The Beginners (4 page)
Authors: Rebecca Wolff
This is absurd, this idea, and I tell her so. She is destined for better things than doling out tablets and capsules and directions on how to take them, with food or on an empty stomach or at bedtime. This is just the sort of employment, the sort of
existence,
no less, that we have always scorned. Can you imagine, we say to each other, and I say to myself, when I am alone, what that would be like, to be that person, to suffer that circumscription, to see the limits of your life in every direction at all times? At least at the library she is surrounded by books, which are limitless, if not unquantifiable, and I have heard that there is a science to shelving called “library science”; I will ask Mr. Penrose about this.
existence,
no less, that we have always scorned. Can you imagine, we say to each other, and I say to myself, when I am alone, what that would be like, to be that person, to suffer that circumscription, to see the limits of your life in every direction at all times? At least at the library she is surrounded by books, which are limitless, if not unquantifiable, and I have heard that there is a science to shelving called “library science”; I will ask Mr. Penrose about this.
THE MILL IS INACTIVE. Its many small windows have been dark for three-quarters of a century. Cherry and I have had the luxury, all our lives, of whiling away hour upon hour just watching the play of the day’s changing light, filtered through surrounding foliage, upon the old blasted red brick, and playing our own game as we watch.
Now it comes into view, and I have the same syrupy feeling of warm anticipation tingling in my arms and legs, in the pit of my stomach, as I often do when I sit down on the shagcarpeted lid of the employee-bathroom toilet to look at a magazine. The promise of our game is that rich. We don’t speak as we climb over the reflective guardrail, warm to the touch in the spring sunlight, and down the slope of the dry riverbank to our usual spot. Clean, sedimentary smells rise up from the riverbed.
But this day turned out to contain an ending, rather than the beginning I had anticipated.
The mill cast its two o’clock shadow, and we lay just out of its reach. Cherry had an idea: “Let’s talk about boys,” she said, “instead of playing castle.” The cool rooms of the castle filled with dust at her careless words; its two-foot-thick stone walls trembled. I lay looking up at the imperturbable blue of the sky.
“All right,” she said, rising on one elbow, “if you won’t talk about boys, let’s talk about Randy Thibodeau. He’s really more like a man. Did you notice that he kept looking at me when Terry was sitting right there? Now Terry hates me, and I haven’t done anything.”
So this is how it’s going to be, I thought. There is a way to grow up, I’m sure of it, that does not require of us this abject absorption . . . in what? In the hypothetical thought processes of a boy—or man—we know only by family name, by house, by car? In charting his actions and pondering his motives and interpreting his every glance? But I did the best I could, under the circumstances. I met Cherry halfway, offering up the young couple I had seen at the Top Hat. I told Cherry she would undoubtedly find the man handsome, the woman pretty. Immediately I was pressed to make a full description: hair, height, coloring, build. My best proved good enough. By the time I had finished elaborating on Theo’s sandy hair, his long arms, his dirty feet in their leather sandals, Raquel’s statuesque figure and strangely inert, catlike, dolorous expression, Cherry was suitably thrilled at the prospect of the visit that we—really I—had been invited to make.
WHEN CHERRY AND I were small we used to brew potions from cigarette butts we picked up in the playing field, under the bleachers where the high school kids dropped them. Butts and pine needles and hydrogen peroxide, with a toadstool thrown in if we came across one in our travels. We would never have called ourselves witches but it was certainly witches’ spells we hoped to cast: we lifted them from an old book with a green marbleized cover I had found at the library, entitled simply
Spells
. I have never been able to find it again. They probably took it out of circulation. It was very professional, though. The ingredients it called for were an intriguing mixture of commonplaces—things we might have on hand, like water from a hundred-year-old well, or a twig with a fork at the end, even leaves from a hemlock tree—and things that we could only just bring ourselves to timidly covet: mandrake root; the fatty layer of a stillborn babe; a frog with two heads. Often we made substitutions of other noxious substances. The spell we wished most would work was entitled “To Make Oneself Invisible, and Walk Amongst the People.” Our dealings with the book tapered off substantially after my mother noticed that I was growing what she called “superstitious.” My brother Jack had leaked to her a secret I stupidly shared with him: I had been followed home from the mill, where we were practicing our spells, by something shy yet persistent—a lonely ghost, I thought, that transformed itself into a particularly large green leaf, its pale, veiny underside pressed against my bedroom window, when I turned to confront it. I would have offered it some solace, if I could.
