untrimmed, and his eyes are the brown of muddy topsoil.”
But this was
my
dream. I’m sure it was my dream. Could it be Cherry’s dream, too? I didn’t dare look across the table to gauge her reaction. I wanted this dream to be mine, and if I could just hold on to it, tightly, through Raquel’s relentless narration . . .
“You are inside the house. There is a big butcher’s block in the kitchen. You converse over it, facing each other. He has been accused of a horrible crime—an ax murder. Suddenly, you are afraid. There is something in his eyes now, something in the dark, clouded depths of his familiar eyes that is telling you to run! Run for your life! You trust what you see. He is your best friend, after all, and would not betray you.
“Out you go, out the door and across the little road, straight into the field and across it and over more hills and straight on until you come to an obstacle: your stopping point. A fence that you can’t climb, tall, made of wood but with an electrified wire running all along the top. You stand, looking up at the top and past it, at the green fields that stretch beyond, past even where the eye fails.
“There is a presence at your elbow. You turn and catch the eyes of your friend, grinning into your own eyes. He does not even appear to be winded, it is as though he has materialized there next to you. His expression shifts from second to second; his features are kaleidoscopic, they make moues and grimaces, winks and blinks and tics and tears and beaming smiles. ‘My friend,’ he says, and the fear that is inside you begins to bloom, like a stomach cramp, like the bends of a deep-sea diver.
“‘Now you must know the truth,’ he intones. You are riveted to the spot. It is clear that he has caught you. You are the culprit. Positions have shifted. That which you came to address, you must now assume responsibility for.
“‘Your best friend is your worst enemy.’ As he utters these words, all the masks drop away and his one true face is revealed: if he is not the Devil himself, he is certainly at least a powerful demon. . . .”
I’m certain she would have gone on, if Cherry had not slumped forward in her chair, her head hitting the table with a surprisingly hollow crack.
I was up out of my seat before Theo could even say “Oh, shit,” from where he stood at the stove. I pulled Cherry up by the shoulders and saw instantly from her rolling eyes and slack mouth that she was having an insulin reaction. I ran to the refrigerator and found apple cider and some marmalade. Raquel asked, “Shall we call anyone?” in a very steady voice. I shook my head, began spooning preserves into Cherry’s open mouth. She tasted it on her tongue and then devoured the spoonful. I fed her the entire jar, and by the time it was gone, she was upright and herself again. She washed it all down with a glass of cider.
“That was stupid of me,” she said. “To go for so long without eating. I’m diabetic,” she explained, apologetic, to Raquel.
“I’ll just bet you are,” Raquel responded, enigmatically.
“Wow.” Theo stepped forward, seeming to insert himself between where Raquel and Cherry sat at the table. He put his arm around Cherry’s shoulders. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Oh yes,” she said, thickly. “I’m just going to the bathroom.” She got up and went out the door and down the hall, where she had left the black fanny pack in which she kept her insulin kit. I heard the bathroom door shut.
“Raquel,” Theo said, “I think we should put Cherry to bed.”
“Oh, she’ll be fine, I’m sure this happens all the time. Ginger can walk her home. The walk will do both of them good. Besides, we haven’t had dinner yet. Once she has some of your delicious concoction in her belly . . . she’ll be better than ever.”
Raquel’s tone was eminently reasonable.
 
 
BUT THAT IS NOT what happened. We did eat huge plates of some kind of vegetable stew, with zucchini and eggplant and tomato, over pillows of rice. But then somehow, moving as though carried out to sea by a strong current, I left Cherry there, limp on the couch in the living room. She looked blankly at me—or she looked imploringly at me and I looked blankly back; the distinction is a fine one but it makes the difference of a lifetime—and said, “Wait, where are you going?” Theo came downstairs with a blanket and pillow, which he laid at her feet. Raquel said, “Theo, really?” from the top of the stairs, and then receded, dematerializing, ascending into the silence that followed. I told Cherry I would see her tomorrow, and as I closed the door behind me I thought I saw him reach out a hand to touch her hair. I caught just the beginning of the gesture, and felt a sharp, confused stab of misery and exultation.
Sometimes it hurts, growing up:
that’s what my mother said to me one day when she found me weeping, consolably, over the final volume in the Anne of Green Gables series, in which Anne has grown so far away from the delightful child she was. The loss of that child could be temporarily ameliorated by beginning at the beginning of the first book again. But this stab felt more like the thrust I felt at the sight of penetration, only higher, somewhere in my chest. My heart contracted, and did not expand again.
I had been waiting patiently for him to touch me again, ever since the Fourth of July. This waiting had added a secret centrality to every day, every evening, every interaction in which the possibility hung lightly, or sometimes with the weight of a thousand breaths, a thousand glances I shot at him. It kept me on the inside of his mind, inside that dark shell, in which he and I were equal in every measure and there was no difference in age, in capacity, in authority. I dwelt in there with him and tried to read his every motion, make with him his every decision—every time he chose to pass behind my chair or reach over me for a book or a knife or a pillow.
So now it was with excruciating clarity that I read his adult motive, his kinetic desire, and because I was so close to him I could not disagree with him. She was more beautiful. She was exquisite, and would exquisitely resist, exquisitely succumb. She would provide him with what I knew he sought from such an encounter: a freshness, a sweetness. An unconscious, living, rushing, breathing doll of life; a girl who would not think but only act, if at first defensively.
I knew I thought too much; it was cast over me like a caul, or like an aura. I did not know if mine had a color but I supposed it must.
Standing on the Motherwells’ porch, my hand still on the doorknob, I brought Cherry’s face up again before me—her dear face, which had taught me what beauty was. The rounds of her eyes, the slow flush of her pure thoughts, spreading concentrically like pools of water or light, or dark, making blank spots where my love had been.
 
 
I LIKE THE IDEA of auras: an organic by-product of living. A gentle, benevolent example of the baffling reserve of potentially real phenomena that we mostly cannot entertain as real, in order to live comfortably. Auras are organic, ghosts are supernatural, the mind is a combustion engine of perception, routinely creating and destroying and creating anew what matters—our hearths, our tongues. Who can dare to navigate these waters and still call herself a useful member of society? It takes all of your breath away. It cleanses your palate of its taste for that which is comfortable. Ordinary knowledge, ordinary society, ordinary love.
But if comfort is not your highest priority, then you might live as we did.
17.
 
The Accident
 

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