And now I found myself in the middle of a perfect fall day, a day for exploring, for recounting, for dreaming, all on my own, with only this dismal, long-winded creature beside me as a reference point.
I don’t think Raquel could have ever had one, a best friend, unless you count Theo, and I’m not sure that you can be best friends with someone who would kill you, given the chance, or who would fuck you and not kiss you. Someone who would eat you, or who would allow you to eat yourself. And watch you while you did eat yourself. But I’m confusing things: I was the one he fucks without a kiss. She was the one he watches while she eats.
As we drove past the Motherwells’ driveway and then the high school, and then past the Qwik-Go, and then past the Lamplighter, and turned around at the Wick town line, it occurred to me that all of Raquel’s talk was simply elaboration on one theme. She really was just killing silence, which could never be, for her, anything other than uncomfortable. Mr. Endicott had a phrase, about talking just to hear the sound of your own voice, which he used to use when Cherry and I had been on the phone for too long. Of course he was wrong: we talked just to hear the sound of each other’s voice. But with Raquel it was more than that. For her, every silence, every break in conversation, was more than just a break, it was a breach. One was constantly called upon, in her presence, to literally make conversation, to pull it out of thin air, to conscientiously fill gaps which, with anyone else, might be stuffed by the accretion of a mutual history, of shared observation, of simple understanding. That’s it, I suddenly realized, and almost felt moved to say aha, softly but aloud nevertheless, like a scientist too shy to shriek Eureka. With Raquel there was no possibility of an understanding—not of coming to one, not of reaching one, certainly not the actuality of having one. It was as though time did not pass, in her company, as though each encounter with her was entirely new, as though there was no such thing as history, as continuity. One began with her afresh each time.
We pulled into the driveway but neither of us got out of the car. It suddenly felt to me just like that moment in movies when a couple is at the end of a date, when all that remains is for them to part ways, but a decision must be made about the tenor of that parting. Raquel made no motion to open the door, to get out. We turned slightly in our seats toward each other, repositioning knees and elbows.
“You do understand, now, what this is all about, don’t you?” she asked me, not looking into my eyes but instead into the rearview mirror. I turned to look out the back: there was nothing behind us but the other side of the road. Then a car drove by, on its way out of town, probably, or to the Lamplighter for a quick flash of breasts, before dinner. I turned back and caught her eyes, which still held her question. I nodded my head yes, then no, then just as quickly yes again. I thought that I might literally nod my own head off.
I swiveled my torso to face her. “Love?” I croaked. Answering her, a large frog leapt out of my throat. She was startled—I suppose by the sound of my voice—and when her eyes darted into mine I saw something in them that made me look away, but not before she had done so first. Whatever it was was unbelievably difficult to observe, something like a hybrid of a dog who has just been hit by a truck but has not been killed, only had its rib cage crushed, its heart bleeding into its mouth, and a rock that has just been thrown through a plate-glass window. Or maybe the window itself.
Ten minutes had passed. I’m actually not sure at all how long we had been sitting there in the driveway, only that the sun had begun to set for real, and that it had grown chilly in the car. We reached simultaneously for our door handles, then stood for a moment looking at the sky, which was wreathed in long, striated clouds tinted morning-glory blue and rose, pale orange and violet. Faint stars showed through here and there.
“Now that’s what I call ‘firmament.’ Nothing like a sunset to bring two people together, is there? Someone wrote about the fantastic properties of the setting sun, its position in the pantheon of natural phenomena. It does provide, really, the prime example of a sharable experience of aesthetic bliss, minus the critical distance, equaling ‘beauty’: the simulacra of objective reality.
“I am going to give birth to a child,” she continued, never missing a beat. “In about six months. However long it takes. Will you help me around the house, then, when I’ve grown so huge I can’t pick my own fork up off the floor where I’ve dropped it?”
I nodded, slowly, considering this scenario. Raquel at the table, big as a house, anemically pale from giving all her blood to Baby. The fork just out of her reach on the floor. Me, under the table to get it. I saw the fetus floating deep inside of her, in the dark, impossibly small for something so significant. The infant would be sickly, would require special care. Or maybe Raquel would not, as she had so often suggested, be able to sustain a life inside of her. An inner life.
But, in truth, I could only imagine that Raquel’s pregnancy would be of the bloomingly healthy, regal sort.
“I only hope we can stay around that long,” Raquel continued, after a long pause. “It may be that we’ll be gone before you know it. One ought never to overstay one’s welcome, Ginger—remember that.”
32.
The holidays. It was Thanksgiving. Paper turkeys and burnished ears of Indian corn strung up all over town; my parents on stools at their Formica counter, making turkey sandwiches with jiggly cranberry jelly from a can, worrying about me. I wondered how the day would pass. My town made a big deal out of Thanksgiving. There was a parade down Main Street, with all the small children dressed up as Pilgrims. Many of the townspeople dressed up, too, just to watch, and later to sit in the stands at the football game at the high school. My parents were some of the few who didn’t get the whole house trussed up like a turkey. I missed my parents terribly, suddenly. Raquel would have envied me, if she could have known what I was feeling. A tremulous concoction of pity and blood and vision: I saw them again in their sad, sturdy progress through the day, my mother rinsing dishes to put in the dishwasher, my father pausing behind her for a moment to give the tight muscles at the top of her shoulders a quick squeeze. They did not speak of me. They spoke of Jack, in the only terms in which they spoke of him: his promise, his folly, his eternal glory. They wept. And here was I, getting older. I had promised to return home by three, for dinner at four.
