The Used World

by Haven Kimmel

  While Rebekah was being waited on at one window, a girl very like the girls behind the counter was ordering two lemonades at another. They were all friends, it seemed, because they were asking her about her love life, or about a date she’d recently had. Rebekah glanced at the girl beside her, but no—it was impossible to differentiate her from the others. She was very thin, and her blue jeans were so low Rebekah could see her sad hip bones. She was wearing a tight white shirt that stopped at her waist and a short coat made of rabbit fur. Rebekah caught a glimpse of a ring in the girl’s tiny belly button. In another time she most certainly would have been pegged as a prostitute; here she looked like any other high school senior.

  “I’m in looooove,” the girl said, leaning over the counter toward her friends.

  “Oooh, she’s in love,” one of them answered.

  Another said to Rebekah, “That’ll be two sixty-eight,” in her faux ghetto accent.

  “Girl, you always say that.” It came out, Girrr, you alway say dat.

  “Yeah, I mean it this time.”

  Rebekah smiled at the girl in love, at her tiny pants and at the exposed stripe of stomach, so foolish in this weather, then took her lemonade and her pretzel to the park benches that formed a square around a plastic tree. Sitting with her back to the kiosk, Rebekah sipped at her drink, watched people shuffle by her, miserable with packages, dragging their screaming children. She wished she had a book but was also glad she didn’t have to endure another To the Lighthouse, or something even more painful. It was fine just to sit.

  The skinny girl in love passed her, walking toward the other end of the mall, hand in hand with her beau, who was now drinking the second lemonade. They were holding hands and swinging them back and forth between them. It took Rebekah a minute to realize what she was seeing—the dark curly hair, the blue down-filled coat, Peter’s hiking boots. She stood, dropping the bag with her pretzel in it. There was Peter, walking without shame through the mall, hand in hand with a child prostitute who most assuredly was Mandy. Rebekah saw stars, she had to put her own cold hand on her forehead to keep from shouting at them. When she’d left his cabin this morning, Peter had said nothing about seeing her again before he left on his coffeehouse tour, just after Christmas. He’d made her breakfast, treated her kindly, as he would any friend with whom he had such a history. He’d not mentioned the pregnancy again, had not again suggested he wanted to be there with her or for her.

  She watched them until they were out of sight, then reached down and picked up her trash. Hazel would surely be home by now.

  The door opened and Hazel stood there, a little out of breath and dressed in a red Mickey Mouse–as–Santa sweatshirt covered with cat hair. She said, “Rebekah, didn’t I just see you? Come in, what are you doing abroad in such cold weather?” She gestured to the book-strewn, bleak living room, where Merlin, Thackeray, Mao, and Sprocket all waited to descend on Rebekah like a rumbling fur blanket.

  “Hazel, I need…” Rebekah began, slipping out of her coat, unwinding her scarf, “I need to talk to you and to ask you a favor.”

  “Okay. Sit.”

  Rebekah chose the couch, and Hazel sat in the armchair next to the small table where she kept her knitting, her Diet Faygo, and the TV Guide.

  “I’ve had a falling-out with Daddy,” Rebekah began.

  “What? With that sweet, reasonable man?”

  “Stop it. And I need some place to stay, just temporarily.”

  Hazel bit her lip, stared down at her lap.

  “Hazel?” Rebekah leaned forward, rested her hand on Hazel’s knee. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” Hazel said, shaking her head as if to clear it. “It’s just…this isn’t the right place for you. That’s all.”

  Rebekah felt a wave of heat start in her stomach and work its way up her throat, ending finally with her face and ears. “Why not?”

  Hazel looked at Rebekah with an odd directness, unusual because Rebekah had come to recognize Hazel only by the distance between what she held out in offering, and what she held back. “Do you know that our lives don’t exist, really—or, that’s not exactly right, we exist but only as a story and we are the ones who tell it? I used to have a friend, this was a long time ago, who would ask me, ‘So do children decide they’re going to die in a house fire? Do babies tell a story in which their parents beat them to death?’ And the answer is no, of course not, telling the story of your life requires will, and openness, and very often Nature overwhelms our narrative with a narrative of her own.”

