The Used World (12 page)

Vernon, who ate everything quickly, wiping his mouth with his napkin between each bite, was finished. Rebekah realized she didn’t really want to eat anything, she’d just been applying herself to the ritual. She put down her spoon and was pushing her chair back from the table when Vernon said, “Rebekah, sit.”

She sat. Was there something she had failed to do? Had she salted the soup, vacuumed the hallway, folded his handkerchiefs? It seemed she’d done all those things, so what was coming? Vernon swallowed, clenched his jaw muscles, didn’t look at her. Rebekah waited. She heard (not for the first time) the hum of the overhead light, the motor of the refrigerator grinding, her pulse.

“You have not,” her father began, “had a menstrual period in two months.” His voice was low, reasonable. He could have been on the radio, he could have been the person to announce,
This one is for all the lovely girls sitting by the phone tonight, waiting for a word from their sweethearts. The message from Woody Herman is: We “Surrender,” darlings. We have surrendered.

Rebekah could see, it seemed, the individual threads in Vernon’s T-shirt, and there was a powerful light at the edge of his body, just where it became itself and not the space around it. The whole of the kitchen rose up this way, vivid and exact. She thought to say,
How do you know this?
And then,
How do you KNOW this?
But she couldn’t speak. Because he was right, and she had just realized it herself as he said it.

“I assume this means you are pregnant, and by the young man who is unemployed and takes money from his parents. The young man with the guitar who hadn’t called you or seen you in four weeks.”

Rebekah wanted to reach across the table and take Vernon’s hands, something she hadn’t done since childhood. She wanted to tell him to stop talking, because she needed time to take in what he’d just told her, she needed to sit still and think about it a minute. Because he was right—there had been something swimming just at the edge of her consciousness, and for weeks when she turned to look at it, it was gone. Just a small, swimming thing. Her breasts ached and tingled, for how long now? Her abdomen felt like one continuous bruise, from her pelvic bone up to her stomach, and there was the tiredness like fainting, and how the color on a box of Cheerios had nearly made her throw up. She was stunned, and mortified. Her periods had always been irregular; it wasn’t unusual for her to skip a month, but two? There had been that one night with Peter—she remembered it clearly—when she had been lying on her back and felt…what was it? What a leaf must feel when its stem breaks free of the tree.

“He’s got a new girl now, a twenty-year-old from the college who drives a red Mustang and smokes cigarettes. He dated her while he was still dating you. Her name is Mandy.”

Rebekah sat back as if something had flown too close to her face. Mandy? A college student? But how could that be, when it should have been clear to everyone that the cabin belonged partly to Rebekah, the bed, the dishes, the vanishing notes of the guitar were hers, it was
her life
? Hadn’t they spoken promises to each other? She couldn’t recall, and it hadn’t mattered at the time; they were implicit.

“I’ve taken this to the Elders—”

“You told
Governance
?”

Vernon’s jaw muscles flexed, relaxed. “They certainly would have known soon enough.”

She saw, first, the women of the church, all of them cycling through pregnancy and nursing, year after year; the shapeless tent dresses made of rough fabric, the whispered consultations and fears. They stayed away from the men—not as a rule but because pregnancy was a sign of…Rebekah rubbed her forehead, she couldn’t think. It was a sliver of power, narrow as a blade, and the women wouldn’t share it. And it was a time to return to your mother and your grandmother. She closed her eyes, tried to will Ruth back to life, back to the table, but when she tried to picture her mother’s face she could only see the Governance men.

Rebekah imagined them sitting around the folding table in the basement Fellowship room: her father; Martin Peacock in his black suit, the vest straining over his stomach; Jeb King, the cattle farmer; Jim Mason, the kindest of the Governance men; Rich Ford, who worked at the Chrysler plant with Vernon and spent all his free time hunting whatever was in season; and Pastor Lowell. Rebekah couldn’t actually see Pastor—just the chair, a squatting shadow. Her father was explaining to them that his daughter, a woman they refused to acknowledge if they saw her on the street, had missed two periods. He told them this. The men considered it, the menstrual blood, the Levitical laws no doubt playing like a bass note under their prayer and conversation. And Mandy?

