The Used World (20 page)

“Nothing could hurt me more than—”

“Okay, the truth is that we were just dating, you know? Like I said, I’m young, I don’t want to be tied down. You seemed perfect because you didn’t ever ask for anything. I’ve had”—Peter shook his head—“girlfriends who were just
on me
all the time. Where had I been, where was this relationship going, on and on and on. You never asked those questions.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“We just had a good time; we were friends, weren’t we?”

After he’d offered her a slinky nightgown (“This isn’t mine,” she’d had to tell him); after they’d brushed their teeth in the usual pattern—Rebekah first, carrying her overnight bag into the bathroom, Peter following; after they’d settled in and Rebekah had grown used to the hard futon sofa, she heard Peter begin to snore in the other room, lightly.

She looked around at the cabin in the faint light from the woodstove. It wasn’t the same place she had loved, and she wasn’t the same person who had loved it, so she tried to see it that way, as the museum of another person and another time. She wished she were still that other Rebekah, or that she could find the Peter who loved her. Without them she was hopeless. She was asleep before she knew what had hit her.

“T
HAT WAS A FOUL,
I’m quite certain,” Amos Townsend said after Claudia had smacked the ball out of his hands. He’d been dribbling toward her with a casual ease that left the ball unguarded on the up bounce.

“I didn’t touch you,” Claudia said, dribbling twice and taking a sixteen-foot jumper. “Ten to four.”

“It was foul in other ways. Can we take a break—how’s that go again?” Amos moved his hands around in meaningless semaphore, as if trying to remember how to make the letter
T,
for time-out.

Claudia retrieved their water bottles from the corner of the court, handed Amos his. He was bent over, hands on his knees, gasping for air.

“I’m dying,” he said. “Why aren’t you dying?”

“I don’t know,” Claudia said, surprised. She was a little tired, a little hot, but mostly she felt great. “Maybe it’s this court.” It had been impossible for Amos to find an available gym in December in Indiana, so he’d gotten the use of the indoor court at the Nathan Leander Church of the Nazarene, which was carpeted. A full-size basketball court inside a church, stretched end to end with low-pile indoor/outdoor carpeting.

“Maybe carpeting makes it more Christian.”

“It is hard to keep up with all the rules.” Claudia bounced up and down, keeping her knees warm and loose.

“I thought you hadn’t played in years.” Amos took a drink of water, wiped his forehead on his T-shirt.

“I haven’t. This is easier than moving furniture all day, though.”

“Well,” Amos put his water bottle down, stretched. “It’s actually easier than writing sermons, too. It’s probably too late to become a professional, huh?”

Claudia looked at Amos, who probably hadn’t even seen a basketball game in more than twenty years. He was six three to her six five, both of them over forty. Amos still believed they were giants. She tried to imagine them standing next to Yao Ming or a half dozen other really tall people. “It’s too late in many, many ways,” she said, passing Amos the ball.

They played another thirty minutes and Amos rallied at the end, but not enough to beat her. The final score was 30–22. After they’d returned the basketball to the closet, where there was a great deal of sporting equipment (“There is much about the Nazarenes I do not know,” Amos had remarked), they changed in their respective restrooms and met in the snack bar, which had coffee, soda, and juice machines, and two more machines filled with chips, cookies, and microwave popcorn.

“I don’t know if I can go back to your church after this,” Claudia remarked, sitting down with a grape juice and bag of peanuts.

“We’re inadequate. I never knew.” Amos came back to the table with a cup of coffee and a giant cookie. “I looked around, but I can’t find the tanning beds.”

Claudia coughed, nearly choking on a peanut. He was right. Other places combined coffeehouses and bookshops; Indiana was probably right on the verge of putting tanning beds in evangelical churches. “The one nearest my house is called A Place to Tan.”

“I like that, it’s to the point.” Amos stretched his legs out, rested them on an empty chair. “It would be easier if everyone would just admit they’re depressed. A lot less skin cancer that way.”

“Is everyone depressed?”

“I’ve always thought so. Maybe I’m wrong. Are you depressed?”

Claudia shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

Amos studied her a moment, weighing, or so it seemed, his next comment. He took a sip of coffee.

“Are you?” Claudia asked, uncomfortable.

