The Used World Page 11

  Rebekah got out of the car and walked toward the wide back porch. She navigated the icy steps and scuffed her boots on the welcome mat. The pale yellow curtains on the kitchen door were drawn open and tied. She knocked. Only strangers used the formal front door. No one came. She knocked again, saw Peter’s mother approach from the living room and look around the curtain.

  Kathy opened the door. “Rebekah! How nice to see you, come in out of this cold.” She was wearing a pair of cream-colored slacks and a dark brown sweater. Her sleek ash blond hair was perfectly cut to accentuate the eyes she’d passed along to her son.

  “Hi, Mrs. Mitchell. I was in the neighborhood…”

  “What’s this ‘Mrs. Mitchell’? We settled that a long time ago. Come in, come in.” Kathy’s face relaxed into a smile. “Well, it’s quite a winter so far, isn’t it?”

  Rebekah walked into the warm kitchen, and was again taken by surprise. How could she have forgotten this smell, the apple-cinnamon potpourri Kathy kept on the stove, mixed with years of dinners and laundry? Or the magnets on the refrigerator proclaiming the “Footprints” poem, and I ASKED JESUS HOW MUCH HE LOVED ME, AND HE STRETCHED HIS ARMS OUT AND SAID THIS MUCH. “It’s—I’m glad to be in this room again,” Rebekah said, smiling at Kathy.

  “Kath?” Pete Senior called, walking in from the living room. “Who was it?” He walked into the kitchen and saw Rebekah just as he finished the question.

  “Rebekah was in the neighborhood,” Kathy said to her husband.

  “Ah. How are you, Bekah?” Pete asked, then simply stood there. Peter had his father’s dark curly hair and his build, although Pete had thickened as he aged. He looked as if he’d never had his son’s slightness, or look of whimsy.

  “I’m good, thank you.” No one asked her to sit down, even though there was the table and there were the benches where she’d had so many dinners. She knew where the dishes were kept, and that Kathy’s spices were alphabetized not in a cabinet, but in a drawer built just for the purpose. “How have the two of you been?”

  Kathy gave her a slight smile. “We’ve been fine. Fine. Are you—on your way somewhere? Have a big day ahead?”

  “I—” Rebekah realized the room was hot, the smell of the potpourri overwhelming. She needed to sit down. “Can I sit down?”

  Kathy gestured to the nearest bench. “Of course, I’m so sorry! How rude of me.” She didn’t join Rebekah there, and Pete didn’t, either.

  “I wonder if you know where Peter is?”

  “Well”—Kathy blinked, glanced at Pete—“I do, as it happens.”

  Rebekah swallowed, tried not to breathe too deeply. “I need to talk to him about something.”

  “I see.” Kathy looked down, turned the thin gold watch on her right wrist. “I wish I knew what to say.”

  The kitchen was too hot; the perfumed air left a chemical aftertaste in the back of Rebekah’s throat. She unzipped her coat and pulled at the scarf around her neck. “Will you just—will you tell me where I can find him?”

  Kathy placed the palm of her hand on her chest, a delicate gesture of consternation Rebekah had seen her make before. “It’s not my place to—”

  “I thought, Kathy—I thought you liked me.”

  “I do,” Kathy said, sitting down next to Rebekah, “we do, very much.” She took a deep breath, said, “We were delighted to welcome you as long as you were dating, but we felt it best to—you know—before you got too serious…”

  “What are you saying?” Rebekah looked at Pete Senior. “What is she saying?”

  “I’m only”—Kathy held out her hands as if to grasp Rebekah’s own, but didn’t—“I’m just trying to be honest. Peter is young, he has so much potential. He’s going to be touring around the country starting…well, soon, playing his guitar in coffeehouses, seeing the sights. It’s the wrong time for him to be tied down in a relationship. He needs room to grow.”

  “Maybe he should get a job,” Rebekah pointed out, her face flushed, hands trembling. “You bought his truck, you pay his rent and give him spending money. I paid for our dates for seven months, seven months of believing we were committed to each other, and he abandoned me without a word for a twenty-year-old? And somehow I’m not good enough for him? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, no, of course not,” Kathy said, dropping her hands. “But Mandy comes from a very good family. They live on Geist Reservoir outside Indianapolis.”

