The Used World Page 7

  Hazel had gotten, in the same auction lot as the couches, two ashtray stands and a coffee table, plastic made to look like leather. She referred to the setup as a Conversational Grouping, and what she’d made at the front of the store was a combination of den (in the home of some poor and tasteless person) and a gas station as they’d been when Rebekah was small, a grimy place where she would sometimes see men gathered, smoking and waiting for an oil change. Her own father never joined in. Rebekah had once heard Claudia ask, aggrieved by something Slim had said, whether Hazel had known what she was doing when she built the Conversational Grouping. Hazel had waved her hand in the air as if Cronies were a fact of life, furniture or no.

  “I knew them when they were young,” she had said.

  “What were they like then?” Rebekah asked.

  Hazel had glanced over at the three, all of whom were bent over, elbows on their knees. “Just the same. But younger.”

  There was a box of books on the counter, something Hazel had just purchased or brought in from the storage shed; Rebekah began looking through them. One thing that puzzled her was the way the men smoked, and drank sodas until their knees began to bounce, and then at some point every afternoon a signal sounded and they all stood up and left, in the way a flock of birds will suddenly depart a tree.

  Hazel pulled her knitting out from under the counter and began counting stitches. “A ‘ramage,’ I think it’s called,” she said between rows.

  “What’s called a ramage?”

  “It’s also possible I invented that word.”

  Rebekah looked at the table of contents in a 1954 memoir of a woman’s first year of housewifery, Boiled Water. “But what does it mean?”

  “It refers to the phenomenon of a flock of birds suddenly leaving a tree.” Hazel’s knitting needles—wide, blue with a mother-of-pearl tint—clicked, slid against each other.

  Rebekah looked up at Hazel. “Was I thinking out loud?”

  “When?”

  “Before ramage. Did I say something about the Cronies out loud?”

  “I don’t know.” Hazel shrugged. “Did you?”

  Rebekah had to turn only one page and there it was, the sentence I couldn’t boil water! She had tried many times to think it through, she had even tried to talk to Peter about Hazel, but he had been skeptical, had suggested that Rebekah, because of her history, was gullible. But as far as she could see, the opposite was true. The first twenty-three years of her life had been spent in thrall to prophecy, or at least those years had been spent with a community that valued nothing more. What was it? Pastor Lowell had once said in a sermon that the only test of a prophet was his accuracy. He said this while discussing a passage from Ezekiel. How could that be, though, Rebekah had wondered, if the prophet and everyone who heard him speak the words of his prophecy were dead and gone? Anyone can say the Temple will fall (because the Temple will fall) and be right eventually. And what does it suggest about the nature of time and space, if the future is given to some long in advance? If one thing is true, namely that the future can be known by the prophets, then the future has been predetermined and there is no such thing as free will and the damned are born damned, the saved likewise. The biblical seers and those members of the Mission who were given the fruits of the Spirit foresaw an arc into history, an apocalypse of change, natural disaster, and vengeance. Its ushering in was accompanied by the signs and symbols everywhere in evidence, so the world itself appeared to be in league with the conspiracy.

  But what of Hazel? Rebekah flipped past the chapter in Boiled Water that dealt solely with Adventures in Ironing. The world was Hazel’s evidence, it was its own testimony. Rebekah had tried to say to Peter that she thought of the old men in the desert, the way their sight (such as it was) traveled like a bullet through time, puncturing everything in its wake, but Hazel just sat knitting or doing needlepoint, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the ephemeral world was right there beside her. All she had to do was reach out and pluck a strand and she knew your past, your greatest fear, and what you’d be trying to avoid the next day. These weren’t the words Rebekah had used with Peter and he’d been irritated anyway. He told her he thought Hazel was a just an old woman with a keen eye, a collection of astrology texts, and a bag of tricks. He thought this even as he courted Hazel, gave her his most level blue gaze. And it seemed that Peter had been right, because Hazel seemed to like him; she seemed unable to see his real feelings for her.

