The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  Who on earth, I wondered, as I hopped on my bike, had composed that garbled message? And who would ever read it?

  I thought about going by myself, right now, out to the Ramapack cemetery, to look for the Goode family, but went instead on the now familiar path past the high school and up the Motherwells’ driveway. I walked my bike around back and went in through the kitchen door. Raquel was there, as always, doing a crossword puzzle at the table, a cup of black coffee in front of her.

  I had thought that this would be just the beginning of a long trail of exploration, of detective work, almost. We would jump in the little powder-blue car immediately and drive the thirty miles, through the forest, along the reservoir’s twisty old blacktop, to Swansbury, a little town at the top of the valley, where we would make inquiry after inquiry into the tormented history of the virtuous Goode family, the descendants of Sarah, who had departed the soiled, fouled, besmirched coastline for a new life in the verdant Shift River valley. In which of the three drowned towns had they built their homestead? And where had they gone after its submersion? Perhaps they had gone nowhere, stubborn old hardworking hands, dirt under the nails, gripping the arms of their straight-backed chairs. Might there be some record of their staunch resistance?

  But she would have none of it. I trailed her outside to the porch, where she sat down on the swing with a book whose title was obscured to me by the long fingers of her left hand. “Look, Ginger, of course I’m fascinated, and I do appreciate the legwork you’ve done so far, but the fact is . . . that’s just it. What shall I do with facts? My book will be written not out of the desire to string together a series of facts”—she hammered the word as though it itself was a curse—“but out of a need to illustrate a series of events that occur out of time, out of order, that in fact recur rather than occur. I will find an appropriately tragic means of representation for the tragic ends my family has met.”

  I was puzzled by her marked lack of interest in my findings. Weakly I again instructed her on the Historical Society, its records and registries. Wasn’t she a historian, after all, even if she had stopped short of the official designation? Wasn’t a Historical Society exactly where she belonged?

  “It’s quite enough for me to know that the lineage of my family took a concussive blow twice already. I don’t need any further evidence of the curse of ignominy that I live under. My suspicions need only be so well-founded.”

  THIS WAS NOT the first time Raquel had perversely managed to draw a kind of blind down on the bright light of activity, of pursuit, of forward motion. Concussive indeed: it was as though she had struck a blow to the head of the day, and I mutely took a seat next to her on the swing and began leafing through an old sports magazine. Very old, in fact: it was dated June 1978 and appeared to have been left by previous occupants. The silence conjoining my muteness was not really quiet, was crashingly occupied, her rejection like the noise of the sea in my ears. All the approving words I had thought she would say.

  But I resolved that I would nevertheless visit the Ramapack cemetery—alone or with accompaniment—and find what there was to find. I would carry on her studies.

  23.

  Tell me something about your friends, the Motherwells? Just who exactly are they?” My mother and I stood, facing off, nearly, in the living room. I had come in weary from my thwarted attempts, from Raquel’s enervating disinterest, and now it made me desperately uncomfortable to witness my mother’s attempt to appear just casually interested, when in fact I could see that, quite unlike Raquel, she was dying for information. “You’ve been spending an awful lot of time with them, considering they’re complete strangers.”

  “Well,” said my father, from where he sat in his chair, torso hidden behind the newspaper, the top of his balding head visible. “They’re not exactly strangers to Ginger. Ginger practically lives at their house.”

  “Pete. You know what I mean. They’re strangers to the town, to the area, to the Endicotts, and especially to us. Our daughters are acting like strangers to their own homes, to their own parents!”

  “Now, Serena, don’t get hysterical.”

  RAQUEL OFTEN REFERRED to my parents as “the paradigm.” It was true that their arrangement was typical of all the families I knew in Wick, and for all I knew, this could be extrapolated to all families everywhere. Mom had been just a mom, staying home with me and Jack, and then just with me, until after my freshman year in high school, when she felt more comfortable with my coming home to an empty house, heating up my own can of vegetable soup. She went to work with my dad. All along, she had been doing his books at the dining room table, after dinner, after I had cleared the dishes away and Dad had washed them, but now she went to the print shop with him every morning, and did the books in Jack’s room.

