The Used World Page 6

  The front door opened into a sitting room that contained a piano no one had played since her mother died, but which Vernon had tuned once a year because that’s what one did: tune the piano. The walls were painted pale green and decorated with the acceptable notions: family pictures, a print of Jesus knocking on the door—everyone knew the image of Him knocking on the door and awaiting admittance. Jesus knocks, was what the print was trying to say, He doesn’t just walk in and help Himself to your old mess. Above the piano was a counted-cross-stitch sampler Ruthie had made that read JESUS IS THE SONG IN MY HEART. The same could be said of everything in the parlor: the bench on which no one sat, the piano no one played, the two wing chairs gathered around the little table on which Ruth had placed her knickknacks and doilies—all of these things were somehow connected to Jesus. It was a wonder to consider, the experiment to make Jesus everything, the effort it contained.

  Rebekah unloaded the groceries on the butcher block table in the kitchen as if compiling the clues to a mystery. Milk, eggs, bread, orange juice—that could be anyone. But this French cheese, a bar of bittersweet chocolate, buttermilk bath salts in what was supposed to look like an antique milk jug? And all this fruit: oranges, grapes, apples, as if it were a different season altogether. For a single fluttery moment she thought Peter must have left it, he must have been worried about her, and then she saw the note: For Rebekah, a cold night. Claudia’s handwriting.

  The oranges looked so good she decided to eat one right away—she would puzzle over Claudia’s gesture later—but then saw again the bath salts, so she carried them both into the bathroom, ran hot water. She took off her clothes without looking in the mirror, as her mother had taught her, poured part of the milk container into the tub. The salt didn’t smell like buttermilk (thank goodness) but it was that color, and the water became creamy, slightly foamy. Rebekah climbed in, surprised by the silky feeling of the water, and leaned back. The water lapped over her, rose and fell as she breathed, leaving a sheen of sweet-smelling oil on her skin. Rebekah closed her eyes and thought of Peter; he had glanced at Hazel and she saw his face again, everything around and behind him gone dark in her memory. She focused on nothing but the color of his skin and the shape of his mouth and the length of his eyelashes. But she couldn’t hold on to the image; she kept seeing Claudia’s handwriting, the span of Claudia’s hand on the glass countertop of the Used World. Span. It was a biblical word for time, Rebekah thought. The smell of the orange rose up in the heat of the room. Water continued to pour from the tap as she claimed the orange from the countertop, thrust her thumb under the skin around the navel. She pulled off large sections of peel and dropped them in the water, where they floated, riding the crests of the small waves around her body. She hummed a bit of Artie Shaw’s “My Heart Stood Still” as she peeled the orange clean, then pulled it apart harder than she meant to, not bothering to divide it into neat sections, and ate the whole thing in quick, big bites.

  Chapter 2

  SNOWPLOWS HAD PARTED the streets of Jonah like a solid white sea. Claudia drove carefully after the scare with the man in the turn lane the night before. Each season in Indiana carried its own near miss, she concluded, remembering a moment last summer when she’d taken an exit ramp onto the highway. She had been holding tight to the inside curve, then decided—for no reason she could discern—to move toward the outside. At the very end of the curve, just before the ramp opened up onto four lanes, there was a beagle, trotting along happily, following a scent and wagging his tail. Claudia most certainly would have hit him, had she stayed her course.

  Keeping her eyes on the street ahead, on the intrepid Midwestern holiday shoppers out in full force, Claudia reached over and lifted the front cover of the book Hazel had lent her, A Prayer for Owen Meany, making sure the photograph was still there. It was. She had checked four times since leaving the house, a gesture that now struck her as compulsive; although it was, she supposed, in the nature of a photograph to slip out of a book, in the same way it is somewhere in the nature of glass to shatter.

  The prior evening, after surviving the snowstorm and the drive home, Claudia had taken the book to read in bed. The wind was slapping tree branches against her bedroom window, and in the silence of her old farmhouse she experienced the weather as another facet of her nightly dread. She was too tired to read. She closed the novel and reached up to turn off her reading light, and a photograph fluttered out of the middle of the book.

