The Beginners (30 page)
Authors: Rebecca Wolff
“This is just the kind of dive in which a gang rape might occur.” Raquel stood over by the lone pinball machine. As she spoke she turned her back to its blinking circuit of lights and made as if to lie back on the glass top. “I can just see Messrs. Grose, Warren, and Endicott lining up to take their turns with some hapless, stone-drunk Polish girl.”
I must admit to being a bit shocked, standing stock-still by the door, not so much at the savagery she suggested, but at the fun she poked at our town’s unspoken distinctions. She was dead-on; of course it would be one of the thick-legged, ruddy underclass that would receive such unkind treatment from our founding fathers. Just as it was those same girls, the stock from which I came, who traditionally became pregnant before their senior year and by the age of eighteen were minding the counter full-time at the doughnut shop, or the pharmacy, or collecting welfare to feed a burgeoning brood. None of that for me.
The Wick Social Club glowed enchantingly in the dark. Mirrored beer advertisements reflected the blink from the pinball machine and the serial chain of Christmas lights that was strung all around the rectangular bar. The stools were upside-down on the counter. Theo grabbed one, inverted it, straddled it.
“Anybody want a beer?” he asked, as casually as if he were the bartender, or the host at a poker game.
“Sure, I’ll have one.” Raquel matched the ease of his tone. “Just make sure it’s not ‘lite,’ okay? Anything but that. And give Ginger something good, something to whet her whistle.” She pronounced the “h”s in both words clearly, as though she were a flute.
“This is your first time inside here, isn’t it, dearie?” I nodded as I crossed over to the bar to receive my drink from Theo, where he now stood behind the counter. He seemed to know his way around the liquor stock, just as, ten minutes earlier, he had known exactly how to go about breaking the back window with a minimum of noise, shimmying through and then releasing the bolt on the heavy safety door to let the two of us in politely, like a bouncer, or a proud proprietor.
But I was lying to Raquel, with neither purpose nor intentionality, and I liked the feeling of that small wedge. I had actually been inside the Social Club once before, when one Thursday night Cherry and I were sent by Mrs. Endicott to drag her husband home for dinner. I would have been about nine years old, and delighted to have the opportunity to intrude upon this mysterious all-adult, all-male arena. I remember watching Cherry flirt precociously with her father’s friends, who chucked her chin and held her in embraces from which she laughingly struggled to be free.
I would guess that the men of Wick had found plenty of fodder for discussion since the arrival of the Motherwells. I must have said as much, sipping my drink (which was sweet but caused a shudder to run down my throat and then back up my spine, culminating in a sensation of there being more air between my ears than before), because Raquel and Theo looked at each other and laughed.
“I bet they have. I just bet they have,” Theo intoned, and Raquel laughed even harder, fairly doubling over.
“How enigmatic we are!” she cried, through her gasping, through her amusement. “What could they possibly be making of us?”
“Whatever they want, would be my guess.” Theo had pulled his stool up to the bar and he sat, facing the room, leaning back, elbows propped on the bar and beer in one hand. He looked unusually lean and tall tonight in the black clothing he had donned for our escapade. Raquel wore black as well, head to toe, and I, too, wore dark things borrowed from their drawers and closets. I felt lighthearted. The ice in my drink clicked against my teeth as I drained the glass. Raquel took it out of my hand and went behind the bar where she lifted bottles and tilted them, then shot a stream of something carbonated from what looked to me like a dentist’s instrument, or a bike pump, or a magic wand.
“You know, you two. Our life here is just like an old horror movie. It’s like the skeleton of the horror novel hanging in the closet with all the suits and dresses that we never wear. Young couple moves to small New England town. House drafty, locals suspicious. Strange rituals, omens of doom. Unreliable narrator. Cows lowing in the fields, arcane pagan religious festivals. The young wife is pregnant! What will be the outcome? Is her unborn the spawn of some bucolic, hood-wearing, agriculturally based, economically depressed demon? Or will light triumph over darkness and the couple escape out the other end of town, back onto the interstate, leaving behind dark clouds and other such symbols, remarkably unscathed? You know how those movies always end, though.” Raquel tossed her hair in the half-light, gripping her drink. Her elbows on the bar shone whitely.