“You
told
them this?” A wave of anger pulsed at her scalp, flooded her face and neck. She felt it in her shoulders and hot in her chest. And there, finally, was her mother’s voice:
Don’t let it touch the baby.

“No doubt you realize,” Vernon continued, staring now directly into her eyes, the bright green unblinking, “that I was censured for allowing you to stay here at all after you left the Mission. The terms of that censure is private, of course. I let you stay because—”

“Because you’re my father?”

“—my spirit wasn’t clear.”

“It’s clear now?”

“You made this decision for me.” His left thumb rubbed against his right hand, as he had before dinner.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Was someone listening? Rebekah wondered. His speeches were obviously prepared, but she couldn’t say who had authored them.

“When I allowed you to stay here five years ago, I invited corruption into my home. I have battled against that corruption every day. I prayed for your soul even as your damnation was certain, and as you wore your worldliness like a cloak. Rebekah”—and here he leaned forward, looked at her—“you wear slacks in my
home.
You cut your hair and walk right through my doorway, as if the laws that have guided my entire life and all of yours don’t mean
nothing.
The Governance committee has threatened to remove me from office, because having you here is no different than committing those sins myself. And now.”

Rebekah swallowed. She was pregnant. Peter had allowed someone else into the cabin and onto her pillow. Someone else sat with him in front of the woodstove; Peter was, maybe right this minute, telling…Mandy? What sort of person was a Mandy?…about his seventh birthday, the way his mother had made him a crown and proclaimed him King for a Day. He’d worn the crown to school, and there was so much magic in it that no one had stolen it or made fun of him or anything, they’d let him be King. And when he came home he played on his swing set, wearing his crown, and once, at the very top of the slide, he’d said to his mom,
I am happy happy happy happy.

“Now you have stepped so far outside the fold that there’s hardly anything can reclaim you. You’ve committed the last crimes available to you: lust, fornication, the defilement of your body and of the institution of marriage. You’ve broken commandments. You’ve done everything but commit murder, and if Ruth was alive this would surely have killed her.”

This
would have killed Ruth? Rebekah nearly shouted.
You
would suggest
I
could commit murder? She didn’t say these things. She didn’t even know what she meant by them.

“This is the decision of Governance. You may go to the home of a couple in Tennessee and stay there until the baby is born. We’ll decide what to do with it later. Then you come back here and rejoin the church—you make a commitment and you live up to it. This will never be talked about amongst us or your cousins neither one. And you live here until a suitable husband is found for you.”

“And if I don’t want to do that?”

“Then you can no longer live in my house and you will no longer be my daughter.”

Rebekah’s breathing steadied. She felt perfectly relaxed, almost sleepy. There was Vernon across the table from her, the same place he’d been sitting all her life, and Ruth’s chair was empty. Here was the table under her hands, the window over the sink her father had painted shut, the faucets she’d turned off and on thousands of times. Outside it was snowing again, and cold enough to kill a man. But the house was warm and dry, because Vernon made sure of it. She was pregnant, Peter hadn’t called in four weeks. Her father was her family, and this was her home. Not for a moment did she think he’d change his mind. She smiled at him, her eyes filled with tears. “This is your
grandchild.
And it’s Mama’s, too, there is
Ruth
in this baby.”

For a long, still moment he didn’t move, and when, finally, he raised his hand, Rebekah closed her eyes and prepared herself. But all her father did was brush the tears off her face with his knuckles, gently, then stood, thrusting his fists into the pockets of his work pants. “Be that as it may. You have until Monday.”

