The Used World (4 page)

She started in the far left aisle, wandering as if she were checking the stock. Hazel and Claudia didn’t seem troubled by what bothered Rebekah the most: these were objects—yes—but they were also lost lives, whole families. They weren’t the dead but they stood for the dead, somehow. Here, in the very first booth, #14, was a four-poster bed made of beautiful aged maple, and right in the center of one of the posts was a shiny, hand-shaped groove, as if a woman had held the post right there as she swung around the footboard and into bed, night after night for decades. Rebekah hurried by booth #15, with its cherry dining room table, its chandelier and vintage landscapes, because #15, rented by the Merrills, also contained a collection of leather suitcases. Inside one she’d found an old rain hat and a note on yellowed paper that reminded:
January 7 11:00 mother to Doctor.
Now she could hardly look at #15, the suitcases especially. Everything stung her, everything Peter had touched, everything that bore the slightest mark of him.

Toward the middle of the building, the displays became more manly: #16 was primarily unmarked, narrow-necked bottles caked with dirt, and #17 was preserved wrought iron—tools and frying pans, with some cracked butter churns on the floor. The two parts of the building were connected by a short hallway (Hazel called it a breezeway), lined with cheap landscapes tacked up on fake-wood paneling. As far as Rebekah could tell, none of these paintings or prints had ever sold—even the frames weren’t worth anything. The hallway was narrow, then opened up into the massiveness of the back. How had it happened, Rebekah wondered, that a structure so displeasing, so prefabricated and out of scale, could feel so wonderful? It was wonderful. The slight breeze from the industrial fans, even the deep thrum of their motors—a sound so insistent Rebekah could feel it in her stomach—daily pulled Rebekah in. There, stretched before her, more than fifty yards of individual rooms established by Peg-Board walls six feet tall, each room filled with treasure impossible to predict. One booth, the Childless Nursery, contained nothing but wooden toys and rocking horses, the kind covered with real horsehide, with horses’ tails and cold glass eyes cracked and cloudy with age. Sometimes when she looked in this booth she imagined not the children who’d owned the toys, but further back: the horses themselves, whose hides now covered the wood frames and stuffing. She couldn’t see them whole, just the chuffing of breath on a winter morning, a flank, the shuddering of a muscle under skin.

There was a booth with a baby crib, a carriage, threadbare quilts, an old print of the Tunnel Angel, the guardian who presses her finger against the lips of the unborn and whispers,
Don’t tell what you know.
It was the very end of the building that Rebekah loved best. From the breezeway to the back were two long aisles—Rebekah thought of them as vertical—and against the back wall Hazel had set up a horizontal display. Everything here belonged to Hazel. It began against the west wall with Your Grandmother’s Parlor: an oval rag rug, its colors dimmed, surrounded by a plunky Baldwin piano, a Victrola, a radio in a mahogany cabinet, a nubbly red sofa with wooden arms and feet. On a low table was a green metal address book with the alphabet on the front—you pulled a metal tab to the letter you needed and pushed a bar at the bottom and the book sprang open—and a heavy black telephone from the 1940s, a number still visible on the dial: LS624.

Rebekah dusted the Victrola with the sleeve of her white cotton shirt, adjusted the dial of the radio, picked a piece of string off the sofa. At the telephone table she scrolled to the letter
S
but didn’t push the bar, rested her hand on the receiver of the phone. It was cold like metal, made of Bakelite, a heavy, nearly indestructible thing. She knew the phone worked, because Hazel had tried it with an adapter. The ringer was broken, but the phone worked. Rebekah had been circling it for three years now, waiting for someone to buy it, hoping they never would, because she believed that someday she’d pick up this phone and call the past. She’d call her own childhood, ask to speak to Rebekah, the bright-haired girl in Pentecostal dresses. She’d issue warnings, some mundane (
Don’t turn your back on the Hoopers’ yellow dog
), some of grave importance (
Don’t ever get in a car with Wiley Crocker
). Was there a way to call her mother, back when her mother was young? Or someone even farther away, a boy who’d just enlisted against his parents’ wishes, a young housewife confiding in her sister?

