The Used World (21 page)

“I can’t take money from you, Kathy,” Rebekah said, shaking her head. A painful blush began at her chest and worked its way up her neck. Worse and ever worse, what she might have to endure over the next few months.

“It isn’t much,” Kathy said, reaching again inside her purse. “Just enough to help us all resolve this. We know”—she took out her wallet—“that this was an accident on your part as much as on Peter’s, that there was absolutely not a hint of malice or entrapment or anything like that, we’re certain.”

“Resolve this?”

“Pardon?”

“You said ‘resolve this’?”

Kathy unzipped her wallet, counted out six one-hundred-dollar bills. “I spoke to someone,” she said, barely above a whisper, “and this will cover everything, including a Xanax before and a painkiller during. We wanted”—she slipped her wallet back in her bag and dabbed at her eyes with the tissue—“we wanted you to be as comfortable as possible. To have everything you need.” The money, folded in half, was pressed into Rebekah’s palm. She looked down at it, looked at Kathy’s face. Kathy’s eyes were half filled with tears, as if she had meant to cry but forgot.

“I can’t—”

“Oh, please let us do this,” Kathy said, covering Rebekah’s hand with her own. “Please. I feel it’s the least…and then we can call it a day and remember one another fondly. This doesn’t”—she leaned her head close to Rebekah’s—“this does
not
have to be the end of the world, sweetheart.”

Rebekah pulled her hand away, and the money fell to the floor like confetti. She couldn’t blame them, couldn’t hold it against Kathy and her husband. She bent down and picked up the cash, refolded it, and pressed it back into Kathy’s hand. “It isn’t. It isn’t the end of the world. But thank you, anyway.”

Kathy pinched the bridge of her nose as if a violent headache were coming on, turned, and left without another word.

“Did you move things around in number fifty-one?” Hazel asked, when Claudia got back to the counter.

“I did, but we should call Bennett and tell him with the love seat and corner hutch gone, I can only do so much.”

Hazel nodded, continued arranging the vintage watches on the white velvet display. She carefully tucked each price tag under each face so customers had to ask her to remove a watch they were interested in if they wanted to know the price.

“Does Rebekah look all right to you?” Claudia asked, picking up one of the self-published books Hazel had stacked on the counter.

“She’s a little short for my taste.”

Rebekah moved in and out of Claudia’s sight in booth #18, Barbie knockoffs and action figures in original packaging, where she appeared to be dusting. Claudia saw a flash of red hair, a pale hand. “I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with her.”

“You mean other than having grown up in a cult, outside civilization?”

“Yes, other than that. I think she’s sick. Have you noticed how pale she is?”

Hazel raised her eyebrows, glanced at Claudia. “Well, she’s the damsel in distress in this story, isn’t she? She could hardly be tan and athletic.” She slid the watches back in the larger display case, sat down on her stool. The black canvas tote bag she pulled off the shelf had a cowgirl on the side and the legend, spelled out in the cowgirl’s spinning pink lariat,
KNIT HAPPENS.
“Rebekah’s basic problem is that her sun is in Pisces, and Venus is in Pisces, putting it in its exaltation. The Love principle in its highest evolutionary development. But no moderation. The first time I looked at that child I heard Aphrodite’s bells ringing at the edge of the foamy sea, if I may say so.”

“Maybe she has the flu,” Claudia said, tapping her fingers on the counter.

“Maybe the flu, or maybe it’s because she has a Cancer ascendant and a moon in Cancer—a triple water sign, that one, the big whammy. No earth to stand on, no fire to fight with. Gives her great depth, a rapport with the Universe, but leaves her open to addiction, alcoholism, and emotional instability.”

“Do you think I should ask her? If she’s all right?”

“I think you should ask her if she needs some Virgo. Virgo in her last three houses would suit that child fine. Alas, we cannot change the stars. We can only change ourselves. Now you, Miss Claudie, have an enviable natal chart. Sun in Virgo, moon in Capricorn, Scorpio rising. An interesting little triad, there. Rebekah could definitely use a piece of what you have.”

Rebekah appeared, disappeared; her hair would suddenly shine out from between two pieces of furniture like the sun breaking free of clouds. Was there something different on the surface of her? She was wearing blue jeans that were a little tight—that was unusual, but she walked in them as she always had, like a person who had spent the first twenty-five years of her life in dresses. Rebekah’s loose white sweater was pretty, her hair a shock against it. All day her skin had been flushed—there was a red circle on each cheek the size of a silver dollar. And when she’d arrived for work, flushed from the cold air, her green eyes had been too bright. She was feverish, that’s what Claudia suspected.

“The air is a bit disturbed around her, I see that,” Hazel said. She put down her yarn and reached under the counter for a book she kept there,
The Complete Book of Dreams,
published in 1934. The glue on the spine was gone, and rodents had gnawed the corners of the cover; Hazel held the thing together with rubber bands. She opened her reading glasses and rested them on the bridge of her nose. “What did you dream last night?” she asked Claudia as she scanned the table of contents.

Claudia felt a catch in her chest, just a glancing knock, and then it was gone. “I…” She remembered something, what was it? The middle of the night. The clock on the bedside table, the curtain in the window—she’d awakened and looked at these things, which gradually grew in focus and became familiar again. Why? “I dreamed…” It had something to do with Millie, something Millie had said. “The basement—I’ve been dreaming of the basement lately.” She had walked down the stairs, through the living room, dining room, kitchen. She opened the cellar door. In some dreams Ludie stood at the sink, scrubbing potatoes or scraping the grubby skins off carrots. The cellar was a cave, consistently cool and damp. The steps were rickety, with open risers, and condensation dripped from the lead pipes snaking through the ceiling. There were cobwebs and mice. Sourceless flashes of light reflected off Ludie’s jars of tomatoes and pickles and beets. Claudia opened the cellar door, reached out for the pull string connected to the bare bulb above the stairs, and leaning toward it was an act of faith. It hung in complete darkness, and could be grasped only by a practiced gesture of leaning forward and praying. The cold, earthy smell rose up and—what did she seek there? And would she go down?

