The Used World

by Haven Kimmel

  “Nothing.” Rebekah smoothed out her blue jeans with the flat of her hand, as Ludie would have a tablecloth.

  “You did so say something.”

  “I only said that we were never vaccinated, the church doesn’t believe in it.”

  “Well, that’s just—” Claudia stopped herself. “My guess is that you’ll have to have some shots, too, then. I don’t know how it works.”

  Rebekah sighed. “I’m uncomfortable.”

  “I understand that.”

  “And also, I’ve never had, what do you call it. An internal exam.”

  “So it will be a day of firsts. Where’s the diaper bag?”

  “It’s under my seat. I really don’t want to do this.”

  Claudia rocked the car seat, pushed up the sleeves of her sweater.

  “We could just get back in the car and you could take me home,” Rebekah said. “I’ll take vitamins, whatever you want.” She shifted in her seat. “I’m uncomfortable.”

  “I know you are.”

  “Between my hip bones, really low, I keep having this sharp, muscular pain. It’s like a stitch in my side, only spread all the way from one side of my abdomen to the other.”

  “You should tell Gil.”

  “Or you could take me home and I could have a nap.”

  Claudia tapped her pen on Oliver’s intake form. She didn’t know much about him, but she’d filled in her address and phone number. The date. Her insurance information—she’d need to add him to her policy.

  “Also I’m worried about leaving Hazel alone for the afternoon. It’ll be busy.”

  “Can I ask you something? Why does Hazel hate your dad so much?”

  “Whew.” Rebekah took a deep breath, blew it out. “They met once, when I had a cold—let’s see—about three years ago. Hazel stopped by with some medicine and soup. I didn’t really want to let her in the house, because I was afraid he’d come downstairs.”

  “Why? What would he have done?”

  “Oh nothing, really, it’s just that he’s not very skilled at, um, disguising his contempt for people outside the church.”

  “Nice.”

  “Well, he has his standards.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Hazel insisted on coming in; it was sort of odd. She’s not really the type. I brought her into the parlor, because I couldn’t very well say no, she was trying to take care of me. And Daddy came downstairs just like I was afraid he would. They shook hands and I could see him taking her in, her hair, her clothes and jewelry. She was wearing that ring she has that’s the head of a goat.”

  “She’s a Capricorn.”

  “Right. That one. He was sort of chilly at first and then just before she left—she was only there a couple minutes—he said, ‘I understand you dabble in astrology and the dark arts now, Miss Hunnicutt.’ My heart near stopped beating.”

  Claudia gave a little whistle through her teeth.

  “Hazel said, ‘You’ve heard that, have you?’ smiling at him as if they were friends, or as if he were a complete fool, it was hard to tell. Daddy said, ‘I know plenty about you.’ And then Hazel looked as if she got a little bigger, you know how she does?”

  Claudia nodded.

  “And she said, ‘I know a fair piece about you, too, Mr. Shook.’ She wasn’t smiling anymore, and the air in the room felt—it reminded me of the scene in that movie, what was that movie again?”

  “I’ll need more to go on than that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. So then Daddy, who’s never been sassed by a woman a day in his life, says, “I’m of a mind to come to your house sometime in the night and burn all your books about astrology and devil worship. That’s what I might do.’ Hazel laughed, said, ‘If you ever step foot on my property, or touch anything I own, I’ll be forced to shoot you through the heart like the common criminal you are.’”

  Claudia shook her head. “But what did that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Daddy turned bright red, his hands gathered up into fists, but he turned and marched straight upstairs and slammed his door and Hazel laughed all the way to the car.”

  “I can picture that.”

  Gil’s nurse, Patti, stepped out into the waiting room and called Oliver’s name. Claudia stood and picked up Oliver’s seat, said to Rebekah, “Fill out your form while I’m back there.”

  Rebekah picked it up and sighed, took a peanut butter cracker out of her pocket.

  Gil tipped his head back so he could see through his reading glasses. “You don’t know his birth date?”

  “Not—” Claudia shook her head. “I haven’t gotten his birth certificate yet. I had to put in a request at the courthouse and they’re going to send it to me. So no.”

