The Used World (9 page)

In Women’s Ready-to-Wear, in Household Goods, in Infants and Children, Finney had asked, “Do you want this? Is this on your list?” No, Hazel had answered, and no. Finally, walking toward the jewelry counter with only four minutes to spare, Finney asked, “What
do
you want for Christmas?”

“A book. I don’t know, something I can keep. Nothing frivolous.”

Finney took a deep breath, rolled her eyes. “I worry about you, Hazey.”

“Really.”

“Yes, I do. I worry that any day now you will tell me you want to write short stories or romances, and then you’ll turn to strong drink.”

“Will I abandon my Christian principles?”

Finney considered the possibility. “You will.”

“Will I die young and tragically?”

“That’s not funny.” Finney ran her fingers over a dozen strands of freshwater pearls, took one off the metal rack and held it to her throat.

Hazel fastened the necklace, gently lifting Finney’s hair. “This looks beautiful on you.”

Finney looked in the square mirror on the counter, turned her jaw to the right and the left in a way that would have never occurred to Hazel. Finney’s camel hair coat was down around her shoulders and her long neck looked more vulnerable than ever, with the pearls lying pale and imperfect against her skin. “I’m not a pearl person.”

“Hmmm. What kind of person are you?”

Finney took three steps away, didn’t answer.

“Anyway, what do you most want for Christmas?” Hazel asked, just as Finney stopped before a display of gold chains.

“Oh, look at this.”

In a blue velvet box were two chains, each chain holding half a heart. On the inside lid of the box were the words
MAY GOD WATCH OVER US WHILE WE ARE APART,
and carved on the heart itself,
ME FROM THEE.
Hazel lifted the left half and warmed it in her hand as Finney did the same with the right.

“Do you think,” Finney whispered, leaning close to Hazel, “that he will ever buy me one of these?” She whispered, it seemed to Hazel, because she had lost her voice, like a girl in a fairy tale. It was only a matter of time before a hunter came after Finney’s real, beating heart, or until her legs became the tail of a mermaid, and she vanished. No, the man in question would never, never buy Finney such a necklace; the possibility did not exist on planet Earth or within the bounds of time and space. “Maybe he will,” Hazel said, turning away from the display. “Your four minutes in jewelry are up, Miss Finnamore Cooper.” She used the old nickname as a distraction, but it failed.

“I will be blue until I die,” Finney said, sighing.

Hazel’s stomach knotted into a fist, and she could taste at the back of her throat the coffee they’d had at lunch. She reached into Finney’s bag and pulled out her muffler, wrapped it around Finney’s neck as they walked past the great Christmas tree beside Sterling’s revolving doors. “Bundle up,” she said, tucking the end of the scarf into Finney’s coat.

Finney smiled, said, “You do the same.”

They’d grown too mature for hats, so they walked close together, heads bent against the bitter December wind, across the street to the parking lot and Albert Hunnicutt’s late-model, sleek black Cadillac. Tomorrow Hazel would return for the necklace, she knew, and she would give it to Finney signed with her own name. Hazel would never pretend it had come from someone else. Finney would accept the gesture as she always had, for years and years now, as long as Hazel could remember. Finney would wear her half of the heart as if it mattered to her as it did to Hazel, and only someone who really knew her, only a best friend, would see the unease and disappointment on her face. It was just metal, after all, and probably hollow at that.

“Admit that you’re a brat.”

“
Captain
Brat.”

“
General
Brat.”

Hazel and Finney tormented little Edna until she was nearly in tears—this happened every time they baby-sat—then gave her what she’d asked for.

“I’ll tell Mama,” Edna said, sitting at the kitchen table, a TV dinner cooling in front of her.

“Tell her what?” Hazel asked. “Here’s your Bosco. Drink it fast or you can’t have it at all. It’s almost bathtime.”

“I’m not taking a bath.”

“Tell her what, Edie?” Finney stood behind Edna, combing the girl’s blond hair with her fingers.

“Tell her that a boy calls.”

“It’s not a crime for a boy to call and anyway he doesn’t call for me. So you’d be getting Finney in trouble and you love her. Think about that.”

