The Used World Read online

  Tracy came in now wearing makeup, and boots that wouldn’t keep the damp out. “Tell Dad it’s time to go,” she said to her mother.

  “He’s starting the car, Trace.”

  Brandon came in with his letter jacket on—a single varsity letter in golf, which Claudia would never see as a sport—and jingling the change in his pocket as if he were a man much pressed for time.

  “That jacket’s not warm enough for this weather,” Millie said.

  And right there it happened—a kind of disorientation that left her dizzy—it was December. High school basketball season in Indiana. The snow was falling, and Claudia was sitting at a kitchen table as teenagers got ready to head back to the school they couldn’t wait to leave earlier in the day. She was warm and safe, but there was a kind of voltage in the air, an excitement generated by having something, anything to do on a Saturday night, and it seemed to Claudia that nothing had changed. If she could just get home she’d find Ludie in the living room knitting in front of the television, and Bertram in his study. This was just what it felt like all her growing-up years: December, January, February, March.

  “Kids, sit down and eat something before you go,” Millie said again, but Tracy was already putting on lip gloss and reaching for the door.

  “We’ll eat at the game.” And then they were gone.

  Millie watched the door for a moment, reached into the freezer where she had hidden a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and sat down across the table from her sister.

  “You’re smoking again?” Claudia asked. She had grown accustomed to the idea that she might spend the rest of her short life inhaling other people’s fumes.

  “Just this one,” Millie said, inhaling hard and blowing a thick cloud out over the table. “And don’t give me any crap about it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I know Daddy would be horrified.” Millie dropped the cigarette into the jar of cheese and burst into tears. “Do you see? I do and do for them, look at this food on the table, and they don’t even notice, nobody cares.”

  But what difference did it make, Claudia wondered, whether they ate nachos at home or nachos sold by the Band Boosters?

  Millie wiped her face with a paper napkin. “You don’t know, Claudia, you can’t imagine what it’s like to watch your perfect babies who loved you so much grow into strangers who won’t even eat the food you offer them.”

  It was a shame, Claudia thought, that Millie wasn’t one of those pretty criers, and also that she didn’t see how it is the fate of every animal to watch the children walk away and disappear. She reached out and patted Millie’s arm, and Hazel was right—it did feel precisely like a clothes hanger. “It’s all the same,” she said, without meaning to.

  Millie wiped her face with a napkin. “Oh, I know you’re right. They’ll be fine eating there as here.”

  Claudia nodded. That wasn’t what she meant at all. Those ball-game nights, Millie up in her room getting ready and Claudia not only prepared but thrilled to stay home, she would listen to Millie moving around, the low, scratchy insistence of her portable radio. A hair dryer. Some pink cologne that came from the drugstore. Millie wore soft sweaters and tight blue jeans, a gray wool coat that tied around her tiny waist, and a slick, fruit-scented lip gloss called Kissing Potion. She was a mess of smells and textures. Their rooms were divided only by a hallway, but it might have been the Mississippi, or one of the bright bands that divides the living from the dead. Claudia had grown too tall for her bed and for the sloped ceiling above it; her wallpaper was still gray with white cabbage flowers, Jack London was her favorite author. No teenagers would ever pound up the stairs to claim her for some mundane adventure, as they did with Millie nearly every night. At school they passed each other a few times a day, Claudia keeping close to the walls and lockers and Millie moving down the center of the hallway in her clump of friends, all in muted pastels and clinging to each other like common roses. Millie was two years younger, so they were there together for years, and not once in that time, on not a single occasion, did Millie ever meet her sister’s eye. Claudia didn’t consider it something to forgive. She patted Millie’s arm and said, “Your kids will be fine. You’ll be fine.”

  Later, Claudia shut her own house down for the night; checked the doors, lowered the thermostat. She carried her book upstairs, intending to try again. She brushed her teeth, hung her white shirt in the six inches of closet space not taken up with Ludie’s modest dresses and winter coats. Claudia had moved into her mother’s bedroom six months before, after thinking about it for more than a year. At first the move had seemed simply practical: take her mother’s room, use her bed. But she’d noticed that she still hadn’t cleaned out the drawer of her mother’s nightstand or moved any of her belongings. It still felt new, this death, and Claudia didn’t want to disturb anything in the room in case her mother returned.

