The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  “But no acorn can be my friend, when I know what sort of growth will come out of the bond. The wet grass drives me mad with discomfort. The wood elves shun my tread. My gosh, girls, look at the time! Am I boring you?”

  I did look at the clock on the bedside table; it was two-thirty. Cherry stretched beside me, and yawned a little. “I guess we do have to get going soon,” she said, her voice thick from long silence. But I figured I could stay for another twenty minutes and still make it to the Top Hat on time for my shift.

  “Well, where was I . . . oh, yes. So. We left the park finally, and set off again, on little back roads, and made our way through town after town, all rife with possibility, until we reached the Pacific coast, in the state of Washington. We stayed in a motel in a logging town, took showers and stretched out between stiff, bleach-saturated sheets for several days. That was where Theo was struck with the desire to call home—‘just to let them know that we’re all right,’ he said.” Raquel paused here, sighed. I regarded her solemnly, aware that some great plot-twist was approaching.

  “We never made it to the promised land. Sadly, it turned out that everything was not all right at home. Theo’s mother had found a new lump in her remaining breast, after years in remission. They had started her on chemotherapy immediately, and she was very ill, throwing up all the time, weak, dizzy. Ted Senior said that he needed Theo’s help. Could we please come home?

  “We got hitched at a stop on our speedy, no-frills return journey, at Details National Park. A justice of the peace performed the ceremony at our campsite. I have snapshots—do you want to see them?”

  I was about to say that I would like to see them, very much—not that I needed proof of the veracity of her tale—but then Raquel spun to look at the clock by the bedside. “Ginger, don’t you have to be at work?” She was cajoling me. I had an unpleasant awareness suddenly that I might be a third wheel. Did Raquel like Cherry better than she liked me? That would be no surprise. Certainly Cherry was the gregarious one, the entertaining one. She had more winning ways. She was, on the whole, more representative of the norm of teenaged girlhood, and I understood already that Raquel greatly admired whatever was normative. “I don’t want you to be late on my account. All that’s left of this story, anyway, is the sad part, the boring old adult part, where we settle down together and try to make each other happy.” I had risen off the bed, was about to make my parting address, when Cherry answered for me.

  “Oh, please, that’s not boring. What was it like? Did you call your parents right away after you got married? Were they so excited?” I noted Cherry’s new expression. Greedy. Lustful. It was as though Raquel had opened a thick vein for a freshly minted vampire, one burdened, burning, with the hunger of a lifetime.

  I felt stifled in the damp coziness of Raquel’s bedroom, the rising smell of drying textiles. The patter of the now-light rain on the windows promised some relief outside and so I made my exit. Raquel waved a little wave and made warm promises of future days just like this one. Cherry said to call her after work. I left them comfortably established, and as I went down the stairs I heard Cherry say, in her soft, slightly toneless voice, “But were you in love?”

  8.

  Sunday Night

  Later that night, as promised, I spoke with Cherry on the phone, as I did almost every night, even when we had just spent the whole day in each other’s company.

  “I have to tell you,” she said. “Something about the Motherwells. You’re not going to believe this.”

  On the contrary, I thought that I would probably believe anything anyone told me about the Motherwells. I had just spent the afternoon and early evening leaning against the counter at the Top Hat, musing over all the fantastic truths I had yet to absorb, all the credulity that was still mine to be exercised. Another form of power.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but those people are so bizarre. Raquel told me the weirdest things about her and Theo. Maybe I shouldn’t even tell you. It’ll just freak you out . . . I know how squeamish you are about boys, and sex, and that stuff.”

  She was only waiting to be convinced of the impossibility of the idea that she would withhold anything from me. I suppose this is one of the bonuses of such a friendship: until something unspeakable comes to pass that truly cannot be repeated, even to your best friend, there can be no doubt that you are like books open to each other’s eager eyes. This is probably the lesson of such a friendship, in fact: if there is one person whom you tell everything to, there must be some people you only tell some things, and some whom you tell nothing. Parents usually serve well in this last capacity.

