The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  I could feel his thrust, and simultaneously feel her O, as though they occurred in tandem somewhere down in the lower part of my stomach, instead of in a magazine in my hands. I don’t know if this is a sympathetic reaction, an involuntary somatic function, or if it is simply a case of extreme aesthetic appreciation, but I know that I reveled in that sensation every time it occurred. It said to me that I was in preparation, that I was going to be tested, that I was equipped to meet the coming challenge. I was sitting on the toilet’s lid in the bathroom at the Top Hat, after closing time. The magazine I held up to my face was called The Beginner, and featured pictorial essays, some more elaborate than others, on deflowerings, male and female. My favorite part was the Letters to the Editor, to which readers wrote in with their own narratives of “beginning,” as it was referred to, rather poetically, I thought. Each issue offered a “Very Special Beginning,” a real virgin whose introduction to sexual knowledge, or at least to penetration, was simultaneous with his or her introduction to the camera’s quick-blinking eye. The boys and girls, all just over the age of consent—their birth certificates reproduced on a facing page—were taken by practiced hands to a sweetly lit room, and laid down in silky coverlets, and propped on fluffy pillows, and gently aroused, with fingers, tongues, feathers, restraints, and other tools, to the point at which they could no longer refrain from begging to be entered, or to enter. The language they used for this begging was strikingly consistent. The transcripts printed in full.

  From deep in my heated concentration I heard the unmistakable sound of the clicking of the cylinders in the deadbolt at the café’s back door: Mr. Penrose, coming in to collect the day’s monies. I must have stayed longer in the bathroom than I realized, as he usually came by after his evening beers at the Social Club, when all the men disbanded and went home to their families or girlfriends or empty houses. I quickly flushed the closed toilet, stashed the magazine under the sink, and turned on the tap, washing my hands as loudly as I could. I opened the bathroom door just as Mr. Penrose was passing by in the narrow hallway connecting the back rooms of the café to the front. I had to shut the door again to keep from jamming it into his surprised face.

  “Ginger, you’re still here?” He opened the door and peered in. The genuine puzzlement on his face disappeared just as quickly as it had come, to be replaced by the dawning of an embarrassed certainty. He averted his eyes quickly from mine and down to the cabinet under the sink, then just as quickly back. I froze, my hands wrapped in paper towels. He said nothing more, but his strong arm, with its brown leather watchband, its blue broadcloth sleeve rolled tightly to the elbow, went up to rest his hand on the doorframe, his chest seemed to fill the doorway, and then my heart, that physical organ, began to try to escape my chest, jumping, like one of the organs I’d seen trapped on the page, in involuntary arousal.

  For what was I but a schoolgirl, and he a gentle adult of great experience? The implied relationship made my just-washed hands grow clammy. I wore cut-off corduroys, not a skirt, but this was hardly an insurmountable obstacle. And here we were, alone in a room with a mirror, albeit a small one. I might need to get the stepstool from the stockroom, but at least I would be able to watch my own face, caught not so much in ecstasy as in a frieze of determination, Mr. Penrose’s once-familiar face now rising and falling over my shoulder like a hypermasculine moon, an expression of simultaneous aggression—the force that must be necessary to mount from behind a girl one has known since her birth—and humiliation. Oh, how he must hate to be so powerless before the temptation of my young flank, my interior, my offering. . . . How he must hate himself. I thought then that the one in power in this position, the one closest to the mirror, the one who is entered, must be sure not to betray her innocence, her uncertainty, her obscure longings, or she would run the risk of sharing that humiliation, that powerlessness. She must be as impenetrable above as she is yielding below. Sex was not a shared experience, it seemed to me. Sex must always carry with it, clearly, the threat of degrading one’s power, rather than enhancing it.

  “Well,” said Mr. Penrose, removing himself from the doorway and coughing into his hand, “come on out of there and let’s sit down and have a soda. It’s been a while since we’ve even talked. We used to chat all the time, didn’t we, Ginger. Now that you work for me there’s hardly ever a moment for a little friendly conversation.” He laughed a short but hearty laugh, halfway down the hallway already.