Hazel’s things were really more beautiful than anyone else’s, but she never made much of it, didn’t carry around catalogs or talk much business with the Cronies. She just went to auctions, answered ads in the paper, came to work with treasure she’d paid almost nothing for. Her trick was to choose the stormy Saturdays—rain or sleet will drive a crowd away—and stay at the auction until the end, when the prize pieces had been saved back but there was no one there to bid on them. Hazel was a businesswoman, Rebekah knew, but still this pained her, the way Hazel moved around Hopwood County like a shark. It didn’t take going to many auctions to see what the truth was: each one was an occasion of sorrow. Either a parent had died, or a spouse who left no insurance. One way or another a life had been foreclosed on, and whatever was earned at the auction would go toward a debt that would never be paid. And there was Hazel, circling somebody’s heirloom china and linens, or a handheld drill with a man’s thumbprint permanently engraved, trying to figure out how to get it cheap and sell it high.

After the Parlor was Rebekah’s favorite place of all and her domain: the Used World Costume Shop and Fantasy Dressing Room.

Of all the things Rebekah had hidden in her years in the Prophetic Mission Church—the doubt at which she didn’t dare glance; the sense that the church was a screen between herself and everything she wanted to experience unmediated—there had been no secret as potent as what she kept in her closet. Forced to wear, every day, long denim skirts with white tennis shoes, white blouses or sweaters, and in full knowledge that the slightest violation of the dress code was a sin against God Himself, Rebekah had assembled—slowly, over the years—her own line of clothing. She had begun with items left in the lost-and-found at church, and then, when she could drive, by combing rummage sales for certain fabrics and rare buttons. Her first dress violated every precept of Pentecostalism’s radical edge: the top of the dress was a girl’s old blue jean jacket, darted beneath the breasts. Rebekah had removed the collar and the sleeves at the three-quarters length, replacing them with rabbit fur from another, moth-eaten jacket. The skirt was yards and yards of pale peach parachute silk lined with white organza, calf-length, 1950s style. Although she had modeled it on herself, Rebekah didn’t want to wear the dress. She wanted to make it, and to know it existed; that was all.

Other dresses followed, and men’s suits, baby clothes. Once she had purchased a box of Ball jars, and had taken it home, rolled up the smaller things and tucked them in the jars as if putting up tomatoes for the winter. Afterward she sat on the floor of her bedroom studying the gold lids of the jars, each in its own cubicle of waxed cardboard. In that week she had told her father she was leaving the church. She had endured brutal hours with him following the news, days of brutal hours, and yet there she was, still in her bedroom, still hiding things from him. The next week she saw a Help Wanted advertisement in the paper, run by Hazel, that read,
Looking for a woman who believes there is a wardrobe beyond this wardrobe,
and so she had come to the Used World Costume Shop and Fantasy Dressing Room.

Here a U shape of wooden rails held hundreds of vintage dresses, countless old coats, men’s suits, sprung leather shoes, which Rebekah found on weekend trips in the spring and summer to the county’s yard and estate sales, sometimes filling her car, sometimes arriving back at the store with nothing but a single item. There was a hat tree that looked more like a wildly exotic bush—hats with feathers, hats with fruit, men’s fedoras, Russian caps of Persian lamb. Hazel had found a dressing room mirror on a stand that was bigger than a bathtub, and a Chinese screen for changing. Tucked away under the dresses was a traveling trunk, barely visible, on its side and open, the drawers pulled out in graduating degrees, lingerie spilling out as if a sexy woman had left in a hurry. It was in the Dressing Room that Rebekah felt most acutely the presence of lives stopped, or abandoned, and here, too, was the place she most expected someone to return. Who could leave forever the narrow, creamy satin nightgown with the lace straps, or a bespoke suit tailored to a man nearly as big around as he was tall? Rebekah would never understand how some people came to have such style and then
died anyway,
but she could hold the satin nightgown, let it flow over the palm of her hand like cool water, and sense a breath of animation.

