The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  THE MILL IS INACTIVE. Its many small windows have been dark for three-quarters of a century. Cherry and I have had the luxury, all our lives, of whiling away hour upon hour just watching the play of the day’s changing light, filtered through surrounding foliage, upon the old blasted red brick, and playing our own game as we watch.

  Now it comes into view, and I have the same syrupy feeling of warm anticipation tingling in my arms and legs, in the pit of my stomach, as I often do when I sit down on the shagcarpeted lid of the employee-bathroom toilet to look at a magazine. The promise of our game is that rich. We don’t speak as we climb over the reflective guardrail, warm to the touch in the spring sunlight, and down the slope of the dry riverbank to our usual spot. Clean, sedimentary smells rise up from the riverbed.

  But this day turned out to contain an ending, rather than the beginning I had anticipated.

  The mill cast its two o’clock shadow, and we lay just out of its reach. Cherry had an idea: “Let’s talk about boys,” she said, “instead of playing castle.” The cool rooms of the castle filled with dust at her careless words; its two-foot-thick stone walls trembled. I lay looking up at the imperturbable blue of the sky.

  “All right,” she said, rising on one elbow, “if you won’t talk about boys, let’s talk about Randy Thibodeau. He’s really more like a man. Did you notice that he kept looking at me when Terry was sitting right there? Now Terry hates me, and I haven’t done anything.”

  So this is how it’s going to be, I thought. There is a way to grow up, I’m sure of it, that does not require of us this abject absorption . . . in what? In the hypothetical thought processes of a boy—or man—we know only by family name, by house, by car? In charting his actions and pondering his motives and interpreting his every glance? But I did the best I could, under the circumstances. I met Cherry halfway, offering up the young couple I had seen at the Top Hat. I told Cherry she would undoubtedly find the man handsome, the woman pretty. Immediately I was pressed to make a full description: hair, height, coloring, build. My best proved good enough. By the time I had finished elaborating on Theo’s sandy hair, his long arms, his dirty feet in their leather sandals, Raquel’s statuesque figure and strangely inert, catlike, dolorous expression, Cherry was suitably thrilled at the prospect of the visit that we—really I—had been invited to make.

  WHEN CHERRY AND I were small we used to brew potions from cigarette butts we picked up in the playing field, under the bleachers where the high school kids dropped them. Butts and pine needles and hydrogen peroxide, with a toadstool thrown in if we came across one in our travels. We would never have called ourselves witches but it was certainly witches’ spells we hoped to cast: we lifted them from an old book with a green marbleized cover I had found at the library, entitled simply Spells. I have never been able to find it again. They probably took it out of circulation. It was very professional, though. The ingredients it called for were an intriguing mixture of commonplaces—things we might have on hand, like water from a hundred-year-old well, or a twig with a fork at the end, even leaves from a hemlock tree—and things that we could only just bring ourselves to timidly covet: mandrake root; the fatty layer of a stillborn babe; a frog with two heads. Often we made substitutions of other noxious substances. The spell we wished most would work was entitled “To Make Oneself Invisible, and Walk Amongst the People.” Our dealings with the book tapered off substantially after my mother noticed that I was growing what she called “superstitious.” My brother Jack had leaked to her a secret I stupidly shared with him: I had been followed home from the mill, where we were practicing our spells, by something shy yet persistent—a lonely ghost, I thought, that transformed itself into a particularly large green leaf, its pale, veiny underside pressed against my bedroom window, when I turned to confront it. I would have offered it some solace, if I could.

  But the mill was the closest we had ever come to true magic. That we had never seen its real interior was certainly part of the spell it cast over us, or we over it.

  For to us it had been a castle, and we two queens abandoned long ago by our royal families when the kingdom was captured by neighboring armies and all the people fled. Only Cherry and I remained, in the vast, dark, desolate castle, but within its walls, its dank, serpentine hallways, its tiny rooms into which light filtered only through meager, slitted windows punched in the thick stone, we thrived like glowing white mushrooms. We prospered, even, foraging crows’ eggs from the nests in the turret, relishing the crunchiness of mice roasted in the huge, man-sized fireplace that heated whole rooms in the bitter winter.

