The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  So now it was with excruciating clarity that I read his adult motive, his kinetic desire, and because I was so close to him I could not disagree with him. She was more beautiful. She was exquisite, and would exquisitely resist, exquisitely succumb. She would provide him with what I knew he sought from such an encounter: a freshness, a sweetness. An unconscious, living, rushing, breathing doll of life; a girl who would not think but only act, if at first defensively.

  I knew I thought too much; it was cast over me like a caul, or like an aura. I did not know if mine had a color but I supposed it must.

  Standing on the Motherwells’ porch, my hand still on the doorknob, I brought Cherry’s face up again before me—her dear face, which had taught me what beauty was. The rounds of her eyes, the slow flush of her pure thoughts, spreading concentrically like pools of water or light, or dark, making blank spots where my love had been.

  I LIKE THE IDEA of auras: an organic by-product of living. A gentle, benevolent example of the baffling reserve of potentially real phenomena that we mostly cannot entertain as real, in order to live comfortably. Auras are organic, ghosts are supernatural, the mind is a combustion engine of perception, routinely creating and destroying and creating anew what matters—our hearths, our tongues. Who can dare to navigate these waters and still call herself a useful member of society? It takes all of your breath away. It cleanses your palate of its taste for that which is comfortable. Ordinary knowledge, ordinary society, ordinary love.

  But if comfort is not your highest priority, then you might live as we did.

  17.

  The Accident

  I rode my bike down toward the mill, insects whirring in the grass, the air full of sweet evening smells. I sat on the bank of the dry river, watching a pair of crows as they perched motionless, facing each other, on top of the cupola. They looked wicked, in their hunched postures of silhouetted predation. I wondered what they would eat, given the chance.

  The sky began its swift evening darkening. I took a tentative stab or two at playing in the castle by myself, but found it unbearably lonely there. It had always been lonely. That was what we had once loved so much, Cherry and I: being lonely as one.

  I felt a blanket of regret, of longing, of desire for her thrown over me, followed by a quick tug of relief at the thought that all I need do is to wake up in the morning and call her, as I did so often I can still remember her telephone number today. She would come to the phone and I would ask her if she was all right; wait for her to tell me what happened; give her my reassurances, or astonishment, or admiring collusion, or shocked disgust, as the case might be. Then we could go on as before, and we would proceed together, and I would, inevitably, grow up with her. I would be drawn into her world of petty employment, teen love, jealousy and chatter and token rebelliousness, hair-and-makeup, skill sets that turn into character traits.

  IT WAS LONG PAST dark when I finally left. I rode my bike fast on the turn down the hill past the Social Club in the pitch-blackness. As I rounded the corner, I barely felt, more heard, a hot, violent nudge, a grunting cry, an engine gunning. I sat in the road. I couldn’t actually feel any pain, but then I couldn’t actually feel anything, so this was not a useful piece of information.

  With the silence of aftermath all around me I began to put the seconds of recent experience into reverse order, working backward from final result: I had been thrown off my seat and into the road by some impact. A motorcycle had pulled out of the Social Club’s gravel parking lot just as I came down the hill. It was a blind corner, and it was a miracle, my mother always said, that more accidents didn’t happen there, what with all the drinking that went on inside.

  Events began to move forward in time again. While I sat in the middle of the road, the motorcyclist dragged his bike back into the parking lot, where another helmeted figure stood, leg slung over his.

  While the one with whom I had collided tended to his motorcycle, the other dropped his in the gravel, pushed his helmet to the back of his head, and was making toward me quickly. He knelt down in the middle of the road by my side and I saw that it was Randy Thibodeau. “Kip, man,” he yelled to the other, “forget your bike and come help me get her out of the road.” Kip Brossard, a boy I remembered from my brother’s class in high school.

