The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  “But didn’t you tell me that you were coming as your poor brother?” Raquel’s question seemed a sincere one, but I knew I had never said any such thing. What a horror that would have been, for my poor mother, so horrified already, on the anniversary of his death. It did occur to me then that my first feeble attempt at a costume, preempted by my mother, might have been read by the casual, yet savvy, observer as an unconscious attempt at a resurrection.

  “I know you must miss him terribly,” Raquel said, and I felt tears again prick up in my eyes like pins finding their way out of a pincushion. I did miss him, and never said so. After his death my parents did not often speak of him, but made offers of puppies, kittens, a rabbit, as though the Jack-shaped void ripped in the world could be patched by anything warm and soft. I, too, had made a habit of not speaking of Jack, and the more I thought about it the more certain I became that I had not spoken of Jack to Theo and Raquel. I had kept his death, indeed his life, his plain existence, “to myself,” as they say; “close to my chest,” as they say. It was a secret that gave me power inasmuch as it gave me unknowableness. It was my light, which I hid under a bushel. How could anyone pretend to know me when they did not know the biggest thing about me, which sometimes threatened to eclipse me?

  “But I was looking forward to meeting him! A true friend, like your Cherry, will always give in to the temptation of sympathy. How sweet a fellow, how much you loved him, and how you alone have shouldered the weight of his death. Nothing can replace him,” Raquel continued, as I reeled with the sudden spasm of my want—my brother, Cherry; my lost friends—“it is true, but this does not mean he must be forgotten. Tonight is a night for just such remembrances. And if we are lucky we may be visited, on such a night. Sit down, Ginger. We have work to do.” She held her hand out to me, and the man beside her also reached toward me to close the circuit. A séance. My missing brother, a lonely ghost. He would like to come and meet these two, I thought, as he had in life liked anything that reminded him there was a world outside Wick, the outside world our mother had emerged from, after all, where people had names we’d never heard and excitement in the form of luck and trouble, speed and spirit, promised itself in the movies he watched and the music he played to himself through his headphones, the ones that still covered his ears in the back of the car when he was found, rocking out to nothing.

  And I thought he would have been quite drawn to Theo, who cut a more dashing figure even than Randy; then I thought that things might have gone very differently for Theo if Jack were around, my big brother after all. Jack would have had to choose between the thrill of reckless endangerment and the innocence of his little sister. Maybe Jack could have had Raquel, I thought, an auspicious beginning to be sure.

  A welter of dead interest, suppressed longing, purified terror churned in me and I turned toward the door, making faint noises about my shoes, how uncomfortable, how I needed to get my tennis shoes from the car. I could see its lights still against the living room wall, hear the engine idling. My mother waited.

  “Ginger, don’t go. You have suffered this bad dream enough. It’s time to wake up.” Raquel stood from the couch and I saw that in my heels, I had attained her great height.

  “Don’t run away, Ginger. My sister and I are so pleased, so honored, to have you here with us.” Theo spoke coolly, evenly, and as he did he took Raquel’s hand in his and pulled her back down next to him, then laid their clasped hands on his thigh. His gaze arrested me and I sank into a chair. “Jack will be pleased to be called forth, as we are pleased to be allowed to make our way freely in the world, to surface. We live submerged in the muck of our shameful past.”

  I thought they were right: Jack had been a sociable boy, with plenty of friends. He must be lonely. Unbearable, to think of his cold grave, in the plain new graveyard on the other end of town, where we never went. At first some kids, his gang, would visit the grave, and even set up a little shrine of sorts—he was that popular, that loved—but even love could not rescue him from real death. Maybe they had visited him tonight; would they notice if his spirit went missing and came to us here?

  Then I heard the sound of my mother’s car pulling away from the curb, making a U-turn, the little squeal of tires as she accelerated away from me. She had waited there until she was certain that someone was home.

