Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1. - Late May
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3. - Late May
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6. - Saturday
Chapter 7. - Sunday
Chapter 8. - Sunday Night
Chapter 9.
Chapter 10.
Chapter 11. - July 4th
Chapter 12. - Mid-July
Chapter 13.
Chapter 14. - More July
Chapter 15.
Chapter 16.
Chapter 17. - The Accident
Chapter 18.
Chapter 19.
Chapter 20.
Chapter 21.
Chapter 22.
Chapter 23.
Chapter 24.
Chapter 25.
Chapter 26.
Chapter 27.
Chapter 28. - October
Chapter 29. - Mid-October
Chapter 30. - All Hallows’ Eve
Chapter 31. - Late November
Chapter 32.
Chapter 33.
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
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Copyright © 2011 by Rebecca Wolff
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolff, Rebecca, date.
The beginners / Rebecca Wolff.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-51626-3
1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. New England—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.O56B
811’.6—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Cybele, Caitlin, Cassie, Cathy, Cate,
Katherine, Caroline, Cintra, Katy,
Christina, and Colie
and Nic, Daphne,
Theo, Valerie, Susan, Sally & Laura,
Amy & Ted & Tamara, Natasha,
and of course Giuliana
1.
Late May
I was standing there in my usual spot behind the counter at the Top Hat Café, looking down, thinking about evil, buttering toast. Last night I dreamt about the Fourth of July. Perhaps that will be the day that I die—this year? If not this year then maybe the next, or maybe in forty-two years. I gauge my reaction to the news of my impending death on a day when fireworks are the only identifiable landmark for miles around, when you picture a black night sky and small similes of stars against it, from the perspective of a craned neck and an open mouth, soundlessly oohing and aahing. I can see it all so clearly. I am fifteen years old. I like to scare myself.
But I don’t know that it is myself.
The worst dream I ever had involved a house and a field. I was outside the house, under a big sky. It was all in Technicolor blues and greens. I had gone to this house to help save my “best friend,” a sort of grinning scarecrow figure, from persecution. He was accused of having committed a murder with an ax. The body of the dream consisted of the straw man chasing me over rutted roads and into a field, finally catching up with me where I was halted at a tall, wooden, electrified fence. All this under a wide, solidly blue sky. At the fence my friend revealed to me, through his toothy grin, a truism. “Your best friend is your worst enemy,” he said, and then proceeded to outline the punishment I was to endure for my crime.
With nothing in sight except the brilliant sky at all edges of the horizon, my horribly smiling friend tells me that I am to begin eating myself alive, immediately, starting with the tips of the fingers of my right hand, and that no sooner will I finish eating myself than my innards will be all outside, and I will be turned inside out, and I must then begin all over again, and eat until I am outside-in again, and then begin again, ad infinitum, or ad nauseam.
But this, even, is not the full brunt of the punishment. This is just the flesh of the sentence. The skeleton, when revealed to me, is what terrifies me most, what causes me to wake up in a state of such white-hot horror and disgust that I can still recall it, although I dreamed this dream when I was barely more than a child.
“Your sentence,” the scarecrow says to me, “is to enact, over and over, the contents of the worst nightmare I ever had: me, your best friend. Now I will stand here and watch you eat yourself, as I have seen it only in my dreams, heretofore. Forever after, you will be the subject of this nightmare, not me.”
Is it evil, I wonder, as I stack the toast, cut it into halves, and arrange the halves on a small plate, to act consistently with one’s wishes, even though one knows that among the consequences of these actions is pain and sorrow for those around one? Or is it evil to wish for things that will cause pain and sorrow. Or are these the same thing. Or is it evil . . . does evil contain . . . is evil bigger than any one person’s actions, or thoughts, or wishes? Evil as a floating contingency of being, like a hat that lands on one’s head. If that were so, then it would seem to exonerate one from any kind of personal responsibility.
THAT FIRST DAY, in the café, I am amazed that I did not notice their entrance, the Motherwells, Raquel and Theo, a good-looking young couple. I was ringing up a check at the register when I heard a distinctive voice, rich and low, cutting through the general hum. “Theo, this toast is as dry as a witch’s tit.” And then laughter that was at once nervous and uncontrolled, like that of a child awake past her bedtime, running on the energy of a new hour. I looked up in the direction of the one table in the window, which at certain times of day is too bright with sun, and saw her there with a man, or tall boy maybe. (Theo is younger than she, slender, though strong.) His feathery hair was an ashy, dirty blond, and he wore loose shorts made of a fabric woven in Guatemala, or some other far-off land, and tennis shoes and a T-shirt. He seemed at ease in our homely setting. They had a newspaper—it did not look to
be the Valley Republican—on the table between them and some plates of eggs with bright orange yolks, as yet unbroken, and toast, and coffee. That might have been the very toast I had buttered, preoccupied as I was. Danielle, the other girl, had served them invisibly.
