The Used World

by Haven Kimmel

  The parking lot was so bright Rebekah had to close her eyes against it, and even then she felt the tears clinging to her eyelashes and freezing there. A gust of wind knifed under her coat as she dug in her pockets for her keys. She had missed them before today, of course, all those relatives and friends; she had missed them every day for five years. Some days it was her aunt Betty, Vernon’s older sister, who was quiet and smelled like lavender powder. Rebekah wouldn’t have guessed there was much there, but time had opened Rebekah’s memories of her aunt like a book, and in it she saw moments of perfect sweetness and safety. Aunt Betty had let Rebekah spend the night anytime she wanted, and she’d taught her to sew, to make a Scripture Cake. She could make flowers out of construction paper, and a Christmas tree from the Sears catalog. Rebekah could no longer remember Aunt Betty’s voice, as if all their time and all of Betty’s kindness had been played out in silence. She missed her cousin Davy, of course, because it’s a rare boy who will let the whole world laugh at him.

  Today, right now, it was five of her girl cousins she missed: Magdalene, Susannah, Elizabeth, Etta, and Virginia. They had been born within three years of one another, Magdalene and Susannah to Vernon’s sister, Margaret; Elizabeth and Etta were sisters of Davy, children of Vernon’s brother, Everett; and Virginia was Aunt Betty’s only daughter. Rebekah had been the youngest of the girls, the smallest, the most treasured. They had been as close as sisters, and shared sisters’ joy and derision. Someone was always getting pinched. Someone else got too much cake or her mother had made her too fancy a nightgown.

  Rebekah sprayed a little rubbing alcohol on her door lock, from a bottle in her pocket. Her key slipped in and turned. Once in the car and out of the wind, she tipped her head back against the seat, felt herself collapse inside her coat. She was too tired to start the car, she had to pee, she needed to eat before she got sick.

  One night when they were all staying at Magdalene and Susannah’s, Elizabeth, who was braver than the others, told them that she had accomplished her mission. She had gone to the public library in Hopwood under the pretense of a project for the church school, and while there, she’d read and photocopied everything she could find on the movie version of Gone With the Wind. How had they become obsessed with that one film? Who first mentioned it, and how did it catch on? Elizabeth had the photocopied microfiche pages of magazines and newspapers rolled up and tucked behind her dollhouse in the closet. They’d stretched out on the floor, passing the pages back and forth by flashlight, listening for Aunt Margaret’s step on the stairs, any sign that they were being too quiet, and would be caught. Because they never knew what sort of sin they were committing until it was too late, until the fathers had gathered with their verdicts and the girls had to guess how to take it. Looking at a picture in a magazine of a movie star in a dress was obviously not the same sin as watching a movie, which none of them had done or could imagine doing. But looking at a secular magazine was a sin in itself, and admiring women who wore makeup was quite a bad sin, and lying about one’s business at the library, where their parents didn’t like them going anyway, was dangerous. And now here they were, on the floor in the closet when they should have been either in bed or doing something wholesome. They were looking at a secular magazine about a movie, and there was Vivien Leigh in her makeup and gussied-up hair and shocking ribbed bodices, and there was Clark Gable, whose name they now knew.

  “You should have seen the real picture, her eyes was the prettiest blue I’ve ever seen, and black black hair and red lips,” Elizabeth said, tracing Scarlett’s face with her fingernail.

  “Could we read the book?” Rebekah asked. “What color was this dress?”

  “Green, I think, green velvet. I can’t believe you can’t see the colors—they were so bright it seemed like they’d come right through this ink.”

  “What happens in this movie?” Magdalene looked through the pages for some sort of story line. “Do you know what happens?”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “It’s in the War Between the States, and it’s something about Scarlett’s dresses, and a staircase. There’s a big house, and a fire. This is Rhett Butler, and I don’t know if he’s bad or good. They go to Atlanta, Georgia, and somebody has a baby and somebody else’s baby dies. Then there’s a potato. Oh, and slaves.”

  “Is there such a real thing as slaves?” Rebekah asked, not really expecting an answer.

  “I wonder what Uncle Vernon would say, he heard you ask that question. Wasn’t the Hebrew peoples slaved in Egypt? Didn’t Moses lead them to the Promised Land?” Elizabeth hit Rebekah on the upper arm, hard.

  “I know all that,” Rebekah said, “but I mean for real.”

  The pages stopped turning. Virginia looked right at Rebekah, “What do you mean?”

  “I only meant—”

  “Because remember how you said last week at the school prayer meeting that either there was dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden or else God left them skeletons in the dirt as a practical joke?”

  Rebekah stared at the carpet, her eyes and cheeks flaming. She had made this mistake so many times recently she’d lost count, sometimes only in her mind, but plenty of times out loud. She was embarrassed, and also afraid she was about to start laughing, because she could see a little wrinkled-up man with white hair roaming around the earth, burying dinosaur bones and laughing into his cupped hands, saying, “This’ll really confuse them.”

  Etta, who had the greatest authority because she was the most pious, finally spoke. “It seems that Satan is working in you, Rebekah Anne.”

