The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  “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.

  The 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.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY IS INTIMIDATING. But when one has grown up in a town as small as Wick, one has a certain proprietary claim on every inch. An inalienable right. This was earth that I had turned with the force of my will, my imagination. I could take a minute or two to explore their impositions.

  I pretended to myself that I didn’t know no one was home. I didn’t, really. I sent a long, psychic halloooo through the screen door at the front, and waited for the silence and deadness of the house to confirm itself before I went around the back and in through the door by the kitchen, pausing to sweep my fingertips across the top of the table, upon which we had drunk our iced tea, upon which love had been made within the range of my hearing. For my benefit the windows were wide open. A small breeze shared the run of the hallway with me. No one sat at the round table. No one was in the living room, and its drawn shades made me feel sleepy. I thought that I might just have a quick look around the house. I felt that I had only seen the surfaces of the rooms, only what they wanted me to see, what I had been shown.

  I went up the stairs. I poked my nose into Theo’s study, where I had spotted an enticing bookshelf full of unfamiliar titles, but found myself propelled instead toward the bedroom. There was a mirror, a tall, oval mirror on a kind of wooden stand, on the floor, almost full-length. I stood before it and watched myself grow, and shrink, and grow again, as it pivoted gently on its dowels. I put out a hand and stilled it, then my hands moved to the buttons of my shirt and I unveiled myself to the mirror: the sweat of my exertions, my hidden stem, my bones upright and incandescent.

  I thought I was beautiful—then I thought maybe it was just the deep, bluish light of R
aquel’s cool bedroom at the back of the house, carving my haphazard forms and lines into a relief of symmetry, regularity. I thought maybe to touch myself.

  Then there was a noise, a heat, a shush, a brush with flesh. My eyes, trained on the specifications of my own form, struggled to recalibrate to the negative space surrounding me.

  Wha?—I jumped, and whirled around, and faced nothing. Had I felt a hand on the middle of my back, a living hand, warm and insistent? There was no one, just a lumpy, unmade bed and a little bedside table, the unlit lamp, the dresser with the big knobs. I turned back to the mirror—incrementally, deliberately, my eyes fixed on the middle distance—and was just in time to catch a white cheek, a shoulder, long dark hair slipping past the doorjamb. I froze. Thump thump down the hall. Bang, the screen door. I stayed still, waiting for the cough of the old car’s engine turning over, but heard nothing, and when I buttoned my shirt and went down to look out the front door the car was still there. I flew out into the sunlight like an exorcised spirit.

  A NARROW OLD PAVED road loops around the reservoir, passing access roads with yellow postings for hunters noting the official number of the entry. I don’t know how they came up with these numbers, which don’t seem to correspond to anything, but I suppose this is the way the official world works, as mysteriously as the unofficial.

  Riding with growing purpose, I tried to imagine why Raquel might have been hiding in the house, spying. Why she had not gone with Theo and Cherry to the reservoir. What she might have been thinking when she crept up behind me. I had been so sure there was no one home: Why did she flee the scene? Did she think I would not know it was she behind me? Maybe she was dreaming, and not thinking at all, and now wandered idly in the summer-green woods behind the house, a spray of tall grass in her fist. That left Theo and Cherry swimming together in cold water sparkling in the colorless sunshine, drying together under the round white sun.

  The road to the reservoir was virtually all downhill, into what had been a valley. One didn’t notice this so much in a car, but on a bike it made for a speedy, thrilling ride, and for arduous work on the way home. I would have to stand on my pedals and push hard to get up the steeper inclines; I would be glad for the trees’ shade. The thrills of speed and wind as I whizzed over the cracked, unkempt asphalt were complemented by my anticipation of their faces when they saw me emerge from the wooded path to the water. They would be engaged in some play and I would join them, would merge with them, sit quietly and watch them and freckle my shoulders in the sun.

  But when I arrived at the banks of the reservoir, finally, dripping with sweat, I found myself alone yet again. The shore was silent and still, the sand untroubled; there were no signs of recent revelry. The sky itself had assumed a telling quietude. A whitewash of clouds obscured the sun and cast a flat, smooth, cooler light. All the heat of the day had come to nothing.

  An unmistakable sensation advanced on me: I roamed around, pacing the sand in small circles. Everywhere I went and at every juncture I had chosen badly. I had followed the wrong leader and been left behind, left out, alone, alone, an avalanche of disappointment, unfair, unfair, a hot, childish, bitter rage of unmanageable impotence. I sat down in the sand, screwed up my hands into fists and rested my face on them. I fixed my eyes on that same middle distance and tears filled them.

  But it was impossible that I should cry with no one there to see it.

  After a few minutes I began to feel useless on the sand, with my unspilled tears. I rose and walked limply to my bicycle.

  11.

  July 4th

  For several days I read, and helped my mother weed the garden, and went to the café, and allowed things to return to normal, with the exception of the absence of Cherry. I thought she must be with them, for she was not with me.

  I almost enjoyed this disengaged time. I ran parallel thoughts continuously: How she must be missing me, and how elegant, to be free of all entanglements. A free agent, as my father referred to himself on those rare nights when my mother went out and he was left to fend for himself. Did I need Cherry? Did I need anyone?

