The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  Involved as I was in describing for her the hilarity of hirsute Petey Kosowski’s passionate rendition of the Monster’s even more impassioned demand that Dr. Frankenstein provide him with a mate, it wasn’t until Theo stood behind me and placed his hand on the top of my head that I heard, retroactively, his approaching footsteps. “Stay right where you are,” he said, and I jumped slightly at the light, synchronous pressure of hand and voice. “I’m going to pour myself a glass of wine. Would either of you like one?”

  “Oh yes, darling, I would,” Raquel replied, and I nodded my head tentatively in concord. Only then did he remove his hand. I thought that later I would dig in my drawers at home to find my diary and start a new chapter. I might title it “He Touched Me.”

  For I needed a new place in which to put this sensation, to let it sit and accumulate motive. Did he mean it? Did he intend to place his hand on me in such a way that I could still feel its warmth, with him in the other room? With these inquisitive thoughts I felt myself slipping into a foreign mind—Theo’s mind—with a new kind of force, one I’d never exerted before. I understood for the first time Cherry’s various absorptions, her efforts at interpretation of the actions of the boy-of-the-moment, which at times approached the level of telepathy. Maybe Theo had wanted to touch me for a long time and only now found this casual means, a perfectly reasonable, unnoticeable spot of time in which to lay hands on me. I felt a thrill stronger even than his touch as I entered his mind, and found it to be so like mine—cold, strong, hopeful—a sympathy so bright and potent between us that I could not determine a point of origin for it. It extended forcefully in our two directions, a ray of light with no discernible source, only vectors of equal and opposite momentum. A mutuality.

  I looked at Raquel to see if she might have registered his touch—sympathetically?—but she only smiled at me. “I always love it when Theo comes back from the city. I feel as though absolute truth has been reasserted. He’s been to see his parents. His mother really. She’s still not quite herself.” I remembered that his mother was ill, and had a brief vision of a light-strewn bedroom, gauze curtains diffusing the rays, Theo sitting beside her plump bed, she a finer, paler, frailer version of her tall, dun-colored, monochromatic son. He held her hand in his and read to her from a book of sonnets until she fell asleep.

  I had thought to find an appropriate moment in our tête-à-tête to ask Raquel how she did it, her appearance and disappearance in the house, her presence and absence at the reservoir, but now Theo was here, holding three round, full glasses of deep red wine in his two hands like a bouquet of gigantic, mutant roses. He stood in front of Raquel, who relieved him of one, and then he did a little dip and handed me mine. I held it in my two hands as I saw Raquel doing, as though I warmed myself at a fire inside a crystal ball. It was my first glass of wine. I’d taken sips of my parents’ but had found it metallic and bloody. Now whatever distaste I might feel was negated by my sense that we three were sharing a potion, one that would make it possible for us to finally become invisible, or to see in the dark, or to read minds, or to understand the language of animals.

  12.

  Mid-July

  One day soon after it seemed as if the sun beat down in its noontime position all day, too hot even to make the usual movements across the sky. I thought of the reservoir, the relief it offered us, and of what I had missed out on already. I wanted to catch up.

  Raquel loved the idea. “Let’s go right now, without further delay. We’ve just been lying here like snakes on a rock.”

  “We’re so suggestible,” Theo concurred. Raquel rose swiftly, considering the heat, from her ragged lawn chair on the porch, where she had been reading a faded paperback. Theo lay stretched out somewhat awkwardly on the swing, squinting at an old Sears catalog that I’d noticed in the hallway on our very first visit, what felt like years ago. They both had an air of such languor I could hardly believe they would summon the energy necessary to open the doors of the car, much less drive it. But Theo rose with a grunt, as though he were performing a single, purposeful sit-up.

  “Oh, good!” Cherry clapped her hands in unchecked enthusiasm. She looked particularly summery that day, I thought, a little proudly, in her pink tank top and faded red gym shorts, cheeks flushed with heat and black hair in a ponytail. Tendrils escaped at her temples and the nape of her neck, curling in the humid air. I didn’t know if she was more pleased at the thought of some relief from the heat or relieved to break the surface tension of our sanguine foursome, in which I was, increasingly, immersed. I could see her dilemma, but couldn’t name it.

