The Used World Read online

  “Would you like to take a walk?” Jim’s cheeks and lips were flushed. “It’s cold, but dry and no wind.”

  They walked down the straight flat lane toward the road, rather than around the barn and down into the meadow. He was right about the weather, and Hazel pulled her chin down into her coat with pleasure. She slipped her arm through Jim’s and rested her mitten against his coat.

  “My dad got me on at the Chrysler,” Jim said, looking at the vanishing point of the locust trees.

  Hazel stopped, turned toward him. “What? When?”

  “He found out today. It’s”—Jim rubbed his forehead through his wool hat—“it’s the best thing that could have happened.”

  “How can you say that? Good God, why didn’t you…”

  “Why didn’t I what? Wait for something?”

  “Yes! Wait for something would have been better by far.”

  Jim pulled against her and they began walking again. “I’ve worked for Malcolm for four years now, Hazel, trying to save up to go to school, but it’s no good. And one by one all of his other hands have taken better jobs. Red and Slim are both already on the line at Chrysler, getting overtime, too. I’m the only one left and Malcolm doesn’t need me full-time anyway.” He took a deep breath, blew it out in a cloud. “He’s cut back a lot. I think he only kept me on because he felt sorry for me.”

  Hazel pictured the house where Jim Hank lived with his dad, Coy Bellamy, too close to the railroad tracks and nearly up against the grain elevator. The place was small and dejected; the oilcloth curtains at the kitchen window were laced with a decade of dust and cobwebs. The inside smelled of kerosene and boiled dinners, and even though Jim kept it neat, no one had actually cleaned it since his mother died ten years before. And Coy himself was best not considered. “Malcolm doesn’t feel sorry for you.”

  “If you say so.” Jim tried to blow a smoke ring from the frigid air, but it didn’t work. They were midway down the lane and he stopped, letting Hazel’s arm fall. He turned and looked at the line of locusts, at the low stone walls that ran along the sides of the lane, built by four Italian immigrants who got off at the wrong train stop twenty years before and never made their way farther west. The wall had been intended to prevent the lane from drifting closed, and it nearly worked. Jim’s eyes took it all in, and he looked, too, at the house, which appeared, with all the lights burning, to be a ship in the distance. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes.” Hazel put her mittened hands in her pocket.

  “Do you think this place is haunted?”

  Hazel took a breath, glanced at the house, the barn, the closed county road running down to the meadow. “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “I think it is haunted, but in the future.”

  Jim tilted his head, gave her a slight smile. “You’ll have to clarify your answer for the judges.”

  She scuffed the toe of her snow boot at the hard-packed dirt and gravel of the lane, thought about what she meant. The house, the outbuildings, had been born as surely as anything else. They weren’t fluid like the land, the tumbling stones in the Planck River. The assemblage of property was under the influence of its genesis, just as Hazel was, as Jim Hank was. “One afternoon,” she said, “in the summer, I was walking right here, on my way to pick up the mail, and—it’s hard to describe, but the light was very strange, and I stopped and held my arms out and I felt this…is there a collective noun for…a mutiny of spirits, let’s say. It was all around me, like the air was thick with it, and…” She stopped, unable to say the rest. She had seen, in flashes, a woman in a white nightgown crawling across a bed like a cat. She’d seen a man standing in the corner of her nursery, wearing a dark suit and turning the handle of an eggbeater, colors spinning out of it and filling the room. She had seen a year, if one can witness such a thing, when many animals would die; there would be raccoons and possums lying fetal at the bank of the river, and one white cat hanging dead from a rafter in the barn.

  “And?”

  “And”—Hazel reached out for Jim’s arm again and they continued walking—“I realized that what is true of every place is true of this place. What has already happened is nothing compared to what will.”

  They walked in silence until they reached the end of the lane, and Jim Hank gestured for them to sit down on the low wall.

  “Does it make you angry,” Hazel asked, “that you work for her father and you might never get to go to college, and Finney gave up that scholarship?”

