The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  IT HAD GROWN COOLER, and I turned toward the shore. Theo sat up as if on cue and reached for his T-shirt. Ominous silver clouds rolled above the tips of the tall pines that ringed the reservoir, and Cherry shivered a little and said, “I’ve got to get back soon.” I noticed that she hadn’t offered any comment on Raquel’s surprising admission, and later that night on the phone she querulously observed that Raquel had made her feel like an idiot, duping her into an enthusiastic recounting of something about which Raquel obviously knew much more than she did.

  Our ride home was silent.

  I HAVE NOT YET mentioned that I never swim. It’s the kind of prohibition that stands in the way of group activities, but if one is steadfast and consistent, after a while it comes to seem natural enough. I never swim: not in daylight, but especially not at night, when there is no hope of seeing the bottom, of moving away from whatever dead body or body part or soft, rotted remnant one might be about to bump into with a bare foot or hand. There, in the dark, exposure is complete: one’s skin to the black water; whatever is in the water to one’s skin.

  13.

  It was out of habit that I asked her, and I felt something quite close to relief when Cherry made an excuse. Rather than coming over to see the Motherwells with me the next day, she would go back down to “the res,” as she put it, with Randy and some of the other kids from school. “I’m just going to go swimming at the res with Randy and a few kids from school” is exactly what she said, and I noted that she used the slang that we never would have used before.

  But though I was relieved to be free of the encumbrance of Cherry—my rival, it now seems necessary to say—I didn’t feel ready to go alone. Knocking at the door, calling into the cool, shady interior, the subsequent immersion. Almost, but not quite. I needed an intermediary, a buffer. I thought I’d go to the mill and spend an hour or two alone with my thoughts.

  I lay on my back and stared at the sky, the sun graciously veiling itself behind a white-hot cloud whose edges showed purple with a coming storm. The kids at the reservoir would be doubly wet, extra-wet with rain.

  The kids in my town were louts. Winter or summer, they liked nothing better than to take their parents’ cars up into the hills, park, get so drunk they’d fall asleep in the back, then wake up gagging on their own vomit. Or some of them died, not having woken up in time; about once every ten years one of them did this. Jack did this, late one October night when I was eleven. He was eighteen, and never any older.

  THINK OF WAKING UP to the stoppage of your own breath, waking up not breathing, having breathed your last with your unconscious mind churning in cooperation with the involuntary actions of the body, which function so smoothly unless blocked or offended by some unforeseen obstacle, such as regurgitated food and alcohol. Think of the unspeakable grief of your surviving family members.

  Raquel spoke, all the time, in language calculated to impress. It was huge, and smelled of the future. She told me, every day, in so many little ways, that someday my dealings with the world would include making choices, on a scale I had never previously conceived of. “It’s all a matter of what you conceive of.” She said that to me on many different occasions. Often just out of the blue, the way someone else might sigh without explanation, leaving you wondering if it was something you had done.

  Did I understand even half of all that came into my ears in this time? Like I have said, I was fifteen, one year ahead of myself at the high school, and of an introspective nature, but I had not yet developed a vocabulary with which to discuss myself with myself. I recorded my impressions not in a diary but as notes taken internally, permanently. (Raquel later said, on the subject of diaries, that they were lonely. “There’s no one to talk to in there.” Occasionally she could be pithy and lighthearted about something she felt deeply. “Felt deeply?!” she would exclaim, if she had heard me say that. “Why, I never felt anything deeply in my whole life.”)

  Raquel was a foreign language and I, her student, fully immersed. I did not understand so much as absorb, like meat in a marinade. It got so they would forget I was there sometimes—or at least Theo did, to my chagrin, as his notice had risen to a place of paramount importance; I’m not sure Raquel could ever be accused of ignoring her audience—and the conversation might follow an intimate path, or even, on rare occasion, fall into the comfort of silence. Or what I perceived as comfort: Raquel never failed to squirm, and look around, and smile painfully in both our directions, as if apologizing repeatedly, silently, for her share of the abyss we had fallen into. “Apologize silently?” I can hear her incredulous tone. “I don’t speak unless I speak out loud. You can be sure that when I am silent, I am silent throughout. If I had an interior monologue, or dialogue, for that matter, it would indicate that there was some content preexisting the moment at which I open my mouth.”

