The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  I thought I had better take advantage of my mother’s momentary softening and so I capitulated, right there on the spot. I agreed that it would be fun to spend the day with her and my father, in whatever activities would strike the right note of reunion, of trinity. Just then my father came down the hall and into the kitchen, hair rumpled, plaid bathrobe tied over blue pajamas. He seemed pleased to see me there. Wordlessly he fumbled for coffee and then joined us at the table, where the three of us proceeded to plan our simple day.

  I DID NOT ALWAYS possess such a taste for unease, such a homing instinct for the path of danger. Now, in these swift-moving days, I felt myself like an initiate craving the hazing ritual, but I remember as if it were yesterday a signal moment in which I rejected fear, literally ejected it from my body—projected it, even, across the room. I must have been six or seven, a recent initiate to that other bounded world, the book, and I sat in an armchair in the corner of the living room with one of these on my lap while my mother put finishing touches on dinner and Jack set the table in the kitchen. I could hear and see them bustling around while I sat. This particular volume had caught my notice because it was, unlike the paperbacks that dominated the bookcase, tall and old and bound in a dark, scaly kind of fabric like a red snake’s skin. The book promised, in its title, not just mystery but also madness. The title alone was terrifying to me, and I had sat for more than an hour, reading silently in a state of cold anticipation, thumbing through story after story, and when, as dinner approached readiness, smells of butter and blood and vegetable matter rich in the air, I reached a page with a color plate showing, in faded yet somehow still lurid tones, a scene of such incipient horror—come to life in my hands—I screamed from deep within my brain cavity. And the book jumped, away, away, flew ten feet across the floor, where it landed open, spine up, depraved pages crushed and broken. I continued screaming, weakly, almost blind with the indelible sight, and while my mother began to scold me for the ruination of her heirloom, Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Madness, she soon stopped, and scooped me out of the chair, and scolded Jack instead for laughing at me as she sat down and held me. I could not speak.

  I TRAILED AFTER my parents into the house as dusk was settling over the yard, the street, the town. We were all exhausted from the effort of catching up with each other: just as my parents had not seen me in weeks and weeks, I, too, had not seen them, and so there was a lot of town gossip to be filled in on, a lot of news from the privileged quarters of the print shop about who was getting married, who had had a baby, who was going out of business. Ice cream had been consumed, a long drive in the country taken, and several effective reassurances had been silently offered that indeed, I was still their daughter. Now they knew all about Mr. Penrose’s offer—they told me I should ask him for a raise, if he valued me so much as an employee—and about my visit to see Hep Warren, and all that he had told me about the fire at the Town Hall and the loss of the town records.

  “Yes,” my father mused, from the front seat, as we drove down through the hills east of Wick, “I remember hearing about that. Amazing how a disaster can just wipe out whole centuries of data. Or at least it could in the past! Now, of course, we have everything on digital files. No fire, or flood, or tornado, for that matter, can erase a digital file.”

  “Why, Pete,” countered my mother, “of course it can! A computer in a flood is a drowned computer, just like a horse in a flood is a drowned horse! You’re never going to get a file off a computer that’s been submerged in water.”

  “Well, Serena, I guess you have a point there,” said my father, and that was the end of that particular conversation. Or at least if they continued it I did not pay attention, but instead turned my gaze to the hills and patiently waited to be returned to my life.

  I excused myself right after dinner (roasted chicken, creamed spinach, white rice from a box) and went up to my room “to read,” I said. But, even though I was tempted, again, by familiar comforts—my bed called out, with its smooth bedspread and the headboard whose finials I had gripped, only months ago, in the spasm of my first climax—I felt an even stronger inclination to be among my friends, to remove myself to them.

  I waited until I heard the dishwasher begin its shushing, the television light up with indispensable news of the world, and then I slipped quietly down the hall and out the sliding kitchen door.

