The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  AT HOME THAT NIGHT I went up to my room and sat down to begin my homework and to wait for my mother to call us to the table, my father from his chair in front of the television, where he watched the nightly news and dozed. I never found that I had much to say to my father, but I knew the things he would like for me to say. He seemed perfect to me, or at least complete, unassailable. I knew he loved me. I could feel it emanating at short range from his armchair, from his place at the dinner table or the kitchen counter, and even sometimes from his cluttered work space at the print shop, where he laid out a flyer for a sale at the shoe store.

  I heard my mother’s call from downstairs. We had lamb chops that night, and so I know we also had small green peas and mashed potatoes and mint jelly. Frozen peas, reconstituted potatoes from a box, jelly from a vacuum-sealed jar; these are the ends by which we come by our means. What more can we ask? My mother hated to cook—“didn’t care about food”; “would just as soon have gone without”—though she never said this out loud, only muttered it under her breath as she stripped the yellow fat from raw chicken breasts, or sliced a bitter cucumber expertly against her pink thumb into the salad bowl. I am grateful that she saw the necessity of feeding her growing daughter as long as she did.

  AFTER DINNER I had difficulty concentrating on my homework. There was a French exam to study for, a short essay to finish for my English class, and a final project for History, but none of it coalesced in my mind in the way that it must if I were to attend to it. I thought about calling Cherry, which I did most nights, and sometimes simply to distract myself from more tedious tasks, but I had a strange feeling, an unusually wordless, spatial feeling, that what I really wanted to do was to stay even more alone than usual, not to extend myself at all. Not to write a word or to say a word, not to move even, not to disturb the silence of my little room, with the desk lamp throwing a small bright circle on notebooks and assignment sheets, and all else dim in the dusky blue shadow finding its way through my curtained windows. Spring was dying a winsome death outside. Crickets rubbed their legs together in the yard, and someone’s dog barked down the road. It all felt static, and I felt suspended within that stasis, but then strangely at the same time I was restless. It seemed as though I ought to go outside and disrupt the stillness, change something. Should I run into the yard and holler, and wriggle my arms and legs “like spaghetti,” as we had been instructed in gym class, as an antidote to sedentary habits? Or should I ride my bike down to the video store and rent a movie, something my mother would like, a big bowl of popcorn between us on the couch? This was one of the ways that I endured her. But it was too late already for that. Even in the time that I had taken to think this, darkness had fallen completely and I found that I had locked my door, and was lying on my back on my bed, and had pushed down my pants and spread my legs and with my middle finger was gently seeking something I had previously only read about.

  2.

  It is an early morning, a few days later. I am alone, walking through Wick, starting from one end and heading to the other. It is so early that birds have only just begun to sing, and the day’s weather has not yet taken hold. We start out always with this same pale mist, the same cool yet humid air. It could be mid-October, it could be early July. But it is May.

  I am on my way from the Endicotts’ house, Cherry’s house, to my own, where I will slide as quietly as possible in through the kitchen door and then down the hall past Jack’s room, silent, into mine, where there is a book I need for school, for my English class. We have been reading Frankenstein, and today is the day we will be quizzed on our comprehension of Chapter Twelve, in which the monster relates his covert observations of an “amiable,” if poverty-stricken, family of cottagers. My thoughts now became more active, and I longed to discover the motives and feelings of these lovely creatures; I was inquisitive to know why Felix appeared so miserable and Agatha so sad. I thought (foolish wretch!) that it might be in my power to restore happiness to these deserving people. My classmates are wretches, who have neither the time nor the place for books. A test is administered to them toward the end of the dumb agony of their high school careers, which determines that they are qualified for going into sales, or the service industries, civil or private sector. Or certainly the military will have them.

  My friend Cherry and I are different. We are not exactly studious, but we have the raw materials for brilliance and we know it. We see it mostly in the course of our endless conversations, in which we dissect our days, which augur an indescribable richness of days to come; a richesse, as Cherry’s mom would say. Her name before she married was Bouchette. She has helped us immensely with our French.

  It’s also in the way we reflect each other’s perfection. We can sit together in front of a mirror, or a television set, or a window, for hours on end, and everything that passes between us seems to be recorded—giggles, silences, commentary—in the annals of righteousness.

  Raquel will later tell me that this is called “an inflated sense of self.” She says that it is “better to be mediocre, because then you won’t run into trouble.”

  But we have so much fun. We mock everybody in school, especially other girls, and we complain about our teachers. We do our homework together, sometimes: the exercises at the end of the chapter, book reports, even take-home tests, which, of course, you’re supposed to do alone. When Cherry insists, we put on eye makeup together, and then take it off and put on another color.

