by Mona Simpson
They also discussed the small slights and bafflements each of them endured during their working day. June had paid an after-school visit to one of Peggy’s classmates, whose mother had invited them to stop by for some cold turkey sandwiches. They’d arrived at 4:30 and she’d let them sit and sit, offering no refreshment. What had become of those cold turkey sandwiches?
They talked next about dyeing their hair. The other kindergarten teacher in June’s school had done it—put in a rinse at home—and June had been against it and told her so, but well, now she had to admit it looked great. And so natural that you wouldn’t really know. They discussed how you would do a thing like that here, though. Unless you moved.
Hazel continued shaking her head. “I wouldn’t do it. Somebody’s going to let the cat out of the bag, and then where will you be?”
“They say if you change the cut, too—not just the color—and if you start wearing new makeup at the same time . . .”
“But what if you get involved with somebody? Would you tell him?”
They both agreed they probably wouldn’t.
“Well, but then what if he’s in a bar some night and some schlub turns to him and says, What do you think about June Umberhum’s new hair?”
“Try and get out of that one,” Hazel said. “That I’d like to see.”
“Now curls—even a permanent—that’s different,” June said. “It’s fun.”
“Like in ‘Which twin has the Toni?’ ” Bea added. “You sort of laugh with the one who gets caught in the rain.”
Hearing her mother and Bea Maxwell go on like this, Peggy ran from the dining room and flung herself on a guest bed, belly-down, to lose herself in Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Double Doors, a story with a soothing, orderly formula and a crime to solve. The households in these books ran ticking in the background with a calm, even regularity. They were only what they were: background. That’s what she wanted hers to be, but it wouldn’t recede. Her mother was now talking about them rooming with this Bea. Peggy hated her.
June sighed. “Maybe blondes really do have more fun.”
Dr. Maxwell had already retired to the bedroom, where he read the paper and waited for the nightly news. He followed the Vietnam casualties the way he’d once turned on the television to get the polio tallies every night.
At nine o’clock, Bea took her mother upstairs to her room while June tucked Peggy under the guest-bed covers (she’d fallen asleep, the book in her hands) so their conversation could continue. Their favorite thing to talk about alone was family, although they saved the subject, taking it out only after a long warm-up on people who were not central, more amusing and less dangerous. When they did talk about Bea’s sister or June’s brother, their voices hushed. Their siblings were each guilty of the worst crime: they were each, unfairly, their mother’s favorites.
They did nothing to help. Bea’s popular sister rarely even phoned her parents, and June’s brother did precious little, even living right next door, but they had all the props Green Bay mothers wanted: Marriage. Children. And houses.
When Bea’s sister called and Bea mentioned how glad she was because it had been so long since they’d heard from her (she kept a running count: four weeks one time, six another; the longest so far was nine), her mother quickly mentioned how busy Elaine was. And when Elaine did phone, it was usually to talk about home decoration. Her last phone call, Bea remembered, had been forty minutes all about lamps. The day Elaine and her brood drove in from Minnesota for the holidays, Bea worked late and met June at Kaap’s for supper to remind herself there was another world. Her nieces, naturally, had been given her own bedroom in the house and were probably right then sifting through her belongings. Breaking them.
Near the end of their late-night discussion, Bea and June meandered to the big dry-sinked kitchen, where Bea concocted hot-fudge sundaes.
“No matter what I do or how many considerations—I mean, to the doctor, the physical therapist for the hip, I’m driving across town every week to get the rolls she likes—all I hear is the kids this and Elaine that. And Elaine doesn’t do diddly-squat.”
“My mother blames me for the divorce,” June said, pulling her knees up close to her on the kitchen chair. “I said, ‘Ma, he left me.’ But she thinks I should’ve kept him. If I’d been easier to live with. George told her once that I sleep in an ugly position. She says to me, ‘Look at Nance. If he wants to go up north, they just pick up and go.’ ”
Bea considered mentioning the odd chase she’d had with her boss at work. But she didn’t. For some reason, she wanted to hoard it, alone.
