The Used World (31 page)

Jack placed his daughter on newspapers in a small trunk. He closed and locked it, then opened the third mahogany door in the upstairs hallway and climbed the attic stairs—Hazel could hear him coming. He crossed the floor as quietly as he could, stepping over her, and even in his day the attic was filled with older things: a spinning wheel, pieces of a loom, burlap bags advertising the Jonah Mill. He moved aside a part of the wall, right behind where Caroline kept her Christmas decorations—Hazel had no idea those boards moved—and placed the little trunk back in a small crawl space next to the dumbwaiter. There were the workings of the pulley, the hemp rope guaranteed to last two hundred years wrapped around the steel wheels. A simple, timeless arrangement.

Jack slid the boards closed, brushed his hands together, stood. Hazel waited for him to leave but he hovered above her, leaned over her. He lit a cigarette and Hazel knew then she was—

“Hazel?”

She opened her eyes and Edie was leaning over her, smoke curling around her hair and up toward the ceiling. Her eyes were dull, her skin dusty over her fading tan.

Edie sat back, stretched her legs out, took a hit off a crookedly rolled joint. “Mama said you were up here doing God knows what, I said leave it to Hazel to get completely sucked in by all that crap and forget what she’d gone up there for. I said leave it to Hazel.”

Hazel sat up, rubbed the back of her head.

“You sick?”

“No.” She could move her eyes without the jerkiness. She wasn’t falling. “Are
you
sick?”

“Sick and tired, maybe. Rather die than stay here, that’s for sure.”

“There’s a box,” Hazel said, pointing with her thumb to the corner, “behind those boards. They move.”

“Yeah, well, there’s also a box sitting right in plain sight, like an attic would have.”

Hazel turned too quickly, felt her vision dim. There it was, the green box the angel was kept in. She stood, walked over and picked it up.

“This was, coming back here, what you might call a last resort if you know what I mean. Things had gotten hairy, a couple people had taken a dive and Mad Dog, he ran the place, was mad at me over something I didn’t…”

A whole colony of dead flies littered the windowsill but she gripped it anyway, squatting down beside the dumbwaiter. She reached out and touched the three boards, expecting them to still feel warm from Black Jack’s hand.

“…I was trying to tell him—man, this is no way to get where we’re trying to go, this My Stuff Your Stuff drama, if something of mine is laying around and you need it, take it, be free! It ain’t as if I hadn’t done the…”

Hazel pushed lightly against the boards and nothing happened. Exhale, she told herself, seeing the first gray dots of dizziness. She pushed again and the three boards moved as one, an inch or so and Hazel stopped, sat down. In that open space was a darkness so complete she would have to call it
pure,
something she had seen once before, inside a man’s mouth, behind his missing teeth. A townie who brought his daughter in to Caroline one afternoon. The daughter was twelve. The midwife in town, Lulamae, knew crawl spaces, Hazel guessed. Caroline, too, for that matter, although in a different way.

“Haze? What are you
doing
? What’s back there?”

She turned toward her sister, who sat in the sunlight, encased in her own brand of innocence. Smoking. “Nothing,” Hazel said, sliding the doors closed.

“Are we putting up this retarded angel, or what? I’m thinking I need to get good and drunk if it’s going to be Family Power Hour at the Hunnicutt Asylum.”

Hazel laughed, stood, and brushed off her jeans. “You carry the treetop to Caroline, be the hero.”

“Well”—Edie stood, stubbed her joint out on the floor—“it’ll be the first time, won’t it?”

Edie went down the steps before her and Hazel paused, hesitated before looking back. Everything was perfectly normal, if in better order. It made sense, didn’t it, the high chair, the wheelchair. The dressmaker’s model and the useless sewing machine. The crutches for the Uncle, his suits waiting for him, zipped up tight and hanging beneath the eaves. Small animals radiated out from under Black Jack’s bootfall, and the bird swooped, just an owl and her kind, calling the Earth
Mother.

“Admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“Say it out loud: say, ‘I was entirely wrong about Millie.’”

“I wasn’t
entirely
wrong about Millie.”

“Say, ‘I don’t know a thing about my sister.’”

“You don’t know a thing about your brother, either.”

“True enough.”

They lay on Claudia’s bed, staring at the ceiling.

“Is Oliver ever going to fall asleep?”

“Eventually he will.”

“What’s he doing?”

Claudia listened. “He’s singing. No, now he’s spitting.”

“Isn’t he tired? I am so bone tired I’d like to die.”

“He’ll fall asleep soon.” Claudia rubbed her fingertips over the bedspread, glanced at Rebekah, who was wearing a pale pink nightgown. She looked like herself, and also she was like a form, like the idea of a woman. Claudia wanted to tell her how she could have been a photograph in a book, but couldn’t find the words.

“This reminds me of a slumber party,” Rebekah said, yawning.

“Really? Slumber parties are this boring?”

“I’m not bored.” Rebekah brushed her hair back from her forehead, let her arm fall above her head. “Slumber parties were fun, we had them all the time. Except that my cousins always fell asleep before me and I would be the only person awake for what felt like ages.”

“Why?” Claudia turned on her side, watched Rebekah’s face in profile.

“I don’t know,” Rebekah said, shrugging. “That’s just how I was.” She paused, listened for Oliver. “Is he asleep?”

The baby was silent, then began spitting and kicking his legs again.

“No. I swear he’ll fall asleep eventually. Millie jumbled up his schedule. Also she’s too loud.” Claudia pulled the bedspread up a little higher around her waist. “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.” Rebekah sat up, resting her weight on her left elbow.

“Something has…”

Rebekah’s eyes were the green of a fern—of a fern seen from a distance, hanging on the porch of someone Claudia didn’t know. That’s how everything felt suddenly, as if she were passing a house she admired and there was a garden, a garden enviable by Ludie’s standards. Claudia could see how fine it all was, how lucky she was to be passing by before the morning mist was burned off by the sun, but that’s all she could do—walk past. It wouldn’t work, what she was about to say.

“What?” Rebekah pressed her hand against Claudia’s arm, and it seemed easy for her, this physical emphasis. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing, nothing. I don’t mean to be dramatic, I’ve just come to realize something. I should have known it a long time ago, or probably I did know it and turned away.” Claudia shook her head. “It hardly matters one way or the other.”

Oliver, who had been quiet for minutes, suddenly let out a startled wail, as if waking from a dream.

“Yikes,” Rebekah said, covering her heart with her hand as Claudia jumped up, saying, “I’ll get him.” She was tangled in the bedspread and nearly fell.

“Claudia, you’re going to break your—”

“Take the end of this, then I’ll unwrap—”

By turns they freed her, and Claudia made her way to the crib, where Oliver had become so distressed he’d kicked his blanket up over his head. “What a problem,” Claudia said, uncovering him and lifting him up, his little body still such a surprise in her hands. How could something so insubstantial bear within it Oliver’s nature, his character, everything that would compel him into adulthood?

“Don’t forget,” Rebekah said from behind her, sleepily.

“Don’t forget what?”

“Don’t forget what you were telling me. As soon as he’s back down I want to hear it.”

Claudia lay Oliver on his changing table, tapped his pacifier against his chin until he grinned at her and opened his mouth. “Okay,” she said. “I won’t forget.”

By the time Claudia had changed Oliver, given him the rest of his evening bottle and rocked him back to sleep, Rebekah was also asleep, her lips slightly parted, a ribbon of hair out of place and covering one eye. Claudia sat down beside her, pulled the blankets up over her exposed shoulder. She reached out and slipped the strand of hair off Rebekah’s face, tucking it behind her ear. The tip of Claudia’s finger brushed Rebekah’s skin, just barely. She sat that way as long as seemed right, then went downstairs, turning off lights behind her.