  Rebekah crossed her arms on the floor and let her head fall on top of them. Her shoulders began to shake, and when they heard her crying, her cousins folded up the pictures of Scarlett and Rhett and knelt on the floor around her.

  “Don’t cry, Bekah,” Susannah said, patting her shoulder. “We’ll hold you up in prayer right now, won’t we,” she said to the other girls, who agreed. “We’ll drive these thoughts out of you and leave you cleansed.”

  Rebekah held out her hand as if asking them to stop, and what her cousins saw was her humility, her knowledge that she was broken and unworthy of God’s love. They persisted, and began to pray in unison, a murmuring of similar voices, pleas they’d learned in infancy. (Lord we ask that You heal our sister Rebekah please ease her sinning heart she is small and weak Lord and the powers at work in her are strong.) Rebekah let her tears fall on the carpet. She was racked with laughter. She hiccupped, arched her back to take the pressure off her aching stomach muscles, let the laughter out in a gasp. She was seeing herself as a snow globe; everything between her shoulders and her hips was rounded glass. Inside was a long table in a flame-lit room, and an array of coins and iron tools. Sitting on a little stool at the table was Satan, the goat-footed elf, hammering out broken toys and muttering to himself. He was just a small thing, sly and old, and he was sick of working in Rebekah, he wanted to go home and have a chicken pot pie.

  In the car, Rebekah’s head dropped toward her shoulder, and then she was lying down on her side. She was dreaming of Magdalene’s closet, the feeling of the carpet against her elbows. She was with her cousins in the dollhouse, sitting on the perfect furniture and holding a tiny teacup. “I’m pregnant,” she was telling them, “and I need your help, I don’t know how to do this.” They stared at her, unspeaking. Rebekah looked down into her glass belly, where now there was a baby sleeping in a crib, its face turned from her. “See?” she said, pointing at her stomach. “It’s in there, just like I thought. But I don’t know what it means.”

  She woke and looked around. She was still in the car, which was bright and warm; no, the car wasn’t warm—she was under a heavy quilt, the one that hung over the quilt rack in #32. It was a Wedding Ring, red and white, Amish. Every stitch was perfect, and it was signed Frances Massey Odom, on the Occasion of her Marriage to Wilder Odom, June 15, 1914. Rebekah felt as she had as a child, when her mother gave her paregoric for toothaches or sore throats and tucked her into be
d, and the sheets and blankets, even her skin felt like heavy soft fabric, like she was wrapped in hot, dark velvet.

  There was no way up. She could open her eyes briefly, but they closed again. She drifted out onto the hot, sleek sea, floating. The girl cousins were gone and Rebekah was alone on the sidewalk in front of her house, in some long-ago autumn. In truth it was the season of the believers, and Rebekah still was one, so she could stand there, under the maple tree. There was a clan and she belonged in it, and when the fold was gathered she would go.

  We believe that the ways of God are hidden, she was saying, that He hideth our souls in the cleft of the rock. We believe in deliverance and salvation, the Holy Spirit, Baptism, prophecy, the gifts and fruits of the slain. We believe in the Blood of the Lamb. She lost track of what they believed, but it began with God creating the earth in six days, and by that they meant six o’clock, seven o’clock, and so on. And God, Jehovah, Yahweh, God of Thunder and the Mountains, was the One True God Who presided directly and immediately over All. If the wind blew a leaf across the sidewalk, God had made the leaf and God had sent the wind, and the pattern by which the leaf moved was known, preordained by God. And they believed that God had left a wrench in the works that required a Son to be formed not out of clay and breath as Adam had been, but by the act of impregnating a virgin, a young girl, and sending her to marry a widower, and that baby was the Messiah. Far away in Bethlehem. What was prophesied in the Old Testament was made Flesh in the new, a perfect, unbroken line from Adam, Abraham, Moses, and David to Jesus the Nazarene. The Hebrews said that the Messiah would come, and He would be of a certain lineage, and all of that came true. And there were the Gospels, which were books but because they had been dictated by God were also living things and not objects like a clay pot or a sink but a living thing that was in fact more alive than the life of Rebekah herself. The Living Gospels told the story of Jesus but they also contained Jesus and when they were spoken or when they were read or when the Bible was just lying around on the table still they were alive, not by meat but by Spirit. And this Jesus, the Word, was crucified by the Jews, by the Sanhedrin, and for this and many other reasons they had ceased to be the Chosen People. Rebekah, the girl on the sidewalk, didn’t know Jewish people actually still existed; she thought they only lived in first-century Palestine, as dusty and unlikely as anyone walking down an ancient Middle Eastern road. And then it all happened so exactly as the Bible said, that He rose again and appeared unto the five thousand and preached His message. But His message was not the Prophecy. The Prophecy began with Paul. It started with women not talking in church, and women not wearing pants or jewelry or being allowed to cut their hair, and husbands as the head of the household and the family as the body of the church. No one wore wedding rings but men could wear watches and men could cut their hair and shave. And men received the gifts of the Spirit and maintained the offices of the ministry, they were slain by the Spirit and spoke in tongues, one man receiving and another man interpreting the message. The same sounds were repeated quite often in the Spirit, it seemed to Rebekah, who watched the leaves tumbling and circling in front of her. The men said: lahobaytaylayseeweedwahdumsaylay. Spoken with the tongue fluttering. But no matter what the first man said, the interpretation was always the same: Lord, You are telling us that some here tonight have not accepted Your power, grace, and majesty, have not seen the wonder of Your works and the glory of Your face, do not know the peace that comes Lord from just inviting You into our hearts. And those who have not accepted You are afraid Lord and they should be afraid because we are living in the Last Days and You want to tell us that these are the Last Days, Your signs and wonders are everywhere apparent and You are telling us to come to You, to open our hearts to You and to sign our name on the Holy Register before the One arrives Who will usher in the monstrous Last Days and leave behind the fallen sinning remnants of this world, while we the saved and purchased flesh for Your flesh will ascend directly into Heaven and will watch from above as a thousand years of toil, pestilence and death rule this earth, we are Your bride Lord and wait for You. We wait for You.

