Off Keck Road

by Mona Simpson

  But Nance didn’t get much in the way. She talked to the other women on the street about Shelley hanging around the pool all the time, even after the job was done and George back at the store.

  “I thought that was a little funny,” she’d say.

  “I think so, too,” would be the answer, no matter which one she talked to.

  · · ·

  But by the middle of September, the leaves were tearing off in the wind. It was too cold by the pool, even in the sun, and Shelley began to think about getting a job.

  At first, finishing school had seemed like it always seemed in May, but just a deeper summer, longer. Then it began to dawn slowly, like a train forming out of the air in the distance, that something was over for you.

  The main work where she lived was in the canning factories or the paper mills. Shelley put in her applications and waited. She worked first for a year at Schneider Trucking, answering radio calls on the night shift, then for three years she was the secretary at Bay Auto Supply.

  All that time, when she was home after work, people saw her around George Umberhum’s backyard, at five-thirty, six o’clock. In summer, she’d be by the pool in her swimsuit. In winter, you could see her, tall and a little crooked, small-headed, walking along the perimeter of the yard, in front of the old hedges, picking up sticks and fallen branches.

  When George said she could come by the pool anytime, he meant while he was at the store.

  He didn’t imagine moving or living in another state.

  One thing he and Shelley had in common was a love for northeastern Wisconsin. But not Nance.

  She wanted to get him to Florida.

  And eventually she did.

  X

  With June, Bea had the endless fugal back-and-forth conversations about love that she had missed as a girl. To anyone else listening, even Hazel, when she had the chance to eavesdrop, these talks sounded repetitive, but they weren’t, not exactly. They repeated only the way that scientists review their data when they are stumped, or pianists return to the beginning of a phrase after an error. They reiterated only in order to further refine.

  Many nights of 1974 were devoted to the question of whether a woman should telephone a man.

  June had a theory about such things. That was one reason Bea liked June; June had a theory about everything.

  “See, if a man calls a woman, what does it mean? It means he might be interested or he might just want to see a movie. And if a woman says yes, that means about the same. She doesn’t have to say yes. Women have been asked out all their lives, so they know how to say no without really saying it. You can always say you’re busy or you’re so sorry but you just can’t that night. So if they go out, they’re about equal. He’s a little interested, maybe, because he asked and she’s a little interested because she didn’t just say no.”

  Bea listened, rapt. She had not been asked out all her life but she was glad June assumed that she had. “But if she calls him . . . ,” Bea said leadingly.

  “If she calls him, she seems really interested, not just a little, but really really. Like she’s so rabid to see him, she can’t wait. And then if he says yes, it doesn’t mean what it means when a woman says yes. Because he’s not used to being asked. He might just say sure because he doesn’t know how to get off the phone. He’s maybe so shocked that she called in the first place.”

  While June explained, Bea knit. At work, Edith’s daughter had had a baby, her first baby, premature. This child was getting a soft cashmere blanket, and a snowsuit with tiny shell buttons. She’d opened the box of shipped cashmere yarn that day.

  “So let’s say they go out. They’re on very different footing. She’s made it clear that she’s interested—boy is she interested—and he’s not made anything clear at all. He might not even like her.”

  “So really she’s better off waiting.”

  “I’d say, waiting and maybe suggesting a little.”

  Bea brought old things out into the air. The married boss in Chicago who hadn’t noticed her.

  “If you felt something, he felt something,” June said. “You can bet on it.”

  Bea wondered if that pertained to herself. If Bill Alberts felt something, did she?

  “Suggesting like, ‘Oh, my dear aunt Betty gave me two tickets to a concert’?”

  “Or even, just when you see a poster for a movie, saying, ‘Hmm, looks good,’ or if he talks about skiing or going to a game, mentioning, ‘That sounds like fun.’ ”

  Hazel would’ve been more than happy to supply her daughter with this same advice then or any other time during the past twenty years, but Bea would have been mortified to discuss the matter with her parents. Nonetheless, coming from June that night as they paced the kitchen making “quick” tapioca pudding, Bea internalized these rules and remembered them forever.

