The Beginners (2 page)

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Authors: Rebecca Wolff

BOOK: The Beginners
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It was not just for the extra twenty-five dollars a week that my parents had urged me to apply to Mr. Penrose for a job. I believe they were already concerned that, even at my tender age, I was not sufficiently engaged in the life of our small community, its comings and goings. I never knew, for example, who was whose best friend in school, who was having a birthday party that weekend. I simply didn’t care, as long as I had Cherry. Cherry did all the caring for both of us.
But my parents were always prodding me to put down my book and go find the other kids. Why didn’t I walk over to the village green, where they often gathered after school. Any hijinks I might engage in, my parents seemed to think, must be an improvement—healthier, more productive, more life-affirming—on sprawling endlessly on my belly in a patch of sun on the short-haired carpet in the living room with a stack of library books, shelling and chewing pistachio nuts. I think they thought I was lonely.
I was an indiscriminate reader, and regularly plundered the stacks of the Agnes Grey Library (erected with monies donated by said dowager lady) for obsolete Hollywood biographies, racy novels of early women’s liberation whose heroines neglected their children and “screwed” their gynecologists, whole series of masculinity-charged spy novels featuring recurring protagonists with names like “Jim Prodder,” men who concentrated as much energy on their sexual technique (he could peel a grape using only his teeth and tongue!) as on espionage,
anything
by Jane Austen, whose sharp eye for the materiality of romantic longing I found instructive as well as entertaining; anything, for that matter, that said “novel” on the cover and promised to feature a family, or a doomed love affair, or a failed life, or a dark secret, or a sexual awakening, or a path to crisis littered with coincidence.
And the Top Hat offered another diversion for my wide-ranging tastes: its owner, my boss, Mr. Penrose, kept a constantly updated collection of pornographic magazines in a stack in the cupboard under the employee-bathroom sink. I often sat quietly with one of these in my lap, sometimes during my break, sometimes for an hour or so after closing time. These clandestine studies left me feverish, with knots in my loins, and they also gave me a heady introduction to a power that might someday be mine, one not like the more circumscribed, esoteric powers I honed in my solitude. This was a power that could only be exercised in the presence of another.
 
 
THE TALL WOMAN at the table in the window squinted as a shaft of sunlight found her in her seat, as I had known it would eventually. She scooted her chair to evade illumination, and in moving caught my eye in its fixed gaze, which she held as she stood up and came toward the counter, carrying her plate of toast. Her friend watched her as though he watched a slow-moving missile. I inserted two fresh slices in the toaster before she could speak. She leaned against the counter and, with nothing of consequence left to be said, asked my name.
“Ginger?” she repeated after me. “Well, that’s fitting. I always admired Ginger on
Gilligan’s Island,
who was so glamorous even after being shipwrecked for years. I hope I haven’t embarrassed you, I know how redheads hate to have attention called . . .” She trailed off and turned sharply to look back at the man I assumed was her husband.
I studied her closely. After all, it’s not every day you see someone new. She looked rich, somehow, I thought, despite the nonchalance of her attire; perhaps it was her total confidence in her worthiness of my attention. I figured they must be travelers. Every so often in summer and fall we get runoff from one of the more accessible towns: families, mostly, looking in vain for a motel. I felt emboldened and I asked her, directly, to name their destination.
“Actually,” she replied, glancing again around to where Theo sat, now leafing through the paper, “we’re not going anywhere. We’ve just bought a house. We’re your new neighbors, the Motherwells, Raquel and Theo.” She said her surname as though it felt funny coming out of her mouth, the way a king might come and tell you his name was Commoner. Commoner the King. “It’s next to the high school, out on Route Seven. You could come by, after school, if you’d like. I’ll draw you a map. We’ve been here for two weeks already, without a single visitor.”
I was surprised both at the invitation—
what had I done to deserve it?
—and at their so-far unremarked presence, but more sharply I was disappointed that she’d guessed, or, even worse,
assumed,
that I attended the high school. I liked to think of myself as ageless.
 
 
AT FIFTEEN I still possessed a child’s native capacity for belief—some call it naïveté but I prefer to think of it as a positive attribute, a capability—and enjoyed a commensurate appetite for phenomena in which to believe. Another appetite that diminishes as we mature. Already, now, telling this story—though I have not yet achieved majority—the weight of adult accountability descends, and I assent to the banality of truth, to the scale’s discernible tipping on the side of whatever is the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation for any phenomenon is usually the correct one. The correct explanation is the simplest one. A ghost is a draft of cold air on the skin, a neuron-fueled shape in the dark hour of sleep. A mind reader is, at best, someone who pays closer attention to detail than most, who is wide open to suggestion. At worst, she is a con artist. A witch is a woman with an enemy or two. Is this simple enough to sustain us? I ask you.
 
 
RAQUEL TOLD ME, one day, when almost everything had already happened, when I had looked at her face so often I could hardly even see it anymore, that someone had once told her that she had a muddy, brown aura. A chance encounter with a psychic healer from Copenhagen in a bar in Lisbon. The woman clasped Raquel’s becalmed face in her smooth hands, then gently released it as though to send her away, to push her off like a little boat from the shore. And when Raquel told me this she laughed, but I could see the brown webbing falling over her, restricting the motion of her jaw, her mouth filling with the dusty stuff.
 
