The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  “I’ve been waiting to be disabused of this notion for a long time. Do you think you could help me, girls?”

  It was impossible to tell what he meant. I could read neither his tone nor his face nor his actual utterance. It was all I could do to laugh again.

  But Cherry took him too seriously. Or not seriously enough. “It’s true! No one can do whatever they want to,” she chided him.

  But he didn’t seem to have heard her.

  “Giggling is fine,” he said, and though he looked at both of us, his eyes still darting, I felt as though he spoke only to me. “I encourage you to giggle all you want, all you can. . . . But I also encourage you to take care of yourself. Stand up for yourself. Guard yourself carefully . . .” He spoke to me as though I was a single representative unit of you, as though Cherry and I could not be divided. But I thought that what he ought to have said was that we must take care of each other, stand up for each other. “You won’t be able to tell when . . .” and then he raised his eyes and we looked around to where Raquel stood in the doorway.

  “Are you conspiring? You’re not planning a surprise party, are you?” She looked from one to the other of us, around the table. She joked lightly, but the uncertainty in her eyes was genuine. I felt as though I had somehow betrayed her, though I had done nothing but attempt to understand. We wouldn’t be able to tell when what? When we had heard enough? I didn’t think I could ever hear enough. It was difficult to say whom he might be trying to protect. Perhaps he had been about to issue one of those bland proclamations about how these years were the best in our lives and we had better enjoy them while we could. Though it seemed obvious to me—something in the way he held himself, loose-limbed, coiled—that he took great pleasure in his present time of life.

  Then he uncoiled, and all levity, and duplicity, resumed. “I know you don’t like surprises, sweetheart. No, Ginger was just telling us a ghost story. The one about the girl whose head falls off when she unties the ribbon from around her neck.” I knew that story. It was one of my favorites, though I could never remember its premise, only the denouement.

  “Ginger and Cherry have to get home soon, Theo. We must bid them farewell.” Raquel gave us a wink and flattened herself against the doorframe, indicating that we should rise and pass by her. We did, Cherry with more willingness than I felt.

  “Come back soon! I’ll be lonely here.” Raquel stood waving on the shabby porch, watching us walk up the hill.

  As we wended our way, Cherry couldn’t stop exclaiming about Raquel’s bold, instructive lecture—“Who does she think she is, a gym teacher?”—and Theo’s titillating aside. “Do you think he was flirting with us?” she wondered, incredulously, and I nodded vacantly, reeling my thoughts away from this banal interpretation.

  7.

  Sunday

  Cherry’s house is a big white beauty on the village green. Mr. Endicott is from one of the first families of the town. They own a farm up in the hills, still a working farm, and he is our town lawyer, as was his father before, handling divorces and custody disputes, deeds and wills and lawsuits. He is also a great storyteller, drinking-buddy, and bowler. My parents have always been friendly with the Endicotts, and Cherry and I were habitually together as small girls. We had in common that we were only children, or at least the seven years between Jack and me made it feel that way, even before it was that way.

  Only children are rare in a town full of Catholics. Cherry’s parents worship common sense. Scraps of paper are collected for leaving phone messages, the time between taking off your socks and getting into bed is to be used for turning your socks right-side-out and putting them in the hamper. I had been sleeping over at Cherry’s for so long her parents had consigned to me a little daybed built into the bay window in Cherry’s room. They called it “Ginger’s bay.”

  I loved the Endicott house. It was drafty, and had a spare, straight-up-and-down look to its walls and steep staircases. When they built houses back then the idea of “space” had not yet been consumed by the people who lived in it; every inch of this commodity in the Endicott house was parsed out into little rooms with low ceilings, almost every room with its own fireplace. The Endicott family had, of course, installed central heating, but still, often Cherry and I huddled upstairs under layers and layers of quilts and comforters. On Saturday mornings, even in high school, we would bring all our blankets and pillows downstairs to sit on the floor in front of an old black-and-white movie.

  TODAY WAS SUNDAY, and it seemed we just could not stay away. Or it was I who could not, and Cherry had not yet found the strength to resist the force of my temptation. Late morning found us walking aimlessly, then, with an unspoken but unerring sense of direction, toward the Motherwells’. First we went and sat in the rain under the dripping overhang of the high school’s auditorium, a separate structure from the school itself, round and windowless like a grain silo. Then we stood for a few minutes on the hill, looking toward their house. I could see a light on in the upper bedroom, a cozy yellow glow in the dark gray. A car drove by packed with a bunch of kids from school, speeding on the wet road. “They should be more careful,” Cherry said, turning her face away as we approached the Motherwells’ house, but I perceived a measure of wistfulness in her disapproval. I think she might have liked to be in that car.

  “GOSH, YOU KNOW, GIRLS, it’s really lucky that you decided to come over again today, because if you hadn’t I would have gone completely insane, sitting here all alone in this downpour.”

  This was believable. Up in the bedroom, under the roof, we might have been under a taut black umbrella. Theo was out somewhere. Raquel didn’t volunteer any details. I had to be at the café at three. It had been raining since early that morning; outside the grass glowed in the mud and I had a delicious, sleepy, encapsulated feeling in the warm chamber.

