The Beginners (17 page)
Authors: Rebecca Wolff
But what I did wonder about was the seemingly universal desire to settle on every explanation for these accusations but the most obvious. What if the women and men had been burned not as a by-product of greed, or inequality, or sheer envy and mistrust, or mind-altering grain, for that matter,
but because they were witches
? Why overlook the trees that stood in the forest so sternly, so full of promise? I do not wish to take up arms against an army of skeptics, but rather to make an argument in favor of that which is, simply, more interesting. Raquel, for example, was obviously and inarguably a mind reader, for she laughed at this, laughed out loud at my silent thoughts, my thoughts which tended toward darkness, and put her arms around me, reaching across the cauldron of darkness between us. Her embrace was loose but warming, and when she let me go I felt the chill air, the damp earth, more exquisitely.
but because they were witches
? Why overlook the trees that stood in the forest so sternly, so full of promise? I do not wish to take up arms against an army of skeptics, but rather to make an argument in favor of that which is, simply, more interesting. Raquel, for example, was obviously and inarguably a mind reader, for she laughed at this, laughed out loud at my silent thoughts, my thoughts which tended toward darkness, and put her arms around me, reaching across the cauldron of darkness between us. Her embrace was loose but warming, and when she let me go I felt the chill air, the damp earth, more exquisitely.
20.
W
hat if I told you we had seen a ghost in the graveyard.” Raquel stood in the doorway of the kitchen, combing her fingers through her dripping hair. It had begun to rain as we walked back.
hat if I told you we had seen a ghost in the graveyard.” Raquel stood in the doorway of the kitchen, combing her fingers through her dripping hair. It had begun to rain as we walked back.
“Would it be the truth?” Theo spoke without turning to look at her from where he stood at the countertop, slicing mushrooms. I regarded his back, and neck, and shoulders, the long rhomboid muscle that allowed his regular motion. I suddenly saw him on top of Cherry, like a photograph from the pages of
The Beginner
brought to life, his ass between her legs, his torso obscuring hers, an irregular rhythm governed by invisible motive, an ungovernable finish. And I then saw the ghost that might have followed us home, watching them, relieved for a moment of his infinite loneliness.
The Beginner
brought to life, his ass between her legs, his torso obscuring hers, an irregular rhythm governed by invisible motive, an ungovernable finish. And I then saw the ghost that might have followed us home, watching them, relieved for a moment of his infinite loneliness.
“At least it’s a partial truth,” Raquel offered, blithely. “And you know every partial truth contains a germ of absolute truth. It’s like genetic cloning, whereby you only need one cell from any creature in order to replicate or re-create, flesh out, as it were, that creature’s whole essential being.”
“Well, gee,” Theo said, after a silence during which he scooped a brown paste he called “miso” out of a plastic container into a small blue ceramic bowl. “I guess you really did go to graduate school, didn’t you.”
She took both hands to the back of her head and collected her hair into a ponytail, then sat down at the table, watching us and waiting. I had nothing to add.
“Ghost sightings, for example, are almost universally understood as some kind of energetic collision. You know, when we die, blah, blah, blah, matter is never destroyed, but only converts into other forms of energy. And some of the living are more receptive to the apprehension of this energy than others. And this is a kind of truth which may not be the final truth but is certainly a useful one.”
I sometimes felt that Raquel herself was a kind of ghost. She could never bring herself to fully materialize—to trust us, to allow us to love her—and perpetually shifted in and out of the little realm we were now creating, there, the three of us newly divined, newly consecrated. Where the other realm she inhabited might be I could not decide: Was it the realm of her imagination, into which she vanished? Or was it some more final, more absolute void, one that might threaten to swallow her up completely, one from which Theo and I, her rescue squad, could never retrieve her? I worried, at times, that she was drifting farther and farther away, that we might not be able to hold her. I did everything in my limited powers. I laughed along with her nervous laughter, laughing especially hard when I did not understand the source of her amusement. I listened attentively to her versions of events, be it what Theo planned to cook for dinner that evening or a narrative of how the true pain of living manifested itself to her (“as a veil cast over my eyes, so that I can never trust that what I see is what anyone else sees. And the pain is both the veil
and
the vision”). I never said no to her. If she wanted me to walk in the graveyard, I walked in the graveyard; if she asked me to sit at her knee and tell her all about the mill, I did so happily, though I had never spoken freely of it to another human being besides Cherry.
and
the vision”). I never said no to her. If she wanted me to walk in the graveyard, I walked in the graveyard; if she asked me to sit at her knee and tell her all about the mill, I did so happily, though I had never spoken freely of it to another human being besides Cherry.
“But what’s really frightening,” Raquel insisted, as though she had been countermanded, rather than colluded with by Theo’s and my twinned silences, “is not the apprehension of the ghost itself. That’s just a comforting illusion. The very idea! What’s truly frightening, whether you know it or not, is the infinite variety of the mind’s creation. The mind creates it all, variety included. You see these things and then you are left alone again, but you never were otherwise: the adrenaline rushes through you in the moment of acceptance of your own power, your own exhilarating and horrific power. I have faith in my mind, if in nothing else. My mind is at the bottom of it all.”
