The Beginners (27 page)
Authors: 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.
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
R
aquel 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.
aquel 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 go 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.
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