“I am not…unaware of the human condition, and I’m fairly clear on my own. Given those facts, it only follows that one would be—concerned.” He gave Claudia a sheepish look, as if he knew he’d taken an end-run around the question. “I think everyone, from the beginning of recorded time, has been depressed. It just follows. Jesus says in the book of Matthew, “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” That’s
some
kind of loss He’s talking about. The Beatitudes are meant to comfort the poor in spirit. Maybe that’s all I am, maybe all you are, the poor in spirit.”

Claudia watched Amos, expecting him to add something but he didn’t. “You say those words and all I hear is static. We’ve heard them so many times they no longer mean anything.”

Amos let his head fall back and hit the wall. “Oh, when a man’s flock turns against him, and using his own words, no less.”

“I don’t really mean it.”

“No. Well, you’re a better person than I, if you don’t.” He drank his coffee, continued to look bemused. “Want to tell me what’s new in your life?”

Claudia ran the palm of her hand over the top of her hair. “Not much.” Was she allowed to lie to her minister? “Not a lot. I mean—something has happened, but it’s not that big a deal.”

“Oh?”

“I have a—someone has come to stay with me.”

“Is that a good thing?”

Claudia shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Maybe. I doubt it. It’s too soon to tell.”

“You’ve lived a solitary life for a while now.”

“Yes, since…since Ludie died.”

“And that was comfortable for you?” Amos broke his cookie in half and offered it to her.

“It was,” she said, nodding. “It makes me realize you never know when someone or something is going to appear. I mean, it happens on television all the time—a fifty-year-old woman finds out she has a twin she never knew about, or a brother resurfaces who’s been gone for decades. I’d never thought it applied to me.”

Amos looked shocked. “Can I tell you something?” he said, leaning toward her.

“Yes.”

“This is completely confidential.”

“I assumed it was.”

“Well, yes—what you say to me is confidential, because I’m your minister. But you aren’t obligated to keep my confidence.”

“Okay.”

“My wife, Langston. She had a brother who disappeared thirteen, fourteen years ago; they’ve never heard of or from him in all that time. Recently she got a call from him.”

“You’re kidding.” Somehow her baby robbery already paled in comparison.

“Nope.” Amos dropped the last of his part of the cookie in his mouth, wiped his hands on his gym towel. “He was cautious, didn’t tell her where he was, but he sounded, in her words, as if he’s thriving. I’ve never”—he swallowed, looked down at the table—“seen her the way she was right after that phone call.” Amos laughed, and Claudia saw the slight shine of tears in his eyes. “She’s the moon and the stars to me; I thought I knew everything about her. And yet I’d never seen her unreservedly happy before. But she was that night, after she finished yelling at me because of my primitivism. Oh, and for causing her to live in the wasteland of Haddington, where we still don’t have caller ID.”

“So she could have seen his phone number.”

“Maybe,” Amos said, using what Claudia guessed was the same tone he used with his wife, “unless he called from some other city or from a pay phone or using one of those whatsits you can get in a gas station.”

“A phone card.”

“Exactly. I told her that her brother might not have even called if we’d been living some place more sophisticated. It was his faith that we wouldn’t have a real telephone that allowed him to contact her in the first place.”

“Good argument.”

“Thank you. It worked.” Amos swept his cookie crumbs into his empty cup. “I didn’t mean for us to talk about me. That wasn’t very professional. Tell me more about your own visitor.”

Claudia looked at him, thinking how funny it was, all those years of Ludie’s ministers, men pedastalized (perhaps even coffinized) and kept distant from their humanity. Claudia had assumed that’s what it meant to choose the profession, or that it was a prerequisite for choosing it—the warmth in the pulpit that could be faked if necessary, the blameless cold reserve in person. But here was one, a minister who had taken on his task like any other craftsman, and Claudia loved him. She loved him simply, like a friend or kindred spirit, as one loves one’s peers. “Next time,” she said. “It may come to nothing, and anyway, your story was more interesting.” She handed him back the other half of his cookie, rose from the table, and threw away the plastic bag from her peanuts. The Nazarenes, she noticed, did not recycle, so she slipped her juice bottle into her gym bag. “But thanks for talking with me.”

“My pleasure,” Amos said. “Come back any time.”

“Get—we’re gonna have to turn it—get your end straightened up there,” the man said. His face was nearly purple with exertion, and his WWF cap had been knocked crooked, revealing a hat-shaped dent in his forehead.