I was about to say something about Sarah Goode—about how that was very real, historically provable, a real collection of people and facts that had truly happened—when a resonance sounded at the front of the house, in the hallway. I realized after a minute that it was the noise created by someone outside, on the front porch, pressing the very old doorbell—an echoey creaking and whining in place of the usual “dingdong.” I was surprised by the sound, but I was not surprised when neither Raquel nor Theo made a move to answer its call.
We all sat very still and presently I heard footsteps, on the porch, down the step, moving away off through the night. The ghost of a visitor.
STATIONED BEFORE JACK’S MODEL of the lost valley, peering in the minuscule windows of the tiny houses at microscopic figures engaged in passing plates around a table, or zooming out to regard the valley as a whole, its rich soils and plentiful waterways, I have often thought of a more distant past, of the people who left the civilized but brutal coastline of Massachusetts to stake a claim on the promise of the river. They found a fertile valley and made all the motions of settling: clearing land, raising structures, forging institutions, establishing trade, begetting sons and daughters. A few generations down the line, we were flourishing. We had sturdy businesses and charming society, an outlying scenery of pretty farms and their structures. This is when the most beautiful houses in Wick were built, all gathered together like a meeting of elders: when citizens were feeling secure, stable, even flush. These houses, lining our serene village green, a monument to certainty, are truly wonderful to behold. They speak volumes about what is inside, and what is out. Inside is for the privilege of privacy and inheritance. Outside is for those who peer, and pry, and try to get inside.
Or at least this is what Raquel explained to me, one day when we wandered out to the green. “These houses,” she said. “I could stare at them forever and not get enough. They satisfy every fantasy I’ve ever had. If I lived in one of these houses, the dream of my life would end and I would finally be living the real life. Because I could rest assured that I need never move again. These houses are not only built to last, but they were built to suit and meet the needs of their inhabitants. They held families together. No one could have ever guessed that they would be passed outside the family—much less sold to a stranger.”
But Raquel expressed disapproval at the presence of the old mill in Wick, about which Theo was quite curious. He wanted to see inside, he said, someday. It simply didn’t fit into her notion of what our small town should be. It was, indeed, the only remaining shred of evidence that at one time Wick had held a promise of industry and economy. It was the ghost of our utility; at one time, there was a reason to move here, and many people did. There would have been nothing odd about such a decision, back then.
21.
I
told Theo and Raquel to come have breakfast that Saturday, down at the Top Hat. I thought it would be fun for all of us, to see one another back there, where we first met, but now with all that we shared between us. Like clandestine lovers greeting each other in an Elizabethan drawing room, I would serve them with teasing formality, dipping the coffeepot down over their half-empty cups like a mother bird, slinging food on their table like a discus thrower.
told Theo and Raquel to come have breakfast that Saturday, down at the Top Hat. I thought it would be fun for all of us, to see one another back there, where we first met, but now with all that we shared between us. Like clandestine lovers greeting each other in an Elizabethan drawing room, I would serve them with teasing formality, dipping the coffeepot down over their half-empty cups like a mother bird, slinging food on their table like a discus thrower.
I hadn’t given a thought, though, to our potential observers: Who would be there to see us? I had grown so used to the mobile bubble that seemed to hold us, to enclose us, and to shield us, that somehow I had envisioned the Top Hat, and us in it together, as though it were a movie set, cleared for a nude scene at the modest actress’s demand.
Therefore I grew nervous as I waited for them that morning, and waited, eyes fidgeting on the door and on the street outside the window, anticipating and reanticipating their arrival. Raquel would appear first, in the corner of the window, her long bare arm swinging into view; then Theo stretching along the sidewalk in her shadow. I acquired an acute awareness of those customers who would witness their entry, to whom I had previously given no thought at all. There would certainly be other customers at the café, and they would indeed take notice of the Motherwells—after all it was a small town, and people talked. Or some people did. And I began to feel a shadowy kind of doubled consciousness growing in me, a second-guessing of my own motive. Was it possible that I had invited them here exactly in order to have a witness or two, or three? Witness to what, exactly. I might have to name it.
Even under normal circumstances I would have been unusually attuned to the presence of Todd Armstrong, who sat at the counter eating a grilled corn muffin, poring over an abandoned copy of
Newsweek
. He was a boy in my class who, like me, didn’t speak much. He was tall, like me, but unlike me quite athletic. He played basketball, silently, his tunic showing off the large, fine muscles of his back and shoulders moving like levers and pulleys, chutes and pistons. Many of the boys in our class still looked generally as they had since they were small. Todd was growing manly, but doing so in a sweet way that made the result look worth the effort. His upper lip was shaded by fuzz; his pants were always a little short for him; he moved through space with a deliberation that made me think that he had suffered some dizzying growth spurts and wasn’t quite sure yet where his body ended and space began. Most important, to my mind, he liked to read, and I had seen him at the library, at one of the big tables in the center of the room, making a careful selection from a large pile of thick books. I think he preferred useful texts—I looked up from Gore Vidal’s witty memoir
Palimpsest
one deep winter afternoon and caught a glimpse of a tome in his large hands whose spine trumpeted
Complete Organic Gardening.
