The Used World

Chapter 1

AT NINE O’CLOCK that morning, Claudia sat in the office of Amos Townsend, the minister of the Haddington Church of the Brethren. Haddington, a town of three or four thousand people, sat only eleven miles from the much larger college town of Jonah. The two places shared so little they might have been in different states, or in different states of being. Jonah had public housing, a strip of chain stores three miles long, a campus with eighteen thousand students and a clutch of Ph.D.’s. Haddington still held a harvest carnival, and ponies grazed in the field bordering the east end. It had been a charming place when Claudia was growing up, but one of them had changed. Now the cars and trucks parked along the sides of the main street were decorated with NASCAR bumper stickers and Dixie flags. There were more hunters, and fewer deer. And one by one the beautiful farmhouses (now just houses) had been stripped of every pleasing element, slapped with vinyl siding and plastic windows. Eventually even these shells would come down, and then Haddington would be a rural trailer park, and who knew if a man like Amos Townsend or a woman Claudia’s size would be allowed in at all.

Amos tapped his fingers on his desk, smiled at her. She smiled back but didn’t speak. The crease in her blue jeans was sharp between her fingers. She left it, and began instead to spin the rose gold signet ring on her pinkie. It had been her father’s, but his interlocking cursive initials, BLM, were indecipherable now, florid to begin with and worn away with time.

“Can I say something?” Amos asked, startling Claudia.

“Please do.”

“I talk to people like this every day. I spend far more time in pastoral care than in delivering sermons. That—podium time—is the least of my job. So I’m happy to hear anything you have to say. Except maybe about the weather, since I get that everywhere I go.”

Claudia nodded. “It’s going to snow.”

“Sure looks like it.”

What did she have to say? She could tell him that she spent every morning sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the English gardening cottage her father had built for her mother, Ludie—stared at it through every season, and also at the clothesline traversing the scene, unused since her mother’s death. She could say that the line itself, the black underscoring of horizontality, had become a burden to her for reasons she could not explain. The sight of the yard in spring and summer, when the fruit was on Ludie’s pawpaw tree, was no longer manageable. Or she could say that looking at the gardening shed, she had realized that the world is divided—perhaps not equally or neatly—into two sorts: those who would watch the shed fall down and those who would shore it up. In addition, there were those who, after the fall of the shed, would raze the site and install a prefabricated something or other, and those who would grow increasingly attached to the pile of rubble. Claudia was, she was just beginning to understand, the sort who might let it fall, love it as she did, as attached to it as she was. She would let it fall and stay there as she surveyed—each morning and with a bland sort of interest—the ivy creeping up over the lacy wrought-iron fence on either side of the front door, a family of house sparrows nesting under the collapsed roofline.

“I suppose I have a problem,” she said, twirling her father’s ring.

“Yes?”

“It has to do with the death of my mother.”

Amos waited. “Three years ago?”

“That’s right.” Claudia nodded. “I can’t say more than that.”

Amos aligned a pen on his blotter. Even in a white T-shirt and gray sweater he appeared to Claudia a timeless man; he might have been a circuit rider or a member of Lincoln’s cabinet, with his salt-and-pepper hair, his small round glasses hooked with mechanical grace around his ears. “I met your mother once,” he said.

“I—you did?”

“Yes, it was just after I moved here to Haddington. She and Beulah Baker showed up at my door just before noon one day and asked if they could take me to MCL Cafeteria for lunch. They were very welcoming.”

“I had no idea.” It had happened a few times in the past few years that Claudia would find a note in her mother’s secretary, or the sound of Ludie’s voice on an unlabeled cassette tape, and it felt like discovering in an attic the lost chapter of a favorite novel, one she thought she knew.

“Salt of the earth. I liked her very much.”

“She and Beulah were friends for a long time. Though I didn’t see much of Beulah after my mother died, of course.” She didn’t need to say because Beulah’s daughter and son-in-law died, and there were the orphaned daughters; Amos knew all too well. “I started coming to your church because of her, because she had spoken highly of you from the beginning.”

“Are you close to her again?”

“No—I—I find her unreachable.” What she meant was I am unreachable. “She’s friendly to me, but so frail she seems to be, I don’t know. In another country.” That was correct, that was what she meant: the country before, or after. There was Beulah in Ludie’s kitchen twenty-five years ago, baking Apple Brown Betty in old soup cans, then wrapping the loaves in foil and tying them with ribbons, fifty loaves at a time, to go in the Christmas boxes left on the steps of the poor. Beulah now, pushing her wheeled walker down the aisle at church, nothing and no one of interest to her but the remains of her family: her grandchildren; Amos and his wife, Langston. Nothing else.