Long after she heard him climb the stairs and close his bedroom door, Rebekah sat unmoving at the table. She should rise, she knew, and get the dishes washed, the leftover soup put away. There was enough to freeze a quart, which Vernon could take for lunch sometime in the spring, long after she was gone and no one in his life knew the secret of Ruth’s recipe. She thought maybe she should write it down and tuck it in a drawer somewhere, in case her father ever took another wife, or allowed a widow from the church to come in and feed him. The note could say: My mother sprinkled cinnamon in her vegetable soup. She cooked rice in chicken broth, not water. She touched everything as if it were fragile. She listened when you talked and she didn’t judge and she had an easy laugh, for a woman in her time and place. Resting her head on the table, Rebekah cried and cried.

S
UNDAY MORNING
Claudia was walking from the kitchen through the living room, just passing the telephone, when it rang. She was so surprised that for a moment she just looked at it. It rang again. Millie called her sometimes, telemarketers a couple times a week, but at eight-thirty on a Sunday morning?

“Hello?”

“Claudia,” Hazel said, as if continuing a conversation they’d been having for a while, “are you coming over today?”

“Am I supposed to?”

“I don’t know, are you?”

“Hazel, what—what are you asking?”

“Didn’t I ask it? Are you coming over today?”

“Not now, I’m going to church,” Claudia said, rubbing her palm over the top of her head.

“Church?”

“Yes, you know. The Protestant Reformation, ministers, hymnals.”

“I know what church is, wiseass. I just don’t know why you’re going.”

Claudia sighed. “We’ve been over this like a hundred times. If you would just go with me one time and meet Amos you’d—”

“I have met Amos.”

“Excuse me?”

“I have met Amos,” Hazel said. “He came into the store looking for an old-fashioned bubble gum machine for one of his daughters. We chatted. We went out to lunch.”

“You—when? When was this?”

“I don’t know. A couple weeks ago.”

“Well.” Claudia was exasperated. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t he?”

“Minister-client privilege, I suspect.”

“Did you—do you like him?”

“Why, is he your boyfriend?”

“Hazel, I’m hanging up. You vex me.”

“Are you coming over?”

“No. No, I’m not coming over, because you vex me.”

“So I’ll see you after church?”

“No.”

“Claudia, wear—bring a change of clothes, like work clothes. Something you’d wear on a farm.”

“No. This is getting worse by the minute.”

“So I’ll see you after church?”

Claudia sighed again, resigned. “Okay. Okay, I’ll be there.”

They sang a song about bread, or at least that’s what Claudia sang, not being much moved by Christian metaphor. Her neighbors were singing about the Bread of Life, she understood, or something involving wheat and sheaves and leaven.

Amos Townsend stood and arranged himself behind the pulpit, straightening his shirt, his black wool suit coat. He opened his notes. He started to speak, then glanced down at one of his two blond daughters sitting in the first row, and said, “Ellie—Eloise, don’t chew on that pencil—give it to your—thank you.” Everyone laughed, and no one glanced around for the girls’ mother in order to give her the thin smile, the judgmental look so often favored in church. If she was there, Langston, she was sitting in the very back pew, nearest to the door. Claudia had sat near her on two occasions, and couldn’t help but study her: the perfect pattern of her dark braid, her thinness. She’d come in after church had started, slid into the aisle seat in the back, and watched her husband all through his sermon, her head tipped slightly to the side, and a look on her face as if she were studying an exotic bird whose native habitat escaped her. Just before Amos closed with a prayer, Langston had slipped out the heavy swinging doors without a sound. But their daughters, two little blond girls, a matching set, were there every week, sitting in the front row with their grandmother, Beulah, or another adult, well behaved.

