The Used World

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 day 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.

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.”

They 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?”