  THE MOTHERWELLS’ HOUSE was dark. I went in through the back and heard the familiar quiet of Raquel and Theo sleeping. It was ten o’clock. They must have had a long day, too, without me. I tiptoed up the stairs so as not to wake them, paused in the darkness of the hallway, opened the door to their room without a sound, stood for a moment to make out the shapes of their bodies under the blankets, long and slim like young, fallen trees, and curled up at their feet like a dog.

  25.

  There is nothing like firelight, flickering on a troubled face or on the glossy jacket of a book on a shelf, to bring a room into sharp focus. I know why they say “hearth” when they mean home. When you’re tending a fire and a spark jumps out after a particularly loud cracking noise and lands on your wrist you can smell, just for a second, burning flesh. Or you can think about smelling it.

  It was a pivotal moment, and I will always carry this image with me: Theo, in the living-room doorway, his arms full of broken wood, and Raquel seated in the green chair by the fire, me on the big round braided rug directly in front of the fireplace. I had been looking into the fire, reaching with a poker now and then to reposition some part of the burning arrangement.

  Sometimes I have wondered what it means to be “good” at something. I know that when I see a fire that’s going out I am always prepared to leap forward, attention focused on the offending element, and with my hand remove whatever is an obstacle in the flame’s path to more and more oxygen. The flame will happily rush in, wherever you create a space for it.

  Raquel was so close to me she could have been brushing my hair, or showing me a picture from the magazine she flipped through, but she wasn’t doing either: she just leafed slowly. I think it was The New Yorker, or maybe Harper’s. She liked to read the index.

  “These old shingles make good kindling,” Theo said to the room in general as he entered with his load. I looked up and smiled. Raquel said, “Don’t you sound just like a real country boy.” And then she blushed, with what looked like pride.

  It seemed like the perfect moment to wonder aloud, and so I did. I wondered when Raquel might be going to start working on her book, for real. Today we could make a trip together to Swansbury.

  “Isn’t it odd,” Raquel said, seemingly by way of response, “how a fire burning in a fireplace is really just that, just itself, self-contained, burning gases merrily away, but for us, sitting here, it seems to actively create an atmosphere?” (And here she held up her two first fingers and crooked them, and cocked them, indicating just how suspect she found such a phrase.) When she spoke like this it reminded me of the language of dreams—not really speech at all but communicative nevertheless, in that it is hermetic. It need never leave the confines of your own system of interpretation.

  “Well, yes,” Theo began to answer her. “I see what you mean—”

  But then she quickly said, before he could go on, “Oh do you? I’m so glad, because that’s just the sort of thing I count on you for. Even as I spoke those words they seemed to lose all currency, coming out of my mouth, but then you picked them up and coined them in your own image, and suddenly, there they are, buying power restored, good for trade and the economy in general.”

  “Fires, small flames at the ends of candles, certain pitches in music, certain times of day . . .” Theo ticked these off on the fingers of his left hand.

  “Certain slants of light,” Raquel interjected, then fell pensive, with a look on her mobile face of frustrated comprehension. This was a look she often wore when she wanted to explain something, as she so often did. A look like a combination of dawn breaking and clouds rolling in.

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nbsp; “Yes, you see,” she began again, “that’s the thing. That’s the thing about talking, about three people talking in a room with the firelight, with music, with air. It happens, doesn’t it? The two of you can’t help being there and you can’t help hearing me.” I noted that Raquel had figured Theo and me as the two of us, together, and thrilled to see us paired, thus, even if only in her perception. For though I never wished to displease her, or even to disobey her, now that she had spoken it there was the possibility of a new triangulation. “No matter what I don’t or do get out of my mouth you are all there, your own selves, experiencing the whole thing, the event, the vibe, the atmosphere. There’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

  “Except kill us.” Theo said it softly. (If Theo seems a shadowy figure it is probably due to the quality of his attention. He looks at you when you speak to him as though you are an educational program on public television that he feels obliged to watch.)

