The Used World (24 page)

She took the stairs two at a time, landing on the edges where they were less likely to complain. The ache in her back, in her legs and hips, was completely gone. Her heart had sped up in a pleasant enough way, and she wasn’t thinking much of anything at all, just picturing the doors, the locked front door, the locked kitchen door, were there any windows they could get through, how much time did she have?

Claudia couldn’t see the car through the narrow window at the bottom of the stairs, so she crept down silently, expecting the men to swarm up and surround the house, like a fat SWAT team. Maybe they’d fallen asleep waiting for someone to lead them.

A car door opened, closed. Claudia turned and pointed the gun at the front door. She’d expected to be overwhelmed by the moment, but the weapon actually felt small in her hands, natural. At first it had seemed she was thinking quite clearly, and then not at all, and in a split second she realized she was clearly
not thinking,
and that wasn’t like her. She lowered the weapon and looked through one of the three panes of glass at the top of the door. There was Rebekah’s car right in front of the house, and rising up from the porch, Rebekah’s small white hand about to knock on the window. Claudia threw open the door, turned on the porch light and the overhead light in the living room at once. Rebekah stood with her hand in the air, her green eyes wide, her serviceable navy peacoat unbuttoned.

“Rebekah, my goodness”—Claudia waved her in with the gun—“come in, come in, it’s freezing out there.”

Rebekah stepped inside, glancing at the gun, and then at Claudia in her old man’s pajamas and chenille sweater, and it seemed to Claudia that something passed through Rebekah’s body, starting at the top of her head and traveling down to her stomach. Rebekah threw back her head and began to laugh. She periodically tried to say something, she would point at the gun or at the pajama pants and say, “I’m sorry—” and then she’d double over, sometimes actually snorting and once issuing a sound that was surely a guffaw. She made her way over to the couch and lay down, opening her coat and wiping her eyes with her scarf, and Claudia followed, sitting in Ludie’s rocking chair.

“I can explain about this gun, Rebekah,” Claudia said.

“Oh please don’t,” Rebekah said, pulling her knees up to her chest. She stopped laughing a moment, then began again, saying, “Oh my God,” waving her hand in the general direction of Claudia.

Things might have gone on like this all night, except that the baby woke up with a wail, and Rebekah stopped. She sat up and looked at Claudia, who rose and headed for the stairs.

“Claudia, is there a…are you baby-sitting?”

“No. No, not really.”

The baby, when Claudia reached him, was on his back, his blanket thrown aside, his arms and legs pinwheeling in fury. In repose he was a bit elfin, but angry he looked like a furious little Secretary of Defense. Claudia leaned over the crib, rested her hand on the top of his head, just to feel it. He stopped crying, but began gnawing on his fist. His diaper had soaked through, so she moved him to the changing table, removed the diaper along with his nightgown.

“Claudia?” Rebekah said from the bedroom doorway.

“Oh, Rebekah—help me, would you? His sheet’s wet, there are dry ones in that laundry basket. I think we’re using the wrong-size diaper.”

Behind her Rebekah was silent a moment. Claudia heard her step in, slip off her coat, drop it on the bed. “Whose baby is this?” she asked, lowering the crib rail.

“He’s mine. I guess.”

Rebekah nodded. “You’re not sure?”

“I’m not sure yet. He’s mine for now, anyway.” Claudia studied the baby, who studied her in return, sucking his thumb. Sometimes he took a deep, shuddery breath, as if he weren’t quite done crying. By the time Claudia had him in clean pajamas, the crib was ready.

“Can I hold him?”

Claudia handed the baby to Rebekah; he grabbed her hair and tried to eat it. She handled him so competently—the way Ludie had been with babies—that Claudia felt like a lumberjack. “Are you, have you known a lot of babies?”

Rebekah tucked her hair into the collar of her sweater. “Oh, lots. Our church was filled with babies, and I worked”—she thought—“twelve? thirteen years in the nursery. What’s this fella’s name?”

