Off Keck Road

by Mona Simpson

  She lived in it just the way it was. She never really thought of it as her house. It was her grandma’s still. That was what she liked about it. After so long, the smells stayed in the closets. Shelley would open the medicine cabinet where her gram had kept the Mentholatum and the Band-Aids and the camphor and hand towels, and for a while, she could forget time. When she opened a wardrobe, cylinders of denser air turned, faintly dancing in her grandmother’s coats.

  She often fell asleep in the easy chair in front of the bluey TV, where her gram had sat. She still had electricity and gas and cable, but her mom and dad had canceled the phone. She used it so little, it was a waste of money; they figured she could always walk across the yard to theirs, but she almost never did. In those days, she was a person one other person had loved once. That was her dose, and she was prepared to settle for it and take what warmth was left in the house. Once, that was all.

  She had tried working. When they told her at Bay Auto Supply that they were phasing out her job, what with the new computer system, she decided to go back to school. She picked Vocational Nursing because she’d always liked taking care of her gram. And she could study that right downtown.

  For her first job, she got sent to Bill Alberts.

  She had never met anybody like him before.

  She wasn’t sure if she’d like being a nurse.

  “What did I know?” she said later. “Classes, you can’t tell.”

  She had never been able to listen in school. She often lost the beginning of what the teacher was saying, and then it was an agony watching the clock, hoping the teacher wouldn’t call on her. She could be lucky for a few days, but then it would come again, the humiliation of not knowing the answer. She never guessed or goofed. She said “I don’t know” right away, looking down seriously.

  The vocational classes were held at night in the old brick YMCA building. There was lots about nutrition, babies, neonatal patients, people with lifelong pain. Shelley was not so interested in babies. She’d had enough of babies at home. They even talked about wardrobe, what to wear for the interview. You were supposed to have two jackets, three skirts, four blouses, and so forth. And for hairstyle, they said to go to an experienced beautician and get a flattering cut. Then you could have someone in your family take pictures of your head from all different angles so a cheaper barber or even someone you knew could copy the shape.

  The teachers understood that everyone had already worked all day. People wore factory uniforms. One guy from the paper mill stunk of chemicals that burned Shelley’s eyes, but still she didn’t change seats. And the students were different ages. None of them knew one another, so nobody was popular and nobody was not.

  When the woman in the job-placement office asked, Shelley just wrinkled her face. “Don’t like babies,” she said. And the woman was right in her hunch. Shelley was good with old people. From being with her gramma, probably. Big oinking noises from the bathroom didn’t frighten or disgust her. She stayed where she was, outside the door, waiting to be called.

  The first day, when she met Bill Alberts, she said, “Jeez, is this all one house?”

  Shelley had seen the place before. It was one of the mansions on Mason, the one made of river stones that Mr. Kaap had built with his money from the restaurant and bakery. Kaap had still been alive, in his restaurant, when Shelley was small. With five kids, her family didn’t go out to eat much, just Christmas; and she remembered, one Easter, going to pick up a pink box of cookies her mom had selected, pointing to them behind the case, one by one by one.

  She’d been to a doctor’s office on the bottom floor of one of these old mansions. The doctor had treated her for free, put hot packs on her legs and given her stretching exercises. Then they walked to the candy store, and each time, he’d given her pennies to pick her own gum balls, different colors. “One for each day till you come again,” he said, “so you won’t get polio in the face.” But when she got home, of course, she had to share the loot with her brothers and sister. One time, two dressed-up ladies took her out to Kaap’s for ice cream. She’d got a lot of attention for the polio the first few months, but then the spoiling petered out. She didn’t have it bad, and everyone probably figured she’d recovered. As much as she was going to anyway.

  She thought most of these old mansions by now were apartments or offices. A couple realtors had a floor in another one, the company that sold Gram Umberhum’s place when she died.

  “All one house,” he said. “But I don’t climb steps anymore. Not with this hip.” He pointed with his cane. “So the second and third floor can be your playroom.”