  “Well.” Gil made a notation in Oliver’s chart. “I would put him at five, six months. Either way his weight is low, and his head circumference is in the thirtieth percentile, so our first priority will be nutrition.”

  Claudia held Oliver on her lap, her hands wrapped around his chest. His rib cage felt tiny, breakable, as if she were holding a rabbit. Gil consulted a small book, put it back in his pocket. He breathed noisily. He seemed healthy, hale, but Claudia knew he’d cut his patient load to almost nothing, and that he’d wanted to retire for more than a decade. It wouldn’t be long before he was gone, taking Judy with him, and then Claudia would have to face moving on to Gil’s young replacement, someone who knew nothing of her and had never even met Ludie or Bertram. She lowered her face, smelled the top of Oliver’s head.

  “Claude?”

  “I’m sorry—I’m listening.”

  “I’m sending home this higher-calorie formula. We’ll start his vaccinations today and you’ll call me if he has a reaction—a rash, a fever above a hundred, vomiting, or diarrhea. Call me at home. Now, you’ve brought a friend”—he shuffled through some folders—“Rebekah?”

  “Yes. She’s pregnant, she’s not married, she chose the absolute worst insurance plan from Hazel’s HMO. Her deductible is more than most people would pay for a car. Is there…could you just charge me for her co-pay and whatever her insurance doesn’t cover? She doesn’t need to know.”

  Gil removed his glasses, sat back in his rolling chair. He slipped the glasses into the pocket of his coat, let his hands lie loosely in his lap. The baby squirmed, arched his back, still unhappy from being awakened from his nap. Claudia turned him around and raised him to her shoulder as Gil sat passively studying her. He seemed to be considering the situation, and in no hurry to make a pronouncement; she had forgotten this element of his personality. He took a deep breath and said, “I don’t want to go through a pregnancy and deliver a baby, Claudia.”

  “I understand.”

  “I am elderly and tired and I want to tend my garden.”

  “I know.”

  He rubbed his eyes, watched her bounce the grizzling Oliver. “I could recommend a wonderful ob/gyn clinic right here in Jonah.”

  Claudia nodded. She wasn’t the pregnant one, she wasn’t the person who should care, but as soon as she pictured Rebekah walking into a big, cold clinic, cycling through eight different doctors who would never know her, she felt sick.

  “We could compromise,” Gil said, his shoulders still drooping, his eyes watery. “If Rebekah will agree to see my new partner in the clinic, Dr. Mehta, when I’m not here, and if she’ll agree that he might be in charge of her delivery if I’m too tired to get up, I’ll take her on as a new patient. But.” He raised a finger in the air. “After the baby’s born you have to promise me that you and Oliver and Rebekah will move over to Dr. Mehta and let me die in peace.”

  Dr. Mehta. The light that contained Claudia’s history flickered, dimmed. But she agreed.

  Is your mother living or dead?

  Rebekah looked at the question twice, trying to imagine how her pregnancy was dependent on its answer.

  Dead. Cancer.

  Is your father living or dead?

  She thought, Well, what is the tru
th? She checked Dead and felt a momentary burst of guilt and joy.

  What is the date of your last menstrual period?

  Rebekah fanned herself, tried to remember, but all the months, all the occasions ran together as one. She wrote, Mid-October?

  Are you sexually active?

  I was. Yes.

  Have you been diagnosed with or are you at risk for any of the following: herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, AIDS?

  She imagined Peter in the living room of the cabin, his arched back and laddered chest, how everything had been so new. She left the question blank.

  A nurse, who was nice—she was round and powdery-smelling, and her hair was cut in a strange sort of bob that made her look daring—led Rebekah to a lab at the back of the clinic and directed her to step up on a scale. “You weigh one fourteen,” she said as Rebekah stepped down. “Perfect for your height.”

  “Thank you,” Rebekah answered, grateful to have gotten something right.