I had been working at the Top Hat, after school some days and on weekends, since the day I turned thirteen and my father suggested it. “Ginger, I think you’re old enough now to earn some pocket money,” he said, and I went right down and got myself a job, first as dishwasher, then as cashier, then to take orders and serve, and now I was entrusted with the ultimate responsibility: I could open and close the place. I was good at all of this, but especially at serving the patrons. I had known the Top Hat menu backward and forward since I was a little child, when my mother would bring me in after school for milkshakes and french fries. Often I knew what customers would order before they opened their mouths.
It was not just for the extra twenty-five dollars a week that my parents had urged me to apply to Mr. Penrose for a job. I believe they were already concerned that, even at my tender age, I was not sufficiently engaged in the life of our small community, its comings and goings. I never knew, for example, who was whose best friend in school, who was having a birthday party that weekend. I simply didn’t care, as long as I had Cherry. Cherry did all the caring for both of us.
But my parents were always prodding me to put down my book and go find the other kids. Why didn’t I walk over to the village green, where they often gathered after school. Any hijinks I might engage in, my parents seemed to think, must be an improvement—healthier, more productive, more life-affirming—on sprawling endlessly on my belly in a patch of sun on the short-haired carpet in the living room with a stack of library books, shelling and chewing pistachio nuts. I think they thought I was lonely.
I was an indiscriminate reader, and regularly plundered the stacks of the Agnes Grey Library (erected with monies donated by said dowager lady) for obsolete Hollywood biographies, racy novels of early women’s liberation whose heroines neglected their children and “screwed” their gynecologists, whole series of masculinity-charged spy novels featuring recurring protagonists with names like “Jim Prodder,” men who concentrated as much energy on their sexual technique (he could peel a grape using only his teeth and tongue!) as on espionage, anything by Jane Austen, whose sharp eye for the materiality of romantic longing I found instructive as well as entertaining; anything, for that matter, that said “novel” on the cover and promised to feature a family, or a doomed love affair, or a failed life, or a dark secret, or a sexual awakening, or a path to crisis littered with coincidence.
And the Top Hat offered another diversion for my wide-ranging tastes: its owner, my boss, Mr. Penrose, kept a constantly updated collection of pornographic magazines in a stack in the cupboard under the employee-bathroom sink. I often sat quietly with one of these in my lap, sometimes during my break, sometimes for an hour or so after closing time. These clandestine studies left me feverish, with knots in my loins, and they also gave me a heady introduction to a power that might someday be mine, one not like the more circumscribed, esoteric powers I honed in my solitude. This was a power that could only be exercised in the presence of another.
THE TALL WOMAN at the table in the window squinted as a shaft of sunlight found her in her seat, as I had known it would eventually. She scooted her chair to evade illumination, and in moving caught my eye in its fixed gaze, which she held as she stood up and came toward the counter, carrying her plate of toast. Her friend watched her as though he watched a slow-moving missile. I inserted two fresh slices in the toaster before she could speak. She leaned against the counter and, with nothing of consequence left to be said, asked my name.
“Ginger?” she repeated after me. “Well, that’s fitting. I always admired Ginger on Gilligan’s Island, who was so glamorous even after being shipwrecked for years. I hope I haven’t embarrassed you, I know how redheads hate to have attention called . . .” She trailed off and turned sharply to look back at the man I assumed was her husband.
I studied her closely. After all, it’s not every day you see someone new. She looked rich, somehow, I thought, despite the nonchalance of her attire; perhaps it was her total confidence in her worthiness of my attention. I figured they must be travelers. Every so often in summer and fall we get runoff from one of the more accessible towns: families, mostly, looking in vain for a motel. I felt emboldened and I asked her, directly, to name their destination.
“Actually,” she replied, glancing again around to where Theo sat, now leafing through the paper, “we’re not going anywhere. We’ve just bought a house. We’re your new neighbors, the Motherwells, Raquel and Theo.” She said her surname as though it felt funny coming out of her mouth, the way a king might come and tell you his name was Commoner. Commoner the King. “It’s next to the high school, out on Route Seven. You could come by, after school, if you’d like. I’ll draw you a map. We’ve been here for two weeks already, without a single visitor.”