  IT WAS TRUE. We used to talk all the time, Mr. Penrose and I, when I was a little girl. My mother would sometimes leave me perched on a stool at the counter with my strawberry shake while she went around to the shops and did errands, and I would sit and tell Mr. Penrose, as he leaned his elbows on the counter and seemed truly interested, all about what I had been reading. In return he would relate to me a story from the newspaper, or sometimes the plot of a novel he’d picked up at the drugstore.

  As we sat at a small table with our sodas we rolled setups for the morning: a paper napkin tucked around a knife, fork, and spoon. We did not talk about books. Instead, Mr. Penrose asked me what I was going to do with myself after graduation next year. His daughter Daisy, who disdained a job at the café, was in my grade at school; she, he said proudly, was planning on the military. She hadn’t settled on army, navy, air force, or marines just yet. An image of Daisy rose before my eyes, on her back, fat legs in the air, camouflage pants around her ankles like a bulky yoke, getting plowed by a slim, dark, disproportionately well-endowed man naked but for a turban. But Mr. Penrose seemed to have something he wanted to say.

  “Ginger, I’d like you to know you have a spot here at the café as long as you want one. You’re one of the best employees I’ve ever had, and it’s handy to have someone like you around, someone I can rely on to manage things for me. For such a young kid you’re sure steady.” I tried to detect in his tone any hint of double entendre, prurient interest, or even of plain salaciousness. Did he envision an ongoing narrative, rather than a simple “beginning”—me waiting for him night after night in the bathroom, naked but for a cook’s apron tied around my slim waist?

  But the truth was more startling. It seemed, from the plain question in his tired brown eyes, that he actually thought that I might be persuaded to stick around Wick and work at the Top Hat for the rest of my life.

  WHEN I GOT HOME I called Cherry and told her to meet me in the morning at the mill. No, I assured her, we would not stay there long. We had somewhere new to go.

  6.

  Saturday

  The long walk gave Cherry ample opportunity to tell me all about her afternoon with Randy. It seems that they had hung out for a while in his truck, just parked there on Main Street, and then had gone for a drive out to the reservoir where, to no one’s surprise, least of all mine, he had kissed her. Cherry’s narration was prosaic. It was up to me to imagine that it was shady under the new green leaves, that their quickened breath sounded loudly in the cab of the pickup, that they had kept the windows shut against gnats. That the radio was broken. That she was surprised when he did not press her to take her shirt off, or at least to let his hand wander beneath it, to her white, teardrop breasts, their pink, untried nipples.

  Cherry was more voluble on the subject of Randy’s recent initiation into the ranks of real manhood. He had been invited, after several visits under the supervision of his own father, Teddy Thibodeau, who ran the town dump, to become a member of the Wick Social Club, and was thereby privileged to take his after-work beers on those hallowed stools, rather than in the darkened office of the auto-body shop, or at an even less distinguished establishment. Rumor had it, Cherry said, that he and a few of his buddies had been hanging out at the Lamplighter. I wondered what they’d seen there. “Live girls”—girls from some other town? Maybe girls from another country. Cherry was relieved that Randy would have no need for the Lamplighter now. Her proprietary pleasure made me anxious; it implied a connection I could not see, an invisible tether being woven between them. Magic.


  IT SEEMED EERIE and wrong to walk by the high school just one day after its evacuation. It was a husk. But to get to where we wanted to go we must pass it. And now there were two cars in the strangers’ driveway, one dark red, shiny, recent, and one a scuffed powder blue, a little hatchback from some other era entirely. Up close, in the early-afternoon sun, the house looked positively unclean.

