The Used World Read online

  “Don’t you love this song?” Finney’s arms were crossed behind her head and she wiggled her toes inside her white socks.

  “I do.” Around the room the elephants marched and the circus train faded against the gray walls. Edna’s nursery had been painted pink, with dancing circus ponies in ribbons and flowers, as if Hazel had been invited to one kind of carnival and Edna to another.

  “You don’t mean it.” Finney would be blue until she died.

  “How do you know?”

  Finney shrugged. Hazel turned her head on her pillow and watched Finney’s eyes trace the border of the casement window. “What do you love?” Finney asked, still looking ahead.

  I love—Hazel thought—your parents’ farm and the tone of voice you use with animals. I love that you have stolen your father’s cardigan and made it look like the most feminine sweater in the world. I love the way your curls hang against your neck, and how you are the one true thing I’ve ever known, and how if I were captured by pirates and didn’t see you for a hundred years I’d still recognize any part of you, even an elbow. “I love Johnny Cash. I love the music from the war and from before the war. I love The Steve Allen Show and the smell of kid leather in my mother’s car. Oh, and toasted marshmallows.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “The world is full of riches.” Hazel settled back into her pillow. “Have you seen him lately? I mean, actually seen him?”

  Finney gave Hazel a nervous glance, an unhappy smile. “My parents had gone to get some grain for the horses, and he found me skating on the pond. I was by myself, I looked ridiculous. I was wearing Dad’s overcoat with the raccoon collar, the one he had his only year at Purdue, and a white hat I knitted last winter, and a yellow and blue woolly scarf wrapped around and around my neck, all the way over my chin. My skates are even dingy. I’m sure my nose was bright red from the cold.”

  “When was this?” Hazel couldn’t keep the blade off each word, the edge that told everything about how lost she was, how scared she was to think of Finney with no need of her, carving figure eights into her frozen cow pond, which in the summer was thick with algae and mosquito larvae. And also what was under the ice, and what would happen if Finney should go there.

  “Three days ago? Maybe.”

  Hazel said to herself, Don’t ask, don’t ask, then asked, “Where was I?” Not plaintive, not demanding. She tried to make the inquiry casual, to suggest a passing puzzlement over her own agenda, three days ago. But how could the question not contain the other times she’d asked it, when Finney had seen a movie without her, when Finney showed up at school with pale pink lips instead of coral, and where did the coral go? Where did she find the pale pink, who shopped with her? When Finney, for instance, suddenly loved “Theme from A Summer Place” and last week had loved “Only the Lonely”? Where was poor Roy Orbison now, with his ugly glasses and slow-dance opera?

  “I don’t know.” Finney bit her thumbnail, seemed not to give Hazel’s whereabouts on ice-skating day a second thought. “He didn’t approve of me skating.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so.”

  “He asked what would happen if I fell and got really hurt while my parents were gone.”

  The arm of the record player lifted in hopeless repetition, and Hazel tried to keep her breathing steady. Time was he didn’t talk to Finney that way, didn’t suggest any tenderness. This was new, his fear, and it was akin to Hazel’s own.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him I’m indestructible. Then I skated backward around the pond twice and he stood completely still watching, right up until I skated into him and we both fell and he hurt his hip and I hurt my wrist.” She raised her eyebrows at Hazel, warm with irony and in full possession of the memory. She was resurrected, the now gone Finney of three days ago, and Hazel could see the coat and hat, the bright scarf, Finney’s long limbs and neck, how graceful she was for such a tall girl. There he was, too, standing on the ice, worried and angry and miserable (so much a part of his charm), watching Finney glide like a carved figure over the mirror of a music box. It would have been a moment outside of time for both of them, and then the sudden physical awakening of her body against his, the swift transport back into the rudeness of winter on an Indiana farm, the love he couldn’t have. Finney’s smell of sleep and tea.

  “And then what happened?”

