The Used World

by Haven Kimmel

  “I feel like I’ve been drinking.” Rebekah pulled the afghan more closely around her feet. She was stretched out on the couch, periodically pressing her fingers against her temples, trying to stop a headache. Bandit was on the floor in front of the couch, asleep on her side. She seemed exhausted, partly just from eating.

  “Millie does that to me, too. Drinking, or brawling in the tavern where I did the drinking.”

  “We have a dog now.”

  Claudia rested her head against the rocking chair, sighed. “It seems that way. Do you want more hot chocolate?”

  “No, I just want to lie here. Remember we got up this morning and it was Christmas, and then we went to church? This is still that same day, but doesn’t the first part seem so long ago?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Claudia, I want to tell you something before I faint.”

  Claudia looked slightly alarmed, but said, “Okay.”

  “Since my mother died, I’ve never…” Rebekah paused, considered her next words. “I’ve never felt so safe is what I’m trying to say. I was afraid all the time with my dad, imagine that. I was afraid from the moment he walked in the door until he left for work again, and really I was afraid even when he wasn’t there because he was going to be there eventually. And I didn’t belong in that house anymore and he didn’t want me, but I was raised to be helpless. I didn’t—I couldn’t figure out how to begin. After I met Hazel, she saw that right away, the fear I had that living in the world was too much for me. She told me to pretend, from the moment I woke up each day, that I only had one thing to do, just one. First it was brush my teeth. And when that was done I’d have just one more thing to do. I spent the first year I worked with her literally doing one thing at a time, like a stroke victim.”

  “You’re very competent now.”

  “No, you’re very competent. I—I don’t think I’ve changed all that much. I see people on television, women living alone in Manhattan or London, going to work every day and navigating what looks to me like a terrifying maze, and I know I could never, ever do it. I would die of shock, like a rabbit in a trap. I don’t want to be the sort of person who forever needs to be taken care of, but.”

  “But maybe you need to be taken care of.”

  Rebekah sighed. “It’s a sad thing to have to admit. You, though. That’s what I’m trying to say. You have been better to me than anyone has ever been, and I will never forget it. I’ll build my life around remembering this kindness you’ve shown to me.” She’d never meant anything as much, and then she heard a car in the driveway.

  Claudia remembered the sound of a tree going down in a storm when she was a teenager, the way it had whined in an almost human voice, on and on, until it finally snapped. Rebekah was saying something that was that storm, or she was marshaling its energy for the future. There was, in Rebekah’s gratitude, the promise to file Claudia in Treasured Incidents, which was the opposite of the promise Claudia wanted to hear. She didn’t even need a vow; a vague understanding would do.

  Bandit heard the car first. She sat up, immediately alert, her poor butchered ears unable to move or signal anything. Headlights washed across the wall behind Claudia, who stood up and looked out the window.

  “It’s probably Millie,” Rebekah said from the couch, her eyes closing. “Or else it’s Hazel with…I don’t know, a peacock? An entire family of Vietnamese refugees?”

  It was a white car, probably the person who had been there earlier in the day. Claudia couldn’t see who got out, so she waited at the door until there was a knock, tentative and unrevealing. Bandit didn’t bark, just stood watching the door.

  “Who is it?” Rebekah asked, standing up. Claudia looked back at her, looked at Rebekah in her pink nightgown and the new robe Claudia had given her for Christmas, the flush of her cheeks that meant she was sleepy. Then she opened the door to Peter, who had his hands in his pockets and was half turned away, so that when he turned back to them it was as if he were offering his face as a gift. Claudia had not remembered him as so pretty, but he was: his eyelashes, his lips, his black hair. He offered both women an innocent shrug, as if to say, What are we going to do about me? Behind her she heard Rebekah take in a breath, then steady herself before saying, “Peter, what are you doing here?”

  He took a step in—Peter took a step into Claudia’s house before she had invited him—and he smiled at both women. Oh, of course, Claudia remembered now; there was also that smile. “Hey, Beckah,” he said, and in his every gesture, the nuance of his voice, there was a knowledge of Rebekah, a claim to her, and that old tree on Claudia’s land snapped and fell to the ground.