  But it was always summer in the castle, and we could be comfortable draped only in a few scarves, spending the days just brushing each others’ hair into glorious coronets, or whispering reassurances that, although surely the royal family would never return, eventually we would find our way out into the surrounding countryside and locate other survivors of the scourge. Maybe some of the more lowly townsfolk, those whose company we tended to favor anyway, such as Tim-Tom the Tailor, or Merrykin the Midwife, or Jangler the Jewelry Maker. For though we had been born with royal blood, we did not relish the high station, the isolation thrust upon us by our noble birthright. . . . I startled. Cherry had flipped over and sat up with an abrupt, almost violent force. I sat erect, too, and the spell was broken. Her knees up, elbows propped, clasping her face between her palms, she cast her eyes down at the grass and spoke with a deliberation that made time stop.

  “Ginger, I said I don’t want to play castle anymore. It just seems kind of stupid to me now.” This was painful for both of us. She was not accustomed to having to point anything out to me. “I mean, I feel like we’re too old for it. I think some of the kids from school heard us the other day, and I just felt like such a baby. I was really embarrassed! I can see how maybe since you’re only fifteen . . .” Cherry’s lovely, open face had a dull cast to it, a mirror over which a veil had been thrown.

  This should not have come as a surprise to me, and if it did it was by means of my own absorptions, which kept me from allowing certain perfectly obvious phenomena to affect me, or afflict me—to penetrate. Though we’d been playing our game since we were little, and it had never seemed stupid to me, not once, Cherry was increasingly engaged in games I did find stupid. Makeup kits with ugly colors, and bra catalogs, and cheaply printed teen magazines promoting false idols. “Stupid” was for this world, not any other we might create.

  Playing castle, however, was just one of many means I had for removing myself from the tedium of our earthly kingdom as it had been constructed for us by our parents, our schooling, and the routes we must take between the two. If Cherry didn’t want to play anymore, that was all right by me, really, and I told her so. I was ready for something new as well.

  The relief on her face was more painful to me than her admission had been, as I could see from its depth that the game had been over for her for quite a while. “It’s time to go home anyway,” she said, and I could not argue with her.

  SLEEP SETTLED ON ME thickly that night, and I woke from what felt like only its middle to see dawn creeping up on my coverlet. I had been dreaming a crowded dream full of unfamiliar characters—people I hadn’t had time, or whom it hadn’t seemed necessary, to name or even make distinct from one another. It was a mob, practically, but its intent was unclear. For what purpose had they congregated? Awake I wished I could remember some of the individual members, as in my dream they had interested me finely, exquisitely, acutely.

  But it was the quite familiar, rhythmic sounds coming from my parents’ room that had awakened me, slower sounds but as shrill in their way as that of an alarm clock stuffed under a pillow: my mother’s weeping—atonal, abandoned—and my father’s rhythmic, automatic shushing. Sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh, the way I had seen new mothers soothe their infants, rocking from one foot to the other, patting, jiggling. Both my parents were asleep, but my mother was weeping and my father was sh-sh-sh-ing. I turned on my side, my back to
the bedroom door, to better vicariously receive the soothing, closed my eyes, and drifted back into the populous dark.

  4.

  As the last day of school approached, I found myself thinking often of the Motherwells, wondering what had brought them here and what it would be like when I saw them again. I wanted to see them again. Would they really want to see me? Maybe Raquel was just being polite.

  I told my parents about the new people I had met. I could see from my mother’s suddenly straight spine that she was terribly interested as well. Her clean, freckled face sharpened to a point, and she wondered aloud if she should ask them over for iced tea, with some crackers and cheese, or if that might seem nosy. Perhaps they had come here to get away from it all and she shouldn’t disturb them until they’d had a chance to settle in . . . ? I interrupted her with the news that I’d been invited to visit their home, and was going to go soon, with Cherry, possibly after school tomorrow, the last day of school before summer vacation. It is often an unexpected force that drives our most significant decision.