  “Do you know who we are,” Raquel asked, and I nodded: I recognized them from the photograph. Or I recognized their bearing, their sheaths, their chrysalises. They turned to each other in mutual pleasure. “How gratifying,” Raquel sang, a low song, and reached her hand around to Theo’s cheek. She applied her lips, pale and dry, briefly to his. “Together in life, but too much so. It disturbed those around us. Together in death, until we were disturbed. Now we are together again in new life—bodies refreshed, faculties sharpened, love stronger than ever—and we will remain so as long as we are allowed. Will you allow us, Ginger?” Raquel extended her long fingers across the table to stroke the side of my face. I recoiled; I couldn’t help myself. Their relationship was in every way so unnatural—their relationship to me. I was not sure I could help them, much less myself. Then I did help myself. I stood up, as though to go, but did instead what any latent starlet would do under the circumstances. My head hit the corner of the table as I went down.

  OUT OF AND INTO and out of consciousness I flew, a sparrow dazed by an encounter with a window, in a directed effort to retain the state of unknowing. My head jostled against Theo’s solid shoulder in his cloth coat as he carried me upstairs and I dove down into it, pressing my face into the loose weave; Raquel’s breath was warm on my cheek as she slid a pillow under my head and I melted into the pillow; I tossed into my life under a rough wool blanket, then tossed myself like a coin down a well back into the dark. Finally I simply slept, for long enough to dream of my mother and father wearing transparent masks that showed the blackness of their hearts against the whiteness of their skulls, my brother with a face like a bright golden coin at my window, knock knock knock, let me in. When I woke up it was because I was cold. It was morning. The window was open. It was the first of November and I lay on the pallet in Theo’s study wearing his shorts, the third-world shorts he wore the first day I saw him, and a T-shirt that said “Oregon—We Love Dreamers.” My head throbbed sharply, a spreading point of pain where it had made contact, and I drew the blanket over it and tried to forget that I was awake, but I could not. That recent unconsciousness, so benevolent, once lost was lost forever, and when I heard the sounds of dishes and forks and spoons downstairs, something cooking on the stove, the flutter of conversation, I realized that I was starving, and once I was starving, empty, I was filled up with a curiosity more potent than food, than knowledge, than any answering entity. It promised nothing but the provision of more, more. More. I rose and went to join them, whoever they would be in broad daylight.

  31.

  Late November

  Raquel said she wanted to know the exact dimensions of Wick. This, sitting over coffee at the kitchen table. It was a deep, late fall day, and once more I had agreed not to go in for my shift at the Top Hat. I would stay right where I was. Theo was gone again to the city to see what he could find there.

  It was Saturday and I knew the café would be busy, people stopping in for a milkshake or a grilled cheese or just for coffee and a chat with some of the other townsfolk. I felt sorry for Danielle, and for Billy, the little dishwasher, but at Raquel’s behest I had called in to say that I had a very bad cold. A fall flu.

  The streets, too, would be busy: men running in and out of the hardware store, children collecting in the doorway of the newsdealer, chewing gum and drinking sodas. Teenagers walking up and down the road aimlessly, in trios and pairs, grouping and regrouping. Women with small children in tow, maneuvering their bulky ways into the grocery store. All this activity in the commercial zone of Wick, in the slanting, deceptively mellow sunshine of mid-afternoon, late November.

  Raquel was edgy at this hour. “I want to g
o among the people,” she said, out of a protracted moment of consideration, “but not be of the people.”

  We tumbled out of the house into air that was sharper than it had looked and into Raquel’s powder-blue Honda. It hadn’t been driven in weeks, maybe months, and the engine turned over with the sound of dice shaken in a cup. “We’ll have to let it warm up for a while,” she said, and so we sat, and Raquel reached for the radio knob. She settled on a country-and-western station. “I could have been a country singer. I love the wordplay, the double entendres, the semantic reversals,” she told me. “Another microcosmic reduction of our experience into palatable dialect and trope.” I smiled and nodded, although I had no idea what she was talking about. Country music to me was just a sentimental outlet for people from the city.

  We pulled out of the driveway and onto Route 7, heading south, toward town. I cracked my window a bit to cut the stale air in the car. Raquel began to make bright conversation. I didn’t feel like talking. On such a beautiful day, it was enough for me—more than enough, actually—to just ride along and know that I was safe and warm, and that nothing would be demanded of me but that I be, and look, and breathe. The seat belt across my chest reminded me of this, and of being driven around by my mother, in the summertime, with Cherry in the backseat, and me playing with the radio dial until my mother would say “Stop! Enough already!” and we would giggle.