  “Yes, well,” Raquel rejoined, a few beats later, “I’m afraid that Ginger’s parents might object to that sort of final solution. Not to mention Ginger’s own right to life . . .”

  “Ginger can take care of herself. Can’t you, Ginger?” He cast me a look that seemed partially to include me in the joke and partially to instruct me to keep my mouth shut. As though I needed any instruction. “I think she takes more after me than she does you, Raquel. I don’t think Ginger can be stopped from getting what she wants, in the end, whatever it may be. If she wants to live, she will live.”

  THE THREE OF US approached the mill through the chill September twilight like thieves at the door of a bank: casually, unconcernedly, as though we had every right to be there. As though we might be customers, or the ghosts of customers, coming to buy batting to stuff a quilt, or to place an order for a length of fine cloth.

  This forced entry was Theo’s idea, an alternate plan to historical adventure. He proposed it, as we sat around the house that afternoon, and from the ease with which he did so I got the sense that he was no stranger to abrupt outbursts of criminal behavior. It might, in fact, be the first alternative when his usual recreations—reading, cooking, sleeping—had been exhausted.

  And he proved to be good at it. He plotted a simple scheme, and when night began to fall we followed him into it like seals sliding off a rock into the ocean, one after another. We walked through town together discreetly, without hurry. No one was on the streets, it being dinnertime, and I pointed out a few landmarks quietly: the lit-up window of Pritt’s Printing, where my parents still toiled; the dark library where I had spent some of my happiest hours.

  THE MILL OCCUPIES a central position in my town’s imagination, if not in its economy. A concrete bridge carries you safely over the dry bed of the Shift River. There, on your right, is a red brick rectangle of great structural integrity, long and massive from the side view, from across the riverbed, all the little windows in their rows.

  It had been a woolen mill. It was really two separate structures: a black sign with gold lettering hung on the face of the front building, above the big red double door’s archway, proclaiming “Wick Knitted Fabrics.” This would have been where prospective customers entered. The small, short, rectangular building stood directly at the roadside, providing its own advertisement. Business transactions must have occurred in the offices on the second floor of this frontal lobe, offices that were graced with larger windows facing out over the road. The long rear building stood tall, with pointed roof, in back, an uncle sternly peering over the shoulder of a foolhardy nephew. On its side were wide black iron double doors, like those of a prison, which must have been where the streams of laborers would enter in the morning, and exit in the evening, dull of brain and limb, dullness the dull fruit of their dull action. On top of all this was a kind of cupola, rising high and white above the flat roof; a small, gazebo-like structure, perhaps an observation tower, though what there may have been to observe we cannot know. Approaching consumers? Mischievous children? Malicious herds of deer? Many times Cherry and I had discussed our plans to find a way inside and up into this point of highest perspective, from which we guessed we could probably see a long way in every direction. But we never did try.

  The iron doors that had always looked so invulnerable to Cherry and me seemed to fairly welcome Theo in, after a few blows with an ax at the rusted mechanism that contained both the lock and the handle. The shouts of the ax against the hasp of the lock rang out in the dusk and I shrank against the brick wall, but I heard no answering cries or indications of notice. Without any hesitation Theo slipped inside, Raquel behind him, and I followed them, as had become my habit.

  THIS WAS NO CASTLE. It was an oblong, dark, dirty room with a high ceiling, empty but for a few long, rough tables that appeared to be bolted to the brick walls. A staircase to the second floor crept up one wall and disappeared into a small square hole. I had always assumed that the mill would still be occupied by machinery, dusty, hulking relics of early industrial labor, but of course it must have all been sold off a hundred years ago. Theo pulled the door shut behind us and moved into the room, to stand by a window on the other side. I followed him, curious to see what the laborers had seen as they sat, or stood, or bent to their tasks.