From the pulpit Amos cleared his throat. Every week he began his sermon reluctantly, it seemed to Claudia. He shifted his weight, smiled at the congregants, took a drink of water. Finally, he said, “God
is
Love.” His audience waited. He said, “God
is
Love. This might be the only piece of wisdom that survives, in the end, from the two Judeo-Christian testaments. This might be the best we could do.” He defined
philia
and
agape,
told them that the Greeks employed the verb
agapao
in their literature, but
agape,
the unmerited, unsolicited love God gives to the world, belongs almost exclusively to the Bible, as if the People of the Book had to invent the word and the concept at the same time. “‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,’” Amos said, quoting 1 John 4:7. He read from Mark 12:30–31, and Luke 11:42. Some of the people around Claudia made notes, or turned the pages of their New Testaments. Then Amos closed his own Bible abruptly. He lifted his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “But that’s not the point, is it, we
know
all that already, we already
know
what the Synoptic Gospels have to say about love and sacrifice and how we ought to feel about our neighbors; for heaven’s sake, we’ve been reading these texts over and over for our whole lives long. It’s just chatter now, just background noise. We say that God so loved the world; we say it and everything meaningful or revelatory is missing from those words. The point is God
is
Love, and that could lead us to a deeper understanding, couldn’t it, a sort of rethinking of the Godhead, wherein the Supreme One is in the process of becoming, the divine character remaining eternal while the temporal pole acquires experience with us,
with us.
Like love.”

Amos took his glasses off, slipped them in the breast pocket of his coat. “I—that didn’t really make any sense,” he said, with a slight laugh. “Let me put it this way: What if God loves us the way we truly love our children, walking around outside with them and watching them eat cinnamon toast and listening to them talk to imaginary friends on imaginary telephones, and they are becoming and we are becoming with them, because all of this, this life with them, is planted in us and stays in us and it’s what we know of love. But instead we huckster around, saying that we know God is love because God is omniscient and sent a son to die, and we know God is love because of Scripture. We don’t say God is love because the
world
is love, because we die without it, without it we’re like those monkeys who were removed from their mothers and given just a metal cutout to cling to—we might say God is a mother, God is oxygen, God is blood. No, we take the most fundamental of human principles, something that may have tripped the wire toward us evolving into what we are, and grind it down with metaphysical abstractions, and in the process make God unreachable, unknowable, unavailable, and
unlovable.
” He stopped, shook his head.

“Even within our own system,” Amos continued, “we can’t agree on what God’s love is or what it means, because there are people like Archbishop Romero—remember our workshop in liberation theology?”—there were a few nods—“who believe, for obvious reasons, that God’s love demands justice for the poor and oppressed, and that working for justice is an act of love most closely aligned with the love of Christ. But Stanley Hauerwas points out”—Amos crossed his arms, nodded—“and I think he has an interesting point here, that an embracing of the story of Jesus doesn’t guarantee the eradication of injustice; rather, we have to have the integrity to accept Jesus’ story as our own, and to speak God’s truth without corruption. Do you see what the difference is? You can look at the Christ event and see what amounts to a call for the end of suffering, an external demand, or you can look at it as an ongoing event, one that’s repeated in the soul of every individual, every day. I just wonder”—Amos opened his arms and asked the congregation, palms up—“if maybe what John, that old man, meant was that when I love you, I am loving God, and the feeling, that astonishing feeling of being loved in return, is what God’s love feels like. Nothing else. God has no eyes, no feet, no mouth to speak with, and this is the gift we’ve been given by God, our material gift. We love the patch of land we grew up on, we love the belongings we live with and touch. We love the spring and the harvest, we love snow at Christmas, and music. We love each other deeply and sometimes without reservation, and we love our children as wild animals love and protect their children, and it’s all God, God, God.” He was smiling, but Claudia thought he seemed a little crestfallen.

“Let’s close with a silent prayer,” he said, and Claudia sat silent but forgot to pray, and then everyone was shaking hands or hugging one another, the Something of Peace, they called it, and she made her way out the door.

The Cherokee started up with new energy, just a little bit of sunlight and warmer temperatures had that effect. Claudia pulled out onto Plum Street and headed out of Haddington, the radio off. She understood it, the path Amos had gotten on and where it had ended up, but there was still something so sad in it. All the way to Hazel’s, Claudia couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d missed something important, something she would have learned already if only she’d lived an entirely different life.