It was Christmas Eve, and there were gifts to place under the tree, Rebekah’s cookies to put on a plate by the fireplace. She left a note beside the plate that said
Rebekah and Oliver have been very, very good this year,
then she lay down on the couch with a blanket and slept without dreaming, the lights of the tree playing over her face like fireflies.

R
EBEKAH DIDN’T WANT
to go to church, and she had tried to make it clear that she didn’t want to go, had vowed to never enter a church again, but somehow Claudia hadn’t heard, or else she was ignoring her. It had been a long time, a long relief of a time since Rebekah had risen earlier than she’d wanted to and frantically tried to find a missing skirt, a pair of stockings without a tear, her Bible, the tortoiseshell barrette Vernon approved of. Oh, it was all idiotic. Fine, Claudia loved this minister and loved the church, and insisted that he was nothing like the ministers of Rebekah’s lost youth. That was probably all true. She seemed to think, Claudia did, that Rebekah didn’t want to go because she’d been traumatized by the Mission, as if they’d made her participate in a Full Gospel Sex Ring with goats down in the basement Fellowship Hall. In fact, Rebekah didn’t want to go because taking her to a safe, liberal, kind-hearted hour of worship would be like taking a cheetah out of the zoo and back to the savannah for a visit, but she would only be allowed to see the home she was stolen from through a window. Through the grimy window of a tourist’s van. That’s what it would be like.

“Rebekah? What are you doing?” Claudia called up the stairs. “I think I got that dried banana off Oliver’s face.” She paused. “Rebekah?”

“I’m sitting on the bed! I’m not going!”

Claudia climbed the stairs and walked down the hallway toward Rebekah’s room. “Why are you just sitting here? If we don’t leave now we’ll be late, and Oliver is about to fall asleep in his swing. What are you doing.”

“I don’t think I should go, because look, I don’t have anything to wear, I’m too fat for all my dresses, and if I have to wear panty hose even for an hour I will slit my own wrists.” Rebekah felt near tears again; she’d already cried twice this morning, once because she’d dreamed of Peter on a swing set—he was swinging too high and scaring her, and she kept asking him to stop, to come down, but he just smiled and went higher—and the second time because standing in the shower she realized she’d gotten everything wrong and was now living such a weird life her sweet mother wouldn’t have recognized her. And she was quite happy, which only made her cry harder.

“This is a Church of the
Brethren,
not the Junior League fashion show, Rebekah, nobody cares what you wear. And remember opening gifts this morning? I got you some new clothes?”

“But I’m crying about that, too, because I couldn’t make the thing I wanted to for you.”

“You know that means absolutely—”

“Also I always thought I’d be a great pregnant person, I thought I’d be a natural. And pretty about it, and romantic. But I hate it, it’s terrible. I feel every minute like I have the flu, I’m exhausted and sick and my breasts ache, and look how swollen I already am, my fingers look like fish sticks.”

“Talk to Gil about it this week. You have an appointment on Wednesday.”

“What’s Gil going to say, I mean really? That he’ll get me out of it somehow, that I don’t have to see it through to the end? Claudia, why on earth do you want to go to church anyway? It’s Christmas Day, we could have a nice lunch, invite Hazel. We could go see a movie, take a walk, something.”

“We can do all those things anyway. And you don’t have to go. I mean it, you don’t have to go.”

“Well, do you want me to go or not?!?”

Claudia took a deep breath, sat down on the bed. “Tell me what you want me to say.”

“No! You have to figure it out yourself.”

Claudia thought about it. “I’m leaving in five minutes. All of your clean laundry is right in that basket. Your new clothes are on your chair. You may go with Oliver and me, or you can go back to bed. Your choice.”

Rebekah fell down on the bed, pulling a pillow over her face. “You’re mean, Claudia Modjeski! You are mean to me, and I’m not going.”