  “After you left . . .” she began, and I shifted my weight from my right hip to my left, where I knelt lopsided in front of the desk on the thin gray carpet in the telephone nook. “Raquel started to tell me things. I’m sure she would have told you, too, if you’d stayed. How was work?” Typically, her narration was scattershot.

  I assured her that work had been, as always, uneventful. I suppressed a problematic visit from Randy: he had lingered outside the café with his coffee-to-go, smoking a cigarette, and more than once thrown his wiry glance in the direction of where I sat—although perhaps he was just checking the clock on the wall above the counter, or perhaps the glass was impermeable at that moment, glazed as it was by the low late-afternoon sun skimming down over the row of opposing brick rooftops, and he glanced luminously in the direction of his own reflected self. Cherry resumed.

  “Wouldn’t you think that everything was perfect between them? They seem like such a good couple. But here’s what happened. This is so weird.” Cherry proceeded to tell me a tale of a dream Raquel had had—or was it a dream? This was as unclear to me as it had been, probably, to Cherry. Apparently Raquel was a heavy sleeper, but since sharing her bed with Theo she had been visited by strange visions and sensations. In her bed she was smothered by a limb over her nose and mouth, dumb and immovable; in her bed the skin of her buttocks was pricked, over and over, by needle-like protrusions, as though she were a pincushion, or a voodoo doll. “She loves him,” Cherry asserted, reassuringly, “but sometimes she feels a little bit scared of him, she said.”

  My own mouth was stopped with a heavy burden of dumb flesh. I woke unbreathing, in an incredulous panic; my friend’s arm, my friend whose body I slept next to each night, had come to smother me, maybe involuntarily, as some kind of fatal by-product of our mutual unconsciousness. Or, even more frightening, of the subconscious. The closer to conscious desire the implied impulse rose, the more unthinkable it became. I felt the words frothing like distemper in my mouth: What just happened? I would say, inquiry arising out of a silent state that knows no hesitation, no calculation, only pure utterance.

  I was spacing out, while Cherry vivaciously spilled more of the details of an increasingly troubling tale. My own dreams usually have something to do with the insides of houses.

  “. . . And he’s like ‘What? Why would I be sticking pins into your ass?’ And this time, she said, it was like the roles were reversed, because he was the one who sounded hurt and betrayed—it was like he couldn’t believe that she would think he would do such a thing.”

  OF COURSE that’s the question: What part of her was it that believed him to be capable of doing such a thing? And how could she allow him to see this part of her, even in half-sleep? It seemed an atrocious intimacy, a violation in itself.

  “So, what do you think?” Cherry asked me again, all charged and full of appetite. “I don’t believe a word she says. She seems kind of nuts to me. She kind of creeps me out.” But I was still caught up, the casing of my body actually punctured, like the skin of a sausage, by a fork.

  “I think they’re both really weird,” Cherry prompted, hopefully, but when I did not feed her the line she required she gave up, said that she was going to go catch something on TV, and that she would see me tomorrow. “Sweet dreams!” she cooed, and laughed, and hung up.

  BUT OF COURSE I could not sleep, and of course I
decided to ride my bike for a little while. I say of course because it was dark out; of course because I was already afraid, even before I thrust myself out the sliding glass door into the backyard and around to the side of the garage. My back as I rode away from the house felt larger than my whole body, like a target, with the raw, unprotected feeling of full exposure, total vulnerability to whatever forces might alight. It was really like an invitation to these forces, to be out in the night alone with my thoughts, which grew increasingly loud as I pumped along toward the Motherwells’, fighting off visions of what might be behind me. I said of course to myself, out loud, because there are some things we know not to do if we wish to stay safe, to avoid danger. Watching a scream-fest we know the young girl must not, if she wishes to keep herself out of the plot, allow herself to be separated from the group. She must not go skinny-dipping in the lake. Certainly she must not display any willingness to be touched. Activity of a playfully flirtatious nature will get her a nonspeaking role, but if she were to offer herself to the dark, the dark would certainly take her. And here I was: I could not tell to whom I wanted to expose myself more.