  “I see.” Rebekah’s voice was barely above a whisper.

  “Her father works for Boeing, she…” Kathy looked at her husband for support, but Pete Senior continued to stare at the kitchen floor. “Mandy’s studying business. She’s in a sorority.”

  “And how, forgive me for asking this, Kathy, how do you think her family is going to feel about your son and his prospects? How do you think they’ll feel about a man who intends to travel around the country on someone else’s money, playing his guitar in coffeehouses?”

  Kathy leaned away from Rebekah. “Well, I guess they’ll feel fine about it, as Peter has gone away for the weekend with them, skiing in Michigan.”

  Sweat trickled down Rebekah’s back, and her stomach fluttered. She was aware, again, of the cloying smell coming from the stove, the way it was mixing with Kathy’s department store cologne. “I hope,” Rebekah said, standing up too quickly, “that Mandy is still able to ski after Peter gets her pregnant.”

  Rebekah slammed the kitchen door behind her, slammed the porch door, too. She kicked the glider just to see the snow fall from it, and when she got into her car, she nearly pulled the door closed on her own foot. She’d never been the one in her family to lose her temper; hadn’t yelled at her girl cousins, or thrown things; had never understood, really, what compelled other people to such misbehavior. She understood now. Even though her heart was pounding and she thought she might have to eventually stop and throw up, she was glad she’d come. Her mind felt clearer than it had in weeks. Kathy and Pete hadn’t been her replacement family after all, and she would never miss them again.

  Claudia left church and drove home to change her clothes, knowing full well that whatever awaited her would be distasteful at best. During the drive to Hazel’s house, she considered worst-case scenarios, and the list was long and terrifying: (a) Hazel had decided to exhume a corpse; (b) one of Hazel’s cats was dead in the crawl space, and Claudia had to go in face-first, and claim it; (c) Hazel had taken up some form of Spiritual Farm Dancing; (d) she was going to trick Claudia into participating in a Carhartt fashion show.

  Sycamore State University lay on the east side of the Planck River, whose sluggish current now struggled under a thin layer of ice. Claudia didn’t know if it was the case with all universities, but this one had, with slow assurance, spread itself out over half of Jonah, after beginning as a discrete entity in the 1920s: a teacher’s college for young women. Sycamore now boasted an enrollment of eighteen thousand undergraduates, a respectable college of architecture, a competitive nursing program, and a MAC-Conference champion basketball team. The main campus occupied a thousand acres, with satellite buildings radiating out like spokes on a wheel. The nicest neighborhoods in Jonah were those where the faculty and administration lived—a dozen streets lined with restored Queen Annes and modest Victorians.

  Students took up the ugliest neighborhoods east of the river, and most of these houses were so wretched one would have thought they were inhabited by bands of wild, orphaned seven-year-olds. In the summer the yards were littered with broken-down chairs and inflatable baby pools where men in their twenties sunned themselves, drunk and half naked. In winter the streets and lawns were garbage strewn, and snowdrifts at the curb were streaked with yellow, evidence that those same men had learned to write in cursive. No area of the county made Claudia more uncomfortable, or more aware that something cataclysmic had occurred between Ludie’s generation and the one currently in residence at Sycamore State. Bertram had begun working for a Farm Bureau office at sixteen; by twenty he was ma
rried and writing his own accounts. At twenty-five he opened his own branch. Now, it seemed, no one need ever grow up.

  Claudia drove down the main university thoroughfare, which was lined with bars, Laundromat/billiard combinations, pizza parlors, and, in a stroke of ironic brilliance, a shop that sold surf-themed clothing. She had been expected to grow up, hadn’t she? So she hadn’t been encouraged to go to college or get a job out of high school; that was because her parents were worried about her, they wanted what was best for her. She helped her mother in the house and garden, she helped Bertram with his taxes each spring. In May of every year they moved the furniture out of his office on a weekend and repainted. Claudia was proficient at most kinds of home repair—she had even helped a local man repair the tuck pointing on the chimney of her parents’ house. So it wasn’t as if she was useless to her parents.