  Ludie’s blood pressure medicine, Atacand, in 16-milligram tablets; a box of Nytol (she hadn’t slept well, those last years); Doan’s Pills; Gas-X; a box of light blue Kleenex tissues, looking dusty; a small green book promising The Comfort of the Scriptures; Dr. Scholl’s corn pads: these were the things in the nightstand drawer. On top of the nightstand was an old white porcelain lamp with a yellowed shade, and a rectangular electric alarm clock, Westclox, white plastic (also gone yellow). The clock had a slight buzz, would light up if the button on top was pushed, and kept impeccable time. Next to the clock was the item that had most fascinated Claudia as a child, a plastic disk half an inch thick, with the words NOW YOU ALWAYS HAVE A DRINKING CUP! printed on the top. On occasion Claudia took off the lid, as she had been moved to do as a young girl, so she could see her mother’s six remaining aspirin, now turning to powder. The disk expanded when the outer edge was lifted, a large ring surrounding a smaller, surrounding a smaller, forming a cone, to make a cup.

  Her book was open in her lap but Claudia wasn’t reading, and the gun lay beside her leg, but she didn’t pick it up. She’d begun to see it as a sort of pet, a very patient, quiet, house-trained animal who waited for her to make a decision and had no opinion either way. For certain she couldn’t do it in this room, not with Ludie’s corn pads right there. She couldn’t do it in her childhood bedroom—she’d been happy enough as a child. Not in Bertram’s study, still filled with his books and papers, his favorite radio sitting next to his desk. Not Ludie’s kitchen or cellar or the bedroom she’d converted to a sewing room; not the living room, which was after all aptly named. That left a guest room, unused since the last of Claudia’s grandparents died, and Millie’s room. Claudia let her head fall back against her pillows and considered it—how grand it would be! How theatrical and dishonest and an enormous mess besides; she would give Millie something to think and smoke about for the rest of her life. Millie would assume it had something to do with their history, a personal message about the grief of sibling estrangement. Millie would assume it had something to do with her, instead of the truth: the ability to cease living had long been the only thing keeping Claudia alive. She picked up the gun and slid it across Ludie’s nightstand, placing the barrel between the lamp and the yellowing alarm clock.

  At 3:48 that morning, Claudia sat up, suddenly awake, her blankets and bedspread thrown to the floor. She was covered in a cold sweat and suffering from the aftertaste of a dream now completely gone. The blast of heat she’d begun experiencing was grim, and when it arrived during the day it was bad enough, but what had begun happening at night was so much worse. In the first few moments after opening her eyes she would be filled with a knowledge so diamond-cut and deep she could only assume it came to her from God alone: nothing would ever save her. That was part of the news. We are alive, she would think, improbably so, and hostages to fortune, and no matter what, no matter if we gather riches or children or the blessings of the Holy Spirit, it will end badly. We’ll first lose all we love and then die, either old, alone, and in pain, or quickly, too soon, and in terror. She woke with the taste of it on her
tongue, no words for it, certain that all that had kept her from seeing it before had been the curtain of estrogen hung between her and the plain facts. Some nights she would wake and think, I’ll lose Bean, her beloved redbone coonhound, even though Bean had been dead three years already. He died over and over, those nights. She thought of Millie, walking on a treadmill in her finished basement, her bony elbows pumping at her sides like brittle machinery about to snap and cost someone an eye. She thought of Hazel sitting on the couch with her cats, watching television alone, and Rebekah, the victim, finally, of her father’s rage. Claudia saw mudslides, bacteria, gigantic oiled weaponry. She saw the simpler, more certain spring, when the frozen ground would thaw and churn up objects long lost and forgotten, and the ways those objects—an old school eraser, a bottle cap, a bent spoon—would arrive like indictments (of what crime she couldn’t say). Worst of all, what she realized in her sleep was so common she had taken to whispering to herself, “This is it, this is it,” this is the dark night, the existential panic that had driven the human race out of caves and into pulpits. The voice she heard, speaking calm and slow, said: You might have loved, or given your life to another or to a cause. You might have had a family, or visions—none of it would have mattered in the end.