  Then Theo asks her, “Well, who are you? Who are you now? And now? And now? Now?” He prods her side with his index finger, none too gently.

  She slaps his hand away, shuts him up entirely. “An intellectual exercise, like everything else.”

  As the rehearsal of this conversation was for me. This was one piece of business they would not conduct in my presence. Perhaps they never conducted it at all, in front of me or each other or Yahweh. I had, it seems clear, only imagined it. High above the mill’s turret, the cloud released its cargo, fat drops heralding a downpour, and I made my way home in the rain.

  14.

  More July

  It went on for days. Wick was sodden, air cooling with the expression of moisture. One late afternoon I tied a sweatshirt around my waist and left my room, where I had been ensconced for hours with something called, beguilingly, The Uses of Enchantment, which I’d pounced on at the library for its title but been disappointed to find was a book about, of all things, fairy tales, how they prepare one, psychologically speaking, for the witches and curses, amputations and stuntings, of adult life.

  “Ginger!” My father hailed me from the living room, where he sat in his chair with the newspaper, a bottle of beer sweating on a coaster on the side table. I halted, caught at the moment of liftoff. “Ginger, what’s on your agenda for the evening? An important meeting to attend?” My father often liked to kid about what he perceived as my advanced maturity, my seriousness, my gravity. I stood in the doorway and gazed into the gloom; he had only one light on to read by. “Your mother’s in Jack’s room doing some bookkeeping . . . go say goodbye at least, honey.” She had set up her home office on Jack’s desk. I think she just wanted a reason to sit in there and look at his belongings: posters and books and records, his trumpet, his prizewinning senior history project—a scale model of the Shift River valley, pre-flood. Toys he had not had time to shed from his teenaged self. I bet she was glad to have all of that.

  “Hi, sweetie. Where are you off to?” She sat peering at the monitor, bills spread out before her. I told her Cherry’s house, and her frame relaxed; it did not seem to occur to her that I might be lying.

  “You know, before you go, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something, Ginger. It’ll just take a minute. Sit down, honey.” She smoothed her hand over Jack’s bedspread. “It’s something . . . I’ve always known this would come up, because you and Cherry are so close and she’s older, and I think now’s the time. Sit down.” An order. I sat on Jack’s bed.

  “Now, I know Cherry’s starting to really date boys, and get involved with all that, and I thought I should find out whether you need any protection. Birth control—you know what I mean, right?” Bang. My mother coolly cast herself in the role of my protector without any sense of irony, though I felt keenly the distinction between the provision of a latex condom and any true parental supervision. With an equal measure of coolness I told her that no, I did not need any protection. No, Mom, I’m okay. I think I blushed, or flushed, and thus indicated to her my persistent innocence and the native delicacy that made any further conversation on the subject undesirable. I kissed her quickly on her cool che
ek and slipped away, down the dark hall and out the door into a day that held a premature hint of fall.

  DOES IT SEEM OBVIOUS to you, too, that I required protection? How embarrassing. I have mentioned before that I felt myself at this time to be ageless, and I would posit that feeling for all children. A child does not perceive herself as such—not in the way that adults grow ever more concerned with their status, their chronos, as it shows itself ever more clearly on their bodies and in the shortening days ahead. A child has no perspective on age, and consequently cannot abide or bear the presuppositions of others, of observers, about how this or that is supposed to make them feel, because they are “just a child.” Violations, intimations, reprobations, invasions. These are labels adults place on experience. This places you in a difficult, almost impossible situation. For it really is your job—you who are grown—to protect the children. For they know not how they feel. They know not how they ought to feel about anything. You must feel it for me.