  “I drive myself crazy, when I’m alone. Of course, being with others can be just as intolerable . . . but I may have found a happy medium. I was just writing in my diary.” Raquel held up a small, leather-bound, gilt-edged book with a clasp, about the size of a box of animal crackers. “Isn’t it priceless? Did you ever have one like this, with the little lock and key? You could contain an entire girlhood between these pages. I keep it here”—she pointed to the top drawer of her dresser—“with my underwear, and I keep the key separately, hidden, as any proper girl would, in this little dish.” She seemed to be inviting us, erstwhile intruders, into her privacy. The white dish sat on top of the dresser and appeared to contain, besides the key, a jumble of earrings, none of which I would ever see her wear. Her lobes were always bare.

  I had kept a diary a long time before, when I was eleven. It was given to me by my parents, on the advice of a grief counselor. The diary was pre-dated, and on every page I wrote something pristinely impersonal. The day’s weather, homework assignments, entries in the long list of every book I had ever finished, including author, title, and date begun. I did include a note the day my first period arrived, the bloody “guest,” as my mother called it, on the last day of summer vacation when I was twelve. And that was where it ended, the journal of my mourning.

  Cherry, I knew, made a habit of slavishly recording in a little notebook each interaction that occurred (in the halls at school, at the riverbank, on Main Street) between her and whichever boy she was obsessed with at that particular moment. She had five completed volumes in a shoebox under her bed, and was at work on her sixth. But she didn’t seem interested in the subject of diaries.

  “Tell us about how you and Theo first met?” This was something Cherry could get enthusiastic about.

  “What? And further darken the mood of this dreary day with a sordid tale?”

  I looked at Cherry and thought we must be thinking the same thought: this was the perfect day to be told such a story. There could be nothing more delightful than to be filled to the brim with an account of a foreign experience when outside the day was damp and chilly and packed to its brim with familiarity. A good story is
second only to a poignant reverie.

  “Well, I suppose it’s really kind of charming. We met fairly recently, you know, so I haven’t had a chance to tell it much.” She shifted her weight on the bed and crossed her legs, settling in. I thought she looked beautiful, there in the yellow light of the little bedside lamp, her long dark hair around her shoulders and her arms and legs bare, a bleachedred cotton sundress covering the remainder of her. The soles of her feet were dusty. I thought she must be a little chilly, and tugged the sleeves of my sweatshirt down over my hands as though it might warm her.

  “Theo and I were both students in the History Department at our university. Getting our PhDs, we were. Don’t worry, girls, I’m not a doctor. We stopped short of that. His area was the history of religion; mine just plain old American history, with a concentration in certain unpleasant episodes.

  “We didn’t know each other well, though we’d been in the same department for several years. He always scared me a little, when I ran into him on campus, or around town. He seemed so indifferent. At department parties he might sit and read a book; in the university library I once came around a corner and found him pressed up against a student—a girl I’d taught in a seminar—his tongue firmly rooted in her mouth. They were practically humping. This was clearly illegal, by all laws of the university, as well as the tacit laws of good behavior, but something in his manner granted him an imperviousness, a candy coating that made him slip easily down the throat of any situation. Maybe it is not so mysterious. He is, after all, a handsome devil.” She appeared, for a moment, to be caught in a reverie of flesh.

  “He always seemed to have lots of friends, unlike me—but like me he had difficulty keeping them. I’d see him all the time with one woman, or a group of fellow students, and then the connection would appear to have been severed. They would walk past him in the department halls without a word—with a wide berth, even.

  “And then last spring—only last spring!—we found ourselves in competition for a fellowship, one that allowed the winner to spend a year researching a proposed project.

  “I remember the day we both waited outside the office of the chair of the department to find out who had been awarded the fellowship. We exchanged some pleasantries, and then fell silent, but soon I found myself distracted from my contemplation of the projected year of intensive research, not to mention the honor of the award itself, by Theo’s graceful concentration—his cheek, the tendons of his neck—as he sat across from me in the waiting area.” Raquel uncrossed her legs, and crossed them in a new configuration. She looked closely at us and smiled.

  “Do you know, yet, girls, the rare pleasure of a mutual attraction?” The question was rhetorical. “There is a sensation of illumination, of being held, with the other, inside a bubble of light. It is almost as though you cannot see each others’ eyes because they are so lit up. The glare is infinitely reflective. It casts you back upon yourself if you look too long, and that is the very last thing you want. You want to see the other, for as long as you can.

  “But while this experience provides the ultimate thrill of mutuality, it is also a platform for the ultimate doubt: an insecurity that thrusts every certainty into relief. Is it really true. Is it really so. Can I trust what I’m feeling. Is this a feeling? How is it different from delusion. Can I base my actions upon anything contained within this feeling, which is quite possibly a delusion. How will I know if I don’t ask.

