The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  In the worst way, I wanted to welcome him, and not be afraid, as I would naturally be of any other ghost.

  I unlocked my body and forced myself to turn, a low moan escaping me at the effort, but there was no one on the beach with me. Or no one I could see. My eyes had adjusted fully and now I scanned the ground for tall grasses, small piles of dead leaves, the remains of a little campfire nearby. If I looked at it all very carefully maybe I could keep it from morphing into dead bodies, into rotting corpses, into grotesque leavings, phenomena I am always prepared to encounter at water’s edge, where such things wash up, where decay is a given.

  Theo gave a yelp and a laugh. I turned back to the water just as Raquel’s head popped up next to his and she laughed, too, slapping at him with her open palms. “You bastard!”

  “What, you don’t like water? I thought witches loved water!” He made a great arc with his arm across the surface, sending a wave into her face, propelling himself backward. She spluttered.

  “No, idiot, witches hate water! Remember: ‘I’m melting, I’m melting!’” Raquel did a convincing impersonation of the famous green prototype from one of my mother’s favorite old movies. “I’m getting away from you,” she teased. “You’re obviously out of your mind. . . .” Raquel launched herself languidly and began swimming farther out, with smooth backstrokes. Theo swam after her, and soon they were both out beyond where I could see.

  I STOOD AND COUNTED STARS. I imagined Jack, breathing and solicitous, watching from the trees. Something human did not frighten me. In fact I thought that if I turned once more, and saw my brother there in the darkness, in whatever form he would take, that I would speak to him calmly, and tell him that I wanted him to take me home.

  That I could, if I wanted to, go home—and there crumple like a child on the floor of my room—occurred to me as authoritatively as a lucid moment in a dream. I could go home. I could wake up. Right now.

  THEO SWAM toward the shore, toward me, alone.

  He emerged from the water glittering, shivering, and made toward the small pile of his clothes. He wiped his T-shirt over his face and pulled it on, then his sweater. Then he approached me, where I kept my watch on the shore, inviolate in the darkness, and held out his jeans: “Dry me off,” he said. Like a servant, I took the jeans, and though they were rough and stiff, I began to rub them across his buttocks and thighs, not hard enough to abrade but with enough force to bring some warmth to his skin. I rubbed his inner thighs. I knelt at his feet and rubbed his calves. I saw that he was rubbing himself, his cock, with his sweater. I was down at his feet; it rose above my head. He stopped his motions and took my face in his hands, brought it close to his crotch, then maneuvered himself into my mouth, his hand guiding himself like a microphone, or a metal detector. I tasted the cold water on his skin. For only a moment did I forget the darkness all around us, and what might come out of it—only long enough to remember to keep my lips soft, and cover my teeth with them as best I could, and allow my own slobber to lubricate his passage. He did the rest, using my mouth as a sort of socket, a vault, a hearth. It was a poor collaboration. It was repetitive and convulsive. He was fucking my face. It went on for a while, until eventually I began to feel as though I might cry. Something might come out of my face. The imminence of that release made it impossible for me to accept anything more. I pulled away, kneeling back on my haunches, closing my mouth, wiping it dry and trying to freeze my face, my organs, my ducts, so that the prodigious tears could not emerge. I froze in a crouch with my eyes open wide like a gryphon suspended forever in the lonely air high on the side of a cathedral, high up for my God.

  And then my ghost came running out of the trees.

  “WHAT THE FUCK?” he yelled, prosaically, a kind of battle cry, as he reached us. I could feel the cold coming off him, off his toughened skin. It felt like he had a thicker skin, like some kind of reptile. He was cold, and thick-skinned—shorter and boxier than in life. He wrenched my shoulders and tossed me onto my back in the sand. Now he turned and wrestled Theo to the ground; several blows were delivered.

  And then a second figure came flying out behind him from the trees, a large round head, a motorcycle helmet. I rolled and tucked myself into a ball, covering my face, a beetle with a hard shell.

  I HEARD THE SOUND of weeping before I knew that Cherry was beside me. Or the familiar sound of her weeping alerted me to her presence. I will always remember the strange cacophony on the quiet shore that night: the connection of flesh and fist was awkward, a thick, nonproductive thump, without any of the elegance or inevitability one is trained to expect by years of televised brutality; her weeping was pitiful, despairing, agonized. She cried for me. As though she represented me.