  She had wanted to tell me something the night before, on the phone. Her father wasn’t pleased, he had told her, a little more sternly than she was accustomed to, that she was spending so much time with these new people, these people nobody knew. Cherry had taken this to heart. She’d promised him that she would ask before the next time, even if she were with me. She had asked today, and been granted permission. I thought it was lucky that my own parents didn’t seem to speak to hers as often as they used to, now that we were a little older. They would not be likely to ask the same thing of me.

  WE TOOK THE OLD ROAD out of town, the one that heads straight to the heart of the water, then veered off onto the loop, heading north, to go over the top and down the other side. Theo drove recklessly, in the middle of the road, even coming around corners. Lots of town kids drive like this, to the very same destination but usually at night, with a trunk full of beer and a backseat full of squealing underage girls.

  Now we were going on our own brand of outing, one with a delicate balance of adult and youthful participants, and I felt happy, absorbed, pinioned in this tenuous equilibrium, as though we were some new kind of four-headed or four-hearted beast. Some of these were things I had always wanted to feel.

  The road itself was shaded all along by thick summer leaves overhead, but just on the other side of the trees you could see the promise of sunlight on blue water and open sky above.

  The swimming area opens out just at the spot where a church once stood, and you can still see the lines of its foundation in the shady soil. A dark blue pickup I recognized as Randy Thibodeau’s was parked by the side of the road. I glanced at Cherry as she slipped out of the backseat, holding on to the seat in front for leverage, glazed from the heat like a child. She rolled her eyes at me, looked at the truck, looked back at me, raised her eyebrows and rolled her eyes again, twisting her lips—a pantomime of “who cares.” I knew she did. She certainly cared enough about Randy to be “totally pissed off” that he hadn’t called her after their recent, to her quite earthshaking, dalliance. Theo and Raquel were already down the narrow path to the slip of sandy beach, towels slung around their necks. We followed after, pulling our clothes off, swimsuits on, in the shadow of Randy’s truck.

  Randy, on his ratty beach towel, appeared to be engrossed in the chatter of Brianna Pickering, who worked at the video store. “I bet she gives him free rentals,” Cherry whispered in my ear, with gratuitous spite, I thought. What had the hapless girl ever done to us? Cherry should be grateful to her for diverting the attentions of the prodigal Randy.

  Just then my own were diverted by the sight of Raquel and Theo stepping out of their shorts, holding on to each other’s shoulders for balance. They stripped off their shirts and stood completely naked in the sand.

  I heard Cherry gasp and whisper, “Oh my God.” My own shock and embarrassment was complicated by the fascination of my gaze. I had never seen anything so beautiful as the two of them together on the shore of the reservoir. Each body was so different from the other. Hers was fluted and scrolled where his was spare and elastic, proportioned for maximum ease of entry, like a knife into sugar as he dove. She waded serenely, round and rounded parts moving like a soft machine, into his wake, and stood, patting her abdomen, underarms, breasts with cool water—a trick of acclimation. Then she glided forward into a smooth breaststroke.

  They seemed to me to work the way a
cliché does: it gets used over and over because it is useful. It is difficult to imagine the source of the usage, or an end to it. Yet I also have difficulty finding the proper cliché to describe their union: “birds of a feather,” no; “peas in a pod,” definitely not. Perhaps “oil and water”; the words themselves stick together although separation is what they illustrate, form denying content for once.

  Cherry and I flattened facedown on our towels and tried not to die of shame, or to explode with laughter. We were not responsible, and yet we were. Randy and Brianna took this opportunity to light up a joint and pass it back and forth. I smelled the mulchy, nutritious odor of pot. Theo and Raquel had swum far out and looked to be dog-paddling, facing each other, talking, oblivious.

  Stoned Randy lurched from his towel with a grunt and swung over to where we lay, smoking joint in hand. He walked right past me and squatted down next to Cherry: “Hey, want any?” I pinched her thigh, touching mine, hard, and propped myself on my elbows.

