The Beginners (5 page)
Authors: Rebecca Wolff
WE LAUGHED AT THE MAP, derisive but excited, as we left school for what felt like good, book bags loaded with the contents of our lockers: swim goggles, tampons, sweaters, music, mirrors, books, notebooks, the hideous self-portrait in acrylics from art class. The idea that we would need directions to anything in Wick was ludicrous, but then on inspection there was something thrilling about seeing our town laid out in these proportions, these distinctions—the vision of a stranger. This was Wick as we had never before seen it, and as I have never been able
not
to see it since; as I have described it: lines intersecting, lines proliferating, lines decomposing underwater. The X marked a spot just over the hill from the high school, headed out of town. We walked that way, and there was the house, regular and old, dilapidated and forlorn-looking. No car in the driveway, but I thought I saw a pale oval, a face, floating in the upstairs window above the porch.
not
to see it since; as I have described it: lines intersecting, lines proliferating, lines decomposing underwater. The X marked a spot just over the hill from the high school, headed out of town. We walked that way, and there was the house, regular and old, dilapidated and forlorn-looking. No car in the driveway, but I thought I saw a pale oval, a face, floating in the upstairs window above the porch.
“She just invited us over, without knowing anything about us?” Cherry asked, as we stood by the roadside looking down at the unremarkable house, and I thought that the pedestrian skepticism in her tone masked a fear, or at least a hesitation, that did not become my bosom friend. She invited
me,
I thought, but didn’t say, and then still more silently wondered at my silent bid for sole possession. With another glance at the window above the porch, now empty, I told her I didn’t think it looked like anybody was there, and that my bag was getting heavy, and we turned and walked away, toward home.
me,
I thought, but didn’t say, and then still more silently wondered at my silent bid for sole possession. With another glance at the window above the porch, now empty, I told her I didn’t think it looked like anybody was there, and that my bag was getting heavy, and we turned and walked away, toward home.
HERE WAS RANDY THIBODEAU NOW, parked in his pickup truck in front of the movie theater, just slithering out of the driver’s seat onto the sidewalk, directly into our path as we walked down Main Street. Really into Cherry’s path: I might as well have not been there at all, with the negligible nod he gave me. I thought of a day long before when he had sat at my kitchen table with Jack, after school, eating frozen pizza, their long legs stretching under the table, and my brother had reached out and grabbed my earlobe as I walked by, causing me to stop short and to screech in pain and surprise. He was showing off for Randy, and my pain included that at an unexpected cruelty from one who had been known to be kind. Jack wanted, that month, that year, to be like Randy; he wanted a motorcycle like Randy’s; a jacket like Randy’s; he wished to try on Randy’s skin. But Jack was lighthearted and light-featured; courteous and freckly and kind of smart, like me. Randy is dark, with snarly brown hair and a pointed face like that on the otters you see on nature programs. His skin is smooth, nut-brown even in winter, and particularly smooth on his hardworking arms, which are often on display in a cut-off T-shirt. Randy laughed with Jack at my little-sister antics, my futile, pinwheeling attempts to free myself, but Jack only let me go after Randy punched him fast and hard on the offending bicep, diverting him and then dancing away backward like a boxer. “Your sister’s cute, leave her alone,” he said.
“Hey, Cherry,” he said now, by way of greeting. “Where ya going?”
“Oh, nowhere. What are you up to, Randy?” was Cherry’s coy, encouraging reply, and she turned around and walked backward to smile at him, and it was abruptly that I told Cherry I would call her later, and didn’t wait for an answer, and continued quickly on my way, alone. I had to be at work in an hour anyway.
5.
M
ost of Mr. Penrose’s porn was of the soft-core variety, and featured articles on subjects of interest, presumably, to men, but sometimes to me (“How to Reach Her G-Spot: With Your Finger!”), and a profile of the naked girl in question, whose sloping hips and globular breasts looked to have been caramelized, candied, like sugar burnt in a pan. Some of it was hard, though, and practically wordless, and looked more like paper traps in which images were kept against their will: isolated parts of the body, male and female, frozen in conditions of helpless engorgement, in situations of impersonal lubrication. Sometimes a woman’s naked breasts were spattered with what looked like a cupful of glue, and she smiled as though she’d been given a polite compliment; sometimes the dry head of a penis was introduced to the tip of a wet tongue with great formality. These images were accompanied by captions, surprisingly concise, accurate representations of what they set out to describe. If you didn’t have the pictures, I thought, this language might do just as well.
