The Used World (37 page)

Oliver had nearly figured out the clasp on the restraint when his fingers slipped off. Furious, he bounced up and down in the seat, rocking the cart.

“Whoa, Bamm-Bamm,” Hazel said, reaching in her bag for something to distract him. She pulled out a wooden boat, which he instantly stuck in his mouth. “If pieces of that show up later, don’t blame me. I wanted to bring the zwieback.”

“It turns to cement when it dries.”

“We would cross that bridge,” Hazel said, tossing the chicken-flavored bone in the cart. “Maybe we should give Oliver a rawhide. Like the kind for puppies?”

Claudia could see the grocery list she’d left on the counter, could see the first three items: milk, diapers, baby food. They went without saying. What came after? Subtle things like poultry seasoning and ChapStick. But not those. She tried to concentrate on what was before her, but she was in the pet aisle, which meant birdseed and cat litter on one side, laundry detergent and bathroom cleaner on the other. Was that it? Laundry detergent? She tried to picture the shelf above the washing machine, couldn’t remember anything about the last time she’d washed clothes.

“Hazel, why am I here?”

“To know God, love Him, and serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”

“Was I out of something?”

“I don’t know, milk, diapers, baby food?”

“What did I say when you called? I said I have to go to the grocery store to get…you say the rest.”

“Yes, I wasn’t really listening.”

Oliver pulled so hard at the strap around his waist, one end nearly came dislodged. He looked up at Claudia and showed all eight of his teeth, the way dogs will when they’re happy, or before they bite. He cried Mamamamama, holding his arms up, pleading for freedom.

“He’s very manipulative, this one,” Hazel said. “Less like a Gemini than—”

“Was it animal? Vegetable? Was it food or something else?”

“—an Aries. But that would mean he was born much earlier than the date on his birth certificate.”

Claudia glanced around the store. She was too distracted to try to complete this errand, and the only sane thing to do would be to go home and when she got the list, come back. And that would mean enduring the countless difficulties of getting Oliver into his car seat, out of his car seat, all over again.

“Let’s head this way, shall we?” Hazel asked, heading toward Frozen Foods and Dairy.

“Eggs!” Claudia said, as soon as she saw them. “That was one thing, eggs. There was more, but that’s a start.”

It was June 25, more than a month after Ludie’s traditional day to begin spring cleaning. Claudia meant to abide by the ritual, even though the parts of the house she used got cleaned all the time. This morning she’d started in her old bedroom, at that end of the upstairs hallway. She stripped the beds of the sheets Rebekah had slept on, and hung the comforter on the line outside. She took down the curtains, cleaned the windows, vacuumed behind the radiator, checked the closet. Nothing there to speak of, besides linens and some old winter coats. She polished the desktop, blew the dust off her books. She had closed the door behind her.

“Perhaps you were thinking of making peanut butter cookies,” Hazel said, checking the eggs for secret breaks.

That was it—Claudia saw the whole list. Baking soda, that was the subtle thing she’d needed. She wrapped her hands around Hazel’s head, smashing her puffy hair, then leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. “Thank you, thank you.” Oliver waved, made his kiss-face, said, “Bye-bye, Neem. Bye-bye.”

“Do you want to come in?” Hazel asked, stepping out of the Jeep. “The cats would love to see Oliver.”

Claudia laughed, picturing poor Sprocket the last time they were there, tearing through the house with his tail tucked between his legs, fleeing from Oliver, who was giggling madly and doing his Frankenstein run, yelling, “HEE key key key key.”

“Thanks, but I should get these groceries home.”

“Okay,” Hazel said, turning as if to close the door. “You know…” She turned back. “You could just go out there. It wouldn’t hurt anything or anyone, and maybe it would be best if you, well, told her that you’d seen Peter—”

“Hazel, stop,” Claudia said, holding up her hand. “I’m not driving out there.”

Hazel leaned in over the passenger seat. “He is not your rival, Claudia. You absolutely must make that clear to yourself. He. Is. Not. Your. Rival.”