  My parents. I felt a peculiar, uncomfortable mixture of derision and defensiveness toward them, when they came up for examination at the Motherwells’. It was exhilarating to discuss them with such detachment, as though I was not their child but instead their biographer. But what a paltry book their lives would make!

  We lived in the same house they had rented when they returned to Wick, young newlyweds. Now they owned it. It was rectangular and pinkish-brown, with a flat roof and a front porch with white pillars. It was where I had lived all of my life.

  My father had attended the state university and caught the theater bug. He appeared in many of the school’s musical productions (Kiss Me, Kate; Oh! Calcutta!) and in a few serious roles as well. He was the lead in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; he also played, apparently to great acclaim, a fictional character in Pirandello’s great tragedy. His yearbooks are testimonials to this implausible phase. In all four he appears in full makeup and costume: down on bended knee, mid-soliloquy, or in a still, staring candidly into the jaws of the photographer.

  After graduation he moved to New York City, and then back almost immediately upon the unexpected and sequential deaths of the grandparents I never met (a heart attack, a broken heart)—but not before meeting and marrying my mother, who in three years of pavement pounding had scored just one Palmolive commercial and an inconclusive callback to a soap opera. She was not ready to give up yet, but she was pregnant. Jack, her own heartbreak.

  I believe that Raquel was nostalgic for my childhood. When she was not speaking and I, therefore, was not listening to her, but instead occupied myself in some other realm—a book off Theo’s shelf, or a game of solitaire—she was recording me. I say recording rather than observing because there was no quality of interaction on her part: her eyes were wide and seemed to simply register the sights they saw, more like a hidden camera than like someone behind a one-way mirror, privy to the doings of a test group. I believe she was storing the sight away for future use. She certainly saw my “growing up,” as she put it, as just so much fodder. “Tell me again about your days, Ginger. How did they go?” And I would again recount the ways in which I had gone about my days ever since I was a small child: how mother would wake us up with hot cereal and milk at an early hour; how I would dress and run to meet Cherry at the point of intersection of our two lines; how we would dawdle on the way to school and sometimes be late; how the day went on and then we were free; how then the day became a paradise of freedom in which we simply played. I told her about the mill. How it had been the site, the locale, of all our greatest exploits. Our spells, our plots to burn it down to the ground, our plans to one day scale its heights and set up camp in the round white cupola, to live with the black birds who roosted there. I told her how violated we felt, our preteen privacy, the day Jack followed us and watched for hours as we went through our blithe routines, uttering our secret words and embodying our unscathed imaginings. I could not find words to express how much it hurt that he would do this.

  And then inevitably back home again, though we would have stayed outside interminably, except that it was getting dark, or getting too cold, in winter, for even our innocent imperviousness to weather. (All children in this way are
like the famous Wild Child; we have no innate need of shelter. We would be just as happy to stay outside, to stay in the bitter ocean, to sleep on grass or sand, as we are to return at close of day to the nest that has been prepared for us. Although Raquel would not have it this way. She would rather imagine a traditional homecoming. We are tired and hungry, our lips beginning to blue, a natural exhaustion reaching its apotheosis coincidentally with the dinner bell and the evening news, the lighting of the lamps and the running of baths, the scrubbing of our grubby ears and fingers.)

  I must admit I have always liked to do my chores. Raquel laughed out loud when I first used this word, in excusing myself from her company. “‘Chores’?!” she said. “‘Chores’? Why, how delightful . . . how charming. Can I come to your house and do some ‘chores’? I’m sure it would do wonders for my constitution, not to mention my disposition.”

  But the last thing I ever wanted was to bring the Motherwells home to my house, to ruin my newfound, twofold mystery. My mysterious parents need never meet, as far as I was concerned, my mysterious friends.