  “What does that have to do with me staying with you?” Rebekah swallowed back tears, tried to sound as if they were having a normal conversation.

  “I don’t think”—Hazel reached over and took Rebekah’s hands—“I don’t think your story is best told by doing that. I know I interfere too much, and I dominate the tales around me, but”—she waved away the charge—“that’s just how it is, it shouldn’t have been given to me to see quite so clearly if I was expected to be passive.”

  She had offended Hazel in some way, Rebekah concluded; she had mortally angered her father, and her boyfriend and his parents considered her both a colossal mistake and a fool. Rebekah could say nothing. There, lined up before her, were the strata of legitimacy from which she was permanently excluded. For twenty-three years as a member of the Prophetic Mission, she had been exiled from the wider population of her peers; having left the church, she belonged nowhere. And now she was to be a mother without property, stability, or a mate. She couldn’t think fast enough to understand it, how she had become the person an entire church despised, a father would renounce, and no parent would want her son to marry. Hazel didn’t want her to spend even a night in her home.

  “Can I just use your bathroom, then, before I go?” Rebekah asked, the words so tight in her throat she sounded twelve years old.

  Hazel nodded, and Rebekah turned and walked through Hazel’s bedroom into her large, well-lit bathroom. She looked in the mirror, shocked to see the bright contrasts of her hair, her eyes, her blushing cheeks and ears. Everything in the room was generic: cream-colored wallpaper patterned with dark green strips, a matching border with maroon flowers and dark green stems. The shower curtain matched the wallpaper, the rugs matched the shower curtain, and the small plastic trash can matched the rugs, all of it inexpensive and purchased as a set. Then Rebekah saw them, between the toilet and the wall, two litter boxes side by side, and a slotted spoon used to clean them. She saw them and the persistent, sharp smell hit her at the same time, and before she’d even felt herself move, she had the toilet lid up and was sicker than she’d been since childhood, the upending, turned-inside-out, unstoppable force of vomiting that was similar to the anger she’d felt at Peter’s parents’ house.

  It was over in less than a minute. She managed to go to the bathroom and clean up the mess she made; she splashed water on her face, straightened her sweater, and walked back out to the living room.

  Hazel was already standing, and she held her arms out to Rebekah in a gesture she’d never made before. Rebekah allowed Hazel to hold her, more for Hazel than herself, and said, “You’re right, I can’t stay here.”

  “You should go to Claudia’s,” Hazel said, patting Rebekah’s back, and as soon as she said it, Rebekah knew it was true.

  The baby had gone to bed like a normal little person for the second night in a row. Claudia was grateful, but she would have stayed up with him all night happily, would have been peed on by him and cleaned up after his mighty vomiting, so happy was she to see him emerge safely from Caroline Hunnicutt’s. His day there had worked out well; Caroline lived in the part of the retirement home still designated ‘independent living,’ so she had an apartment and plenty of privacy. But she also had nurses just a bell away—she and Hazel paid dearly for their attention—and once they’d gotten wind of the baby, Caroline had a steady stream of visitors vying for a chance to take care of him. Hazel couldn’t have chosen a better place t
han an assisted living facility, given the abundance of nurses who were flat tired of old people and their problems.

  He wouldn’t sleep long, two or three hours, before needing a bottle, which made Claudia wonder (with fresh horror every time) what his nights had been like at Cobb Creek, where he had spent them, and how much he had been ignored. She had just closed the Irving novel and was staring out the window at a scattering of stars when she heard a car pull in the driveway. Without a second’s hesitation, she rolled off the bed, pulled the .38 out from under the mattress, and slipped out into the hallway, turning off lights as she passed them.

  She took the stairs two at a time, landing on the edges where they were less likely to complain. The ache in her back, in her legs and hips, was completely gone. Her heart had sped up in a pleasant enough way, and she wasn’t thinking much of anything at all, just picturing the doors, the locked front door, the locked kitchen door, were there any windows they could get through, how much time did she have?

  Claudia couldn’t see the car through the narrow window at the bottom of the stairs, so she crept down silently, expecting the men to swarm up and surround the house, like a fat SWAT team. Maybe they’d fallen asleep waiting for someone to lead them.