In the Dressing Room was the stereo where all day Hazel’s favorite songs played:
Big Band Hits 1936–38, The Anthology of Swing, The Greatest Hits of Glenn Miller, Sinatra and Dorsey.
At least once every day Rebekah stood among the clothes, singing along with “These Foolish Things,” “Moonlight and Shadows,” “Make Believe Ballroom”—these were her new hymns. She stood back here just before opening and closing, when the cool, cavernous space was all hers, taking stock of everything—from the sad, shapeless housedresses every girl with a mother or grandmother recognizes with guilt and longing, to an evening dress made of cheap chain mail—Hazel’s costume collection covered the spectrum of the human drama.

Rebekah swayed to Rudy Vallee’s “Vieni, Vieni,” her favorite song on the tape.
Vieni vieni vieni vieni vieni / Tu sei bella bella bella bella bella…

She knelt down and turned off the stereo, with reluctance. The vast space rushed in where the music had been, a tomblike echo belied only by the bass notes of the fan. She stood too quickly, looking over her shoulder at the two aisles leading directly to her. From the perspective opposite her, more than half a football field away, she was the vanishing point. The next thing she knew, she was on her knees, her face in a wine-colored silk dressing gown that smelled of age and cigarettes. No harm done; her knees weren’t scraped, she hadn’t hit her head. And there had been nothing there, no one in the aisle, no one just emerging either from the booth set up to resemble a one-room schoolhouse or from #32, the Abandoned Pews. No one was coming for her, and yet Rebekah wasn’t alone where she stood, and she knew it.

By the time Rebekah returned to the front counter, Claudia had checked the totals against the day’s receipts and prepared the deposit. The green zippered bag was closed and locked, the top and front of the glass estate jewelry case was wiped clean, the lights in the office were off. Claudia was looking at a
Life
magazine from 1954, waiting, Rebekah assumed, for her return, even though the wind outside was picking up and Claudia had farther to drive.

“You didn’t have to stay, Claudia.”

“That’s okay,” Claudia said, standing up and pushing her stool in, and it happened again as it happened every day that Claudia just kept rising. First there was the complicated gesture of getting her legs underneath her, and then the slow straightening up. Sometimes she stretched or pressed a fist against her back as if her body constantly came as a shock to her. Sitting on the stools behind the counter, Claudia was the same height as Rebekah standing. At her full height she was five or six inches taller than Peter, who stood at six feet even. All day Rebekah marveled at the basic facts of Claudia, the way her hands were twice the size of Rebekah’s. She watched openly as Claudia walked around the counter to the coat rack, removing her blue parka with the orange lining; watched the way Claudia covered the distance in two long steps. No matter what she wore—jeans, slacks, the plain dress shirts she favored, sweaters—it was impossible to tell at first glance that she was a woman. Rebekah didn’t think she looked like a man, either, which was a puzzle. Claudia’s black hair, just going gray at the temples, was cut short, but it wasn’t exactly a man’s haircut, and besides, a lot of women had short hair. Her face was both broad and well defined; she had high, pronounced cheekbones, gray eyes, dusky skin. What Rebekah really felt was that when Claudia stood up, it wasn’t Claudia who was revealed as too tall; rather, the rest of them were obviously
too short.
Red and Slim, for instance, the Main Cronies, sat all day on the cracked Naugahyde sofas at the front of the store smoking cigarettes, yammering away about nothing, both of them weak-backed and heading for emphysema, while Claudia lifted heavy furniture with one hand, opened the back door with the other.

Rebekah herself—the china doll of the Prophetic Mission Church, of the church school; the backyard, twilit games—was treasured for being smaller than other girls, more frail. Famous among her friends and cousins for her tipply laugh, a laugh so quick and impossible to repress, Rebekah was the embodiment of
Girl.
Her mother said she had Bird Bones, her uncles called her No Bigger’n a Minute. She had felt pride when other girls became coltish and awkward and she was still so neat and childish. Even after she’d reached a normal height, had grown unexpectedly so curvy that her father wouldn’t look at her, she continued to think of herself as that princess child, the one girl small enough to sit on Jesus’ knee as He Suffered the Children to Come Unto Him, while the others, the tall angry girls and the pimply boys, sat at His feet.

“Bekah, you coming?” Claudia stood next to the heavy front doors, her hand at the keypad for the alarm system.