The Used World (30 page)

“Mil, don’t you want to go outside and start smoking again?” Claudia asked, placing the ornament where she was told.

“What do you mean?” Rebekah said from the rocking chair. “What do you mean about if you could only have gotten what Claudia had?”

Millie rubbed her hand over the frosted spikes of her hair, shocking Claudia with familiarity. When had
that
happened? When did they both begin making that gesture?

“Whew, well, it’s hard to describe.”

“I feel like you’re going to try.” Claudia reached in the box, pulled out a red and silver ball, faded now and flaking its metallic shell.

“She just”—Millie looked at Rebekah as if the two of them were alone, which was fine by Claudia—“she was so self-contained and nothing got into her, nothing. It was as if…as if she lived on her own planet and nobody bothered her there, and everything there was orderly and clean and without…you know, disruption. Her car was always clean and her clothes were always pressed and she moved…as if she was just gliding over ice.”

Claudia was leaning down for another ornament, and stopped midway. “What did you say?”

“I said you just glided past the rest of us. You never reacted to me or my life. I’m not complaining or anything, I’m saying I envied you, especially after the kids were born because God knows my own life became such a tangle and I could never get anything done and everything
right
seemed, you know, just out of reach. But not with you, Claudia.”

The three women were silent, but Claudia could hear Millie’s voice still ringing around the room, nearly four decades of an ignored monologue.

“Everything with you was always right. Now, this one goes near the bottom of the tree so his little legs hang down,” Millie said, holding up a dessicated fabric Santa with a porcelain face. “Yes, like that. Oh he’s a sad one, isn’t he but Mom couldn’t throw such a thing away now, could she.”

1969

But where is the angel for the top of the tree?

Hazel and Caroline had looked through every box, uncoiled every string of dead lights. They had found a strand of tinsel so scraggly neither could recall its purchase; they’d found the missing baby Jesus from the plaster nativity set, gone three years now; they’d found the evidence of mice below the tree skirt. But no treetop angel.

On the east side of the wide hallway were three mahogany doors side by side. Standing before them, Hazel could see how they might appear in a dream: identical but for what was behind them, and what that was the dreamer couldn’t know until she’d opened one and it was too late. Awake, and in the bright daylight of Christmas Eve, they were just doors: one to the bathroom, one to the linen closet, one to the attic.

She opened the attic door, turned on the light to the hallway, which stayed dark even on the brightest days. The stairwell walls had gone unpainted perhaps the entire twentieth century; their color, streaked and flaking, was not one Hazel could name. It was a muddy yellow and it lacked uniformity, as if the original owners had mixed the remnants of two or three other colors together, without regard to the results, in order to cover raw plaster. The stairs, the same fine wood as the front staircase, were covered with dust. Nancy, their current housekeeper, obviously never ventured through door number three.

Six steps up, a landing, a turn, seven more steps. At the top Hazel turned and there it was. The ceiling was twelve feet at the peak, six feet on the dormer ends, above the windows with the large fans. The attic stretched the width of the house, as big as a ballroom. To her right was the place Albert had intended to build an entire village for model trains, if only Edie had been a boy. To the left was the nook, hidden behind an old batik blanket, where Edie used to bring her boyfriends to smoke pot and talk about overthrowing the government with mass levitation. Behind Hazel, stacks of waxed cardboard boxes, two hundred or more, containing medical records, invoices, journals Albert intended to read but never quite got around to. And everywhere, in front of the boxes and in place of the model train village, was the story of her family’s life, told in objects.

A birdcage, a child’s wheelchair, a set of crutches: these were left from the previous owners. A dressmaker’s dummy, a broken sewing machine, a wobbly hat rack. Here was a metal pole run between two beams, on which hung her uncle’s clothes, zipped up in a cloth bag and saturated with mothballs. Boxes marked
Edna’s Things,
packed up by Nancy when it seemed they would never see Edie again. A high chair that doubled as a potty chair, its decals of dancing teddy bears faded. Hazel rubbed her arms in the cold. She picked up the high chair and moved it across the room, closer to the wheelchair. She leaned the crutches against the bags of Uncle’s clothes. She straightened the dressmaker’s dummy, scooted it back until it caught a shaft of sunlight, and moved the sewing machine close enough that someone could really sit there, sewing, then stand and make adjustments. She found a stool, its cane seat shredded, and slid it in front of the sewing machine.