WE STRETCHED OUT VARIOUSLY, like cats, on couches and in front of the fire Theo lit. The day was nippy and blue, very blue, with November’s giant clouds moving slowly. I felt a strong desire to take a walk, to be outdoors in the day, to visit familiar sites, shops, to greet the people I knew. Or to turn a corner and see Cherry. Maybe instead I should walk away from town, down the Old Road to the reservoir. At this time of year the mosquitoes were all dead, and no one would be out hunting today, when the football games on TV had reached a frenzied peak.
It was such an unusual movement on my part that I felt I must explain myself. I stuttered, wool jacket in hand. Theo and Raquel exchanged a sly glance, and Raquel patted the couch next to where she sat.
“Here, come sit here,” she said. I did not want to upset her, at any cost, and so I went and sat beside her although I felt an unprecedented urge to stay away, as far away as possible, to keep moving away.
“Don’t leave now,” she said, half-pleading. “Why, if you wait just a little while, we’ll go with you. I haven’t been down to the reservoir since that first time we went. Can you believe it?”
I looked sharply at her as she lied, or fabricated, or believed herself, but I could see not a trace of any more than the usual effort at speech on her face. I glanced at Theo and he was looking steadily at me. Oh, how I longed to be outside: to see the road, the streets, the town, the world; anything outside of the Motherwells’ house, and their faces. I longed to see my parents, and I thought that Theo and Raquel would have laughed at me if they had known.
And I did not feel that I could leave them now, even though Raquel had just a day before implied that she, that they might leave me. Right no
w they both wanted me. Theo promised breakfast; as soon as he said the word I felt the emptiness of my gut. He went to the kitchen and came back in ten minutes with omelettes, infused with Swiss cheese, encrusted with chives.
As we ate, Raquel hatched an alternate plan for the day. “It’s almost noon; let’s take a little midday nap and then we’ll go for a walk, the three of us, on the Old Road, down to the reservoir. I’ll bring my camera. Then later I’ll show you some of the family relics I have—the old photographs. Or we could even go up to that graveyard you told me about.”
The thought of Raquel, with her intractable surface, her empty insides—now filling—strolling amongst the stones . . . I felt a stab of revulsion. A blast: my stomach turned, full of yellow eggs. I’d been feeling a bit nauseated lately, I’d noticed, and hadn’t wanted anything much besides popcorn and big glasses of milk.
The fire was easily revived, and I lay stretched out on the sofa with a pink blanket Raquel draped over my legs even as I grouchily refused it. “You’ll be glad you have it,” she whispered, and then after pulling down the shades in the already dim living room she trailed up the stairs after Theo.
I DON’T KNOW what time it was when I awoke, but my urgent desire had not abated in my sleep. Daylight still shone through the drawn paper shades, yellowed and fly-spotted, and I guessed that there must be a couple of hours of it left at least. I rose and slipped into my tennis shoes, whose laces I had not unknotted since the first day Mr. Breslak sold them to my mother, and trod lightly on their flat soles as I went dutifully upstairs to wake Theo and Raquel, to invite them to come out and walk with me.
IT TOOK ME an awfully long time to reach the door to their room. I remember thinking that fear made time pass more slowly, quite measurably more slowly. But why was I afraid? I do not know. It could have been the dim hall, with the closed door at the end of it, around which I could not see any daylight coming through. They must have darkened the room. Would they be awake? Perhaps they were awake already, and murmuring softly to each other. Perhaps Raquel had chosen this moment of sleepy daytime to tell him of her pregnancy. Perhaps he was not fully awake when she told him, when she whispered into his ear, his ear with its secret chambers, its dark whorls and cabins of air and wind, with its acrid tang of which I had tasted with the tip of my tongue, my one caress, unreciprocated, and perhaps out of some dream he rose without thought, no conscious thought, but only with a subterranean desire to make her stop talking, to make her just shut up, and he took the pillow from under his head and rolled on top of her and placed the pillow over her face and smothered the life out of her. Would she resist? Why? And if she did, would he come awake more fully and realize his actions, or more accurately, their consequences?
But by this time I was to the door, and so terrified that I burst in without knocking, my breath coming in great gusts like wind in a sail. In the dark room Theo and Raquel lay lumped together indecipherably. I switched on the bedside lamp and stripped the covers back, disclosing a handsome, spooning nakedness: Raquel appeared quite pale surrounded by his dusky, dust-colored body; her sculptural whiteness inert in sleep, her dark hair lying over her face and in her mouth. I could detect no swelling in her belly.