  “Oh, man,” Kip said, striding sheepishly into the road, “is she paralyzed?”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Kip.” Randy’s long hair was in disarray from the helmet, and he smelled of the motor oil with which he was daily anointed. “She just scraped herself up. She’s okay. What kind of asshole are you, though, man, I saw you pull out without even looking. Hey”—to me—“are you all right, Ginger? You’ve got to be more careful. You were whipping! Lean on my shoulder. Can you move? Should I call 911? Let’s get you out of the road.”

  This last injunction seemed like a sensible one, and so I gripped his outstretched hand, threw my other arm around his neck, and leaned heavily on his shoulder as he drew me up to my feet with incongruous tenderness. I remembered then that Randy was one of seven children, the eldest, in fact, and that he could often be seen parading one or another of his youngest siblings around on his shoulders, or squiring them to the pizza parlor for a slice. He had practice in tenderness.

  Randy walked me solicitously over to a bench by the door of the Social Club, Kip dancing antically at his elbow. The outside lights winked to blackness as Randy and I sat down and I heard the back door slam, then lock. Presently a large black car emerged slowly from behind the Club. The bartender, Stan Lipski, looked out his window at the three of us curiously. “Hey, Randy, Kip, give it a rest, dudes,” he called out the window, and laughed in a suitably suggestive manner, then pulled out into the road and toward home.

  “Oh, great,” Randy said. “That’s all I need is more rumors. Listen, Ginger, are you okay?” I nodded my assent, moving my head carefully up and down, then side to side, to test the stability of my vertebrae. Everything seemed to work. I predicted that I would have a large bruise on my left thigh and side, where I’d landed. My palm was skinned.

  Randy left me to walk back out to the road, haul my bicycle up by the handles, and wheel it over to lean it against the wall. Kip took this opportunity to shuffle away, calling, “Hey, I’ve got to get home. You in charge, Randy?”

  “Sure, whatever, man. Just next time you decide to run someone over, make sure you finish the job.” The two of them laughed, and Kip kick-started his bike and roared away.

  I sat for a few minutes, my whole body beginning to throb in time with my heartbeat. “Man,” Randy said, looking me over. “My mom always used to make me wear a helmet. I would bitch her out about it every time, but now I’m like, ‘Where’s yours?’ Are you sure your head is okay?”

  I nodded. He paused a minute, then sighed and sat down beside me on the bench. “Nice night,” he said, craning his neck, squinting up at the profusion of stars as though they were suns. “What were you doing down here so late?”

  I didn’t want to tell him where I’d been, any of the places I’d been. I sat quietly and hoped he would take my silence for shock.

  “Do you need to call your mom for a ride home? I’d totally take you on my bike but I don’t have an extra helmet. I’ve got a key to the back door of the Club. You could use the phone in there.”

  I pictured the empty barroom, lit only by a pinball machine and the glow from the refrigerated case where they kept bottles of soda. Randy would maneuver me carefully through the door and to a chair at a table by the bar. He’d go look for the phone and come back with it in his hand, then put it gently on the table. Then he would kneel down at my feet and take my shoes off. “Let me see the point of impact,” he might say, or something more directly salacious, like “Show me where it hurts.” He would push my sweater up to expose my ribs, and move his mouth up to graze the delicate skin just under my breasts. I wore no bra—I didn’t really need one. He might cup my breast, and kiss my throat. He would proceed from there to undress my lower half
very carefully, tenderly, gently, lifting and lowering each limb to avoid injuring me further.