Edna took a drink of her chocolate milk, pushed away the foil tray with her uneaten dinner. “I’m not taking a bath.”

“But you are. And what about that chicken leg?”

“I’ll tell Mama you smoke a cigarette once. When her and Daddy was gone.”

“Yeah? Is that right, Edie?” Hazel picked up the washcloth from the edge of the sink and threw it on the table. “How about if I tell Mother about the letter your teacher sent home last week, the one I signed so you wouldn’t get in trouble? How about if I tell Mother that you got caught stealing a cap gun from the Ben Franklin and I got you out of that one, too?”

Edna sat very still, one hand in her lap and the other around her Mickey Mouse Club cup. She was small for eight—almost nine—with the facial features of a much younger child. Staring at her, Hazel couldn’t see at all who her sister might turn out to be. Edie’s chin shook and her gray eyes filled with tears, but it was not to Hazel she apologized. “I’m sorry, Finney!” she said, jumping up and spilling her Bosco all over the table.

“Great. I’ll just clean this up for you,” Hazel said, using the washcloth she’d thrown at the child.

“Come here, Edie,” Finney said, holding out her arms. “Don’t cry, I’m not mad. You just don’t want to take a bath, right? It’s cold in the upstairs bathroom.” Finney held her on her lap, using her sweater to wipe Edie’s face. “Come on, we’ll go upstairs, I’ll wash behind your ears and brush your teeth and we’ll call it a night. Maybe mean old Hazel will bring you some more milk.” They stood and walked toward the back staircase.

“Nice,” Hazel said to the empty kitchen. She dropped Edna’s frozen dinner in the trash can, poured more milk in her cup. “Thanks a lot, Finney.”

The arm of the record player lifted the 45 and dropped it back in place, and the needle settled into the wide opening groove. “Theme from
A Summer Place
” began for the third or fourth time, the waltzing melody washing over Hazel as if it really were another season. She and Finney lay on their backs in Hazel’s bed, looking out the window at the bare winter branches, the clouds passing the moon.

“Don’t you love this song?” Finney’s arms were crossed behind her head and she wiggled her toes inside her white socks.

“I do.” Around the room the elephants marched and the circus train faded against the gray walls. Edna’s nursery had been painted pink, with dancing circus ponies in ribbons and flowers, as if Hazel had been invited to one kind of carnival and Edna to another.

“You don’t mean it.” Finney would be blue until she died.

“How do you know?”

Finney shrugged. Hazel turned her head on her pillow and watched Finney’s eyes trace the border of the casement window. “What
do
you love?” Finney asked, still looking ahead.

I love—Hazel thought—your parents’ farm and the tone of voice you use with animals. I love that you have stolen your father’s cardigan and made it look like the most feminine sweater in the world. I love the way your curls hang against your neck, and how you are the one true thing I’ve ever known, and how if I were captured by pirates and didn’t see you for a hundred years I’d still recognize any part of you, even an elbow. “I love Johnny Cash. I love the music from the war and from before the war. I love
The Steve Allen Show
and the smell of kid leather in my mother’s car. Oh, and toasted marshmallows.”

“That’s a lot.”

“The world is full of riches.” Hazel settled back into her pillow. “Have you seen him lately? I mean, actually seen him?”

Finney gave Hazel a nervous glance, an unhappy smile. “My parents had gone to get some grain for the horses, and he found me skating on the pond. I was by myself, I looked ridiculous. I was wearing Dad’s overcoat with the raccoon collar, the one he had his only year at Purdue, and a white hat I knitted last winter, and a yellow and blue woolly scarf wrapped around and around my neck, all the way over my chin. My skates are even dingy. I’m sure my nose was bright red from the cold.”

“When was this?” Hazel couldn’t keep the blade off each word, the edge that told everything about how lost she was, how scared she was to think of Finney with no need of her, carving figure eights into her frozen cow pond, which in the summer was thick with algae and mosquito larvae. And also what was under the ice, and what would happen if Finney should go there.

“Three days ago? Maybe.”