  Six Months Later

  Chapter 8

  JUNE WAS A COIN TOSS. It could be a paradise, like today, seventy degrees, only the occasional white puff of cloud against a clean blue sky; the sort of day that had made Claudia wonder, as a child, where the blue of the sky came from, when air has no color, no matter how high you go.

  She and Amos were walking down the gravel alley that was the outermost edge of Haddington. On one side of them were backyards and flower gardens, clothes hung on lines, and swing sets. On the other side were cornfields, hundreds of acres.

  From a distance they must have looked like two very tall men taking the measure of an estate, which was the only reason men in the Midwest ever walked anywhere. They walked to where the horses got out, and they walked to the place they thought they’d someday build a new house. But strolling down the wide alley at the edge of town was not the business of men.

  “Even being aware of it myself,” she said, “has made me realize how diminished my status is.”

  “Your status,” Amos said, nodding.

  “I mean, just at the social level, I am at the lowest ranking in this society.”

  “Not the lowest, surely.”

  “I’ve been thinking, what if PBS wanted to make an after-school special about how hard it is for a child to go visit his father in prison? Republicans would grumble because any depiction of the poor is not Family Value friendly. Because it doesn’t depict the pretend ideal family. It’s possible—barely—PBS would be able to sneak it in.”

  “I agree.”

  “But imagine if PBS wanted to make an after-school special about an intact, employed, Christian family headed by two lesbians or two gay men.”

  “It couldn’t be done.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Lesbians are lower in the hierarchy than maximum-security prisoners. Murderers, rapists, you name it, they are higher.”

  They walked in silence a minute or two, Amos so distracted by what Claudia said he twice almost walked into an overhanging branch. “What makes you believe in this hierarchy,” he asked, “and who controls it?”

  “I believe in it because it’s right in front of us all the time.”

  “And who runs it?”

  “I don’t know, Amos.” Claudia sighed. “The same people who run everything.”

  “But couldn’t you…isn’t it possible to ignore it, to refuse to grant a tottering, if you ask me, social structure such power?”

  Claudia turned to Amos, smiled at him. “Where are you on it, do you suppose? On this abstract list.”

  Amos laughed, pushed up his glasses. “Fair point.” They reached the end of the alley, where one of the farmhouses original to the town had been torn down to make way for a double-wide, and turned around. “You’re saying you understand Rebekah’s decision.”

  “Yes,” Claudia said. “I always did. No one would choose this, given the option.”

  “So for her it was a choice, you think, and for you it isn’t.”

  “For me it isn’t, as it turns out.” Claudia ran her hand over her hair. “Although I haven’t lived any differently, it was just, it was only her. As for Rebekah, we’ll never know. Well, that’s not right, exactly. She did choose, so I do know.”

  Amos kicked a rock by accident, looked at it as if it had leapt out of nowhere. “There is just stuff eve
rywhere,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m reminded of a conversation I had a few years back with a man in a diner, an ordinary guy from Ohio. He believed the Second Amendment was not up for discussion; hated feminists—he thought they were funny, I mean; didn’t love, shall we say, minorities. Didn’t like paying taxes, hated liberals—hated all Democrats, actually. His pet issue was inner-city welfare mothers, for some reason. I asked him if he’d ever been to an inner city and he waved me away with disgust. Like visiting a zoo without any cages, he said. All these welfare mothers were crackheads and whores who had babies just to increase their monthly subsidies.”

  “Guess where this guy is on the hierarchy.”

  Amos nodded. “Afraid so, yes. Not only were these women robbing him of his hard-earned money, they were tipping the population balance, so that soon the minority population of the United States would be higher than the white. And then good-bye civilization. He’d had this idea, a revolutionary idea, he thought, to develop these mobile spay/neuter buses. Have you seen those, where you can take a dog or cat?”

  Claudia stopped walking, turned and looked at Amos, who didn’t stop. She took one long step and rejoined him.