“There is something missing in my life,” Claudia said, more urgently than she meant to. “I wake up every day and it’s the first thing I notice. I wake up in the middle of the night, actually. Sometimes the hole in the day is big, it seems to cover everything, and sometimes it’s like a series of pinpricks.”

Amos leaned forward, listening.

“I’m not depressed, though. I’m really quite well.”

“Are you”—Amos hesitated—“are you lonely?”

Claudia nearly laughed aloud. Loneliness, she suspected, was a category of experience that existed solely in relation to its opposite. Given that she never felt the latter, she could hardly be afflicted with the former.

“Loneliness is fascinating,” Amos said. “I see people all the time who say they are lonely but it’s a code word for something else. They can’t recover from their childhood damage, or they’ve decided they hate their wives. I don’t know, I had lunch with a man once who kept complaining about his soup. It was too hot, it was too salty. I remember him putting his spoon down next to the bowl with a practiced…like a slow, theatrical gesture of disgust. The soup was a personal affront to him. I knew on another day it would be something else—he would have been slighted by a clerk somewhere, or the rain would fall just on him, at just the wrong time.”

“Wait, go back—code for what?”

“Excuse me?”

“Loneliness is a code word for what?”

Amos shrugged. “That’s for you to decide, I guess.”

They sat in silence a few more minutes, Claudia now fully aware of all the reasons she had never sought counseling before. She glanced at the clock on the wall behind Amos’s desk and realized she needed to get to work. “I need to go,” she said, standing up. Amos stood, too, and for Claudia it was one of those rare occasions when she could look another person in the eye.

They shook hands and Amos said, smiling as if they were old friends, “It was a pleasure. Come see me again anytime.”

Salt of the earth. All through the day Claudia considered the phrase as it applied to Ludie, and to her father, Bertram. She didn’t know the provenance, but assumed the words had something to do with Lot’s wife, who could not help but turn and look back at the home she was losing, the friends, the family, the—who knew what all?—button collection, and so was struck down by the same avenging angels who had torched Sodom and Gomorrah. Ludie would not have looked back, of that Claudia was certain. They were plain country people, her parents, upheld all the conservative values that marked the Midwest like a scar. But they had been canny, too—they had played the game by the rules as they understood them. They were insured to the heavens, and when they died they left Claudia a mortgage-free house, and a payout on their individual policies that meant she would never want for anything. For her whole, long life, they seemed to be saying, Claudia would never have to leave the safety of the nest.

Ten days before Christmas and the Used World Emporium was busy, as it had been the whole month of December. Claudia thought about her mother and Beulah Baker showing up on Amos Townsend’s doorstep and wished, as she wished every day, that she could witness, or better yet, inhabit, any given moment when Ludie was alive. Claudia didn’t need to speak to her, didn’t need to stand in her mother’s attention; she would take anything, any day or hour, just to see Ludie’s hands again, or to watch her tie behind her back (so quickly) the pale blue apron with the red pocket and crooked hem. She thought of these things as she moved a walnut breakfront from booth #37 into the waiting, borrowed truck of a professor and his much-too-young wife, probably a second or third spouse for the distinguished man, and not the last. She carried out boxes of Blue Willow dishes (it multiplied in a frightful way, Blue Willow; 90 percent of what they sold was counterfeit, but in the Used World the sacred rule was Buyer beware). Over the course of the day she wrapped and moved framed Maxfield Parrish advertisements; an oak pie safe with doors of tin pierced into patterns of snowflakes; a spinning wheel Hazel had thought would never sell. She watched the clientele come and go, and they were a specific lot: the faculty and staff from across the river filtered in all day, those who knew nothing about antiques except the surface and the cache. The gay couples who were gentrifying the historic district, well-groomed men who walked apart from each other, their gimlet eyes trained to see exactly the right shade of maroon on a velvet love seat, a pattern of lilies on a cup and saucer that matched their heirloom hand towels. And behind them the crusty, retired farm folk who knew the age and value of every butter churn and cast iron garden table, who silently perused the goods and would not pay the ticket price for anything. Claudia watched them all, this self-selected group of shoppers, aware that just half a mile down James Whitcomb Riley Avenue, the Kmart was doing a bustling business in every other sort of gift, to every other kind of person, and she was grateful to work where she worked, at least this Christmas season. She moved furniture, took off and put on her coat a dozen times, thought about Ludie and Beulah, and she thought about loneliness, a code for something. Everyone she encountered stared at her at least a beat too long, then talked about the weather to disguise it. She nodded in agreement, as the sky grew dense and pearl-gray.