Partly, she was ashamed; partly, she was proud. That old elusive happiness.
She believed her refusal was smart, a coin in her hand. She felt better afterward. There was a power in denial. Her mother had taught her that no was a magic word, generative: It created more and greater tries. He’ll ask again, she thought. They all knew what they were supposed to do. They’d all been taught the same things. But June had fallen off. She may not understand.
If it had been a weekend, June might have stayed even longer, sleeping in the guest bedroom across the hall from her daughter. But it was a Tuesday. Tomorrow, she had work and Peggy had school.
Bea didn’t consider until years later why it was that their almost nightly visits took place in her mother’s big house, where she herself stayed over several times a week. She’d always assumed it was because of her mother. But what about Peggy?
At the end of that night, June carried the long sleeping girl out over the lawn into the backseat of her Volkswagen. Bea ran behind carrying Peggy’s shoes.
VIII
When Bea was named broker of the year, in 1971, everyone gathered in her office at four o’clock to open the champagne and drink it out of Styrofoam cups, and Bill Alberts noticed the old change-of-address card on her bulletin board as the other brokers were leaving. Their efforts at festivity wore out quickly; after birthday celebrations, they were all back at their desks, cake eaten, within twenty minutes.
He looked up at her oddly. “Should we run away together to New York? We could catch Bill Evans playing the Village Vanguard.”
He extracted her flexible needles from her hands, crushed her fists into his, and nicked her shoes with his into a fox-trot, singing,“ ‘So let’s keep dancing. Just bring on the news and have a ball. If that’s all. There is.’ ”
Later on, when she looked back over her life, Bea would see that afternoon as a last chance. True, it was a joke of a question. True, he was still married, but what shimmered for her behind the lightness was something possible, dark and strange. But she hadn’t lifted her head. Her mother was still alive—here in Green Bay—and infirm.
Besides, by then Bea was used to him. He no longer upset her sense of balance. Her mother, whom she’d finally told about his compliments, suggested that Bill Alberts chose her only because he knew she had too much sense ever to acquiesce. Bea wasn’t sure she agreed. Though she didn’t want to assume otherwise and be the fool. But inwardly, she really did believe it was she herself who excited him.
And with him, Bea adopted an exaggerated attitude of shock.
She was half-convinced that if she said, Okay, Bill, take your pants off, let’s go to a hotel, he would faint on the spot.
But only half-convinced.
“Well, what about bringing culture to Green Bay?” she finally answered him.
“Changed my mind,” he said, walking out shaking his head. “You know Marge and the kids moved to a house in Ashwaubenon.”
Bea did know that, of course. Everyone did. And what a house! Seven bedrooms. People said there were “built-in” saunas in three of the baths.
He sighed. “Someday, Bea Maxwell, you’re going to wish you’d taken me seriously.”
One thing she did think that turned out to be wrong: She’d counted on him making his half-joke propositions to her forever.
A year later, Bill Alberts was pursuing June.
He woul
dn’t have dared when she was in high school or home for vacation from college. Even being from where she was from, June had been prom queen of Prebble High and sorority sweetheart. In her mind, at least, she didn’t need to make any compromises.
But being back, living in a rented top of a house with a daughter, on her own—that carried a certain air of defeat that made her approachable.
And she did join him for weekend lunches. She invited him along on Sunday-afternoon forays with Peggy and Bea and Father Matthew. At that time, while she was working for the Brown County school district, June was planning to open a flower store. Weekends, she led the whole group (Peggy often brought along a friend) into the woods, where she foraged, bringing back branches, leaves, pussy willows, cattails and pinecones. She mixed these up with the flowers she bought sparingly, arranging them in vases on the floor.
Bill thought June showed a great talent. He hired her to do a weekly arrangement for the real estate office. It was set on the front table, as you walked in, with a little card that said Flowers by June Umberhum.
