The Used World

by Haven Kimmel

  “Rebekah? What are you doing?” Claudia called up the stairs. “I think I got that dried banana off Oliver’s face.” She paused. “Rebekah?”

  “I’m sitting on the bed! I’m not going!”

  Claudia climbed the stairs and walked down the hallway toward Rebekah’s room. “Why are you just sitting here? If we don’t leave now we’ll be late, and Oliver is about to fall asleep in his swing. What are you doing.”

  “I don’t think I should go, because look, I don’t have anything to wear, I’m too fat for all my dresses, and if I have to wear panty hose even for an hour I will slit my own wrists.” Rebekah felt near tears again; she’d already cried twice this morning, once because she’d dreamed of Peter on a swing set—he was swinging too high and scaring her, and she kept asking him to stop, to come down, but he just smiled and went higher—and the second time because standing in the shower she realized she’d gotten everything wrong and was now living such a weird life her sweet mother wouldn’t have recognized her. And she was quite happy, which only made her cry harder.

  “This is a Church of the Brethren, not the Junior League fashion show, Rebekah, nobody cares what you wear. And remember opening gifts this morning? I got you some new clothes?”

  “But I’m crying about that, too, because I couldn’t make the thing I wanted to for you.”

  “You know that means absolutely—”

  “Also I always thought I’d be a great pregnant person, I thought I’d be a natural. And pretty about it, and romantic. But I hate it, it’s terrible. I feel every minute like I have the flu, I’m exhausted and sick and my breasts ache, and look how swollen I already am, my fingers look like fish sticks.”

  “Talk to Gil about it this week. You have an appointment on Wednesday.”

  “What’s Gil going to say, I mean really? That he’ll get me out of it somehow, that I don’t have to see it through to the end? Claudia, why on earth do you want to go to church anyway? It’s Christmas Day, we could have a nice lunch, invite Hazel. We could go see a movie, take a walk, something.”

  “We can do all those things anyway. And you don’t have to go. I mean it, you don’t have to go.”

  “Well, do you want me to go or not?!?”

  Claudia took a deep breath, sat down on the bed. “Tell me what you want me to say.”

  “No! You have to figure it out yourself.”

  Claudia thought about it. “I’m leaving in five minutes. All of your clean laundry is right in that basket. Your new clothes are on your chair. You may go with Oliver and me, or you can go back to bed. Your choice.”

  Rebekah fell down on the bed, pulling a pillow over her face. “You’re mean, Claudia Modjeski! You are mean to me, and I’m not going.”

  On the way to church Rebekah noticed that Claudia listened to an AM gospel station; so this was what she did when she was alone, on a Sunday. They heard the Oak Ridge Boys sing “On the Sunny Banks”; Don Rigsby’s “Love Lifted Me”; the Nelons’ “O for a Thousand Tongues”; and a song that activated Rebekah’s newfound weeping gene, Merle Haggard singing something with the line Come home, come home, it’s suppertime.

  “What’s that song called?” she asked, wiping her eyes.

  “‘Suppertime.’”

  “Ah.”

  She was on her way to church again after so many years, the building and hour that contained a thousand conspiracies and dramas, to listen to a man tell her that what was right before her eyes was not true, that it did not, in fact, even matter. It mattered enough to destroy; that was all. Its import was as an obstacle, a stumbling block. Rebekah watched it go by: the winter fields, the stark sky, a hawk descending.

  “You’re going to church with me,” Claudia said.

  Rebekah stared at her a moment, at Claudia’s sharp jawline, her perfect, burnished skin, the streak of rose that blushed along her cheekbone. Vernon had seemed to think that Rebekah had fallen as far as a woman could, and so had she. But it had turned out that the few square feet of the planet she lived on were gravity-less, full of bottomless surprises. Unmarried, pregnant, in exile, and now living with a woman and her rescued child. If they had their way, the men who meant to rip away the screen of reality, the men who meant to devour everything, everything—on the dark day they finally seized the reins, she knew she would be the first to go. They would be the first: Rebekah, Claudia, Oliver, and the little alien. The lithe, red-haired, beloved child of God, lovely little Pentecostal Rebekah Shook, had become the enemy of both the temple and the state.