  A car door opened, closed. Claudia turned and pointed the gun at the front door. She’d expected to be overwhelmed by the moment, but the weapon actually felt small in her hands, natural. At first it had seemed she was thinking quite clearly, and then not at all, and in a split second she realized she was clearly not thinking, and that wasn’t like her. She lowered the weapon and looked through one of the three panes of glass at the top of the door. There was Rebekah’s car right in front of the house, and rising up from the porch, Rebekah’s small white hand about to knock on the window. Claudia threw open the door, turned on the porch light and the overhead light in the living room at once. Rebekah stood with her hand in the air, her green eyes wide, her serviceable navy peacoat unbuttoned.

  “Rebekah, my goodness”—Claudia waved her in with the gun—“come in, come in, it’s freezing out there.”

  Rebekah stepped inside, glancing at the gun, and then at Claudia in her old man’s pajamas and chenille sweater, and it seemed to Claudia that something passed through Rebekah’s body, starting at the top of her head and traveling down to her stomach. Rebekah threw back her head and began to laugh. She periodically tried to say something, she would point at the gun or at the pajama pants and say, “I’m sorry—” and then she’d double over, sometimes actually snorting and once issuing a sound that was surely a guffaw. She made her way over to the couch and lay down, opening her coat and wiping her eyes with her scarf, and Claudia followed, sitting in Ludie’s rocking chair.

  “I can explain about this gun, Rebekah,” Claudia said.

  “Oh please don’t,” Rebekah said, pulling her knees up to her chest. She stopped laughing a moment, then began again, saying, “Oh my God,” waving her hand in the general direction of Claudia.

  Things might have gone on like this all night, except that the baby woke up with a wail, and Rebekah stopped. She sat up and looked at Claudia, who rose and headed for the stairs.

  “Claudia, is there a…are you baby-sitting?”

  “No. No, not really.”

  The baby, when Claudia reached him, was on his back, his blanket thrown aside, his arms and legs pinwheeling in fury. In repose he was a bit elfin, but angry he looked like a furious little Secretary of Defense. Claudia leaned over the crib, rested her hand on the top of his head, just to feel it. He stopped crying, but began gnawing on his fist. His diaper had soaked through, so she moved him to the changing table, removed the diaper along with his nightgown.

  “Claudia?” Rebekah said from the bedroom doorway.

  “Oh, Rebekah—help me, would you? His sheet’s wet, there are dry ones in that laundry basket. I think we’re using the wrong-size diaper.”

  Behind her Rebekah was silent a moment. Claudia heard her step in, slip off her coat, drop it on the bed. “Whose baby is this?” she asked, lowering the crib rail.

  “He’s mine. I guess.”

  Rebekah nodded. “You’re not sure?”

  “I’m not sure yet. He’s mine for now, anyway.” Claudia studied the baby, who studied her in return, sucking his thumb. Sometimes he took a deep, shuddery breath, as if he weren’t quite done crying. By the time Claudia had him in clean pajamas, the crib was ready.

  “Can I hold him?”

  Claudia handed the baby to Rebekah; he grabbed her hair and tried to eat it. She handled him so competently—the way Ludie had been with babies—that Claudia felt like a lumberjack. “Are you, have you known a lot of babies?”

  Rebekah tucked her hair into the collar of her sweater. “Oh, lots. Our church was filled with babies, and I worked”—she thought—“twelve? thirteen years in the nursery. What’s this fella’s name?”

  “He doesn’t have one.”

  “I see. He probably needs to have one soon, then, and he should eat again before he goes down for the night,” Rebekah said.

  “Should I—”

  “Why don’t you—”

  “I’ll go—”

  “Great. I’ll stay here with him.”

  By the time Claudia got back upstairs, Rebekah was lying on the bed with the baby, letting her hair fall on his forehead, tickling it down his face. He wasn’t just laughing, he was making an odd sound—a sharp intake of air, and then an “Ooooo” as he expelled it.

  “Guess who’s back, Mr. Buttons?” Rebekah said to the baby, kissing his nose. He made a sound in his throat like a baby raccoon.

  Claudia handed Rebekah the warm bottle.

  “No, you feed him,” Rebekah said. “I’ll just watch.”