On the way to church Rebekah noticed that Claudia listened to an AM gospel station; so this was what she did when she was alone, on a Sunday. They heard the Oak Ridge Boys sing “On the Sunny Banks”; Don Rigsby’s “Love Lifted Me”; the Nelons’ “O for a Thousand Tongues”; and a song that activated Rebekah’s newfound weeping gene, Merle Haggard singing something with the line
Come home, come home, it’s suppertime.

“What’s that song called?” she asked, wiping her eyes.

“‘Suppertime.’”

“Ah.”

She was on her way to church again after so many years, the building and hour that contained a thousand conspiracies and dramas, to listen to a man tell her that what was right before her eyes was not true, that it did not, in fact, even matter. It mattered enough to destroy; that was all. Its import was as an obstacle, a stumbling block. Rebekah watched it go by: the winter fields, the stark sky, a hawk descending.

“You’re going to church with me,” Claudia said.

Rebekah stared at her a moment, at Claudia’s sharp jawline, her perfect, burnished skin, the streak of rose that blushed along her cheekbone. Vernon had seemed to think that Rebekah had fallen as far as a woman could, and so had she. But it had turned out that the few square feet of the planet she lived on were gravity-less, full of bottomless surprises. Unmarried, pregnant, in exile, and now living with a woman and her rescued child. If they had their way, the men who meant to rip away the screen of reality, the men who meant to devour everything, everything—on the dark day they finally seized the reins, she knew she would be the first to go. They would be the first: Rebekah, Claudia, Oliver, and the little alien. The lithe, red-haired, beloved child of God, lovely little Pentecostal Rebekah Shook, had become the enemy of both the temple and the state.

“Well, as it turns out,” she said to Claudia, “I’m going to church with you.”

The church was bare, not as if anything was missing, but as if nothing had ever been there. They were slightly late and Oliver was asleep; Rebekah held him as Claudia hung up their coats. The vestibule smelled so familiar, but she couldn’t decide what to call the smell, or what it was made of. Filling, and emptying out—that was part of it, the comings and goings of people driven to congregate and talk it over. It wasn’t a home, it wasn’t an institution, it was merely a space standing still and waiting.

Claudia took Oliver and pushed against one of the double swinging doors, which sighed open on a well-oiled hinge. There were thirty or so people gathered in front of them on the old wooden pews, all completely silent, including the few children. A clock ticked so loudly in the expectant air that it made Rebekah’s heart speed up. The only concession to the season were two red poinsettia on either side of the altar. She followed Claudia to a place at the end of a pew midway down the aisle, and was surprised to find herself embarrassed without knowing why. She’d ended up wearing the last pair of black slacks that fit her, but that wasn’t it; everyone was dressed plainly. She was pregnant, which amounted to wearing her sex life on her sleeve, but she’d mostly gotten over fretting about it.

The minister stood from the short pew where he’d been sitting behind the altar and approached the podium. “Good morning, friends, and Merry Christmas.” Amos Townsend was tall and lanky, handsome, severe, but with a warm voice that carried a trace of irony? Chagrin? The congregation answered him, and Amos pushed his glasses up and held his hymnal out the length of his arms.

“I wonder if we can start today by singing my favorite Christmas hymn, ‘The Friendly Beasts’? It’s on page one forty-two of the blue hymnal, the modern one. My father”—Amos lowered his hymnal, nudged his glasses again—“used to refer to every modernization of the church as Peter, Paul and Jesus.”

Rebekah made the hiccupy sound of an abbreviated laugh—her Peter had
loved
Peter, Paul and Mary—which in turn made everyone around her laugh, and then she was even more deeply mortified. At the Mission, with its One Strike policy, she would have been out the door and pleading for mercy.