  “We helped each other up. I brushed him off, he brushed me off, he kissed me once, so hard my teeth nearly went through my lips, then he walked fast away. I tried to follow him and he told me to go home.” Finney blinked, her eyelashes damp with tears, and Hazel could see Finney was happy to be so sad, because he had made her sad, he had sent her away. In turning his back to her, he had told her something intimate and they shared it now, and the most Hazel could wish for was to witness it. “Do you hear a car?” Finney asked, raising her head.

  Hazel sat up, glanced at the clock. Her parents weren’t due home for three more hours. “We’ve got to clean up the kitchen and fold the laundry.” She hopped around, pulling her shoes on. Finney stood up, stretched, languid as a cat. Her parents were kind, permissive, sloppy. They let her bake cookies when she and Hazel were barely old enough to turn on the stove. Nobody cared about the mess. On Sundays in the winter, after the livestock were fed, Finney’s dad, Malcolm, came home and put his pajamas back on, drank hot chocolate, and listened to the radio, letting the sections of the newspaper pile up around him. Their house wasn’t a museum or a testament to anything. Just a house.

  “Hazey, that isn’t your dad’s car.”

  Headlights were more than halfway down the lane, and Finney was right—it wasn’t the Cadillac. Hazel bent over, tied her shoes. She ran her fingers through her hair, pulled it into a ponytail, and wrapped it with a rubber band from her wrist. Finney, too, sped up, tying her shoes and straightening her sweater. “You expecting someone?” she asked.

  “No. Are you?” It would be unbearable if she’d invited him here.

  “Hardly. He wouldn’t come if I invited him to a church social.”

  The car pulled up in front of the house, and in the sodium light Hazel almost recognized it. It was someone who had been there before, and recently. Yesterday?

  The brass doorknob of her bedroom door was cold; the pattern of the hallway rug was a thousand eyes. Hazel turned left and Finney was behind her, humming. They went down the front staircase, passing the silvery ancestors, through the front parlor, past the wide front door with the leaded glass panes, to the side entrance with the heavy lock and the screen. Neither thought to take a coat. They walked out into a bitterly cold, windless December night just as the car pulled into one of the clinic parking spaces and stopped. A man jumped from the driver’s side, shouting, “Miss Hunnicutt, where’s your mama?”

  Hazel and Finney stopped on the porch, squinted into the dark to take him in. “Jerome? Is that you?”

  “I need your mama, Miss Hazel. Lorraine isn’t doing good, she’s bleeding, where’s Mrs. Hunnicutt?” The young man covered the distance between his car and the porch in two long strides: Jerome Wilson, who played center for the Southside Wildcats, a local star, and Negro.

  “She’s at a…” Jerome had been here yesterday with Lorraine, that much was true, and while her father was at his Jaycees meeting. Her mother had asked Hazel to take over at reception for an hour or so, and Hazel had taken three phone messages. Lorraine was pretty, a cheerleader at the all-Negro high school.

  “She’s at a Christmas party at the Cannadays’,” Finney said, stepping around Hazel. “She won’t be home for quite a while.”

  “Miss?” Jerome wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’ve got to help me.”

  Hazel and Finney ran the length of the porch, took the stairs two at a time. The passenger door of the old Chrysler opened with a groan, and the overhead light didn’t work. Jerome reached for a flashlight on the floorboard and shined it on Lorraine. Her head was tipped back against the seat, her lips pale. Her coa
t was unbuttoned and her hands hung limp at her sides. She was wearing a black flannel skirt, pulled up around her thighs, and in between her legs was a stack of blood-soaked towels.

  Hazel pulled her head back so hard and swiftly she smacked her scalp on the doorframe. “Finney, there are five hooks on a board next to the door leading to the clinic. On the second are the clinic keys. Unlock the inner door, then go through and unlock this door we’re facing. Jerome, can you lift her?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He handed Lorraine the flashlight and reached into the car, his arms so long they slid under Lorraine’s knees and behind her back and came out the other side. Lorraine let out a tight breath, not quite a moan, and Jerome did the same. He straightened up to his full height, kissed her forehead, whispered something against her hair.