Claudia took a deep breath, glanced in the rearview mirror. “There’s someone coming, I need to get out of the street.”

“There’s no one coming. Do you remember where he lives?”

“Of course I do, and I’m not going out there. If he isn’t my rival, who is?”

Hazel threw up her hands with relief, as if someone had finally given the right answer to a vexing test question. “That’s the point! No one is! You have no rival! Please think about it, Claudia.”

“I have thought about it,” Claudia said, refusing to meet Hazel’s eye. If Peter wasn’t her rival, why had he stolen her happiness, and why was he careless with it? What could it mean that she’d seen him twice now after not seeing him for months, the first time carrying suitcases out to his white car late at night (she’d just happened to be driving by, it was an accident, really, Oliver was feverish and wouldn’t sleep, so she’d done what mothers have done since the invention of the automobile—she strapped him in the car and turned up the radio and before she knew it, she was on One Oak Road). They were going somewhere, she’d thought at first; but why was the cabin so dark? Maybe they were leaving very early in the morning. But where could Rebekah go that required so many suitcases, as pregnant as she was? The next morning Peter’s car was still there; Rebekah’s, too. And then two days after that, Claudia had gone to Sears for new tires, and while wandering through the store with Oliver she’d heard Peter’s voice. She turned a corner into Sporting Goods and saw him talking on the phone, his back to her. She couldn’t make out the words, but could tell he was upset. With his free hand he rubbed the back of his neck, then leaned against the wall as if he were dizzy.

“There is something you’re not—” Hazel straightened up, looked at the blue sky, squinted. “Where are the sane people is what I want to know. Claudia, look at me. Don’t you feel this heaviness in the air? It isn’t just summer, it isn’t barometric pressure or anything like that, it’s…”

“What? What is it, then?”

“It’s
change,
Dim. There is wild change afoot, and you must be brave enough not only to endure it, but to embrace it, to make it your own. I thought,” Hazel said, “I thought you were the most courageous person I’d ever known. I trusted you with a baby and a dog and a pregnant woman.”

“Listen,” Claudia said, leaning toward Hazel, “I have risen to every challenge before me, and for you to suggest otherwise is both cruel and a lie, and you are
not
the author of a story called Claudia, so please back away from this car before I say something I regret.”

Hazel’s face gave nothing away until just before she closed the passenger door. It was then Claudia saw, just fleeting, Hazel’s look of supreme satisfaction. Hazel turned quickly and walked toward her house.

Claudia drove away in such anger she actually left the top layer of her new tires on the street, and from the backseat Oliver clapped and said, “Wheeee!”

1971

In the fifteen acres that separated the house and the road, thousands of dandelions had come up in the bright green grass. Hazel was grateful that her mother was too practical and busy to care about such things as dandelion eradication, which was a popular pastime in Indiana. The ideal Hoosier lawn was rolled into a perfect horizontal plane, and there was grass. Nothing else. The grass was kept quite short and nothing was ever done
on
the lawn, like dining or croquet. Exhibit only, no touching.

Hazel walked down the lane to the mailbox. Mercury zipped in and out of the grass, chasing imaginary mice. It was one of those days she could barely keep from singing; just standing in a landscape so infused with color, so radiant and warm, felt transcendent. There was no possibility of harm. For the moment, all that was unseen remained so, and let her be.

She had been too early for the mail; no matter. It only meant she would get to go check again, later. She turned left on the old county road and headed for the barn. The apple trees in the small orchard, gnarled and gargoyle-ish as they were, still blossomed and produced fruit, imagine the luck. Mercury dashed under an abandoned flatbed wagon, peered out at Hazel as if they were playing hide-and-seek.

She reached the barn and slid the door open on the rust, just a foot or so, enough to poke her head in.