ost of Mr. Penrose’s porn was of the soft-core variety, and featured articles on subjects of interest, presumably, to men, but sometimes to me (“How to Reach Her G-Spot: With Your Finger!”), and a profile of the naked girl in question, whose sloping hips and globular breasts looked to have been caramelized, candied, like sugar burnt in a pan. Some of it was hard, though, and practically wordless, and looked more like paper traps in which images were kept against their will: isolated parts of the body, male and female, frozen in conditions of helpless engorgement, in situations of impersonal lubrication. Sometimes a woman’s naked breasts were spattered with what looked like a cupful of glue, and she smiled as though she’d been given a polite compliment; sometimes the dry head of a penis was introduced to the tip of a wet tongue with great formality. These images were accompanied by captions, surprisingly concise, accurate representations of what they set out to describe. If you didn’t have the pictures, I thought, this language might do just as well.
amateur babe fucks dildo
two big-breasted chicks having hard threesome
bound brunette roughly fucked and dominated
teen spreading legs for super cock
mom with massive juggs gets rammed hard
two babes reaming their butt holes
brother tricks sis into wild fucking
redhead and brunette in horny lesbian foreplay
on bed
pretty blond teen cached in bathroom for action
military man gets lucky with mom and daughter
I noted as well the pedestrian quality of these narrations, their everydayness, their accessibility. For the most part, despite their astonishing variety, these were materials to be found on hand in any home, any bedroom, any imagination.
Often I wondered, as I felt the heat rise between my legs, my own engorgement, if it would be possible to get as much titillation from actually engaging in these activities as it was from looking at still photographs of the same, with their shorthanded captions. Most things, I had already learned, tended to happen too fast, when they happened—to rise to the occasion, to return a kind word, to demonstrate a flush of affection, to seize on the material of an inspiration—and I supposed that sex acts did also. How could one get enough distance from the proceedings to find the point of origin, one’s perspective on it, the angle of observation at which the image becomes optimally arousing? I supposed you’d have to have a mirror, as the pair of lovers on whom I was now spying did, an oval mirror in an ornate gilt frame reflecting the face and neck and large, white, tremulous breasts of a very pale young woman wearing the penny loafers, kneesocks, and short skirt of a schoolgirl, bent over the back of a chair in front of the mirror, her eyes and mouth all stretched into the pointed O of orgasm, while behind her was a tall, naked man with short dark hair whose long back was arched and rocky buttocks clenched in such a way as to imply the apex of a thrust.
I could feel his thrust, and simultaneously feel her O, as though they occurred in tandem somewhere down in the lower part of my stomach, instead of in a magazine in my hands. I don’t know if this is a sympathetic reaction, an involuntary somatic function, or if it is simply a case of extreme aesthetic appreciation, but I know that I reveled in that sensation every time it occurred. It said to me that I was in preparation, that I was going to be tested, that I was equipped to meet the coming challenge. I was sitting on the toilet’s lid in the bathroom at the Top Hat, after closing time. The magazine I held up to my face was called
The Beginner,
and featured pictorial essays, some more elaborate than others, on deflowerings, male and female. My favorite part was the Letters to the Editor, to which readers wrote in with their own narratives of “beginning,” as it was referred to, rather poetically, I thought. Each issue offered a “Very Special Beginning,” a real virgin whose introduction to sexual knowledge, or at least to penetration, was simultaneous with his or her introduction to the camera’s quick-blinking eye. The boys and girls, all just over the age of consent—their birth certificates reproduced on a facing page—were taken by practiced hands to a sweetly lit room, and laid down in silky coverlets, and propped on fluffy pillows, and gently aroused, with fingers, tongues, feathers, restraints, and other tools, to the point at which they could no longer refrain from begging to be entered, or to enter. The language they used for this begging was strikingly consistent. The transcripts printed in full.
The Beginner,
and featured pictorial essays, some more elaborate than others, on deflowerings, male and female. My favorite part was the Letters to the Editor, to which readers wrote in with their own narratives of “beginning,” as it was referred to, rather poetically, I thought. Each issue offered a “Very Special Beginning,” a real virgin whose introduction to sexual knowledge, or at least to penetration, was simultaneous with his or her introduction to the camera’s quick-blinking eye. The boys and girls, all just over the age of consent—their birth certificates reproduced on a facing page—were taken by practiced hands to a sweetly lit room, and laid down in silky coverlets, and propped on fluffy pillows, and gently aroused, with fingers, tongues, feathers, restraints, and other tools, to the point at which they could no longer refrain from begging to be entered, or to enter. The language they used for this begging was strikingly consistent. The transcripts printed in full.
From deep in my heated concentration I heard the unmistakable sound of the clicking of the cylinders in the deadbolt at the café’s back door: Mr. Penrose, coming in to collect the day’s monies. I must have stayed longer in the bathroom than I realized, as he usually came by after his evening beers at the Social Club, when all the men disbanded and went home to their families or girlfriends or empty houses. I quickly flushed the closed toilet, stashed the magazine under the sink, and turned on the tap, washing my hands as loudly as I could. I opened the bathroom door just as Mr. Penrose was passing by in the narrow hallway connecting the back rooms of the café to the front. I had to shut the door again to keep from jamming it into his surprised face.