  One of the pleasures of her friendship with Father Matthew was that the rules didn’t quite pertain. He wasn’t a man in the ordinary sense of the word.

  And yet he was. One.

  She felt a little racy, phoning Father Matthew at the abbey.

  After one such call (“Edith, from my office, gave me some tickets she can’t use . . . ”), Bea found herself riding with Father Matthew through the West Side, on their way out of town. They were going to a new community theater in what used to be a cornfield. Hazel was supposed to come along, but at the last minute the joints in her fingers hurt.

  Driving with Father Matthew was always slow and relaxing. He was so scrupulous, he left lots of time around the edges. He’d arrived early to pick her up and they stayed in the car a full two minutes without actually moving, because someone had once told him that he should idle the engine first, every time, before starting. And in fact, his conscientious obedience had paid off, carwise. He still drove the same Honda, a green one that wasn’t even new when they’d met, a full ten years before.

  He was the kind of man who ceded his place in traffic. He never asserted himself in conflicts over lanes or parking spaces.

  Bea supposed that was what he had in place of the old-fashioned respect her father and a few other men in town still engendered: Father Matthew had the private knowledge that he’d given forth only decency and generosity in the world.

  Which was all fine and good, she thought, but it took so damn much time.

  Sometimes she just wanted to move a little faster. Their friendship, for example, seemed to be another of his scrupulous projects. She felt quite sure that he never indulged in a moment of petty gossip, that he’d never taken the smallest advantage, never cut into line even when no one but no one was watching. At times, though, she wondered whether this rather general consideration didn’t prevent more specific attentions.

  It was strange how the West Side had developed. Plains of houses had sprung up in the sixties and seventies, with no main street, no clustered commercial district, no downtown. In fact, the houses seemed to branch right off the new highway itself.

  The East Side was Bill Alberts’s, but he’d left off here—too busy with the club and with the Fox River Trotters. “What does he need more money for?” Hazel had said. “Already has more money than God.”

  They passed Van Dam Chevrolet, with its mile-long enclosure of plastic flags, tractors waiting stumped and forlorn, banished to the far edge of the lot.

  Bea knew that family, the Van Dams. She’d sold them a lot five or six years ago in a still-wooded development over here, where they built. “Our dream house,” they’d called it.

  They were rich and felt rich in a way Bea suspected her parents never had, though it was possible, even likely, that their bank balance was equal or superior. When Bea drove her by to see, Hazel had called the Van Dam house an “atrocity.” She’d had to take her bun out and pin it back up again. (Bea had made her—per her request—a snood.) But Bea found the odd cathedral refreshing, even exhilarating. The car people’s money actually seemed to give them pleasure.

  Bea looked over at the driving priest. Despite h
is uniform jacket—a little in need of dry cleaning or replacement, the fabric “tired,” as her mother would’ve said—this seemed something he, too, would understand.

  Large malls opened off the highway. Here, next to a vast Piggly Wiggly, was the big Singer Sewing Center, where you could buy machines, patterns, fabric, and trim. Bea knew that mall well, because the Sewing Center helped her order her yarn. There was one catalog they got for her specially—of nubbly, soft, heavy Italian cashmere blends.

  There were restaurants, too, of course, lone restaurants, far apart, each buffeted by a flat tar lot, more parking than you could ever use, and then stray untended field. Everything seemed practical. She saw no charming little place you could duck into for a treat. Ponderosa Steak House. The Sizzler. Big food in big portions. Pound-and-a-half porterhouses. Eight-inch baked potatoes. Nothing delicate or exquisite, nothing small, like at Kaap’s downtown, where, in her mother’s day, people ate flavored ice creams in colorful molded shapes, and where even now you could get a sundae with the nuts and whipped cream on the side, the hot-fudge sauce in a small pitcher, made of heat-bearing metal, well polished.