  It was small, and had stood empty for a long while. It had been the site of after-school mayhem in the form of silver graffiti on the eastern side—“Sox in ’86”—and then, in black, a pentacle had been described, with the word “Sabbath” inside it, a reference to an antique but deathless heavy-metal band. The siding under its coat of grime was sea-foam green, a color peculiar to objects of a certain era. Dishes, in thrift shops. The shallow front porch was a shabby white, nothing on it but an empty plant hanger and an aluminum beach chair with a shredded seat, folded up and leaning against the wall.

  Something about this house would always put me in mind of a stage set, or even a sketch for a stage set. Each room had in it only exactly what was sufficient to lend it the characteristics of whatever sort of room it was. The dining room featured a rickety, square wooden table, painted black, around which sat four mismatched straight-back chairs and upon which stood a brass candelabra, with holders for three candles, all covered in wax drippings. And that was all.

  In the living room, a fireplace, a couch, a big stuffed chair, a braided rug, and a lamp. In the kitchen, a round brown table with three chairs and a stool. Later we would discover the rooms’ more intimate contents: a Scrabble set, with letters missing; a complete service for four in the cupboard; a Chinese wok and a few pots and pans; one big knife, exclusively Theo’s, which he wiped clean immediately after use. They had a coffeepot unlike any I had ever seen before, a glass and chrome device they referred to as the Plunger, because you pressed the grounds down to the bottom of the beaker, leaving, invariably, some very strong coffee that was lukewarm and had grounds in it. I was accustomed to the coffee at the Top Hat, grown muddy as it burned off throughout the day. The Plunger came from Europe.

  WE STOOD on the porch for a second, Cherry and I, and then I knocked on the frame of the screen door, and the woman from the café appeared behind it immediately, as though I had summoned her from out of thin air, or as though the door was a television we had turned on by knocking, and she the show that filled the screen.

  Again I was struck by the warmth of her address. “Hello, Ginger!” she cried, with obvious pleasure—it almost seemed like relief—and then became abruptly self-conscious. “It’s just I haven’t seen anyone for days and days—I’m like a little mole in a warren, or whatever you call the holes underground that moles live in. But here’s Theo . . .” And the tall man appeared behind her.

  “Come on in,” he said, and Raquel swung the door wide. We stepped into a miniature hallway. The house looked much bigger from outside.

  I introduced Cherry and then there was a slightly awkward pause. What were we doing here? What did we have to offer this handsome couple? They reminded me of models I’d seen in a mail-order catalog, representative of people with extensive wardrobes, people fluent in other tongues, people who evidently didn’t live in the small town in which they had been born.

  “What can I offer you?” Raquel simultaneously echoed and preempted my unspoken question as she led us into the little kitchen, its diamond-patterned wallpaper and dark-painted cabinets in uneasy relationship. We accepted glasses of iced tea from a pitcher—not scooped in individual portions from a can of powder, as my mother made it—and then we were seated at the table. All right, I thought. What can you offer us.

  “What an extraordinary town we live in, don’t you think?” Raquel began. “I just feel like my life is starting all over again, fresh, here.” Cherry and I looked at each other. This was a promising beginning.

  Theo came in and took a beer from the refrigerator—at only one o’clock—and leaned against the counter, twisting the top off. His cotton shirt was unbuttoned and I could see a thin slice of thorax, abdomen, the little hairs on his lower belly. This could be discussed with Cherry later. “So these are the daughters of Wick?” he said, and smiled, and slugged. Cherry, across from me at the table, sipped nervously from her iced tea, looking up over its rim. Like me, she couldn’t tell whether he expected an answer.

  “And what fine daughters they are,” Raquel sang out. “This is the proof we were seeking. Look at you! Wick is just the sort of wholesome environment we would want for our own little hatchling.” Raquel smiled sweetly at Theo.

  “Oh, are you expecting?” Cherry found her footing in this familiar subject. Lots of girls in Wick got pregnant by senior year and were married shortly afterward. I scrutinized Raquel’s flat belly in her white T-shirt, one that looked like it belonged to Theo.

  “Not yet, but with any luck by the new year . . .”