  Lights came on in the clinic, and then the light outside the door was burning and Finney was holding the door open. Jerome walked quickly, trying not to jostle Lorraine, and Hazel ran ahead. She wasn’t thinking or praying or making note; only hoping in a vague way that Edna stayed asleep and that there would be room to get out of this, somehow.

  “Take her in where you were yesterday, Jerome, and put her on the examining table. Finney, I need you to call Mother.”

  “Do you know the number?” Finney’s face was pale, her eyes bright.

  “Jesus Christ. Try the phone book.” A line of sweat ran down Hazel’s neck and into her sweater. Finney turned and headed for the outer office.

  Lorraine was on the examination table, nearly panting, her eyes glassy and her lips chapped. Jerome leaned over her, running his thumb over her forehead and whispering the same thing he’d been saying walking in.

  “Help me get her feet in these stirrups. Lorraine, cooperate with us, we’re going to elevate your legs.”

  “I found a Cannaday on Riley Road, is that it?”

  “Umm.” Hazel thought she might faint. She grasped the table and swallowed, waiting for her vision to clear. Lorraine was wearing polished saddle oxfords and rolled white socks flecked with blood. Her legs were as smooth and chilled as glass. “Yes, I think so. Tell Mother that I need her. You can say Edie’s got a fever or that I have a feminine problem, whichever will get her here without my father. Make sure she understands she needs to come alone.”

  Finney left without another word, closing the examining room door quietly. Hazel turned the black handle that raised the stirrups and a trickle of blood dropped onto the floor. In the silence she could hear Jerome whispering, We’ll get married, we’ll get married, we’ll get married.

  In bed that night Hazel knew she could buy the heart necklaces or not, it no longer mattered. There were gestures stronger than vows, secrets that contained more momentum than a tall girl skating backward, and she and Finney had such a secret. In part they all—Hazel and Finney and Caroline—had become bound by the shared labor, and by Caroline’s cool response (which both girls had tried to imitate), how she had unpacked the towels so calmly and given Lorraine injections of antibiotics and pain medication, then finished what she’d started the day before. No one suggested Finney leave, as if Caroline had taken Finney as a daughter in a dark hour. But they were also united by the honesty of the lawless—Finney might love any boy and never speak the words again: I understand, I will never tell, I will never.

  Hazel slept, finally, and dreamed of a foreign place where many objects were stored. She wandered through alone, picking up things she didn’t recognize, and then there was an old man standing next to her, his hair gone white, his back bent like a crone’s. She remembered he had once been beautiful, and was sad for him. He handed her something—a candlestick, a broken bell, a hairbrush—and Hazel knew that it was hers to keep. She hated it, whatever it was, it felt like death itself in her hand, but she couldn’t give it back and she couldn’t put it down, and in the morning she was still holding it, in all the ways that matter.

  By five o’clock the sky was fully dark and a light snow was falling; Claudia sat in her sister Millie’s kitchen and watched the wind swirl the flakes into white tunnels. The snow fell on the barn, the new garage, the empty chicken house—all were lit up and vivid in the yellow glow of the security light.

  “You’re probably sitting there thinking about Mom,” Millie said, taking one container out of the microwave and putting another in.

  “No, I’m not,” Claudia said, but she was.

  “I bet you’re thinking how Mom would have been snapping beans or grinding corn or whatever for dinner.”

  “You don’t snap beans in December.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  There, then, was Ludie, standing in the warm kitchen, listening to gospel music on the AM radio, and outside there was a snow falling like this one, and Millie was probably upstairs in her bedroom, on her way to becoming the person she was now but not yet there, and Claudia was in the kitchen, with her mother.

  “It’s no crime to enjoy the time-saving devices of the modern world, Claude.”

  “I never said.”

  “I happen to like microwaved food, and I happen to like not having to do dishes.”

