The Used World (23 page)

Rebekah remembered the days of her childhood and teenage years as if they were one long day; she remembered sitting in the pew in the gingham dresses Ruth made for her, her cotton slips, her hair brushed up high over her forehead and sprayed with Aqua Net, then held back in a headband, pastel to match her dress. She sat in the hard pews with her cousins, and they knew better than to swing their feet or whisper, but they sometimes wrote notes or drew pictures on the mimeographed church bulletin. They sometimes got so bored they let their heads fall from side to side as if to distant music. She wore white socks and black patent leather shoes. Her cousins dressed the same. From a distance they all looked alike, except for Rebekah’s red hair. At the front of the church Pastor Lowell would be preaching the Second Coming, Revelation, the End Times. He would say that the ark of the covenant was buried beneath the Dome of the Rock, sacred to both Jews and Muslims, and the only way for Christians, the rightful owners of the ark, to get to it would be to start the final War, in which the Jews and the Muslims would kill one another over the site. Our job as Christians, what the blessed Savior is calling us to do, he would say, is to start the War, and the only way to do it is to penetrate the deepest reaches of government and the military, if not by election or enlistment, then by conversion and by force. Christ is waiting! he would yell, and the men in the church, stone-faced and heavy-jawed, would flare their nostrils and whisper Amen, while the women moaned, rocked back and forth. How painful it had been for Ruth, Rebekah knew, to have Him so close, to feel Him just on the other side of…what? What divided them from their heart’s desire? Only these events, this reality, which was acting as a shield. The time had come, Pastor Lowell would shout, for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Rapture, the rule of the Antichrist; until the first switch was thrown, the Prophecy of the Bible could not be fulfilled. The pastor would grow flushed, he’d perspire, and the tempo would rise until the organist had joined in, and the congregation would be slain, and in the end there would be a laying on of hands and an altar call and all manner of people on the floor, and through it all Rebekah and her cousins sat in the hard pews, bored and restless and sometimes swinging a foot. She didn’t hear what they were saying; she hadn’t heard it. And then five years ago, out of the blue, she heard it.

She sat up in the car, weak as if a fever had broken. The worst of the snow glare was gone, and in fact the day was diminishing. There were so many problems to solve at once, each of them acute: She had to go to the bathroom immediately. She was going to throw up. The quilt was tangled up around her legs and over the steering wheel and the gearshift, and it was worth a thousand dollars and she was about to throw up on it. The car was cold, and her hair was damp with sweat. As soon as she opened the car door, the wind plowed in and put things in order; she slid out, folded the quilt. Seeing her shoes on the parking lot made her think she’d been dreaming, but whatever it had been was gone.

After the store closed Rebekah had dinner at Richard’s and then did something she’d never done before—she drove to the mall alone.

It was mayhem there, just what she should have expected. There was no place to park, and when finally, after circling the parking lot for fifteen minutes, she found a spot the farthest possible distance from a door, she should have given up and left. She couldn’t accept such defeat. The air in the parking lot was so cold and there was in the air a sort of chemical aftertaste; her eyes watered and she felt sick before she’d ever gotten inside.

She entered at the JCPenney end and couldn’t believe the crowds. She fought her way inside, unwinding her scarf, unbuttoning her coat as she walked. There was no reason for her to be where she was, she realized; the mall was just someplace warm she could pass the time before dealing with the question of where she would sleep.

The lighting was aggressive, and everyone looked older than they were, and defeated. She passed an athletic shoe store so bright she had to look away, and a candy store stocked with dozens of different kinds of brightly colored jawbreakers and jelly beans. She strolled into a crowded record store but didn’t recognize anything advertised, so she backed out after a few seconds. There were movies she could sit through but she didn’t want to, and there were restaurants she could while away the evening in, but she was both exhausted and restless and no option felt right. She needed to be carrying something to nibble on—she’d realized she couldn’t let herself get hungry at all—and something to drink, so she stopped at a kiosk that sold soft pretzels and lemonade and bought one of each. The girls working behind the counter were interchangeable with a hundred other such girls she’d seen in the mall; their hair was processed, streaked, and perfectly straight; their eyebrows were plucked in two nearly invisible arches, and they talked with a strange nasal accent it took some moments to realize was in imitation of black girls.