  Cherry is two years older. I skipped second grade, and she stayed back one year, the year she had mono. Still, she often says that I am the more mature of the two of us. She means intellectually, for clearly in the physical realm she is ahead by leaps and bounds (“as she should be,” my mother says, in a rare effort at shoring up my self-esteem). She’s had a couple of boyfriends, the last of which broke up with her because she wouldn’t do more than kiss, and then instantly started going out with this other girl Barbara, who is called Barbie by everyone. We make bitter fun of Barbara for this. Cherry stopped eating for three weeks when this happened, which made her a very delicate creature indeed, on top of her usual condition, which is diabetes, and for which she must inject herself, and take unusually good care of herself, and monitor her blood sugar by pricking her finger three times a day. For weeks she had to be physically restrained—and she counted on me to restrain her—from placing herself in the traitor’s path like a forlorn doe in the sightline of a hunter whose gun is pointed at bigger game, or like one of those political activists you read about who tie themselves to a beloved tree and wait for the chain saws. Now she seems to have transcended her anguish, although she walks the other way when she sees them, and there is this older guy, my brother’s age, Randy Thibodeau (Tib-a-doe), who works at the auto-body shop and who has stopped her on the street several times just to talk to her about the weather or something. And he showed up one time at a school dance, with one of his younger brothers, and lurked around in the bleachers, while a lot of the boys gathered around him, listening to stories about the girls who dance at the Lamplighter. Jack used to hang around with Randy in the woods behind the high school sometimes, listening to music and laughing about escape. He always planned to escape.

  THERE IS NOT MUCH TRADE, and no industry at all, in my small town in the middle of Massachusetts. A few working farms are hanging on in the hilly, rocky, but rich country around us, mostly dairy farms. Otherwise we just service the town. Electricians, plumbers, roofers, morticians, teachers, nurses, shopkeepers. We have no hospital but there’s a clinic where you can get your blood pressure checked or a prescription for antibiotics.

  Wick is a drive-through town. From a car, it is picturesque. It is the kind of town that makes you gawk a little. Who in the world lives here. Heading south on Route 7, a sharp bend in the old two-lane blacktop gives you the feeling that you might tilt, as the road slopes downhill at the same time. There, on your right, you’ll see the Wick Social Club. This is a place for men—an unwritten law, but the men of the town
do gather there, including the selectmen of the Town Hall and a lot of the business owners, and then some of the men who are just fathers and mechanics or work in the post office. My own father was, still is, one of the few who does not spend a fair bit of his free time, after work, before supper, after supper, Saturday afternoon, even Sunday, at the Club. It used to be closed on Sundays, in deference to some stern, long-standing bylaws, but that policy long ago shifted to one of compromise: on Sundays the Social Club serves as a sort of informal Town Hall, a place where men can meet and do their business, or discuss important matters, such as zoning laws or budgeting for the new fiscal year, with a beer in one hand and a pen in the other. My father liked to keep to himself, as he put it, meaning he did not meddle in town politics, nor did he rely on drunken pledges to keep his business afloat on the waters of Wick’s small economy. Instead, he and my mother chose to provide an indispensable service.

  Now you’re on the outskirts and you pass an old barn on the left that advertises a Polish bakery in three-dimensional lettering on its side. The sign gets repainted every few years. We have a lot of Polish families in our town, and Ukrainians. They came in the middle of the century, fleeing persecution of some sort, settled right down with their families and began doing business. My father’s parents were some of these. The dry cleaner is Perchik’s, the Shell station is owned by Mr. Kosowski, and the Qwik-Go franchise was purchased by the enterprising Lasky family. We’ve got the bakery, and a small deli where you can get kielbasa and knishes, not to mention pickles and pig’s knuckles in brine. All my life I would go in after school with Cherry to ogle these in giggling disgust.

  The Polish influx was our last. Before them had come French Canadians, in the twenties and thirties, who labored in the creation of the Ramapack Reservoir, never dreaming that they were sealing the coffin of their new hometown. They built their houses along Route 7, Pelletiers and Robichauds, Greniers and Roucoulets. Now their houses are old, too. The pastel paint job is more than a little dingy, the porch pushes away from the house, the window cracks and goes unrepaired, the screen in the door is ripped, dysfunctional. On the far end of town, out by the school, is an Orthodox Catholic church, attended by both the Poles and the French-Canadian families. Next door to that is the “new” graveyard, the Catholic graveyard, too well-tended for my taste.

  Our town, seen from way up above, might look like a diagram: a vertical line running north and south along Route 7, and then a line perpendicular to that. This is the Old Road, which divides and surrounds the village green with its white houses, and then runs quickly into the hilly country to the east. Here are our few farms, a few very old farmhouses, with ceilings so low you practically can’t stand up straight, and a lot of good places to walk and go unseen. At the top of the green, where the roads converge, are the Town Hall and the Wick Calvinistic Congregational Church, with its mossy old graveyard. These whitewashed edifices sit and face us as if in the hope of setting a good example, an elderly couple keeping their hands from idleness with hobbies and charity work.

  There used to be more to diagram. The Old Road runs down to the west, down into what once was a valley, home to three prosperous communities, and is now nothing but a watery grave. On county maps the Old Road is traced faintly, fainter even underwater as it runs beneath the Ramapack Reservoir.