  “He said the government should drive the bus into the worst, most crime-ridden areas of any city. Gather up the whole neighborhood, men, women, teenagers. Offer them a thousand dollars cash, on the spot, to be sterilized. They sign a waiver, you give them the money, snip, move on to the next block.”

  “Just…okay, just to start with, where does the money come from?”

  “I asked him that, and he said that at least half the taxpaying population of this country would willingly contribute to a fund for that purpose, maybe more than half. I said to him, ‘What if the thousand dollars was spent on alcohol and drugs? You surely don’t want to contribute to the drug trade.’ He said the drug trade is someone else’s problem and he didn’t care how the money was spent. I told him that he had to admit—there is no way around it—that denying a person his or her fertility is to deny them what we’ve always seen as a fundamental human right, and is fascistic in the extreme. But, he said, he wouldn’t be depriving them of anything. No one would have to take the money, no one would have to have the procedure, it would all be entirely voluntary. Nothing like fascism.”

  Claudia was silent.

  “I finally said, but how could he get his conscience around the obvious? Those people have nothing—even their most basic needs are not being met. Many are addicted to drugs, many have probably never held a thousand dollars at one time in their lives. To offer them money for any part of their bodies, any part of their future, is coercion. And to render people sterile by coercion is evil, plain and simple. It is evil.”

  “I’m guessing he wasn’t swayed.”

  Amos shook his head. “Of course not. I asked him if he fancied himself a Christian and he said he was a lifelong in-the-pew-every-time-the-doors-were-open Baptist. I asked him to imagine, then, what Jesus would think of his proposition. He laughed out loud. Jesus, he said, had his own way of dealing with taxes, didn’t he?”

  “Am I supposed to see”—Claudia rubbed her forehead, where the trace of a headache was blooming—“that I’m not at the bottom of the hierarchy?”

  “No.” Amos stopped, looked out at the midday sun on the field beside them. “All I’m saying is that if you are, then Rebekah was coerced.”

  Claudia turned away from him, looked out at the same field he was studying. “I see people like me everywhere now, I guess that happens whatever your condition is, and they’re all married with children. They’re fighting tooth and claw against what their neighbors would think about them, would do to them if they knew the truth.”

  “Do you consider those people to be cowards?”

  “No. No, I don’t. They’re just doing the best they can, like everyone else. But they all look so miserable and out of place. They stand out like a misplaced piece of a jigsaw puzzle. I can’t imagine what it costs them to live that way.”

  Amos and Claudia turned onto the side street that would lead Amos back to his office and Claudia back to her car.

  “They’re saying rain tomorrow,” Claudia told him.

  “I heard. Rain is good.”

  “Rain is fine, yes.”

  Rebekah lay on her back, which she wasn’t really supposed to do, and looked at the sky through the living room window. Now in her eighth month, she looked like an exhibit at SeaWorld. A lump the size of a grapefruit rose up against her skin—the baby’s bottom. Sometimes an elbow revealed itself, or the flat sole of a foot. When the baby had the hiccups, Rebekah’s entire midsection jumped rhythmically. All of it was hilarious, or would have been if it weren’t so weird. Whose idea was this, anyway? Who would think that the best way to propagate the species would be to grow a new one inside a used one? She imagined a white-coated scientist in a laboratory saying to another, “Yeah, yeah—that’s a good idea. Let’s put it in…what part isn’t doing anything else? And it’ll be too big to get out? Perfect.”

  She turned on her right side, causing the baby to turn and kick her in the kidneys. Lying on her back was amusing in a sideshow sort of way, but lying on her side actually allowed her to breathe. Her heartbeat settled; the day was lovely, even looking at it through a window, although the window itself left a great deal to be desired. She had remembered Peter’s house as rustic and romantic, but once she came back she saw that it was actually just shabby. The cabin had been cold all winter, and was now damp and hot and growing mold. His window was dirty, and the trim was missing from the top of the frame. The ivory curtains were streaked with dust, and hung as if they’d never been moved, as if the wind had never touched them. The first few months she’d lived there Rebekah had cleaned every day, believing she could turn the place around, and had been defeated at each turn. Everything was the same: the dim bathroom in which giant tree roaches and wolf spiders were regularly found; the grotty aquarium; the spice rack with its evidence of mice. When they were dating, Rebekah had imagined living here, and had seen the two of them as pioneers of a sort—she’d seen them baking bread and cooking fresh fish on a grill (she’d never thought about who would actually catch the fish)—practicing a daily authenticity made plausible by the cabin, the trees, the isolation. But everything in this house was a prop, just a thin backdrop to a story that wasn’t even interesting.