 
I LEFT THE CAFÉ that day at six-thirty, as usual, after giving the counter and tables a final wipe-down and separating the bills in the register into rubber-banded denominations, then stashing them in the little safe in the stockroom, switching off the lights, and locking first the front door, from inside, then the back door, behind me. I could indeed be trusted.
My bike was where I’d left it, where I always left it, propped against the fence by the trash cans, lids ajar, fat orphans wanting gruel. As I rode home I thought about the newcomers. As far as I could remember, no one had
ever
moved to Wick. But was that possible? I supposed some had moved away and then scurried back—my own father, for example, before Jack’s birth—but that didn’t really count. That was like a trick question on a first-grader’s math quiz: What’s two plus two minus two.
Did this mean that I had never before met anybody I hadn’t known my whole life? I guessed so, unless you counted newborn natives, who came bawling to the town and were duly presented in their swaddling clothes.
These were my first adults.
 
RAQUEL WAS TWENTY-SEVEN, but she could have been nineteen, or thirty-five. No even number. Her face was long, her eyes green and narrowed like canoes. No one ever knows what you mean when you say that eyes are green. We tend to picture emeralds, stoplights saying “go,” or grass the green of meadows and clearings (two of her favorite words). In this instance understand green like moss, like lichen, like the forest floor at the deep end of summer, about to turn brown. An enviable green, rather than the green of envy. Now you can picture her clearly, gazing into the mirror as one might at the sky, unaware of the identity of her observer but always appreciative of a compliment. Yet never equipped to respond appropriately.
Her hair was brown. She was tall, as tall as Theo almost. I remember once we were passing in front of the mirror upstairs in her back bedroom when she caught sight of our reflection. “Look at how scrawny you are, Ginger,” she said, and her arm slid around my waist and held me. I examined instead the wallpaper, which looked very old and was patterned with small bouquets of cornflowers, realistically represented, against an unrealistic ivory ground.
“It’s possible you haven’t hit the full flush of puberty yet, but more likely this is just the way you are. Stringbean, willowy, all those words that mean you’ll never have to go through the anguish us more ‘womanly’ women do.” She held her fingers up and wriggled them, to indicate quotation marks. I caught myself staring at the rounds of her breasts beneath her T-shirt.
We stood still before the mirror and I watched her grow uncomfortable in a split second of silence. She was trying to think of something to say, already. For Raquel there was no continuity, from utterance to utterance, story to history. The currency in which we traded, in Wick. So she filled in the blank with awkward chatter. “When you stand before a mirror with someone you must see yourself together, and decide how it feels. You must acknowledge that you stand in some relation to each other: tailor to customer, sister to brother, mother to the bride, or two naked people who have fornicated and now must look again, harder this time, at their partner, in the upright position. It is meant to be an emotional moment, usually: tearful mother smooths bride’s hair; lovers’ eyes fuse with renewed desire and they return to bed.” She laughed at herself, and we turned away from the image of our own fusion.
 
 
AT HOME THAT NIGHT I went up to my room and sat down to begin my homework and to wait for my mother to call us to the table, my father from his chair in front of the television, where he watched the nightly news and dozed. I never found that I had much to say to my father, but I knew the things he would like for me to say. He seemed perfect to me, or at least complete, unassailable. I knew he loved me. I could feel it emanating at short range from his armchair, from his place at the dinner table or the kitchen counter, and even sometimes from his cluttered work space at the print shop, where he laid out a flyer for a sale at the shoe store.
I heard my mother’s call from downstairs. We had lamb chops that night, and so I know we also had small green peas and mashed potatoes and mint jelly. Frozen peas, reconstituted potatoes from a box, jelly from a vacuum-sealed jar; these are the ends by which we come by our means. What more can we ask? My mother hated to cook—“didn’t care about food”; “would just as soon have gone without”—though she never said this out loud, only muttered it under her breath as she stripped the yellow fat from raw chicken breasts, or sliced a bitter cucumber expertly against her pink thumb into the salad bowl. I am grateful that she saw the necessity of feeding her growing daughter as long as she did.
 
 
AFTER DINNER I had difficulty concentrating on my homework. There was a French exam to study for, a short essay to finish for my English class, and a final project for History, but none of it coalesced in my mind in the way that it must if I were to attend to it. I thought about calling Cherry, which I did most nights, and sometimes simply to distract myself from more tedious tasks, but I had a strange feeling, an unusually wordless, spatial feeling, that what I really wanted to do was to stay even more alone than usual, not to extend myself at all. Not to write a word or to say a word, not to move even, not to disturb the silence of my little room, with the desk lamp throwing a small bright circle on notebooks and assignment sheets, and all else dim in the dusky blue shadow finding its way through my curtained windows. Spring was dying a winsome death outside. Crickets rubbed their legs together in the yard, and someone’s dog barked down the road. It all felt static, and I felt suspended within that stasis, but then strangely at the same time I was restless. It seemed as though I ought to go outside and disrupt the stillness, change something. Should I run into the yard and holler, and wriggle my arms and legs “like spaghetti,” as we had been instructed in gym class, as an antidote to sedentary habits? Or should I ride my bike down to the video store and rent a movie, something my mother would like, a big bowl of popcorn between us on the couch? This was one of the ways that I endured her. But it was too late already for that. Even in the time that I had taken to think this, darkness had fallen completely and I found that I had locked my door, and was lying on my back on my bed, and had pushed down my pants and spread my legs and with my middle finger was gently seeking something I had previously only read about.
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