“And,” Raquel continued, “this is just exactly the kind of town I’ve always wondered about. I drive through, on my way somewhere else, and I see a ‘For Rent’ sign in an apartment above a doughnut shop or a florist and I just want to stop the car and alter my path entirely, irretrievably, irreparably. The path is arbitrary anyway, why not acknowledge that truth by making truly arbitrary choices? If I lived in an apartment above a doughnut shop in a town like this, that would be the solution to the whole problem of identity, right there. In this context, who could name me? I would be void-of-course, like a moon, and like a moon I would orbit my new planet. And anyone who observed me would be changed. They would reflect a new me back at me and I would be, therefore, new.”
“Only one objection, my dear. Or rather an amendment.”
“What, my dear?” The endearments were spoken without irony, but knowingly.
“You won’t be alone.”
“You and I in an apartment in a strange, small town. Don’t you see that I will be alone just the same?”
“Better yet,” Theo said, with typically sudden and full enthusiasm. “How about a real house? I bet we could get one of those big old houses. I have always imagined that in a big old house I could spread myself thinly throughout, really inhabit it.” His certain eyes.
“Become one with it, as it were,” she said.
Theo glanced sideways at her sharply to see if she was making fun of him. It was often difficult to read her tone of voice. A single eyebrow was gently raised. When entirely in earnest, as she so often was, both eyebrows shot up.
“Why, yes. Do you have a problem with that?”
“No,” she said. “My darling.” These words like a sound check for another, more persuasive endearment.
One month later they drove back into town with their few belongings and moved into the house they’d purchased from Mr. Grose, the selectman, who also ran Grose Realty.
RAQUEL MATERIALIZED in the doorway, a lit cigarette in her hand. I had not heard her shut the door downstairs, nor come up the staircase, nor smelled the smoke. I was engrossed. I was remembering the bubble of light she had evoked so genuinely, on that rainy day when Cherry and I stayed upstairs in her room for hours. The bubble of mutuality that had held the two of them together, outside the office of the academic, in her story, in which at the moment of contact it had been difficult to hold his eyes, but not out of fear, or disability, or disbelief; rather it was an excess of illumination, as though the moment of being seen, a shared experience, or a shared feeling within that experience, caused something like pain, expressed as blindness. In Theo’s story, he had misrepresented her pain, just as she had in her story misrepresented his desire to look at her. Everyone wants to look at someone when they are speaking. How disappointing.
“I do like to have a postcoital cigarette,” Raquel remarked, deliberately casual. “Smoking is just one of the many things I can’t seem to become addicted to.” She crossed the room and sat down on the bare mattress. Theo held out his cup. I took it and passed it. She reached out and dropped her half-smoked cigarette in the cup, but left it in my hand. She slid off the bed and down to the floor, to our level. I sloshed the ashy dregs of cocoa around in the bottom, and the cigarette drowned in them.
“Since you’re telling stories, Theo, why don’t you tell Ginger all about how you ended up in prison?” She slid her eyes around to regard me. “It’s probably the most interesting thing about him, in the end—though you’ve found out by now that he can be very entertaining, given the chance. I do hope you’re all right, dear. He can be entertaining, and more than a little self-serving.” I was as humiliated by the note of motherly concern in her voice as I was at the realization of her knowledge. She knew what was happening between Theo and me: nothing. Nothing was happening that did not include her.
“Again, Raquel,” Theo said, speaking from out of his silence like a singer who has waited for just the right stillness to break, “just look. Once more you’ve provided us with what could only be described as ‘atmosphere.’” He got up and walked over to the window, waving at the air in front of him, in which shafts of low-slung sunlight coming in through the panes had materialized, lent body and volume, a medium, as it were, by the curls of smoke she had blown through her nose and mouth as she spoke.
She looked to where he pointed and snorted a little, laughing, a flush in her cheeks. Still laughing: “He tried to do his own mother in.”
