The Beginners

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolff, Rebecca, date.
The beginners / Rebecca Wolff.
p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-51626-3

1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. New England—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.O56B
811’.6—dc22

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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For Cybele, Caitlin, Cassie, Cathy, Cate,
Katherine, Caroline, Cintra, Katy,
Christina, and Colie

and Nic, Daphne,
Theo, Valerie, Susan, Sally & Laura,
Amy & Ted & Tamara, Natasha,
and of course Giuliana

Late May

I
was standing there in my usual spot behind the counter at the Top Hat Café, looking down, thinking about evil, buttering toast.
Last night I dreamt about the Fourth of July. Perhaps that will be the day that I die—this year? If not this year then maybe the next, or maybe in forty-two years.
I gauge my reaction to the news of my impending death on a day when fireworks are the only identifiable landmark for miles around, when you picture a black night sky and small similes of stars against it, from the perspective of a craned neck and an open mouth, soundlessly
ooh
ing and
aah
ing. I can see it all so clearly. I am fifteen years old. I like to scare myself.

But I don’t know that it is myself.

The worst dream I ever had involved a house and a field. I was outside the house, under a big sky. It was all in Technicolor blues and greens. I had gone to this house to help save my “best friend,” a sort of grinning scarecrow figure, from persecution. He was accused of having committed a murder with an ax. The body of the dream consisted of the straw man chasing me over rutted roads and into a field, finally catching up with me where I was halted at a tall, wooden, electrified fence. All this under a wide, solidly blue sky. At the fence my friend revealed to me, through his toothy grin, a truism. “Your best friend is your worst enemy,” he said, and then proceeded to outline the punishment I was to endure for my crime.

With nothing in sight except the brilliant sky at all edges of the horizon, my horribly smiling friend tells me that I am to begin eating myself alive, immediately, starting with the tips of the fingers of my right hand, and that no sooner will I finish eating myself than my innards will be all outside, and I will be turned inside out, and I must then begin all over again, and eat until I am outside-in again, and then begin again, ad infinitum, or ad nauseam.

But this, even, is not the full brunt of the punishment. This is just the flesh of the sentence. The skeleton, when revealed to me, is what terrifies me most, what causes me to wake up in a state of such white-hot horror and disgust that I can still recall it, although I dreamed this dream when I was barely more than a child.

“Your sentence,” the scarecrow says to me, “is to enact, over and over, the contents of the worst nightmare I ever had: me, your best friend. Now I will stand here and watch you eat yourself, as I have seen it only in my dreams, heretofore. Forever after, you will be the subject of this nightmare, not me.”

Is it evil, I wonder, as I stack the toast, cut it into halves, and arrange the halves on a small plate, to act consistently with one’s wishes, even though one knows that among the consequences of these actions is pain and sorrow for those around one? Or is it evil to wish for things that will cause pain and sorrow. Or are these the same thing. Or is it evil . . . does evil contain . . . is evil
bigger
than any one person’s actions, or thoughts, or wishes? Evil as a floating contingency of being, like a hat that lands on one’s head. If that were so, then it would seem to exonerate one from any kind of personal responsibility.

THAT FIRST DAY, in the café, I am amazed that I did not notice their entrance, the Motherwells, Raquel and Theo, a good-looking young couple. I was ringing up a check at the register when I heard a distinctive voice, rich and low, cutting through the general hum. “Theo, this toast is as dry as a witch’s tit.” And then laughter that was at once nervous and uncontrolled, like that of a child awake past her bedtime, running on the energy of a new hour. I looked up in the direction of the one table in the window, which at certain times of day is too bright with sun, and saw her there with a man, or tall boy maybe. (Theo is younger than she, slender, though strong.) His feathery hair was an ashy, dirty blond, and he wore loose shorts made of a fabric woven in Guatemala, or some other far-off land, and tennis shoes and a T-shirt. He seemed at ease in our homely setting. They had a newspaper—it did not look to be the
Valley Republican
—on the table between them and some plates of eggs with bright orange yolks, as yet unbroken, and toast, and coffee. That might have been the very toast I had buttered, preoccupied as I was. Danielle, the other girl, had served them invisibly.

I had been working at the Top Hat, after school some days and on weekends, since the day I turned thirteen and my father suggested it. “Ginger, I think you’re old enough now to earn some pocket money,” he said, and I went right down and got myself a job, first as dishwasher, then as cashier, then to take orders and serve, and now I was entrusted with the ultimate responsibility: I could open and close the place. I was good at all of this, but especially at serving the patrons. I had known the Top Hat menu backward and forward since I was a little child, when my mother would bring me in after school for milkshakes and french fries. Often I knew what customers would order before they opened their mouths.

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