by Mona Simpson
And Bea remembered her mother’s letdowns and subdued rages, after a big party, after Christmas, when her energy was spent and her bones felt hollow.
Of course, in a few weeks, a month, it would start all over again. Even in the dead of winter, Hazel and her friends made expeditions to some nursery forty miles away, where one of them had heard they had the best narcissus bulbs.
“Why?” Bea would sometimes wonder. Her mother would only shrug. “There’s only so much bridge you can play.”
Bea had often wished she could teach her mother to knit, but—the arthritis.
Keck Road—where she was turning now—had at first been paved in only as far as the original four houses. By the time June finally brought Bea home, there were eight. No more homes had been built since then, but there was big talk. The fields, owned by the two large nurseries, had always grown alfalfa, strawberries, and cow corn. In summer, they hired the local children. Once, when she was small, Peggy had wanted to pick strawberries, June said. But there was nothing pastoral about it. Her fingers bled and she’d gotten a sunburned nose and quit before the end of the day. Her mother, frosting on moisture cream, had scolded her for doing it at all. They paid twenty-six cents a flat.
Now one of the nurseries was buying out the other. Bill Alberts was brokering the transaction. But he was doing less of the fine work—busy with the Riverclub and the Fox River Trotters. By now, he’d named his ballroom More, after the one in New York called The Most. Bea would ask him to let her work with the developers, to pick out good stoves, simple sinks, and floors. People wanted carpet, but flooring lasted longer. That was one reason she liked her dark yarns.
“The Garshes used to live out here,” June said, “over there, in that place. And then when Marge was nine or ten, they bought the smallest little house in De Pere.” Her voice curved, scolding around her point. She was still bitter about Keck Road. “And then Marge was in with all those kids.”
Bea was one of those kids. Or if she was not one of them, she’d known them all her life, graduated with them from Miss Pimm’s Nursery Day and, for that matter, De Pere High. She looked down at her hands on the steering wheel.
Marge Garsh was the now-estranged wife of Bill Alberts, the one who had let herself become a drudge.
Well, that’s what this neighborhood was, all right, Bea thought, people who weren’t about to buy the smallest house in De Pere so their daughters could get in with any crowd. “But you wouldn’t have married Bill Alberts,” she murmured.
June sighed. “Maybe I should’ve. Who knows.”
Had she seriously considered him? Had he made an offer? “What have they done over there?” Bea asked, changing the subject.
They were passing June’s brother’s place. It was late spring, and George’s front yard looked ominous, a building site in the dark. There was a hauling truck and a pile of dirt more than twenty feet high.
“Oh, he built his own swimming pool. Yah. With that little Shelley across the street. They all say she’s a good worker. Better than the boys. Now I think they’re putting in a Jacuzzi.”
Peggy didn’t know Shelley anymore. She was too old to need a baby-sitter now when she was at her grandmother’s, and she didn’t go outside to play there either; she had homework. She was already concerned about her score on the PSAT, a test she doubted the kids on Keck Road had even heard of or would ever take.
IX
When Shelley’s grandmother died in 1971, George Umberhum went to the funeral. Just him, not any of the rest of the family—not his wife, not his son. Not his mother, the other grandmother Shelley had wanted to make into her gramma’s friend so long ago, though she’d lived across the street from her for all those years. Certainly June didn’t go. Not even the Kecks. The fat woman sent over a casserole. Her son Buddy, now a high school sissy, delivered it covered with a dish towel.
At the funeral, George talked about his latest dream: He wanted to build a swimming pool in his yard, that summer.
Even before school was out, he had Shelley working every day with him to dig the hole.
The summer before, Shelley had picked for the nurseries. Almost every kid on Keck Road had tried one time or another, but most left after a few hours of midday sun, their fingers swollen and bleeding. None of the Umberhum kids had done it; they got better jobs. The Umberhum girls were legendary anyway, but older. Their father had been a prison guard, but the girls were all pretty and smart, and won scholarships to college. The only kid who didn’t go was George. And his son, Petey, didn’t have to work summers. He just rode his bike to the park every day and played Ping-Pong.
By July, the year before, only Shelley and two of her brothers were still picking. At the end of that summer, the nursery had hired Shelley’s brother Tim to work year-round in their store. They couldn’t take Shelley because of the way she looked. It was a job serving the public. They told her as much and expected her to understand.
So by the time George Umberhum hired her, she was doing yard work for all the neighbors. She raked and mowed lawns, shoveled and plowed in winter. When the mower or plow broke, she knew how to replace a belt or change the filter.
She does a nice job with the yard, they said about her.
The women shook their heads. If it weren’t for that leg.
George had a vision of what he wanted. He’d seen places, on vacation down in Florida and up in the Peninsula, where he and Nance sometimes went camping.
He never before had built anything bigger than a model of the B-52, the Flying Fortress bomber. He sent away for brochures, and he and Shelley studied the possibilities that spring in the breezeway. There were different sorts of materials and shapes and sizes: rectangle, oval, kidney, L-shaped. Before they started, he checked out a stack of books from the library, written twenty and thirty years before, published in Florida and California. These showed pictures of families in out-of-date clothes gathered around their pools having luau parties.