  MY TOWN IS SMALL, dreary; yet somehow elegant, concise. We have everything a town needs, and a few things a town doesn’t, like Janine’s Frosty (schoolchildren, screaming with laughter: “Janine’s Frosty what?”) and the Qwik-Go, open twenty-four hours, right there on the side of the road as you leave town, heading east toward the city. On your way out we have the Lamplighter, a windowless concrete cube crowned by a satellite dish, where girls we never see in daylight park their cars, take off their clothes, and dance on the pool table for dollar bills. We are in between the city and the rest of the country. We are more than ninety minutes away from a large university, far enough to be unthinkable for commuting. Or no one does it, anyway, because with the kind of winters we have here, as harsh as any the settlers might have dreaded, a commuter would be greatly disadvantaged. And therefore the property values have never gone up. You can still buy a house for a song.

  ON MY WALK through town I am not thinking about any of this. I am concentrating solely on my immediate and most familiar surroundings. The air, the ground, the trees, houses and storefronts that have been the same and will be the same for the duration. I pass Gumulka’s Market, the Congregational church, the Agnes Grey Library, Claire’s Fashion Shoppe, Breslak’s Shoe Store, the Movie Magic video store, Cluett’s Appliance (“Sales–Service–Parts”), and the Acme Pizza Parlor, upon which daily descends a horde of schoolchildren. Across the street is the Top Hat, where I don’t have to work today, and above my head is my parents’ shop, with the painted window that says PRITT’S PRINTING.

  ALTHOUGH I HAVE NEVER yet left my town to go anyplace else, I am working on developing a sense of distance from it, the distance that is necessary in order to make this keen emotion out of nothing other than available beauty and will. So that I could walk down the street in the early morning toward my home and focus my attention briefly but conspicuously on a blue house with a leftover plastic pumpkin on the front porch, or on a view between houses into someone’s backyard where a kiddie pool is decomposing, cartoons of kiddie pools decorating its circumference, and instantly be satisfied, as a great well is uncovered in my heart, and when I drink from the well the liquid is sweet but briny, like tears in the back of your throat or like the sea, which I have never tasted, and the feeling lasts just as long as I want it to. Sometimes it is the whole walk, and sometimes it is only until I feel the beginning of a smothering, a twinge of suffocation. This is unpleasant, and I grow uneasy, but just as quickly I can drop the whole endeavor. I walk on, or I get where I’m going, and the day proceeds like a diamond, bright and efficient.

  In this case I reach my house and enter through the kitchen door quietly, then slip into my room and grab my book. I have already groomed myself (face, neck, ears, teeth, hair) in the Endicotts’ dim bathroom, whose eggshell-blue walls promote a calm demeanor in the mirror. It is time to be on my way. I hear my parents stirring in their bedroom, opening drawers and murmuring. Nobody comes to look for me, to question me. They already grow accustomed to my absence from their home.

  3.

  Late May

  Cherry’s mom gives us sandwiches and milk at the big kitchen table. She asks me about summer plans and I tell her the usual: longer hours at the café. “When are you going to start helping your folks out at the print shop?” she asks, turning around from where she stands, scrubbing potatoes at the sink, and Cherry says that she thinks I should find a boyfriend soon, and maybe he could help my parents out at the print shop. “Like going into the family business, y’know?” Neither mentions Jack. Increasingly, Cherry’s thoughts turn to boys, and boyfriends. She even goes so far as to talk about husbands, and babies.

  I cannot think like this. I use my allotted visions of the future to puzzle out smaller states of being. More internal movements . . . shifts in understanding. Will I always be this person that I am? Will my powers expand, or contract? Are the fleeting, unbidden visions that I have of myself in the future—striding on a street somewhere, tall buildings shadowing me; crouching, blind, in a damp basement, imprisoned; burdened with odorous goods in an outdoor market—are these premonitions, or inventions? What is the difference?

  CHERRY AND I GO outside after lunch and meander around the green. Kids from school are parked on the grass near the general store, smoking and waiting for nothing to happen. “Why don’t we see what they’re doing?” Cherry wonders, hesitantly. I suggest that instead we go over to the mill, and begin our summer properly. And this is what we do.

  We walk past the church, heading down toward Main Street, and Cherry tells me—I can’t believe what I’m hearing—that she is thinking of quitting her job at the library and getting one at the drugstore. Maybe,
she says, she’ll go to the community college in Springfield after she graduates and learn to be a pharmacist. She’s been talking to Mandy Ensler, who works at Cobb Drug (we are passing it now, and stop briefly to look in the window at a towering display of toilet paper and foot powder) and who says that it’s a good job, and decent pay. You get a big discount on cosmetics and any other thing you might need to buy at the drugstore. Cherry says that the library is dull, and musty, and that she’s always being corrected in her shelving by one of the old ladies who have worked there for a hundred years. We follow the curve of Main Street as the business district ends and we are on our way out of the town center, toward the mill.

  This is absurd, this idea, and I tell her so. She is destined for better things than doling out tablets and capsules and directions on how to take them, with food or on an empty stomach or at bedtime. This is just the sort of employment, the sort of existence, no less, that we have always scorned. Can you imagine, we say to each other, and I say to myself, when I am alone, what that would be like, to be that person, to suffer that circumscription, to see the limits of your life in every direction at all times? At least at the library she is surrounded by books, which are limitless, if not unquantifiable, and I have heard that there is a science to shelving called “library science”; I will ask Mr. Penrose about this.