A breath crossed her shoulder. Hazel stood up straight, looked around. The room was bright, dusty, but nothing moved. She took a step toward the corner where the Christmas boxes were stored, and she felt it again: a sigh, a stirring. Her palms began to sweat and she rubbed them against her blue jeans.

Nancy hadn’t left any stray boxes when she carried the decorations downstairs. The angel must have been separated from the others last year, after the ritual dismantling of the tree.

Hazel blinked against the light, against the slight aura on the edge of the high chair. A child’s wheelchair. She closed her eyes, felt herself falling, but when she opened them, looked around, she was still standing. She moved her eyes and they jerked from object to object, as if the attic were the set of some stop-frame animation, a gothic
Little Drummer Boy.
She knew enough from working in the clinic to realize she might be having a seizure; she might be having a stroke, although it was unlikely. Getting downstairs was best, but for the moment she’d need to sit down.

The rough planks of the attic floor had been swept, but were gritty and had a charred smell. Hazel went all the way down, resting her cheek against the back of her open hand. She was fine and conscious, had access to all the usual nouns. The picture of an apple in her mind conjured the word apple, and when she wondered if the attic had ever burned she saw a fire and thought the word fire, so she hadn’t had a stroke. But if she tried to lift her head she felt it again, the overwhelming, sweeping sense of falling that caused her stomach to drop. Sweat ran down her back, soaking her bra strap. Head down then, she thought, and eyes closed.

She was not dreaming. She wasn’t dreaming because she knew where she was and she knew why she had decided to lie down on the attic floor. The board beneath her palm was threatening her with splinters; her right hip pushed painfully against a key in her pocket. She could picture Edie in her bedroom watching television, speaking to no one, and she could even conjure up Edie’s new, peculiar scent: it was a funk, in both ways. Edie had come home not right—scarred and depressed and smelling bad. She talked ceaselessly about making her way back to British Columbia, where the shreds of a commune were still trying to make a go of growing hemp and eating nothing but what fell on the ground. Food that volunteered, they called it, and Hazel knew if she could remember that, she was conscious.

But why, then, was she also seeing another world as clearly as if she were there? She was thinking her own thoughts about her own life and time, and watching something else unfold against her closed eyelids in clear, manifest detail. There was a man. Jack Lynch, he was black Irish and his mother used to call him Black Jack. He lived in a shed at the edge of a cemetery…it was the Wilbur Wright Cemetery, about half a mile away. In it was the lone Civil War grave, of a settler who’d gone back to Georgia to fight for the Confederacy. Jack was the groundskeeper, Hazel knew, he ran the three cemetery dogs, and they lived together in the shed, under a magnificent spreading tree.

A hanging tree, a Lynching tree. Black Jack was tall and thin, a shuffling man with big hands and a cockeyed, lined face. He was a couple degrees past handsome and into ruination. She watched him leave the cemetery—a moment ago it was daylight, but darkness fell in seconds as Hazel watched—and walk down the road that curved in front of the graveyard. The dogs followed him, silent: a wolfhound, a shepherd, a block-headed terrier. They followed him a quarter mile or so, then turned and ran back home. They made no sound, but Hazel could hear Jack’s boots on the gravel: scraping, insistent.

He passed the old woods—wait, Hazel thought, those aren’t there anymore. That acreage had been cleared for hay. He put his hands in his pockets, whistled, pulled out a comb and ran it through his hair. He turned onto Hazel’s road, kicking along in the gravel. Before the road was paved, she realized—it was still the County Road. So that was what it looked like.