  Raquel hung back, and I felt her hesitation on the back of my head like an invasive set of eyes, a vision not my own. She spoke in a loud whisper. “What industriousness, what tireless production. What product, after all, could have been attempted here? If each innumerable window represents innumerable handy workers, then what an incalculable amount of work was going on inside these walls!

  “Okay, this place gives me the creeps,” Raquel continued, and I turned to watch her as she moved slowly backward, her hands reaching out behind her, in the general direction of the door. “I’m sorry, my darlings, but it’s too real. So much history in one place, I can feel it in the air like particles I don’t want to inhale. But you two knock yourselves out. I’ll wait for you at home.” Still facing us she bumped up, hard, against the heavy door; it budged and she backed through, pushing it firmly shut from the other side. Theo stayed silent at the window, and I stood frozen in my place between him and the door. He crossed the room, in which my eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom even as it deepened, and stopped at another window. It seemed a cue: I went and stood beside him and together we watched Raquel recede. The air between our bodies filled with a kind of vibratory compulsion: I needed to move nearer, or farther. I struggled to stay still.

  With hindsight, one sees that there were several cues, or prompts, or leads that we followed. A setup. I can still feel the heaviness that settled on me; it was odd to be on the inside, to watch her through the begrimed glass of the small window as she grew like an afternoon’s long shadow away up the riverbank, slung her leg over the guardrail, and was gone. It was even odder to be now so alone with Theo. This had never happened. Still, the unexpected feeling of bereftness, and the uncomfortable sense that in some way I must now take the place of the absent woman, was familiar, reminded me of those rare dinners at home with my father when my mother had gone out to a town meeting or to visit a friend. I was so used, by now, to being three; three provided me with the proper balance. I was neither fulcrum nor lever but ballast, the one who could be unloaded, dispensed with if lightness was called for. In this new pairing I would surely be missed. I had some responsibility.

  But still, even as the path lay cleared ahead of us, remember that I was quite young, and believe that I was unsure. I wondered, I really wondered, if I should follow Raquel, and leave Theo alone here inside the mill to explore. That would have been the natural choice—to remain by Raquel’s side. But she hadn’t seemed to want it. In fact it seemed as though she had wanted to leave Theo alone with me. Maybe she wanted us to get to know each other better, or, more likely, to have a chance to talk about her. Or maybe she had to be taken at her word: she had simply wanted to not be inside. And I did, I did want to be inside, even if what I saw there was tantamount to yet another en
d of my childhood. The empty mill, no castle; the mill itself strangely uninflected, devoid of atmosphere. For unlike Raquel, I found the mill’s air to be altogether quiet, still, free of debris, psychic or otherwise. I found that I felt quite at ease there, in the empty room, as though all the years of my imaginings had made it ready for me, made it welcome me, much in the way it welcomed Theo.

  “Come sit here,” Theo said. He’d pulled his jacket off and laid it on the table next to where we stood, in the violet light coming through the window. My eyes were unaccustomed to dwelling so long on him: usually I trained them on Raquel so as not to call attention to myself. His attention. What would I do with it if I had it? Now his form in the dimness was like a blot of light, a silvery, uninflected shape that I couldn’t wholly define. I levered myself up onto the table. We would talk now; I could tell him about the castle, and he would understand, as I had not tried to make anyone else understand, not even myself, what the still fresh, still recent loss of Cherry meant to me: two becoming one, a final collapse. And then he might tell me what Raquel meant to him, so that I could know better how to place myself in relation to the two of them. Should I come nearer? Go farther? Should I leave them more to themselves or did they resent the time I spent away from them? Should I quit my job and simply stay with them, always? We could all three leave this town together, and find a new town, and I could be known there as their daughter. For some reason I felt sure that if we spoke now, in the privacy of the castle, with Raquel absent, I would be able to talk to him as I had never talked to any man before. Certainly not to my father, with whom I spoke only in well-rehearsed lines. Not to Jack, who had departed before I could learn to speak.