The Beginners (9 page)

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Authors: Rebecca Wolff

BOOK: The Beginners
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She sipped some liquid. The glass came down on the table with a resonant
ping.
“Because when I think of a phrase like ‘dewy pussy,’ it is actually my own . . . that is referred to, and what is exciting to me is the idea that my pussy could be, and probably will be, referred to by someone in the future—near or far—as ‘dewy.’ And this excitement in turn actually produces in my body the phenomenon, or state, if you will, of ‘dewy pussy.’ ”
This time she allowed the two words to issue silkily from between her lips, to be drawn out like a shining ribbon.
Theo’s voice was a little lowered. I had to strain to hear him. “Keep talking—”
“Hang on to your hat. I’ll let you in on a deeper secret.”
“It’s about time,” Theo said, and I jerked backward toward the door, in the dim hallway, in thrill and panic. But if I made a noise now, or knocked on the doorjamb, or cleared my throat, it would become instantly obvious to the two of them, in the kitchen, that I had been standing motionless in the hallway, eavesdropping, up until that moment. On the other hand, they
must
have heard me come in: the door was heavy, and the screen door had slammed against it and bounced and then slammed again, before coming to rest. If I just stood and listened, the dilemma would only be aggravated. My deceit grew more heinous, my culpability increased with every word that I heard.
But there was nothing I could do. The noise then of another chair scraping back. “Let me just clear this off a bit . . . now, come here.” Steps, and then, in rapid succession, the
zzzzip
of a zipper, the crush of clothes moving, pushed off of limbs. “I don’t think we’ll break it, do you?”
What I heard now was all flesh. Nothing I had names for except “suck,” and a smacking like a candy bar; sometimes a brushing noise, just pure friction. The table squeaked a little, but not much. Then:
“. . . and just ‘fuck.’ ‘Fuck me hard,’ or ‘fuck me now,’ . . . ah, you’re fucking me. . . .” Her voice had deepened, seemed to be coming from a more complicated place in her throat, a strangled place. There was a flapping, a slapping of flesh on flesh, and the table’s joints squeaked.
When Theo spoke his voice was hoarse, almost a whisper, but a stage whisper.
“She is beautiful, you know. I for one would fuck her.”
“Well.” Long pause, of speech but not of action. “I’d fuck her, too.” Her breath seemed to be caught in her throat.
“So, why don’t you?” Theo said, rather coolly. The table protested loudly.
“Careful, angel. Because I’m fucking you, you bastard. God. Also, you know, because fantasy isn’t . . . reality. As far as I can tell, darling,
you
are my reality.”
The table creaked and creaked. The sound of their breathing got louder, speech concluded by mutual agreement. I gauged my distance from the door, then commenced creeping backward.
“Mmm . . . just pull out . . . when you’re gonna . . .”
I closed the door behind me with as much caution as I had left in me.
9.
 
O
ne evening later that week found me dreamy, standing at the sink back at the Endicotts’ with my hands in soapy water. Outside, the night sky showed an awareness of the blue it had recently been. Cherry dried the dishes as I washed them. We did not speak, had not spoken much all day. I felt we were at an impasse, though she could not be privy to it. The novelty of this private experience, of knowing something she didn’t, and wouldn’t, was both a pain and a pleasure, as in fact I also knew it had to be Cherry the Motherwells referred to—“she” of the black hair and flushed cheeks, the overripe lips and white skin.
On the other hand, Cherry had told me, teasingly, that she had seen Theo watching me. And she thought that they took more of an interest in me. They were both so intellectual, she said. I had been intent on my book, one day, on the porch, she said, when she saw Theo watching me. I was indulging myself in some decidedly unintellectual but deeply rewarding fare: the first volume in the Dragonriders of Pern series,
Dragonflight,
in which, on a distant planet, infant dragons hatch from giant eggs and seek to make an “Impression”—to bond telepathically with a human “rider,” who will be their eternal companion and guide. Cherry also said, lightly, though with a sidelong glance as though to gauge the aftershock, that she thought I was getting obsessed with Raquel and Theo. It felt strange to be so observed.
Now I was going back over that first encounter, in the café, thinking how it held in its virgin arms a discreet premonition of all that was to come. Every moment does, though, I thought. In every instant lies a pattern, a code, from which every antecedent moment can be predicted. Much like the way we live out our family’s story, the way I look, and Jack looked, just like my mother, and just like my father, equally, according to the bias and predilection of the observer. Our whole bodies represented perfectly by fine lines: limbs, lips, eyelashes, hair, extremities. Freckles excepted.
 