One day, he stopped by Bea’s office. She was working on a mortgage, phone to ear, wearing golf clothes, knitting. He stood in her doorway and said, “You know, I go to see a psychiatrist. And for years, every time I lay on that couch, I heard a strange sound. Like little bones snapping. And finally then, you walked into my office one day with your needles and black yarn and I knew what it was. I told her, I said, ‘Dr. Klicka, you’re knitting on my time.’ ”
“And?” Bea said.
“She wasn’t the least bit apologetic. She said Anna Freud knit.”
June went along as his date to the opening of his Riverclub, which he hoped would put Green Bay on musicians’ touring circuits. Billy Eckstine played. Bill had recruited him after he’d heard him perform at the Holiday Inn in Milwaukee. “Nobody wants crooners anymore,” Bill said on a Wednesday afternoon in the office. “And he was a big star in the forties and fifties.” The party was on the top story of the old canning factory, overlooking the river, their Fox River, which required darkness and scattered light to achieve any romance and to obscure its mounds of coal and sulfur and the smokestacks of the paper mills.
But the next evening, returning the knit black cashmere shawl and evening bag she’d borrowed, June lingered in the Maxwells’ living room, to describe the event. In front of Bea, Dr. and Mrs. Maxwell, and Peggy, June did barefoot imitations of Bill—his crooked walk, coattails flapping. He was a short man, so, giving her performance, June bent her knees. She copied how he played the drums at the end of the opening-night party, his tongue going outside his mouth, his face contorting. She was a good mimic: Everyone laughed except Bea and her father, who stood up and left the room, saying,“Leave the poor man be.”
“He had pictures of Jewish jazz drummers framed behind the bar,” June said, “and one of Vince Lombardi. He said that was for the hoi polloi. It was the only one I recognized. Get with the times, I wanted to say.” Then she hummed a little something from “Let It Be.”
Bea’s hands shook. Bill Alberts had told her that there were an inordinate number of great Jewish jazz drummers. It seemed to be his only source of pride in his heritage.
“And authors, too,” Bea had told him.
By now, Bea knew the names in his pantheon. Buddy Rich, Tiny Kahn, Stan Levey, Mel Lewis, Shelly Manne, Jack Sperling, Saul Gubin, and Dave Tough. He’d played her cuts of each of their hits. She especially remembered Saul Gubin, who’d recorded sound tracks in Hollywood studios.
“Well, you don’t sound in love with him,” Mrs. Maxwell said.
“I don’t even know what love is anymore.” June sighed. “At my age.”
“You’re not!” Peggy shouted from the kitchen table, where she’d retreated with her schoolbooks. “He’s a boob.”
Mrs. Maxwell concurred. “No. Trust me, dear. You are not.”
Bea hadn’t said anything. She didn’t want June to take him—it was a definite, stabbing feeling. She didn’t know why.
That was 1972. They were each thirty-five years old.
After he stopped trying—“a little soon, if you ask me,” June said. “I mean, if you really want something, and he did, I could tell, then go for it a little”—the two women went out one windy, wet, warm spring day and bought silver services at Bakes. Bea couldn’t admit she’d felt the same way, because she’d never really come out and told June he’d chased her, too. And now that it was over, she wished she had. It was a relief to be like June in this. Relief, at this age, almost equaled triumph.
Not wanting to at first, but finally joking it was maybe inevitable, each selected the same pattern: the Normandy Rose. It was the most elegant. Bea just wrote a check, and June bought hers on time.
It was a small step. A small step to settlement in this life.
The old man at Bakes remembered Bea from her March of Dimes campaign. “I still keep a jar,” he said, showing her a small urn on the counter.
They felt the regular measure of Peggy, who seemed to be growing up so much faster than they were. And her own life now, most of it, had been lived in this town.
Bea was elected to join her mother on the board of the historical society, called Heritage Hill. She joined the club to find pickup games of golf.
June read an article in Life about an East Coast wedding on Cape Cod. The caption said that baby lobsters—called crawdaddies by the locals, it noted in parentheses—were flown in from eastern Wisconsin. Eastern Wisconsin? That’s here!