  The picture seemed to have been taken sometime in the sixties—all the colors had been muted by the orange pall that marked that decade’s snapshots. Two young women were in the back of a pickup truck. One was sitting on the lowered tailgate, her bare legs crossed at the knee. She was wearing shorts and a halter top, white or pale yellow. Her hair was in a ponytail and her sunglasses were pushed up on her head. There was something familiar about her. The other was standing behind her friend, her legs about a foot apart, in a short-sleeved shirt with buttons. The shirttails had been tied around her midriff, showing off her small waist and tan. Her hair was loose and curly, chin length, streaked with light. Her arms were resting on her friend’s shoulders, her hands lightly clasped, and the sitting girl had reached up, her right arm across her chest, to lay her own hand over her friend’s.

  Claudia was aware, again, of the wind, the ticking of the old radiators, absences. She felt her pulse in her throat, heard it in her ears. She turned the photograph over and read, Hazel and Finney on the way to the Fair, August 7, 1964. Hazel. Claudia studied the picture for another few minutes before turning off the light and not sleeping; she studied Hazel’s young face, her smile, her hand resting so lightly against that tanned, beautiful girl.

  The store had only been open for ten minutes when Claudia arrived, but there were five cars in the lot already. She sighed, stepped out of the Jeep. The sky was blue above her, but there was a threatening haze in the east, and the temperature seemed to be dropping. The delivery door at the side of the building was unlocked, which meant that Rebekah had gotten there early.

  There were four or five people milling about in the back half of the store, picking up various items, hoping that an ugly little statue of a dog would be marked OCCUPIED JAPAN (not just that the dog would be here and they would find it, but that the dog’s origin would have been missed by both its owners and Hazel). Rebekah was playing Frank Sinatra’s Christmas album on the stereo and someone had hung a strand of twinkly lights over the doorway to the breezeway. The music, the heat blown down by the industrial fans, all of it worked together to make Claudia feel as if she’d just returned from a war or an epic journey, in time for the holidays. The Used World was, after all, nothing but the past unfolding into an ideal home: enough bedrooms for everyone, a parlor, a chapel, a well-stocked kitchen. Hazel had more books here than the local library, more tools than the craftiest farmer. Claudia stopped in the breezeway, next to a muddy painting of a shipwreck, and felt something come over her, a blast of heat from her solar plexus, overwhelming her like a mortal embarrassment. She put her hand against the wall, fanned herself. Her coat slipped from her hand, landed on the floor, A Prayer for Owen Meany beside it. The collar of her shirt was too tight, and her wool sweater was suffocating her. She pulled it off in one swift gesture, took a deep breath. In less than a minute her entire body was drenched in sweat; she reached into her back pocket, pulled out a folded handkerchief, dried her face.

  “Claudia?”

  She turned, and coming up behind her was Rebekah. A light around Rebekah’s body shimmered. Claudia squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. The light was gone.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Claudia said, folding the handkerchief and putting it back in her pocket. “I think I got too hot.”

  Rebekah stepped closer. She reached out to touch Claudia on the elbow, and just before she did, a crack of blue light passed between her hand and Claudia’s arm.

  “Oh!” Rebekah flinched, pulling her hand back.

 
“You shocked me,” Claudia said, looking down at her elbow.

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Want me to do it again?” Rebekah asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Want me to try?”

  Claudia studied her, the red hair and pale skin, the pale green of her eyes. Whatever had held Claudia in its grip loosened. “Okay.”

  Rebekah took ten steps backward, shuffling her feet on the grimy dark blue indoor-outdoor carpeting in the breezeway. She shuffled back toward Claudia, reached out slowly, and again, in the narrow space before Rebekah’s finger touched Claudia, there was a pop and a flash.

  “Ow!”

  “Ouch.” Claudia rubbed her arm. Her shirt was drying and she was suddenly cold.

  Rebekah shook her fingers. “That was fun,” she said, smiling up at Claudia.

  “In its way.” Claudia leaned over and picked up her coat, her book. She opened the front cover and the photograph was still there. Maybe it had been a hot flash, she thought, glancing again at the young Hazel. Or maybe it had been a barb on the shaft of nostalgia that had struck her, listening to Frank Sinatra sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

  “I was looking for you, actually,” Rebekah said, still standing close. “Hazel needs you—somebody bought that gigantic ugly painting in number forty-two, and also the love seat with the yucky upholstery job.”