  Jim blew out through his lips, a chuffing sound like a horse, or a tiger. “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “I’m not angry that she gave up the scholarship, or that I didn’t get one, nothing like that. I feel like if Coy Bellamy is your dad, the DAR isn’t going to be lining up to pay your way to school.” Jim reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. “But that she gave it up for…I started to say love. That’s what she says, isn’t it? I can hardly stand it that she gave it up for him.”

  “Ha.” Hazel’s laugh carried no mirth. “She gave it up for him. And now she’s working at Sterling’s as a shopgirl, watching the door on the off chance he’ll come in. That he’ll call. Which he doesn’t, by the way, not very often.”

  Jim turned to her, took her hand. “Would you say, Contestant Number One, that Miss Finney is haunted?”

  “Oh.” Hazel flinched, pressed her other hand against her forehead. “I would say…”

  “She will be?”

  “No. I would say that we are.”

  They looked at the sky, the deepening night. Jim Hank offered Hazel his handkerchief and she touched her nose, watery from the winter air, with it.

  “You’ll not change your mind,” he asked, but it wasn’t a question.

  She turned to him. In the light of the moon she was prepared to appreciate him as more than what he was, which was less than what she wanted. The bones of his face cast their own shadows, and she admired him, admired the way he let her look at him so openly. It had not always been so between the two of them, who had grown up together, and from two different worlds. “Tell me how to change my mind,” she said, with anguished sincerity.

  Jim took his handkerchief back, wiped his own nose with it. “If I knew that,” he said, “I’d have given up on you a long time ago.”

  They didn’t talk on the walk back to the house; nothing had been started and nothing had been finished. When they reached the parlor they smelled the cider from the kitchen, and from upstairs a thin ribbon of Nag Champa, the incense that in the years to come would permeate Edna’s walls as the dancing circus ponies faded.

  With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. Rebekah finished the last lines of the novel and put her head down on the table, praying she wouldn’t make more of a fool of herself than she already had, weeping silently through the last two chapters. She didn’t know why every book Hazel gave her made her cry so. When, two months ago, she finished The Member of the Wedding, she’d told Hazel it had made her suicidal.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Hazel had said.

  “No, in the good way.”

  “Ah, wanting to die in the good way. I feel better.”

  On the cover of To the Lighthouse a woman, mostly in shadow, looked out a dark window at the sea. Other people, Rebekah was convinced, could read this book without weeping because they were…she didn’t know what. Culturally inoculated, maybe. No one said to them that the world itself was a lie and a prison, and the only thing worth imagining was the blight of Golgotha, the carcass on the cross. One sob escaped Rebekah, a sharp intake of air, and she made herself think about something other than Mrs. Ramsay and Virginia Woolf. There were dishes all around her folded arms—the dirty plates from her early dinner—and an empty coffee cup, an empty coffeepot. The after-Sunday-evening-services crowd had come and
gone from Richard’s Diner and there was still no answer at Hazel’s house. Rebekah had called her at least a dozen times from the pay phone just inside the front door. God only knew what the waitresses thought she was up to. They’d let her sit at a table undisturbed for almost four hours. She’d eaten two meals, gone through at least half a gallon of decaf. She’d had two glasses of milk, an orange juice, and had gone to the bathroom upwards of twenty-five times. No one asked her how long she was going to be or if they needed to call her social worker. Why hadn’t she befriended these women before now? Rebekah wondered. She’d been coming in for lunch for years; she’d been polite, the waitresses were polite to her. Once in a while she’d ask about someone’s children, or if Wanda was over the flu, but mostly she kept to herself. If she’d only been different, if she’d been open to them, she could have asked any one of these women for a place to spend the night and they’d have invited her home, she was sure of it.

