Off Keck Road

by Mona Simpson

  Laid horizontally on top of the neat wedged files was a clipping from The Press Gazette. Also brittle, frail, headlined GREEN BAY’S ONLY CASE OF POLIO. DOCTORS BELIEVE IT CAME FROM THE VACCINE. In the photo, Shelley sat posed between her parents. They all three seemed to be wearing their best clothes, smiling.

  XIV

  Bill Alberts took Shelley to the car lot and asked what color she liked.

  “Your car, you decide; doesn’t matter what I like.”

  He looked at her a strange way, his gaze flat, like a knife. “You don’t think I could drive, at my age?”

  “I’ll drive whatever color you want. Still your car.”

  “Now, what am I going to do with a car I can’t drive?” He sighed. “You lose interest. In so many things.”

  Shelley thought restaurants were the real reason he bought her the Jeep Cherokee wagon. He probably wanted to go back to Madison and get some more of that meat with the cherries in the sauce. She made up her mind to duplicate that sauce. Usually, if she tasted something twice, she could do it at home. If they were someplace and he loved a dish with a flavor she couldn’t identify, she’d say she had to go to the bathroom and walk right into the kitchen and ask the cook. Most times, the cook told her.

  She picked red.

  He spent an hour haggling with the salesman, arranging for the car to be delivered to a store on the outskirts of town where a certain sound system he had in mind could be installed. He wanted the speakers to be just so. Jazz was the one thing that still interested him.

  Every night, after dinner in a restaurant, she took him to the Riverclub and got him settled at his table. That was their routine. He had a drum set there and another at home. Most nights, he didn’t play anymore, but he always listened. And he talked to his friends. Shelley never stayed. The whole Port Plaza mall was now open late, and she would take a drink from the bar and wander through the lighted indoor streets, stores winking on both sides.

  He put the red truck in Shelley’s name.

  “What if I quit you?” she asked.

  “I’ll be out a truck and a girl,” he said.

  That was the first time she really thought, I lucked out.

  More times followed. And during the first year, no one seemed to notice that he was buying her things. The Jeep was first, but that probably seemed to most people a necessary perk of the job. Those who knew it was in Shelley’s name thought there must be some good reason, likely having to do with insurance, and that if Shelley left, the car would decently revert to the next nurse.

  “You probably don’t remember it here before the mall,” Bill said. They were downtown in December. The Jeep was already almost two years old.

  “Oh, yeah, I was born yesterday, sure.”

  This was one of their themes, a tree many small jokes grew out of. All the things Shelley didn’t remember because she wasn’t even alive then.

  Bill Alberts thought it was somehow terribly funny that there was a Shelley at all. Someone born so long after everything he cherished had already ended. Someone younger than his own children, who were all in the East, two in medical schools, like his parents. Having children had worked out well, he thought. Could’ve had even more. The youngest, about whom he’d worried least, were turning out just as well, maybe better. Could have had six.

  But Shelley did too remember the old Main Street, when only Kendalls was six stories and all the other stores were low.

  Keck Road was just far enough out that her family had made coming downtown their Christmas trip. They drove in to eat an early supper at Kaap’s, in one of the dark wooden booths with little hexagonal lights: hamburgers on rye bread, the meat bleeding through and mixing with the odd, sweet, hot mustard. Over the bar, a lighted picture of a waterfall seemed to perpetually renew itself, making rushes, jumping foamy waves—provided by a Wisconsin beer company. Their mom and dad ordered Tom and Jerrys and let the kids sip the fluff. Their dad drank in gulps, so they could see his Adam’s apple bobbing, while their mom took an eternity, eating it with a spoon.

  On the way out, they passed through the wide hallway of dark wood, murals, and more dim tiny lights, and then, in the foyer, the bakery case on one side, full of colored cookies in the shapes of fruits, on the other side all the fancy candies, little bars, cased in paper, the foil ends glittering, with beautiful painted scenery from Switzerland.