“Just when you think it’s all over, everything back to normal, battles fought and won, there’s some indication, some, I don’t know, mark of the devil or glowing red eyes in the window or in the baby carriage, or new young couple, for that matter, to take the place of the old young couple, and to let you, the reader, know that in fact ‘good’ is perpetually at risk, and that the trials of Satan are everlasting, and that his minions walk the earth in human form untiringly, doing his work. Finding your weakness, entering your bloodstream, your workforce, your workplace, your interpersonal relationship, your bedroom, your sanctuary, your vision, your sleep, your rest, your dream; your death.” Her low voice had such resonance in the dusty barroom, but still I was dubious. Through the increasingly glamorous haze of my first true buzz it didn’t seem at all possible to me that there could ever come a new young couple who could take the place of the ones I had already found. And who had found me.
“You’ve thought this all through quite carefully, then.” There was only a hint of sarcasm in Theo’s voice.
“Is there anything I don’t think through carefully, my darling. Have another?” She opened two beers and passed one to him. They drank deeply.
“I am no different from the good fictional people of Wick in this one respect: I make of everything what I want. I make of this town a reluctant haven; I make of you a recalcitrant soul mate; I make of this hellhole”—indicating the room with a sweep of her arm—“a playground for our antisocial tendencies. Get it?” She laughed. “Antisocial at the Social Club. If we can’t be a part of it, then let’s defame it and be the spoilers of it. . . . What do you say? At least in this way we will know, as will they, undoubtedly, that we were really here. Like Kilroy, whoever the hell that was.” She picked up an empty bottle off the bar and, holding it by its neck, swung it at the unlit overhead light, whose stained-glass shade said Löwenbräu in big gothic German-style letters. The first blow sent glass flying in many directions. I instinctively took cover under my arm. I listened for a moment to the relative silence, then looked up just in time to see Theo pick up a bar stool and swing it at the disco ball that hung above the small dance floor. Tiny hexagons of mirror sprayed over the room. The ball still hung, less reflective now, and he took another swing at it, then moved on, picking up momentum, using the stool for a blunt instrument, smashing bottles and windows and glasses. Raquel stood, watching, unmoving, like the catalyst she was. When he headed for the pinball machine she said, “Wait,” and picking up a stool, walked over to where I stood, my drink clutched in my two hands like a chalice full of the blood of a sacrificed maiden. She offered me the stool with one hand while she removed the drink from me with the other, a fair trade.
“Don’t you want to?” she asked me, as though she was urging me to try on an article of clothing at a shop, or to buy that same well-fitting article of clothing. My hands were listening to my brain and so they came up and grasped the metal stool by its vinyl-covered seat. I took a swing, grunting as I did. I had never used such force before against anything, living or inanimate. It felt like I had a different body, one thrashing, insisting, encountering resistance but with repeated efforts overcoming that opposition. The Plexiglas was thick but I broke through. The lights of the game eventually went out, amid a jangling of small bells.
“This is what it’s like to do what you want,” either Raquel or Theo, I couldn’t tell which, whispered into my ear as they took the stool out of my hands and, acting as one, led me through the newly complete darkness, out the door, and to the parking lot. We got into Theo’s car in silence, listening to the hum and banging of the Club’s big generator in its shed at the edge of the parking lot, where it bordered abruptly on deep woods.
SOMEONE WAS BEHIND US on the dark road. It was hard to tell how far behind because the vehicle in question had its lights off, was driving through the dark with only our taillights to guide it. Craning around in the backseat, I could just make out our red and yellow reflections off their chrome. As we drove down a slight incline on the Old Road and turned off onto the loop road, I saw the silhouette of what looked like a two-humped camel—a helmeted rider?—flash against the side of the big old barn at the corner.
We parked in one of the makeshift spaces along the road and Theo killed the engine. “Let’s go swimming,” he said. “I bet the water’s warmer than the air. Perfect for a midnight dip.”