  “You’re planning for me to live here?”

  “Sleep here nights, Sunday through Friday, that’s what they told me. During the day I’m in the office with a lot of people. Nights are when I need someone, strictly speaking. And it’s a just-in-case kind of situation. Most nights, you can just sleep. Is that a problem for you? Say now or forever hold your peace.”

  “They told me nights. I just didn’t know you wanted me to live here, live like live, bring-my-stuff kind of live.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, either. This is the first time I’ve had a nurse. You’ll have to pardon me. I’m new at this.”

  She grinned. “I’m new, too. Just finished up over at Central.”

  “Well, we can make it all up ourselves, then.” He tapped the lens of his glasses with a finger. “I’ve never been much of a chef, so I take most of my meals out. Have you eaten lunch?”

  That was how they started. Eating out at a restaurant.

  This ain’t too bad, she was thinking. I can stand this.

  “Shelley,” he said to her that first day. “Like Shelly Manne. You share a name with one of the great jazz drummers, who, moreover, is in my personal Great Jewish Jazz Drummers Hall of Fame.”

  “Huh?” Shelley said. The Packers had a Hall of Fame here in town, but she’d never been to it.

  “See, I’m a drummer. One of a long line.”

  “You got a drum set?” she asked.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  They went to all kinds of restaurants. He would read about a restaurant in the newspaper and want to try it.

  Shelley thought they made a gooney pair. He was five foot three and bald as an egg, with black glasses. Shelley stood six one, even stooping.

  Of course, she didn’t have the sort of clothes the other people in those restaurants wore. She never did build up her wardrobe from following the markdown sales, the way the lady had suggested in night school. She just went in her regular shorts and T-shirts, figuring she was working. This perturbed her mother no end, her mother, who was fascinated by the idea of Shelley eating in places like that. She called Kimmie in Germany to tell her, but Kimmie seemed less riveted by her sister’s meals. She was far away, in a military-housing two-bedroom, with babies who woke up at night crying for bottles every three hours.

  After Shelley worked for Bill Alberts a month, she couldn’t believe all the things she hadn’t known about before. She got so she could tell the difference between different salads. Salad! Before, she didn’t even eat salad, she told him. He made fun of her because she liked to go to Kroll’s on her nights off and get a chili burger and press the soft bun flat between her fingers. She still liked regular food, the food she used to eat, sandwiches, she also pressed flat. Sometimes she would miss a liverwurst sandwich and then just make one. Now she cut off her own crusts.

  She started to cook in his kitchen. She noticed the things he liked. Some you couldn’t get in stores, so she had her mother plant them in her garden, a certain kind of green bean called haricot vert.

  She drove his old Cadillac to Madison because there was a horn player he wanted to hear. He knew a restaurant where they made a special kind of meat with cherries in the sauce, and he was remembering that.

  After dinner, they went to a club where Ruby Braff played with local pickups. “The Armstrong style,” he said, and listened for hours and hours. She didn’t ask anything
, but thought, Armstrong, Armstrong. It made her think of a man with muscles she’d seen on TV commercials, something to do with kitchen floors. But maybe that was Mr. Clean. Shelley sat in the corner reading a magazine. When the little candle on her table guttered out and she couldn’t see anymore, she dug a clipper from her pack and went at her nails, feeling the hard edges in the dark.

  XIII

  One day, during Bea’s years of watching her mother, Dr. Maxwell up and died. Bea and her mother were stunned, though no one else was.

  “Here we were always worrying about her!” Bea told people at work, her voice incredulous.

  In the office, after he closed the door, Bill Alberts said to Edith, “ ‘Her’ will live to be a hundred. Hazel’s an ox. A miniature ox.”

  Dr. Maxwell died the way he’d done everything else in his life—quietly, without fuss, essentially alone. The evening before, wearing his tweed hat, he’d driven his wife to Kaap’s for dinner.