A dream. It hit her as a physical sensation, and she recoiled. She had been in the barn with a crowd of people; the barn was dark but there seemed to be a spotlight on the drama: a black horse had fallen into a hole in the floor the size of a grave. It had fallen on its back and it was thrashing, panicked. No one, it seemed, had any idea what to do. The Night Mare. Wait, wait, that hadn’t been a dream. Hazel pressed her hand against her eyes. There had been a crowd, too, gathered around the fire ring, throwing art into a tall fire.
Maybe
it had been a dream.

She took a deep breath and leaned through the opening in the barn door. There was Edie, sprawled out on a full-size mattress placed directly on the dirt floor. She was still in her clothes from the day before, half wrapped in an old comforter, and sound asleep. Beside her was her new boyfriend, Charlie, a thin, handsome criminal type, probably not smart enough to pile rocks, and currently homeless. Albert had put his foot down, said Charlie could sleep in the barn and shower once a day in the basement. Edie had replied, “Because we’re all so brainwashed by Procter and Gamble to believe we have to shower
every day.
” Hazel shook her head. Edie was amusing in her way, but life was about to pick her up in its jaws and shake her like a rag doll, shake her until she was boneless and pliable, even though she was in love. In loooove. Hazel closed the barn door, walked back to the house.

There was a note on her desk in reception in Caroline’s hand,
Call Finney.
Hazel dialed the number of the diner and one of the other waitresses answered, this one the Kentucky-bred toothless woman named Shug who worshiped Mac Davis and said her dream in life was to see him in a pair of ‘tight white pants.’

“Shug, it’s Hazel. Is Finney around?”

“Hey, Hay-zel,” she said, drawing out the first syllable the length of a city block. “She’s here but she ain’t in good shape. I’ll see can she come to the phone.”

No one answered for a long time. Finney was in bad shape. That could mean any number of things…no, actually, it could mean only one thing. Finally, after a few minutes, Finney picked up the phone, said hello in a voice thick with tears, ragged from smoking and crying. “Can you come over here?”

“I’m on my way.” Hazel walked back into reception to tell her mother she needed to leave; Caroline wouldn’t have cared. The schedule was light today, probably because of the fine weather, and anything Hazel did, Caroline could do just as well. Instead, Hazel ran into her father, who was stepping out of his examination room.

Albert was balding—only a silver fringe of hair was left. He was monkish in other ways, too: in his faith in his cause; his discipline; his belief that it was his own constancy and dedication that bound the chaotic elements of the world. He was tan from golfing with his peers, and he was immaculate in every element of presentation: his clothes, his glasses, his hands. He wrote with a Mont Blanc pen, wore leather shoes from a village in the north of Italy that custom-made them for him from a model of his foot he’d had cast when he was there.

“Hazel, good—I need you to look up Horace Greg—”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. I just came back to tell Caroline I have to run out for a moment.”

“Run out where, during the working day?”

“There’s a crisis.”

“Oh, a crisis. I assume it is of the emotional rather than the natural-disaster variety. An emotional emergency that requires you to attend to it immediately. I assume this would be your friend ‘Lucy’ again.” Albert’s voice never changed. He never sounded sarcastic or angry, which made him all the more formidable.

“Actually, it appears Lucy’s appendix has burst.”

“You’ve used that one already.”

“Alas, she was born with two.”

“What are you, thirty years old now?” Albert turned and walked away, his face finally giving way to derision, and Hazel grabbed her keys and left. Albert could not get to her with anything short of a loaded gun.

“Sixty-two,” she called after her father. “But thanks.”

Finney was sitting at a table in the corner of the diner, a worn-out round one that didn’t match the rest of the restaurant’s furniture. The table was reserved for the staff; they ate there, read the paper during breaks. Finn was just sitting, a coffee cup in front of her, a cigarette burning in the already overflowing ashtray. Hazel sat down across from her.

Finn’s mouth was swollen from crying, her lips chapped, and her nose was red. Her eyes were as swollen as if she’d been stung by a bee. Her hair was dry and brittle, the cut shapeless. When she picked up the cigarette her hands were trembling, and Hazel saw that her fingernails had been stripped or chewed away.