  I didn’t know that I wanted it, but it dawned on me what a perfect exchange this would make. My virginity for hers, her loss an exploitation of vulnerability, mine a gallant, courtly, supportive act. I began to rise, cautiously, but Randy stood up before I could and proffered his arm for balance. “If you’re sure you’re okay, I really need to ask you about something.” He looked slightly past my face, into the dark trees edging the road. “I’m going nuts here. Cherry won’t talk to me, hasn’t talked to me in days. She’s mad at me because she thinks that I’m still interested in Terry, because, now we’re like, going out, me and Cherry, but she just found out that last week Terry came over to my place above the shop with some other dudes and we got really wasted and she ended up staying over. But so did, like, three other guys! And I swear they all just slept on my floor. Terry was so out of it she puked in my fish tank—killed all my goddamned fish, man.” He pulled his helmet all the way off his head now in a flurry of earnestness, and wiped the sweat from his brow into his hair with a blue bandanna he retrieved from his back pocket. “You have to talk to her for me, Ginger. Just get her alone and tell her what I told you. She’ll listen to you. I swear I would never do anything to hurt her. She’s, like . . . I really care about her.

  “When you see her, will you tell her that she’s really special to me and I want her to know that?”

  I have to confess I was moved by his distress and could not bring myself to tell him that it was not likely that I would soon have such an opportunity.

  I gave him my word.

  “And tell your mom and dad I said hi,” Randy said as I started off. “It’s been a long time.”

  I REMEMBER THE DAY Jack died. Actually, he died in the middle of the night, Halloween night, time of death approximately two-thirty a.m., dead drunk, on his back, drowning in his own vomit in the backseat of Randy’s dad’s car, so what I remember is the next morning, the morning that we learned of his death during the night before, when he might have been home sleeping in his bed. If anything could have kept him home. Early in the morning, around five a.m., the doorbell rang. I burrowed into my bed. I heard the doorbell but I heard it in my dream, and searched for a door to open there. Meanwhile my mother sprang to life in her and my father’s room, feet hitting the floor before her eyes opened. In the graveyard, an officer on patrol had shone his flashlight on something terrible. At the door she collapsed, and Officer Collins called for my father to come and help him get her to the sofa. His voice woke me, finally. I stood at the door of my bedroom and watched my father go past in his bathrobe and bare feet; my mother wailed the news. “Jack,” she cried, and the impossible made possible colored the whole day invisible: it made the day disappear into itself, a voided, emptying, vacuous processional. I could not wait till the lights went out again, but it would take a long time to get there. Someone was removed; we would never see someone again. The extraction was painful. My mother hung her head over the sink in the kitchen and wept and puked for a long time, emptying herself; my father held her hair back from her face. Then they sat on the couch, or rather my father sat and my mother lay with her head in his lap, her eyes closed. I was sitting, or standing, I don’t know, in a corner of the room. My father beckoned me to them but I had the sensation that I had to keep watch over the room, that I had to keep as wide an angle of perception as possible, so that I could keep anything else from entering, unwanted.

  I REMEMBER A FEW THINGS about the day before the night Jack died. It was a Saturday, the day he died, and he was going to go out that night, as he had done the night before, with his friends. No costume—he was too old for that. In the morning, his last morning, he woke up late, around eleven. I had been up for hours, eating my cereal, watching a little TV, reading my copy of Highlights, the kids’ magazine I’d subscribed to since I was five years old. It was full of puzzles and poems and simple stories and educational games. I would cancel my subscription when I was twelve, after Cherry hinted to me that it was impossibly immature. I was lurking, hoping that when Jack woke up we’d do something fun—maybe we’d rake leaves together in the yard, and he would throw me into the piles, or maybe we would play gin rummy, one of the few games I was good at. I had hoped that later he might take Cherry and me around town, house to house, door to door, trick-or-treating, but he had made it clear that this was out of the question. My mother was probably straightening the house, as she often did on the weekend. My father might have been reading the newspaper, or working on something out in the garage. I waited, and finally Jack rolled out of his room and into the bathroom, where I could hear him lightly grunting and brushing and spitting all the way from where I lay on the living room floor, in the sun, reading my dorky magazine.