  She turned on Glen Street toward Hazel’s. Nearly every porch for the next three blocks contained furniture otherwise designated as “indoor.” The exception was the omnipresent Weber grill, set up on wooden porches, inches from wood-framed houses. Claudia sighed, shook her head. What was she supposed to have done, especially after Bertram died? She couldn’t have left her mother, and Millie had already married Larry. What a terrible year that had been—she could hardly think of it, even now. No one knew, or at least she hoped no one knew, that ten years ago when the Home Depot had gone in out on the highway, Claudia had applied for a job there. It was the first thing she’d ever really wanted, that job. The store manager was someone she’d graduated high school with, a man named Clarence Yoder, and she’d applied and waited and never heard from him. So she’d gone to see him, and was shocked to discover that at thirty he still resembled Sonny Bono, that no kindhearted woman had told him he had to cut his hair. Clarence had said there wasn’t anything open but he’d keep her in mind. She was good, she’d told him, with her hands, and she would memorize the store faster than anyone. She’d said things she hadn’t intended to say, like how she assumed a man in his position surely would have the integrity not to treat her as she’d been treated in high school. Clarence had blinked at her over the mustache that threatened to take over his face, said nothing. Claudia had even opened her mouth to say that Clarence hadn’t been so loved himself in high school, had he, given that his nickname was Fifi and not because his parents were French. There was a rumor that Clarence had been caught having sex with his poodle, and the rumor was passed down to every incoming freshman class. When Millie came home as a freshman and asked Claudia if she’d heard the rumor, Claudia knew Fifi was doomed, and would do well to leave the state.

  She didn’t mention it, that day in his office, and it wouldn’t have done any good anyway, she was certain of it now. Because he didn’t call, and over the years he had hired hundreds of people in her stead, idiots and rude people and teenagers. When Lowe’s opened across the highway, Claudia just started shopping there instead.

  Hazel’s house was a two-story cottage built in the 1930s. Only the lack of recreational furniture separated it from the student rentals surrounding it. Every few years she had a student crew repaint it an indifferent shade of yellow. She did not have a garden in the summer; she didn’t put in flowers in the spring. A boy cut the grass of her small lawn and Hazel called it a day. Rebekah had asked Hazel once how she could stand to live there, how she could endure the parties and the traffic and the general histrionics of college students. Hazel thought about it and said, “I like the noise, actually. I like seeing people around. Far worse for me would be someplace like Montana.” She shuddered. “I prefer car stereos and exhaust fumes.”

  Claudia parked behind Hazel’s six-year-old Jetta, turned off her Jeep. She took a deep breath, dreading Hazel’s fresh surprise, stepped into the street. A college student, a young man wearing a knit cap advertising his attachment to the Patriots, came around the corner, walking a young shepherd mix on a length of rope. There were bags under the man’s eyes and his skin was faintly green, as if he were up far earlier than he intended. The dog bounced around on the end of the rope, slid, fell into a snowdrift, bounced out again. Claudia made brief, reluctant eye contact with the student.

  “Hey,” he said, a quick verbal gesture.

  “Hey,” Claudia said.

  The student stopped in his tracks but the dog kept going a few feet, nearly pulling them both into a parked car on the other side of the street. “Duuuuuuude!” the young man said, looking squarely at Claudia. “Are you a girl?”

  Claudia stopped, braced herself. “Yes,” she said, nodding slightly.

  The Patriot looked her up and down. “That’s cool,” he said, walking away.

  Hazel’s street was icy; Claudia took careful steps between the cars and up onto the sidewalk. “Yeah, right,” she muttered, “it’s cool.”