  “The pink one?”

  “The pink one.”

  “Let me go put these things in the office,” Claudia said, turning.

  “Oh, and also, Claudia? Thank you for the groceries.”

  Claudia blushed, rubbed her hand over the top of her head, a gesture she’d made since childhood. “You’re welcome.”

  The new owner of the ugly pink love seat fell into one of east-central Indiana’s most recognizable categories: the married woman with small children, the kind who might have been adorable or saucy or wild in high school, but who had long since cut her hair, stopped trying to lose weight, and who had donned her I Give Up Suit. In this case she had also plucked her eyebrows too thin, which struck Claudia as a peculiar trend. Everyone seemed to be doing it, creating a county full of startled women.

  “Do you think this will fit in my Suburban?” the woman asked Claudia, who had tipped the love seat on its side and was wheeling it on a dolly toward the delivery door.

  “Probably,” Claudia said.

  “Because I could maybe borrow a truck from someone but I don’t know who—we aren’t really truck people. Well, my husband isn’t a truck person. There’s a long list of things my husband isn’t but I’m sure you don’t want to hear them.” The woman was wearing the holiday uniform of her class: a red turtleneck, an oversize cardigan sweater embroidered with a Christmas scene, blue jeans, tennis shoes.

  Claudia said nothing.

  “I’m Emmy, by the way. I just hate Christmas, I hate it,” Emmy said, drawing in and exhaling a shaky breath. “I’m buying this love seat for myself when I ought to be Christmas shopping but I’m not, I’m buying a piece of furniture that my husband is going to despise because it isn’t new and we didn’t get it at Sears.”

  They passed the shelves of blue, ruby, and carnival glass. Claudia backed the dolly up, turned it until it was straight, started up the breezeway.

  “I need a new one because one of my kids set the old one on fire. That’s what he’s doing these days, setting things on fire. I found hundreds of burnt matches in his closet a few days ago, taken from my husband’s matchbook collection. No one is saying he set the couch on fire, it’s just assumed and kept quiet. Do you hate Christmas? Don’t you?”

  The answer, Claudia thought, might be: I have. I could. I can sure see how it’s possible.

  Before she could speak, Emmy continued, “I say to my husband, ‘Brian, admit it, admit what you expect of me,’ but he won’t. He says I make my own choices and I should live with them. Does he think I want to spend two weeks decorating the house, leave those decorations up two weeks, then spend two weeks taking them down? Does he think I want to bake cookies and little cakes for the neighborhood association and the postman? And do all the shopping, all the wrapping, pick out every single goddamn gift, including for his parents who he won’t spend two seconds thinking about? And send out Christmas cards with a picture of the kids in it every year when I can’t hardly get them to sit still to take the picture, not to mention the furniture is on fire and one of the boys has decided he can’t live without a python?”

  They turned the corner at NASCAR collectibles and Claudia said, “Could you open that door for me?”

  Emmy leaned against the bar on the delivery door and it opened, letting in a blast of white light and cold. “Good God,” Emmy said, slipping on her red coat. She opened the back of the Suburban, lowered the tailgate. She’d left it running, and the parking lot was streaked with blue exhaust. Two or three loose napkins were picked up in a gust of wind and blown out toward Claudia. She caught one, green with white letters that read, SANTA, IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!

  Claudia lowered the dolly, took the ramp from the side of the building. The back of the Suburban was littered with the castoffs of family life: shoes, clothes, collectible trading cards, CD cases, crumpled grocery bags.

  “Just,” Emmy said from behind Claudia, “just put it on top of all that shit, if you don’t mind. Flatten it all, I don’t care.”

  The love seat was light; in addition to the unfortunate color and upholstery, it was shabbily constructed, and might not last the afternoon with the Arsonist and the Snake Handler. Claudia pushed it up the ramp and into the vehicle, where it laid waste to a comic book and a variety of plastic items. After she’d taken away the ramp and closed the tailgate, she turned to find Emmy leaning against the side of the building, her hands over her face.

  “I’m done here,” Claudia said, wheeling the dolly back toward the door.