  She turned on the white porcelain lamp, looked around the room, taking in its familiarity. Ludie’s bed had no footboard, so Hazel had helped Claudia cover a cedar chest with a foam cushion. They’d placed the chest flush against the end of the bed, making an extension to the mattress. Eventually she would rise, open the window, let the winter air in, so cold it felt like a solid thing; she would pace, close the window, try again to sleep. While her knees (and to a lesser extent, her spine) would never fully recover from the growth spurt in the sixth grade, she felt fine this particular night. Nothing really hurt.

  In Rebekah’s lifetime, Vernon’s schedule had rarely wavered. Weekdays he stood on the assembly line at the Chrysler plant. For all she knew, he’d been standing in the same place for the past forty years, every day since his family’s farm had sold; for all she knew, his black work shoes had left a fossil-like impression in the concrete. Wednesday evenings were reserved for Prayer Meeting. Saturdays he tended to the fleet at Peacock’s Mortuary, cleaning and waxing the coach, the family car, the black Fleetwood Brougham that Martin Peacock drove. He changed the oil in the cars, checked the tires. Sunday morning he rose at dawn and went to church. In the winter he turned the heat up, organized hymnals. Summers he cut the grass, trimmed the hedges. He would have done well, Rebekah thought, or at least far better, in Puritan New England. Vernon would have been the one to stuff old newspapers in the cracks in the chinking, the one to light the potbellied stove and sweep out the dirty water from boots and hems at the end of the day. He seemed to need the feeling of shoring up structures against the elements, doing it with his bare hands, and all he had now was the airtight, square brick building at the edge of town the Mission had purchased from the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1980, after the old meetinghouse had burned down.

  Dinner was nearly ready. Rebekah checked the corn bread, took the cast iron skillet from the oven. The vegetable soup would be too hot to eat, the corn bread steaming. Vernon sat at the table silently, hands crossed over his plate. He had taken off his work shirt in the kitchen heat and wore only a white T-shirt and his dark blue factory pants. As Rebekah passed behind him she was struck by how clearly she could see his spine snaking up his back, pressing through the skin, the shirt; the vertebrae were close enough to touch. The Mission taught that Scripture was a skeleton. The sinew and flesh of the Body were two things: the interpretation of the Book given through prophecy, and a life lived in absolute accordance with the church’s principles.

  “Do you want milk?” Rebekah asked.

  Vernon seemed not to hear her. He moved his right thumb over the back of his left hand, stared unseeing at the butter dish on the table.

  “Do you want milk, Daddy?”

  “Hmmm?” He glanced at her, his eyes bloodshot, a line of shadow around his jaw. “Yes, thank you.”

  There was a sort of temporary brilliance, Rebekah had noticed, that caused some men to be handsome just a moment, maybe right at the edge of manhood; later their wives wouldn’t be able to recall what precisely had set up such a need in them. What had they seen in this fleshy, mottled, dull-eyed bore, or in that brute now gone to seed? Peter would probably not stay handsome, if she was being honest. His light seemed connected to his age, his freedom. He was lovely in that cabin, by moonlight or with candles burning on the windowsill. The curve of his neck and shoulders as he played his guitar was like an undiscovered coastline, and Rebekah had been the first to sight it.

  She slipped silverware, a napkin next to her father’s plate, placed in front of him a bowl filled with soup. He was the other sort of man. Rebekah didn’t have to squint or look at him aslant to see what her mother had seen, at seventeen. His wavy, dark red hair was still thick, and streaked with white, not gray. His eyes were the green of imaginary water, not a lake or a pond or even the sea, but dream green. And everything in his face—his nose, his chin and jaw, his forehead—was so uncompromising that time couldn’t change it much. He would be whittled down as everyone finally was, but until then he was like stone.

  “Precious Lord,” he began, not waiting for Rebekah to sit, “we thank You for this food, for the blessings of Your love and comfort, and ask that we may use this nourishment to Your greater glory, in Jesus’ name.”