Spells
. I have never been able to find it again. They probably took it out of circulation. It was very professional, though. The ingredients it called for were an intriguing mixture of commonplaces—things we might have on hand, like water from a hundred-year-old well, or a twig with a fork at the end, even leaves from a hemlock tree—and things that we could only just bring ourselves to timidly covet: mandrake root; the fatty layer of a stillborn babe; a frog with two heads. Often we made substitutions of other noxious substances. The spell we wished most would work was entitled “To Make Oneself Invisible, and Walk Amongst the People.” Our dealings with the book tapered off substantially after my mother noticed that I was growing what she called “superstitious.” My brother Jack had leaked to her a secret I stupidly shared with him: I had been followed home from the mill, where we were practicing our spells, by something shy yet persistent—a lonely ghost, I thought, that transformed itself into a particularly large green leaf, its pale, veiny underside pressed against my bedroom window, when I turned to confront it. I would have offered it some solace, if I could.
But the mill was the closest we had ever come to true magic. That we had never seen its real interior was certainly part of the spell it cast over us, or we over it.
For to us it had been a castle, and we two queens abandoned long ago by our royal families when the kingdom was captured by neighboring armies and all the people fled. Only Cherry and I remained, in the vast, dark, desolate castle, but within its walls, its dank, serpentine hallways, its tiny rooms into which light filtered only through meager, slitted windows punched in the thick stone, we thrived like glowing white mushrooms. We prospered, even, foraging crows’ eggs from the nests in the turret, relishing the crunchiness of mice roasted in the huge, man-sized fireplace that heated whole rooms in the bitter winter.
But it was always summer in the castle, and we could be comfortable draped only in a few scarves, spending the days just brushing each others’ hair into glorious coronets, or whispering reassurances that, although surely the royal family would never return, eventually we would find our way out into the surrounding countryside and locate other survivors of the scourge. Maybe some of the more lowly townsfolk, those whose company we tended to favor anyway, such as Tim-Tom the Tailor, or Merrykin the Midwife, or Jangler the Jewelry Maker. For though we had been born with royal blood, we did not relish the high station, the isolation thrust upon us by our noble birthright. . . . I startled. Cherry had flipped over and sat up with an abrupt, almost violent force. I sat erect, too, and the spell was broken. Her knees up, elbows propped, clasping her face between her palms, she cast her eyes down at the grass and spoke with a deliberation that made time stop.
“Ginger, I said I don’t want to play castle anymore. It just seems kind of stupid to me now.” This was painful for both of us. She was not accustomed to having to point anything out to me. “I mean, I feel like we’re too old for it. I think some of the kids from school heard us the other day, and I just felt like such a baby. I was really embarrassed! I can see how maybe since you’re only fifteen . . .” Cherry’s lovely, open face had a dull cast to it, a mirror over which a veil had been thrown.
This should not have come as a surprise to me, and if it did it was by means of my own absorptions, which kept me from allowing certain perfectly obvious phenomena to affect me, or afflict me—to penetrate. Though we’d been playing our game since we were little, and it had never seemed stupid to me, not once, Cherry was increasingly engaged in games I did find stupid. Makeup kits with ugly colors, and bra catalogs, and cheaply printed teen magazines promoting false idols. “Stupid” was for this world, not any other we might create.
Playing castle, however, was just one of many means I had for removing myself from the tedium of our earthly kingdom as it had been constructed for us by our parents, our schooling, and the routes we must take between the two. If Cherry didn’t want to play anymore, that was all right by me, really, and I told her so. I was ready for something new as well.
The relief on her face was more painful to me than her admission had been, as I could see from its depth that the game had been over for her for quite a while. “It’s time to go home anyway,” she said, and I could not argue with her.
SLEEP SETTLED ON ME thickly that night, and I woke from what felt like only its middle to see dawn creeping up on my coverlet. I had been dreaming a crowded dream full of unfamiliar characters—people I hadn’t had time, or whom it hadn’t seemed necessary, to name or even make distinct from one another. It was a mob, practically, but its intent was unclear. For what purpose had they congregated? Awake I wished I could remember some of the individual members, as in my dream they had interested me finely, exquisitely, acutely.
But it was the quite familiar, rhythmic sounds coming from my parents’ room that had awakened me, slower sounds but as shrill in their way as that of an alarm clock stuffed under a pillow: my mother’s weeping—atonal, abandoned—and my father’s rhythmic, automatic shushing.
Sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh,
the way I had seen new mothers soothe their infants, rocking from one foot to the other, patting, jiggling. Both my parents were asleep, but my mother was weeping and my father was sh-sh-sh-ing. I turned on my side, my back to the bedroom door, to better vicariously receive the soothing, closed my eyes, and drifted back into the populous dark.
Sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh,
the way I had seen new mothers soothe their infants, rocking from one foot to the other, patting, jiggling. Both my parents were asleep, but my mother was weeping and my father was sh-sh-sh-ing. I turned on my side, my back to the bedroom door, to better vicariously receive the soothing, closed my eyes, and drifted back into the populous dark.
4.
A
s the last day of school approached, I found myself thinking often of the Motherwells, wondering what had brought them here and what it would be like when I saw them again. I wanted to see them again. Would they really want to see me? Maybe Raquel was just being polite.
s the last day of school approached, I found myself thinking often of the Motherwells, wondering what had brought them here and what it would be like when I saw them again. I wanted to see them again. Would they really want to see me? Maybe Raquel was just being polite.
I told my parents about the new people I had met. I could see from my mother’s suddenly straight spine that she was terribly interested as well. Her clean, freckled face sharpened to a point, and she wondered aloud if she should ask them over for iced tea, with some crackers and cheese, or if that might seem nosy. Perhaps they had come here to get away from it all and she shouldn’t disturb them until they’d had a chance to settle in . . . ? I interrupted her with the news that I’d been invited to visit their home, and was going to go soon, with Cherry, possibly after school tomorrow, the last day of school before summer vacation. It is often an unexpected force that drives our most significant decision.
“Oh,” said my mother, and nothing else. She turned back to the newspaper she had been scanning, standing at the kitchen counter, jabbing her thumb at her tongue before turning each new page. It pained me to see that she was envious, that she felt excluded, that she resented my being singled out. That she was lonely, having made few close friends among the lifelong residents of Wick, and wanted to live through me. I hated to be party to the complications I was so eager to read of in novels.
AND NOW it had arrived, the last day of school, always anticlimactic. I stood looking at the playing field out the back entrance, watching the graduating seniors rushing from gaggle to gaggle, getting their yearbooks signed. They would see each other later that night, and the next day, and the next. There was no promise, with the end of school, of anything particularly new, just the hazy heat that settled over Wick like a blanket and the relinquishing of one’s in-school identity (the weird skinny girl who reads all the time, the pretty girl who hangs out with the weird girl) and the stepping up of one’s workaday identity (the girl who works at the café, the girl who works at the library)—this latter identity, in most cases, having more to do with what the rest of life would look like than did our halting, remedial discussions of
Macbeth,
or
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
or the Pythagorean theorem for that matter.
Macbeth,
or
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
or the Pythagorean theorem for that matter.
But if it did not offer climax, still there was a kind of warm-bath quality to the summer that I looked forward to very much. Cherry and I would slide in together, clutching hands, and every day after would be essentially the same: waking up without a single purpose; the lack of decision as to where to go and what to do; the inattention paid to timepieces, which would keep us out all day, away from chores, away from mothers’ instructive voices. Our only obligations were to arrive at work at the proper hour, go to sleep, wake up. We didn’t even have to eat, though Cherry must take her kit with her everywhere we went.
BUT HERE WAS something extra, something new. In the pocket of my jeans was a crumpled paper napkin, and on it a crude, ridiculous diagram of our town, in Raquel’s hand, a big X marking the site of their house.
I had looked for Cherry in our usual after-school meeting place, in the last row of the auditorium, but did not find her. Now I was surprised to pick her out among the rushing throng of seniors all crying and hugging and inscribing deeply felt platitudes. Oh yes, I thought. She would have been a senior this year, but for the glamorous illness that kept her in bed for months and months of what should have been her freshman year, months during which I was at her bedside every day. So, this is, in a sense,
her
throng. Her crowd. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that she was overdoing it a little, as I watched her throw her arms around Terry Sheeler, the very girl with whom she was nakedly competing for the attentions of Randy Thibodeau. With her head over Terry’s shoulder Cherry finally caught sight of me, and waved a little wave. I thought she looked a bit like a caged bird herself.
her
throng. Her crowd. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that she was overdoing it a little, as I watched her throw her arms around Terry Sheeler, the very girl with whom she was nakedly competing for the attentions of Randy Thibodeau. With her head over Terry’s shoulder Cherry finally caught sight of me, and waved a little wave. I thought she looked a bit like a caged bird herself.
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