The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  Or at least this is what Raquel explained to me, one day when we wandered out to the green. “These houses,” she said. “I could stare at them forever and not get enough. They satisfy every fantasy I’ve ever had. If I lived in one of these houses, the dream of my life would end and I would finally be living the real life. Because I could rest assured that I need never move again. These houses are not only built to last, but they were built to suit and meet the needs of their inhabitants. They held families together. No one could have ever guessed that they would be passed outside the family—much less sold to a stranger.”

  But Raquel expressed disapproval at the presence of the old mill in Wick, about which Theo was quite curious. He wanted to see inside, he said, someday. It simply didn’t fit into her notion of what our small town should be. It was, indeed, the only remaining shred of evidence that at one time Wick had held a promise of industry and economy. It was the ghost of our utility; at one time, there was a reason to move here, and many people did. There would have been nothing odd about such a decision, back then.

  21.

  I told Theo and Raquel to come have breakfast that Saturday, down at the Top Hat. I thought it would be fun for all of us, to see one another back there, where we first met, but now with all that we shared between us. Like clandestine lovers greeting each other in an Elizabethan drawing room, I would serve them with teasing formality, dipping the coffeepot down over their half-empty cups like a mother bird, slinging food on their table like a discus thrower.

  I hadn’t given a thought, though, to our potential observers: Who would be there to see us? I had grown so used to the mobile bubble that seemed to hold us, to enclose us, and to shield us, that somehow I had envisioned the Top Hat, and us in it together, as though it were a movie set, cleared for a nude scene at the modest actress’s demand.

  Therefore I grew nervous as I waited for them that morning, and waited, eyes fidgeting on the door and on the street outside the window, anticipating and reanticipating their arrival. Raquel would appear first, in the corner of the window, her long bare arm swinging into view; then Theo stretching along the sidewalk in her shadow. I acquired an acute awareness of those customers who would witness their entry, to whom I had previously given no thought at all. There would certainly be other customers at the café, and they would indeed take notice of the Motherwells—after all it was a small town, and people talked. Or some people did. And I began to feel a shadowy kind of doubled consciousness growing in me, a second-guessing of my own motive. Was it possible that I had invited them here exactly in order to have a witness or two, or three? Witness to what, exactly. I might have to name it.

  Even under normal circumstances I would have been unusually attuned to the presence of Todd Armstrong, who sat at the counter eating a grilled corn muffin, poring over an abandoned copy of Newsweek. He was a boy in my class who, like me, didn’t speak much. He was tall, like me, but unlike me quite athletic. He played basketball, silently, his tunic showing off the large, fine muscles of his back and shoulders moving like levers and pulleys, chutes and pistons. Many of the boys in our class still looked generally as they had since they were small. Todd was growing manly, but doing so in a sweet way that made the result look worth the effort. His upper lip was shaded by fuzz; his pants were always a little short for him; he moved through space with a deliberation that made me think that he had suffered some dizzying growth spurts and wasn’t quite sure yet where his body ended and space began. Most important, to my mind, he liked to read, and I had seen him at the library, at one of the big tables in the center of the room, making a careful selection from a large pile of thick books. I think he preferred useful texts—I looked up from Gore Vidal’s witty memoir Palimpsest one deep winter afternoon and caught a glimpse of a tome in his large hands whose spine trumpeted Complete Organic Gardening. I thought it winsome that he could have been dreaming of planting on such a short, bitter day.

  Now he was eating. I stood there with Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None—I always stowed a mystery at the café, should it prove a slow shift—and refilled his water glass every few minutes, just to watch him empty it, his rocky Adam’s apple chugging like another piston in his throat, as thick around as my thigh.

  He swallowed the last of the corn muffin and stood up to fish some money out of his jeans pocket. He was looking down and I almost didn’t hear him. “Whatcha been doing lately, Ginger? I haven’t seen you at the library in a while.” The thought that he might have been looking for me in that one-room sanctuary—looking for me anywhere; that he might have actually come to the Top Hat not just for our superlative corn muffin—dawned on me electrically. He looked at me and projected something that made me look away. It was a hope, and it caused his brown eyes to look wet, and open. He shifted his gaze away, too, to the clock above my head. “What time do you get off? I could walk you home.” My shift was over soon, but I couldn’t leave—Raquel and Theo might be on their way right now. I mentioned that someone was coming to see me, and saw his hopes dashed. Was it the skin around his eyes that made these various expressions, or the shape of the eyeballs themselves, or the muscles supporting them? What creates these perceptible differences in the look in someone’s eyes?