  I REGALED THE MOTHERWELLS with stories that in turn my mother had regaled me with—but only if I begged, or if I couldn’t sleep at the prescribed bedtime. “Regale”: there is no other way to describe the thrill of newfound loquaciousness I experienced in my days—afternoons, evenings, nights—at their house, when we would sit around the fire with glasses of ruby-red wine and simply speak. I had never known anyone else to do this. Certainly not my parents, who were far too busy to take more than thirty minutes for dinner—including clean-up—and who, if they did not retire immediately to bed, might sit quietly, eyelids drooping, through some half-hour sitcom, waiting for the nine o’clock news. “Good night, Ginger. Did you finish your homework?” Yes, Mom, yes, Dad. Good night.

  The Endicotts were too efficient to allow any gratuitous talk. “School okay? Warm enough? Full?” All their questions could be answered with just one assentive noise.

  The Motherwells lived to talk. I never saw them do anything else, in fact. To me this world of constant conversation was a world of wonder, of delight. Not only did they reveal themselves to me with unprecedented honesty, but they asked me questions about myself, about my life in Wick, about growing up in this inexplicable town, and as we talked more and more intimately, albeit, at times, abstractly, I began to feel at home in their company as I had never felt at home anywhere before. Perhaps I shared some of the qualities that made the Motherwells themselves so inherently, unquestionably different. I was different: from the kids at school, from my parents, from the little town of Wick. Different even from Cherry. Hadn’t I, after all, been chosen to be their friend, their companion, their entertainment? They seemed to prefer me as I preferred them: infinitely. They socialized with no one else in town. They did not go bowling, they did not go out for breakfast or lunch. They certainly did not attend either of the churches.

  In fact, they never went anywhere. Not to the Top Hat, since that first day—since they’d found me; not to the grocery store, nor the post office, nor the gas station. I wondered if they attended to all their basic needs in the city, when they made their visits to Theo’s family.

  The Motherwells had come along like a pair of crows alighting, permanent and merciless, and as the summer days passed I felt an effortless environment growing up around us, the three of us—it was true! They grew close to me, and I to them. I had found another game to play, new friends to play it with.

  I HAD WONDERED ABOUT all these things, silently, to myself, and with Cherry. But I found myself reluctant to respond to my parents’ questions with any of my speculations. They had speculations of their own.

  “They must have some family here, don’t they?” My mother’s tone indicated just how circumspect she thought them, if they didn’t. I thought of the Goode family, but kept silent. “No one moves here just for no reason. It’s not the kind of place that attracts that sort of people.” I knew what “sort of people” she referred to: wealthy émigrés from the city.

  “And where do they work? They must have some kind of jobs somewhere. How else do they pay their bills? Unless they’re rich. But if they were rich, they’d have bought a nicer house. I don’t quite understand. I never see them anywhere. I’d certainly have noticed two young, unfamiliar faces.” My continued silence on the subject was, I’m certain, maddening.

  I did not, for example, regale them with the story of how Raquel had sighed empathetically over my bruised side, when I revealed it to her, and planted a kiss on the fading purple pool on my thigh like a mother kissing a toddler’s boo-boo. I laughed, at first, but when her lips stayed pressed to my skin for a few extra seconds I looked down and saw how there seemed to be no line between her flesh and mine, her lips the color of my bruise, their warmth equal to the heat of my tender flesh. It looked like she was eating my leg, and I closed my eyes and waited to feel the sharpness of her teeth.

  24.

  In the morning it was reassuring to eat my mother’s frozen waffles at the little kitchen table, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook splayed open by my plate. I always wished I had some kind of device to keep the pages from flipping while I attended to my meal; now a saltshaker acted precariously as paperweight while I used both hands to cut up my waffle. The chef herself sat by my side, backlit by the bright sun streaming through the window with its yellow curtains tied in bows. I squinted at her. When had she stopped cutting up my waffles for me? She sipped her coffee and reached out to brush my hair from my forehead. “You really didn’t get a lot of sun this summer, did you. So pale! It seems sad, to me, a teenage girl without a tan, but it’s probably just as well. Look at my wrinkles! When I was a girl the idea was to get as brown as you could, as fast as you could. We used baby oil! We just roasted ourselves. I hope you haven’t been working too hard at the café—what time do you have to be there?”