 
ON THAT FIRST DAY I had been shy, and therefore quiet. Raquel made her showy advances while Theo looked on, amused, perhaps wary, certainly appreciative. The outcome was pleasing to us all. They looked like adults to me, and unfailingly glamorous, though that glamour would acquire somewhat of a patina of familiarity as the summer passed and I spent night after night in their company, more often than not going to sleep on their couch long past midnight, having called my parents to say I was at Cherry’s and I’d come right home after breakfast tomorrow to do the chores I had neglected, plus some extra.
I had brought Cherry to their house with me because I was scared to go alone. Scared just in the way you’re scared to do anything for the first time. There was hardly anyone in Wick whose home I hadn’t been inside on one occasion or another, at a wake, or a birthday party, or delivering a box of paper goods from my parents’ shop. That is supposed to be the beauty of it, isn’t it? I’d even been inside the churches, although my parents didn’t belong to the Catholic or the Congregational.
“What are you? Jewish?” a boy once asked me, in front of a knot of kids at recess, with a look on his face, equal parts boldness and apprehension. What if I was, I remember wondering at the time. What would he say to that. There has never been a Jew in our town, and consequently any stereotype he could have had prepared would have been wildly trite and dated. Couldn’t he have come up with something more menacing, more profoundly foreign? What about “heathen,” or for that matter “devil worshipper”? I suspect the fact that everyone knows my mother isn’t from around here had paved the way for this more pedestrian suspicion. I used to press my mother for stories about where she came from, the world outside Wick, every night when she was putting me to bed, but she would never comply. She was concerned for my night’s sleep. She needn’t have worried.
 
 
I WOKE UP in the middle of the night in my little bay window at the Endicotts’.
Cherry had switched on her bedside lamp. I sat up, squinting, and asked her what was wrong, in a whisper. She didn’t answer immediately. She sat, hugging her bent knees, her face resting on her crossed forearms. Her hair was all in disarray, as though she’d been tossing her head on the pillow.
“I don’t know exactly. I’ve just been having strange dreams.”
Cherry and I often told our dreams to each other in the morning after a sleepover, over cereal. Sometimes hers bored me; sometimes they were fantastic. Her diabetes affected her sleep. If her insulin levels were off, high or low, her dreams went wild. She remembered them in great detail, while my own enjoy widely varying degrees of lucidity, ranging from the completely muddled—those that linger only as a vague cobweb of a mood in the morning light—to the absurdly willful, in which my waking brain conducts its business with the figments of the dream in complete lucidity, and every movement of the unconscious mind is conversant with the conscious.
But, oddly, Cherry could not remember what had been so terrible as to wake her up that night, only that it gave her the greatest relief to come awake and realize, after a moment, that the consequences, or the realities, or the conclusions reached in the dream were null and void. She went to the bathroom and did a blood-sugar test, something I always loved to watch, as she pricked her index finger and squeezed out a big vermilion drop. She was fine. We settled down in our beds again.
10.
 
