The Used World (26 page)

What is the date of your last menstrual period?

Rebekah fanned herself, tried to remember, but all the months, all the occasions ran together as one. She wrote,
Mid-October?

Are you sexually active?

I was.
Yes.

Have you been diagnosed with or are you at risk for any of the following: herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, AIDS?

She imagined Peter in the living room of the cabin, his arched back and laddered chest, how everything had been so new. She left the question blank.

A nurse, who was nice—she was round and powdery-smelling, and her hair was cut in a strange sort of bob that made her look daring—led Rebekah to a lab at the back of the clinic and directed her to step up on a scale. “You weigh one fourteen,” she said as Rebekah stepped down. “Perfect for your height.”

“Thank you,” Rebekah answered, grateful to have gotten something right.

The paper gown opened in the front and Rebekah clutched it closed against her chest. She was naked underneath it, sitting on a strip of paper, a second paper exam sheet over her lap, and crying. None of this was
right,
she couldn’t make it right in her mind that she would be so dishonored and humiliated. She had been raised to believe in the body as belonging to God, hers connected to the wider body of the Church, and she could even recall once when she fell jumping rope and Ruth had comforted her by saying that Jesus felt it, too, the raw scrape on her knee, and had tears in His eyes for her. But in the wide world and certainly here, in a doctor’s office, she was more like a side of beef marked into quarters and about to go under the saw’s wheel.

Nurse Patti came in with a blood pressure cuff. “One-ten over sixty.” She pulled tissues out of a box, pressed them into Rebekah’s hand. “Are you scared he’s going to hurt you?”

Rebekah nodded, then shook her head. She couldn’t stop crying. “A little, but really I just don’t think I should have to be here this way, and I’m cold, and I have a sense that the whole experience, the whole pregnancy, is going to be miserable like this and I won’t have any say, I’ll just have to endure it. I shouldn’t have to sit here naked like this.”

The nurse folded the blood pressure cuff and slipped it into her pocket. She sat down in the doctor’s chair and rolled toward Rebekah. “
A
, you aren’t naked, and
b,
you’re sitting there now because you were naked someplace else. And if you ever thought you’d escape with your dignity intact, you missed a lot of facts for a woman your age. You’re right about how it’s going to get worse, so I’d suggest you talk yourself into some courage here at the beginning.”

Rebekah wiped her face, sat up straighter. They weren’t the exact words Ruth would have used, but they would do.

“Okay,” Rebekah said, taking another tissue. “Okay, I’ll do that.”

Dr. Gil came into the room and looked at Rebekah’s chart. She could see right away that he was kind and well-intentioned, and he couldn’t help it that he was tremendously old and that his hands were purple and brown. But all Rebekah could think of was that he was about to remove or move aside her pieces of paper with his very old hands, and so while he was talking to her and asking her questions, showing her diagrams of what he was about to do, she cried quietly and tried not to look at his skin.

“Lie back, dear,” Dr. Gil said, and Nurse Patti handed her another tissue. Rebekah lay back, and he said, “Scoot down toward me. Scoot again. One more time,” until Rebekah was certain she was going to slide right off the end. Her embarrassment was now so acute, she could scarcely catch her breath. Patti moved over and stood beside her, took Rebekah’s hand. Dr. Gil was rolling from the cabinets to the little tray on which there were instruments and gloves, asking her to repeat the first day of her last period, said it was okay she didn’t know, wondered how long she had been acquainted with Claudia, wasn’t that Oliver a little pistol? Finally, when the dreaded speculum was revealed and the water-soluble jelly had been produced, the clear gloves snapped on, Dr. Gil said, “It might help if you visualize something or some place that makes you feel better, and to stay there in your mind until the exam is over. It makes the time pass faster, and it’s good practice for labor and delivery. You don’t have to say anything—the place is your secret.”