“He doesn’t have one.”

“I see. He probably needs to have one soon, then, and he should eat again before he goes down for the night,” Rebekah said.

“Should I—”

“Why don’t you—”

“I’ll go—”

“Great. I’ll stay here with him.”

By the time Claudia got back upstairs, Rebekah was lying on the bed with the baby, letting her hair fall on his forehead, tickling it down his face. He wasn’t just laughing, he was making an odd sound—a sharp intake of air, and then an “Ooooo” as he expelled it.

“Guess who’s back, Mr. Buttons?” Rebekah said to the baby, kissing his nose. He made a sound in his throat like a baby raccoon.

Claudia handed Rebekah the warm bottle.

“No, you feed him,” Rebekah said. “I’ll just watch.”

She hadn’t been self-conscious with him yet, really—there hadn’t been time—but now Claudia felt as if she might actually hurt him. She picked him up, settled him on her lap.

“Here, raise him up some, cradle him against you.” Rebekah guided Claudia’s arms into position and tucked the baby into them. “Remember, babies like to drink a bottle as if they’re nursing, it’s the comfort they crave as much as the milk. He’s heavier this way, so why don’t we put these pillows under your arm, there, like that? See?”

“Yes. I get it, thank you.”

“I’m actually here to ask you a huge favor,” Rebekah said, looking at the baby. “I wonder if you’d mind if I stayed here for a little while.”

“Stay here? Really?” Claudia asked, nearly dropping the bottle. “There are
four
—I’m not kidding—four empty bedrooms in this house. Just choose. You can choose two if you want. Millie’s bathroom, well, it
was
Millie’s bathroom, hasn’t been used since she got married, although my mom and I long ago chipped away the crusts of perfume and hair spray and I don’t know what all, so it’s actually quite nice in there now. And you know I’ve got, well, my mom had this amazing kitchen, in the summer you can sit at the table and see the garden and her pawpaw tree, and also the little English gardening shed my dad built for her, all three things.”

Rebekah lay down on her side, tucked her coat under her head. She smiled sleepily at Claudia, at the baby, said, “I remember pawpaws. Nobody has those anymore.”

Rebekah didn’t choose Millie’s room with its own bathroom, but Claudia’s old room under the eaves. She couldn’t have said why, really. There was something about the sloping walls, the gray wallpaper, the plain white coverlet on the bed that made her feel less homesick. On the low bookcase next to the bed were Claudia’s favorite books from high school, her Jack Londons, the Hardy Boys, all of Nancy Drew. There was a series of books by Albert Payson Terhune, who wrote the Lad and Lassie books. Here was
The Bronze Bow,
and
The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
Rebekah ran her finger over the spines, imagining a childhood with these books. She had learned to read with Bible stories, and then the Bible, and had finally graduated to what these days was called ‘Christian fiction,’ or as Hazel referred to it, ‘by Oxymorons, for Oxymorons.’

She wanted to study the rest of the room, but her body was closing down in a way she couldn’t get used to; she had no say in the matter. Claudia had made her a peanut butter sandwich and a bowl of soup, and Rebekah had eaten and eaten, had two glasses of milk, and only stopped because she was too tired to swallow. While Rebekah washed the dishes, Claudia carried all her things in, carefully setting the odds and ends in a line in the foyer so Rebekah could put them where she wanted in the morning.

Rebekah’s own pillow was on the bed. She pulled back the quilt, the old, soft sheets, which were freezing, even through her nightgown. Rebekah had the sensation the bed was moving; when she opened her eyes it stopped. Just before she fell asleep, she realized again that she was pregnant, and that it was something she could, from this moment on, begin to dwell upon. She rested one hand on her abdomen, and was stunned to feel, in the place her stomach had always dipped between her hip bones, a solid, hard thing, like the edge of a cantaloupe. It was in there. It wasn’t leaving, not for a long time. And somewhere, deep in that darkness, a heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird’s, right below her own heart, which wasn’t broken, wasn’t breaking. It was just beating.