  Millie happened also to like not eating, although she never said as much. She was tall (but not too tall) and thin, what Hazel called Warning Label Thin, or Sack of Hangers Thin. Hazel sometimes referred to Millie simply as Death’s-head, and it was true that in certain lights you could see Millie’s skull as surely as if she were being used in an anatomy class. At thirty-eight she was pinched and severe; the lack of body fat, combined with years of tanning, had left her with a web of fine lines on her face and neck. She wore her hair so short it stood up straight at the crown, and she did something to it she called ‘frosting’—which she would do to her head, but not a cake—so that the roots were black and the ends were a creamy orange.

  Millie’s two children, Brandon and Tracy, came and went from the kitchen, speaking to neither their mother nor their aunt. Brandon, a junior in high school, took a soda from the refrigerator, then went back into the living room, where he slumped down on the couch to watch TV. A few minutes later he came back and got a bag of chips.

  “We’re going to eat in about fifteen minutes, Bran,” his mother said.

  Tracy, a year younger than her brother, ran into the kitchen, a cordless phone against her ear, and copied a phone number off the chalkboard, where she’d written TRACY + TIM 4EVER! Claudia had never heard of Tim, and doubted she’d ever make his acquaintance.

  “We’re going to eat in fifteen minutes, Tracy,” her mother said.

  “You are, maybe,” Tracy said, and slid across the linoleum in her socks, out of the room.

  How could it be that everything had changed so much so quickly? There was no such world as had Ludie in it. She was the last mother to put up vegetables every year; the last fat mother who didn’t dye her hair or wear pants to church; the last to sing the old hymns and maintain a flourishing garden. Claudia couldn’t think of one other soul in the world who had a pawpaw tree in the yard, one that bore fruit, and that was because of Ludie. But Millie was the New Mother, no doubt about it, driving her SUV and buying everything in her life (her clothes, her furniture, her food, her pictures in frames) at the Wal-Mart. Sitting in Millie’s country kitchen with her seven thousand unnecessary pieces of plastic, Claudia sometimes expected to hear a voice call out for a manager in aisle nine. Ludie had worked all day, from the time she got up until she went to bed. She cooked and cleaned and visited the sick. In the summer she gardened and hung the washing on the line; in the autumn she raked leaves and baked; in the winter she shoveled snow and made candy. All spring she drummed her fingers on the windowsills, waiting for the time to put in annuals. She was never too sick or too tired for church or to take care of her own elderly parents. But it was Millie, who did none of those things and had no other job besides, who treasured time-saving devices like nacho cheese you could heat up right in the jar.

  She put the jar of cheese down on the table, and a bag of corn chips. Beside
the chips were refried beans, taken from a can and microwaved, and a jar of salsa. Millie had emptied a bag of shredded lettuce into a plastic bowl; another bowl held ground beef. The back door opened as Millie was putting paper napkins on the table and Larry came in, stamping his feet and blowing on his bare fingers.

  “We caught three horses, but there’s two more still out there somewhere.” He pulled off his wool cap, shook the snow off his jacket. His muddy-blond hair was pushed up on his forehead.

  “Sit down and eat something before you take the kids to the school,” Millie said, without looking at him.

  “Temperature’s dropping. There’ll be a livestock alert by morning, I’ll bet, and tomorrow it’ll be too cold to snow.” Larry reminded Claudia of an actor in a western film. No particular actor—just a character with a squint, and an air of indifference to his clothes, his bunk, his companions.

  “Sit down and eat something, Larry, before you take the kids to the school.”

  “Take the kids to school? What for?”

  “There’s a varsity game tonight.”

  “So? If Brandon can’t drive them, they don’t need to go.”

  Millie continued moving around the kitchen, opening the dishwasher, putting a dish in. She had a way of moving, Claudia had often noticed, that closed a door on a conversation. “Brandon isn’t driving with the roads the way they are, especially if two of Woodman’s horses are out.”

  Larry looked at Claudia, sighed, pulled his cap back on.

  “Sit down and eat something, I said. We’re having Mexican Hat Dance.”

  “Well, I can’t, can I. I have to start the station wagon. I’ll eat something at the game.” The door closed behind Larry, and he left in his place a pocket of air so cold it surprised Claudia, even though she’d been sitting and studying the weather all evening.