The Beginners (20 page)
Authors: Rebecca Wolff
24.
I
n the morning it was reassuring to eat my mother’s frozen waffles at the little kitchen table, Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook
splayed open by my plate. I always wished I had some kind of device to keep the pages from flipping while I attended to my meal; now a saltshaker acted precariously as paperweight while I used both hands to cut up my waffle. The chef herself sat by my side, backlit by the bright sun streaming through the window with its yellow curtains tied in bows. I squinted at her. When had she stopped cutting up my waffles for me? She sipped her coffee and reached out to brush my hair from my forehead. “You really didn’t get a lot of sun this summer, did you. So pale! It seems sad, to me, a teenage girl without a tan, but it’s probably just as well. Look at my wrinkles! When I was a girl the idea was to get as brown as you could, as fast as you could. We used baby oil! We just roasted ourselves. I hope you haven’t been working too hard at the café—what time do you have to be there?”
n the morning it was reassuring to eat my mother’s frozen waffles at the little kitchen table, Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook
splayed open by my plate. I always wished I had some kind of device to keep the pages from flipping while I attended to my meal; now a saltshaker acted precariously as paperweight while I used both hands to cut up my waffle. The chef herself sat by my side, backlit by the bright sun streaming through the window with its yellow curtains tied in bows. I squinted at her. When had she stopped cutting up my waffles for me? She sipped her coffee and reached out to brush my hair from my forehead. “You really didn’t get a lot of sun this summer, did you. So pale! It seems sad, to me, a teenage girl without a tan, but it’s probably just as well. Look at my wrinkles! When I was a girl the idea was to get as brown as you could, as fast as you could. We used baby oil! We just roasted ourselves. I hope you haven’t been working too hard at the café—what time do you have to be there?”
When I told her that I had the day off, her eyes widened, then narrowed, then widened again, in internal calculation. “Well, that’s great!” she concluded, rapidly. “Your father and I do, too! Why don’t we spend it all together. We’ll go to Janine’s Frosty for a cone. I can’t believe the summer’s over and we haven’t even gone for a cone. What is this world coming to?”
My mother’s insouciance could not hide, from me, her sharp anxiety. What was she afraid of? That I would say no? That I did not want to be seen in public with them? That because I had found new friends, people she did not know, I had changed into another person, a new daughter, a pale, languid, unrecognizable creature with unknowable, inconceivable thoughts and ideas?
Really, the truth was that she had never known what I was thinking, and had never asked.
Now, though I had relished the freshness of my own bed, my clean sheets, and had found it sweet to sit reading as she moved about the kitchen, and be fed, and petted, I did not feel any particular remorse in turning her down. I had plans. It was the perfect day to go to the Ramapack cemetery. There I would find whatever trace of the Goode family remained, and this would be the starting point for Raquel’s research. She would have names, dates, actual stones with deeply etched identities.
So I was surprised, and made sad, and afraid, by the vehemence of my mother’s reaction to my refusal. It was like someone pulling an old leather glove out of a drawer to slap you with it. The gestures were awkward, the tool stiff with disuse. It was embarrassing.
“Do you know, Ginger, that you are not the only person in the world? Have you given one thought, all summer, to your father and me? Your poor dad is practically speechless with worry. He hasn’t wanted to say anything. But the last thing he needs is another disappearing child.” These last words hit me like the intended slap. My mother had clearly been thinking. She sped on in her attack.
“The Endicotts are absolutely beside themselves. Last week your father went down to the Social Club with Jim and they were talking about these new people, and it turns out that Cherry was over at their house one night, without you, and she told her parents that she was here, and of course your father said that we hadn’t seen her once all summer, since we haven’t! And now Cherry won’t tell them anything about it, has refused to talk about it, and spends all her time with Randy Thibodeau. I’m sure he’s turned out to be a perfectly nice young man, despite everything . . . but he’s certainly too old for Cherry. I mean he’s got his own apartment, his truck, his job! And she’s just a young girl.
“And we still don’t know anything about these people! How can you expect us to let you practically move in with them, when we’ve never even met them! Some of the men down at the Club were joking that she’s a witch, that she’s put a spell on you two. Not funny! You’re only fifteen years old. Just because you skipped a year in school doesn’t mean that you’re not fifteen. Maybe I shouldn’t have let you skip that year . . . I think it really has made you a bit
too
independent. But I thought it might help you get through a rough patch. . . .” She alluded to the time after Jack’s death, when we had all wanted to die.
too
independent. But I thought it might help you get through a rough patch. . . .” She alluded to the time after Jack’s death, when we had all wanted to die.