“I
USED
TO BE
a believer, I was. Some time ago.”

Amos nodded. “Used to be. But you’re back in church.”

“Right, I—”

“Not that it means anything, necessarily. Being in church. There are as many reasons for showing up as there are people in the pews. Or as many reasons for not attending, as the case may be.”

Had she been a believer? She had attended the Jonah Christian Church with her parents right up until her mother’s death, a rural church with an unobtrusive theology and little in the way of graven images. The pews made predictable protests each time the parishioners sat down or stood to sing. The stained-glass windows along the south wall were just two colors—milky white and tangerine in alternating panes—so the light in Claudia’s memory was dusty and gold. The pews, the worn brown carpet, the broken-backed hymnals, the light. She could still see her parents’ hands gripping the pews in front of them as they rose to pray, the skin becoming marked with age, the fingers knobbed and angled. Sunday upon Sunday morning passing and gone.

Amos cleared his throat but said nothing more.

From Nativity to Crucifixion, Christianity was a club into which Claudia had been born; she hadn’t needed to apply or beg entry. Ludie told her,
This is how it is, this is who we are,
and it became true, and Claudia had been safe there, all things considered. Even after she had grown past the point of acceptability everywhere else, even when, at eleven, she was taller than all the women in the congregation, no one stared or turned her away. But none of those things were the same as faith.

“I don’t know what it means, to be a believer,” Claudia said.

“No?”

Had there been a moment of suspension in her life when all that was actual, tangible, had fallen away and she had seen something in the remaining darkness? And what would one see in that instant anyway? What had it felt like to believe in Santa Claus or an imaginary friend? Claudia tapped her foot on the floor of Amos’s office, tried to remember not Christmas morning itself, but the feeling of belief. It had been…it had felt as if a wide array of needs was about to be met all at once, this desire, that emptiness, all swept away by wrapped packages and plates of cookies. And when the belief was gone, what was left—what seemed to be left for most adults—was the unending labor of re-creating the myth.

“What happened was…it was a couple years before my mom died, and we were in church during the Easter season, I don’t remember the exact Sunday. I wasn’t listening to the minister—Bill, we called him Pastor B.—I was making a grocery list or something.”

“You’d stopped listening to him.”

“Years before. I’m not sure I ever listened to him, actually. He just said the same things over and over, year after year, I’m sure the same things I could have heard in any mainstream Protestant church anywhere in the country. Over and over.”

“John 3:16.”

“Exactly. But on that Sunday I tuned in just as he was saying it’s impossible to deny the historical proof of the Resurrection and what it means for humankind. Those were his words.”

Amos tilted his head, pushed his glasses up. “What…historical proof?”

“Right? I approached him after the service, something I never did ordinarily, and asked him what he meant and he said, ‘Why, the evidence in the Bible, my dear.’”

Claudia and Amos were silent for a moment.

“That’s too bad,” Amos said.

“Which part? That there is no historical proof, still?”

“It would have been nice.”

She hadn’t felt, in the instant Pastor B. revealed his argument, a crashing disbelief, no temple falling, nothing grandiose or tragic. It was more as if she’d been standing uncomfortably in one room and she took a step sideways and was now standing uncomfortably in another. In the first room she nominally belonged to a group—the congregation of the Jonah Christian Church—and to a larger world, and to a history. Then she didn’t belong anymore. The hardest part was Ludie, how to continue living with Ludie and not let her know. Her mother’s faith was simple, innocent; if told that the stories in the Bible were true and there was proof, and the proof was the Bible itself, Ludie nodded, stood, sang “Blessed Assurance” in her flat contralto. Then she went home and baked a meat loaf.

“There are lots of ways to talk about, to think about the Resurrection,” Amos said, “and all kinds of ways around the damage of our childhood religion.”