  Rebekah remembered the days of her childhood and teenage years as if they were one long day; she remembered sitting in the pew in the gingham dresses Ruth made for her, her cotton slips, her hair brushed up high over her forehead and sprayed with Aqua Net, then held back in a headband, pastel to match her dress. She sat in the hard pews with her cousins, and they knew better than to swing their feet or whisper, but they sometimes wrote notes or drew pictures on the mimeographed church bulletin. They sometimes got so bored they let their heads fall from side to side as if to distant music. She wore white socks and black patent leather shoes. Her cousins dressed the same. From a distance they all looked alike, except for Rebekah’s red hair. At the front of the church Pastor Lowell would be preaching the Second Coming, Revelation, the End Times. He would say that the ark of the covenant was buried beneath the Dome of the Rock, sacred to both Jews and Muslims, and the only way for Christians, the rightful owners of the ark, to get to it would be to start the final War, in which the Jews and the Muslims would kill one another over the site. Our job as Christians, what the blessed Savior is calling us to do, he would say, is to start the War, and the only way to do it is to penetrate the deepest reaches of government and the military, if not by election or enlistment, then by conversion and by force. Christ is waiting! he would yell, and the men in the church, stone-faced and heavy-jawed, would flare their nostrils and whisper Amen, while the women moaned, rocked back and forth. How painful it had been for Ruth, Rebekah knew, to have Him so close, to feel Him just on the other side of…what? What divided them from their heart’s desire? Only these events, this reality, which was acting as a shield. The time had come, Pastor Lowell would shout, for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Rapture, the rule of the Antichrist; until the first switch was thrown, the Prophecy of the Bible could not be fulfilled. The pastor would grow flushed, he’d perspire, and the tempo would rise until the organist had joined in, and the congregation would be slain, and in the end there would be a laying on of hands and an altar call and all manner of people on the floor, and through it all Rebekah and her cousins sat in the hard pews, bored and restless and sometimes swinging a foot. She didn’t hear what they were saying; she hadn’t heard it. And then five years ago, out of the blue, she heard it.

  She sat up in the car, weak as if a fever had broken. The worst of the snow glare was gone, and in fact the day was diminishing. There were so many problems to solve at once, each of them acute: She had to go to the bathroom immediately. She was going to throw up. The quilt was tangled up around her legs and over the steering wheel and the gearshift, and it was worth a thousand dollars and she was about to throw up on it. The car was cold, and her hair was damp with sweat. As soon as she opened the car door, the wind plowed in and put things in order; she slid out, folded the quilt. Seeing her shoes on the parking lot made her think she’d been dreaming, but whatever it had been was gone.

  After the store closed Rebekah had dinner at Richard’s and then did something she’d never done before—she drove to the mall alone.

  It was mayhem there, just what she should have expected. There was no place to park, and when finally, after circling the parking lot for fifteen minutes, she found a spot the farthest possible distance from a door, she should have given up and left. She couldn’t accept such defeat. The air in the parking lot was so cold and there was in the air a sort of chemical aftertaste; her eyes watered and she felt sick before she’d ever gotten inside.

  She entered at the JCPenney end and couldn’t believe the crowds. She fought her way inside, unwinding her scarf, unbuttoning her coat as she walked. There was no reason for her to be where she was, she realized; the mall was just someplace warm she could pass the time before dealing with the question of where she would sleep.

  The lighting was aggressive, and everyone looked older than they were, and defeated. She passed an athletic shoe store so bright
she had to look away, and a candy store stocked with dozens of different kinds of brightly colored jawbreakers and jelly beans. She strolled into a crowded record store but didn’t recognize anything advertised, so she backed out after a few seconds. There were movies she could sit through but she didn’t want to, and there were restaurants she could while away the evening in, but she was both exhausted and restless and no option felt right. She needed to be carrying something to nibble on—she’d realized she couldn’t let herself get hungry at all—and something to drink, so she stopped at a kiosk that sold soft pretzels and lemonade and bought one of each. The girls working behind the counter were interchangeable with a hundred other such girls she’d seen in the mall; their hair was processed, streaked, and perfectly straight; their eyebrows were plucked in two nearly invisible arches, and they talked with a strange nasal accent it took some moments to realize was in imitation of black girls.