Now that she had begun to shift the blame to herself I thought that I might insert a well-placed tidbit of information. Casually, though careful not to appear glib in the face of her arousal, I told her about Raquel’s book, and that I had been helping Raquel to do research, and about the fellowship from the university, and last, about the family connection that had brought the Motherwells to Wick in the first place.
I watched the information do its work, like a tranquilizer dart in the haunch of a feral dog. I saw her relax, one part of her body at a time, and then saw the original, sharp interest in the Motherwells rekindle in her eyes, which, despite the wrinkles she had spoken of, were still clear and blue and at times painfully young. “Well, that is remarkable,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s taken an interest in town history since old Daniel Skagett passed. We printed all those little pamphlets for him, you know, on the lost towns, the ones you can get at Lawson’s.” I knew the ones she meant. They had titles like “Ghosts of the Valley” and “The Lore of Ramapack,” and mostly retold old legends about eccentric townsfolk, such as the gentleman who wanted to lie in state in a glass coffin so that everyone could watch him decompose. I had never been able to get through any of them. The writing was terrible.
I thought I had better take advantage of my mother’s momentary softening and so I capitulated, right there on the spot. I agreed that it would be fun to spend the day with her and my father, in whatever activities would strike the right note of reunion, of trinity. Just then my father came down the hall and into the kitchen, hair rumpled, plaid bathrobe tied over blue pajamas. He seemed pleased to see me there. Wordlessly he fumbled for coffee and then joined us at the table, where the three of us proceeded to plan our simple day.
I DID NOT ALWAYS possess such a taste for unease, such a homing instinct for the path of danger. Now, in these swift-moving days, I felt myself like an initiate craving the hazing ritual, but I remember as if it were yesterday a signal moment in which I rejected fear, literally ejected it from my body—projected it, even, across the room. I must have been six or seven, a recent initiate to that other bounded world, the book, and I sat in an armchair in the corner of the living room with one of these on my lap while my mother put finishing touches on dinner and Jack set the table in the kitchen. I could hear and see them bustling around while I sat. This particular volume had caught my notice because it was, unlike the paperbacks that dominated the bookcase, tall and old and bound in a dark, scaly kind of fabric like a red snake’s skin. The book promised, in its title, not just mystery but also madness. The title alone was terrifying to me, and I had sat for more than an hour, reading silently in a state of cold anticipation, thumbing through story after story, and when, as dinner approached readiness, smells of butter and blood and vegetable matter rich in the air, I reached a page with a color plate showing, in faded yet somehow still lurid tones, a scene of such incipient horror—come to life in my hands—I screamed from deep within my brain cavity. And the book jumped, away, away, flew ten feet across the floor, where it landed open, spine up, depraved pages crushed and broken. I continued screaming, weakly, almost blind with the indelible sight, and while my mother began to scold me for the ruination of her heirloom, Poe’s
Tales of Mystery and Madness,
she soon stopped, and scooped me out of the chair, and scolded Jack instead for laughing at me as she sat down and held me. I could not speak.
Tales of Mystery and Madness,
she soon stopped, and scooped me out of the chair, and scolded Jack instead for laughing at me as she sat down and held me. I could not speak.
I TRAILED AFTER my parents into the house as dusk was settling over the yard, the street, the town. We were all exhausted from the effort of catching up with each other: just as my parents had not seen me in weeks and weeks, I, too, had not seen them, and so there was a lot of town gossip to be filled in on, a lot of news from the privileged quarters of the print shop about who was getting married, who had had a baby, who was going out of business. Ice cream had been consumed, a long drive in the country taken, and several effective reassurances had been silently offered that indeed, I was still their daughter. Now they knew all about Mr. Penrose’s offer—they told me I should ask him for a raise, if he valued me so much as an employee—and about my visit to see Hep Warren, and all that he had told me about the fire at the Town Hall and the loss of the town records.
“Yes,” my father mused, from the front seat, as we drove down through the hills east of Wick, “I remember hearing about that. Amazing how a disaster can just wipe out whole centuries of data. Or at least it could in the past! Now, of course, we have everything on digital files. No fire, or flood, or tornado, for that matter, can erase a digital file.”
“Why, Pete,” countered my mother, “of course it can! A computer in a flood is a drowned computer, just like a horse in a flood is a drowned horse! You’re never going to get a file off a computer that’s been submerged in water.”