  When I told her that I had the day off, her eyes widened, then narrowed, then widened again, in internal calculation. “Well, that’s great!” she concluded, rapidly. “Your father and I do, too! Why don’t we spend it all together. We’ll go to Janine’s Frosty for a cone. I can’t believe the summer’s over and we haven’t even gone for a cone. What is this world coming to?”

  My mother’s insouciance could not hide, from me, her sharp anxiety. What was she afraid of? That I would say no? That I did not want to be seen in public with them? That because I had found new friends, people she did not know, I had changed into another person, a new daughter, a pale, languid, unrecognizable creature with unknowable, inconceivable thoughts and ideas?

  Really, the truth was that she had never known what I was thinking, and had never asked.

  Now, though I had relished the freshness of my own bed, my clean sheets, and had found it sweet to sit reading as she moved about the kitchen, and be fed, and petted, I did not feel any particular remorse in turning her down. I had plans. It was the perfect day to go to the Ramapack cemetery. There I would find whatever trace of the Goode family remained, and this would be the starting point for Raquel’s research. She would have names, dates, actual stones with deeply etched identities.

  So I was surprised, and made sad, and afraid, by the vehemence of my mother’s reaction to my refusal. It was like someone pulling an old leather glove out of a drawer to slap you with it. The gestures were awkward, the tool stiff with disuse. It was embarrassing.

  “Do you know, Ginger, that you are not the only person in the world? Have you given one thought, all summer, to your father and me? Your poor dad is practically speechless with worry. He hasn’t wanted to say anything. But the last thing he needs is another disappearing child.” These last words hit me like the intended slap. My mother had clearly been thinking. She sped on in her attack.

  “The Endicotts are absolutely beside themselves. Last week your father went down to the Social Club with Jim and they were talking about these new people, and it turns out that Cherry was over at their house one night, without you, and she told her
parents that she was here, and of course your father said that we hadn’t seen her once all summer, since we haven’t! And now Cherry won’t tell them anything about it, has refused to talk about it, and spends all her time with Randy Thibodeau. I’m sure he’s turned out to be a perfectly nice young man, despite everything . . . but he’s certainly too old for Cherry. I mean he’s got his own apartment, his truck, his job! And she’s just a young girl.

  “And we still don’t know anything about these people! How can you expect us to let you practically move in with them, when we’ve never even met them! Some of the men down at the Club were joking that she’s a witch, that she’s put a spell on you two. Not funny! You’re only fifteen years old. Just because you skipped a year in school doesn’t mean that you’re not fifteen. Maybe I shouldn’t have let you skip that year . . . I think it really has made you a bit too independent. But I thought it might help you get through a rough patch. . . .” She alluded to the time after Jack’s death, when we had all wanted to die.

  Now that she had begun to shift the blame to herself I thought that I might insert a well-placed tidbit of information. Casually, though careful not to appear glib in the face of her arousal, I told her about Raquel’s book, and that I had been helping Raquel to do research, and about the fellowship from the university, and last, about the family connection that had brought the Motherwells to Wick in the first place.

  I watched the information do its work, like a tranquilizer dart in the haunch of a feral dog. I saw her relax, one part of her body at a time, and then saw the original, sharp interest in the Motherwells rekindle in her eyes, which, despite the wrinkles she had spoken of, were still clear and blue and at times painfully young. “Well, that is remarkable,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s taken an interest in town history since old Daniel Skagett passed. We printed all those little pamphlets for him, you know, on the lost towns, the ones you can get at Lawson’s.” I knew the ones she meant. They had titles like “Ghosts of the Valley” and “The Lore of Ramapack,” and mostly retold old legends about eccentric townsfolk, such as the gentleman who wanted to lie in state in a glass coffin so that everyone could watch him decompose. I had never been able to get through any of them. The writing was terrible.