Off Keck Road

by Mona Simpson

  They both sat quiet for a while, absorbed by the peace of the room.

  “Raising two children together, living in a house every day, that is a sexual act,” Father Matthew finally said.

  “She said she missed his warm back at night.”

  Father Matthew nodded as if this had been expected. But he had known them together, had heard Hazel’s exasperation talking about her husband. Surely she had been a dutiful wife. But Bea found herself wondering if there was anything personal in it. Sometimes, Bea felt a spike of something—even rage?—but then it subsided as if embarrassed, always unexplained. It would have been important for Hazel to be a good wife. To anyone.

  “Maybe she did love him, then,” Bea said, a small sob escaping the corner of her mouth, continuing a conversation with herself that Father Matthew was, nonetheless, in his silence, steering. “It was just hard for her to feel that most of the time.”

  “But she could feel her attachment to you,” Father Matthew said. “When she first came to me here, in this room, it was because you’d moved home and she was worried about you. She thought you wouldn’t find enough here, after Chicago.”

  Her mother had selected her own outfit, her own jewels. She was going to be buried in one of Bea’s dark brown shawls.

  The jewelry became a problem, though. Bea’s sister didn’t want to bury her in it. “That watch is full of diamonds,” Elaine said, here at last, in for the action. Well—the action, so to speak, Bea thought. Her sister hadn’t made it in time to see their mother alive.

  “Those are real pearls,” Elaine murmured.

  Bea’s sister didn’t seem to expect or want or try for any experience here. No walk, no conversation that could make a memory. No, her real life was in Minnesota and she was only here to uncover things to take back there. It was as if here she couldn’t feel. And Bea was a part of what dulled her so.

  Her sister was a person who was sure of things. Sure of her life and its importance.

  Children, a household, no one would deny that Elaine was living a productive life. But weren’t there other things that could matter?

  They were in the dim morgue, their mother literally between them, frowning. That frown became an issue later on, too.

  “She wants to wear the things our father bought for her,” Bea said.

  “It’s up to you,” the undertaker added. “But if it was my mother, I’d think she’d want one of you to get it. Or one of your kids.”

  Of course Gregg Garsh knew Bea had no children. Everyone was always, in the end, on the side of people with kids. Why was love for children more esteemed than love for parents? Even a man who’d seen you in church every Sunday for the past twenty-five years. And Bea and her mother had always been conscientiously kind to Marge Garsh since the divorce.

  After all those evenings, nights when she and her mother sat on their porch looking over the darkening backyard, drinking their tea, now Bea was outnumbered.

  Bea tried one more time. “She did select. She gave each of us gifts. But she didn’t give us these.”

  “How old was your ma?” the undertaker asked.

  “She was eighty-one, Gregg. I think you know that.”

  In that way, they won. And because Bea would have none of the dividing or fighting, she let her sister take it all.

  She remembered her mother with a three-inch pencil, making notes on a lined card. Bea had tried to see every one of those wishes materialized.

  But now she had failed. Her mother’s hands were buried bare.

  XVI

  Bea and Bill Alberts met for breakfast every Thursday. At Bosses, they had their own booth. Bill walked, along the river, and was always there, a little before seven, dressed and dapper, sleeves already rolled up, dipping his dry toast in black coffee and reading the newspapers, when Bea arrived. He’d put money on the tabletop jukebox and set it for Nat King Cole’s “Route 66.”

  They talked, ate, and then got to-gos and drove out in Bea’s car to see the new listings.

  When Jim Dehn handed them their cups from behind the counter, a revolving display of pipes and pipe cleaners, he passed Bea a dime, with a wink.

  All week long, she looked forward to Thursday.

  Her mother had died and there was an immense stillness in her nights. The eternal conversation, infinitely detailed, had finally ended, leaving Bea in a large house, which seemed itself duller, lackluster.

