The Used World (8 page)

One was tan, stained. This belonged to Red, the most knowledgeable, or at least the most opinionated, of the three. He was horse-faced, wore glasses, and the other two accepted his pronouncements as self-evident because he had, in the very distant past, held a county record in pole vaulting. Red rented space in the back corner of the front of the store (not prime real estate by any means), where he sold an assortment of things he swore to be valuable: carved historical figures, forged at the Franklin Mint; commemorative coins; a set of dish towels bearing the likeness of Spiro Agnew.

The second couch was green and missing a leg, which had been replaced with a set of coasters. This was Slim’s domain, which he claimed by spreading his belongings around him: cigarettes, lighter, wallet, and keys. Slim seemed to be persistently busy working on a political system at the center of which was advertising and sentimentality. He was in favor of any person, establishment, or event said to promote Family Values; thus he loved Republicans, chain restaurants, NASCAR, and military skirmishes. He choked up listening to Toby Keith, and saluted when he saw a flag, although Rebekah believed he, like his comrades, had sat out all military duty. Slim shared the corner booth with Red, where he sold what Della told him to. She tended toward old bedspreads and a variety of pastel-colored mixing bowls.

The third sofa was black and had been repaired with silver duct tape, not even electrical tape, which would have matched. Jim Hank, unmarried and the least of his brethren, sat on the edge of one of the sofa’s three cushions. He never sat back or settled in. Red claimed that a vicious rival for a woman’s hand had hit Jim Hank in the back of the head with a crowbar; Rebekah had no idea if it was true.
Something
had happened to him, maybe just a nick on the edge of a chromosome. From a distance he looked as if he’d been handsome and strong, but up close one side of his face dragged and his eyes were all but empty. He limped, couldn’t hold anything small in his left hand. When he lifted a can of soda it shook all the way to his mouth. He and Hazel rarely spoke, but there was a file in Hazel’s office filled with receipts for his rent, his prescriptions, his groceries. Jim Hank had a table in Red’s booth, where he arranged various articles taken from his home: a butter dish, a pocketknife, a wooden box designed to hold a family’s silver. Inside were a lone, tarnished butter knife and an ornate meat fork.

Hazel had gotten, in the same auction lot as the couches, two ashtray stands and a coffee table, plastic made to look like leather. She referred to the setup as a Conversational Grouping, and what she’d made at the front of the store was a combination of den (in the home of some poor and tasteless person) and a gas station as they’d been when Rebekah was small, a grimy place where she would sometimes see men gathered, smoking and waiting for an oil change. Her own father never joined in. Rebekah had once heard Claudia ask, aggrieved by something Slim had said, whether Hazel had known what she was doing when she built the Conversational Grouping. Hazel had waved her hand in the air as if Cronies were a fact of life, furniture or no.

“I knew them when they were young,” she had said.

“What were they like then?” Rebekah asked.

Hazel had glanced over at the three, all of whom were bent over, elbows on their knees. “Just the same. But younger.”

There was a box of books on the counter, something Hazel had just purchased or brought in from the storage shed; Rebekah began looking through them. One thing that puzzled her was the way the men smoked, and drank sodas until their knees began to bounce, and then at some point every afternoon a signal sounded and they all stood up and left, in the way a flock of birds will suddenly depart a tree.

Hazel pulled her knitting out from under the counter and began counting stitches. “A ‘ramage,’ I think it’s called,” she said between rows.

“What’s called a ramage?”

“It’s also possible I invented that word.”

Rebekah looked at the table of contents in a 1954 memoir of a woman’s first year of housewifery,
Boiled Water.
“But what does it mean?”

“It refers to the phenomenon of a flock of birds suddenly leaving a tree.” Hazel’s knitting needles—wide, blue with a mother-of-pearl tint—clicked, slid against each other.

Rebekah looked up at Hazel. “Was I thinking out loud?”

“When?”

“Before ramage. Did I say something about the Cronies out loud?”

“I don’t know.” Hazel shrugged. “Did you?”