  She hadn’t been self-conscious with him yet, really—there hadn’t been time—but now Claudia felt as if she might actually hurt him. She picked him up, settled him on her lap.

  “Here, raise him up some, cradle him against you.” Rebekah guided Claudia’s arms into position and tucked the baby into them. “Remember, babies like to drink a bottle as if they’re nursing, it’s the comfort they crave as much as the milk. He’s heavier this way, so why don’t we put these pillows under your arm, there, like that? See?”

  “Yes. I get it, thank you.”

  “I’m actually here to ask you a huge favor,” Rebekah said, looking at the baby. “I wonder if you’d mind if I stayed here for a little while.”

  “Stay here? Really?” Claudia asked, nearly dropping the bottle. “There are four—I’m not kidding—four empty bedrooms in this house. Just choose. You can choose two if you want. Millie’s bathroom, well, it was Millie’s bathroom, hasn’t been used since she got married, although my mom and I long ago chipped away the crusts of perfume and hair spray and I don’t know what all, so it’s actually quite nice in there now. And you know I’ve got, well, my mom had this amazing kitchen, in the summer you can sit at the table and see the garden and her pawpaw tree, and also the little English gardening shed my dad built for her, all three things.”

  Rebekah lay down on her side, tucked her coat under her head. She smiled sleepily at Claudia, at the baby, said, “I remember pawpaws. Nobody has those anymore.”

  Rebekah didn’t choose Millie’s room with its own bathroom, but Claudia’s old room under the eaves. She couldn’t have said why, really. There was something about the sloping walls, the gray wallpaper, the plain white coverlet on the bed that made her feel less homesick. On the low bookcase next to the bed were Claudia’s favorite books from high school, her Jack Londons, the Hardy Boys, all of Nancy Drew. There was a series of books by Albert Payson Terhune, who wrote the Lad and Lassie books. Here was The Bronze Bow, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Rebekah ran her finger over the spines, imagining a childhood with these books. She had learned to read with Bible stories, and then the Bible, and had finally graduated to what these days was called ‘Christian fiction,’ or as Hazel referred to it, ‘by Oxymorons, for Oxymorons.’

/>   She wanted to study the rest of the room, but her body was closing down in a way she couldn’t get used to; she had no say in the matter. Claudia had made her a peanut butter sandwich and a bowl of soup, and Rebekah had eaten and eaten, had two glasses of milk, and only stopped because she was too tired to swallow. While Rebekah washed the dishes, Claudia carried all her things in, carefully setting the odds and ends in a line in the foyer so Rebekah could put them where she wanted in the morning.

  Rebekah’s own pillow was on the bed. She pulled back the quilt, the old, soft sheets, which were freezing, even through her nightgown. Rebekah had the sensation the bed was moving; when she opened her eyes it stopped. Just before she fell asleep, she realized again that she was pregnant, and that it was something she could, from this moment on, begin to dwell upon. She rested one hand on her abdomen, and was stunned to feel, in the place her stomach had always dipped between her hip bones, a solid, hard thing, like the edge of a cantaloupe. It was in there. It wasn’t leaving, not for a long time. And somewhere, deep in that darkness, a heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird’s, right below her own heart, which wasn’t broken, wasn’t breaking. It was just beating.

  Part Two

  For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.

  —Luke 1:43–45

  Chapter 5

  “IUSEDTO BE a believer, I was. Some time ago.”

  Amos nodded. “Used to be. But you’re back in church.”

  “Right, I—”

  “Not that it means anything, necessarily. Being in church. There are as many reasons for showing up as there are people in the pews. Or as many reasons for not attending, as the case may be.”

  Had she been a believer? She had attended the Jonah Christian Church with her parents right up until her mother’s death, a rural church with an unobtrusive theology and little in the way of graven images. The pews made predictable protests each time the parishioners sat down or stood to sing. The stained-glass windows along the south wall were just two colors—milky white and tangerine in alternating panes—so the light in Claudia’s memory was dusty and gold. The pews, the worn brown carpet, the broken-backed hymnals, the light. She could still see her parents’ hands gripping the pews in front of them as they rose to pray, the skin becoming marked with age, the fingers knobbed and angled. Sunday upon Sunday morning passing and gone.