I was surprised both at the invitation—what had I done to deserve it?—and at their so-far unremarked presence, but more sharply I was disappointed that she’d guessed, or, even worse, assumed, that I attended the high school. I liked to think of myself as ageless.
AT FIFTEEN I still possessed a child’s native capacity for belief—some call it naïveté but I prefer to think of it as a positive attribute, a capability—and enjoyed a commensurate appetite for phenomena in which to believe. Another appetite that diminishes as we mature. Already, now, telling this story—though I have not yet achieved majority—the weight of adult accountability descends, and I assent to the banality of truth, to the scale’s discernible tipping on the side of whatever is the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation for any phenomenon is usually the correct one. The correct explanation is the simplest one. A ghost is a draft of cold air on the skin, a neuron-fueled shape in the dark hour of sleep. A mind reader is, at best, someone who pays closer attention to detail than most, who is wide open to suggestion. At worst, she is a con artist. A witch is a woman with an enemy or two. Is this simple enough to sustain us? I ask you.
RAQUEL TOLD ME, one day, when almost everything had already happened, when I had looked at her face so often I could hardly even see it anymore, that someone had once told her that she had a muddy, brown aura. A chance encounter with a psychic healer from Copenhagen in a bar in Lisbon. The woman clasped Raquel’s becalmed face in her smooth hands, then gently released it as though to send her away, to push her off like a little boat from the shore. And when Raquel told me this she laughed, but I could see the brown webbing falling over her, restricting the motion of her jaw, her mouth filling with the dusty stuff.
I LEFT THE CAFÉ that day at six-thirty, as usual, after giving the counter and tables a final wipe-down and separating the bills in the register into rubber-banded denominations, then stashing them in the little safe in the stockroom, switching off the lights, and locking first the front door, from inside, then the back door, behind me. I could indeed be trusted.
My bike was where I’d left it, where I always left it, propped against the fence by the trash cans, lids ajar, fat orphans wanting gruel. As I rode home I thought about the newcomers. As far as I could remember, no one had ever moved to Wick. But was that possible? I supposed some had moved away and then scurried back—my own father, for example, before Jack’s birth—but that didn’t really count. That was like a trick question on a first-grader’s math quiz: What’s two plus two minus two.
Did this mean that I had never before met anybody I hadn’t known my whole life? I guessed so, unless you counted newborn natives, who came bawling to the town and were duly presented in their swaddling clothes.
These were my first adults.
RAQUEL WAS TWENTY-SEVEN, but she could have been nineteen, or thirty-five. No even number. Her face was long, her eyes green and narrowed like canoes. No one ever knows what you mean when you say that eyes are green. We tend t
o picture emeralds, stoplights saying “go,” or grass the green of meadows and clearings (two of her favorite words). In this instance understand green like moss, like lichen, like the forest floor at the deep end of summer, about to turn brown. An enviable green, rather than the green of envy. Now you can picture her clearly, gazing into the mirror as one might at the sky, unaware of the identity of her observer but always appreciative of a compliment. Yet never equipped to respond appropriately.
Her hair was brown. She was tall, as tall as Theo almost. I remember once we were passing in front of the mirror upstairs in her back bedroom when she caught sight of our reflection. “Look at how scrawny you are, Ginger,” she said, and her arm slid around my waist and held me. I examined instead the wallpaper, which looked very old and was patterned with small bouquets of cornflowers, realistically represented, against an unrealistic ivory ground.
“It’s possible you haven’t hit the full flush of puberty yet, but more likely this is just the way you are. Stringbean, willowy, all those words that mean you’ll never have to go through the anguish us more ‘womanly’ women do.” She held her fingers up and wriggled them, to indicate quotation marks. I caught myself staring at the rounds of her breasts beneath her T-shirt.
We stood still before the mirror and I watched her grow uncomfortable in a split second of silence. She was trying to think of something to say, already. For Raquel there was no continuity, from utterance to utterance, story to history. The currency in which we traded, in Wick. So she filled in the blank with awkward chatter. “When you stand before a mirror with someone you must see yourself together, and decide how it feels. You must acknowledge that you stand in some relation to each other: tailor to customer, sister to brother, mother to the bride, or two naked people who have fornicated and now must look again, harder this time, at their partner, in the upright position. It is meant to be an emotional moment, usually: tearful mother smooths bride’s hair; lovers’ eyes fuse with renewed desire and they return to bed.” She laughed at herself, and we turned away from the image of our own fusion.
The Beginners Page 1