  THEY FOUGHT FOR SOME MINUTES, and Cherry took my hand in hers as we watched. Her weeping quieted and I heard the sharp intake of her breath when a particularly nasty blow landed. It was only when Theo managed to evade the grasp of his attacker for long enough to snatch his jeans and shoes off the beach, and to barrel into the bushes, and crash down the path to the car—I heard a door slam and the engine start up, then the sound of his tires on the sandy road—that I thought again of Raquel, who had, I believe, been left behind. The form lay on his side in the sand, rubbing his neck. I saw his pointed face in the moonlight. A human form in the sand, materialized. The simplest explanation for everything. It was Randy. “Dude was going to strangle me,” he said, in my direction.

  I told him.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “You mean she’s still out there somewhere? Ah, fuck. Maybe she . . . she could have swum back to shore and just not come back here. Maybe she got confused and couldn’t find her way. We should call for her... ?” I reminded him of her name. He roamed the little beach, projecting the dead name in all directions.

  There was no reply.

  “Shit,” he said breathlessly. “She can’t just have disappeared. Listen, are you okay? That asshole—I’m sorry. I should have busted in sooner but I . . .” I imagined Randy crouched in the woods, so corporeal, waiting for a perfect juncture of incriminating activity but reluctant to break up the moonlit tableau, so poignant. Perhaps he had learned something.

  I thanked him.

  “Listen,” he said, letting his head drop down between his shoulders so that his gaze was on the sand beneath our feet. He passed his hand across his brow, his eyes, as though to wipe them clean of unsavory visions, then breathed in deeply, abruptly, almost a snort, a return to action. “Here’s what we have to do. We’ve got to go get the cops. I can tell them the whole story. What he . . .”

  “What he did to you!” Cherry finished his sentence, to save me any further embarrassment, but in her doing so I was further embarrassed—powerless. In this version the passive and active roles had been reversed: Theo had, in a sense, given me a blow job. I saw myself darkly on my knees in the sand, hooded and shackled.

  “You girls go wait by the road. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I nodded. Randy took off his leather jacket and threw it around my shoulders. It was unexpectedly heavy, a borrowed skin. He turned and started up the path, and did not look back at us. Cherry moved to follow him, to lead me by the hand, and I saw her, pivoting half away as I used to see her in the dark corridors of the castle, where we wound our way from one small silent room to another, Cherry the elder in the cool dark, a torch flickering in the hand that did not hold mine. But now I did not immediately follow. My hand dropped from hers, and without that warmth and the light of her human face, I was alone in the dark, by the edge of the reservoir. Alone without a ghost.

  And in a strange combination, an irreducible mixture of ultimate vulnerability and ultimate power, I felt the jacket like a layer of chain mail against the plain, unnameable horror at my back. The night, the thick woods, the impossibly deep, shrouded water, the drowned girls and their long lives. The impending fear. Fear itself.

  Epilogue

  Jack would have found a way out, if he had lived, I’m sure of it.

  And
in being alive I had always assumed that I, too, would leave Wick, but I had never gone so far as to imagine how, or when. College, the most obvious means of transport, still seemed far off to me at sixteen, though my mother never failed to put in a good word for her alma mater when the subject came up. The truth was I knew of very few who had ventured beyond a semester or two at the community college, almost an hour away, and I found it hard to grasp what it would mean to truly go off to college. Would I live in a dormitory, like the ones I had read about, with dozens of girls I had never met before? I imagined something more like young Jane Eyre’s stay at the school for poor girls than a modern institution, built with money from the state. We would sleep in narrow beds in rows. The innumerability of it brought to mind Raquel’s projections of the workers at the mill: they could not be counted.

  So perhaps what I experienced was relief, when I realized that I would stay in Wick. The finality of it dawned on me the day I rode my bicycle out to the Ramapack cemetery, on Route 7, an unseasonably mild March day, and strolled around looking for the Goode family gravestones. My nose ran, and I wiped it on the sleeve of my jacket. The symptoms had so far been few and easy to conceal: an aversion to certain foods, attributable to my recent ordeal; a bit of fatigue, also easy to lump in with “what I had gone through”; the aforementioned runny nose. My breasts had grown large, and hard as rocks, hot and tender to the touch, but the first symptom would appear to the casual observer to be appropriate to my developing form, and the second was known only to me.