  Was it possible that the West Side of town was actually western enough to eat more meat?

  Father Matthew turned off the highway and drove through some older streets. He stopped the car then at an average corner and said, “There’s my folks’ place. Where we grew up.” He said it just like that.

  And there it was. A scrappy yard, with mud paths worn in the lawn, presumably by pets or children. A few bushes, a tree, some rhubarb along one side of the house. Nothing in the yard seemed planned or planted. The house had once been green, but the paint had chipped enough to show the gray boards.

  It was a different way of living in a house.

  Bea had understood that for the first time not from selling real estate, but from watching June look for an apartment years ago and helping her move in.

  In the upstairs flat, June never considered changing a thing except in the most superficial way, with white paint and bamboo shades.

  Bea didn’t do much to her rental unit, either, but that was just a matter of laziness. She understood that in the realm of the domestic, all was fundamentally malleable. Walls could be moved, shelves put up or taken down, tiles replaced with a different color. (In her life as a real estate agent, Bea had seen people tear out tiles to put in new ones that to her looked indistinguishable from the last.)

  June didn’t think the owners would allow her to do anything, even if she was willing to spend her own money. She never felt she had permission. She was afraid even to ask.

  “But you’d be improving the place,” Bea had tried to explain.

  “It’s theirs, though. What if they didn’t like it?”

  Bea still remembered June’s delight at the few felicitous touches—already there—in the upstairs apartment. That delight had amazed Bea. And all for a deep tub with hot water to last. “It’s a seventy-five-gallon heater,” Bea explained.

  Perhaps Hazel’s style—inch by inch, year by year, taking control of every square foot of property and fitting it to her own taste and eye—had deprived her of just that delight at having found something good, beautiful already, without your needing to make it so.

  Over the years, Bea had learned that most buyers were like Matthew’s parents—one-timers. They bought a house and then got to the business of living in it, more or less as they found it. One of the fascinations of selling houses was seeing how people lived. Sometimes she could even tamper with that.

  And there was a beauty to Father Matthew’s family house and yard, where nothing seemed ornamental, all strictly for use. His upbringing, no doubt, made it easier to live in the monastery.

  As they passed the big Sears, on the highway again, he said, “Remember the Sears catalog? I don’t think they have that anymore. Not like they did.”

  It must have been the trance of these old streets.

  “My sisters used to tear into it. They were each allowed to order one new outfit every spring. I think my grandmother paid. And that was the most thumbed-over section of the book. It was that thick then.” He held up and opened a hand to show. “One spring, the theme was gingham, red-and-white-checked. Every night, I swear to God.”

  Bea looked over at him. He didn’t take God’s name in vain with just anyone.

  Bea had never ordered her clothes from a catalog. She remembered her mother taking her to buy her little socks from Em Flato, who wore her eyeglasses on a tortoiseshell chain. She would open an old wooden drawer of anklets in pastel colors, folded like Easter eggs. Bea and her mother would pick. At that time, all the better apparel shops were owned by the Jews in town. Bea once believed these shop owners lived inside their stores, because those were the only places she saw them.

  “They’d do the dishes—had to finish your chores first in our house—and then they’d sit at the kitchen table for hours trying to decide what to order. Should it be the white slacks with the red-and-white top? Or the all gingham dress? Or the zip-up jacket, what about that?

  “Man. The funny thing is, I’m sure they each finally picked one and ordered it. They must’ve worn it, probably all that year, but I don’t remember ever seeing those checkered outfits on either one of them. I just remember the models in the catalog jumping in jumping jacks. They looked happy. Red-and-white checks. And my sisters, so serious poring over the pages.”

  Both those sisters were living away now, one in Duluth, one in Milwaukee. He still wrote them letters and called on the phone, especially the youngest, who was going through a rough divorce.