“Ginger, you’re still here?” He opened the door and peered in. The genuine puzzlement on his face disappeared just as quickly as it had come, to be replaced by the dawning of an embarrassed certainty. He averted his eyes quickly from mine and down to the cabinet under the sink, then just as quickly back. I froze, my hands wrapped in paper towels
.
He said nothing more, but his strong arm, with its brown leather watchband, its blue broadcloth sleeve rolled tightly to the elbow, went up to rest his hand on the doorframe, his chest seemed to fill the doorway, and then my heart, that physical organ, began to try to escape my chest, jumping, like one of the organs I’d seen trapped on the page, in involuntary arousal.
.
He said nothing more, but his strong arm, with its brown leather watchband, its blue broadcloth sleeve rolled tightly to the elbow, went up to rest his hand on the doorframe, his chest seemed to fill the doorway, and then my heart, that physical organ, began to try to escape my chest, jumping, like one of the organs I’d seen trapped on the page, in involuntary arousal.
For what was I but a schoolgirl, and he a gentle adult of great experience? The implied relationship made my just-washed hands grow clammy. I wore cut-off corduroys, not a skirt, but this was hardly an insurmountable obstacle. And here we were, alone in a room with a mirror, albeit a small one. I might need to get the stepstool from the stockroom, but at least I would be able to watch my own face, caught not so much in ecstasy as in a frieze of determination, Mr. Penrose’s once-familiar face now rising and falling over my shoulder like a hypermasculine moon, an expression of simultaneous aggression—the force that must be necessary to mount from behind a girl one has known since her birth—and humiliation.
Oh, how he must hate to be so powerless before the temptation of my young flank, my interior, my offering. . . .
How he must hate himself. I thought then that the one in power in this position, the one closest to the mirror, the one who is entered, must be sure not to betray her innocence, her uncertainty, her obscure longings, or she would run the risk of sharing that humiliation, that powerlessness. She must be as impenetrable above as she is yielding below. Sex was not a shared experience, it seemed to me. Sex must always carry with it, clearly, the threat of degrading one’s power, rather than enhancing it.
Oh, how he must hate to be so powerless before the temptation of my young flank, my interior, my offering. . . .
How he must hate himself. I thought then that the one in power in this position, the one closest to the mirror, the one who is entered, must be sure not to betray her innocence, her uncertainty, her obscure longings, or she would run the risk of sharing that humiliation, that powerlessness. She must be as impenetrable above as she is yielding below. Sex was not a shared experience, it seemed to me. Sex must always carry with it, clearly, the threat of degrading one’s power, rather than enhancing it.
“Well,” said Mr. Penrose, removing himself from the doorway and coughing into his hand, “come on out of there and let’s sit down and have a soda. It’s been a while since we’ve even talked. We used to chat all the time, didn’t we, Ginger. Now that you work for me there’s hardly ever a moment for a little friendly conversation.” He laughed a short but hearty laugh, halfway down the hallway already.
IT WAS TRUE. We used to talk all the time, Mr. Penrose and I, when I was a little girl. My mother would sometimes leave me perched on a stool at the counter with my strawberry shake while she went around to the shops and did errands, and I would sit and tell Mr. Penrose, as he leaned his elbows on the counter and seemed truly interested, all about what I had been reading. In return he would relate to me a story from the newspaper, or sometimes the plot of a novel he’d picked up at the drugstore.
As we sat at a small table with our sodas we rolled setups for the morning: a paper napkin tucked around a knife, fork, and spoon. We did not talk about books. Instead, Mr. Penrose asked me what I was going to do with myself after graduation next year. His daughter Daisy, who disdained a job at the café, was in my grade at school; she, he said proudly, was planning on the military. She hadn’t settled on army, navy, air force, or marines just yet. An image of Daisy rose before my eyes, on her back, fat legs in the air, camouflage pants around her ankles like a bulky yoke, getting plowed by a slim, dark, disproportionately well-endowed man naked but for a turban. But Mr. Penrose seemed to have something he wanted to say.
“Ginger, I’d like you to know you have a spot here at the café as long as you want one. You’re one of the best employees I’ve ever had, and it’s handy to have someone like you around, someone I can rely on to manage things for me. For such a young kid you’re sure steady.” I tried to detect in his tone any hint of double entendre, prurient interest, or even of plain salaciousness. Did he envision an ongoing narrative, rather than a simple “beginning”—me waiting for him night after night in the bathroom, naked but for a cook’s apron tied around my slim waist?
But the truth was more startling. It seemed, from the plain question in his tired brown eyes, that he actually thought that I might be persuaded to stick around Wick and work at the Top Hat for the rest of my life.
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