The Used World

by Haven Kimmel

  This. This was where she now lived, the tall, graceful, starry-eyed skating girl, Finney.

  Hazel walked with care up the precarious front steps, which canted to the left and were slick with mud and ice. The yellow bulb in the outside socket lent the porch a jaundiced air. Through the cheap, gauzy curtains in the front windows Hazel saw Finney’s shadow move between two doorways in the center of the house, but when Hazel knocked, Finney was right there, waiting.

  “Come in! Come in, Hazey May, and Merry Christmas.” Finney kissed Hazel on the cheek, squeezed her hands.

  “Are you expecting company?” On the small dining room table were two glasses, and an open bottle of wine.

  “Just you, nutty girl.” Finney took Hazel’s coat and scarf, draped them over the arm of the sofa, a faded blue monstrosity with scarred wooden arms.

  Hazel tried, as she had tried for the past eighteen months, not to look too closely at the home Finney had chosen for herself, for which she would forgo the comfort of the farm and her parents. It was right—she knew this—for Finney to leave home, no matter where she ended up, much more right than Hazel’s decision to stay put. But the reason Finney moved when she did stuck in Hazel’s throat like a bone; she couldn’t get past it.

  She had to hand it to Finney—she’d worked at the place gamely. There were brightly colored pillows on the cast-off sofa and chair in the living room, and scarves draped over the two lamps. She was going for a gypsy look, and had achieved it, as gypsies undoubtedly loved nice things as much as anyone else, and made do with what they had. It wasn’t the decor that bothered Hazel, it was that Finney had chosen an atmosphere so shopworn and desperate. Shack Town was the end for most everyone who lived there, it was the dank bottom of the barrel. Finney was surrounded by alcoholics, by women in their twenties who’d already lost most of their teeth to their fathers’ pliers. The children were hollow-eyed and prone to violence. Finney could have chosen a hundred different places, all of them an improvement, but she knew only one place where no one, not one soul, cared what her neighbor was doing.

  “Sit down, let me pour you some wine.” Finney gestured to the Formica table, and a metal chair with a bright yellow cushion.

  “It’s four in the afternoon,” Hazel reminded her.

  “But it’s Christmas.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Finney’s hair was still cut in her signature style, but it no longer shone as it once had. She spent four mornings a week at the 10th Street Diner, serving up eggs and coffee and red-eye gravy in a fog of cigarette smoke and grease. It was all she could do, she’d once told Hazel, to get the smell off before she went to her regular job at Sterling’s. Some of the women she worked with gave her disquieting looks when she passed, though no one said anything outright.

  “It’s Mogen David,” Finney said, pouring. “Not what Caroline would serve, I’m sure.”

  “Caroline loves you.”

  “I know—I’m sorry. I love her, too.”

  “Have you seen your parents today?” Hazel took a sip of the wine, licked her lips to hide any expression she might have made at the taste of it.

  “Oh. Well.”

  “Finney, for God’s sake.”

  “There was a chance he might drop by. He didn’t say when, so I was afraid to leave. You know how it happens that you walk out the door for just a moment and the phone call you’ve been waiting for comes right then?”

  “No. No, I don’t know, because I don’t stake my life on telephone calls.”

  Finney took a deep drink, blotted her lips on a cloth napkin. “I don’t want us to fight.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “He doesn’t come right out and say it, but I think there’s a possibility, I think he may be considering leaving her when he’s never thought about it before.”

  “He will never leave her.”

  “They don’t sleep together anymore, that’s what he told me, not even in the same bed.”

  Hazed sighed. “He’s lying.”

  “No, no—their lives are completely separate. It’s more like a contract he’s fulfilling.”

  “That isn’t even remotely true.”

  Finney drank the rest of her glass, poured another. Hazel rested her hand lightly on top of her own glass to prevent Finney from giving her more.

  “We have a deep emotional bond, Hazel. I know you don’t believe it, but it’s impossible to put into words and impossible to get over.”

  “Clearly. You have wasted, Finn, ten years of your life. You can call it a deep emotional bond or mental illness or prison, you’ve still wasted it.”