  “Hey kid,” he said, as he dropped down into a seat at the kitchen table and peeled a banana from the fruit bowl. “I’ve got to go down to the hardware store and see about a job. Enough of this freeloading off of Mom and Dad, right?” He cleared his throat. He’d been smoking, lately; I’d seen him. “Do I look presentable?” He stood up and revolved to show me the backside of his creamy corduroys, his plaid shirt, both rumpled. I loved him so much. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t always be as nice to me as he was right then. It was no skin off his back. He turned around to show me his front and I gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Maybe when I get back we can do something, okay?” He knew how much I wanted that. My knowledge of this knowledge only slightly reduced the value of his offer. I nodded, but I knew that he would disappear into the day, off on his bike. He would bump into his friends on the green and they would drift around together all day until dinnertime, and then after dinner he would head off with Randy in his car to go loiter in the graveyard, drinking beers and laughing, leapfrogging gravestones, jumping on the backs of the dead, jeering at their misfortune, desecrating their silence, dismembering their corpses, disrespectful at the end in a way he had not been at the beginning.

  18.

  My collision served as a fine excuse for a retirement. I limped home, wheeling my bike, and showed my mother the purple, lake-like bruise that spilled over my outer thigh, my green ribs, my abraded palm, and her reaction was deeply satisfying: she brought out all the liniments and bandages at her disposal and went to work on me, then sent me to my bed in clean pajamas. She pursed her lips at the mention of Randy’s name, and grew more silent than before. Randy, forever sleeping soundly in the passenger’s seat of her sorrow while Jack dies forever in the back.

  Cherry called for me several times during these days, but I would not come to the phone. I did not speak to anyone about this refusal, not even to myself. I just did not come to the phone. It was a consequence that had no action—a blank, spreading spot where the reason might have been. A growing child does not get many opportunities to regress into unreason, to retract the steps she has taken toward adult accountability. I was mute to myself like an infant. I answered my mother’s quizzical looks, as she stood with her hand over the receiver of the phone, with what I imagined could be taken as a typical teenager’s expression of private outrage, implying that Cherry and I had had a typical teenage falling-out. We had fallen out. My mother was glad to see me doing something typical, glad to see me at all, and I was happy to trail around after her, for a change, to go for pizza, to the library for books, to the video store to rent one of the Pink Panther movies she found so hilarious.

  But then I happened to pick up the phone one morning, early, and Cherry began to sob into it immediately, like I was a slot machine, her tears, quarters. I would begin pouring out consolation when she hit the lucky combination.

  “Ginger,” Cherry said, hiccuping through her tears, “where have you been?” She did not wait for me to answer. “Meet me at the mill, okay, I really need to talk to you. Something terrible happened and I can’t tell anyone about it besides you. I have to go now—my mom’s coming up. I’ll be there at two-thirty.”

&nbs
p; I PUT DOWN the phone and wondered how soon it would be proper for me to see the Motherwells again. I should have stayed, I thought, or felt. I could not—cannot still—tell the difference. I should have stayed.

  I thought of Theo’s early, incomplete warning at the kitchen table. He had enjoined us, as a unit, to watch out, as though we were indivisible. It had made me want to distinguish myself, I thought; to accelerate a process that had already been put in motion by Cherry’s increasing preoccupations, her leaning away from me. But if “watchfulness” meant keeping one’s self from harm, staying “safe,” then it had been an ineffectual warning indeed.

  And here I WAS, still only a child, after all, with my childhood perfectly available to me, intact as the hymen of a virgin is purported to be. I thought of Cherry, and a veil of the old love, old loyalty came down gently over my eyes. I closed my eyes and lifted the veil; beneath it I saw not my own face, but hers. I could go and meet her, sit with her, stroke her hair, listen to her version of events. I could relay to her Randy’s tale of devotion. That would help her to forget any intrusions that might have been made upon her person.

  But then I thought of a daring shortcut. I went to the cabinet where my parents kept the slender county phone book. Thibodeau was a common surname, and there were even several R. Thibodeaus, but after a few embarrassing attempts I hit on the one I was looking for.