  Cherry sat up on her towel and for a minute I thought she was going to accept. But she had sat up only to make her enthusiasm for him more obvious. “Oh, thanks, Randy, no, I’ve got some stuff to do later, I have to drive us back, anyway, but thanks.” I listened to her lying with interest. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard her do it before. “But how’s your summer going?” Why was she keeping him here? Raquel and Theo were swimming back now, heads bobbing in unison. Any minute they would emerge, dripping, dangling, and glistening.

  “Oh, you know, same old shit. Now that I’m out of school summer’s just like every other time of year—only hotter.” Cherry giggled like an idiot at this banal observation. “So, what’s up with the circus freaks? Store run out of bathing suits? Or don’t city people think they have to follow the same rules as anybody else?” I refrained from pointing out to Randy that we were all breaking the rules, simply by swimming in this water. His own lower half was modestly encased in a pair of old cutoffs, which had molded themselves to his wiry legs, the hair dried in snaky rivulets.

  Cherry laughed and fluttered her hand in the air in front of her face, as though to dismiss the Motherwells from Randy’s view. “Yeah, I dunno, I think they just forgot their suits at home,” she lamely explained.

  “Forgot their brains at home more like it,” Randy retorted. “Well, we’ve gotta get going. I have to be at the garage at three. Grease monkeys never rest. See you later. Hope to, anyways.” Cherry’s face lit up like a lamp rubbed by a genie. “Stay out of trouble, Ginger,” Randy added with a smirk as he pushed off with one hand, sinewy forearm, joint held aloft, and I relaxed my tightly held muscles—jaw, shoulders, abdomen—into the hot towel. I did not like for Randy to address me directly. I listened as he and Brianna gathered their things and left, my cheek down on my arms, my eyes closed, the perfume of wet sand in my nose.

  WHEN I WOKE the sky was a deeper blue, and insects had begun to hum in the brush. Cherry’s towel, beside me, was vacant. Theo and Raquel lay a few feet away, on their backs, eyes closed, arms splayed. Raquel’s breasts had fallen to either side of her ribs, leaving a smooth expanse of breastbone.

  I sat up. My mouth was dry. Cherry was down the beach a short way, wading in the shallow water where reeds and lily pads grew. Her hair was wet.

  I tiptoed past them, noticing Raquel’s burnished pallor, Theo’s dusky blond skin, the sandy color of his pubic hair, the darker blond skin of his penis, darker still where the skin was wrinkled and on his testicles, where black blood showed purple beneath the skin. I stood thigh deep in the water and looked down to see what might be living in there.

  “Sssst,” Cherry hissed and, when I looked, waved me over to where she stood. I looked back once more at the sleeping couple. I thought I saw Raquel open one eye.

  Cherry was pushing lily pads around with her toe. They swayed gently all about her ankles. I stood outside the circle of their swaying and looked under the surface of the water to the muck beneath, a dense weave of brown root systems infiltrated with slimy vegetation of unknown origin. The whole mess floated like a cloud of smog over the already slimy bottom—the soil was dense with clay. Beneath the roots and above the bottom was a half-foot of invisibility; it was impossible to be sure of what one stood in.

  “Hey, are you jealous of me?” Cherry asked, looking up at me but down again quickly. I could not think what she might mean by that. My mind blanched. “I mean, I feel like you never want me to talk to anyone, and it’s like, I know we’re best friends, but, I wonder sometimes if you feel annoyed because I’m more popular than you, and they never invite you to do anything, or something like that. And maybe that’s why you want to hang out so much with these . . . I mean, I don’t really get why we’re here.”

  Her mildness, even in this confrontational stance, was as sweet as the breeze that had begun to pick up over the water as the day grew later. Her sweetness and my blankness canceled each other out. I could not tell her that she was wrong. I could not tell her anything at all. And now Raquel splashed over to us, sleeveless T-shirt restored, white cotton underwear damply covering the dark triangle at her crotch.