  Apparently, he’d complained that night of indigestion and had taken two tablets of Alka-Seltzer before bed. (Two tablets—an advertising decision Bea remembered reading about. Some clever copywriter thought, Why not say two and double sales?)

  Hazel hadn’t thought anything of the indigestion, because he’d ordered the creamed shrimp on toast, and Kaap’s had already gone down quite a bit by then. Once, Father Matthew and Bea saw a cockroach scaling the wall of their booth.

  After the doctor died, Bea and her mother cleared out his office. Hazel would have hired some college girl to do it, but Bea insisted that they sift through the items one by one. Behind the closet door hung an old poster of Elvis with his sleeve rolled up, getting inoculated. The files of living patients and most of the instruments could be simply passed on to the younger pediatrician he’d worked with—one of Lil’s twins, now divorced, the girl who used to eat half a head of lettuce for supper.

  Most files of the dead were already in the hospital basement. There was a locked cabinet marked EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL. DO NOT OPEN. Only one key existed, and it now belonged to her mother. Without exactly acknowledging what they were doing, they saved that cabinet for last.

  Dr. Maxwell’s collections had to be dispersed. He had nests, including a hummingbird’s, the size of Bea’s thumb; abandoned eggs and bones of all kinds, bee skeps and a wasp’s dome that looked like petrified cotton candy. He’d kept these things around his office for the children to look at while they waited for their appointments. Bea packed them each up. Her mother didn’t want any of it in the house.

  “Too much dirt,” she said. “That’s why he kept it all here. I wouldn’t let him bring it home in the first place. Those nests are full of bugs.”

  But Dr. Maxwell had never worried about bugs or dirt. He always said, “Let them eat dirt. It builds immunity.”

  It was rainy the day Bea carried her father’s treasures from her car into the Brown County Museum, so she covered the box with dry-cleaning plastic. Marion Betz locked up once she’d let Bea in, then led her to the back stockroom, where they stood together unpacking and labeling Dr. Maxwell’s collection. Dr. Maxwell had been the pediatrician for Marion’s three children, who were now all grown, living other places. The room was dim, with high windows, the rainfall exaggerated by the metal roof, and Marion made a delicious tea that tasted of cinnamon, heating the water in a tin pan on an electric hot plate. Strange boxes filled the metal shelves, random odd materials, even rolls of what looked like insulation.

  From what Bea gathered, Marion cleaned and maintained the exhibits and led tours for schoolchildren.

  When Bea left, she was leaving, too, Marion said. That was why she’d locked up early. She was going to drive out to the old prison camp. In the 1960s, men in the penitentiary had been rewarded for good behavior by being let out to work in the woods. They’d cultivated a portion of the forest, building paths, putting in metal rides, swings, barrels, and a merry-go-round.

  For a long time, that area had been a vague public park called the Reforestation Camp. Bea and June had often hiked there on Sundays. Bea had a picture from one picnic with Bill Alberts—at the time he was courting June, or her, or was it both of them?—wearing a corduroy jacket with patches, and a bow tie.

  Now that place was the site of the new zoo. It no longer seemed so far out of town, either, and it had lost its quaint, slightly sinister feel. It was one of the main family tourist attractions of Green Bay. There was a glossy pamphlet about it offered at the information kiosk near the car rentals in the airport. But people had once been afraid to take their children there.

  “They’re the good prisoners,” June used to say when another mother questioned her, the mother of a friend Peggy wanted to bring along.

  What did they expect? Chain gangs? Abductions?

  The prisoners did the maintenance. They kept the trails clear and cleaned the cages of the few animals. Bea recalled a skunk, a raccoon, maybe even a badger, the state mascot. All local beasts, not the colorful exotics of today, most of which would never normally be found in North America. And Bea didn’t remember ever hearing that anything had happened to a child there. Nothing done by any of those men.