Rebekah had to turn only one page and there it was, the sentence
I couldn’t boil water!
She had tried many times to think it through, she had even tried to talk to Peter about Hazel, but he had been skeptical, had suggested that Rebekah, because of her history, was gullible. But as far as she could see, the opposite was true. The first twenty-three years of her life had been spent in thrall to prophecy, or at least those years had been spent with a community that valued nothing more. What was it? Pastor Lowell had once said in a sermon that the only test of a prophet was his accuracy. He said this while discussing a passage from Ezekiel. How could that be, though, Rebekah had wondered, if the prophet and everyone who heard him speak the words of his prophecy were dead and gone? Anyone can say the Temple will fall (because the Temple will fall) and be right eventually. And what does it suggest about the nature of time and space, if the future is given to some long in advance? If one thing is true, namely that the future can be known by the prophets, then the future has been predetermined and there is no such thing as free will and the damned are born damned, the saved likewise. The biblical seers and those members of the Mission who were given the fruits of the Spirit foresaw an arc into history, an apocalypse of change, natural disaster, and vengeance. Its ushering in was accompanied by the signs and symbols everywhere in evidence, so the world itself appeared to be in league with the conspiracy.

But what of Hazel? Rebekah flipped past the chapter in
Boiled Water
that dealt solely with Adventures in Ironing. The world
was
Hazel’s evidence, it was its own testimony. Rebekah had tried to say to Peter that she thought of the old men in the desert, the way their sight (such as it was) traveled like a bullet through time, puncturing everything in its wake, but Hazel just sat knitting or doing needlepoint, watching
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
and the ephemeral world was right there beside her. All she had to do was reach out and pluck a strand and she knew your past, your greatest fear, and what you’d be trying to avoid the next day. These weren’t the words Rebekah had used with Peter and he’d been irritated anyway. He told her he thought Hazel was a just an old woman with a keen eye, a collection of astrology texts, and a bag of tricks. He thought this even as he courted Hazel, gave her his most level blue gaze. And it seemed that Peter had been right, because Hazel seemed to like him; she seemed unable to see his real feelings for her.

“I’ll tell ya what you’re gonna have to do,” Red suddenly said, pointing at Slim with his burning cigarette. “You’re gonna have to drill through the hardwood, the subfloor, right through that concrete, my friend, one them full-inch drill bits, then pump the poison dreckly in the ground, and do the same outside the house. Course you’ll have to wait fer spring.” He sat back, satisfied.

“Naw!” Slim said, slapping his forehead. “The wife’ll kill me, she’s gonna kill me!”

“You brung it on yourself, not putting in a basement or a crawl space. Where’d you get that idea, build a house on a concrete slab? You get your house plans with a set of Ginsu knives?”

Jim Hank wheezed his hardest laugh, fell to coughing.

“Lord but it is gettin’ cold outside.” Red shook his head. “What happens when your pipes burst in that slab, Slim?”

Rebekah glanced up at him, but Slim just shook a Doral out of his pack, lit it.

“Did you see him last night?” Hazel asked, adjusting the pale blue afghan that was lengthening by the minute in her lap.

“See who last night?” Rebekah pretended to be reading.

“Oh please.”

“No.” Rebekah turned past an illustration, classic 1950s style, of a woman tangled up in the cord of a vacuum, little stars above her head.

Hazel lifted the afghan, let it fall over her knees. “Will you try again?”

Would she try again? Rebekah thought about it. “I feel like,” she began, “like maybe he’s waiting on me to make a move? Some grand gesture, maybe?”

“You mean because the grand gesture of calling him repeatedly and leaving plaintive messages wasn’t sufficient?”

“I stopped leaving messages a long time ago.”

“Ah.”

“You know, part of the problem is that I miss him so much I want to tell someone every detail of it, the missing him, and the person I want to tell is Peter.”

“Why?” Hazel asked.

“Why what?”

“Why Peter?”