  “Okay then,” Emmy said, standing up straight and clapping her palms together, as if declaring the case closed. “This is going to be great. Everything is going to be fine. I can do this, absolutely.” She opened the driver’s side door, climbed in. “Merry Christmas,” she said, looking back at Claudia.

  “To you, too,” Claudia said, pushing the code into the keypad lock on the door. She wheeled the dolly inside and turned around. Emmy was still sitting there in the smoking Suburban. She wasn’t crying, she wasn’t moving; she had slipped on a pair of sunglasses and was just looking out at the traffic as it sailed by.

  “I sold the last of the Santa suits,” Rebekah said, placing the receipts on the spindle.

  “The one with the cigarette burn in the crotch?” Hazel asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  Hazel hummed a bit of “I’m Dreaming of a White Trash Christmas.”

  “Do you want me to see if there are any more out in the storage shed?”

  “Please don’t.” Hazel closed the phone book, unable to find what she was looking for, and slipped it on a shelf under the counter. “Santa is too much with us as it is.”

  “Hey, Becky,” Slim called from his perch near the RC Cola machine. “Want to come sit on my lap and tell me what you want for Christmas?”

  Rebekah blushed. Hazel didn’t look up but said, “Slim, remember D-day.”

  Red wheezed out a laugh, put out his cigarette; Jim Hank wheezed out a laugh, lit a new one. D-day, Rebekah knew, referred not to World War II, but to Slim’s wife, Della, who had forgone any employment for the past forty years in the interest of maintaining her bitter anger at her husband.

  The Cronies were three men in their early sixties who had taken an early buyout from the Chrysler plant. Their histories, ideologies, and fashion tastes were so similar that for the first six months Rebekah worked at the Emporium, she had no idea which Crony was which. Their sons were wastrels, their overweight daughters were married to ne’er-do-wells (if not outright criminals), and their wives disappointed them on a daily basis. Almost every d
ay the Cronies sat on the three couches in a U shape with the soda machine in the corner. Hazel had bought the furniture at some auction; she swore she hadn’t been drinking, but without some mental impairment Rebekah didn’t understand how the couches could be justified.

  One was tan, stained. This belonged to Red, the most knowledgeable, or at least the most opinionated, of the three. He was horse-faced, wore glasses, and the other two accepted his pronouncements as self-evident because he had, in the very distant past, held a county record in pole vaulting. Red rented space in the back corner of the front of the store (not prime real estate by any means), where he sold an assortment of things he swore to be valuable: carved historical figures, forged at the Franklin Mint; commemorative coins; a set of dish towels bearing the likeness of Spiro Agnew.

  The second couch was green and missing a leg, which had been replaced with a set of coasters. This was Slim’s domain, which he claimed by spreading his belongings around him: cigarettes, lighter, wallet, and keys. Slim seemed to be persistently busy working on a political system at the center of which was advertising and sentimentality. He was in favor of any person, establishment, or event said to promote Family Values; thus he loved Republicans, chain restaurants, NASCAR, and military skirmishes. He choked up listening to Toby Keith, and saluted when he saw a flag, although Rebekah believed he, like his comrades, had sat out all military duty. Slim shared the corner booth with Red, where he sold what Della told him to. She tended toward old bedspreads and a variety of pastel-colored mixing bowls.

  The third sofa was black and had been repaired with silver duct tape, not even electrical tape, which would have matched. Jim Hank, unmarried and the least of his brethren, sat on the edge of one of the sofa’s three cushions. He never sat back or settled in. Red claimed that a vicious rival for a woman’s hand had hit Jim Hank in the back of the head with a crowbar; Rebekah had no idea if it was true. Something had happened to him, maybe just a nick on the edge of a chromosome. From a distance he looked as if he’d been handsome and strong, but up close one side of his face dragged and his eyes were all but empty. He limped, couldn’t hold anything small in his left hand. When he lifted a can of soda it shook all the way to his mouth. He and Hazel rarely spoke, but there was a file in Hazel’s office filled with receipts for his rent, his prescriptions, his groceries. Jim Hank had a table in Red’s booth, where he arranged various articles taken from his home: a butter dish, a pocketknife, a wooden box designed to hold a family’s silver. Inside were a lone, tarnished butter knife and an ornate meat fork.