  “Raquel,” interrupted Theo, gently. “I’m not sure that Ginger and—Cherry?—need to learn everything about us all at once, huh?”

  “Theo, these are growing girls. The more information they can gather the better, don’t you think? Why be coy? And I’m sure we have a lot to learn from them, as well. The wisdom of youth, country wisdom . . . you know, the simple things in life being so difficult to grasp and all that. Why, when I was a young girl I would have given anything for someone to just be honest with me, you know? I grew up thinking babies came from a man and a woman sitting too close together on a park bench. I mean, I wish someone had talked to me about birth control”—at this Theo groaned, and left the room, while Cherry giggled in apprehensive delight—“and orgasms, and different positions . . .” That was it. We were hooked, small silver fish with our jaws open wide.

  We had received concise instruction in birth control in a special unit of gym class, somewhere between volleyball and basketball, but no adult had ever spoken to us about the activity that made it necessary. We knew very well that it went on, and Cherry had spent more than a few thrilling evenings rolling around, fully clothed, on the couch in her parents’ den with this sweaty boyfriend or that, but to hear it—sexual intercourse—spoken of in the context of actual living adults, free to pass their time as they liked . . .

  The afternoon flew as we three sat around the kitchen table, drinking iced tea and later eating popcorn (Raquel swore it was the only thing she knew how to cook), and Raquel told us all about how she had tried the Pill but it caused her to fall asleep wherever she was, at odd hours of the day; how condoms made her queasy just to look at (especially used ones); how the diaphragm was just right as the insertion of it gave Theo time to calm down, as she said, matter-of-factly, so he could hold off longer. And about how she, Raquel, required all sorts of manual stimulation, simultaneous with penetration, to reach orgasm, and how this was best accomplished by Theo’s approaching her from behind; and about how she would like to have a child sooner rather than later. How (and she leaned closer and said this in a very low voice) she had a plan to prick her diaphragm with a pin: Theo would never know.

  So now, already, we had a secret, the three of us, and when Theo eventually came back in Raquel sat straight up and fabricated. “. . . so that’s really the whole story of how we settled on Wick as the right place for us. It’s wonderful to be in this town that has so much history. It means such a lot to me to feel a sense of continuity, of connection, to think that I may actually belong somewhere, after all.” She concluded her partial speech triumphantly, and gave Theo another, sweeter smile. “I have to go to the bathroom. Will you entertain the girls for a moment, Theo?” She left the room and made her way noisily up the stairs.

  Her empty chair faced us. Theo slung himself into it. He looked at us steadily and for a moment we looked at him; then at each other—I registered Cherry’s flush; then down. His gray, reflective gaze put me in mind of a body of water. One could not make an impression upon it; only be washed over by it, dashed by it, drowned in it.

  He leaned for
ward suddenly. The table squeaked. His voice was round, articulated. “Don’t you girls have something more wholesome to do with your time?” He was stern, even severe, though what he said was, I had to assume, meant as a joke. We had been invited. Or at least I had. “Why aren’t you out milking cows, or braiding one another’s hair in a field, or slaving over your college-application essays?”

  We tittered like mice. “That’s next year!” Cherry exclaimed, literal as ever. I was embarrassed for her and was about to make an interjection that I hoped would impress him with its sophistication, when Theo sat back and spoke so quietly that we had to cease all motion and lean in slightly to hear him.

  “I remember when I was your age . . .” Cherry rolled her eyes. “I thought the sun rose and set in my own asshole.” We laughed again, in surprise, looking to each other for reinforcement, and I saw Cherry grip the arm of her chair as though to push up out of it. “I thought there was nothing I couldn’t have, or do, if I wanted it badly enough.” He regarded us for a moment, his flat gaze flicking from Cherry’s face to mine, and back again, like the forked tongue of a snake, while the single pointed tip of his own pink tongue slipped out of the corner of his mouth and rested there for a moment, as though he wished to have a taste of his own skin.