READER, DO NOT ASK ME how I roused them. The gaps in my story are for everyone’s sake. We left the house in single file and arrived at the Old Road moments later—again, do not ask me how we got there, all I remember now is the walk down the road that went, quite literally, nowhere. There was a flat kind of expectation on the walk. We were going to see a ruin, a desecration, a tomb, but one that looked just like a body of water.
“This is the most haunted road I’ve ever seen,” Raquel whispered into the cadence of our footsteps. We had been walking for twenty minutes on the decrepit blacktop, through dying forest. Bare trees hung over our heads blankly. In summer they would form a canopy. There was no sign, no plaque to tell the traveler: “This Road Once Went Somewhere.” I remembered that I had been told—by my father? Mr. Endicott?—that you could still see the remains of one of the drowned towns’ village green, on a plateau above the rest of the town, an open space in the midst of trees. We began to search for it but found a confusing multiplicity of open spaces. After a while, we stopped speculating. Long-sleeping crickets woke up in the grass around us as the sun began to set.
“We may never reach this dead end,” Raquel said, as we continued our otherwise silent march through the woods and the sun drooped ever lower in the sky. “What if we can’t get home? What if we turn around now and walk back but we find that, though we walk, and walk, and walk, we never come back to the beginning of the road? And it gets darker and darker as we walk, and we feel that something is at our backs but when we look around it isn’t there?”
“Or worse—” Theo said from somewhere behind me, but closer than it seemed possible for him to be, so that I jumped at the sensation of his warm breath on my neck, the turbulent smell of his breath, “worse . . .”
I looked around behind me—he was far too close, he was inside me—and saw a look on his face that I cannot describe here because it was in my dream, it was a dream, I was in the dream, and as I ran down the road, clutching what I thought was Raquel’s hand but when I really looked at it, when I could bear to look at it what I held in my hand, it was some kind of formless rag of a hand, as though I’d pulled the meat right off her bones in a sudden exertion of the force I needed to get away, to get back to where the road began, and ended, to where Wick began and ended. I woke up, late-afternoon sun low in my face, dry-mouthed and dizzy with residual terror. I wanted water desperately, something to restore my arid tongue to its natural state. I needed to get home for dinner. I jerked myself up off my cramped side on the couch, swung my legs to the floor and sat up, only to feel a hand on my shoulder, a hot whisper in my ear: “Look outside, Ginger.”
I turned around and followed Raquel’s pleased gaze to the front windows, which were lit up not with daylight after all but with torchlight. It was dark out—I must have slept five hours or more—and from the front yard came the sound of crackling wood and of gathered voices. I started toward the window, but Raquel moved between me and it, her face lit and shaded alternately by the flickering of the fires outside. “Don’t come any closer,” she cautioned me. “If they see you who knows what they’ll do. The last thing we need is an angry mob on our hands. Or perhaps that’s the first thing we need.”
“Who’s out there?” Theo asked calmly as he came into the room with an armful of logs for the fireplace. But I had already slipped past him into the hallway and out the back door. I ran into the cold night, around to the front of the house, toward the sound of fire, toward the heat, and hid myself, crouching, behind a corner of the porch. I could watch through the railings.
ALTHOUGH THE SCENE was strangely familiar to me, there was no one I recognized among the crowd of villagers bearing torches. I guessed they had come from the Thanksgiving parade. My parents would not have been there. The women wore long dresses and shawls; their hair was pinned up at the backs of their heads. The men were in dark suits with stiff hats. They were a solemn bunch, but visibly agitated. I saw that a few women at the front of the group were sobbing, holding each other, while several men carried rifles. One of these broke free from the rest and advanced up the steps of the porch. He banged loudly on the door and shouted, “Send her out! Release her to us.” From where I squatted I had a child’s perspective: the man towered above me, his dark clothes blending with the dark around him, his rage causing him to shake slightly as he stood, arms straight at his sides, rifle pointing down, and waited. I wondered if he was waiting for me, if someone had finally come to claim me, the mechanism of my town with its cogs and wheels clicking spontaneously out of inaction like a child’s toy brought to life in a child’s movie. But I did not wonder for long.
The door opened, and I watched, craning my neck, as Raquel was handed out on to the porch, into the man’s custody. He stood his rifle against the wall and reached into hi
s pocket, whence he produced a rope. He turned her around to bind her hands behind her back, and now I could see that her belly was quite swollen, protruding tautly—not like Cherry’s doughy thickening. Her head was held high, her long hair loose around her shoulders, her red wool sweater and blue jeans, slung low around her hips, incongruous. When her hands were bound the man turned her around again to face the crowd, who raised their torches and shouted a chorus of hateful promises: She will be dead by morning, the life inside her, too. She will hang. She is already dead.
I could not see Raquel’s face as the man led her down the porch steps and into the crowd, but I could see that she did not protest, did not struggle, walked erect still as several men formed a phalanx around her and the whole mass turned away from the house and began to move off as one, down the road toward town, toward the village green, where a gallows had been erected.
BY THE LOGIC of dreams, as I knew them, I should have awakened then, at the acme of anxiety and horror and incapacity, with my heart beating wildly and sweat coursing down my sides.
The Beginners Page 21