The Beginners (29 page)
Authors: Rebecca Wolff
And I did not feel that I could leave them now, even though Raquel had just a day before implied that she, that they might leave me. Right now they both wanted me. Theo promised breakfast; as soon as he said the word I felt the emptiness of my gut. He went to the kitchen and came back in ten minutes with omelettes, infused with Swiss cheese, encrusted with chives.
As we ate, Raquel hatched an alternate plan for the day. “It’s almost noon; let’s take a little midday nap and then we’ll go for a walk, the three of us, on the Old Road, down to the reservoir. I’ll bring my camera. Then later I’ll show you some of the family relics I have—the old photographs. Or we could even go up to that graveyard you told me about.”
The thought of Raquel, with her intractable surface, her empty insides—now filling—strolling amongst the stones . . . I felt a stab of revulsion. A blast: my stomach turned, full of yellow eggs. I’d been feeling a bit nauseated lately, I’d noticed, and hadn’t wanted anything much besides popcorn and big glasses of milk.
The fire was easily revived, and I lay stretched out on the sofa with a pink blanket Raquel draped over my legs even as I grouchily refused it. “You’ll be glad you have it,” she whispered, and then after pulling down the shades in the already dim living room she trailed up the stairs after Theo.
I DON’T KNOW what time it was when I awoke, but my urgent desire had not abated in my sleep. Daylight still shone through the drawn paper shades, yellowed and fly-spotted, and I guessed that there must be a couple of hours of it left at least. I rose and slipped into my tennis shoes, whose laces I had not unknotted since the first day Mr. Breslak sold them to my mother, and trod lightly on their flat soles as I went dutifully upstairs to wake Theo and Raquel, to invite them to come out and walk with me.
IT TOOK ME an awfully long time to reach the door to their room. I remember thinking that fear made time pass more slowly, quite measurably more slowly. But why was I afraid? I do not know. It could have been the dim hall, with the closed door at the end of it, around which I could not see any daylight coming through. They must have darkened the room. Would they be awake? Perhaps they were awake already, and murmuring softly to each other. Perhaps Raquel had chosen this moment of sleepy daytime to tell him of her pregnancy. Perhaps he was not fully awake when she told him, when she whispered into his ear, his ear with its secret chambers, its dark whorls and cabins of air and wind, with its acrid tang of which I had tasted with the tip of my tongue, my one caress, unreciprocated, and perhaps out of some dream he rose without thought, no conscious thought, but only with a subterranean desire to make her stop talking, to make her
just shut up,
and he took the pillow from under his head and rolled on top of her and placed the pillow over her face and smothered the life out of her. Would she resist? Why? And if she did, would he come awake more fully and realize his actions, or more accurately, their consequences?
just shut up,
and he took the pillow from under his head and rolled on top of her and placed the pillow over her face and smothered the life out of her. Would she resist? Why? And if she did, would he come awake more fully and realize his actions, or more accurately, their consequences?
But by this time I was to the door, and so terrified that I burst in without knocking, my breath coming in great gusts like wind in a sail. In the dark room Theo and Raquel lay lumped together indecipherably. I switched on the bedside lamp and stripped the covers back, disclosing a handsome, spooning nakedness: Raquel appeared quite pale surrounded by his dusky, dust-colored body; her sculptural whiteness inert in sleep, her dark hair lying over her face and in her mouth. I could detect no swelling in her belly.
READER, DO NOT ASK ME how I roused them. The gaps in my story are for everyone’s sake. We left the house in single file and arrived at the Old Road moments later—again, do not ask me how we got there, all I remember now is the walk down the road that went, quite literally, nowhere. There was a flat kind of expectation on the walk. We were going to see a ruin, a desecration, a tomb, but one that looked just like a body of water.
“This is the most haunted road I’ve ever seen,” Raquel whispered into the cadence of our footsteps. We had been walking for twenty minutes on the decrepit blacktop, through dying forest. Bare trees hung over our heads blankly. In summer they would form a canopy. There was no sign, no plaque to tell the traveler: “This Road Once Went Somewhere.” I remembered that I had been told—by my father? Mr. Endicott?—that you could still see the remains of one of the drowned towns’ village green, on a plateau above the rest of the town, an open space in the midst of trees. We began to search for it but found a confusing multiplicity of open spaces. After a while, we stopped speculating. Long-sleeping crickets woke up in the grass around us as the sun began to set.
“We may never reach this dead end,” Raquel said, as we continued our otherwise silent march through the woods and the sun drooped ever lower in the sky. “What if we can’t get home? What if we turn around now and walk back but we find that, though we walk, and walk, and walk, we never come back to the beginning of the road? And it gets darker and darker as we walk, and we feel that something is at our backs but when we look around it isn’t there?”
“Or worse—” Theo said from somewhere behind me, but closer than it seemed possible for him to be, so that I jumped at the sensation of his warm breath on my neck, the turbulent smell of his breath, “worse . . .”