Hazel said to herself,
Don’t ask, don’t ask,
then asked, “Where was I?” Not plaintive, not demanding. She tried to make the inquiry casual, to suggest a passing puzzlement over her own agenda, three days ago. But how could the question not contain the other times she’d asked it, when Finney had seen a movie without her, when Finney showed up at school with pale pink lips instead of coral, and where did the coral go? Where did she find the pale pink, who shopped with her? When Finney, for instance, suddenly loved “Theme from
A Summer Place
” and last week had loved “Only the Lonely”? Where was poor Roy Orbison now, with his ugly glasses and slow-dance opera?

“I don’t know.” Finney bit her thumbnail, seemed not to give Hazel’s whereabouts on ice-skating day a second thought. “He didn’t approve of me skating.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so.”

“He asked what would happen if I fell and got really hurt while my parents were gone.”

The arm of the record player lifted in hopeless repetition, and Hazel tried to keep her breathing steady. Time was he didn’t talk to Finney that way, didn’t suggest any tenderness. This was new, his fear, and it was akin to Hazel’s own.

“What did you say?”

“I told him I’m
indestructible.
Then I skated backward around the pond twice and he stood completely still watching, right up until I skated into him and we both fell and he hurt his hip and I hurt my wrist.” She raised her eyebrows at Hazel, warm with irony and in full possession of the memory. She was resurrected, the now gone Finney of three days ago, and Hazel could see the coat and hat, the bright scarf, Finney’s long limbs and neck, how graceful she was for such a tall girl. There he was, too, standing on the ice, worried and angry and miserable (so much a part of his charm), watching Finney glide like a carved figure over the mirror of a music box. It would have been a moment outside of time for both of them, and then the sudden physical awakening of her body against his, the swift transport back into the rudeness of winter on an Indiana farm, the love he couldn’t have. Finney’s smell of sleep and tea.

“And then what happened?”

“We helped each other up. I brushed him off, he brushed me off, he kissed me once, so hard my teeth nearly went through my lips, then he walked fast away. I tried to follow him and he told me to go home.” Finney blinked, her eyelashes damp with tears, and Hazel could see Finney was happy to be so sad, because
he
had made her sad,
he
had sent her away. In turning his back to her, he had told her something intimate and they shared it now, and the most Hazel could wish for was to witness it. “Do you hear a car?” Finney asked, raising her head.

Hazel sat up, glanced at the clock. Her parents weren’t due home for three more hours. “We’ve got to clean up the kitchen and fold the laundry.” She hopped around, pulling her shoes on. Finney stood up, stretched, languid as a cat. Her parents were kind, permissive, sloppy. They let her bake cookies when she and Hazel were barely old enough to turn on the stove. Nobody cared about the mess. On Sundays in the winter, after the livestock were fed, Finney’s dad, Malcolm, came home and put his pajamas back on, drank hot chocolate, and listened to the radio, letting the sections of the newspaper pile up around him. Their house wasn’t a museum or a testament to anything. Just a house.

“Hazey, that isn’t your dad’s car.”

Headlights were more than halfway down the lane, and Finney was right—it wasn’t the Cadillac. Hazel bent over, tied her shoes. She ran her fingers through her hair, pulled it into a ponytail, and wrapped it with a rubber band from her wrist. Finney, too, sped up, tying her shoes and straightening her sweater. “You expecting someone?” she asked.

“No. Are you?” It would be unbearable if she’d invited him here.

“Hardly. He wouldn’t come if I invited him to a church social.”

The car pulled up in front of the house, and in the sodium light Hazel almost recognized it. It was someone who had been there before, and recently. Yesterday?

The brass doorknob of her bedroom door was cold; the pattern of the hallway rug was a thousand eyes. Hazel turned left and Finney was behind her, humming. They went down the front staircase, passing the silvery ancestors, through the front parlor, past the wide front door with the leaded glass panes, to the side entrance with the heavy lock and the screen. Neither thought to take a coat. They walked out into a bitterly cold, windless December night just as the car pulled into one of the clinic parking spaces and stopped. A man jumped from the driver’s side, shouting, “Miss Hunnicutt, where’s your mama?”