By three o’clock Rebekah Shook had said, “What a lovely piece—someone will be happy to get it,” approximately twenty-four times, and had meant it on each occasion. She was always the saddest to see anything go. She had wrapped dishes and vases and collectible beer bottles in newspaper until her hands were stained black and her fingerprints were visible on everything she touched. No matter what she was doing or whom she was talking to, she was also remembering the number 31 (or maybe it was 32 now), rising up before her like an animate thing as she was falling asleep, something with power. The 3 was muscular, with hands sharpened to points, and the 1 was a cold marble column. She sat up straighter on the stool behind the counter, closed her eyes. Her lower back ached; the night before, she’d sat down on the edge of the bed, intending to brush her hair, but before she could lift her arms the room had swayed like a hammock. She was on her back, counting the days since she’d last seen Peter, the hairbrush next to her pillow. She didn’t remember anything else until morning, when she woke to the sound of her father’s heavy gait in the hallway outside her room and realized she’d been reliving, in a dream, the last conversation she’d had with her mother.

It isn’t life, Beckah.

I don’t understand.

Of course not, but your father does. I’m going to ride this horse home.

Which horse, what horse?

Can’t you see it? It has blue eyes. Turn that knob and see if it comes in any clearer.

“It’s almost completely dark outside,” Hazel said, coming around behind the counter with a box of miscellaneous Christmas cards.“Sell these for a quarter apiece. Some don’t have envelopes, so if anyone complains tell them that the glue becomes toxic over time anyway.”

“Does it?” Rebekah asked, flipping through the stack. There were plump little angel babies, snow-covered landscapes, faded Santas affecting listless twinkles.

“Oh who knows. There are a few in there that date back to the thirties, I’m pretty sure. Who the hell would want to lick something that old?” Hazel jingled as she walked. Today she was wearing, Rebekah noticed, one of her favorite outfits, an orange and yellow batik vest with matching pants. The vest sported big metal buttons designed to look like distressed Mediterranean coins. Under the vest she wore a lime-green turtleneck, on her swollen feet a pair of stretched white leather Keds. Her dangly earrings were miniature Christmas trees with lights that blinked red and green. Hazel had less a sense of style than an affinity for catastrophe, which was one of the things that had drawn Rebekah to her.

“I’m going in my office for a minute, listen to the weather report. I’ll call the mall, too. If they’re closing early, we’re closing early.” Hazel jangled down the left-hand aisle, past booths #14 and #15, toward the cramped little office. Rebekah noticed that Hazel favored her left hip, something she hadn’t done the day before, and she realized, too, that the Cronies, the three men who always sat at the front of the door drinking free RC Colas, were mysteriously absent. Rebekah stood. She glanced at the two grainy surveillance cameras trained on the back of the store; in one a man flipped through vintage comic books. In the other nothing happened. She looked out the large picture window, through the backward black letters painted in a Gothic banker’s script that spelled out hazel hunnicutt’s used world emporium, and saw the heavy sky, the absence of a single bird on the telephone line. She knew, as everyone from the Midwest knows, that if she stepped outside she would be struck by a far-reaching silence. In the springtime of her childhood it hadn’t been the green skies or the sudden stillness that would finally cause her mother to throw open doors and windows, grab Rebekah’s hand, and pull her down the stairs to the basement: it was the absence of birdsong, of crickets, of spring peepers that meant a twister was on the way. It’s not the temperature, it’s not the sky. It’s the countless unseen singing things that announce by the vacuum they leave that some momentous condition is on its way.

Rebekah rang up a lamb’s-wool stole and a breakfront from #37 for the professor’s young wife, forgot to charge the tax. She said to the customer, whose expression was cold, “This is lovely, this lamb’s wool—it’s one of my favorite pieces.” The woman smiled vaguely, as if made uncomfortable by the familiarity from the Help. The husband, his beard streaked with the marks of a small comb, rested his hand on his wife’s shoulder with a proprietary ease. “I shouldn’t be buying her gifts before Christmas, but how can I stop myself?” he said, glancing down at his wife.

“Merry Christmas,” Rebekah said to them both, and the man nodded, steered his sullen charge out the door.

She sat back down on the stool, felt dizzy just for a moment. Her vision righted itself, and she decided to begin organizing the day’s receipts in case Hazel closed early. She lifted the thick stack off the spindle—it had been a busy day—and could go no further. The receipt on top was nothing special, just a box of miscellaneous linens from #27. Rebekah let her hand rest on top of it, felt her pulse pound against her wrist. What had happened on that night thirty-one or thirty-two days before? She had read the events over and over, she had turned every word between them inside out, she had rebuilt from memory every square inch of Peter’s cabin, as if the truth were under a cushion or tucked between two books.