Rebekah sighed, rubbed her temples. She was very tired all of a sudden. “Because we were friends, I thought. He’s the only boy besides my cousins I ever knew. Men don’t—they don’t make much sense to me—”

“No.”

“—and I feel like if he’s still in my heart, I must still be in his.”

Hazel let her hands fall in her lap. “But Rebekah, feelings are not facts.”

The pages of the mildewy book blurred before her; Rebekah closed it. “Grief is a fact.”

“No, grief is a feeling.”

Rebekah swallowed hard, tossed the book back in the box. “Whew, I should get back to work. I thought I might put some New Years-y dresses on the mannequins, hats, things like that. Then I’ll help Claudia rearrange number forty-two. She wants to show you something, by the way,” she said, slipping out from behind the counter.

“All right, dear,” Hazel said. Rebekah heard the ticking of the knitting needles resume as she walked quickly past #14, #15, the suitcases, the dining room table at which no one ever sat.

It was four o’clock before Claudia found Hazel alone in the office, putting stamps on a stack of letters to vendors. Hazel glanced up at her, nodded toward the empty chair beside her desk. “Women are the pack mules of the world,” she said, pressing a stamp down with her thumb.

“You aren’t a pack mule,” Claudia replied, gingerly stretching out her left knee.

“True. But I bought my way out of it. Plus I’m too old.”

They sat a few moments without speaking. Claudia listened to the faint, tinny sound of the Andrews Sisters coming from the back of the store.

“They were lovely, the Andrews Sisters.” Hazel completed her task and dropped the stack of envelopes in her outgoing-mail tray.

“I found this in your book last night,” Claudia said, handing the photograph to Hazel.

“What’s this?” Hazel slipped off her glasses and held the picture at arm’s length. She squinted. “You found this in
Owen Meany
?”

Claudia nodded.

“Thank you for returning it to me.” She slipped the picture inside the book she was reading,
The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & the Reality,
and said, with a perfunctory clip, “Let’s get this store closed down and go home.”

Claudia allowed one beat to pass between them, one chance for Hazel to change her mind and speak. It passed, and Claudia stood up, Hazel following her. “Okay.” Claudia touched Hazel’s shoulder with just her index finger, attempting to make the gesture communicate something. But Hazel left the office without another word.

1961

“I can’t be late getting home.” Hazel looked at her watch for the fifth time, thrust her hands back into her coat pockets.

“You
can’t
be late.” Finney’s breath smelled like tea. Sometimes she smelled like sleep or cinnamon, but today it was bergamot and lemon.

“That’s what I said. If we don’t leave here in twenty-seven minutes, it’s all over for Miss Hazel.”

“Well, we don’t want that.” Finney leaned farther over the scrollwork railing of the mezzanine, let her body tip just slightly past the fulcrum of her own weight.

“Hey, how’s about you follow the rule about keeping your feet on the floor.” Hazel tried to sound casual as she grabbed Finney’s coat belt, which was untied and slipped free.

“What I want”—Finney turned and reclaimed her belt—“is to go up, up to the sixth, Women’s Lingerie. Then I want to come down, down, stopping on every floor. Last is the jewelry counter. If I have twenty-seven minutes I’m going to use them.”

Below the girls, the black-and-white-tiled ground floor of Sterling’s Department Store spiraled around the square jewelry counter, so that from Women’s Lingerie, looking over the railing, Hazel knew she would feel an urge to jump. “Women’s Lingerie it is,” she said, taking Finney’s arm and heading for the elevator.

The folding metal door of the elevator closed, cagelike, behind them. In the red velvet interior the air was warm and close. The elevator operator hummed along with Bing Crosby’s Hawaiian Christmas song, which both Hazel and Finney hated. Jerry Hamm, that was the name of the man sitting on a stool in front of the elevator’s controls, but Hazel didn’t acknowledge him, nor did he look at her. He was a patient of her father’s, and there were countless rules of conduct that applied to meeting a patient in public, or at his job. Finney knew him, too, of course, but she ignored him, leaning against the back wall to watch the numbers light up above the doors.