The Used World. Haven Kimmel
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 continued, “I say to my husband, ‘Brian, admit it, admit what you expect of me,’ but he won’t. He says I make my own choices and I should live with them. Does he think I want to spend two weeks decorating the house, leave those decorations up two weeks, then spend two weeks taking them down? Does he think I want to bake cookies and little cakes for the neighborhood association and the postman? And do all the shopping, all the wrapping, pick out every single goddamn gift, including for his parents who he won’t spend two seconds thinking about? And send out Christmas cards with a picture of the kids in it every year when I can’t hardly get them to sit still to take the picture, not to mention the furniture is on fire and one of the boys has decided he can’t live without a python?”
They turned the corner at NASCAR collectibles and Claudia said, “Could you open that door for me?”
Emmy leaned against the bar on the delivery door and it opened, letting in a blast of white light and cold. “Good God,” Emmy said, slipping on her red coat. She opened the back of the Suburban, lowered the tailgate. She’d left it running, and the parking lot was streaked with blue exhaust. Two or three loose napkins were picked up in a gust of wind and blown out toward Claudia. She caught one, green with white letters that read, SANTA, IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!
Claudia lowered the dolly, took the ramp from the side of the building. The back of the Suburban was littered with the castoffs of family life: shoes, clothes, collectible trading cards, CD cases, crumpled grocery bags.
“Just,” Emmy said from behind Claudia, “just put it on top of all that shit, if you don’t mind. Flatten it all, I don’t care.”
The love seat was light; in addition to the unfortunate color and upholstery, it was shabbily constructed, and might not last the afternoon with the Arsonist and the Snake Handler. Claudia pushed it up the ramp and into the vehicle, where it laid waste to a comic book and a variety of plastic items. After she’d taken away the ramp and closed the tailgate, she turned to find Emmy leaning against the side of the building, her hands over her face.
“I’m done here,” Claudia said, wheeling the dolly back toward the door.
“Okay then,” Emmy said, standing up straight and clapping her palms together, as if declaring the case closed. “This is going to be great. Everything is going to be fine. I can do this, absolutely.” She opened the driver’s side door, climbed in. “Merry Christmas,” she said, looking back at Claudia.
“To you, too,” Claudia said, pushing the code into the keypad lock on the door. She wheeled the dolly inside and turned around. Emmy was still sitting there in the smoking Suburban. She wasn’t crying, she wasn’t moving; she had slipped on a pair of sunglasses and was just looking out at the traffic as it sailed by.
“I sold the last of the Santa suits,” Rebekah said, placing the receipts on the spindle.
“The one with the cigarette burn in the crotch?” Hazel asked.
“That’s the one.”
Hazel hummed a bit of “I’m Dreaming of a White Trash Christmas.”
“Do you want me to see if there are any more out in the storage shed?”
“Please don’t.” Hazel closed the phone book, unable to find what she was looking for, and slipped it on a shelf under the counter. “Santa is too much with us as it is.”
“Hey, Becky,” Slim called from his perch near the RC Cola machine. “Want to come sit on my lap and tell me what you want for Christmas?”
Rebekah blushed. Hazel didn’t look up but said, “Slim, remember D-day.”
Red wheezed out a laugh, put out his cigarette; Jim Hank wheezed out a laugh, lit a new one. D-day, Rebekah knew, referred not to World War II, but to Slim’s wife, Della, who had forgone any employment for the past forty years in the interest of maintaining her bitter anger at her husband.
The Cronies were three men in their early sixties who had taken an early buyout from the Chrysler plant. Their histories, ideologies, and fashion tastes were so similar that for the first six months Rebekah worked at the Emporium, she had no idea which Crony was which. Their sons were wastrels, their overweight daughters were married to ne’er-do-wells (if not outright criminals), and their wives disappointed them on a daily basis. Almost every day the Cronies sat on the three couches in a U shape with the soda machine in the corner. Hazel had bought the furniture at some auction; she swore she hadn’t been drinking, but without some mental impairment Rebekah didn’t understand how the couches could be justified.
One was tan, stained. This belonged to Red, the most knowledgeable, or at least the most opinionated, of the three. He was horse-faced, wore glasses, and the other two accepted his pronouncements as self-evident because he had, in the very distant past, held a county record in pole vaulting. Red rented space in the back corner of the front of the store (not prime real estate by any means), where he sold an assortment of things he swore to be valuable: carved historical figures, forged at the Franklin Mint; commemorative coins; a set of dish towels bearing the likeness of Spiro Agnew.