I looked around behind me—he was far too close, he was inside me—and saw a look on his face that I cannot describe here because it was in my dream, it was a dream,
I
was in the dream, and as I ran down the road, clutching what I thought was Raquel’s hand but when I really looked at it, when I could bear to look at it what I held in my hand, it was some kind of formless rag of a hand, as though I’d pulled the meat right off her bones in a sudden exertion of the force I needed to get away, to get back to where the road began, and ended, to where Wick began and ended. I woke up, late-afternoon sun low in my face, dry-mouthed and dizzy with residual terror. I wanted water desperately, something to restore my arid tongue to its natural state. I needed to get home for dinner. I jerked myself up off my cramped side on the couch, swung my legs to the floor and sat up, only to feel a hand on my shoulder, a hot whisper in my ear: “Look outside, Ginger.”
I
was in the dream, and as I ran down the road, clutching what I thought was Raquel’s hand but when I really looked at it, when I could bear to look at it what I held in my hand, it was some kind of formless rag of a hand, as though I’d pulled the meat right off her bones in a sudden exertion of the force I needed to get away, to get back to where the road began, and ended, to where Wick began and ended. I woke up, late-afternoon sun low in my face, dry-mouthed and dizzy with residual terror. I wanted water desperately, something to restore my arid tongue to its natural state. I needed to get home for dinner. I jerked myself up off my cramped side on the couch, swung my legs to the floor and sat up, only to feel a hand on my shoulder, a hot whisper in my ear: “Look outside, Ginger.”
I turned around and followed Raquel’s pleased gaze to the front windows, which were lit up not with daylight after all but with torchlight. It was dark out—I must have slept five hours or more—and from the front yard came the sound of crackling wood and of gathered voices. I started toward the window, but Raquel moved between me and it, her face lit and shaded alternately by the flickering of the fires outside. “Don’t come any closer,” she cautioned me. “If they see you who knows what they’ll do. The last thing we need is an angry mob on our hands. Or perhaps that’s the first thing we need.”
“Who’s out there?” Theo asked calmly as he came into the room with an armful of logs for the fireplace. But I had already slipped past him into the hallway and out the back door. I ran into the cold night, around to the front of the house, toward the sound of fire, toward the heat, and hid myself, crouching, behind a corner of the porch. I could watch through the railings.
ALTHOUGH THE SCENE was strangely familiar to me, there was no one I recognized among the crowd of villagers bearing torches. I guessed they had come from the Thanksgiving parade. My parents would not have been there. The women wore long dresses and shawls; their hair was pinned up at the backs of their heads. The men were in dark suits with stiff hats. They were a solemn bunch, but visibly agitated. I saw that a few women at the front of the group were sobbing, holding each other, while several men carried rifles. One of these broke free from the rest and advanced up the steps of the porch. He banged loudly on the door and shouted, “Send her out! Release her to us.” From where I squatted I had a child’s perspective: the man towered above me, his dark clothes blending with the dark around him, his rage causing him to shake slightly as he stood, arms straight at his sides, rifle pointing down, and waited. I wondered if he was waiting for me, if someone had finally come to claim me, the mechanism of my town with its cogs and wheels clicking spontaneously out of inaction like a child’s toy brought to life in a child’s movie. But I did not wonder for long.
The door opened, and I watched, craning my neck, as Raquel was handed out on to the porch, into the man’s custody. He stood his rifle against the wall and reached into his pocket, whence he produced a rope. He turned her around to bind her hands behind her back, and now I could see that her belly was quite swollen, protruding tautly—not like Cherry’s doughy thickening. Her head was held high, her long hair loose around her shoulders, her red wool sweater and blue jeans, slung low around her hips, incongruous. When her hands were bound the man turned her around again to face the crowd, who raised their torches and shouted a chorus of hateful promises:
She will be dead by morning, the life inside her, too. She will hang. She is already dead.
She will be dead by morning, the life inside her, too. She will hang. She is already dead.
I could not see Raquel’s face as the man led her down the porch steps and into the crowd, but I could see that she did not protest, did not struggle, walked erect still as several men formed a phalanx around her and the whole mass turned away from the house and began to move off as one, down the road toward town, toward the village green, where a gallows had been erected.
BY THE LOGIC of dreams, as I knew them, I should have awakened then, at the acme of anxiety and horror and incapacity, with my heart beating wildly and sweat coursing down my sides.
But instead I went on dreaming, if that’s what it was, past the point of maximum effect, and had thoughts inside my dream, lucid, if meandering thoughts.
What shall I do when I wake up,
I wondered.
If today is Thanksgiving, then I will be sixteen years old in just a few more days. Does that mean that I will have attained my majority? When can I vote? I know I can drive at sixteen. I cannot buy liquor legally till I’m twenty-one. At sixteen I believe I can legally have intercourse.