  “I’ll tell ya what you’re gonna have to do,” Red suddenly said, pointing at Slim with his burning cigarette. “You’re gonna have to drill through the hardwood, the subfloor, right through that concrete, my friend, one them full-inch drill bits, then pump the poison dreckly in the ground, and do the same outside the house. Course you’ll have to wait fer spring.” He sat back, satisfied.

  “Naw!” Slim said, slapping his forehead. “The wife’ll kill me, she’s gonna kill me!”

  “You brung it on yourself, not putting in a basement or a crawl space. Where’d you get that idea, build a house on a concrete slab? You get your house plans with a set of Ginsu knives?”

  Jim Hank wheezed his hardest laugh, fell to coughing.

  “Lord but it is gettin’ cold outside.” Red shook his head. “What happens when your pipes burst in that slab, Slim?”

  Rebekah glanced up at him, but Slim just shook a Doral out of his pack, lit it.

  “Did you see him last night?” Hazel asked, adjusting the pale blue afghan that was lengthening by the minute in her lap.

  “See who last night?” Rebekah pretended to be reading.

  “Oh please.”

  “No.” Rebekah turned past an illustration, classic 1950s style, of a woman tangled up in the cord of a vacuum, little stars above her head.

  Hazel lifted the afghan, let it fall over her knees. “Will you try again?”

  Would she try again? Rebekah thought about it. “I feel like,” she began, “like maybe he’s waiting on me to make a move? Some grand gesture, maybe?”

  “You mean because the grand gesture of calling him repeatedly and leaving plaintive messages wasn’t sufficient?”

  “I stopped leaving messages a long time ago.”

  “Ah.”

  “You know, part of the problem is that I miss him so much I want to tell someone every detail of it, the missing him, and the person I want to tell is Peter.”

  “Why?” Hazel asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why Peter?”

  Rebekah sighed, rubbed her temples. She was very tired all of a sudden. “Because we were friends, I thought. He’s the only boy besides my cousins I ever knew. Men don’t—they don’t make much sense to me—”

  “No.”

  “—and I feel like if he’s still in my heart, I must still be in his.”

  Hazel let her hands fall in her lap. “But Rebekah, feelings are not facts.”

  The pages of the mildewy book blurred before her; Rebekah closed it. “Grief is a fact.”

  “No, grief is a feeling.”

  Rebekah swallowed hard, tossed the book back in the box. “Whew, I should get back to work. I thought I might put some New Years-y dresses on the mannequins, hats, things like that. Then I’ll help Claudia rearrange number forty-two. She wants to show you something, by the way,” she said, slipping out from behind the counter.

  “All right, dear,” Hazel said. Rebekah heard the ticking of the knitting needles resume as she walked quickly past #14, #15, the suitcases, the dining room table at which no one ever sat.

  It was four o’clock before Claudia found Hazel alone in the office, putting stamps on a stack of letters to vendors. Hazel glanced up at her, nodded toward the empty chair beside her desk. “Women are the pack mules of the world,” she said, pressing a stamp down with her thumb.

  “You aren’t a pack mule,” Claudia replied, gingerly stretching out her left knee.

  “True. But I bought my way out of it. Plus I’m too old.”

  Th
ey sat a few moments without speaking. Claudia listened to the faint, tinny sound of the Andrews Sisters coming from the back of the store.

  “They were lovely, the Andrews Sisters.” Hazel completed her task and dropped the stack of envelopes in her outgoing-mail tray.

  “I found this in your book last night,” Claudia said, handing the photograph to Hazel.

  “What’s this?” Hazel slipped off her glasses and held the picture at arm’s length. She squinted. “You found this in Owen Meany?”

  Claudia nodded.

  “Thank you for returning it to me.” She slipped the picture inside the book she was reading, The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & the Reality, and said, with a perfunctory clip, “Let’s get this store closed down and go home.”

  Claudia allowed one beat to pass between them, one chance for Hazel to change her mind and speak. It passed, and Claudia stood up, Hazel following her. “Okay.” Claudia touched Hazel’s shoulder with just her index finger, attempting to make the gesture communicate something. But Hazel left the office without another word.