While Rebekah was being waited on at one window, a girl very like the girls behind the counter was ordering two lemonades at another. They were all friends, it seemed, because they were asking her about her love life, or about a date she’d recently had. Rebekah glanced at the girl beside her, but no—it was impossible to differentiate her from the others. She was very thin, and her blue jeans were so low Rebekah could see her sad hip bones. She was wearing a tight white shirt that stopped at her waist and a short coat made of rabbit fur. Rebekah caught a glimpse of a ring in the girl’s tiny belly button. In another time she most certainly would have been pegged as a prostitute; here she looked like any other high school senior.

“I’m in looooove,” the girl said, leaning over the counter toward her friends.

“Oooh, she’s in love,” one of them answered.

Another said to Rebekah, “That’ll be two sixty-eight,” in her faux ghetto accent.

“Girl, you always say that.” It came out,
Girrr, you alway say dat.

“Yeah, I mean it this time.”

Rebekah smiled at the girl in love, at her tiny pants and at the exposed stripe of stomach, so foolish in this weather, then took her lemonade and her pretzel to the park benches that formed a square around a plastic tree. Sitting with her back to the kiosk, Rebekah sipped at her drink, watched people shuffle by her, miserable with packages, dragging their screaming children. She wished she had a book but was also glad she didn’t have to endure another
To the Lighthouse,
or something even more painful. It was fine just to sit.

The skinny girl in love passed her, walking toward the other end of the mall, hand in hand with her beau, who was now drinking the second lemonade. They were holding hands and swinging them back and forth between them. It took Rebekah a minute to realize what she was seeing—the dark curly hair, the blue down-filled coat, Peter’s hiking boots. She stood, dropping the bag with her pretzel in it. There was Peter, walking without shame through the mall, hand in hand with a child prostitute who most assuredly was Mandy. Rebekah saw stars, she had to put her own cold hand on her forehead to keep from shouting at them. When she’d left his cabin this morning, Peter had said nothing about seeing her again before he left on his coffeehouse tour, just after Christmas. He’d made her breakfast, treated her kindly, as he would any friend with whom he had such a history. He’d not mentioned the pregnancy again, had not again suggested he wanted to be there with her or for her.

She watched them until they were out of sight, then reached down and picked up her trash. Hazel would surely be home by now.

The door opened and Hazel stood there, a little out of breath and dressed in a red Mickey Mouse–as–Santa sweatshirt covered with cat hair. She said, “Rebekah, didn’t I just see you? Come in, what are you doing abroad in such cold weather?” She gestured to the book-strewn, bleak living room, where Merlin, Thackeray, Mao, and Sprocket all waited to descend on Rebekah like a rumbling fur blanket.

“Hazel, I need…” Rebekah began, slipping out of her coat, unwinding her scarf, “I need to talk to you and to ask you a favor.”

“Okay. Sit.”

Rebekah chose the couch, and Hazel sat in the armchair next to the small table where she kept her knitting, her Diet Faygo, and the
TV Guide.

“I’ve had a falling-out with Daddy,” Rebekah began.

“
What?
With that sweet, reasonable man?”

“Stop it. And I need some place to stay, just temporarily.”

Hazel bit her lip, stared down at her lap.

“Hazel?” Rebekah leaned forward, rested her hand on Hazel’s knee. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Hazel said, shaking her head as if to clear it. “It’s just…this isn’t the right place for you. That’s all.”

Rebekah felt a wave of heat start in her stomach and work its way up her throat, ending finally with her face and ears. “Why not?”