  “Well, as it turns out,” she said to Claudia, “I’m going to church with you.”

  The church was bare, not as if anything was missing, but as if nothing had ever been there. They were slightly late and Oliver was asleep; Rebekah held him as Claudia hung up their coats. The vestibule smelled so familiar, but she couldn’t decide what to call the smell, or what it was made of. Filling, and emptying out—that was part of it, the comings and goings of people driven to congregate and talk it over. It wasn’t a home, it wasn’t an institution, it was merely a space standing still and waiting.

  Claudia took Oliver and pushed against one of the double swinging doors, which sighed open on a well-oiled hinge. There were thirty or so people gathered in front of them on the old wooden pews, all completely silent, including the few children. A clock ticked so loudly in the expectant air that it made Rebekah’s heart speed up. The only concession to the season were two red poinsettia on either side of the altar. She followed Claudia to a place at the end of a pew midway down the aisle, and was surprised to find herself embarrassed without knowing why. She’d ended up wearing the last pair of black slacks that fit her, but that wasn’t it; everyone was dressed plainly. She was pregnant, which amounted to wearing her sex life on her sleeve, but she’d mostly gotten over fretting about it.

  The minister stood from the short pew where he’d been sitting behind the altar and approached the podium. “Good morning, friends, and Merry Christmas.” Amos Townsend was tall and lanky, handsome, severe, but with a warm voice that carried a trace of irony? Chagrin? The congregation answered him, and Amos pushed his glasses up and held his hymnal out the length of his arms.

  “I wonder if we can start today by singing my favorite Christmas hymn, ‘The Friendly Beasts’? It’s on page one forty-two of the blue hymnal, the modern one. My father”—Amos lowered his hymnal, nudged his glasses again—“used to refer to every modernization of the church as Peter, Paul and Jesus.”

  Rebekah made the hiccupy sound of an abbreviated laugh—her Peter had loved Peter, Paul and Mary—which in turn made everyone around her laugh, and then she was even more deeply mortified. At the Mission, with its One Strike policy, she would have been out the door and pleading for mercy.

  She watched Amos bounce up and down a little as the piano started, although the opening chords were stately, not bouncy. Not hymns, not hymn singing, she had no desire for that. She didn’t want to hear them again, not “Power in the Blood” or “The Old Rugged Cross,” none of them. This, she wanted to say to Claudia—could have just turned and said to her in front of everyone—is what I do not want and am allowed to be free of. The small congregation began to sing:

  Jesus our brother kind and good

  Was humbly born in a stable rude

  And the friendly beasts around him stood

  Jesus our brother kind and good

  Each verse was from the point of view of a different animal, the donkey, the camel, the dove. The song ended:

  Thus every beast remembering it well

  In the stable dark was so proud to tell

  Of the gifts they gave Emmanuel

  The gifts they gave Emmanuel

  Rebekah pressed her fingertips against her eyelids, tried not to cry. Well, it had been a lovely song, she was never right about anything, and her little peanut-shaped alien had heard it. That had been what she dreaded the most—the notion that the baby would be infected with the language of her father; that it might know eve
n before greeting the world that it had been responsible for the death of an innocent man two thousand years ago. Lambs, slaughter.

  There was the familiar sound of thirty hymnals closing, being slipped back into place. Beside her Oliver slept on Claudia’s shoulder, sometimes making a little snoring sound. Amos waited a moment, cleared his throat. “In every other church you’d be hearing about the Nativity right now. Maybe you’ll be disappointed not to hear that story today. But you know”—he looked at the ceiling, seeming to search for the right words—“I’m just a little tired of it.”

  Rebekah began to feel queasy, and pulled a saltine cracker out of her pocket, trying not to make any noise.