  I wanted to tell Raquel of this dreamy, easy feeling. Each familiar sight of my town came quickly into view and just as quickly receded. The word “familiar” doesn’t even apply, when describing something from which one has never been away. It would be like saying that the womb is familiar to the fetus.

  RAQUEL DROVE SLOWLY, slowly past the little houses dotting the hill alongside Route 7. Perchik’s dry cleaners on our left, the mill on our right, the riverbed running north to south behind it, perpendicular to the road. We crossed over the two-lane concrete bridge that signified our entry into the town proper.

  “You know,” Raquel said. “I can imagine feeling how you feel—I really can.”

  I just nodded. She needed no corroboration. We entered town and stopped at the one traffic light. Bank, shoe store, pharmacy, grocery. Four corners. She turned the car to the right, onto Main Street. We drove slowly past the parked cars and the shoppers, past the Top Hat and the insurance company with my father’s shop above it. Squinting up, I thought for a second that I saw my mother’s face in the window, and I thought I saw her see me, eyebrows raising. Then the sun was reflected off the window and we were past.

  Where the shops end and houses begin, little ratty houses, Raquel turned the car around and we drove through the light again, taking a turn toward the village green. Some kids from school were hanging out at one end, tossing a Frisbee around. I thought I saw Cherry’s black hair, her red corduroy jacket, as we drove by, but Raquel sped up and soon we were past the green, past the church and the graveyard and the Town Hall, and off on the Old Road, going up into the hills.

  “You just don’t know what it’s like inside my brain,” she said, and I could not help but grow a little irritated. Did she honestly think she knew what was inside mine? But she does, I thought then. She does.

  “There is not one moment, waking or otherwise, that I am not being consumed by my own brain. And consuming it. My brain is eating itself, do you see? Am I here, with you, really, the way you are here with me, a captive audience? It doesn’t matter what I say to you. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  Her speech unfolded, as smooth and evenly modulated as ever—like a radio announcer’s, it occurred to me—but her face was pale and her expression taut. She was nowhere near tears, but I somehow felt certain that she would weep soon, or had recently wept. The ghosts of tears.

  “If you do understand what I’m saying to you,” she continued, “it will be just another miserable joke at my expense. Oh, I am a monster, Ginger.” Wryly, almost gently. “Do you understand, now? It would be a miracle, if you did.” We wound up and up, in the little blue car, through the piney, hilly country, coming out into the open pastures of farmland. Little old houses, barns standing near in varying phases of dilapidation, strewn on either side of the road, at intervals, among the great fields.

  Driving along. “Human lives are works of art. Complete with themes and leitmotif and clumsy symbolism. But we are not supposed to recognize this quality as we live them. That is what I call a curse. To make each second tick along. From the seat of the brain, pulling strings somewhere behind the eyeballs. Agonized.”

  The Wick town line bore down on us mercilessly. I noticed that she never placed her two hands on the wheel. She always left one lying in her lap. Now we had reached the summit of Wicker Hill. Raquel did a three-point turn, the car’s rear end dangling far out over a ditch, and we headed back down toward town.

  Raquel turned the car left on Route 7, back at the light, and we headed north again. We passed Mr. Motor’s Auto-Body Shop, and had to swerve around a huge white truck parked along the roadside that said “Allied Technologies Automotive Appearance Specialists, since 1949,” on its side. I pointed this out to Raquel, and she smiled a little disinterested smile that faded just as soon as it appeared.

  We were past the Social Club, then the old barn on our right, coming around the hairpin turn, going uphill. We drove back through the center of town. Raquel turned the car toward the Old Road, heading, I guessed, toward the loop.

  “I still believe that the difference humanity makes is incalculable, because it is a question of self-consciousness. In humans, self-consciousness varies only by degree, although it varies hugely. The day that a chipmunk sits up on a rock and tells me, or even just looks like it wants to tell me, that it’s having trouble deciding what to eat, is the day that I will give up my title and join the ranks of those who see their place on the food chain. . . . You know, this all reminds me of one of my favorite stories, the allegory to end all allegories.