  The paper gown opened in the front and Rebekah clutched it closed against her chest. She was naked underneath it, sitting on a strip of paper, a second paper exam sheet over her lap, and crying. None of this was right, she couldn’t make it right in her mind that she would be so dishonored and humiliated. She had been raised to believe in the body as belonging to God, hers connected to the wider body of the Church, and she could even recall once when she fell jumping rope and Ruth had comforted her by saying that Jesus felt it, too, the raw scrape on her knee, and had tears in His eyes for her. But in the wide world and certainly here, in a doctor’s office, she was more like a side of beef marked into quarters and about to go under the saw’s wheel.

  Nurse Patti came in with a blood pressure cuff. “One-ten over sixty.” She pulled tissues out of a box, pressed them into Rebekah’s hand. “Are you scared he’s going to hurt you?”

  Rebekah nodded, then shook her head. She couldn’t stop crying. “A little, but really I just don’t think I should have to be here this way, and I’m cold, and I have a sense that the whole experience, the whole pregnancy, is going to be miserable like this and I won’t have any say, I’ll just have to endure it. I shouldn’t have to sit here naked like this.”

  The nurse folded the blood pressure cuff and slipped it into her pocket. She sat down in the doctor’s chair and rolled toward Rebekah. “A, you aren’t naked, and b, you’re sitting there now because you were naked someplace else. And if you ever thought you’d escape with your dignity intact, you missed a lot of facts for a woman your age. You’re right about how it’s going to get worse, so I’d suggest you talk yourself into some courage here at the beginning.”

  Rebekah wiped her face, sat up straighter. They weren’t the exact words Ruth would have used, but they would do.

  “Okay,” Rebekah said, taking another tissue. “Okay, I’ll do that.”

  Dr. Gil came into the room and looked at Rebekah’s chart. She could see right away that he was kind and well-intentioned, and he couldn’t help it that he was tremendously old and that his hands were purple and brown. But all Rebekah could think of was that he was about to remove or move aside her pieces of paper with his very old hands, and so while he was talking to her and asking her questions, showing her diagrams of what he was about to do, she cried quietly and tried not to look at his skin.

  “Lie back, dear,” Dr. Gil said, and Nurse Patti handed her another tissue. Rebekah lay back, and he said, “Scoot down toward me. Scoot again. One more time,” until Rebekah was certain she was going to slide right off the end. Her embarrassment was now so acute, she could scarcely catch her breath. Patti moved over and stood beside her, took Rebekah’s hand. Dr. Gil was rolling from the cabinets to the little tray on which there were instruments and gloves, asking her to repeat the first day of her last period, said it was okay she didn’t know, wondered how long she had been acquainted with Claudia, wasn’t that Oliver a little pistol? Finally, when the dreaded speculum was revealed and the water-soluble jelly had been produced, the clear gloves snapped on, Dr. Gil said, “It might help if you visualize something or some place that makes you feel better, and to stay there in your mind until the exam is over. It makes the time pass faster, and it’s good practice for labor and delivery. You don’t have to say anything—the place is your secret.”

  Rebekah nodded, wiped her eyes. The place is your secret. Peter sitting across from her at Richard’s Diner on a Sunday morning; Peter on any given Sunday, waking beside her, the still-strange feeling of liberation and well-being she experienced each time she realized she didn’t have to go to church. Not going to church in winter, in freezing rain; not going to church when her throat was slightly sore or when she was just tired. Not going. She tried to make one of those her secret place but they vanished before she could really see them. Instead, she remembered a moment from a few months before, when Red had said something cruel about Claudia, something Rebekah didn’t at first catch. He hinted that she might actually be a man, and Hazel, who had continued reading throughout the conversation, looked up as if as an afterthought and said, “Well, boys, everyone has a secret. Isn’t that right?” All three Cronies shut up, coughed, looked away, and Hazel had gone back to her book as if nothing had happened. Dr. Gil touched Rebekah’s skin with the speculum and it was cold; she flinched and he stopped, asked her to try to relax her thighs.

  Red had been right that Claudia had a secret, but he’d guessed incorrectly. It happened Rebekah’s first morning at Claudia’s house, four days ago. Claudia had just stepped out of the shower and Rebekah opened the bathroom door without knocking; it was an accident—she didn’t share a bathroom with Vernon and wasn’t used to being careful. It was a dark morning and the lights above the mirror were burning. Claudia was standing on one long leg on the bath mat, with the other propped up on the edge of the tub. She was bent over, drying the tops of her toes, when Rebekah walked in, and instead of saying anything, she just straightened up to her full height.