And then in my dream I thought I might go back inside the house and find Theo. The house would be empty but for the two of us and we could use their big bed. I could steady myself against the headboard if Theo would get behind me. My hands gripped the maple-wood board and I felt his long, iron-stiff cock pressing against my ass, between the cheeks—could he get in? I wasn’t sure it was physically possible, but then I felt his finger there, all slick with some kind of jelly—I saw the tube on the nightstand out of the corner of my eye—and he slipped his finger into my anus and worked the jelly around; then I felt the pressing, the pushing, and then more, filling me, and a feeling like I would be paralyzed from the waist down, or like I had an extra spine in me and would be held erect forever on the length of it. He reached around with one hand to use the headboard for leverage and with the other he squeezed my breasts, mashing them against the wall of my chest and then releasing, pinching my nipples and then releasing. All the while slowly in and out of my asshole. But now I wanted to feel him inside me, in the other place—I needed him to fuck me—and told him so.
What shall I do when I wake up,
I wondered.
If today is Thanksgiving, then I will be sixteen years old in just a few more days. Does that mean that I will have attained my majority? When can I vote? I know I can drive at sixteen. I cannot buy liquor legally till I’m twenty-one. At sixteen I believe I can legally have intercourse.
And then in my dream I thought I might go back inside the house and find Theo. The house would be empty but for the two of us and we could use their big bed. I could steady myself against the headboard if Theo would get behind me. My hands gripped the maple-wood board and I felt his long, iron-stiff cock pressing against my ass, between the cheeks—could he get in? I wasn’t sure it was physically possible, but then I felt his finger there, all slick with some kind of jelly—I saw the tube on the nightstand out of the corner of my eye—and he slipped his finger into my anus and worked the jelly around; then I felt the pressing, the pushing, and then more, filling me, and a feeling like I would be paralyzed from the waist down, or like I had an extra spine in me and would be held erect forever on the length of it. He reached around with one hand to use the headboard for leverage and with the other he squeezed my breasts, mashing them against the wall of my chest and then releasing, pinching my nipples and then releasing. All the while slowly in and out of my asshole. But now I wanted to feel him inside me, in the other place—I needed him to fuck me—and told him so.
AND WOKE AGAIN, the words dying on my lips, on the couch in the Motherwells’ living room, and looked up into Raquel’s face.
What I saw there was bemusement. Had I spoken aloud? Or had she simply seen my dream as I dreamt it, first her condemnation, the prelude to her execution, and then my ravishment, a scenario I had lifted wholesale from the useful pages of
The Beginner.
Would I always be a beginner? Did each encounter enact the loss of that innocence anew, and anew.
The Beginner.
Would I always be a beginner? Did each encounter enact the loss of that innocence anew, and anew.
AGAIN, IT WAS JUST on the verge of darkness outside. This time I really had slept for hours. I could feel it in the stiffness of my shoulder where it had been wedged between the cushion and the back of the sofa. Saliva had dried on my cheek; the corners of my eyes were infiltrated with grit. I sat up and rubbed my face, blinking slowly into a dawning, draining vision of my parents sitting, waiting for me, at our holiday-laden dining room table. They were trying not to panic, not to be too protective, not to grasp as hard as they wished to at my life. Again Theo entered the room, carrying an armful of logs for the fireplace. Then the doorbell rang—that odd, creaky resonance in the still house. This might, after all, be them. We all turned to look toward the noise, and saw outside the window, on the porch, a flickering light, a flame.
Theo dropped the logs, strode to the hallway, and flung open the door. I could hear him exclaim, “You’ve got to be kidding!” and then he called to Raquel to bring a bucket of water from the kitchen. I went to stand behind him and saw on the doorstep one of Wick’s favorite adolescent pranks: a paper bag, filled with human excrement—sometimes canine, if the prankster were lazy—and set on fire. The idea, of course, is that the recipient will instinctively move to stamp out the flames; in so doing, the shit in the bag is caused to spray and splatter all around, besmearing shoes and legs and porch and walls.
But Theo was not an alarmist, nor a reactionary. He waited calmly, like a storm cloud, while Raquel filled the bucket and brought it, then he simply poured water over the bag, dousing the flames. Now the sodden bag filled with shit sat on the porch, quieted. Theo pushed it to one side with his foot, and shut the door.
33.
I
t was a night for pranks, for vandalism, and I went along. I did not run along home; the impulse slept in me like a hostage, drugged. I had dreamed my way through Thanksgiving dinner, and I thought I might finally have broken some mechanism of shelter, of solace, of return. My parents would never guess where I was tonight.
t was a night for pranks, for vandalism, and I went along. I did not run along home; the impulse slept in me like a hostage, drugged. I had dreamed my way through Thanksgiving dinner, and I thought I might finally have broken some mechanism of shelter, of solace, of return. My parents would never guess where I was tonight.
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