  A LIGHT WAS ON in the kitchen. I went around to the back and stood at the door for a minute. At the bottom of the dingy lace curtains I could see elbows on the round table and the remains of dinner. Wineglasses and a candle. I knocked, and, after half a minute, knocked again. I thought I heard a faint call to come in—the wind, or my ears playing a trick, fulfilling a wish. I opened the screen door, then the inside door, and I was in the hallway. As soon as I heard her voice, so clear, so definite, I knew that the invitation I had heard had not been spoken out loud.

  “For example, when I hear a phrase like ‘dewy pussy.’ It gets me completely wet.” Raquel. I froze.

  “Oh, and do you hear ‘dewy pussy’ often?” Theo’s voice, gently quizzical.

  “If you only knew how many of my waking moments are spent rehearsing new word combinations. Or sex. Rehearsing sex. Or rather, thinking about sex.”

  “There is nothing conceptual about sex. Sex is not in the abstract.”

  “It depends on what you define as sex. I can come in a split second if I think of certain words, certain phrases. When I’m all alone. Dewy pussy.” Dryly; sotto voce.

  “Oh, really?” Theo sly, teasing. “Why aren’t you thinking about me, when you’re alone?”

  She laughed, sighed. “It’s all about separation from reality.”

  “Isn’t everything, for you.” This was not a question.

  “Oh, but this especially! If I were to try to conjure up a vision, a fantasy, of actual physical contact with you . . . it just wouldn’t do the trick at all.”

  She sipped some liquid. The glass came down on the table with a resonant ping. “Because when I think of a phrase like ‘dewy pussy,’ it is actually my own . . . that is referred to, and what is exciting to me is the idea that my pussy could be, and probably will be, referred to by someone in the future—near or far—as ‘dewy.’ And this excitement in turn actually produces in my body the phenomenon, or state, if you will, of ‘dewy pussy.’ ”

  This time she allowed the two words to issue silkily from between her lips, to be drawn out like a shining ribbon.

  Theo’s voice was a little lowered. I had to strain to hear him. “Keep talking—”

  “Hang on to your hat. I’ll let you in on a deeper secret.”

  “It’s about time,” Theo said, and I jerked backward toward the door, in the dim hallway, in thrill and panic. But if I made a noise now, or knocked on the doorjamb, or cleared my throat, it would become instantly obvious to the two of them, in the kitchen, that I had been standing motionless in the hallway, eavesdropping, up until that moment. On the other hand, they must have heard me come in: the door was heavy, and the screen door had slammed against it and bounced and then slammed again, before coming to rest. If I just stood and listened, the dilemma would only be aggravated. My deceit grew more heinous, my culpability increased with every word that I heard.

  But there was nothing I could do. The noise then of another chair scraping back. “Let me just clear this off a bit . . . now, come here.” Steps, and then, in rapid succession, the zzzzip of a zipper, the crush of clothes moving, pushed off of limbs. “I don’t think we’ll break it, do you?”

  What I heard now was all flesh. Nothing I had names for except “suck,” and a smacking like a candy bar; sometimes a brushing noise, just pure friction. The table squeaked a little, but not much. Then:

  “. . . and just ‘fuck.’ ‘Fuck me hard,’ or ‘fuck me now,’ . . . ah, you’re fucking me. . . .” Her voice had deepened, seemed to be coming from a more complicated place in her throat, a strangled place. There was a flapping, a slapping of flesh on flesh, and the table’s joints squeaked.

  When Theo spoke his voice was hoarse, almost a whisper, but a stage whisper.

  “She is beautiful, you know. I for one would fuck her.”

  “Well.” Long pause, of speech but not of action. “I’d fuck her, too.” Her breath seemed to be caught in her throat.

  “So, why don’t you?” Theo said, rather coolly. The table protested loudly.

  “Careful, angel. Because I’m fucking you, you bastard. God. Also, you know, because fantasy isn’t . . . reality. As far as I can tell, darling, you are my reality.”