  It did not take me long to find them, a whole family plot’s worth, crudely but feelingly carved stones featuring willow trees and urns, and hands clasped in prayer, strewn carelessly in among like stones as though in a bid for anonymity. Emily and her brother Jacob were born, and died, within twelve months of each other. They did not have any use for a life apart. Emily died at the hands of the unforgiving town. Jacob died at sea.

  I felt the baby move inside me, as I sat in the graveyard with my back against a tree, a bare tree whose base was dotted with crocuses. It felt like a minnow in a bowl. In an earlier time, of course, such a pregnancy would have been all the force that was needed to eject a young girl out of her community and into an even more striking anonymity, that of a city amongst whose inhabitants she might sink out of sight with her shame.

  But I was not ashamed. More curious: more alive. This was something I had not foreseen. As I sat under the tree I imagined that the baby would be born in the heat of the summer, into the bosom of my family. He or she would grow up alongside Cherry’s daughter, who had arrived prematurely, in February. Cherry had told me that Randy’s bad dreams woke her in the middle of the night more often, more reliably, than the baby’s weak cries.

  I am not ashamed, then, and now. I am only terrified for a minute or two—one moment, in all—to imagine Raquel coming upon me in the graveyard, weaving, flickering, blinking for a moment behind the tree I lean on, emerging from behind it and behind me wearing one of several possible costumes: dripping wet and dark against the broad daylight, and stinking of abandonment, and vengeful.

  NOW I am a young girl, now a teenager, someday I will be full-grown. I’m sure I must have been a baby once; I feel the warm weight of myself even as I move off, relieved of any burden, even of my solitude. My mother knew where to go. She took me away from Wick, more than a three-hour drive, and in a small city, on a white table, with solicitous practitioners around, I felt a prick, and then a tug. Not pain, but an ungainly vector against which I must brace myself, an eternity shoving away from my body. She held me and murmured to me, as the doctor patted my bent leg and redraped my gown. From here, my mother said, unexpectedly, she would help me go anywhere I wanted—I need not return to Wick; she had been researching and learned of several residential schools where I might earn my diploma, and then, she continued, move on to a fine college, then later on to some dreamy city, far or near, in which I would stride down long blocks with my long legs. Her arms as she held me and related such visions were warm.

  SUPERNATURAL is when you wake up in the middle of the night, as I occasionally do, and did just last night, with your hands crossed peacefully at the wrist over your chest, like a corpse lying in a coffin in a grave. Unconsciously prefiguring. You have to put these things right out of your mind in order to go back to sleep. Or what would you do, for that matter, if you finally really saw something in the dark at the back of your closet, when you opened the door quickly, as if to surprise it out of being there? I don’t know how many times a day I’ve taken a moment to predict what profane materialization might await me around that corner, or in my room when I get home. It’s this old trick of outwitting one’s own creation: if I imagine it fully first, then it can’t be so. I’ll take the life right out of it. Every night, in my childhood, before I went to sleep, I’d gaze at the shadow on the wall next to my bed and turn it into the silhouette of a witch, a crone on a broomstick, warts and all. That accomplished, I could rest assured that the shadow would not do anything like this of its own accord, while I slept on in the dark.

  But here, in Wick, is the future, in which I am not to be left alone—I am to be accompanied, and supported, even cradled by my friends and my relations. Now, and now, and now again. There is no end to this story, in my version or any other. An X marks the spot where I rest, remain, and you can’t tell from where you sit, or stand, if I am an X on a diagram—a place, a situation, a process—or a timeline. If this is a map, or a history, or a beginning.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Excerpts from The Beginners appeared in Open City and trnsfr; many thanks to Joanna Yas, Tom Beller, and Alban Fischer. And thanks to Joydeep Roy-Battacharya, Janet Steen, and most of all Ira Sher, for astute readings and friendship and love. And a million thanks to Bill Clegg for years and years.