In May, they marked the site with chalk and began. They dug dirt out onto tarps and then dragged the tarps around the house to the front yard. Altogether, they moved more than 170 tons of dirt.
“Oh, it’s all real glamorous to her,” Shelley’s mother said.
Working together every day, George and Shelley got to talking about almost anything they thought of, even about going to the bathroom and the problem of gas. Just because of the boredom of digging, Shelley knew everything.
Nance didn’t let him touch her there.
At first, way back when they were young, she’d told him it was because it tickled. For a while, he believed that. He even wrote away to a magazine to ask advice.
“And what did they tell ya?” Shelley asked.
“Don’t remember anymore. Couldn’ta been much.”
Later on, Nance said she just didn’t like it.
“She thinks she’s holding on to the royal jewels,” he said. “Well, she can keep ’em. More like a fruit basket gone bad.”
Whenever her name came up, Shelley’s mother always said Nance had been very very pretty when she was young.
“Maybe her mother told her not to,” Shelley suggested.
“Nance’s ma? Naw. I’m sure she never mentioned a thing about sex.”
There. There it was. The word. Sex for the pretty and the unpretty. Shelley supposed they’d had sex for the pretty.
He told her about what he’d done in the war. They were stuck on an island where there were women who looked like a breed between regular boys and ponies, women with manes, who didn’t wear tops. And they let George and the other guys do all kinds of stuff to them, things he described, softly laughing.
She shook her head. “I don’t think that way even about animals.”
He looked up, penitent, young-seeming, even sweet. He waited a minute, as if this was something he’d never thought about before but now had to. “Well, they couldn’t even talk—English, I mean. They had their own language, I s’pose.”
And what they then began was so
mething there was no name for.
Shelley started it. She was the one. They were working on a June day. They’d poured the concrete already and were setting in the tiles. It was hard to keep them at right angles.
“Hey, you over there, I’ve got an itch,” she said. She knew she could act that way with him, she didn’t know why. She was testing. The gate was always there for her to open. It was a delicious feeling, icy, and, like ice, it contained shock.
She thought it was probably what normal girls had all the time, with high school boys, even ones they liked. With her sister, Kimmie, she could tell. Kimmie bossed her boyfriend.
Shelley’s itch got him coming over to where she was. He had a big gut he tried to carry around daintily; it spilled over his shorts, but he was delicate on his long, thin legs. Nance would look at Shelley dragging her foot, then at him, and say, “It would have to be a boy to get those legs.”
It wasn’t really warm yet; there was still a taste of cold dark water in the air, but they were both hot from work.
And there was a smell of rot you could feel in your teeth. Spring out where they lived reeked. The snow melted slowly, unless they had a big rain. It just got gray and dirt-pocked, and Shelley imagined all the piles of animal make that were released now, into the air, moist and thawed.
Her legs were stretched out in the sun on the concrete of what was going to be the pool.
Our pool, he always said. Even though he was paying for the whole thing, including paying her to help build it. Still, he didn’t pay her for all she did. He couldn’t have. She was over there so much, different times of day. It was what she was always doing. Meals and sleeping and doing chores at her own house were only interruptions.
She liked having a place to be all the time, the same as when her gramma was still alive.
Her legs were out long and she looked at them in front of her and saw them not the way she always saw herself but the way he would.
He was always daring her to pick him up. He’d say she couldn’t; she’d say could too if she wanted. This time, he took his wallet and offered her five dollars if she could lift him just one foot off the ground.
Shelley was known on Keck Road for her strength. When Wesley Janson fell twenty feet down from a telephone pole and broke his arm, Shelley carried him all the way back home, with his bike slung over her shoulder.
The mothers of other girls warned, “Don’t you ever get in a fight with her. She looks like a rail, but she’s all muscle.”
When Shelley locked her arms around George’s belly (it was warm; that was kind of a surprise), she didn’t know if she really could.
He weighed—what?—probably two hundred pounds.
But she did.
George hired her to do his ma’s yard, too, every month or so, when the grass got long. One day, she invited Shelley in for a pop. She had another neighbor there from down the street, the fat woman everyone liked. They were sitting in the dim living room, helping themselves to butter cookies. Shelley felt the slick of her bare legs, with the little flecks of grass on them, smearing the scratchy fabric of the chair.
The fat woman was holding up a photograph in a frame. It was the youngest Umberhum girl, Nell, who was years older than Shelley.
“She was a one that was good in school,” George’s mother said.
“Oh. Good for her. Isn’t that something?”
“She always liked that. She just liked school. Her friends were always glad to get vacation, but she liked school.”
That caused a halt in conversation. Shelley had her hand over her mouth. It was good and right to like school; everyone knew it would mean things in that girl’s life would probably turn out better than they would in Shelley’s, and would also probably take her far far away.
Shelley didn’t know really why she didn’t like school.