Claudia didn’t say, she would never say, that she had suggested they tip the love seat a long time ago. It was a sleeper, with a single bed built in, and awkward. Right at the very beginning she’d said, “We ought to turn this on its side,” not like a woman who’d just beaten her minister in basketball, but as a polite suggestion from someone who worked at the place and moved furniture every day.

Rebekah passed the open delivery door, carrying something into booth #42. Claudia got just a glimpse of her. In fact, all morning Rebekah had moved through the store like a ghost, a blank expression on her face.

The Undertaker. That was the character on the man’s hat, Claudia recognized him now. One of the Cronies was fond of him, too. She had no idea what any of it meant, what this character did or why. She turned the couch into the position she’d originally suggested, squatted under her side of it, and lifted. The Undertaker lifted his side and backed out the door into the freezing, bloodless day; he breathed heavily and didn’t meet her eye.

A black Ford F150 was waiting with the tailgate down, and the man puzzled a moment over how to get the couch into the high bed without a ramp. This was what he’d bought such a gigantic truck for, right? Claudia wanted to ask. The bed liner was unscuffed. It seemed the man could lift the couch no higher. Claudia didn’t tell him that if he put his end down, she could easily take care of it. She stood there, letting him make his own decisions. She knew what he looked like under the barn coat and black sweatshirt; his arms were the size of hams, but not strong, and his belly and chest were weak and white. After a lifetime of being a healthy farm specimen of a boy, he’d become a reclining, television-watching, soda-drinking captive to the modern time-saving conveniences, and he was under the weight of a piece of furniture he could hardly lift with a woman who was at least six inches his superior, and Claudia remained silent.

He put his end down. “You got a ramp, a dolly?” Lifting his cap, he wiped a line of sweat off his forehead.

“They’re in that shed,” Claudia said, putting down her end. This would be the first time she used them today. “I’ll be right back.”

After they’d loaded the couch and covered it with plastic, she asked the man if he wanted to take the ramp home with him. He shook his head, said, “I’ll get my boys to bring it in,” as if they weren’t just like him, as if they weren’t the New Sons. She imagined them at home right now, a ranch house on the highway, playing video games and eating Doritos out of the bag, the room dark. It didn’t matter what age they were—twelve or twenty-seven—that’s what they were doing. For just a moment she saw something flicker on the Undertaker’s face, a grimace or a twitch, as if he’d seen it, too. He slammed the tailgate shut, took his keys from the pocket of his relaxed blue jeans. “Thank ya,” he said, walking toward the driver’s door.

Rebekah pulled the red dress over the mannequin’s head, trying to make the unnaturally high and pert breasts fit in the space provided for them. If she made an adjustment one way, the neckline was too deep; if she repaired the neckline, the nylon fabric slipped off the mannequin’s plastic shoulders.

“Well,” she said, humming along with Sammy Davis, Jr., singing “Christmas Time All Over the World.” She pulled the dress up, pulled it down.

“Rebekah?”

She turned and there was Peter’s mother, a vision in her traditional winter palette: cream, cinnamon, and rust.

“Kathy?”

“I don’t mean to bother you at work.” Kathy reached out for the cheapest of the holiday dresses, a concoction of bows and inorganic fibers.

“That’s all right,” Rebekah said, allowing the red dress to fall in an awkward way. She looked at Kathy’s straight, structured hair, the delicate blond streaks, and unconsciously reached up and touched her own tangled, untended curls. “Are you…shopping?”

“No,” Kathy said with a nervous laugh, glancing at the other shoppers. “No, I wanted to apologize for what happened at the house. It was an awkward situation and I’m afraid I…well, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings in any way.”

Rebekah swallowed, fought back tears. “That’s all right. I’m sorry for the tone I took with you, too.”

Kathy waved the memory away. “You had every right.” She reached into her purse and took out a tissue. “I also want to tell you something.”

“Okay.” Rebekah didn’t know whether to hope or take a step backward.

“My husband and I have been talking….”

“You mean Pete Senior?”

“Pardon?”

“You said ‘my husband,’ as if I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

Kathy pressed her lips together, looked down at the floor. “
Pete
and I have been talking and we realize that you must feel very alone right now.” She waited for Rebekah to reply, but the understatement had left Rebekah speechless. “I don’t know anything—I wouldn’t presume to know anything about your financial situation—but we were hoping we might make a helpful gesture, just something to—”