  JACK HAD PLAYED TRUMPET, in martial lockstep in the marching band, at school, but at home he liked to close the door to his room, put on one of my dad’s old jazz records, plug in his headphones, and follow along with the soloist. His sound alternated: strong and smooth; short blasts of stridency; occasional fluttering arpeggios, flights of fluty articulation. I was not allowed in, usually, but once or twice I sat on his bed and watched, and was amazed at his mirthful frown, his plugged-up mouth, by how he seemed to be talking through the instrument, not just blowing air into it. It was an instrument of expression, just like a mouth, a tongue, a palate, its language one of feeling, purely wordless. It made me feel proud.

  I had been proud on his graduation day, when Cherry and I pressed together, seated on the bleacher between my parents in our sundresses, a fine June day. Jack marched around the playing field with the band; then a short while later bounded up onstage to accept a special prize for his project on Wick’s early days as “A Town of Steep Vicissitudes.” A pre–Revolutionary War site of great prosperity, Wick was in 1762 host to the nation’s first market fair! (A much-reduced version persists in the parking lot of the grocery store every third Sunday, weather permitting.) Wick and its several neighboring towns, Hammerstead, Shadleigh, and Morrow, used the bountiful force of their many streams to power early milling and manufacturing: wood, fabric, cannonballs when cannonballs were required. The invention of the steam engine carried our products far and wide, and the mills labored overtime to fill orders, putting the area’s first wave of immigrants to work doing so. Many decades of contentment ensued. But by the 1930s competition and diversification in these markets had reduced our perceived efficiency, and jobs began to drain out of the valley. Meanwhile, water began to drain in, as a diabolical plan that had been afoot in the Massachusetts legislature for many years was set into final, cataclysmic motion, in a huge and bitterly opposed landgrab. The case went as far as the Supreme Court, but just as the land had originally been grabbed from the Ramapaquet Nation, by white settlers, now the land was grabbed, cleared, deforested, manipulated; rivers and tributaries diverted, redirected, then finally, over a number of years—inhuman, literally detached from any one human decision or approval or appraisal, the unstopped trickle of man-made disaster—blocked with tons of granite, a dam built, the valley irreversibly flooded. Wick alone, on high ground above the insensitively named Ramapack Reservoir, remained, and remains to this day, and we its rueful citizens.

  Jack’s project was multimedia, multidimensional. He’d taken photographs, written text to accompany them, and constructed with great pains the balsa-wood-and-cardboard-and-papier-mâché model resting now, collecting authentic local dust, atop the low bookcase in his room, complete with tiny little houses and automobiles, even tractors, even minuscule citizens making their way from point to point, on dusty roads. Even dust. A teensy but legible signpost pointing the way up out of the valley, to higher ground, to Wick. Cherry and I had crouched in front of the model and regarded the little towns, the lost towns, with the native disinterest of the native. But Jack was “a real history buff,” his teacher said that day, shaking my father’s hand, watching as Jack ascended the platform to have his own hand shaken, degree conferred with honors. I glanced into the face of my mother, leaning across Cherry to get a good look. She smiled into my eyes, even beamed, a motherly light, but I thought I could detect across her own eyes a shadow of dissatisfaction—that which colored her world, and was part of every story she ever told—the part she couldn’t tell, the part left out: that which she really wanted. She was shortchanged; she had not chosen exactly this life, this town, she had certainly hoped for more; and now her firstborn son, so bright, so full of the same promise that yet brimmed in her, had neglected to apply to colleges, had chosen instead to “stick around for a while.” Another mother might have welcomed this. I for one was thrilled. I could not imagine our house without Jack.

  Later we walked around the commencement grounds, my parents greeting other happy parents, Jack signing yearbooks and others signing his, high fives and exclamations of joy all around. My mother kept her arm around my shoulders as we strolled and I remember thinking, with wonder, that one day I would be in Jack’s place, and would have a choice to make. I couldn’t imagine, then, how anyone could choose to leave the warmth of that embrace, so palpable in the sunny afternoon. There was a lot I couldn’t imagine. In certain areas I perhaps overcompensated.

  15.