  Poor Peter. His do-it-yourself singer-songwriter tour had not been a success; the people who booked such acts hadn’t been impressed with his repertoire. “Not,” Rebekah had asked him on Christmas night, “the song about the tree house?” No, he answered sadly. “Not the one about Pumpkin?” Pumpkin had been Peter’s childhood schnauzer. And when we buried Pumpkin dear / I knew at least he’d reappear / in this same patch come autumn / some fine year. They hadn’t loved the telegraph song, the flashlight song, or the one about umbrellas.

  He’d totaled his truck in Kentucky, and when he called his parents they discovered he’d let his insurance lapse. He signed the truck over to a wrecking service and flew home on a ticket his parents bought him. All of it—the rejections, the wreck, the flight to Indianapolis—had taken five days, and in that time Mandy, the twenty-year-old college student with the bright future, had taken up with a tattoo artist from Fort Myers, Florida, and gone south, leaving Peter heartbroken.

  Rebekah lifted the dirty curtain so she could see more of the sky. A slight breeze touched her arm, even though the window wouldn’t open; the problem with the cabin (a phrase she found herself saying to Peter nearly every day) was that there was no solid division between the inside and the outside. She hadn’t always spoken to him in such a way, she hadn’t said things like how much she hated the kitchen drawers or how dearly she wished he would clean out his stupid fish tank, or could he possibly bother himself to bring home some milk? She and Peter had been fine for the first couple of months, given that she wouldn’t allow him to sleep in the same bed with her and he didn’t protest, and knowing, as Rebekah did, that Pet
er had come and claimed her because his parents, after Rebekah had refused their offer of an abortion, had threatened to cut off his allowance if he didn’t. They were fine playing house as long as she was still working and supporting them and he stayed home and did whatever it was he did all day. They kept up the veneer of preparing to be a family even though Rebekah had already lost two—the family of her childhood, and her life with Claudia and Oliver—and it was loss of the latter that had finally cleaved her spirit as cleanly as a lightning strike but she never said so. She never told Peter that Claudia was so distant to her at work Rebekah had given up trying to talk to her, and that she only got to see Oliver when Hazel arranged it. She swallowed that grief and spent Sundays with Peter’s mom and dad, who punished her with their rightness, with the way they fit into the life of Jonah, Indiana, regardless of how narrow the space they were given. While Rebekah was still working Peter even mentioned marriage, knowing that marriage would have been a species of salvation for her, a belonging, finally. She said she’d think about it, and neither of them brought it up again. In the evenings she cleaned and cooked and he played on his computer and sometimes built a fire in the stone fireplace, and things were nearly what she had dreamed of when she used to dream of Peter.

  But things had changed when she went into preterm labor and was placed on bed rest. She received disability insurance but it wasn’t enough. It also turned out she could no longer clean and cook every day and Peter was not inclined to do so himself, and even though he was less inclined toward gainful employment, he weighed the evils and took a job in the sporting goods department at Sears, the noon-to-closing shift. The store closed at nine; it took an hour for him to get his deposit ready, and for the shelves to be restocked. In the beginning she waited up for him, mostly because she’d nearly gone insane from all the authenticity of the cabin, and she needed to hear a voice that wasn’t the television or the radio. More and more often she was asleep by the time he got home, although she always remembered to make up his bed on the futon. If she got up to go to the bathroom, she would find him sitting in the dark living room at the computer, sending instant messages to Mandy in Florida. At seven in the morning, when Rebekah could no longer sleep, Peter would rouse himself from the couch and go to Rebekah’s bed, getting up just before work every day. In this way they lived in the same house, but not together.