  “I don’t even remember where I first heard this. I can’t tell stories. All I really recall is a servant, in some bushes beneath the window of the king, bearing a covered dish. Under the cover is a pure white snake, cooked, prepared simply for the king’s consumption. It seems the king had overheard one day that in order to understand the language of the animals, the residents of that other kingdom just outside his window, one must eat of the rare white snake. At this point in the story, you, the listener, should be wondering just who it was he overheard say this. A sorcerer? A practical joker? Or was it a jackrabbit, speaking in human tongue.

  “So he catches the fever of wanting. Now that he possesses this knowledge he must put it into action: he commands his servant to go out into the forest, return with the sublimely exoticized white snake, and bring it to him for his supper. This is where the story begins, in my memory, with that fabulous image of the weary, triumphant servant of the king, having spent all the long day in the forest entrapping the luminous, exquisite snake. Who knows what trials he underwent in its procurement? We can only imagine. See, this is the trouble I have with stories. It’s the fleshing out part that bothers me.

  “But ever onward with the engrossing narrative! The king, alone in his grandly appointed chamber, sits down and devours the white snake. It probably tastes a lot like frogs’ legs, which supposedly taste like chicken. But a bit oilier, and stringier, I would bet. He cuts it up into little sections, small rings of snake, like calamari, and eats the whole thing. And then immediately goes out the window and into the forest, where, just as he had hoped, he converses freely with badgers and crows and wild boars and the occasional gazelle.

  “He is gone for several months. The effects of the snake on the language centers are long lasting. And of course he is in a kind of ecstatic state of communion. The natural world! Opened up to him! He runs about in the forest and listens in on the unexpectedly fascinating dialogue of chipmunks, who chatter, their jaws stuffed with roughage. He understands wildcats when they address themselves to their god. He has intersp
ecies communication skills! He serves as interpreter in the forest, settling disputes between hawks and voles, foxes and hounds. He is at one with what he believes to be the natural order, for the first time in his benighted, bejeweled, hierarchical life. In all his days of glory in the forest, however, he never sees another white snake.

  “And this is because he has eaten the last one. An otter tells him so. And when the power of the previously ingested one begins to wear off, there is nothing for the devastated king to do but return home, to the castle, where he lives out the rest of his days in torpor and misery. It is the far greater ill, after all, to have a memory of a tongue stuck in your head with no capacity for speaking it, than to have had no tongue at all. The great king! The poor king. To remember the flavor but not the texture, to know that there was something so free, so wild, so necessary, that he could say, something being said all around him, but to have no recall of its content, its meat. Just like a dream. Not like riding a bicycle; that, they say, you never forget. But just like the way some people speak of the experience of having an emotion. Love, for instance. Or is love a metaphysical condition? Anyway, they say ’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But this was not so for the king. ’Twas misery to have understood so much! And then to fall back to not understanding.

  “What fresh hell. What constantly fresh hell.” Raquel sighed and leaned forward against the steering wheel.

  We were stopped now at the end of the long access road, the road to nowhere, literally, or at least to nowhere that we could go and survive the going. In front of us was a footpath that led straight down to the edge of the water, to the submerged valley of lost ancestors, lost histories, lost names and truths and reasons.

  I WONDERED, THEN, as Raquel turned the car toward home, and her multiplicity of stories faded from the air around us, if she and I were now best friends, as Cherry and I had been. But just as quickly as it entered my mind to wonder, I found the answer: if we were, I wouldn’t have to ask myself the question in the first place. It’s like magic that you don’t ask it. About once a year, Cherry and I would pause for a moment in the middle of some day we were spending together, some formless, endless activity in which we participated, thoughtlessly, like two skinny monkeys, to survey our long, long history, and to conclude, inevitably, that it was good. We might laugh, then, that accomplished, and resume. Even the brevity of our exchange was a signature of our mutual perfection with relation to each other. We could be succinct together.