  “I don’t consider that time wasted.” Finney sniffed, sat up straighter. Her second glass of wine was half gone, although Hazel had not seen her drink it.

  “I never would have thought you could be this person.”

  “You don’t love me anymore.” Finney’s eyes filled with tears. “You are the last friend I have and you don’t love me either, anymore.”

  “You know why you have no friends. You know perfectly well what the reason is. Most of your friends couldn’t even bear hearing about it anymore, this ghastly story you keep repeating and repeating, trying to convince everyone, trying to convince yourself.”

  “He’s not who you think he is.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I know you consider him…sinister in some way, cruel—”

  “You left out dishonorable and manipulative.”

  “—but when we are together, when it’s just the two of us, he’s so tender. I know because of him what it feels like to be loved. When I’m in his arms I am loved and that’s an amazing feeling, the only thing that matters.”

  Hazel blinked, looked down at the table.

  “Can you say the same? Can you say you have ever felt loved?”

  I felt loved by you once. “Do you know what this is, this argument you offer? You have somehow come to believe that there’s such a thing as ‘love,’ such a thing as a feeling that is also an a priori truth, rather than an invention by the courtly poets. And you’ve got movies and music and books confirming for you that romantic ‘love’ is the highest good and it’s what everyone is seeking and should be seeking. But it’s a meager justification for what you’ve traded your life for. If there is any such thing as that sort of love, as opposed to the perfectly obvious and real love between parents and children, between friends, this ain’t it, Finn, and you damn well know it.”

  Finney let her head fall to the table and she began sobbing. “I know you’re right, I know what I’ve done here is awful and there’s no justification for it, none at all. It makes me hate myself.” She wiped her face with her napkin, leaving a smear of mascara on one cheek.

  “Then stop.”

  “I try.” Finney cried harder but was still able to pour herself another glass of wine. The bottle was nearly empty. “I’ve tried two thousand times. He gets ready to leave and I know he’s going home to her and to his life, which everyone thinks is one thing and only I know the truth—”

  “No, I also know the truth and so does Jim Hank: he’s a fraud and a charlatan who has not only fooled you, he’s fooled an entire community.”

  “—and I say to him, I scream at him, ‘Just don’t ever come back! You’re killing me and I can’t take it anymore! You’re killing me!’”

  Hazel could, alas, picture the scene: the disordered bedclothes, Finney flushed with drama while he stood before her, silently getting dressed and planning his return to his real life.

  “Sometimes I even stick to it, I don’t answer the phone or the door and if he comes into the diner because I won’t answer him, I get someone else to take his table. He doesn’t dare ask for me. But then something will happen, a week will go by, once even two weeks—”

  “You talk as if I don’t remember those two weeks. I remember them the way one would remember time spent as a hostage.”

  “—and I ran into him by accident. By accident, Hazel—”

  “I
was there, Finn.”

  “—at the gas station and our arms touched”—Finney rubbed her upper arm—“here, they touched here, and if we hadn’t been in public we’d—”

  “Do stop. Please.”

  Finney drained the wine, pushed the bottle aside with a practiced gesture. “I’m beginning to think he might not always be honest with me. There have been moments.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “He talks about her sometimes and I get the feeling he’s not telling the whole truth, it’s just a sensation in my gut, I get sort of sick and fluttery just to hear him say her name. His mouth forms the word and I feel like his mouth belongs to me and another woman’s name should not be in it. I told him not to call her by name anymore, I said he could refer to her as That Person, but he refuses. I think sometimes he doesn’t even listen to me.” Finney’s chest and cheeks were bright red from the wine. There were dark circles under her eyes and her fingernails were chewed down to the quick. She reached for Hazel’s full glass and Hazel said nothing. “Sometimes I follow him at a distance, when I have a day off I sometimes just follow him the whole day. I would give up the whole day just to see the back of his head in front of me, or in the summer to see him rest his arm on the open window. He has a scar on his left arm shaped like an arrow. I drive and I sit in the parking lot waiting for him to come out of the hardware store or the bank, I think about the first time I ever saw him and I can remember everything. I was so young but not too young, I was exactly the right age to see him.”