“Well, Serena, I guess you have a point there,” said my father, and that was the end of that particular conversation. Or at least if they continued it I did not pay attention, but instead turned my gaze to the hills and patiently waited to be returned to my life.
I excused myself right after dinner (roasted chicken, creamed spinach, white rice from a box) and went up to my room “to read,” I said. But, even though I was tempted, again, by familiar comforts—my bed called out, with its smooth bedspread and the headboard whose finials I had gripped, only months ago, in the spasm of my first climax—I felt an even stronger inclination to be among my friends, to remove myself to them.
I waited until I heard the dishwasher begin its
shush
ing, the television light up with indispensable news of the world, and then I slipped quietly down the hall and out the sliding kitchen door.
shush
ing, the television light up with indispensable news of the world, and then I slipped quietly down the hall and out the sliding kitchen door.
THE MOTHERWELLS’ HOUSE was dark. I went in through the back and heard the familiar quiet of Raquel and Theo sleeping. It was ten o’clock. They must have had a long day, too, without me. I tiptoed up the stairs so as not to wake them, paused in the darkness of the hallway, opened the door to their room without a sound, stood for a moment to make out the shapes of their bodies under the blankets, long and slim like young, fallen trees, and curled up at their feet like a dog.
25.
T
here is nothing like firelight, flickering on a troubled face or on the glossy jacket of a book on a shelf, to bring a room into sharp focus. I know why they say “hearth” when they mean home. When you’re tending a fire and a spark jumps out after a particularly loud cracking noise and lands on your wrist you can smell, just for a second, burning flesh. Or you can think about smelling it.
here is nothing like firelight, flickering on a troubled face or on the glossy jacket of a book on a shelf, to bring a room into sharp focus. I know why they say “hearth” when they mean home. When you’re tending a fire and a spark jumps out after a particularly loud cracking noise and lands on your wrist you can smell, just for a second, burning flesh. Or you can think about smelling it.
It was a pivotal moment, and I will always carry this image with me: Theo, in the living-room doorway, his arms full of broken wood, and Raquel seated in the green chair by the fire, me on the big round braided rug directly in front of the fireplace. I had been looking into the fire, reaching with a poker now and then to reposition some part of the burning arrangement.
Sometimes I have wondered what it means to be “good” at something. I know that when I see a fire that’s going out I am always prepared to leap forward, attention focused on the offending element, and with my hand remove whatever is an obstacle in the flame’s path to more and more oxygen. The flame will happily rush in, wherever you create a space for it.
Raquel was so close to me she could have been brushing my hair, or showing me a picture from the magazine she flipped through, but she wasn’t doing either: she just leafed slowly. I think it was
The New Yorker,
or maybe
Harper’s
. She liked to read the index.
The New Yorker,
or maybe
Harper’s
. She liked to read the index.
“These old shingles make good kindling,” Theo said to the room in general as he entered with his load. I looked up and smiled. Raquel said, “Don’t you sound just like a real country boy.” And then she blushed, with what looked like pride.
It seemed like the perfect moment to wonder aloud, and so I did. I wondered when Raquel might be going to start working on her book, for real. Today we could make a trip together to Swansbury.
“Isn’t it odd,” Raquel said, seemingly by way of response, “how a fire burning in a fireplace is really just that, just itself, self-contained, burning gases merrily away, but for us, sitting here, it seems to actively
create an atmosphere
?” (And here she held up her two first fingers and crooked them, and cocked them, indicating just how suspect she found such a phrase.) When she spoke like this it reminded me of the language of dreams—not really speech at all but communicative nevertheless, in that it is hermetic. It need never leave the confines of your own system of interpretation.
create an atmosphere
?” (And here she held up her two first fingers and crooked them, and cocked them, indicating just how suspect she found such a phrase.) When she spoke like this it reminded me of the language of dreams—not really speech at all but communicative nevertheless, in that it is hermetic. It need never leave the confines of your own system of interpretation.
“Well, yes,” Theo began to answer her. “I see what you mean—”
But then she quickly said, before he could go on, “Oh do you? I’m so glad, because that’s just the sort of thing I count on you for. Even as I spoke those words they seemed to lose all currency, coming out of my mouth, but then you picked them up and coined them in your own image, and suddenly, there they are, buying power restored, good for trade and the economy in general.”
“Fires, small flames at the ends of candles, certain pitches in music, certain times of day . . .” Theo ticked these off on the fingers of his left hand.
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