  Their mom and dad always used to joke about the cash register. Mr. Kaap’s ancient, bone-thin sister Mabel worked there. She lurched over the keys as if her tiny fingers were attached with strings. People said she was there every night of the year, Thanksgiving too and Christmas. When she got old, they stopped the joking.

  Everyone knew she died there, standing. There were no children anywhere in the family. All the property was sold and left to Bea Maxwell, to distribute to charity. Mabel Kaap hadn’t known Bea well. She just remembered her collecting for March of Dimes.

  After Kaap’s, Shelley’s parents took the children to see the windows at Kendalls. There were other stores on North Main, brick buildings, each a little different, but all she remembered were the mechanical windows of Kendalls, each perfect like a page inside a book.

  Now that she understood what Jewish was, it seemed odd that the Kendalls had gone to all that work making the windows with their lights.

  “Business,” Bill Alberts said, shrugging. “To them it was business.”

  Shelley and her brothers and sister rode around town in their father’s cement truck, starting with the big neighborhoods. It was a real show. People went to trouble, whole scenes blinking on and off in their front yards. The wide, many-windowed mansions had mostly Santas and reindeer. They wound through the streets and blocks slowly, farther and farther out—where, in the small houses with only one front window, they saw more crèches—until they ended up near where they started, at their own church, Saint Philip’s, for the midnight Mass.

  And now Shelley was on the top floor of Kendalls and he was telling her to try on this and this and this, getting ready to buy her more.

  Shelley knew she’d cheated. She hadn’t even gone to a four-year school. What was she doing in these same dressing rooms with the doctors’ wives and the career women?

  “I don’t need such stuff,” she said as he was piling things onto the wooden register desk. “I’m fine with what I’ve got.” Shelley stood with her hands in her pockets, as if chastened, the way athletes sometimes look dressed up in regular clothes.

  Just then, Bea Maxwell appeared from behind a mirror, where she was looking at herself holding a big leather sack made to look like the ones mailmen carried. Her leg canted out a certain way, her heel lifted from her shoe.

  “Spiffing up the girl,” she whispered to Bill Alberts after hellos were said all around and Shelley ducked her head down behind the racks. “Christmas bonus,” he said.

  “A bonus for you, too.” She laughed.

  Bea said she’d been on the first floor buying ribbon for her Christmas balls. On Christmas Day, Bea and her mother gave a formal sit-down lunch for nineteen, and Bea presented every guest with a ball made of cloves stuck into an orange. Bea was known for these clove balls, and people would ask her how far along she was. In Kendalls, she told Bill Alberts, “Half-done. Ten more to go. It is the seventeenth of December.” Several people in the office had offered to buy them, so of course she felt obliged to give each of them one, though without inviting them to the lunch.

  If you were a woman in Green Bay, eventually you took up something you did for Christmas. Marion Betz at the museum gave old pots she found in junk stores, planted with forced bulbs. The only man Bea knew who entered into this ritual of exertion was Father Matthew, who was famous in a small circle for leaving a glass milk bottle filled with his own homemade eggnog (spiked) outside your door in the snow. He didn’t even write notes or cards; you just knew it was from him. Bill Alberts made a trip to the bank to get unfolded bills for his cash bonuses. The older Bea became, the less it seemed to her that most
men participated in festivities at all. They attended.

  Shelley was hunched by the cash register, stubbornly repeating that she didn’t want any of it.

  “Ta-ta,” Bea said, excusing herself.

  Watching her walk away, a tall woman in expensive woolen clothes, Shelley suddenly missed her own family.

  On the wooden escalator going down, while Bill Alberts was trying to convince her that no one deserved such things, that every woman who shopped on that floor had luck every bit as random as hers—Bea Maxwell, for example, who was just born rich—Shelley got the idea that she’d like to buy her mother one of those coffee machines. They probably had them here in the gourmet basement.