I thought it winsome that he could have been dreaming of planting on such a short, bitter day.
Newsweek
. He was a boy in my class who, like me, didn’t speak much. He was tall, like me, but unlike me quite athletic. He played basketball, silently, his tunic showing off the large, fine muscles of his back and shoulders moving like levers and pulleys, chutes and pistons. Many of the boys in our class still looked generally as they had since they were small. Todd was growing manly, but doing so in a sweet way that made the result look worth the effort. His upper lip was shaded by fuzz; his pants were always a little short for him; he moved through space with a deliberation that made me think that he had suffered some dizzying growth spurts and wasn’t quite sure yet where his body ended and space began. Most important, to my mind, he liked to read, and I had seen him at the library, at one of the big tables in the center of the room, making a careful selection from a large pile of thick books. I think he preferred useful texts—I looked up from Gore Vidal’s witty memoir
Palimpsest
one deep winter afternoon and caught a glimpse of a tome in his large hands whose spine trumpeted
Complete Organic Gardening.
I thought it winsome that he could have been dreaming of planting on such a short, bitter day.
Now he was eating. I stood there with Agatha Christie’s
And Then There Were None
—I always stowed a mystery at the café, should it prove a slow shift—and refilled his water glass every few minutes, just to watch him empty it, his rocky Adam’s apple chugging like another piston in his throat, as thick around as my thigh.
And Then There Were None
—I always stowed a mystery at the café, should it prove a slow shift—and refilled his water glass every few minutes, just to watch him empty it, his rocky Adam’s apple chugging like another piston in his throat, as thick around as my thigh.
He swallowed the last of the corn muffin and stood up to fish some money out of his jeans pocket. He was looking down and I almost didn’t hear him. “Whatcha been doing lately, Ginger? I haven’t seen you at the library in a while.” The thought that he might have been looking for me in that one-room sanctuary—looking for me anywhere; that he might have actually come to the Top Hat not just for our superlative corn muffin—dawned on me electrically. He looked at me and projected something that made me look away. It was a hope, and it caused his brown eyes to look wet, and open. He shifted his gaze away, too, to the clock above my head. “What time do you get off? I could walk you home.” My shift was over soon, but I couldn’t leave—Raquel and Theo might be on their way right now. I mentioned that someone was coming to see me, and saw his hopes dashed. Was it the skin around his eyes that made these various expressions, or the shape of the eyeballs themselves, or the muscles supporting them? What creates these perceptible differences in the look in someone’s eyes?
Todd turned to the street, as though to see who might have staked this claim on me, and nodded at a shape I hadn’t noticed, leaning against the glass at the far end of the window. Half a jean-jacketed form, a scraggly ponytail, a hand pressed on the steamed-up glass, a lean hip. It was Randy. A concatenation, a roaring in my ears and a piling up of variables, too much I hadn’t been able to calculate in my ambitious little plan for the morning. It was clear I was not in control of anything, and that I ought never to make a plan again. I would remain unplanned, as my conception had been, according to some hints my mother had let drop from time to time. My consciousness underwent that painful doubling, or was it splitting—a cellular type of division or like the slides of mitosis we had observed in biology class as I absorbed the situation in which I
did not know
something about myself, something that someone else did know. It was obvious he was waiting for me, Randy, and I suffered a quick revulsion—how could I have been so weak as to risk this kind of exposure? Did he know something already, or had he come to find out? I was ashamed to think that I might have dimly, self-unknowingly, like a single-celled organism, sought shelter from my friends in the gaze of this public setting. There was Randy, who owed me everything, love and death, now and forever, yet I could also plainly see, and understand, that he wanted something from me, and at the same time wanted to offer something to me. I could see it, and Todd could see it, though what he thought he saw was my fulfilled hope: my date. What he really saw in the window was a young man who wanted some answers.
did not know
something about myself, something that someone else did know. It was obvious he was waiting for me, Randy, and I suffered a quick revulsion—how could I have been so weak as to risk this kind of exposure? Did he know something already, or had he come to find out? I was ashamed to think that I might have dimly, self-unknowingly, like a single-celled organism, sought shelter from my friends in the gaze of this public setting. There was Randy, who owed me everything, love and death, now and forever, yet I could also plainly see, and understand, that he wanted something from me, and at the same time wanted to offer something to me. I could see it, and Todd could see it, though what he thought he saw was my fulfilled hope: my date. What he really saw in the window was a young man who wanted some answers.
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