The Beginners Read Free

when she caught sight of our reflection. “Look at how scrawny you are, Ginger,” she said, and her arm slid around my waist and held me. I examined instead the wallpaper, which looked very old and was patterned with small bouquets of cornflowers, realistically represented, against an unrealistic ivory ground.
    “It’s possible you haven’t hit the full flush of puberty yet, but more likely this is just the way you are. Stringbean, willowy, all those words that mean you’ll never have to go through the anguish us more ‘womanly’ women do.” She held her fingers up and wriggled them, to indicate quotation marks. I caught myself staring at the rounds of her breasts beneath her T-shirt.
    We stood still before the mirror and I watched her grow uncomfortable in a split second of silence. She was trying to think of something to say, already. For Raquel there was no continuity, from utterance to utterance, story to history. The currency in which we traded, in Wick. So she filled in the blank with awkward chatter. “When you stand before a mirror with someone you must see yourself together, and decide how it feels. You must acknowledge that you stand in some relation to each other: tailor to customer, sister to brother, mother to the bride, or two naked people who have fornicated and now must look again, harder this time, at their partner, in the upright position. It is meant to be an emotional moment, usually: tearful mother smooths bride’s hair; lovers’ eyes fuse with renewed desire and they return to bed.” She laughed at herself, and we turned away from the image of our own fusion.
     
     
    AT HOME THAT NIGHT I went up to my room and sat down to begin my homework and to wait for my mother to call us to the table, my father from his chair in front of the television, where he watched the nightly news and dozed. I never found that I had much to say to my father, but I knew the things he would like for me to say. He seemed perfect to me, or at least complete, unassailable. I knew he loved me. I could feel it emanating at short range from his armchair, from his place at the dinner table or the kitchen counter, and even sometimes from his cluttered work space at the print shop, where he laid out a flyer for a sale at the shoe store.
    I heard my mother’s call from downstairs. We had lamb chops that night, and so I know we also had small green peas and mashed potatoes and mint jelly. Frozen peas, reconstituted potatoes from a box, jelly from a vacuum-sealed jar; these are the ends by which we come by our means. What more can we ask? My mother hated to cook—“didn’t care about food”; “would just as soon have gone without”—though she never said this out loud, only muttered it under her breath as she stripped the yellow fat from raw chicken breasts, or sliced a bitter cucumber expertly against her pink thumb into the salad bowl. I am grateful that she saw the necessity of feeding her growing daughter as long as she did.
     
     
    AFTER DINNER I had difficulty concentrating on my homework. There was a French exam to study for, a short essay to finish for my English class, and a final project for History, but none of it coalesced in my mind in the way that it must if I were to attend to it. I thought about calling Cherry, which I did most nights, and sometimes simply to distract myself from more tedious tasks, but I had a strange feeling, an unusually wordless, spatial feeling, that what I really wanted to do was to stay even more alone than usual, not to extend myself at all. Not to write a word or to say a word, not to move even, not to disturb the silence of my little room, with the desk lamp throwing a small bright circle on notebooks and assignment sheets, and all else dim in the dusky blue shadow finding its way through my curtained windows. Spring was dying a winsome death outside. Crickets rubbed their legs together in the yard, and someone’s dog barked down the road. It all felt static, and I felt