  Rebekah had counted on Hazel; she had assumed Hazel, and now—there was no way to disguise it—Rebekah was homeless. She was amazed at how blithe she had always been about such things as homelessness, what happened to people when their mistakes and bumbling caught up with them and they were cast into exile. One paycheck away, it was a phrase she’d heard on the news any number of times, and while she had recognized that it applied to her in some way, it didn’t apply to her at all. Because her life wasn’t predicated on any paycheck, not ever before.

  She raised her head, wiped her face with a napkin. In the five years she’d been working she’d spent very little money, so she could go to a motel if she needed to. It was the idea of a motel that scared her; the one nearest the store, for instance, rented rooms by the hour and there was often furniture floating in the pool. And it would have been another first, staying in a motel alone, as a thousand things had been and continued to be, and she didn’t want to do it. She wanted to go home, wherever that was.

  There were two men in the booth in front of Rebekah’s. She had been so consumed with first the novel and then her own problems that she’d been able to block out their conversation for the last forty minutes, but now it began to filter in. The man facing her was in his forties; he was wearing a blue seed cap advertising Monsanto. His skin was sun damaged and his eyes were pale. She tried not to look too closely at him, afraid he’d mistake her curiosity for a different kind of interest. The man facing him was also wearing a seed cap; his was red faded almost to pink. He seemed a normal size, at least from behind, but there were two folds in the back of his neck that made Rebekah’s stomach flutter.

  “D’jew hear what them granolas is up to over at the college?” Blue Seed Cap asked his friend.

  Red Seed Cap sighed, as if his life were one long chain of grievances, each link a shenanigan committed by someone over at the college. “Naw. What this time?”

  “They’re picketing at the Wal-Mart. Jeannie seen ’em when she was there today. They’re saying Wal-Mart and Meijer and all them stores out on the highway has killed the downtown.”

  “Jonah has a downtown?”

  “It’s all gays over at the college, you know that, right? And Clintonites. If you interview for a job over there you get just one question: Do you enjoy”—Blue Cap leaned toward his friend—“ass sex?”

  Red Cap snorted in his coffee cup.

  “Must be offerin’ a Ph.D. in whining is all I can say. ‘Ooooh, bad corporations ruinin’ my liberal fun! Bad Home Depot for robbing customers from Public Hardware!’ As if free enterprise don’t apply to everyone equally.”

  “You said it.” Red Cap nodded.

  “Them falling-down termite holes downtown has failed because of the laws of the jungle, nothing else. ‘Oooh, save our history, save our pretty buildings!’”

  Red Cap shook his head, poured himself more coffee. “It’s pitiful.”

  “I wished I’d been there with Jeannie, I’d’a said, ‘You show me a place downtown where I can get new tires for my truck, bullets for my rifle, and a six-pack of briefs all at once and I’m there. Oh, and don’t forget the popcorn and Slushie I’ll need on the way out the door.’”

  Red Cap laughed, blew his nose on his napkin. “No Slushies downtown that I’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s because downtowns are stupid.”

  “Downtowns,” Red Cap said, giving his punchline a pause, “are gay.”

  Rebekah and Blue Cap exploded with laughter at the same time, Blue Cap for one reason, Rebekah for another. She was imagining the men chasing each other through Wal-Mart in their underwear, trying to insert plastic toys in each other’s rectum. And during the chase they would be offering up for public consumption their brilliant social commentary: Red lights is gay! Cats is gay! Books is gay! Green vegetables is gay! The men laughed at each other and at Rebekah, who was way past being able to control herself. They saw her as an ally, and in a way she was: she hadn’t laughed this hard in quite a while. Red Cap turned around to look at her, and as she wiped tears from her face with her napkin, she tipped her own imaginary seed cap to him.

  As the men passed Rebekah’s table on their way out, Blue Cap casually reached out and picked up Rebekah’s check. “It’s on us,” he said, smiling at her. “Our wives never laugh at nothing we say.”