“I know. I didn’t mean to suggest that you’re
all
”—Claudia made a gesture meant to encompass the whole of the clergy—“so circular.”

“I just wonder”—Amos picked up a pencil, put it down—“if there was some other reason, other reasons you might have left the Jonah Christian Church.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

High on the wall behind Amos’s head the black hands of a clock ticked forward; Claudia heard herself breathing in time with it. There had been other reasons, he was right.

“Last full day of work before Christmas,” Claudia said, standing, “and a Saturday besides. I should get over there.”

Amos stood, too, offered Claudia his hand.

“Thanks for talking to me,” she said.

“My pleasure. Come back anytime.”

The sofa, circa 1880, was one of the best pieces Claudia had ever seen pass through the Emporium. The burled walnut was as smooth as glass. Some of the grain looked like caramel being poured hot from a pan. A pew construction with fifteen walnut slats so strong they might have been steel, with a rare double-lyre pattern in the back. Even the fitted cushion was beautiful, a heavy red and gold brocade with two matching bolsters tied with red ribbon, like rare candies.

Claudia didn’t know the man who delivered it; he was in a white step van that advertised nothing—no antique dealer or service. He was middle-aged and silent, wearing a gray wool coat and matching driving cap, obviously not a local. The only question Claudia dared ask him was if the sofa was French. He replied, without looking at her, that it was purchased in a French market but was Swedish in origin.

They carried it all the way back to the Parlor, where its elegance was jarring. The man left without another word. Claudia stood looking at the available space, but there was no part of the Parlor that wasn’t of a piece. What happened in that room was a Saturday afternoon in Queens or Baltimore, a family gathered together to listen to news of the war on the radio, sons too close in age wrestling on the threadbare Oriental. This was not a room that held a double-lyre sofa.

Behind Claudia someone whistled; she turned to see Rebekah walking up the aisle.

“It’s something, isn’t it?”

“Would you even dare
sit
on that?” Rebekah asked, running her hand over one of the arms.

“It was made for sitting, I guess.”

“How do we know? Maybe it was meant to be just…spectated.”

“Like a museum piece? Maybe.” Claudia straightened the bolster at her end.

“Well, since its original purpose is forever beyond us, let’s go ahead and sit on it.”

“You first.”

Rebekah sat. “Hmmm,” she said, leaning back. “Surprisingly comfortable.” She patted the cushion beside her. “Give it a try.”

Claudia eased herself down beside Rebekah, but the wooden slats made no sound at all. “My God, the Swedes.”

“Where did it come from?”

“A French flea market.”

“No, where did Hazel get it?”

“She said she found someone on the Internet who needed to divest himself of a few fine articles….”

“In a hurry.”

“Exactly.” Claudia leaned back. Rebekah was right—it was comfortable. “In a hurry. You wouldn’t so much want to sit on it to watch a Jimmy Stewart movie, though, would you.”

“Not so much.”

“Okay, let me ask you this.” Claudia turned to Rebekah, continuing a game they’d been playing for the five days they’d lived together. Claudia would pick up an item Rebekah had brought from Vernon’s house and ask her the story of it; Rebekah in turn would ask Claudia to find something in her house that was similar. Narrativewise. Claudia had seen Ruth’s flour sifter and shown Rebekah Ludie’s. She had seen a chipped bud vase from the only time Vernon had given Rebekah flowers, when she had scarlet fever, and she’d held some of the clothes Rebekah had made over the years, creations so strange, the combinations of fabrics so…
unlikely,
that at first Claudia hadn’t known what to say. Three days later she couldn’t stop thinking about them.

“Tell me about that wooden box you keep on the dresser.”

“Tom Smith and Sons?”

“Yep.”

“Well.” Rebekah took a breath, squinted into the distance. “Terry, the first boy who ever courted me. He was a foster son of one of the elders, he was sixteen, I was fifteen. He began his courtship by leaving a dead king snake on my chair at the church school.”