  “I’m tired of the television specials and the songs. I’m not even talking about the secular, commercial part; good heavens, everyone is sick of that, and sick from it. I’m tired of the Archangel and Herod and Joseph the Widower. I don’t want to talk about a virgin birth or the Three Wise Men. Is it just me, or is there something in that story you can’t get your mind around?”

  Rebekah froze, the cracker halfway to her mouth. Oh yes, she certainly knew the story of the Nativity. She, like all of her cousins, could quote Luke 2:1–20 in its entirety, and also she didn’t understand it.

  “It’s—I’m not sure what I want to say, even though I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks now.” Amos tugged at the cuff of his white shirt absently. “All I know is that what we’re told to read there is not what I read. It is the story, after all…”

  …of a child born to die, Rebekah thought, glancing against her will at the sleeping Oliver. If she knew he was the Messiah, if her faith in that proposition was uncompromised, her life would be an unhappy one indeed. And so would his.

  “…of a child born to die. So, with all due respect, and I mean that, I’d like to talk to you today not about how the person of Jesus was born, but why; in the same way that on the anniversary of Einstein’s birth we talk about how he changed the world.”

  Rebekah closed her eyes, felt something like a trapdoor open beneath her. Pregnancy had had one unexpected effect, one she had never heard mentioned in the literature. Her memory had become vibrant, crystalline. She remembered events full of body and color and scent. Now, sitting in church beside Claudia and Oliver, whose lips were pressed in sleep into a little squash blossom, Rebekah was also sitting on the couch holding a shoe box she’d found in the coat closet. She had been looking for scraps of material; she wanted to make dresses for her dolls. The box was in her hands, dusty, the texture displeasing. It had held her father’s work shoes, was blue, faded to gray. Here was the couch beneath her, the exact color and weave; here the oval braided rug that slid if she ran on it. Rebekah took the lid off the shoe box and found her baby book, which she had never seen before, the book that celebrated her birth. She opened it and nothing was written there. Nothing. Not even her name. She turned every page just to make sure, her heart growing more steadily unsure, and at the very back she found a black-and-white photograph, someone she didn’t recognize, and then her mother was upon her. The only time Ruth ever struck Rebekah, and it was across the cheek with a wet dish towel. By the time Rebekah lowered her hand from the stinging surprise, the box and her mother were gone.

  “…where we read, ‘In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”

  Matthew 3:1–2, Rebekah thought. Repent. There was a number one hit from the Prophetic Mission. She was constantly being told to repent, to beg forgiveness for her sins; she was first admonished at the same age other children were being shown a toothbrush for the first time and told of Mr. Cavity Man.

  Amos looked up. “Repent in this case means, literally, to ‘return,’ an important Judaic concept. It signifies, oh, more like turning around and going back to something, back to the original covenant, the one between the Hebrew God and the Israelites. The writer of Matthew is saying that because the kingdom of heaven has come near—and remember that phrase, it has ‘come near’—because of its nearness, whoever reads this document should return to the original promise.”

  There—there was something familiar; the nearness of God, the maddening sensation the Mission had that He was right there, and the only thing keeping them from instant and complete unity was sin. And what of you, little Rebekah? A question posed to her in Hazel’s voice. Rebekah was the failure, the sin, at least she had become that for her father. But as a girl? She had not understood it—she just thought God was everywhere and it was simple, really. Vernon, the Governance men: they understood the divide.

  Amos said, “Later in Matthew, um…13:10–12, we’re told, ‘Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”’ When Jesus says, ‘To those who have, more will be given,’ He’s talking, I think, about a certain kind of insight, what my father used to call a leading. He’s not suggesting power or privilege, certainly not wealth. If he is, I’ve chosen the wrong profession.” There was polite laughter, a shuffling in the pews. “The kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God—it’s the cornerstone of Jesus’ ministry, and the subtheme of the entire New Testament. Again, it’s a Judaic concept, but that goes without saying; it’s as if someone talking about Indiana were to remark on what Indiana has in common with America. Remember that the Hebrew people believed that the Messiah would be a king—he would be a person who had harnessed immense political force. So the kingdom of God meant one thing in that context, and it means something different coming from the carpenter from Nazareth. I—” Amos shifted his weight, cleared his throat. “I don’t mean to take any kind of polarizing stand here, but it behooves us, I think, to remember that the ‘Church’ as an entity, the Roman church and many Protestant congregations, still pray for the conversion of the Jews. But Jesus wasn’t appropriate as their Messiah—not according to their scriptures, and certainly not given their condition. He failed them. He failed them in Roman-occupied Palestine; they didn’t need a wandering magician, a powerless, poverty-stricken philosopher; they didn’t need His philosophy. They spoke of one kingdom, and He spoke of another.”

