The Used World. Haven Kimmel

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СКАЧАТЬ behind her friend, her legs about a foot apart, in a short-sleeved shirt with buttons. The shirttails had been tied around her midriff, showing off her small waist and tan. Her hair was loose and curly, chin length, streaked with light. Her arms were resting on her friend’s shoulders, her hands lightly clasped, and the sitting girl had reached up, her right arm across her chest, to lay her own hand over her friend’s.

      Claudia was aware, again, of the wind, the ticking of the old radiators, absences. She felt her pulse in her throat, heard it in her ears. She turned the photograph over and read, Hazel and Finney on the way to the Fair, August 7, 1964. Hazel. Claudia studied the picture for another few minutes before turning off the light and not sleeping; she studied Hazel’s young face, her smile, her hand resting so lightly against that tanned, beautiful girl.

      The store had only been open for ten minutes when Claudia arrived, but there were five cars in the lot already. She sighed, stepped out of the Jeep. The sky was blue above her, but there was a threatening haze in the east, and the temperature seemed to be dropping. The delivery door at the side of the building was unlocked, which meant that Rebekah had gotten there early.

      There were four or five people milling about in the back half of the store, picking up various items, hoping that an ugly little statue of a dog would be marked OCCUPIED JAPAN (not just that the dog would be here and they would find it, but that the dog’s origin would have been missed by both its owners and Hazel). Rebekah was playing Frank Sinatra’s Christmas album on the stereo and someone had hung a strand of twinkly lights over the doorway to the breezeway. The music, the heat blown down by the industrial fans, all of it worked together to make Claudia feel as if she’d just returned from a war or an epic journey, in time for the holidays. The Used World was, after all, nothing but the past unfolding into an ideal home: enough bedrooms for everyone, a parlor, a chapel, a well-stocked kitchen. Hazel had more books here than the local library, more tools than the craftiest farmer. Claudia stopped in the breezeway, next to a muddy painting of a shipwreck, and felt something come over her, a blast of heat from her solar plexus, overwhelming her like a mortal embarrassment. She put her hand against the wall, fanned herself. Her coat slipped from her hand, landed on the floor, A Prayer for Owen Meany beside it. The collar of her shirt was too tight, and her wool sweater was suffocating her. She pulled it off in one swift gesture, took a deep breath. In less than a minute her entire body was drenched in sweat; she reached into her back pocket, pulled out a folded handkerchief, dried her face.

      “Claudia?”

      She turned, and coming up behind her was Rebekah. A light around Rebekah’s body shimmered. Claudia squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. The light was gone.

      “Are you okay?”

      “I’m fine,” Claudia said, folding the handkerchief and putting it back in her pocket. “I think I got too hot.”

      Rebekah stepped closer. She reached out to touch Claudia on the elbow, and just before she did, a crack of blue light passed between her hand and Claudia’s arm.

      “Oh!” Rebekah flinched, pulling her hand back.

      “You shocked me,” Claudia said, looking down at her elbow.

      “I’m sorry, I—”

      “That’s okay.”

      “Want me to do it again?” Rebekah asked.

      “Excuse me?”

      “Want me to try?”

      Claudia studied her, the red hair and pale skin, the pale green of her eyes. Whatever had held Claudia in its grip loosened. “Okay.”

      Rebekah took ten steps backward, shuffling her feet on the grimy dark blue indoor-outdoor carpeting in the breezeway. She shuffled back toward Claudia, reached out slowly, and again, in the narrow space before Rebekah’s finger touched Claudia, there was a pop and a flash.

      “Ow!”

      “Ouch.” Claudia rubbed her arm. Her shirt was drying and she was suddenly cold.

      Rebekah shook her fingers. “That was fun,” she said, smiling up at Claudia.

      “In its way.” Claudia leaned over and picked up her coat, her book. She opened the front cover and the photograph was still there. Maybe it had been a hot flash, she thought, glancing again at the young Hazel. Or maybe it had been a barb on the shaft of nostalgia that had struck her, listening to Frank Sinatra sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

      “I was looking for you, actually,” Rebekah said, still standing close. “Hazel needs you—somebody bought that gigantic ugly painting in number forty-two, and also the love seat with the yucky upholstery job.”

      “The pink one?”

      “The pink one.”

      “Let me go put these things in the office,” Claudia said, turning.

      “Oh, and also, Claudia? Thank you for the groceries.”

      Claudia blushed, rubbed her hand over the top of her head, a gesture she’d made since childhood. “You’re welcome.”

      The new owner of the ugly pink love seat fell into one of east-central Indiana’s most recognizable categories: the married woman with small children, the kind who might have been adorable or saucy or wild in high school, but who had long since cut her hair, stopped trying to lose weight, and who had donned her I Give Up Suit. In this case she had also plucked her eyebrows too thin, which struck Claudia as a peculiar trend. Everyone seemed to be doing it, creating a county full of startled women.

      “Do you think this will fit in my Suburban?” the woman asked Claudia, who had tipped the love seat on its side and was wheeling it on a dolly toward the delivery door.

      “Probably,” Claudia said.

      “Because I could maybe borrow a truck from someone but I don’t know who—we aren’t really truck people. Well, my husband isn’t a truck person. There’s a long list of things my husband isn’t but I’m sure you don’t want to hear them.” The woman was wearing the holiday uniform of her class: a red turtleneck, an oversize cardigan sweater embroidered with a Christmas scene, blue jeans, tennis shoes.

      Claudia said nothing.

      “I’m Emmy, by the way. I just hate Christmas, I hate it,” Emmy said, drawing in and exhaling a shaky breath. “I’m buying this love seat for myself when I ought to be Christmas shopping but I’m not, I’m buying a piece of furniture that my husband is going to despise because it isn’t new and we didn’t get it at Sears.”

      They passed the shelves of blue, ruby, and carnival glass. Claudia backed the dolly up, turned it until it was straight, started up the breezeway.

      “I need a new one because one of my kids set the old one on fire. That’s what he’s doing these days, setting things on fire. I found hundreds of burnt matches in his closet a few days ago, taken from my husband’s matchbook collection. No one is saying he set the couch on fire, it’s just assumed and kept quiet. Do you hate Christmas? Don’t you?”

      The answer, Claudia thought, might be: I have. I could. I can sure see how it’s possible.

      Before she could speak, Emmy СКАЧАТЬ