  Bill’s old nanny had taught Shelley how to make his coffee in the morning and she’d gotten to like it, too. It was the one thing about his life she thought she probably couldn’t give up and go back to the old way. Later on, it turned out, there was quite a bit more. One of the restaurants Bill Alberts went to took his favorite dish off the menu—noodles made with tomatoes and wild mushrooms. She’d said, “I can try and make that.” She didn’t measure or look at books. And by now, she’d transformed Mabel Kaap’s German rose beds into a kitchen garden, with corn, tomatoes, peas. She’d shrugged when Bea Maxwell mentioned the roses. “He likes food. Different kinds of stuff.”

  The one time Shelley’s mom had come to visit at his house while he was out at work, Shelley had made a pot of his coffee and even she liked it.

  Downstairs, Shelley picked out the whole works—the machine, the grinder, filters, beans, everything—and paid with her own money, cash. He stood there next to her and didn’t offer, but she was wondering the whole time if he would. She wouldn’t have let him, no way.

  By the time they got to the Jeep she wasn’t mad at him anymore. Here he was paying her to help him and he was carrying two big shopping bags of new clothes for her.

  He looked at her in a funny way. Maybe because of the polio, he thought she needed fixing up. “A fixer-upper” was what she’d heard Bea Maxwell say to him about a house they were selling.

  The one thing he really wanted to give her was music. In the house and in the car, he played her his favorites: Chet Baker, Bill Evans, Charlie Parker. She couldn’t really follow it. “It’s your dime,” she always said when he asked if she minded.

  She didn’t mind when he had it on, but it shook right off of her. Most of it sounded the same to her. She couldn’t tell one from the other, any more than she could with rain, a different day’s rain. She preferred songs with words, ones about love.

  That night, she wanted to drive out to her ma’s. She called Bea Maxwell to see if she could take him home from the Riverclub.

  Big surprise. Bea said she’d be glad to.

  Shelley liked driving out to Keck Road in the Jeep. She used to go weekends to her gramma’s house, but not every weekend, since George and them moved to Florida. So last summer, when her mom asked could Dean and Cathy stay there just to get on their feet again after the baby, she’d had to say yes.

  The house wasn’t really her gramma’s anymore. The smells would all be different now, what with baby stuff. Shelley didn’t even like to go in.

  She parked in the drive behind her dad’s truck and went through the kitchen door. They had never used the front door as a door. The last time Shelley remembered it open was when her mom used to sit on the two cement steps—what they called a porch—years ago. The color in those days, in her memory anyway, was different, less bright. The sky was a paler blue, the bricks of the house liver-toned and the cement just gray. Her mother must not have been thirty yet, but she already had four kids. She was tall and slim, even in loose print dresses. She wore rolled-down white socks and tie-up shoes and her hair was already wife-short. She sat on the little cement square outside the front door trying to teach Boo Boo how to read, her finger tracing words in a book. It had taken days and days, maybe years—Boo Boo had always been slow—and now he was back, a veteran of the Vietnam War, living in Milwaukee. Shelley hardly ever saw him. She couldn’t remember if he ever did learn to read right. After having had him around with his big face and slow-apprehending eyes all those years, they should have been friends. The two with something off. But he was the brother who had picked on her. The good-looking ones were always remote and kind.

  Everything inside was the same. Her mom cleaning up the kitchen counters, her dad’s legs stretched out long and straight like Abe Lincoln’s in a chair in front of the tube. There was a playpen set up in there still: her youngest brother’s baby.

  “Dean and Cath went to the movies,” her mother said.

  Her father stood up when she came in, patted her shoulder, but then he was back to his show. Her mom was the one who would talk to her. They stood at the end of the house, in the little hall where the linen closet was, between the two bedrooms.

  She told her mother she wanted to bring Bill out with her for Christmas. “He doesn’t got nobody. Where else can he go?”

  “Oh, of all things,” her mother said. “Kimmie will be home with the kids. She’d have a cow. People would talk. Like that Bea. She talks.” Shelley’s mother made a motion with her hand that meant, Blabbermouth.

  But it wasn’t only gossip that made the women use that gesture for Bea. They all gossiped themselves. So what was it?

  Maybe only that she was alone. That she didn’t have children. Shelley wasn’t sure. But she didn’t like her, either. “And he knows her, too,” she said. “They eat breakfast together every Thursday.”