T
he maroon car slowed, crept along beside us, tires crunching. We were on our bikes in the breakdown lane, riding to the mill for a quick sandwich in its shade before I had to be at the café.
“Hey, where do people go to get wet around here? I just drove all the way from the city and I sure could use a swim.”
It was a hot June, the sun high in the sky at one o’clock, bleaching everything but the blackest contours. Theo leaned over the steering wheel in the shady interior of the car and rested his lean cheek on his knuckles.
“Oh, I know, me too,” Cherry said, pushing her sweaty bangs out of her eyes. So easy, for her, to make an offer of herself. “The reservoir is good for swimming—do you know how to get there? But you have to find the special place.”
The reservoir had several different entry points, most of them quite wooded, and cordoned off except to those with hunting and fishing permits, but swimming was forbidden at all of them. This was, of course, the source of drinking water for hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of city dwellers. There was, however, one entry in particular that was generally recognized by kids in town as the proper spot for gentle recreation, primarily because it was hidden from view inside a small inlet, all the way across the reservoir from Wick. You needed a car to get there, and so we didn’t often go, now that the necessity of being driven everywhere by our parents was so unappealing.
“I know all about
some
special places, my girl”—Cherry laughed, and blushed—“but I’m a babe in the woods in this town. I don’t know anything. I need your guidance. What do you say, young ladies? We can pick Raquel up on our way. She’ll be pleasantly surprised.” I wondered if Cherry was thinking about pillows, and pincushions, or if the heat had pushed all thought away. Or the immediate thrill of this interloper, his easy elocution, his interlocutions, his lanky body slung over the wheel, was enough to silence all but the helpful native in her.
“Ginger has to go to work,” Cherry began, and I felt a dreadful sensation of heaviness. I was ballast, a spoiler. They would cut me loose. It was happening even as I sank. For a moment I considered alternatives: Could I be late for work? Could I call in sick, or pretend my bike had a flat tire and I was far away and couldn’t get back? Unused to deception as I was, I couldn’t think that fast.
“Oh”—Theo shaded his eyes and squinted out at me, smiled a rueful smile—“what a drag. Ginger, could you spare Cherry a little while so she can aide me in my quest?” I felt, strangely, as though it were, actually, my decision whether Cherry could go with him. What should I tell her? But she was already acting in her own best interest, moving to lock her bike to the stop sign.
“Ginger, I’ll just see you later. Let me have my sandwich. I’ll call you tonight, okay?”
Theo stretched his long arm across the empty seat and shoved the door open; she climbed in and waved and I watched the car grow smaller and turn the corner. I was alone. I rode my bike to the mill and ate my peanut butter and jelly, quieting my mind as I chewed, in preparation for the long afternoon of servitude ahead.
 
 
AT THE CAFÉ, Mr. Penrose greeted me with incomprehension in his eyes. “Ginger, did you miss us? Can’t get enough of this place, can you?” Danielle stood behind the counter in my customary spot; this was a Wednesday, the slowest day of the week, and there was only ever one waitress on the schedule for the after-lunch crowd. I retraced my steps, looking for the flaw in the fabric of this particular reality. I distinctly remembered double-checking to make sure I had the shift this week. Sometimes Mr. Penrose changed things at the last minute to accommodate a special request.
“Thursdays are too slow for two girls, sweetie. Sorry! But since you’ve come all this way, how about a milk shake at the counter, like old times?” Mr. Penrose picked up the tall metal shaker, the wet ice cream scoop, but I shook my head.
Thursdays.
It occurred to me that I actually had no idea what day of the week it was. Summertime held me in its loose embrace, and now the Top Hat had released me; I was free to pursue the day, whatever day, to its rightful end. I laughed at myself, at my errors, and made an excuse about needing to get home for some chores. I backed out the door, jumped on my bike, and rode as fast as I could, pumping wildly up the hill toward the Motherwells’.
But only one car was in the drive, Raquel’s old blue car. I had missed them. My first impulse was to keep my momentum going, to get myself as fast as I could to the reservoir—quite a long ride—and join them there, but then it occurred to me that I might have rather managed to arrive before them. If they had, for example, stopped at Cherry’s to pick up her suit. Her big empty house—no one home at this time of day. That would mean that I might have a moment alone with Raquel. What would I do with it? I couldn’t think of anything to say to her. I just might prompt her to speak. I advanced on the house, but as I climbed the porch steps I became filled with the conviction that Raquel was not inside. No one was home here, either. My certainty was the same kind of one-way-mirrored certainty with which one knows when one has just hurt another’s feelings. Nothing has changed, nothing has been said; it is a petite alteration of chemical composition, of electrostatic energy. Feelings have been hurt. A house is unoccupied.

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