  Bea asked how Donna was doing. That sister, once a girl trying to pick the prettiest, most useful gingham, was now a woman of forty, unhappy about the bags under her eyes.

  Matthew had saved and was planning to send her the money for cosmetic surgery.

  “That seems so un-you,” Bea said.

  “If it makes her feel better about herself when she looks in the mirror.” He shrugged. “People get their peace different ways.” He was always a kind, kind man.

  Like Bea’s own father. But unfortunately for Matthew, he’d entered the priesthood at a time when, in Green Bay at least, his own counsel was less sought. That might have happened to Bea’s father, too, if he’d lived a half century later. With all the changes that were coming to medicine.

  There were fashions, it seemed, even in veneration.

  But Bea’s father was lucky. Even now, he was the most trusted pediatrician in town. Bea always assumed that it was because of the general respect for him, so great and taken for granted, that, in the house, he let his wife decide everything. He just did whatever she said.

  Theirs was an old friendship.

  “It was ten years if it was a day,” as Bea heard her mother say recently to Lil, discussing Lil’s daughter’s divorce.

  In the first years, Bea sometimes slid into forgetting that Father Matthew was a priest. It seemed, from the tendencies of their connection, his odd care and intent gestures, that they would tilt into something else, perhaps even something scandalous.

  Later, at the time Bill Alberts was pursuing June, it seemed almost certain to Bea that they were heading for a cliff.

  During that period, she found her fantasies tangled. It was easy to imagine the before: a time and place, the banter as things began to turn and extend just a little bit further than they had. They would stand, hands on hips, and say things to each other until they fell to . . .

  To what, exactly, was hard to imagine. But she could easily come up with dialogue.

  “But you’re a priest!”

  “Even priests are men. You are the first woman to . . . ”

  She had ideas, of course, from magazines and the movies. As she lay in bed in the dark trying to sleep, she couldn’t hold the images of models and actresses for long (she could picture them in a pose or a contained movement, but she couldn’t make them improvise past what she’d already seen), so she shuffled to parents and her frien
ds. For her, it was difficult to imagine most people in bed, hard to think how they moved, what they felt. The only person she could envision was June. It was easy to picture June unzipping her side-zip pants, moving like a flexible doll into all the positions Bea could think of that a man would want. She saw her friend June’s mouth, slack and open, craving.

  That was another way Bea used their friendship, all those years, without June ever knowing.

  When Bea began to announce her affair to her mother and her father—Father Matthew ceasing to be Father Matthew, giving back his cassocks in a long, flat cardboard box, but to whom?—Bea’s fantasy tripped her into a state of sit-up alarm.

  No, it was impossible to think of an ending together without a degrading scandal. Perhaps that was one reason the culmination had never yet occurred, even in her before-sleep moments of unraveling wishes, taking out her precious jewels on a plate, just to look at. Her fantasies halted. They could kiss but not finish. Her imagination stopped at the place on the neck where a necklace cut.

  Now that June was gone, Bea remembered her rules as if they were commandments. She’d broken the ban on calling him—that made no sense; they’d been regular friends for too long—but she’d silently replaced that restriction with the edict that she would never be the one to make a pass.

  It had been so long, she was quite sure things would remain more or less how they were. Or, if not forever, at least today. Each time she saw Father Matthew, change seemed less likely. Yet, a few years back, it had seemed impossible that they could endure another talk without touching.

  She made a mental note to put Donna on her Christmas list—maybe a muffler.

  Though by now, the city and her parents had lived through enough scandals that a little flare-up began to seem as if it might have been worth it.

  The protagonists of the local disgraces Bea had watched so far had ended up married and late-middle-aged, concerned with property and money and barbecues, more or less like everybody else.

  XI

  Bea was offered the listing for June’s brother’s house in 1975. Nance called her up at the office and said they were moving to Florida. She wasn’t sure she wanted to sell; she just wanted to see what kind of money they could get.