  And yet when she called, her familiar voice made me feel that everything was as it had always been, without exception. She asked me to come with her to the Motherwells’, said they’d invited her for lunch but that she didn’t really feel like going by herself. She asked me to come with her and then to go to the parade, and then later to the fireworks, for it was indeed the Fourth of July. She said she was sorry she hadn’t called, that she’d been working at the drugstore a few hours a day to see if she liked it, and that she did.

  I asked her, quite casually, as a means of prompting the usual flood of chat about this or that, about swimming with Theo. “Oh, we were there for hours,” she said. “We stayed till practically sunset. It was really fun,” she added blandly, and I swam, suddenly, in waters of disorientation. I saw the sun, setting over the empty beach, but I also saw the sun setting over a beach with three figures. I saw the sun setting over a beach with two figures and a third in the woods, watching. I saw the beach minus the sun, for I do not think the sun sets over that shore. I thought I had better say something, and Cherry said, in reply, that I must have come just when they all had swum way out, together, and stayed for an improbably long time, dog-paddling, far beyond where they could touch bottom. “Raquel knows how to do backflips,” Cherry said, but I did not want to say anything about Raquel, as I was uncertain now of anything I had seen, or felt.

  That afternoon, after lunch, Raquel preempted my unasked questions with a set of her own, more easily formulated ones. She was curious about my parents. I told her how Pritt had evolved from Pryputniewicz (Prih-poot-na-wits), how my father had changed his name when he went away to become an actor in New York City, and then kept the new one after his parents died, when he returned home with his disgruntled, pregnant bride to carry on the family business. He said the new name was easier for customers to remember. Pritt Printing was one room, right upstairs from the insurance agency, where he and my mother made all the business cards, wedding invitations, announcements of birth and death, letterheads, etc., for the whole town. They had contracts with the school and municipal offices, and now that all the technology was advancing so swiftly, they’d bought a computer and a fax machine and with these devices they serviced all the printing needs anybody could come up with.

  “Well, that just sounds wonderful,” Raquel said to me, and, to look at her, you’d never believe otherwise. Her eyes were shining, her hands folded in her lap like a small girl at charm school. “I just love hearing about families. It’s like walking around town after dark, looking in at all the lit-up dining rooms, all the people settling down for dinner, or, after dinner, to watch TV all together. Something middlebrow, like 60 Minutes. A sweet melancholy comes over me.”

  She got up from the armchair in the living room, where we had eaten tuna fish sandwiches, and bent to pick up our crumb-strewn plates off the floor. Cherry fidgeted on the couch next to me and I could hear a little sigh of what I thought might be impatience. It must irk her that Raquel did not express interest in her family.

  “Doesn’t everybody love that? What I hate is when I’m out walking around at night looking at lit-up windows and that sweet melancholy doesn’t settle in. It’s just a walk.”

  She was gone in the kitchen for a minute, during which Cherry gave me a little look that meant “Can we leave now?” When Raquel came back she caught the tail end of the look and it made her laugh.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Raquel sat down on the couch next to Cherry and reached across her lap to take her hand. She applied pressure. Then she gave Cherry a look—raised eyebrows, a tipped smile—which seemed to say How’s that, for wordlessness?

  “Hey, are we gonna go to the parade?” Cherry broke Raquel’s small spell with a query that smacked slightly of desperation. She whipped her head around toward me and I shrugged. I’d already forgotten, to tell the truth, about the parade, the fireworks. I would have gi
ven anything, I thought, to be sitting where Cherry was now, my hand in the palm of Raquel’s hand.

  “Don’t you want to go and see the fireworks? They’ll be starting as soon as it gets a little bit dark.”

  “That’s called ‘dusk,’ ” Raquel interjected, with a small, inward-turning smile.

  “We could bring a blanket,” Cherry rambled on, “and just sit on the green. It’d be so much fun! I bet some of the other kids would like to meet you and Theo, Raquel. They’ve been asking me about you. I never know what to say.” Cherry’s hand still lay in Raquel’s. I watched Raquel stroke its palm gently with one finger. Did Cherry shiver? She giggled nervously. “Well, if you don’t want to go I think I’ll head home now and see if my parents are going. You know”—she turned to face Raquel again, and delicately withdrew her hand at the same time—“that’s what we all do, every year. We always do that, don’t we, Ginger?”

  It was true that that was what we always did, but I would rather do what we didn’t always do. I would rather stay here and just listen to the fireworks, listen to the distant sound of hands clapping after each modest crack and flash, the humble show our town could afford.

  Cherry stood to go and gave me another wordless look. This one said: Do you really want me to leave you here? In reply I stretched out on the couch, taking up the space she had recently occupied. I rested my bare feet tentatively on the coffee table, and was not rebuked.

  NOW I WAS FINALLY alone with Raquel, and though I had been afraid that she might be disappointed in my companionship, that I might be the one she could have spared, if this was the case she was a good actress, and within minutes had woven a kind of web around the two of us, a cocoon of questions and answers and frilled, generous, engrossing chatter. She wanted to know how I liked my job at the Top Hat, and my coworkers; she wanted to know about all the teachers at the high school—which ones were beloved and which were batty, which gave out A’s to the athletes by default. I told her all about our reading of Frankenstein, and the day we had been required to act out scenes from the life of the Monster and his maker.