  “Oh,” said my mother, and nothing else. She turned back to the newspaper she had been scanning, standing at the kitchen counter, jabbing her thumb at her tongue before turning each new page. It pained me to see that she was envious, that she felt excluded, that she resented my being singled out. That she was lonely, having made few close friends among the lifelong residents of Wick, and wanted to live through me. I hated to be party to the complications I was so eager to read of in novels.

  AND NOW it had arrived, the last day of school, always anticlimactic. I stood looking at the playing field out the back entrance, watching the graduating seniors rushing from gaggle to gaggle, getting their yearbooks signed. They would see each other later that night, and the next day, and the next. There was no promise, with the end of school, of anything particularly new, just the hazy heat that settled over Wick like a blanket and the relinquishing of one’s in-school identity (the weird skinny girl who reads all the time, the pretty girl who hangs out with the weird girl) and the stepping up of one’s workaday identity (the girl who works at the café, the girl who works at the library)—this latter identity, in most cases, having more to do with what the rest of life would look like than did our halting, remedial discussions of Macbeth, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, or the Pythagorean theorem for that matter.

  But if it did not offer climax, still there was a kind of warm-bath quality to the summer that I looked forward to very much. Cherry and I would slide in together, clutching hands, and every day after would be essentially the same: waking up without a single purpose; the lack of decision as to where to go and what to do; the inattention paid to timepieces, which would keep us out all day, away from chores, away from mothers’ instructive voices. Our only obligations were to arrive at work at the proper hour, go to sleep, wake up. We didn’t even have to eat, though Cherry must take her kit with her everywhere we went.

  BUT HERE WAS something extra, something new. In the pocket of my jeans was a crumpled paper napkin, and on it a crude, ridiculous diagram of our town, in Raquel’s hand, a big X marking the site of their house.

  I had looked for Cherry in our usual after-school meeting place, in the last row of the auditorium, but did not find her. Now I was surprised to pick her out among the rushing throng of seniors all crying and hugging and inscribing deeply felt platitudes. Oh yes, I thought. She would have been a senior this year, but for the glamorous illness that kept her in bed for months and months of what should have been her freshman year, months during which I was at her bedside every day. So, this is, in a sense, her throng. Her crowd. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that she was overdoing it a little, as I watched her throw her arms around Terry Sheeler, the very girl with whom she was nakedly competing for the attentions of Randy Thibodeau. With her head over Terry’s shoulder Cherry finally caught sight of me, and waved a little wave. I thought she looked a bit like a caged bird herself.

  WE LAUGHED AT THE MAP, derisive but excited, as we left school for what felt like good, book bags loaded with the contents of our lockers: swim goggles, tampons, sweaters, music, mirrors, books, notebooks, the hideous self-portrait in acrylics from art class. The idea that we would need directions to anything in Wick was ludicrous, but then on inspection there was something thrilling about seeing our town laid out in these proportions, these distinctions—the vision of a stranger. This was Wick as we had never before seen it, and as I have never been able not to see it since; as I have described it: lines intersecting, lines proliferating, lines decomposing underwater. The X marked a spot just over the hill from the high school, headed out of town. We walked that way, and there was the house, regular and old, dilapidated and forlorn-looking. No car in the driveway, but I thought I saw a pale oval, a face, floating in the upstairs window above the porch.

  “She just invited us over, without knowing anything about us?” Cherry asked, as we stood by the roadside looking down at the unremarkable house, and I thought that the pedestrian skepticism in her tone masked a fear, or at least a hesitation, that did not become my bosom friend. She invited me, I thought, but didn’t say, and then still more silently wondered at my silent bid for sole possession. With another glance at the window above the porch, now empty, I told her I didn’t think it looked like anybody was there, and that my bag was getting heavy, and we turned and walked away, toward home.