  Now Marion Betz was driving out in her Taurus wagon to the old camp office with her camera and tape recorder. She was writing up the history of the place. She would also gather the Popsicle-stick models the prisoners had made, and the animal keepers’ chronicles of daily feedings, animal illness, birth and death.

  It would make a good exhibit. And the ground trails families still walked on, the tall trees they hushed under, would be remembered for their planters and keepers—for a little while longer at least.

  Running out to her car, the box, now empty, held over her head to keep it dry, Bea thought that jobs, many of them—hers, Marion’s—could grow or contract. You could push the edges out more and more or you could do so little that you barely did anything at all.

  After June left, Bea spent a good six years on the Vandermill development, starting with the paperwork and bank loans, all the way through to sod and planted trees. Since then, she’d been casting about, selling the odd house here or there, waiting for another big project. Last summer, she’d even driven down to Shell Lake for a knitting camp, never again.

  Since her father died, Bea had reached an all-time point of diminishment. Soon she would have to rev up a little. At the very least, she’d have to list her father’s office.

  When Bea and her mother finally opened the cabinet of confidential files, they found old secrets, mostly irrelevant now. Which pregnancy was a well-liked teacher’s fault and how and where it ended, whose knife wound was given by everyone’s favorite mother. Most of the parties by now were dead or moved. Apparently, secrets expired, too. Whether passed among people, used, or kept lifelessly in a dim jar.

  “Like Christmas cake,” her mother mumbled, “worth nothing the day after.”

  Bea had heard that said about a girl’s virginity.

  Her mother had certainly taken plenty of care over that. She’d kept her daughter inside, a secret. But then she’d missed the date she should’ve set her out with a flourish, as the centerpiece. That’s what the South knew how to do, with its debutante balls.

  Maybe her mother was only waiting for her to blossom, be ready to wear the weight of all those eyes. There were pictures of her sister, Elaine, all through the house. Elaine as a baby, Elaine in a swing, Elaine set atop a pony. Elaine went through a bad stage, then turned beautiful and stayed there. Even now, though she’d thickened with motherhood. Hazel kept waiting for Bea to turn. There were very few pictures of Bea.

  Also, Hazel knew too much. As the wife of Dr. Maxwell, she knew what happened to girls, even to the best girls, from the old families. She never once told a friend, although several times over the years, their speculation, their gossip, came close to a mystery she understood. Then she had no choice but to become very quiet, as she had been when her husband talked, lying next to her in the dark bed at night.

  The doctor�
�s confidentiality stopped with her; she was where he placed his secrets. Yes, she had been a good doctor’s wife.

  But what about her details, her secrets?

  Now, sometimes, she wondered if she should have been less scrupulous. Her friends might’ve talked to her more about Bea. No, she had kept silent and held her daughter’s secrets aloft, when she would’ve been better off as one of the crowd. She’d never laid her real problems out on the table. That would have seemed to her a betrayal of Bea. But would it have been?

  Marie Winslow, the most beautiful girl in twenty years, had been made pregnant by an older man in town, a married person who was still alive. Still married.

  Girls were brought in from the country for virginity checks.

  Even repairs.

  One mother demanded stitches. “Doctor, it was a—I don’t want to say the word, but it wasn’t her fault. The equivalent of a theft.”

  “And who was the thief?”

  “Someone we thought was a friend. Who was staying with us.”

  A young man who was now thriving down in Milwaukee—a city councilman—had grown up his whole life a hermaphrodite.

  That baby of Marie’s—it was a big child, too, coming out of that slim underage girl. Marie returned afterward, but she was never the same. Hazel always imagined the delicate beautiful shelf of a hipbone, cracked.

  Bea watched her mother finger through the files, trembling. Her father had been a modest man, too fearful. “I’m no Jonas Salk,” he used to say.

  These had been her secrets, too, which she had kept for her husband. Perhaps at some expense to herself.

  And now what were they? Old files. Yellowed, flaking.

  What had she expected to find here? Something about herself?