I looked at Theo; he was watching Raquel with an almost imperceptible smile on his lips. He saw me watching him and his smile broadened, though he did not smile at me. Suddenly I could see just exactly what he must have been like as a small boy: confident, toothsome, amoral. I saw how his mother might have found it difficult to find fault with him for anything he did. He held a pillow over her face. He gently pressed it, or he brutally smashed it, or he caressed her silvery hair with one hand while he leaned on the pillow with the weight of his whole torso. Or he wielded a blunt instrument, her fine hair sticky with blood.
“That’s true, but it’s not what it sounds like.”
“Oh, go ahead, Theo, tell her the whole story.”
“There’s not much to tell, is there.” He turned to face me and made a little bow, then clasped his hands behind his back and thrust his chest out in a parody of recitation. “My mother was ill; her quality of life had sunk below acceptable levels. I had been asked to take care of her, and I took care of her in the way I saw fit. Which involved a bottle of painkillers, a mortar and pestle, and a cherry Coke. My father came into the kitchen just as I was preparing this merciful potion, and he reacted badly. Called the police. Pressed charges. . . . My mother was the only one who appreciated what I was trying to do. Though as it turned out she did survive the chemotherapy quite well in the end, and has since gone into full remission.”
“Sometimes she’ll contrive to see Theo when he goes into the city,” Raquel chimed in, “and she’ll slip him a few hundred dollars. Enough for groceries for a few weeks.”
THE TABLES HAD TURNED, and I was like an indulgent parent, full to the brim with unconditionality. There was nothing that either of them could say, or do, nothing that anyone could tell me, that would cause me to give up on them. No inconsistency in their stories, no reversal of fact or fiction. I had moved far beyond judgment, beyond acceptance, into love. The magic spell of love. The oldest metaphor in the book. My love was for the two of them together, as indivisible a unit as Theo had once figured me with Cherry—as we had once been—that stabbing pain again. Apart from each other they were unlovable, but fused together in love they required, demanded, and owned my love. I could not go back. However, my bladder was uncomfortably, postcoitally full. I got up off the floor and moved past Raquel, my leg brushing her shoulder, out of the room, into the hall, into the bathroom. I pissed, then went to the kitchen for a glass of water.
I could hear them continuing their conversation quietly as I slipped down the stairs. I felt as though I were a ghost, and that I moved as in a dream of moving. My feet did not touch the ground, and I had only to think of where I meant to go and I was there. In the kitchen I found lemonade in a tall pitcher waiting for me on the table, and a glass filled with melting ice. As I rose up the staircase, thirst quenched, I listened for more chatter, but heard only what sounded like weeping.
I STOOD IN THE DOORWAY. Raquel and Theo sat facing each other, cross-legged, on the floor. Theo held Raquel’s hand in his, palm up, like a fortune-teller.
They looked to be playing some kind of game—a word game, a guessing game? But I could see this was a game of a different sort. Raquel’s eyes were closed, and her face was wet. Her nostrils and mouth had a suffused, inflamed look, like those of a child who simply cannot stop crying and eventually cries herself to sleep.
But Raquel was not asleep; she spoke, as Theo turned to me slowly with his finger to his lips.
“I went all the way down to the reservoir,” she said. “It was quieter there than I could stand.
I came back to hear the sound of your voice.
“But I will never know . . .” she said, and her own voice sounded as though it was coming from somewhere in her stomach. It was lower and somehow flatter. “All I know is that it hurts me to be near you. Like I am cooking on the inside.
“Because I say the things and they just slide off. It’s like throwing snow at ice.”
Theo’s hand rested gently on her shoulder. “But you do want to be with me, don’t you? All you have to do is want. You have always wanted to be with me.” This was a prompt, as though he had coached her before in the answer. There was a note of trepidation there, too. He was afraid of what the real answer might be.