  HERE WAS RANDY THIBODEAU NOW, parked in his pickup truck in front of the movie theater, just slithering out of the driver’s seat onto the sidewalk, directly into our path as we walked down Main Street. Really into Cherry’s path: I might as well have not been there at all, with the negligible nod he gave me. I thought of a day long before when he had sat at my kitchen table with Jack, after school, eating frozen pizza, their long legs stretching under the table, and my brother had reached out and grabbed my earlobe as I walked by, causing me to stop short and to screech in pain and surprise. He was showing off for Randy, and my pain included that at an unexpected cruelty from one who had been known to be kind. Jack wanted, that month, that year, to be like Randy; he wanted a motorcycle like Randy’s; a jacket like Randy’s; he wished to try on Randy’s skin. But Jack was lighthearted and light-featured; courteous and freckly and kind of smart, like me. Randy is dark, with snarly brown hair and a pointed face like that on the otters you see on nature programs. His skin is smooth, nut-brown even in winter, and particularly smooth on his hardworking arms, which are often on display in a cut-off T-shirt. Randy laughed with Jack at my little-sister antics, my futile, pinwheeling attempts to free myself, but Jack only let me go after Randy punched him fast and hard on the offending bicep, diverting him and then dancing away backward like a boxer. “Your sister’s cute, leave her alone,” he said.

  “Hey, Cherry,” he said now, by way of greeting. “Where ya going?”

  “Oh, nowhere. What are you up to, Randy?” was Cherry’s coy, encouraging reply, and she turned around and walked backward to smile at him, and it was abruptly that I told Cherry I would call her later, and didn’t wait for an answer, and continued quickly on my way, alone. I had to be at work in an hour anyway.

  5.

  Most of Mr. Penrose’s porn was of the soft-core variety, and featured articles on subjects of interest, presumably, to men, but sometimes to me (“How to Reach Her G-Spot: With Your Finger!”), and a profile of the naked girl in question, whose sloping hips and globular breasts looked to have been caramelized, candied, like sugar burnt in a pan. Some of it was hard, though, and practically wordless, and looked more like paper traps in which images were kept against their will: isolated parts of the body, male and female, frozen in conditions of helpless engorgement, in situations of impersonal lubrication. Sometimes a woman’s naked breasts were spattered with what looked like a cupful of glue, and she smiled as though she’d been given a polite compliment; sometimes the dry head of a penis was introduced to the tip of a wet tongue with great formality. These images were accompanied by captions, surprisingly c
oncise, accurate representations of what they set out to describe. If you didn’t have the pictures, I thought, this language might do just as well.

  amateur babe fucks dildo

  two big-breasted chicks having hard threesome

  bound brunette roughly fucked and dominated

  teen spreading legs for super cock

  mom with massive juggs gets rammed hard

  two babes reaming their butt holes

  brother tricks sis into wild fucking

  redhead and brunette in horny lesbian foreplay

  on bed

  pretty blond teen cached in bathroom for action

  military man gets lucky with mom and daughter

  I noted as well the pedestrian quality of these narrations, their everydayness, their accessibility. For the most part, despite their astonishing variety, these were materials to be found on hand in any home, any bedroom, any imagination.

  Often I wondered, as I felt the heat rise between my legs, my own engorgement, if it would be possible to get as much titillation from actually engaging in these activities as it was from looking at still photographs of the same, with their shorthanded captions. Most things, I had already learned, tended to happen too fast, when they happened—to rise to the occasion, to return a kind word, to demonstrate a flush of affection, to seize on the material of an inspiration—and I supposed that sex acts did also. How could one get enough distance from the proceedings to find the point of origin, one’s perspective on it, the angle of observation at which the image becomes optimally arousing? I supposed you’d have to have a mirror, as the pair of lovers on whom I was now spying did, an oval mirror in an ornate gilt frame reflecting the face and neck and large, white, tremulous breasts of a very pale young woman wearing the penny loafers, kneesocks, and short skirt of a schoolgirl, bent over the back of a chair in front of the mirror, her eyes and mouth all stretched into the pointed O of orgasm, while behind her was a tall, naked man with short dark hair whose long back was arched and rocky buttocks clenched in such a way as to imply the apex of a thrust.