“Very romantic.”

“I failed to see the beauty. I ignored him for a year, and in that time he”—Rebekah held up her fingers to count off—“broke his arm trying to impress me by jumping a fence on one of Davy’s horses. He wrecked his father’s car, driving and talking to me through the window as I walked down the street.
And
he was hit in the thigh by a round of BB’s while singing ‘O Holy Night’ under my window. Pellets fired by my daddy.”

“He was serious.”

“Apparently so. He joined the army, and the night before he left he made one last gesture: he gave me an antique box that had belonged to his real mother, and in it he placed part of a poem and an incisor from a black bear. And just like that, I opened it, I saw what was inside it, and I fell in love with him. Looking back the snake seemed…you know, magnificent, something like that. I kept reliving the moment with the horse, seeing his front feet clear the fence, one of his back legs get caught. And in my vision of it I did
not
laugh so hard Davy’s mother had to make me lie down on the bed. I was a very different sort of girl.”

Two customers walked by, a young couple in matching camouflage jackets. “What happened? In the end.”

Rebekah sighed. “I never saw him again. He was sent to Korea and he married a seventeen-year-old local girl. He never came back to Jonah. You can look in the box when we get home.”

“What was the poem?” Claudia asked.

“It was by e. e. cummings. I can only remember the first line, ‘your homecoming will be my homecoming.’”

“Cummings? You Pentecostals never cease to surprise.”

Rebekah sighed again. “Terry. He was a rebel in his way. He found the poem in the library, which is where we got all our contraband.” She rubbed her palm over the brocade cushion. “Very nice upholstery.”

“It is.”

“You”—Rebekah turned and looked at Claudia—“know more about me than anyone ever has.”

Claudia blushed, looked at the floor. Rebekah, Claudia knew, loved crisp food and glass doorknobs; she disliked wind and open-backed stairs. She was a morning person and enjoyed the winter, she had a beautiful singing voice and her two smallest toes on each foot were webbed. She had, for years as a child, dreamed she was a twin, and that her brother had died by drowning. She even knew her brother’s name: Samuel. Claudia knew about the girl cousins, and how for one summer they had all pretended to be married to the Apostles. “Well”—she cleared her throat—“I’m sorry to say you’re the only person I’ve ever really known.”

“Really? The only one? What about your sister?”

“Millie?” She might have known Millie briefly, when they were children, but that time was distant and fast fading. “I knew
of
her.”

“Your dad? You loved your dad.”

Bertram, much on Claudia’s mind of late, had been unknowable to women, and probably to other men. What she treasured of her father now was not any communion they had shared, but just the memory of him in his study at night, writing up policies and reports as he listened to high school basketball on the little black radio with gray knobs. “Yes, I did love him.”

“Okay—look: you had to know Ludie. Nobody could have known Ludie more than you did.”

It was true that she could have recognized Ludie blindfolded, by the smell of her powder, the smell of her
comb,
or by her odd tuneless humming in the garden. She would sing a few words (
while the dew is still on the roses
) and then hum more. There was nothing about her mother Claudia didn’t know, nothing she couldn’t have predicted, and yet…“It’s not the same, what I’m talking about with you.”

“Do you know”—Rebekah looked at Claudia, eyes wide—“this is the longest we’ve talked in the past five days without mentioning the baby?”

Just like that, there was the shock, the low, rumbling anxiety. Where was the baby? She had a baby. Mornings Rebekah moved through the kitchen like a waitress, fixing larger breakfasts than Claudia would ever have made on her own. She made cereal for the baby and got him to eat from a spoon, which Claudia still couldn’t convince him to do, and she handed him Cheerios one at a time in his bouncy chair. (He dropped them, mostly.) Every day she put him in his high chair, and he slid sideways and stayed there, like a tired old man on a train, until Rebekah said, “Enough of that, Buttons,” and lifted him out, resting him on her hip as she cleared the table.