“That sounds grand. Just what I need. Last one in is a rotten egg. . . .” Raquel banged her door open and threw herself out of the car, disappearing fast into the darkness of the path to the water. The interior light remained on as her door remained open, and I wished she had closed it. It threw everything into too-sharp relief. Whoever had followed us—and reader, so help me, I thought I knew—could watch us in the car like turtles in a terrarium. A ghost rider. The ghost of a vandal. The ghost of a visitor. My true protector, steadfast and substantiated.
Theo watched Raquel go, then twisted around in his seat to give me a look. I imagined it, in the shadow-strewn interior of the car, to be one of fond amusement. Left over from his last look at her.
Then his warm hand found its way to mine where it rested on my knee. “You can take care of yourself, can’t you, Ginger?” he said, and tilted his head at me as one would tilt a blade, to maximize the impact of its cutting edge. “You’ll never do anything you don’t want to do. I really appreciate that in you. It’s a rare quality. Not everyone is as strong as you are, and the more you remember that, the more you can take care of yourself.”
I was not at all certain that what he said was true, but he overrode any tentative stabs at self-knowledge I might have made, my dull-edged rapier. I could feel myself believing him regardless, absorbing his conviction, granting his words a kind of amnesty. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that I would be exposed in this way. To have someone tell you something about yourself—something they’ve noticed, notated, interpreted, concluded—whether it is true or not, whether you agree with it or not, whether you understand it or not, is like being fucked. An entry into your person—an opportunity seized, sometimes by force—a rolling over on top. It presses, it commands. It, in certain extreme circumstances, violates. I remember Mr. Penrose telling me, when I was a little girl sitting at his counter, sipping my shake through a straw that bent cleverly to meet my lips, that I was a smart girl, and that a smart girl like me wouldn’t need to work too hard to make it in life. That good things would come to me. “Just you wait and see. And when they do, I want you to come on into the café and say ‘Hey, Mr. Penrose, you were right!’ And I’ll still be here, serving you a milkshake.” I remember very well the sense of involution that accompanied me out of the café that day: What did it mean that he could just look at me and see these things about me? See my future? I was not hiding myself well enough—I was not protecting myself from the clouds of vision, the collections of impressions that might form around me. They would know me! I needed to deflect them, I concluded, and to do so I would require some kind of spell. A cloak of invisibility. I would see if Cherry and I couldn’t find one in the green book at the library.
But our spell had failed. I remember Mr. Endicott barging into the bathroom at their house one bright morning, just as I was rising off the toilet seat to pull up my underwear and pants. I was twelve. I had forgotten to lock the door. “Oh Ginger, I’m sorry,” he said, and then laughed heartily as he backed out of the room: “I guess you’re a true redhead, aren’t you!” I could hear him laughing his way down the hall. And then, although we were often seated across from each other at the dining room table, over plates of meat and potatoes and salad, he never looked at me again.
THEO PATTED MY HAND, there in the car, then paused a moment to stroke it, then a moment longer to take it up in his own and bring it toward his lips. I let my hand travel in his, hardly able to feel it. All the months I had waited and watched him, so closely, wanting a delicate, intentional touch like this one, something to answer the sympathy I felt with him, came back to me as I froze—and watched him slide his tongue between my index and middle fingers. This was something closer to a kiss but falling still far short. He dropped my hand and looked up at me; my expression was, I hoped, one of tremulous appreciation, though it felt more like embarrassment, or worry, and I held it while he opened his door and slid out of the car. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked.
This informal invitation—I must rise to meet it, as I had been rising and rising, all summer long. Down the dark path, and onto the beach. A half-moon had risen also, and hung above the reservoir, throwing its light uselessly onto the nonreflective mist that was draped like a shroud over the surface of the water. Fifty feet out from the shore I saw Raquel’s head like a mountaintop poking up through low clouds—“Hey, it’s really nice,” she called; “you should come in!”—and then Theo had stripped off his clothes and run the first few paces, and dove. The drops that splashed up and hit me where I stood, my back to the dark trees, shoulders hunched in the frosty air, did indeed feel warmer by comparison.
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