But Raquel was asleep after all, for her voice began to quaver suddenly, to slide, to half-sing syllables that I could not recognize, a kind of slippery flux of sonic essay. Then the syllables began to gather, to gel, and her mouth opened wider as she spoke louder, and more quickly, so that the words cohered out of their discrete parts. But just as I thought that I could begin to make out a series of words, a litany of declaration, a round of utterance (could it be that she said what I thought she said?), Raquel suddenly sat straight up, as though a wire at the top of her head had been pulled, and then crumpled forward into Theo’s lap, where she lay quiet. I sat frozen as Theo stroked her hair; finally he looked around at me again, a sternness on his face that I hadn’t seen before—like a parent, suddenly, protecting his only true priority—and motioned for me to go.
AT HOME I FOUND my own father stern and protective, waiting uncustomarily for me in the kitchen. It seemed Mr. Czabaj had lived up to his word and put in a call to let them know of my repeated absence from school. “What on earth, Ginger,” my father asked, “is going on? What are you thinking? You girls have gotten a little bit out of hand lately. You and Cherry both need to think about the future—it’s wonderful to have fun now, but you have to keep thinking about the future. Consider yourself on probation: I want to see you in your room every day after school doing your homework, or I’m going to say no more Mr. Nice Guy. No more fooling around. Now go on up and get started.”
UPSTAIRS I LAY on my bed and thought of how Raquel had run just out of our sight, in the woods, and then disappeared. She had told me once of her suspicion that when she walked out of the sight and hearing of others she ceased to exist. Or, conversely—alternatively, but not exclusively—that whatever was out of her range of sensation ceased to exist. She knew the name for this. They call it solipsism, or sometimes, simply, self-interest, and they try to cure it, with psychology and medicine and politics, with philosophy when all else fails. I had to wonder if my virginity yet remained. Perhaps what Theo and I had done, not once but twice, had not been done at all, since Raquel had not seen it with her own eyes.
30.
All Hallows’ Eve
Last October Cherry and I had costumed ourselves as punk rockers, in T-shirts our mothers artfully sliced holes in, T-shirts with safety pins stuck through, and jeans we found at the church thrift shop and decorated with slogans scavenged from televised and print media: “A” for Anarchy, Here Come the Warm Jets, God Save the Queen. From what did a queen need saving? I wasn’t sure, but I had found an antique telephone cord in our garage, bright yellow, the spiraling kind, and worn it around my waist as a belt.
I didn’t think I would bother with a costume this year. It had always been Cherry’s job to spur me into make-believe. Without her I hadn’t even been moved to visit the castle, not since my clash with Kip Brossard’s motorcycle.
But I was surprised at how pleased I was to receive an invitation to an exclusive gathering in honor of All Hallows’ Eve. A small card, tucked between the brake cables of my bicycle, in Raquel’s hand, announced that we would feast and make merriment. Costumes required. This gave me one day to find my perfect disguise: What was I, really? More important, who did I wish to be, for this one night? I thought of dressing as a man. It would be easy—almost too easy. I could rummage through Jack’s closet for his one tie—his clothes packed neatly away in cardboard boxes by my mother—and his navy blazer, and tuck my hair under a baseball cap, and draw a thin line with my mother’s eyebrow pencil on my upper lip to make visible my latent masculinity. I imagined myself standing in the Motherwells’ living room, a pillar among the swarm of other guests, a wineglass in my hand, wielding my temporary authority, my blithe unconcern, like a rapier. Raquel’s laughing, convoluted appreciation. Theo’s quick, mercenary appraisal. And who else would see me, in my harmless inversion? Who would the other guests be? Was this a gesture of goodwill toward the town, a long-overdue housewarming? Maybe Cherry would be there, with Randy, dressed as witch and ghost, or spider and fly, or bride and groom. The possibility of her presence provided me with a perfect lie and I told my parents that I would go home with her, would sleep at her house that night.