  Todd turned to the street, as though to see who might have staked this claim on me, and nodded at a shape I hadn’t noticed, leaning against the glass at the far end of the window. Half a jean-jacketed form, a scraggly ponytail, a hand pressed on the steamed-up glass, a lean hip. It was Randy. A concatenation, a roaring in my ears and a piling up of variables, too much I hadn’t been able to calculate in my ambitious little plan for the morning. It was clear I was not in control of anything, and that I ought never to make a plan again. I would remain unplanned, as my conception had been, according to some hints my mother had let drop from time to time. My consciousness underwent that painful doubling, or was it splitting—a cellular type of division or like the slides of mitosis we had observed in biology class as I absorbed the situation in which I did not know something about myself, something that someone else did know. It was obvious he was waiting for me, Randy, and I suffered a quick revulsion—how could I have been so weak as to risk this kind of exposure? Did he know something already, or had he come to find out? I was ashamed to think that I might have dimly, self-unknowingly, like a single-celled organism, sought shelter from my friends in the gaze of this public setting. There was Randy, who owed me everything, love and death, now and forever, yet I could also plainly see, and understand, that he wanted something from me, and at the same time wanted to offer something to me. I could see it, and Todd could see it, though what he thought he saw was my fulfilled hope: my date. What he really saw in the window was a young man who wanted some answers.

  THAT DAY I WALKED toward home with Todd Armstrong. He ushered me out of the café, and we nodded at Randy as we passed. Randy raised his eyebrows, combined amusement and annoyance, and tried to hold my gaze and impart something to me, but I shuffled closer to Todd and implied by this small gesture that we could not be disturbed. And so we weren’t, and walked as far as the library together, where I told him I’d need to stop, by myself, to do some extra-credit work for school. I obviously didn’t have any schoolwork with me, and I’m sure he found me very mysterious, and was perhaps relieved even to be rid of me, as I had been scared stiff to be walking side by side with this living, breathing human being who “liked me.”

  For he had decided that I was the one he “liked”—he’d told me so; announced it with the categorical definition of a schoolboy’s crush. Cherry would have been atwitter with excitement if she could have shared this knowledge with me, but alone with myself I felt instead a terrible fear, stronger, more paralyzing than any I had ever felt.

  Categorically, this fear felt very different from the kinds of fear with which I was familiar. I knew the fear of death, realized; I knew the fear of inexplicable adults and their hot, degenerative plans; I knew the fear that comes laced with ameliorative promise
of adventure. And I knew the fear of a life that might come to nothing.

  But the fear of Todd was overwhelming, immediate, crashing, for he had come unexpectedly, with a full complement of independent thought and motive, to give himself to me. It was as though I had opened my clenched fist and observed his open, wet eyes in the palm of my hand making a painful demand on me with their offering, their communication, their bald invitation to the human stuff inside, particolored if you looked carefully enough, deeply enough. I was not prepared for this communication—not up to the responsibility, the weight of it a smothering. I once responded to my English teacher’s assignment that we write about “the most beautiful thing we’d ever seen”—she tried hard, Mrs. Kislak—with a short disquisition on Cherry’s own brown eyes, her whole sublime personage represented axially in its variousness by wheeling spokes of gold and ochre and chestnut—but had thought better of it, crumpled up my paper and written instead on infinitely less tease-worthy subject matter: my mother’s prize rosebushes, flanking our little-used front door.

  I thought of the power of witchcraft. At least one citizen in my small town might have believed a spell had been successfully cast on me, in that pale green house on the hill. When we are truly under a spell we are freed from a certain natural instinct for self-preservation, and we might prick ourselves with pins over and over and over, at another’s behest. We have been steeled to this, by the force of another’s will and wit and craft. How else could I have withstood all that I did? How else could I have cast myself out, set myself afloat, allowed the deep waters of these days to rise? There could be no possible explanation but witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment. This is the simplest.

  22.

  Now it was really just the three of us, and though they had rejected, dismissed, or simply overlooked my recent attempt at an organizing gesture, I thought that I still might be of some use to Theo, in his role as Raquel’s guide, or guard, or guardian. I thought I might do something to help break Raquel’s torpor, regain whatever footing it was she’d lost in the world. The way was clear. Her book! I would help her to find her footing in her book. As a native of Wick, I was an ideal guide to its repositories and relics. For instance, I knew that the Agnes Grey Library would offer only the most rudimentary public documents. I had spent several weeks one hot summer absorbed in the Wick town records of births and deaths gathered there in many old leather-bound volumes, and knew that while it would be the place to determine that none of her family had settled in Wick itself, it would not tell her much beyond that.

  What I had access to that Raquel, as a newcomer to the town and a virtual recluse at that, did not, was its living, breathing historians.

  WHEN I ASKED HIM for advice, Mr. Penrose recommended that I go see Hep Warren, the old man who ran the Historical Society in the little parish house next to the church.

  I went by the next day, a Friday, in the morning, but the door was locked. A wooden plaque hung on a nail driven into the door, with its white paint layered thickly and full of crackles: “Be Back Soon.”

  I decided to wait, and walked across the green to Lawson’s General Store to buy some gum. Becky Lawson was at the cash register, stamping price tags on boxes of crackers with a big price gun that went shock-uh as she pulled the trigger. I talked with her for a minute. She had been in my French class and we laughed facilely over the presumed senility of Mrs. Clinger, our teacher, who when she did not refer to us simply as her little cabbages called us by the names of our parents, as though she presided over a stalled classroom, an underwater classroom of permanence.