So she started asking around. And sure enough, outside of town—farther out than Keck Road, where June’s mother and brother still lived—there were bars that on Friday nights served crawdaddies in baskets with your beer.
They drove past the dammed banks of the Fox River on the east side, where the water was filled with bobbing logs ten to twenty feet long.
“That’ll all be paper,” Bea said. Whenever she could, she’d offer Peggy, in the backseat, bits of information. She’d noticed that June’s instructions were mostly improvements Peggy could make—to her behavior, her posture, her hair.
Parked in front of the first bar, Bea was paralyzed by the powerful desire to stay put. Peggy was scrunched up, reading by the tiny car light in the backseat. “This doesn’t look so good, June. With Peggy?”
She knew Peggy was June’s daughter, but she was with her a lot, too. Once or twice, she’d silently considered teaching Peggy to knit. She was waiting for the right opening to bring it up.
“Well, we’re here,” June said. “We might as well try it. People are flying them in dry ice all the way to Massachusetts. If we’ve got to live here, we might as well get what’s best of it!”
The first bar didn’t have any, but, from the bartender, they got directions to more distant and shabbier places, down close to the river. In the shack where they finally found the crawdaddies—they were called crayfish by these locals—it was all men except for one decrepit old woman in the corner, stationed in an armchair under the TV.
But the men were eating baby lobsters, all right. June and Bea and Peggy—with a soda pop Bea had bought her—sat on bar stools, the briny juice tickling as it dripped down their arms, under their sleeves, to the elbows.
On the way home, they drove to June’s mother’s to drop Peggy. June did that sometimes, when she needed to get school reports done or had a date or just needed to let off some steam and be alone.
Tonight she had a stack of student dictations that needed to be typed and pasted on construction paper. The question she and the other teacher had asked the kindergarteners was, “If I had one hundred dollars, I would buy . . . ” More than one child had answered, “I’d buy my mother a house.”
“You should almost use that to advertise,” June said. Bea still thought of jingles sometimes, and she tried to use them on her flyers. But her work was boring her lately. “Or best offer” was a joke she shared with Bill.
But Peggy didn’t want to go to her grandmother’s.
“I
have homework,” she whined. “Two tests on Monday.”
“Do it there,” June said. “I always did.”
“But she goes to bed so early.”
“You can stay up. I’ll tell her you have to study.”
This part of town had been incorporated into Green Bay proper in 1964. Much of the land off 141, which had been wooded the first time Bea saw it, was beginning to be developed. Fields, with silos in the distance, were marked out with one road, pastel small houses budded on either side.
“It’s all getting built-up over here, too,” June said.
“I should really drive out one day and take a look around.” This was now part of Bea’s profession. For families just starting out, these properties would be more affordable. She’d done well so far by selling the large homes of her mother’s friends, but this was newer, more compelling. It meant more, even though the commissions would be smaller. Besides, Bea was sick of beautiful houses.
Maybe everything was that way in sales. Bea knew old Mr. Campbell, the main decorator in town. They’d meet every few months, at Bosses. “These people tear out a picture from a magazine,” he told her, “and say, ‘I want it to look like this.’ All for four thousand dollars. ‘Well, I can make it look like that,’ I tell them, ‘if you let me take the pictures.’ ”
Beauty had begun to seem a sham. And it meant so much to her mother. Hazel could sit at tea in her breakfast room and talk for an hour about a shade of green. There was a door they always passed on a riverside, Dutch-roofed house, an old door from the last century. The owners had painted it a pretty color, somewhere between China red and the shade of a bittersweet berry. Her mother, if left alone, would comment on that every time they passed. Every single time.
What they all wanted, hankering after a life that looked like a picture, was permanence. Whereas Bea and Mr. Campbell understood that it was all a performance, with its opening night, its run and closing. Anyone with half a mind to see reality would notice the amount of peak-open flowers in those magazine spreads.