But when the day dawned, I could not prevent my mother from helping me with my costume. It was one of her earthly duties, and she would fulfill it; she came briskly into my room, her arms laden with cloth stuffs and a handful of sparkling items. “Honey,” she exclaimed, when I showed her my sparse get-up, the slacks and button-down shirt I had culled from my own wardrobe, the jacket and tie and hat. I wasn’t sure what to do for shoes. . . . “Don’t you remember? Last year you said you wanted to be Ginger, from Gilligan’s Island! Your namesake. It’s such a great idea.” It had been Cherry’s idea; she wanted to be Mary Ann. “I’ve been scouting all year for a dress, and gloves, and costume jewelry. Look!” She dropped her armload on my bed and began sorting through the booty. A long, skinny, silvery dress with no sleeves, elbow-length white gloves, a pair of glittering, pointy pumps in white satin. Dangly earrings with crystals, a set of shiny, jingling bracelets. “I’ll fluff up your hair, and I can draw a beauty mark on, and you’ll look just beautiful.” She had done all the work for me, and I had to hand it to her: she knew my size.
WRAPPED IN MY MOTHER’S plush evening cape, I sat in the passenger seat of the family car and surveyed the unnatural setting. But for the cars in the driveway, just their own two cars, one would have assumed that the house remained uninhabited. Bushes and beds in the yard had blossomed and dropped their blossoms and grown wildly unattended all summer, and now had returned to a state of untrained dormancy; the porch held the same dilapidated outdoor furniture. There was no sign of a homeowner’s care, much less pride. “Well,” my mother said, in the driver’s seat, “I guess you’re the first one here.” I guessed so, too. “Are you sure they’re home, sweetie? I don’t see any lights.” I could make out the faint glow of a candle in the front room, through the yellowed shade, but otherwise, she was right. The house was dark. It was Halloween, after all. . . . “Would you like me to come in with you? I don’t want to cramp your style . . .” My mother offered this brightly, so as to skate over the obvious: she wanted to come in with me. We had passed loads of pleasure-seekers on our way to the Motherwells’: toddling gangs of bumblebees and flowerpots, held tightly by the hand; bands of grade-school kids roving in prefab drugstore superhero and -heroine regalia; disdainful teenagers in a bare minimum of costume, hot for candy, pretending not to care whether they were tricked or treated. And all along I saw her carefully controlling her envy, her desire. She had been an actress, after all, and Halloween is what actors do every day. She missed it, and had poured the last ounces of her longing into the success of my costume this year, my starlet year, with my eyelashes laid on thick as caterpillars, my mouth a sticky, glossy mess, a beauty spot calibrated high on my left cheek, among freckles muted with powder.
But it was out of the question, and I heaved myself up from the low bucket seat in my handicapping dress and tottered toward the house on my high heels with the uncomfortable sensation of her bereft eyes glued to the back of my head. It’s the kind of thing you have to shake off as soon as you can.
AND I DID, as I walked through the door, blinking in the gloom. Two figures were seated primly, almost punitively, side by side on
the couch in the living room, a fat round candle on the coffee table before them, and no other light. I saw that it was my friends, but their costumes were so complete as to cast this certainty into doubt. They appeared to have slipped out of their own skins and into those of another young couple—one with an even closer relationship than theirs, it seemed, from the way they sat: erect; shoulders, hips, and thighs slammed together like the embattlement of a castle.
Raquel’s thick hair was parted exactly in the center and combed tightly into a bun at the back of her neck. Her face was pale and plain, while her dark dress was wildly elaborate, with lace at the bodice, puffed and tapered sleeves, and many tiers sewn into its silk-beribboned skirt. The effect of these flourishes was merely to underscore the overwhelming mournfulness of the felted woolen gown. Theo’s suit bore a corresponding set of grace notes signifying both wealth and grief: the tip of a black silk handkerchief peeked out of the breast pocket of his fine coat; his hat was round and plain like a Quaker’s.
We all three gazed at one another for quite a while before Raquel spoke. “We don’t often have the opportunity to reveal ourselves so clearly, do we,” she said, and I blushed under my powder to feel the skeleton of my inner self, bones glowing unquenchably beneath the thin, silvery sheath. It made my skin hurt; I wished I could remove not just the thick makeup my mother had laid on, not just the dress into which she had zipped me, but also the casing of my flesh, to flay myself so that I could be free of the finality of the impression that I made. Short of that, I wished that I could wipe the mark I made off of the world, like a smudge off a snow globe.
The Beginners Page 19