  Rebekah remembered walking out of the cemetery after her mother’s funeral—it had been a cold April 17—and while everyone around her wept, they also took consolation in the belief that Ruth had become one with Jesus, that she was sitting at His right hand, His bride. But Rebekah knew long past argument that she’d seen the last of Ruth Harrison Shook; her light had gone out. She had vanished. Pastor Lowell, if she’d ever consulted him, would have called what felled Rebekah grief, and she had most assuredly grieved. She continued to. But she also was simply changed. Her mother’s death changed her, as it was meant to, and while it took almost five years for Rebekah to finally leave the Mission, she began the process of leaving when she walked out of the Sycamore Grove Cemetery, and slid, her knees pressed together, into the slick backseat of Martin Peacock’s family car.

  Now her sewing machine and basket, along with three storage containers filled with fabric, took up most of the trunk of her Buick. Her family hadn’t bothered with many photographs, but there was one album and Rebekah wanted it. She took her mother’s Bible, with its battered leather cover and Ruth’s name stamped in gold. The pink flannel robe Ruth died in, and which Rebekah had washed by hand and sealed in a wedding dress box; the lamp that had stood on Rebekah’s nursery table; a flour sifter just beginning to rust—she took things Vernon would never notice were missing, and in this way filled every square inch of the Buick, leaving just enough room for her to drive.

  When the car was loaded and the Sunday sun had tipped from its zenith, she wandered around the upstairs, all through the warm, tight rooms on the bottom floor, touching the walls, the furniture, the pots and pans. She was about to see the end of the Great Experiment, the trick of taking a notion—that of a dead and resurrected man—and turning Him into the stuff of daily life, the meat and breath and will of human existence. Everything lovely and kind, every stroke of luck, every moment they lived while others died, had been His work. And every toothache and untimely rain, every fall from grace or patience, had signified His absence, their failure to perceive Him standing there before them, where nothing stood. She was about to see the end of Him, and the end, too, of Vernon Shook and all her family and the whole of her past, and she felt lucky that she’d been given so much warning. There were mudslides, after all, and avalanches, and every manner of misfortune that permits you not a second of preparation before your bones break. Afterward kind people in uniforms pull you from the wreckage and tell you, gently and with hesitation, that you have lost everything you knew and loved and imagined permanent, and that hadn’t happened to Rebekah. As she walked across the porch, the steps and sidewalk her father had long since cleared of snow and ice, she felt she was leaving, again, the Sycamore Grove Cemetery. She felt the same wonder and grim weightlessness. She drove to Hazel’s.

  Even though her car was there, Hazel wasn’t home. Rebekah had the sensation that she had been afflicted with a neurological condition, one that caused her to drive past empty houses, disbelieving, then to turn around and drive past again. A sad, demented repetition. She drove out to the retirement community, Cambridge Village, where Hazel’s mother, Caroline Hunnicutt, lived, but she didn’t go in; she wasn’t sure what she would
say. Rebekah stopped, tried to imagine where else Hazel could be. Her sister, Edie, was still in jail, and even when she wasn’t, she was homeless, Rebekah thought. Who were Hazel’s friends? Rebekah realized with a slight shock that she had no idea; Hazel never talked about anyone outside work except her family. Wasn’t that odd? Rebekah drummed her fingers on her steering wheel, stared at Caroline Hunnicutt’s front door without really seeing it. Who were her friends, for that matter? Hazel, certainly. Claudia, maybe. Claudia didn’t like her much, that was Rebekah’s guess, and why should she? Almost the entire year they’d worked together Rebekah had done nothing but moon over Peter, which—even though she was still doing it—she recognized as tedious.

  She drove out of the Cambridge Village parking lot, unsure where she should go. How different life would be, she thought, if she had the church, her girl cousins, the ring of history they represented. Their pale, plain hands were as recognizable to her as her own; the varying shades of auburn of their hair. Susannah was afflicted with eczema in the winter, and this weather was probably bothering her. Elizabeth had a mole just to the left of her upper lip. Right now the girls would be leaving church, heading home to make lunch. They would meet together in the early afternoon for quilting, and to share church gossip…. Rebekah stopped at a stop sign and didn’t move. They weren’t girls anymore, and she didn’t know them. They were all married now and probably had children, and their world had become so unbearable to Rebekah she had traded everything to leave it.