  1961

  “I can’t be late getting home.” Hazel looked at her watch for the fifth time, thrust her hands back into her coat pockets.

  “You can’t be late.” Finney’s breath smelled like tea. Sometimes she smelled like sleep or cinnamon, but today it was bergamot and lemon.

  “That’s what I said. If we don’t leave here in twenty-seven minutes, it’s all over for Miss Hazel.”

  “Well, we don’t want that.” Finney leaned farther over the scrollwork railing of the mezzanine, let her body tip just slightly past the fulcrum of her own weight.

  “Hey, how’s about you follow the rule about keeping your feet on the floor.” Hazel tried to sound casual as she grabbed Finney’s coat belt, which was untied and slipped free.

  “What I want”—Finney turned and reclaimed her belt—“is to go up, up to the sixth, Women’s Lingerie. Then I want to come down, down, stopping on every floor. Last is the jewelry counter. If I have twenty-seven minutes I’m going to use them.”

  Below the girls, the black-and-white-tiled ground floor of Sterling’s Department Store spiraled around the square jewelry counter, so that from Women’s Lingerie, looking over the railing, Hazel knew she would feel an urge to jump. “Women’s Lingerie it is,” she said, taking Finney’s arm and heading for the elevator.

  The folding metal door of the elevator closed, cagelike, behind them. In the red velvet interior the air was warm and close. The elevator operator hummed along with Bing Crosby’s Hawaiian Christmas song, which both Hazel and Finney hated. Jerry Hamm, that was the name of the man sitting on a stool in front of the elevator’s controls, but Hazel didn’t acknowledge him, nor did he look at her. He was a patient of her father’s, and there were countless rules of conduct that applied to meeting a patient in public, or at his job. Finney knew him, too, of course, but she ignored him, leaning against the back wall to watch the numbers light up above the doors.

  In Women’s Ready-to-Wear, in Household Goods, in Infants and Children, Finney had asked, “Do you want this? Is this on your list?” No, Hazel had answered, and no. Finally, walking toward the jewelry counter with only four minutes to spare, Finney asked, “What do you want for Christmas?”

  “A book. I don’t know, something I can keep. Nothing frivolous.”

  Finney took a deep breath, rolled her eyes. “I worry about you, Hazey.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, I do. I worry that any day now you will tell me you want to write short stories or romances, and then you’ll turn to strong drink.”

  “Will I abandon my Christian principles?”

  Finney considered the possibility. “You will.”

  “Will I die young and tragically?”

  “That’s not funny.” Finney ran her fingers over a dozen strands of freshwater pearls, took one off the metal rack and held it to her throat.

  Hazel fastened the necklace, gently lifting Finney’s hair. “This looks beautiful on you.”

  Finney looked in the square mirror on the counter, turned her jaw to the right and the left in a way that would have never occurred to Hazel. Finney’s camel hair coat was down around her shoulders and her long neck looked more vulnerable than ever, with the pearls lying pale and imperfect against her skin. “I’m not a pearl person.”

  “Hmmm. What kind of person are you?”

  Finney took three steps away, didn’t answer.

  “Anyway, what do you most want for Christmas?” Hazel asked, just as Finney stopped before a display of gold chains.

  “Oh, look at this.”

  In a blue velvet box were two chains, each chain holding half a heart. On the inside lid of the box were the words MAY GOD WATCH OVER US WHILE WE ARE APART, and carved on the heart itself, ME FROM THEE. Hazel lifted the left half and warmed it in her hand as Finney did the same with the right.

  “Do you think,” Finney whispered, leaning close to Hazel, “that he will ever buy me one of these?” She whispered, it seemed to Hazel, because she had lost her voice, like a girl in a fairy tale. It was only a matter of time before a hunter came after Finney’s real, beating heart, or until her legs became the tail of a mermaid, and she vanished. No, the man in question would never, never buy Finney such a necklace; the possibility did not exist on planet Earth or within the bounds of time and space. “Maybe he will,” Hazel said, turning away from the display. “Your four minutes in jewelry are up, Miss Finnamore Cooper.” She used the old nickname as a distraction, but it failed.