She wasn’t dumb or anything, she didn’t think. But she was big. And her legs were long and heavy. It was hard to sit at the desk all day and concentrate in the building the bus towed them to every morning, away from their trees and loose air. She got feelings in her toe joints and calves that if she didn’t move them, she would die.
She’d had that all her life. Physical limits. Where she just couldn’t take it anymore, something had to change.
And now that her own gramma was dead, it seemed odd that this grandmother was still here, in her house, the same.
· · ·
At first, George never let himself go all the way in, even though she wanted him to.
“You gotta be in one piece for your wedding,” he said.
In all her life, he was the only one who said the words “wedding” and “you” in the same sentence.
Not even her grandma had supposed she would get married. Her family never spoke about any of that in reference to her.
“’Specially you,” he said. “It never bothers me, but some kid doesn’t even know you? That’s the way it is at that age. They don’t know nothing, but they think they do.”
“You’re strange,” she said, socking him in the warm gut.
“I’ve always been strange,” he said. “I’ve just gotten used to it.”
She tried to think, while it was happening, how he saw her leg. Sometimes she imagined it was the part of her he wanted. She pictured her bones the way they might look to somebody else—the dull foot, the slant leg—like a clump of hair growing out where it’s not supposed to be, on an elbow, a shin.
When she asked, he told her, “You’re different at first, but then you’re not. Then you’re just young.”
It was a small motion like a sawing. She could feel herself hanging on underneath wanting nothing to change, nothing to stop, like that dog, needing the hit hit hit.
Nothing had happened until after her grandma died.
Shelley knew her grandma wouldn’t like it. “Other people’s lives aren’t yours and they aren’t going to be,” her grandma had said. “You have to think what’s interesting for yourself in your own day.”
But maybe, Shelley thought, still under him, his shoulder pressing into her collarbone, maybe they are the same. She didn’t love him—not la-de-da love, nothing like that. But it was easier after to laugh.
The first time it happened, they were behind the currant bushes, by the cement mixer, bags of the dusty formula stacked around them like a fort. Nance had taken Petey off to get new Keds and then they were stopping at Dairy Queen for Dilly bars.
After that they watched for when she and Petey were gone. They never talked about it. They just noticed and waited. Her grandmother’s house was across the way, sitting empty. She still slept there most nights. But they never went inside that first summer. Uncle Bob sometimes walked back and forth in the yard with a stick. It would have required talking about it and planning. They just waited until they were both alone, an acre of hot quiet land ringing around them, and then the air got thicker, making their skin itch and swell.
Only one time, they saw another person: Wesley popping wheelies on his bike in the back of their lawn.
It was never romantic.
They knew each other too much already. Shelley thought it was the opposite of romance, or what she’d seen of that so far. If romance was your heart beating too fast in your chest and your breath shallow and catching, this was more like boredom. Where it was easy to say whatever just walked through your mind.
The only time her body was really like that, when something felt the way it was supposed to look from the outside, wasn’t sex; it was the day they filled the swimming pool. That was already July the second year. They couldn’t finish the first summer. They covered up the hole with tarps and bricks when the frost came, and then there was snow damage they’d had to repair. But finally it was done, all the cement poured, the bottom painted—that was what made the color. When they turned the hoses on, the thing just filled, the clear water turning blue when it gained volume.
He let her be the first one. She stood on the diving board for a good long minute, springin
g on it, feeling the bounce ripple through her legs, up her whole body. Then she threw herself in and felt the surprise.
That was her romance, and she never wore it out. She jumped in every day, liking even the sting in her eyes and her limbs being tossed around in the slam of gravity. She loved swimming in that pool they made. Most of the time, that summer, she was the only one in it.
When Nance and Petey planned a party, she stayed away.
George’s being older didn’t seem to matter. His being married wasn’t what people would have thought, either. That he had all that money built up—those differences seemed eased, blurred away with water.
What could ever happen to end it? she sometimes wondered.
Nothing happened. It never ended, not really, not for thirteen years.
After they finished the pool, the next year they completed the cabana, too. A few weeks later, there was some trouble down at the store and George had to go over and watch them all, make them stop making mistakes.
He said Shelley could come over by the pool anytime she wanted, if he was there or not.
“What’ll she think?” she said.
“I don’t care what she thinks.”
Shelley watched from poolside. The sliding glass walls of the kitchen made Nance, with her bright colors and darting motions, look like a fish in an aquarium. When Nance stepped outside, she minced, her high heels clicking on the cement. “Oh George, oh George,” she said, in a little squeak, shaking her head at the same time.
The month left of summer after they finished the pool house, Shelley was there most days, sunning her legs on the cement. Nance would be prussing around inside, always in a hurry, not doing much that Shelley could see. Inside, she always wore nylon stockings, with fluffy slippers over them, usually a whole suit above. She looked like she was going to work at a job. But she had no job. She just helped at the store.
“ ’Cept she isn’t any help,” George told Shelley.
“Seems like you’re mad at her all the time,” she said.
“I don’t care what she does,” he said.