  She leaned in to our silence and spoke conspiratorially. “This reservoir has an interesting history to it, doesn’t it? When we signed the contract on the house the realtor said something about some other towns that used to be here, but they weren’t here anymore.”

  “Oh yes, it’s true!” Cherry abandoned her demure reserve, all excited at the prospect of gossip, even antique gossip. Or maybe she was simply glad for this diversion. I felt a strong impulse to restrain her from telling too much, or in fact anything at all. This was our town’s open secret, and I didn’t know what Raquel would do with it. But Cherry continued unimpeded: “You can see the foundation of an old church, in the grass, right back behind where we were lying. Some people say, but they’re just being ridiculous, that when the water gets really low, when there hasn’t been much rain, you can see chimneys, even the tops of houses, rising above the waterline. But that’s really not true. They totally leveled all the towns. There were three of them. It took years and years, the whole thing. They knocked down everything and evacuated every last person before they let the river fill it up.” Here she spoke as though from a script; I’d heard her mother telling it just this way to Cherry years ago, when we were little and very eager to go down and scout out steeples and rooftops peeking from the dark water.

  “Well, how do you know that’s true, Cherry?” Raquel voiced my thoughts exactly. “Have you ever dived down deep and looked? Or were you there when they were doing the leveling?”

  “Oh, of course not.” Cherry was all sincere assertion. “It happened when my parents weren’t even born yet, or at least they were little babies. It happened when my grandparents were young. They remember it perfectly, believe me. My great-uncle was one of the overseers of the gravediggers.”

  “Oh, my word,” Raquel breathed. “They dug the bodies up? What did they do with them?”

  “Why, they buried them again, of course! There’s a huge cemetery out on Route Seven for all the people who were dug up from the towns. They brought the stones and everything! Some of my family is buried there.”

  Raquel looked up at us, from where she had been gently digging in the mucky bottom with her toes. The heat of the day had turned the tops of her shoulders, the tops of her cheeks, her nose, all a peachy color. Her eyes radiated a silty green, the color of the mud. I felt as if a trap had snapped shut somewhere behind them. “I believe,” she said softly, “that some of my family is buried there, too.”

  WE LEFT THE RESERVOIR with our heads full of new information. Now, it all made sense, these visitors, these rootless cosmopolites—a phrase that had seeped out of my history textbook and into my consciousness. Raquel was doing research. Raquel was writing a book! This was a book that had begun, she told us, as we stood in our hushed circle around the swaying lily pads, as her doctoral study on the history of the New England witch trials—her proposed fellowship project—but w
hich had evolved into much more than that, when she and Theo found Wick. Now the book had taken up a more personal, singular set of concerns. It seemed that Raquel could trace her ancestry along a dramatic timeline of tragic conclusions: first, to the scene of the famous atrocities in Salem, where at least one of the innocent women hung as witches was her direct ancestor; and then to our own flooded valley, where long ago yet another of her unfortunate ancestors, with the unlikely surname of Goode, had been persecuted in the name of righteousness. And then later, those that remained were forced out of their homes and displaced, dispossessed—a final debasement. So the book had grown from a simple, potentially dry, potentially superfluous historical treatment of a much-documented set of mistakes to a memoir of a family curse, which would not incidentally include revolutions both cultural and industrial.

  This was the coda to the story she had told us that day in the rain, in her cozy bedroom, and to the lie she had blithely told that first day of conversation, in her kitchen. Now it all made sense, the presence of Raquel and Theo in Wick—what they were doing here—and this, to me, I can confess now, was something of a relief. I had longed for mystery, and excitement, and even confusion, if it came naturally along with these, but now that I’d tasted of them, in the form of this strange pair. . . . Once it became clear that they needed to come back east, to give up their pioneering dream for the sake of Theo’s family obligation, Theo, she said, had been all too happy to support her in this year of research and writing with the fellowship money from the university. They would stay in Wick and here together be both responsible and productive at the same time: Theo a good son; Raquel a good scholar. And they might even be so productive as to produce a child, a child of Wick.