He was coming there, to her house. Hazel tried to open her eyes, to raise her head, and her vision swirled as if she’d had too much to drink. When she lay back down, the scene had changed and Hazel was studying a girl of nineteen, Marguerite Henrietta Post, someone Hazel felt she knew but in the way she knew a virus was incipient or that a coming storm would bring with it a high wind. Marguerite’s hair was strawberry blond and she had a mole on the side of her neck. Her mother was buried in the Wilbur Wright Cemetery and that was where she met him, Black Jack. Marguerite’s father was a judge, he was Teutonic and coldhearted, worse than Albert Hunnicutt but similar. And corrupt, where Albert was not. Marguerite was sitting in…she was sitting in Hazel’s room but it looked very different; the walls were papered black and covered in a pattern of hand-painted blooming peonies. But Marguerite’s bed was in the same place as Hazel’s, facing the window. She sat in a rocking chair, wearing a long gray dress. Her mother was dead; her father was ill with tuberculosis and mostly out of his head.

Hazel saw Marguerite growing older, and fast, a speeding past of hands and hair and silk, then back again to where she rocked, nineteen, in Hazel’s room. Marguerite’s room. Her hands rested on her abdomen. Jack was in the lane, it was the middle of the night, Hazel could see him from above, as if from the veranda, and there were animals—rabbits and mice and all manner of small things—running away from where he stepped. The animals were fanning out and away from him and Marguerite was inside waiting, her father delirious, his pillowcase flowered with a spray of blood.

Hazel rolled over on her back, taking the weight of her head off her hand. Marguerite had called him but Hazel couldn’t imagine how she did so; in what language, along what conduit? Marguerite wore gray but all around her was blackness, a miasma of damage. Hazel had never seen the likes of her before. Or she had, but couldn’t remember where. Marguerite lifted one hand from where it rested on her stomach. She winced, and brushed the hair away from her forehead, which was perspiring…

…and Jack slipped in through the unlocked back door, sleek as Mercury. He stopped in the kitchen, where things were very much the same as now, the same low, misbegotten sink, the same stone floor, except it was dirty, there were dishes piled up everywhere. They had even let leaves blow up against the cabinets and the pie safe. He rummaged through the bread box, found something and ate it. In the butler’s pantry, which had been wrecked, he pillaged the last of the Judge’s brandy, tossed it on a pile of unmarked bottles in the corner while Marguerite—

—drew in a deep breath and wiped her forehead and there they were: two thick scars, branching out beneath Marguerite’s hairline. The window was open (it hadn’t been a moment before) and the owl leapt off the sill and circled the room.

Hazel didn’t know what the bird wanted; she had never known, but Marguerite did, and she barely glanced up as the draft off his wings moved her hair. Or Hazel had known but refused to bite. A bite. She could see Marguerite’s mother’s grave, silver in the moonlight. Dead ten years, since Marguerite was nine, a hard age for girls, an in-between. Marguerite suffered as her mother suffered, similar to the way her father was suffering his own way out of life, and perhaps it wasn’t all that strange, Hazel thought, the experiment of Family gone so radically wrong: mother dead, the hanging judge dying, the daughter with her black heart panting now in the nursery. The owl flown and Black Jack creeping up the stairs, tiptoeing down the wide hallway, his arms outstretched for balance, not touching either wall.

Together they delivered the baby. Hazel didn’t see this part, but she could have written it if asked, she knew the script as well as anyone. The greatest violence the human species knows, worse than tumbling off the bridge at Remagen, worse than being trampled underfoot by wild horses; she had seen the souls of women fly out through their mouths in the depth of it and later they were changed. They did not recover although they claimed they did. The affluent took the ether from the mask, delivered in the amnesiac twilight they were blessed to be able to afford. Better, Hazel believed, to forget the entire thing and take what you are handed, even if it’s the neighbor’s baby, even if it grows up to be a stranger. It was the poor, or the outlawed like Marguerite, who endured it in a long, blind panic and recalled it with spite.

The baby was a girl. They placed a coral bracelet on her plump right wrist, a tiny band handed down through many daughters. Her profile was flawless, the nose and chin, the downy forehead, her eyes closed and her black lashes resting on her cheeks. Amazing to Hazel how we all arrive in a bloody fog but soon enough look like nothing but love; she was love itself, the round bottom and belly, the ten toes as small as pearls, the mouth opening in a kitten’s yawn, so helpless.