  He failed them. Rebekah wanted to hold up her hand and ask Amos to stop, stop, she needed to write this down; she needed a doughnut and a nap. She wanted to think about it for a few days and then they could all get back together and go on with the sermon. He failed them. A chill passed over her arms, across the back of her neck. All that anger in the Mission! All the anger in Rebekah, for years. For so long, from the moment He died! the church had been saying He was coming soon, He was coming for those who knew the Way, the Truth, and the Life. But where was He? If only she had the guts to walk up to her father, even to call him on the telephone and say, Daddy? Maybe He failed you.

  “We’ve talked before about the shift between the First and Second Testaments from the historical to the metaphorical; from the Law to the Spirit. The Hebrews sacrificed animals, the Christian community believed Jesus’ sacrifice was the final one necessary. So, too, with the kingdom of God. For the Jews, God seems to have been as present, as real, as anything else in creation. To paraphrase Martin Buber”—a number of people laughed aloud, as if Amos paraphrased Martin Buber with some frequency—“there was a time when God spoke; it seems He speaks no more. God spoke directly to Noah, to Moses, to Abraham. The kingdom of God was Egypt, it was Babylon and Zion, the desert, because it was the covenant God had made with the Chosen People; a living, active, demanding deity. But by the age of the Synoptic Gospels, the King was silent; His emissary had been sent and killed; and the kingdom in question had become the stuff of parables. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, God speaks through Jesus, Who is speaking through the writers of the books, and we are receiving them in transl
ation from the language of the occupiers in which they were written. And now we are told that the Kingdom of Heaven is near, that it’s here, that it’s coming, all at the same time. I wish I knew what that meant.”

  Rebekah sighed. Poor Vernon. Amos was right, and simply so: God spoke, God stopped speaking; except, of course, in the little drywalled box that held the Prophetic Mission, where the cruel, the stupid, the kind and good alike believed that they were the conduits for the direct revelation of Yahweh. And the kingdom of heaven…she closed her eyes and could see the phrase standing like a sentry in the Old Testament, then sailing through the New as if on wings. It is near, it is here, it is coming soon. Her King James Bible—purchased for her at birth and with her name inscribed on the cover—printed the words of Jesus in red, and Rebekah could see herself lying in bed at night in her white gown, skipping everything but that red text. She had been told that she loved Him. She had been given no choice but to love Him, and so she had, with her eyes and her hands and her mind. What He said—His words, not the words of the apostles, not their acts or their demands—what He said sometimes rose right up out of the onionskin pages, not like speech but like a thing; what He said rose up with mass and definition, and if she didn’t stare directly at it, if she turned away just slightly and concerned herself with the moon, the dusty valence over the window, she could feel something touch her in the hollow of her throat.

  “The Kingdom,” Amos continued, polishing the lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief, “is, for some, the Church. The Church is the kingdom of heaven and the world is not, and the Church becomes the status quo. Everything Jesus said, everything in the biblical tradition, is then used to uphold the status quo, because that’s what it means to enter the kingdom. But when the Kingdom is seen as transcendent, or beyond the Church, there is a call to revolution, in defiance of old customs and conventions. That’s where we get the Jesus I find more attractive: the radical overturning the money changers’ tables, the man who, in fact, turned everything upside down, the Jesus Who is not on the side of any empire or principality, but Who is concerned with outsiders and sinners and the sick.”