  “Amen.” Rebekah pulled her chair closer to the table, opened her napkin in her lap. She was struck by a wave—not of sickness, exactly, or exhaustion, but of sadness, an unaccountable sensation. Was it the light in the kitchen, her grandmother’s butcher block table? Her hand was so close to her spoon, but she couldn’t seem to reach for it. For years after her mother died she’d find herself frozen, a sewing needle halfway through a hem, the bed half made, and Rebekah just standing there, unable to move. She didn’t think about Ruth in those long minutes, not specifically, anyway. Her heart just turned things over, a handful of pebbles: one for the dresses in her closet (she didn’t know why). One was for loneliness. This one was the piano, in tune, and this was the heavy front door of the funeral home that opened just before you could touch it.

  “Rebekah?”

  It was gone. She picked up her spoon, stirred the too hot soup, didn’t bother answering Vernon. He did not, as a general rule, speak to her, hadn’t for the past five years. She abided by the laws he established in the first harrowing weeks after she left the church, and he responded with silence. Her room was still hers, but she was to clean the house, buy the groceries, and prepare all of his meals, seven days a week. If she ate with him, she couldn’t read a book or listen to the radio, nor could she talk at him, as she had done all of the years of her life. How strange it seemed to her now, the way she used to sit at the table and babble away, telling first both her parents everything that had happened in her day, laughing crazily over every funny thing she’d seen or heard, and later just Vernon, who didn’t respond but didn’t tell her to stop, either. She would tell her parents how her favorite boy cousin, Davy, could fill his cheeks with peanuts and imitate a squirrel, and as she told them she’d first laugh, and then begin to cry from laughing, and finally she’d realize she was in such a state not because the squirrel imitation was so funny but because she herself, laughing so hard, was so funny. Some days she’d even admit this, wiping tears from her face and holding her aching right side; she’d say, “Oh, lands, I am just completely out of control here,” and that would make her start all over again. Ruth would say, “Well, Rebekah, I never,” and Rebekah would put her head down on the table and simply weep. Eventually Ruth would start to laugh, and sometimes it went on this way all through the evening, and Vernon just watched. Ate his dinner, folded his napkin, watched them. Rebekah never would have guessed—it didn’t occur to her until she was fully grown—that not everyone shared her belief that God had spared humani
ty its relentless fate in a single way: by making a good portion of every day hilarious.

  Vernon, who ate everything quickly, wiping his mouth with his napkin between each bite, was finished. Rebekah realized she didn’t really want to eat anything, she’d just been applying herself to the ritual. She put down her spoon and was pushing her chair back from the table when Vernon said, “Rebekah, sit.”

  She sat. Was there something she had failed to do? Had she salted the soup, vacuumed the hallway, folded his handkerchiefs? It seemed she’d done all those things, so what was coming? Vernon swallowed, clenched his jaw muscles, didn’t look at her. Rebekah waited. She heard (not for the first time) the hum of the overhead light, the motor of the refrigerator grinding, her pulse.

  “You have not,” her father began, “had a menstrual period in two months.” His voice was low, reasonable. He could have been on the radio, he could have been the person to announce, This one is for all the lovely girls sitting by the phone tonight, waiting for a word from their sweethearts. The message from Woody Herman is: We “Surrender,” darlings. We have surrendered.

  Rebekah could see, it seemed, the individual threads in Vernon’s T-shirt, and there was a powerful light at the edge of his body, just where it became itself and not the space around it. The whole of the kitchen rose up this way, vivid and exact. She thought to say, How do you know this? And then, How do you KNOW this? But she couldn’t speak. Because he was right, and she had just realized it herself as he said it.

  “I assume this means you are pregnant, and by the young man who is unemployed and takes money from his parents. The young man with the guitar who hadn’t called you or seen you in four weeks.”

  Rebekah wanted to reach across the table and take Vernon’s hands, something she hadn’t done since childhood. She wanted to tell him to stop talking, because she needed time to take in what he’d just told her, she needed to sit still and think about it a minute. Because he was right—there had been something swimming just at the edge of her consciousness, and for weeks when she turned to look at it, it was gone. Just a small, swimming thing. Her breasts ached and tingled, for how long now? Her abdomen felt like one continuous bruise, from her pelvic bone up to her stomach, and there was the tiredness like fainting, and how the color on a box of Cheerios had nearly made her throw up. She was stunned, and mortified. Her periods had always been irregular; it wasn’t unusual for her to skip a month, but two? There had been that one night with Peter—she remembered it clearly—when she had been lying on her back and felt…what was it? What a leaf must feel when its stem breaks free of the tree.