On Saturday night Rebekah had driven by the cabin, and he hadn’t been there, not when she got off work at four. He hadn’t been there any hour up to midnight, when Rebekah had given up and driven home so tired she couldn’t discern where the shoulder of the road began. And now, all Sunday morning, he wasn’t there. She had so much to do—things from her bedroom she didn’t want to leave behind but wasn’t sure how to pack, and the simpler problem of not knowing where she was going. This was a long shot, she knew, but some part of her believed that if she took the risk and told Peter, he would see that the only thing to do was…she didn’t know what. He would do something.

At noon she made her decision, and drove back to the edge of Jonah, to a subdivision built in the late sixties where Peter had grown up. His parents still lived there, in the same house. Peter’s bedroom looked like it had when he was in high school, and his basketball hoop was there, and in the three-car garage a 1957 Thunderbird, robin’s-egg blue. Peter and his dad, Pete Senior, had restored it together. Like Rebekah, Peter was an only child, greatly cherished. She thought of the house at the edge of town as the Peter Museum for the way his mother, Kathy, had one whole wall of the living room covered with his school pictures, an eight-by-ten of every year, right up to the graduation portrait of Peter leaning against a ladder outside the photographer’s studio.

She pulled into the driveway, turned off the car. Kathy and Pete Senior were here, and Rebekah should have reckoned on the wave of heartsickness she felt seeing the house, the backyard. There was the padded glider, now covered with snow, on which she’d sat with Peter in August while his father grilled hamburgers, and the line of trees at the edge of the yard where they’d watched one squirrel chase another, back and forth, for thirty minutes. They’d only started dating last spring, but all through those months she’d believed, in a way, that she’d been redeemed. She thought her own tribe had been taken from her and she’d been given this instead, this comfortable suburban home and family. His parents had been warm to her, if not intimate; they’d welcomed any opportunity to have her over for dinner, or to meet Peter and Rebekah out somewhere. They had been decent, polite. It seemed odd to her that Peter could vanish from her life and his parents would just go with him, that they wouldn’t put up a little bit more of a fight. When they mentioned the upcoming holidays they had always looked in her direction, as if to include her, and yet Thanksgiving had come and gone without a word from them.

Rebekah got out of the car and walked toward the wide back porch. She navigated the icy steps and scuffed her boots on the welcome mat. The pale yellow curtains on the kitchen door were drawn open and tied. She knocked. Only strangers used the formal front door. No one came. She knocked again, saw Peter’s mother approach from the living room and look around the curtain.

Kathy opened the door. “Rebekah! How nice to see you, come in out of this cold.” She was wearing a pair of cream-colored slacks and a dark brown sweater. Her sleek ash blond hair was perfectly cut to accentuate the eyes she’d passed along to her son.

“Hi, Mrs. Mitchell. I was in the neighborhood…”

“What’s this ‘Mrs. Mitchell’? We settled that a long time ago. Come in, come in.” Kathy’s face relaxed into a smile. “Well, it’s quite a winter so far, isn’t it?”

Rebekah walked into the warm kitchen, and was again taken by surprise. How could she have forgotten this smell, the apple-cinnamon potpourri Kathy kept on the stove, mixed with years of dinners and laundry? Or the magnets on the refrigerator proclaiming the “Footprints” poem, and
I ASKED JESUS HOW MUCH HE LOVED ME, AND HE STRETCHED HIS ARMS OUT AND SAID THIS MUCH.
“It’s—I’m glad to be in this room again,” Rebekah said, smiling at Kathy.

“Kath?” Pete Senior called, walking in from the living room. “Who was it?” He walked into the kitchen and saw Rebekah just as he finished the question.

“Rebekah was in the neighborhood,” Kathy said to her husband.

“Ah. How are you, Bekah?” Pete asked, then simply stood there. Peter had his father’s dark curly hair and his build, although Pete had thickened as he aged. He looked as if he’d never had his son’s slightness, or look of whimsy.

“I’m good, thank you.” No one asked her to sit down, even though there was the table and there were the benches where she’d had so many dinners. She knew where the dishes were kept, and that Kathy’s spices were alphabetized not in a cabinet, but in a drawer built just for the purpose. “How have the two of you been?”