Rebekah nodded, wiped her eyes. The place is your secret. Peter sitting across from her at Richard’s Diner on a Sunday morning; Peter on any given Sunday, waking beside her, the still-strange feeling of liberation and well-being she experienced each time she realized she didn’t have to go to church. Not going to church in winter, in freezing rain; not going to church when her throat was slightly sore or when she was just tired. Not going. She tried to make one of those her secret place but they vanished before she could really see them. Instead, she remembered a moment from a few months before, when Red had said something cruel about Claudia, something Rebekah didn’t at first catch. He hinted that she might actually be a man, and Hazel, who had continued reading throughout the conversation, looked up as if as an afterthought and said, “Well, boys, everyone has a secret. Isn’t that right?” All three Cronies shut up, coughed, looked away, and Hazel had gone back to her book as if nothing had happened. Dr. Gil touched Rebekah’s skin with the speculum and it was cold; she flinched and he stopped, asked her to try to relax her thighs.

Red had been right that Claudia had a secret, but he’d guessed incorrectly. It happened Rebekah’s first morning at Claudia’s house, four days ago. Claudia had just stepped out of the shower and Rebekah opened the bathroom door without knocking; it was an accident—she didn’t share a bathroom with Vernon and wasn’t used to being careful. It was a dark morning and the lights above the mirror were burning. Claudia was standing on one long leg on the bath mat, with the other propped up on the edge of the tub. She was bent over, drying the tops of her toes, when Rebekah walked in, and instead of saying anything, she just straightened up to her full height.

“Are you okay?” Dr. Gil asked. “I’m taking a swab here—you won’t really feel it—for some tests.”

Claudia’s shoulders were as broad as a man’s, straight—not sloped like Rebekah’s own. Even just standing there holding a towel, not lifting a chair or exerting herself in any way, the muscles in Claudia’s arms were dense and defined, slick with water and dark like the cool skin of something just pulled up from the sea. She stood completely naked, the towel at her side, and the Cronies would never have guessed this: her breasts were as high and full as those of a girl half her age. A line of water ran between them, down the plane of a stomach long and flat, contoured. Rebekah’s eyes, tracing that surface, seemed to fall for whole minutes, until she reached Claudia’s hip bones, their protective curve, and then there was the length of her legs. Her thighs looked as if they’d been carved out of wood, and her knees were pronounced, covered with small scars. Water ran down Claudia’s shins, past her calf, toward the feet she’d been trying to dry.

“Okay. I’m just going to palpate your uterus manually now,” Dr. Gil said, as if it made sense. He pressed against her abdomen and stared into the distance, measuring something he couldn’t see. When he was finished he snapped off his latex gloves and stood beside Rebekah, gently easing aside the paper gown. He ran his fingers over each breast, as if playing the piano, and pressed under her armpits. It had been the look on Claudia’s face that most amazed Rebekah, a look she’d never seen Claudia give anyone. What had it been? Not fear or shyness or anger at being interrupted, even though Rebekah guessed that no one had ever seen Claudia completely naked as an adult.

“Yep,” Dr. Gil said. “There’s a baby in there.” He reached for his prescription pad, wrote down the name of a prenatal vitamin, talking as he wrote about folic acid and iron and calcium. He said based on her rough estimate of her last period and the internal exam, he’d put her at ten weeks pregnant, at term on July 23. Rebekah gathered the paper sheet around her, answered his questions: No, she didn’t smoke or drink alcohol, didn’t like fast food. Yes, she was tired and nauseated, but manageably so. He told her to come back in a month and they’d listen to the baby’s heartbeat; he handed her a stack of pamphlets on nutrition, sex during pregnancy, when to call the doctor, and all the while Rebekah was seeing Claudia’s expression. Bemusement, that was part of it. Her face seemed to say:
Here it is.
Later she had walked out of the bathroom wearing a white dress shirt, a sweater vest, and a pair of dark brown corduroys, and no one looking at her could have known.

“Congratulations, Rebekah,” Gil said, offering her his hand.

She took it, grateful suddenly, even fond of him, “Thank you,” she said.

“You should go to T.J. Maxx,” Red said. “The wife gets everything there, clothes and dishes, and now she’s started bringing home food I’ve never heard of before.”

“Food you’ve never heard of before?” Slim asked. “And it came from a clothes store? Has she tried stuff from the bait shop? The automotive center?”

Jim Hank gave his wheezy, painful laugh. “What kind of food have you never heard of? Is it Martian? Canadian?”