  Finney had begun to overenunciate all sibilant consonants, a sure sign that she was working overtime at staying upright and conscious. Hazel had heard it before—a few times, now that she thought about it.

  “I—” Finney stood quickly; the blood drained from her face and her chin quivered. She ran with an awkward, tilted gait the few steps to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Within seconds Hazel could hear her, and she closed her eyes in sympathy. There was nothing worse than being sick that way, nothing. Hazel herself had never consumed enough alcohol to vomit, but she imagined it would be even worse than the flu, because she would know she’d done it to herself, as Finn was doing it to herself.

  Hazel stood, took the empty bottle and the wineglasses into the spare, damp kitchen. Finney was trying to grow herbs in a little kitchen garden on the windowsill, but everything looked thin and barely alive. She washed out the glasses so Finney wouldn’t have to face them in the morning, threw the bottle in the trash. In a drawer that only opened halfway, Hazel found a hand towel, which she soaked with cold water and took with her to the bathroom.

  She didn’t knock. Finn was on her knees in front of the toilet, her head down on her forearms. She was breathing heavily; panting. Hazel knelt behind her, laid the cold towel across her neck just as she began throwing up again.

  “I didn’t eat all day.”

  “I understand.”

  “I should have eaten, I thought if he came I’d leave afterward and go home and Mama would feed me.”

  Hazel pulled off Finney’s flat shoes, put them in the closet, then unbuttoned her blue jeans and pulled them down. It wasn’t easy; Finn neither fought nor helped. She lay on her back, completely still and staring at the ceiling. She wore beautiful underwear, probably something she’d gotten at Sterling’s—white silk with lace inlaid on either hip.

  “You might have to—Finn, you need to sit up just a minute so I can get your sweater off.”

  “My bra, too, I can’t sleep in a bra.” She didn’t move.

  “You’re going to have to sit up a minute.”

  Hazel wrestled her out of everything but her panties, and Finn lay back, exhausted.

  “You have to stay with me tonight, Hazey, you have to.” Finney was crying, but easily. She made no noise and didn’t draw attention to her tears. “You don’t know how lonely and heartsick I am all the time. If I didn’t have two jobs I don’t know what I would—”

  “It isn’t night.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said it isn’t yet night. It’s only five-thirty in the evening.”

  “No, it’s very late. It’s very late, Hazel.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed, making phone calls. Malcolm and Janey first, to say that Finney wouldn’t be coming over because she was ill and in bed. They were sad, and confused. They’d been confused about Finney for years. Hazel barely made it through the conversation without bursting into tears herself.

  She called Caroline, who seemed a bit perplexed that Hazel wasn’t home; she hadn’t noticed her daughter’s absence.

  “Enjoy yourself, dear.”

  “Mother, will you make sure Mercury has food and water?”

  “I will if I remember,” Caroline said, before hanging up.

  Hazel expected to turn around and find Finney asleep, but her eyes were wide. “I’m going to borrow a nightgown, okay?” Hazel asked.

  “They’re in the top drawer. Take whichever you like.”

  Hazel chose the longest and most modest, which was still more revealing than anything Hazel had ever owned.

  “Please, you’re going to stay, aren’t you? Please don’t go.”

  “I said I would.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll change your mind.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Please come get in bed with me, my teeth are chattering.”

  “You aren’t wearing any clothes.”

  “I’m freezing, please come get in bed with me. You aren’t going to leave, are you?”

  Hazel pulled back Finney’s old crazy quilt, a second blanket, a sheet, and slipped in beside Finney, who was indeed shivering.

  “I’ll stop talking about him now,” Finney said, turning on her side and facing Hazel.

  “Good.”

  Finney was studying her, and Hazel felt the gaze travel over her like a fever. She closed her own eyes, she would not return the look. The bedroom was so quiet she could hear every movement of their skin against the sheets. Finney moved an arm up, up. A cold hand—just the right amount of cold—rested on Hazel’s cheek.