Hazel looked at Claudia over the tops of her glasses. “The basement? Could you be less original?” She ran her fingers over the
B
’s in the table of contents. “See, Mr. Allen doesn’t even include a listing for basement, that’s how much everyone knows what it means.”

“Try cellar.”

“Cellar—ah, here. Three different places he puts cellars. Basement must have not yet entered the lexicon in 1934. Here—under Love Dreams he writes:

Hazel looked up at Claudia. “Dear Mr. Allen. This is what I love about him—no danger of being shocked in his icy depths.” She turned to a chapter further in the book. “In Good Luck Dreams he writes: ‘A well-stocked cellar, whether with food, wine, or coal, is a presage of contentment.’ Is there coal in your dream?”

Claudia thought about it. “Not that I can tell. But you know, it’s a basement, so it’s dark. And coal is coal.”

“All true. And here’s what he says in Strange Prophecies, Warnings, and Bad Luck.”

“I hate this chapter.”

“Don’t we all. ‘A cold or damp cellar is a portent of bad news from a relative who lives at a distance. If you dream of being locked in a cellar, it is a presage of illness.’”

“One has to wonder who edited this book,” Hazel said, turning it over in her hands. “Because what’s the difference between not being able to get out of a cellar, and being locked in a cellar?”

“What is the difference between Love and Strange Prophecies?”

“Indeed.” Hazel put the rubber bands around the book, slipped it under the counter. “Interesting how the world has changed, isn’t it, Miss Claudie,” she said, returning to her knitting. “Basement doesn’t mean the same thing as cellar. One is like the dark muck of the unconscious, and the other is more like a pantry, it seems to indicate bounty.”

There was Rebekah, walking down the breezeway and disappearing from sight, bountiful and sick. “I was thinking about something like that at my sister’s the other night, about how it isn’t just that my mother is gone, everything that made her what she was is gone, too. Ludie was more like a cellar.”

“And you’re a basement?”

“No,” Claudia said, shaking her head. “I’m not a basement.” But she knew as she said it that she was at least partially wrong. The difference between herself and Ludie was that there wasn’t a basement
inside
Ludie; there were jars of tomatoes, each fruit glowing like a red planet, and shelves for holding the jars. There was a barrel filled with sand where she kept carrots crisp all winter. But in Claudia there was the doorway, the black steps, the lunge into emptiness.

“You didn’t know everything about your mother,” Hazel said, pulling out a length of yarn.

“I know I didn’t.”

“You only know yourself in relation to her.”

“I know, Hazel.”

“You’re just telling a story called Ludie. You’ve made up a character who stands in a spot and fulfills certain needs and is rounded by your perfect imagination of her.”

But, Claudia wanted to say, what about how her worn-out bras cut into her back, and I could see it through her dresses? What about her heavy ankles, and the way she loved to smooth out fabric, run her hands over tablecloths and quilts, it was heartbreaking. What about the way she left my father’s study untouched and kept the radio off for a year after he died? I wouldn’t put those things in the story of Ludie, if it were mine to tell.

“You’re ignoring me,” Hazel said.

Claudia rubbed the sleeve of her sweater over a smudge on the countertop. “That’s because you’re just a story I’m telling called Hazel.”

Hazel dropped her knitting, leaned so close to Claudia that she could see the copper edges of Hazel’s otherwise faded brown eyes. “That’s
right.
Now look busy, Rebekah is about to come around the corner. We don’t want her to know she’s the only one who does any work around here.”

Rebekah came around the corner, her hands empty. She seemed to have been crying, or sneezing. Between the dust motes thickening the air all through the building, and the cigarette smoke of the Cronies, Claudia considered it a wonder they weren’t all hauling around oxygen tanks.

“Do you mind if I go get something to eat?” Rebekah asked. She sounded exhausted, Claudia thought.

“What? And leave us here with this crowd?” Hazel said, glancing around at the four or five people in the store.

“I’m just going across the road to Richard’s. Do you want anything?”

Hazel and Claudia both said no; Red and Slim arrived as Rebekah slipped out, and within seconds had removed their coats and were smoking, staring off into space, silent. Neither of them could ever remember a dream.

“Hazel,” Claudia said, exasperated, “there is something wrong with her.”

Hazel pushed the yarn down farther on the needles, pushed up her glasses with her shoulder. “Yes, there certainly is.”

“Well—why didn’t you say something?”

“Say what?”

“I don’t know, maybe ‘Rebekah, are you okay?’”

“But she isn’t okay, you can see that much.”

“How about, ‘Rebekah,
what
is wrong with you?’”

The older woman busied herself counting stitches, or pretended to, then said, “But I know what’s wrong with her. I’m not going to be the one to decide when she talks about it.”

Claudia raised her palms in a gesture of helplessness. “If you know, tell me, Hazel.”

The door opened, and a couple from the local college came in. They were both pretty and well dressed, and could have been brother and sister. In a glance Claudia guessed that she taught art history/women’s studies, something like that, and he was an architect. Hazel smiled at them, gave them a friendly nod. She whispered to Claudia, “You’re no Pisces, but you should be able to see what is made manifest before you. It’s not
magic.
Look at her with the devotion you give to the past, Claudia—try that and see what happens.”

Claudia tugged her cuffs out from under her sweater, sat up straighter. “You’re not very likable sometimes.”