  The table creaked and creaked. The sound of their breathing got louder, speech concluded by mutual agreement. I gauged my distance from the door, then commenced creeping backward.

  “Mmm . . . just pull out . . . when you’re gonna . . .”

  I closed the door behind me with as much caution as I had left in me.

  9.

  One evening later that week found me dreamy, standing at the sink back at the Endicotts’ with my hands in soapy water. Outside, the night sky showed an awareness of the blue it had recently been. Cherry dried the dishes as I washed them. We did not speak, had not spoken much all day. I felt we were at an impasse, though she could not be privy to it. The novelty of this private experience, of knowing something she didn’t, and wouldn’t, was both a pain and a pleasure, as in fact I also knew it had to be Cherry the Motherwells referred to—“she” of the black hair and flushed cheeks, the overripe lips and white skin.

  On the other hand, Cherry had told me, teasingly, that she had seen Theo watching me. And she thought that they took more of an interest in me. They were both so intellectual, she said. I had been intent on my book, one day, on the porch, she said, when she saw Theo watching me. I was indulging myself in some decidedly unintellectual but deeply rewarding fare: the first volume in the Dragonriders of Pern series, Dragonflight, in which, on a distant planet, infant dragons hatch from giant eggs and seek to make an “Impression”—to bond telepathically with a human “rider,” who will be their eternal companion and guide. Cherry also said, lightly, though with a sidelong glance as though to gauge the aftershock, that she thought I was getting obsessed with Raquel and Theo. It felt strange to be so observed.

  Now I was going back over that first encounter, in the café, thinking how it held in its virgin arms a discreet premonition of all that was to come. Every moment does, though, I thought. In every instant lies a pattern, a code, from which every antecedent moment can be predicted. Much like the way we live out our family’s story, the way I look, and Jack looked, just like my mother, and just like my father, equally, according to the bias and predilection of the observer. Our whole bodies represented perfectly by fine lines: limbs, lips, eyelashes, hair, extremities. Freckles excepted.

  ON THAT FIRST DAY I had been shy, and therefore quiet. Raquel made her showy advances while Theo looked on, amused, perhaps wary, certainly appreciative. The outcome was pleasing to us all. They looked like adults to me, and unfailingly glamorous, though that glamour would acquire somewhat of a patina of familiarity as the summer passed and I spent night after night in their company, more often than not going to sleep on their couch long past midnight, having called my parents to say I was
at Cherry’s and I’d come right home after breakfast tomorrow to do the chores I had neglected, plus some extra.

  I had brought Cherry to their house with me because I was scared to go alone. Scared just in the way you’re scared to do anything for the first time. There was hardly anyone in Wick whose home I hadn’t been inside on one occasion or another, at a wake, or a birthday party, or delivering a box of paper goods from my parents’ shop. That is supposed to be the beauty of it, isn’t it? I’d even been inside the churches, although my parents didn’t belong to the Catholic or the Congregational.

  “What are you? Jewish?” a boy once asked me, in front of a knot of kids at recess, with a look on his face, equal parts boldness and apprehension. What if I was, I remember wondering at the time. What would he say to that. There has never been a Jew in our town, and consequently any stereotype he could have had prepared would have been wildly trite and dated. Couldn’t he have come up with something more menacing, more profoundly foreign? What about “heathen,” or for that matter “devil worshipper”? I suspect the fact that everyone knows my mother isn’t from around here had paved the way for this more pedestrian suspicion. I used to press my mother for stories about where she came from, the world outside Wick, every night when she was putting me to bed, but she would never comply. She was concerned for my night’s sleep. She needn’t have worried.

  I WOKE UP in the middle of the night in my little bay window at the Endicotts’.

  Cherry had switched on her bedside lamp. I sat up, squinting, and asked her what was wrong, in a whisper. She didn’t answer immediately. She sat, hugging her bent knees, her face resting on her crossed forearms. Her hair was all in disarray, as though she’d been tossing her head on the pillow.