  “Are you okay?” Dr. Gil asked. “I’m taking a swab here—you won’t really feel it—for some tests.”

  Claudia’s shoulders were as broad as a man’s, straight—not sloped like Rebekah’s own. Even just standing there holding a towel, not lifting a chair or exerting herself in any way, the muscles in Claudia’s arms were dense and defined, slick with water and dark like the cool skin of something just pulled up from the sea. She stood completely naked, the towel at her side, and the Cronies would never have guessed this: her breasts were as high and full as those of a girl half her age. A line of water ran between them, down the plane of a stomach long and flat, contoured. Rebekah’s eyes, tracing that surface, seemed to fall for whole minutes, until she reached Claudia’s hip bones, their protective curve, and then there was the length of her legs. Her thighs looked as if they’d been carved out of wood, and her knees were pronounced, covered with small scars. Water ran down Claudia’s shins, past her calf, toward the feet she’d been trying to dry.

  “Okay. I’m just going to palpate your uterus manually now,” Dr. Gil said, as if it made sense. He pressed against her abdomen and stared into the distance, measuring something he couldn’t see. When he was finished he snapped off his latex gloves and stood beside Rebekah, gently easing aside the paper gown. He ran his fingers over each breast, as if playing the piano, and pressed under her armpits. It had been the look on Claudia’s face that most amazed Rebekah, a look she’d never seen Claudia give anyone. What had it been? Not fear or shyness or anger at being interrupted, even though Rebekah guessed that no one had ever seen Claudia completely naked as an adult.

  “Yep,” Dr. Gil said. “There’s a baby in there.” He reached for his prescription pad, wrote down the name of a prenatal vitamin, talking as he wrote about folic acid and iron and calcium. He said based on her rough estimate of her last period and the internal exam, he’d put her at ten weeks pregnant, at term on July 23. Rebekah gathered the paper sheet around her, answered his questions: No, she didn’t smoke or drink alcohol, didn’t like
fast food. Yes, she was tired and nauseated, but manageably so. He told her to come back in a month and they’d listen to the baby’s heartbeat; he handed her a stack of pamphlets on nutrition, sex during pregnancy, when to call the doctor, and all the while Rebekah was seeing Claudia’s expression. Bemusement, that was part of it. Her face seemed to say: Here it is. Later she had walked out of the bathroom wearing a white dress shirt, a sweater vest, and a pair of dark brown corduroys, and no one looking at her could have known.

  “Congratulations, Rebekah,” Gil said, offering her his hand.

  She took it, grateful suddenly, even fond of him, “Thank you,” she said.

  “You should go to T.J. Maxx,” Red said. “The wife gets everything there, clothes and dishes, and now she’s started bringing home food I’ve never heard of before.”

  “Food you’ve never heard of before?” Slim asked. “And it came from a clothes store? Has she tried stuff from the bait shop? The automotive center?”

  Jim Hank gave his wheezy, painful laugh. “What kind of food have you never heard of? Is it Martian? Canadian?”

  Red said, “All right, you tell me, then: what’s a caper? If your wife brung home a jar of capers, what would you say that is?”

  Slim and Jim Hank sat back, considered each other.

  “I can’t say I know what a caper is,” Jim Hank said.

  “Never come acrost one myself,” Slim said.

  Claudia looked through the phone book, writing down the name and address of the now closed secondhand store from which she and Rebekah said they’d go retrieve a few things. “Do you know which part of Elm this is?” Claudia asked. “One twenty-two B? Is that before or after Walnut?”

  “The two of you don’t interest me much anymore,” Hazel said, pulling her necklace, a heavy gold Celtic cross, out of Oliver’s mouth. “You were fine for a while, but now I only really love the baby.”

  “Sam’s Club is where you ought to go, Slim,” Red said, pointing at his friend with the red tip of his cigarette. “You could get your tires and also twenty-four rolls of toilet paper and a gallon of mayonnaise, all at the same time.”