  No one answered my knock at the Motherwells’, so I just went in. The living room was empty. I went to the kitchen, expecting to find Raquel, but found no one. A plate of crumbs—Raquel knew how to make toast—sat on the round table, aside from which there was no sign that anyone had been there in the last decade.

  I went down the hall and put my foot cautiously on the first step of the staircase; I couldn’t decide if I ought to be very, very quiet, as was my wont, or instead do the unexpected—announce myself. Aside from in conversation, and the occasional meal, Raquel and Theo seemed to spend most of their time catching up on sleep. When had they missed all these hours? And sure enough, as I ascended to the landing I saw that they lay curled up together on the pallet in Theo’s study, a book splayed, cracked wide open, its spine broken, on the floor next to them. They did not move at all as I continued up the stairs and then stood in the doorway for a moment, and this seemed odd. I focused my attention minutely on the movements of their chests, on their breath. I did not believe that they were really asleep. Did I spy the shallow rhythm of a feigned unconsciousness? Had they set me a trap of some sort?

  Nevertheless, after standing there for a few moments I found, to my surprise, that I felt quite drowsy: a paralyzed, lids-propped-open, already-asleep kind of drowsy. The door to their bedroom was half open, and a cozy glow from the bedside lamp illuminated the tangle of blankets and sheets on their bed. As I approached I saw that a small book with gilt-edged pages lay open on Raquel’s pillow—where I might lay my head—and I sat down on the edge of the bed and picked it up.

  As soon as I came to a total comprehension of what I saw—the scratchy handwriting, the dated entries—I put it down again, like it was a hot pan and I without a potholder.

  Then I thought of them lying quietly—sleeping, or silently, though pointedly, caressing one another, or simply waiting—in the next room, and knew that it was desirable that I should read what lay on the pillow.

  The diary began at the time of their arrival in Wick, and had been kept with extreme inconsistency thereafter.

  May 13th

  Theo has instructed me to keep this diary, a journal of our stolen year here together, and so I will do what I can with what I have: this perfect tool, a pen; this ideal receptacle, with its little lock and key. If he were my flesh and blood he could not know me any better. Does he want to know me better?

  June 7th

  I’m not sure that I have the courage to go on. All these people seem to trust me: Oh, people, people; so sweet and stupid. If I had a heart to break . . .—note: pos
sible country-song lyric.

  July 28th

  My question remains: Why do people bother to write legibly in their diaries. For that matter, why do they write in English? (Or Spanish, French, Polish, whatever blasted language.) Why do we not invent new languages, or at least codes that only we can decode. I suppose Michelangelo did—or was that da Vinci? (I muse, mutter, ponder to myself, getting quite into the spirit of the thing.)

  AND THAT WAS TODAY’S ENTRY. I thought that I had never read anything so sad. The ink was still a little shiny; if I touched it with my finger, as I was tempted to do, I would smear it. She must have just been lying in bed, struggling to do what had been asked of her, moments before I entered the house. And then what? She had prepared the room as she wanted me to see it, and slipped into Theo’s study, where he sat working, or meditating, or whatever it was he did when he was not by Raquel’s side, and coaxed him down onto the small guest bed.

  In their bedroom, just on the other side of the wall, I replaced the diary, open, on Raquel’s pillow and lay down facing it, on my side, with my head on Theo’s pillow. The pillowcase smelled faintly of hay. I reached behind me and groped for the lamp.

  I WOKE to the click of the switch, the spread of light, and Raquel’s softest voice saying, “Wake up, sleepyhead. I want to show you something.” Something else? I thought dreamily, and I dragged myself out of a swamp of sleep and muscled up to sitting. There she was with what looked like an old hatbox in her hands. She placed it on the bed and sat down next to it, at my feet, then removed the cover to reveal a pile of photographs, perhaps fifty of them, some edged in crimped white borders, some with no borders and missing their corners, as though they had been torn out of old albums. Some looked antique; their surfaces were dull, and the images were watery and uniformly brownish, the brown of a horse’s coat.