  “Hazey,” Finney whispered, now very close to Hazel’s face. In the bathroom Hazel had helped her brush her teeth and still there was the wine on top of the toothpaste. The smell of the wine was abiding, as if Finney had been working on it a long time. Finney’s breath was nothing at all what it had been when they were growing up. Her skin, too, smelled different.

  Hazel opened her eyes just before Finney kissed her, and saw that Finney was crying harder—late crying, it might be called—just tears flowing steadily, ignored. Her lips were chilled, the hand that had been on Hazel’s face was now resting in the curve of her neck. Finney kissed just the corner of Hazel’s mouth, light, lightly, then took Hazel’s bottom lip between her teeth. Tears dropped onto Hazel’s face and ran down toward the pillow, and it took a moment for Hazel to realize she was crying, too.

  “This is what you want, isn’t it?” Finney spoke quietly into Hazel’s mouth. “This is what you’ve always wanted.”

  Hazel couldn’t answer. She was stunned to discover that she could feel the shape of Finney’s mouth; the Cupid’s-bow top lip she’d only ever seen, she could now feel with her own. When did she begin kissing back? Later she wouldn’t be able to separate the moments, one from another.

  “Everyone else is gone, so disappointed with me.” Finney moved her hand across Hazel’s shoulder. “But you stay.”

  “I stay.”

  “Because you’re in love with me.”

  “No, Finn.”

  “Yes, you are. You are devoted to me in a way he’ll never be.” Finney was crying harder now, speaking between small gasps. She moved her body closer to Hazel’s, closer still, until her breasts were pressed against Hazel’s own. Hazel couldn’t breathe; she felt her chest expanding and contracting, a flutter there that was perhaps fatal. What if this was how she died? How could it be explained? Her body was turning to liquid, water spilling over hot stones. Finney’
s hand traced the contours of Hazel’s face.

  “There it is,” Finney said, choking on tears, every other word a supreme effort, “there’s that old scar.”

  “It’s an old scar.” Hazel reached up for Finney’s hand, gently pushed it away. “You’re drunk.” What she meant was this can’t happen, it will ruin everything, I will lose you completely.

  “I’ve been drinking all day.” Finney’s hand returned to the nape of Hazel’s neck. She pressed her fingertips into the hollow place there and Hazel felt it in her feet.

  “I know.”

  “I forget what I was saying.” Her hand stopped moving, went limp against Hazel’s shoulder.

  “You were saying you need to go to sleep.” Hazel tried to dry Finney’s face with her thumb.

  “No, that’s not it.” Finney’s eyes closed. She tried to open them but couldn’t. She was silent for a minute, maybe two. In a long-ago winter, standing in Janey’s kitchen, Finney had told Hazel that if she wanted to know how long two minutes really was, she should try stirring cake batter that long with a wooden spoon. “I was saying I love you, I love you so horribly, I wish this were our bed and that you lived here with me.”

  Hazel froze. She listened to her heartbeat, allowed herself to feel the inrushing of possibility, hope rising up like the back of a whale. “You want me to live with you?”

  Finney buried her face in the pillow in a gesture of pain Hazel had seen many laboring women make. “Of course I do,” she said, hiccupping around another sob, “it’s what I’ve always wanted. I want you to myself, I want you to leave her. I want you to leave her.”

  Hazel closed her own eyes, took a deep breath. She rolled over on her back, looked at the ceiling. Beside her, Finney continued to sob, resting her head now on Hazel’s shoulder. “Lift up,” Hazel said, “and let me put my arm behind you.” Finney curled up against her side. Her skin was hot now and the sheets felt sticky even in the drafty, cold bedroom. Hazel said nothing as Finney’s sobs faded into a tremor and her breathing grew shallow. She lay unmoving, staring at nothing, the taste of Finney’s mouth still on her lips. She would stay a little longer, and then she would slip out of bed and get dressed and go home. She would escape from Finney’s bed just as he would, and dress quietly the way he would, even though it was Christmas Day and he had never bothered to come, and Hazel had.