Red said, “All right, you tell me, then: what’s a caper? If your wife brung home a jar of capers, what would you say that is?”

Slim and Jim Hank sat back, considered each other.

“I can’t say I know what a caper is,” Jim Hank said.

“Never come acrost one myself,” Slim said.

Claudia looked through the phone book, writing down the name and address of the now closed secondhand store from which she and Rebekah said they’d go retrieve a few things. “Do you know which part of Elm this is?” Claudia asked. “One twenty-two B? Is that before or after Walnut?”

“The two of you don’t interest me much anymore,” Hazel said, pulling her necklace, a heavy gold Celtic cross, out of Oliver’s mouth. “You were fine for a while, but now I only really love the baby.”

“Sam’s Club is where you ought to go, Slim,” Red said, pointing at his friend with the red tip of his cigarette. “You could get your tires and also twenty-four rolls of toilet paper and a gallon of mayonnaise, all at the same time.”

“What—what would I do with a gallon of mayonnaise?” Slim asked, raising his hands in the air as if begging for mercy. “Open a school cafeteria?”

“You’ll be all right?” Rebekah asked Hazel, wrapping her scarf around her neck. “He’s had a dose of Tylenol, just in case, and there’s more in his diaper bag. We probably won’t be long.”

“I’d like to keep him for the evening, if you don’t mind,” Hazel answered, lowering Oliver into a playpen they’d brought up from the back. She wound the mobile hanging crookedly above him and it began to chirp out a show tune. “We’re taking Mother out for dinner. He cheers her considerably.”

Claudia folded the address and phone number of their destination and put it in her back pocket. “She’s feeling down?”

Hazel cleared her throat, looked for something under the counter. “Well, Edie has disappeared with Charlie.”

Claudia froze. Oliver blew spit bubbles and rocked from his left side to his right.

“It seems he missed a few meetings with his parole officer, failed to pay child support on that thirteen-year-old he’s got in Hopwood. Oh, and he borrowed a neighbor’s truck in the middle of the night without mentioning it as such.”

“Did he return it?” Claudia asked without really knowing why, as it couldn’t be considered the issue.

“He traded it to his dealer, who was arrested while driving it. So there’s a warrant out on Charlie for, oh, sixty-two different things, plus his dealer will kill him dead every day for the rest of his life if he finds him. There are a few reasons for old Charlie to lay low.”

“And Edie went with him?”

“We have deduced. All we know is that he’s gone, she’s gone.” Hazel settled in with her knitting, took a drink of grape Faygo. “This makes our mother sad, for some reason.”

“Children,” Red said, lighting a cigarette. “It don’t matter if they’re good or bad, they break your heart every time.”

On the drive downtown, Rebekah wanted to ask Claudia what it meant: was it good or bad that Charlie and Edie were gone? Should they be more scared for Oliver, or less? But Claudia wasn’t talking. She drove with grim determination, chewing her lip. They drove through older residential areas, once lovely and now given over to student housing; past the Queen Anne that used to be known as the House for Wayward Girls; past the bus station and a hairstylist’s called Family Beauty. Claudia turned left on Walnut Street and from there it was one empty building after another, some with the names of the businesses still inscribed on the facades, some stripped completely clean.

The light was fading, and the empty buildings began to resemble tombs. They passed the shell of the magnificent Sterling’s Department Store, which Rebekah had been in only once as a child. She could still recall the ornate interior of the elevator, and the elevator operator, a small man with a smashed nose and prominent chin who’d complimented Ruth on her hair and made her blush. The ceiling soared straight up through five floors, and on each floor you could look over a rail to the hypnotic black and white tiles of the entrance. They had gone to find a birthday present for a woman in the church—who was it? Someone slightly grander than the others. Ruth and Rebekah had been so out of place among the scarves and gloves, the silk blouses and crystal, that finally Ruth had said, near tears, “I’ll make her something,” then refused to ride the elevator a second time. They had gone straight to the Ben Franklin at the edge of town and bought some gingham in an autumn print, and Ruth made the woman an apron with a pumpkin for a pocket. Rebekah tried to imagine what was inside Sterling’s now, the abandoned display cases, the fallen plaster, air unmoved for years. She pulled her coat closer, and Claudia said nothing.