  “I will be blue until I die,” Finney said, sighing.

  Hazel’s stomach knotted into a fist, and she could taste at the back of her throat the coffee they’d had at lunch. She reached into Finney’s bag and pulled out her muffler, wrapped it around Finney’s neck as they walked past the great Christmas tree beside Sterling’s revolving doors. “Bundle up,” she said, tucking the end of the scarf into Finney’s coat.

  Finney smiled, said, “You do the same.”

  They’d grown too mature for hats, so they walked close together, heads bent against the bitter December wind, across the street to the parking lot and Albert Hunnicutt’s late-model, sleek black Cadillac. Tomorrow Hazel would return for the necklace, she knew, and she would give it to Finney signed with her own name. Hazel would never pretend it had come from someone else. Finney would accept the gesture as she always had, for years and years now, as long as Hazel could remember. Finney would wear her half of the heart as if it mattered to her as it did to Hazel, and only someone who really knew her, only a best friend, would see the unease and disappointment on her face. It was just metal, after all, and probably hollow at that.

  “Admit that you’re a brat.”

  “Captain Brat.”

  “General Brat.”

  Hazel and Finney tormented little Edna until she was nearly in tears—this happened every time they baby-sat—then gave her what she’d asked for.

  “I’ll tell Mama,” Edna said, sitting at the kitchen table, a TV dinner cooling in front of her.

  “Tell her what?” Hazel asked. “Here’s your Bosco. Drink it fast or you can’t have it at all. It’s almost bathtime.”

  “I’m not taking a bath.”

  “Tell her what, Edie?” Finney stood behind Edna, combing the girl’s blond hair with her fingers.

  “Tell her that a boy calls.”

  “It’s not a crime for a boy to call and anyway he doesn’t call for me. So you’d be getting Finney in trouble and you love her. Think about that.”

  Edna took a drink of her chocolate milk, pushed away the foil tray with her uneaten dinner. “I’m not taking a bath.”

  “But you are. And what about that chicken leg?”

  “I’ll tell Mama you smoke a cigarette once. When her and Daddy was gone.”

  “Yeah? Is that right, Edie?” Hazel picked up the washcloth from the edge of the sink and threw it on the table. “How about if I tell Mother about th
e letter your teacher sent home last week, the one I signed so you wouldn’t get in trouble? How about if I tell Mother that you got caught stealing a cap gun from the Ben Franklin and I got you out of that one, too?”

  Edna sat very still, one hand in her lap and the other around her Mickey Mouse Club cup. She was small for eight—almost nine—with the facial features of a much younger child. Staring at her, Hazel couldn’t see at all who her sister might turn out to be. Edie’s chin shook and her gray eyes filled with tears, but it was not to Hazel she apologized. “I’m sorry, Finney!” she said, jumping up and spilling her Bosco all over the table.

  “Great. I’ll just clean this up for you,” Hazel said, using the washcloth she’d thrown at the child.

  “Come here, Edie,” Finney said, holding out her arms. “Don’t cry, I’m not mad. You just don’t want to take a bath, right? It’s cold in the upstairs bathroom.” Finney held her on her lap, using her sweater to wipe Edie’s face. “Come on, we’ll go upstairs, I’ll wash behind your ears and brush your teeth and we’ll call it a night. Maybe mean old Hazel will bring you some more milk.” They stood and walked toward the back staircase.

  “Nice,” Hazel said to the empty kitchen. She dropped Edna’s frozen dinner in the trash can, poured more milk in her cup. “Thanks a lot, Finney.”

  The arm of the record player lifted the 45 and dropped it back in place, and the needle settled into the wide opening groove. “Theme from A Summer Place” began for the third or fourth time, the waltzing melody washing over Hazel as if it really were another season. She and Finney lay on their backs in Hazel’s bed, looking out the window at the bare winter branches, the clouds passing the moon.