She watched Amos bounce up and down a little as the piano started, although the opening chords were stately, not bouncy. Not hymns, not hymn singing, she had no desire for that. She didn’t want to hear them again, not “Power in the Blood” or “The Old Rugged Cross,” none of them. This, she wanted to say to Claudia—could have just turned and said to her in front of everyone—is what I do not want and am allowed to be free of. The small congregation began to sing:

Each verse was from the point of view of a different animal, the donkey, the camel, the dove. The song ended:

Rebekah pressed her fingertips against her eyelids, tried not to cry. Well, it had been a lovely song, she was never right about anything, and her little peanut-shaped alien had heard it. That had been what she dreaded the most—the notion that the baby would be infected with the language of her father; that it might know even before greeting the world that it had been responsible for the death of an innocent man two thousand years ago. Lambs, slaughter.

There was the familiar sound of thirty hymnals closing, being slipped back into place. Beside her Oliver slept on Claudia’s shoulder, sometimes making a little snoring sound. Amos waited a moment, cleared his throat. “In every other church you’d be hearing about the Nativity right now. Maybe you’ll be disappointed not to hear that story today. But you know”—he looked at the ceiling, seeming to search for the right words—“I’m just a little tired of it.”

Rebekah began to feel queasy, and pulled a saltine cracker out of her pocket, trying not to make any noise.

“I’m tired of the television specials and the songs. I’m not even talking about the secular, commercial part; good heavens, everyone is sick of that, and sick from it. I’m tired of the Archangel and Herod and Joseph the Widower. I don’t want to talk about a virgin birth or the Three Wise Men. Is it just me, or is there something in that story you can’t get your mind around?”

Rebekah froze, the cracker halfway to her mouth. Oh yes, she certainly knew the story of the Nativity. She, like all of her cousins, could quote Luke 2:1–20 in its entirety, and also she didn’t understand it.

“It’s—I’m not sure what I want to say, even though I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks now.” Amos tugged at the cuff of his white shirt absently. “All I know is that what we’re told to read there is not what I read. It is the story, after all…”

…of a child born to die, Rebekah thought, glancing against her will at the sleeping Oliver. If she knew he was the Messiah, if her faith in that proposition was uncompromised, her life would be an unhappy one indeed. And so would his.

“…of a child born to die. So, with all due respect, and I mean that, I’d like to talk to you today not about how the person of Jesus was born, but why; in the same way that on the anniversary of Einstein’s birth we talk about how he changed the world.”

Rebekah closed her eyes, felt something like a trapdoor open beneath her. Pregnancy had had one unexpected effect, one she had never heard mentioned in the literature. Her memory had become vibrant, crystalline. She remembered events full of body and color and scent. Now, sitting in church beside Claudia and Oliver, whose lips were pressed in sleep into a little squash blossom, Rebekah was also sitting on the couch holding a shoe box she’d found in the coat closet. She had been looking for scraps of material; she wanted to make dresses for her dolls. The box was in her hands, dusty, the texture displeasing. It had held her father’s work shoes, was blue, faded to gray. Here was the couch beneath her, the exact color and weave; here the oval braided rug that slid if she ran on it. Rebekah took the lid off the shoe box and found her baby book, which she had never seen before, the book that celebrated her birth. She opened it and nothing was written there. Nothing. Not even her name. She turned every page just to make sure, her heart growing more steadily unsure, and at the very back she found a black-and-white photograph, someone she didn’t recognize, and then her mother was upon her. The only time Ruth ever struck Rebekah, and it was across the cheek with a wet dish towel. By the time Rebekah lowered her hand from the stinging surprise, the box and her mother were gone.

“…where we read, ‘In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”

Matthew 3:1–2, Rebekah thought. Repent. There was a number one hit from the Prophetic Mission. She was constantly being told to repent, to beg forgiveness for her sins; she was first admonished at the same age other children were being shown a toothbrush for the first time and told of Mr. Cavity Man.

Amos looked up. “
Repent
in this case means, literally, to ‘return,’ an important Judaic concept. It signifies, oh, more like turning around and going back to something, back to the original covenant, the one between the Hebrew God and the Israelites. The writer of Matthew is saying that because the kingdom of heaven has come near—and remember that phrase, it has ‘come near’—because of its nearness, whoever reads this document should return to the original promise.”