  “And so I asked. ‘What will you do if you don’t get the fellowship,’ was my entrée, a bold one, implying confidence in my own chances of winning. His reply was decisive. ‘Live with you and spend your money,’ he said quietly, not missing a beat, his eyes on mine longer than I could stand. ‘Oh, really,’ was the response I mustered, and just then the sheepish chairman opened his door and beckoned us into his office, where he made it painfully clear that Theo had won, with his proposal that he drive across the country, intruding upon a different house of worship each day, recording the congregation’s responses to his presence and asking them a set of probing questions he had developed toward an eventual dissertation. He jokes that when he finally writes his book it will be called ‘The Devil Came to My Church Today.’

  “Theo held the door for me as we left the chair’s office, my failed ambition tight around me like a shroud. Just outside the building he stopped. The day was bright, windy, all the clouds blown out of the blue sky. ‘It’s enough for two, if we live frugally,’ he said. He smiled at me, and it looked as though he was unused to smiling in any casual way. I realized then that he was serious. He was proposing. That we spend the year together, the two of us; that we should be the project: an experiment in bliss, conjugal or otherwise. When you get to know Theo better you’ll see this side of him. He is definite about his desires, and how to achieve them. If he took infinitely more care with the effects of these desires on others, he might be a world leader. In this case, with his clarity, he would save me, no matter if it were incidentally. If I hadn’t recognized this radical vision of his for what it was, I probably would have thanked him for his gallantry and gone on my way. But I could see that what he was offering me was something potentially far more gratifying than the chance to concentrate on my field of study. He offered me nothing less than a shared reality. A life inside the bubble, with him.” Raquel’s forested eyes were bright with the deep memory of this life-changing event. I had never heard of anything so providential, not even in one of the countless cheap romance novels I had devoured in a particularly gluttonous phase at the library. But listening to Raquel, watching her serious, finely drawn face describe acmes and zeniths of humor and discernment, I could easily understand how Theo had been so inspired. She made me think of la belle dame sans merci, the eponymous antiheroine of a poem we’d read in class, an imaginary woman who left her real-life swains spellbound, on a hillside, the blood drained out of them, “alone and palely loitering.” They could never find her again. But he had found her, whoever she was. I wondered if it mattered to him who she was, or if he had perhaps taken an even greater leap than Raquel realized, shooting himself at her randomly like a proton, a spark from a fireplace, like a freewheeling ember of meaninglessness.

  “It didn’t seem enough just to leave the office together and stay that way. We decided to quit the program together, though we wouldn’t tell the department till after we’d spent our year’s worth of funding. We still haven’t told them. We would take the money and drive across country, like any other red-blooded American couple with a functional hatch-backed automobile, but we would not stop at any churches. We gave ourselves the whole summer to make the trip, and left our small university town a week later. We drove all day and all night, heading northwest, through Ohio, Illinois, and North Dakota in a blur of navigation and convenience-store coffee. All the way I was pointing out perfect sites for our new life, little towns in the middle of nowhere, and Theo was saying, ‘No, it’s too soon.’ Because, you see, we didn’t realize that this would be a round-trip voyage. We thought we were gone for good.”

  Gone for good, what a strange expression. I looked at Cherry, a question dawning on my lips, but her face wore the look of politely suppressed boredom she wore when she was being chatted at by some friend of her mother’s at the library. This was not what she’d expected. I, on the other hand, was suffused with borrowed bliss: I was in a little car, passing through dozens and dozens of towns even smaller than Wick, and never stopping. I was alone in the car.

  “Now, looking back on the trip, it seems obvious to me what we thought we were doing. We were forging ever westward. We were pioneers, luring each other on with the nugget of that last frontier. We wanted something new, and what could be newer than the huge landscape in front of us, so unsettled to our crowded New England eyes? We passed through farm towns, dairy towns, mountain towns, cowboy towns, ranch towns, tourist towns, and in all of them I could see a place for us. I had no trouble visualizing our niche and just how we might come to occupy it. I would have babies, T
heo could read. We both could have jobs at the local toothbrush factory, or teaching at the high school. God knows young minds always need forming.” Raquel smiled, comfortable as she was in her monopoly on our attentions.

  “By the time we got to Glacier National Park, in Montana, we were completely fatigued, not to mention malnourished from subsisting on peanut butter and soft white bread. So we decided to stay there for a while. We rented a spot in a campsite. It was late May and still quite cold. You could see snow up on the peaks. Even down where we were at night it might drop to thirty-five degrees, and in the morning we would wake up in the back of the car all cramped and stiff from sleeping clenched together.

  “I can’t remember a more idyllic time. Every morning we got up and had instant coffee and bread and apples, then we’d go hiking. The park is infested with bison. You find their huge spiral droppings all over the place, on every trail, in every meadow. They look just exactly like a massive cinnamon roll made of shit.” At this we giggled, ceremoniously.

  “But I was reluctant to go on any of the more difficult trails. Reluctance characterizes my attitude toward this brief sojourn in the wild. I know exactly what relationship I am supposed to be enjoying with the environment—it’s meant to be one of sublime, transcendent communion. An understanding, if you will, is meant to spring up between me and the leaves on the trees, me and the meadows and the wildflowers growing wildly on those meadows, between me and the warm rain that fell on our heads and shoulders one day when we were caught in an early summer storm.” Cherry coughed lightly, and when I glanced her way she caught my eyes purposefully, but I did not want to be distracted. I returned to Raquel my full attention.