  Rebekah parked her car behind the storage unit, in the most isolated space in the lot. “This is insane,” she said aloud, her hand on the overnight bag she used to carry to Peter’s. She stepped out of the car and locked it; the night air was biting and darkness fell so early this time of year. With each step she took she tried to recall better Christmases, like the year her mother made her a Pollyanna doll in a red gingham dress with white lace trim. In the last box Rebekah opened was a matching dress for her. There was the year of the ice storm, when the electricity went out while they were at Aunt Betty’s, and she and the girl cousins sang carols to their parents by candlelight.

  For one long moment Rebekah couldn’t remember the key code to the back door, even though she’d entered it every day for years. After hours the door required a key and a code, and the same code was entered in the alarm system just inside the door. She closed her eyes and let her fingers rest on the number pads, and it came back to her automatically. Something very important, she had never asked what, happened to Hazel on the Fourth of July, and that was the security code: 0704.

  The Used World Emporium in the dark, in the days before Christmas. The alarm system beeped its warning and Rebekah disarmed it by its own light. She closed the door and leaned against it, her heart pounding so hard she had to bend at the waist and take deep breaths to keep from throwing up. She was terrified. She hadn’t reckoned on being scared, although she should have, and would have anticipated it if she hadn’t gone completely insane. Spend the night here? Might as well try to sleep in a pen with psychotic clowns. She leaned against the door and the vastness of the space bore down upon her like a weight. This half of the store was in near-total darkness, relieved only by the blinking of the Christmas lights at the entrance to the breezeway. The lights came on and there was a flash in the vanity mirror in booth #37, a flash of light but also of shadow. Rebekah couldn’t move, not even to open the door and run screaming to her car. To her left, deep within those black aisles, were the rocking horses with their glass eyes and decaying hides; there were dolls with human hair, dolls with teeth; there was the old telephone, which had not rung but might yet ring.

  I have to go, I have to get out of here, Rebekah thought, without taking a step. She was afraid to blink, afraid to turn her head. Nothing like this had ever happened to her; she had been afraid as a child sometimes, but that fear was not the same species as this. She knew she was standing in a cavernous space and that what had crippled her was a congregation of inanimate objects; she knew, intellectually, that the mannequin (the mannequin) in the Costume Shop had not moved, would not move. She also knew, intellectually, that it was moving.

  Time passed; the Christmas lights blinked off, on. Above her the fans thrummed an
d there were slight noises everywhere: clocks ticking, the gurgle of a drain, dolls grinding their teeth. Rebekah stood frozen.

  Hazel came out of the drugstore carrying two huge bags, which were so heavy she gave up and dragged them. Claudia knew she should get out and help her, but felt justified in staying put, since the baby’s diaper had soaked right through the waterproof Carhartt’s. It had been quite a feat on his part, but he had succeeded.

  “I asked a matronly sort in the store what I should get, I told her I was going to a baby shower for a new adoption, and she said at six months he needs formula and cereal. So look, I got this formula you just pour in a bottle.” Hazel poked through the items in the larger of the two bags in the backseat.

  “Could you close the door? You can tell me on the way home.”

  “And I got cereal with bananas in it, and a bowl that heats up, and a baby spoon. Also some bibs. Here are diapers, twenty-four for now but I can get more tomorrow, and here’s zinc oxide since he’s bound to have diaper rash. I got a pacifier, a digital thermometer, baby wash, baby shampoo, a sponge thing you lay him on in the sink, baby towels, a baby brush, though I notice he doesn’t have much in the way of hair. I got a pack of onesies—that seems to be some sort of little underwear thing—and a nightgown, tiny little nail clippers, look at this. Here’s a six-pack of bottles with cartoon characters on the side, quite cute. This is a thing you strap to his wrist and he can shake it like a rattle.”

  “Hazel, please get in the car and close the door.”

  Hazel closed the back door, slid into the front seat. “He needs, in this order, I think, food, a bath, clean clothes, a good night’s sleep, a visit to the doctor, and more stimulation. He needs to be held a lot, according to the chubby woman in the drugstore.”

  “Let’s get home, then.”

  “And he needs a name.”

  “Hazel, I am not I am not I am not keeping this baby.”