Hazel looked at Rebekah with an odd directness, unusual because Rebekah had come to recognize Hazel only by the distance between what she held out in offering, and what she held back. “Do you know that our lives don’t exist, really—or, that’s not exactly right, we exist but only as a story and we are the ones who tell it? I used to have a friend, this was a long time ago, who would ask me, ‘So do children decide they’re going to die in a house fire? Do babies
tell a story
in which their parents beat them to death?’ And the answer is no, of course not, telling the story of your life requires will, and openness, and very often Nature overwhelms our narrative with a narrative of her own.”

“What does that have to do with me staying with you?” Rebekah swallowed back tears, tried to sound as if they were having a normal conversation.

“I don’t think”—Hazel reached over and took Rebekah’s hands—“I don’t think your story is best told by doing that. I know I interfere too much, and I dominate the tales around me, but”—she waved away the charge—“that’s just how it is, it shouldn’t have been given to me to see quite so clearly if I was expected to be passive.”

She had offended Hazel in some way, Rebekah concluded; she had mortally angered her father, and her boyfriend and his parents considered her both a colossal mistake and a fool. Rebekah could say nothing. There, lined up before her, were the strata of legitimacy from which she was permanently excluded. For twenty-three years as a member of the Prophetic Mission, she had been exiled from the wider population of her peers; having left the church, she belonged nowhere. And now she was to be a mother without property, stability, or a mate. She couldn’t think fast enough to understand it, how she had become the person an entire church despised, a father would renounce, and no parent would want her son to marry. Hazel didn’t want her to spend even a night in her home.

“Can I just use your bathroom, then, before I go?” Rebekah asked, the words so tight in her throat she sounded twelve years old.

Hazel nodded, and Rebekah turned and walked through Hazel’s bedroom into her large, well-lit bathroom. She looked in the mirror, shocked to see the bright contrasts of her hair, her eyes, her blushing cheeks and ears. Everything in the room was generic: cream-colored wallpaper patterned with dark green strips, a matching border with maroon flowers and dark green stems. The shower curtain matched the wallpaper, the rugs matched the shower curtain, and the small plastic trash can matched the rugs, all of it inexpensive and purchased as a set. Then Rebekah saw them, between the toilet and the wall, two litter boxes side by side, and a slotted spoon used to clean them. She saw them and the persistent, sharp smell hit her at the same time, and before she’d even felt herself move, she had the toilet lid up and was sicker than she’d been since childhood, the upending, turned-inside-out, unstoppable force of vomiting that was similar to the anger she’d felt at Peter’s parents’ house.

It was over in less than a minute. She managed to go to the bathroom and clean up the mess she made; she splashed water on her face, straightened her sweater, and walked back out to the living room.

Hazel was already standing, and she held her arms out to Rebekah in a gesture she’d never made before. Rebekah allowed Hazel to hold her, more for Hazel than herself, and said, “You’re right, I can’t stay here.”

“You should go to Claudia’s,” Hazel said, patting Rebekah’s back, and as soon as she said it, Rebekah knew it was true.

The baby had gone to bed like a normal little person for the second night in a row. Claudia was grateful, but she would have stayed up with him all night happily, would have been peed on by him and cleaned up after his mighty vomiting, so happy was she to see him emerge safely from Caroline Hunnicutt’s. His day there had worked out well; Caroline lived in the part of the retirement home still designated ‘independent living,’ so she had an apartment and plenty of privacy. But she also had nurses just a bell away—she and Hazel paid dearly for their attention—and once they’d gotten wind of the baby, Caroline had a steady stream of visitors vying for a chance to take care of him. Hazel couldn’t have chosen a better place than an assisted living facility, given the abundance of nurses who were flat tired of old people and their problems.

He wouldn’t sleep long, two or three hours, before needing a bottle, which made Claudia wonder (with fresh horror every time) what his nights had been like at Cobb Creek, where he had spent them, and how much he had been ignored. She had just closed the Irving novel and was staring out the window at a scattering of stars when she heard a car pull in the driveway. Without a second’s hesitation, she rolled off the bed, pulled the .38 out from under the mattress, and slipped out into the hallway, turning off lights as she passed them.