  I looked out through the screen door into the haze of the summer morning, the bright grass of the green made somehow denser, more dimensional through the tiny crosshatching. I asked Becky what she knew about that whole flooding thing, over my shoulder, and she looked up and thought carefully before she said, “I dunno, whattayou know? I never thought much about it.” And then we were quiet, as quiet as the giant wall of stillness that had spilled into those towns—the Lost Towns, as some of the more rancorous, or more regretful in the town called them—as quiet as the old blacktopped roads you could still walk on, but not to get anywhere. As quiet as the water’s edge.

  “But you know there’s really nothing down there, right?” She spoke suddenly, liquidly. “A lot of times people say that there’s houses and churches and stuff left down there, that you can see tops of buildings and steeples through the water when it gets low enough, if there’s a drought or something, and even old roads from up in a plane, but it’s not true, that’s just a story people use to try to spook you. Really, they burned everything, they knocked everything down. Or sometimes people moved their houses. My grampa and gramma moved our house up from the valley on a flatbed truck. They have pictures of it over at the Historical Society.”

  I told her that that was my next destination.

  “Why are you so interested all of a sudden?” she asked, leaning forward over the counter to peer out the screen door in the direction I was looking. “Is that what those people are doing here? Those people you and Cherry have been hanging out with?”

  That’s for me to know and you to find out, I thought to myself, digging up a childhood chestnut of secretiveness as I pushed out the screen door, hot cinnamon gum in hand, but all I said was something about extra-credit projects for senior history next year. Now she’d probably go tell her friends that Ginger Pritt really was a Goody Two-shoes, doing schoolwork in the middle of summer. Todd Armstrong would agree.

  I CROSSED THE GREEN again and there was a favorable sign, a car parked at the Historical Society. The door was open and I blinked in the dimness of the old structure with its low ceilings, little light coming through small windows. Flies buzzed against the thick bottle-glass panes with their wavy perspectives on an age I was only partially glad to have missed.

  The front room, what would have been a sitting room, served as a museum for old dresses, old plates, old chairs, old etchings. The dresses were shockingly small—child-sized. I stood next to a wedding gown on a dressmaker’s dummy and my shoulders were nearly twice as broad. It must be true, what they say, I thought, about modern nutrition.

  “Hello, there!” Mr. Warren stepped out of a small back room, through the doorway of which I could see dusty shrouded shapes and a desk with a round circle of light over it. I’d known Mr. Warren all my life, but seen him mostly down at the town offices, where he served as Notary Public, Town Clerk, and a few other things.

  “Can I help you, Ginger?” he said, and came out into the front room, holding his glasses in one hand. I could tell that he was surprised and pleased to see me there, the way adults always are when children “take an interest” in their interests, in genealogy, in knitting, in procreation.

  I told him what I was looking for, and his eyebrows flew up. “Well, Ginger, I wish I could help you, indeed I do. Fact is, it’s awful difficult for us to track the comings and goings of folks from the lost towns back in those early days. You know the big fire in 1851 gutted the Shadleigh Town Hall and many of the records were destroyed—births, deaths, marriages, deeds, etc.—in the flames. It’s a real shame. Kind of wiped out a whole lot of history. However, if you’re really in the spirit of it, the Shift River Valley Historical Society up in Swansbury has whatever papers were salvaged—some of them you can still read—plus all the records after that, and it has all sorts of old photographs that people took when they were trying to document their properties before they were demolished, when the water came. The industry, the houses, the farms, the daily lives of the people of the area. Pretty much anybody you’d be looking for would be likely to show up somewhere, if you’ve got the time.”

  I thanked him and turned to go, eager to find Raquel, to tell her what I’d learned. I stopped by the door to look at the photograph Becky had mentioned; it showed a small, square house, with a pitched roof, featureless aside from its blank square windows and door, being hauled on an old flatbed truck down a dirt track though the middle of what loo
ked like a desert, or a representation of some uninhabitable planet’s arid surface, but was actually the once-thriving center of the razed village of Shadleigh.

  The gentle hills of Wick rose at the perimeter of the image.

  Mr. Warren saw me still standing there. “Oh,” he said, picking up the thread again—and I was filled with dread that he, like so many old people do, would carry the conversation on and on, long past when I wanted to end it—“and of course there’s the big Ramapack cemetery, where they moved all the graves they dug up before they flooded the valley. If you’re looking for any folks in particular, you’re sure to find them there. Problem is, those Canucks just laid the stones in all willy-nilly, just however they came off the truck, with no thought for which town or which family plot they belonged in. That’s a real shame, too. Kind of like a second death for those people, like dying all over again.” His mouth closed with some finality and his bright blue eyes clicked onto a more cordial vision. “How’s your pa? Your ma?” He paused a beat over the absent Pritt, the one whose presence I seemed to feel more and more every day, an intermittent shadow at the periphery of my movement, my gaze. A spot of white, a spot of dark. I blinked to confirm its presence and he seized upon this as acquiescence. “I hear they’re doing real well with the printing business? I might need to order more of these flyers soon, if we get a few visitors this summer.” He held up a brochure with a line drawing of the old church on it and the hours of the Historical Society printed along with some lines of text: “Wick is no relic of bygone days. Here we preserve and cherish our modern promise and offer to the world the fruits of our everlasting labors.”