  “I’m telling ’em all at Saint Philip’s. I say, ‘Naw, she works for him. It’s just a job and they’re friends, that’s all, but it’s getting so I don’t even know myself. Anyway, he’s such a short little poop.’ ”

  Shelley shook her head. “Nothing’s doing.”

  The way her mother looked at her—Shelley had to pinch herself to remember she was telling the truth. All her life, if someone accused her, she felt the ring of a bell deep in her body and she believed it, that what they said was true, it was, and that was why other things were the way they were. She couldn’t stop the falling until she was at the bottom of a stone well—cold, slow, almost unable to speak.

  Her mother and them, they never guessed about George, but they must have noticed something, and that’s where the spot of wrong felt sore.

  “You know what they’re saying,” her mother whispered. “They’re saying you’re getting to be like a prostitute almost.”

  “No” was all Shelley could answer.

  “Well, I said so, too. And so did Cath. Cath was real mad. She said, ‘With a guy that age, he probably can’t anymore.’ But everyone knows they still want to try.”

  Shelley went back to the kitchen sink, craned her neck over, and drank from the faucet. The cold water out here tasted good. It was well water, still—what she missed the most living in town.

  Then she gave her mom the wrapped boxes with the coffeemaker and all. She told her what was inside, so she wouldn’t have to open it right then.

  “Jeez, Shelley, it’s so much bother,” she said.

  That was it. No thank-you or anything. And Shelley could tell she wouldn’t use it. You knew right away with her mother and a gift. Now, if one of the boys had brought it, that would be a different story.

  Even so, Shelley asked Bill Alberts to her family’s Christmas, but he declined. He’d go to the Riverclub on Christmas Eve to hear some bass player and then over to Bea Maxwell’s house the next morning.

  “Though, God knows, the food would be better anywhere else,” he said.

  XV

  When her mother died, for a long time Bea kept busy. She took great care to honor the wishes her mother had expressed regarding the funeral. After all, they’d had a long time to plan. Her mother died June 14, 1984.

  She had left detailed preferences, much as, years earlier, she’d organized her parties. She wanted roses, definitely, clustered together in round glass vases, and if there was anything else at
all, it should be branches. No ferny things. Or baby’s breath, God forbid.

  Standing in the back of the florist’s, Bea thought of June’s store in Arizona. June would get it right away, what her mother wanted. June had always admired Hazel’s taste, which even Bea had to admit was somewhat standard. Three or four of the more subtle women Hazel’s age wore the same cardigans, chose the same muted shades for their living room drapes. But June’s taste—Bea had never seen anything else quite like it. It was almost what you’d have to call a talent. As original as June was, though, she didn’t have the confidence Hazel and her friends took for granted. That was a difference, Bea had thought to herself many times since June left. A talent was really something you were born with. Taste had more to do with money, growing up around one kind of furniture you were taught was better than the other kinds.

  Her mother had asked for specific music, Schubert songs and an aria from Lakmé. Bea told Bill Alberts—her music adviser for many years—and he’d found the musicians. And Lil would play a piano piece by John Robert Poe.

  Father Matthew would deliver the eulogy. By the end of her life, Bea’s mother would sigh and say, “Too bad he’s a priest. Maybe he should just leave, like so many of them do now. Wouldn’t that be something? Course, then what would he do? He’s not really trained in anything. When you think about it, it’s not a great background.”

  Bea shrugged. “How about real estate?”

  That was how they laughed together. Small soft jokes that no one else would find funny.

  “And look at how well you’ve done,” her mother said. “Really. Really.”

  Maybe, maybe, her mother would’ve even come around to Bill Alberts.

  Talking to Father Matthew about the service, she found herself, for the first time, sitting across a desk from him in his office.

  It was a strange room, absolutely silent, lit with the stained-glass windows in muted 1950s colors, muddy pink, brown, and pale green. “My mother and dad,” she heard herself saying. “I don’t know if they, if they really . . . ”