  But every Thursday, she and Bill talked. Often they discussed starting a book club, but they never went about making the necessary plans. Bea didn’t take on the task because she felt reluctant to invite others. What if she and Bill didn’t like them, once they were in?

  Bill Alberts and Bea had June in common. He’d pursued her once, if not for very long; he always was a realist. But he still got a kick out of her adventures and asked after her. When Bea received a letter, she brought it and read the more audacious parts out loud. (“Guess who’s blond!” the last one said. “And I am having more fun.”) They both laughed about her in the same way, glad she was somewhere in Arizona, with her wildflowers and bright colors.

  Bea had been surprised and gratified by the finite term of Bill’s pursuit of June. It had been pronounced andpublic, but shorter than his interest in Bea. That alleviated a certain humiliation Bea had felt when it ended. No, even June had not been the grand passion in Bill Alberts’s life. That was some consolation, Bea supposed, since she hadn’t been, either. It made her wonder if there even was such a thing.

  He had one passion and that was jazz.

  Green Bay had become a regular stop on musicians’ tours, as he’d hoped it would when he’d bought the Riverclub, though jazz itself, he told her, was becoming rare. Its audience, and not only here, had dwindled. People wanted to hear other things. The younger people wanted rock ’n’ roll. Even Tony Bennett was scraping bottom. Most of the crooners were playing wherever they could get a job. Bill himself had played drums for more than forty years. Once, when Benny Goodman’s band toured Green Bay, he had filled in for a sick drummer. “Glared at me all night,” he told Bea. “Didn’t like my playing.”

  But he had chosen to stay here in Green Bay. “Why did you?” Bea asked one Thursday morning.

  “I used to tell my friends I was the only one whose mother worked when he was growing up and the only one who had her living with him now.” He waved his hands the same as he had eighteen years ago when he’d hired her. “My sisters left. I was the one to look after them. See my parents into their last beds,” he said. “Tuck them in.”

  Was her reason also his reason? Now, Bea thought, she’d finally gotten the answer to something she’d always wondered. And here the flirt, the womanizer, the putative philanderer had made his life at home in order to take care of his parents.

  Bea had seen him drum.

  He was one of those musicians who look worst, their most contorted, playing. And yet he played, wanted to play, more than anything. There was something beautiful in it.

  After his divorce, he’d never chased Bea again. She was either not pretty enough or not poor enough; she’d never known exactly which. Her mother, of course, had believed it was the latter.

  Or maybe it was because he’d already asked, long ago.

  Perhaps he’d merely accepted her refusal.

  And now Shelley. Shelley who was tootling around town in her new red Jeep, slapping down the platinum credit card he’d given her.

  For years, Bea hadn’t trusted him because he was a flirt.

  And he still was, even with a hip that hadn’t healed in the four years since he’d broken it, a prescription that gave him thicker and thicker lenses, and a revoked license that declared him legally blind. She’d wondered if he said the things that he’d said to her to everybody. By now she knew he did, but somehow that didn’t seem to make them any less good.

  One night at the Riverclub, for a Chamber of Commerce dinner, she recognized his familiar still-headed quality of attention as he listened to the waitress who brough
t them their drinks. The waitress had a son at home who’d been diagnosed with a condition. Bill wrote the name of a doctor on a napkin and told her he’d call the man tomorrow; the doctor had been one of his mother’s students.

  He was a flirt, no doubt. But, she found herself wondering, was that so bad? Surely there were worse things. Bea’s mother had always said he asked Bea because he knew she had the good sense to say no. What might have warranted a yes?

  Was it just another way he flung beauty (white lace handkerchiefs) onto the life they both knew? (Green Bay could certainly use a little.)

  To help a waitress command respect from a doctor, to make a real estate agent feel alluring, perhaps this was his compassion.

  She ended most Friday evenings with him in the Riverclub, listening to his Cocktail Combo.

  One Thursday morning in November, she told him her favorite novel was Middlemarch. She’d first read it in college and was reading it again. It was her favorite because the two best people never got together.

  “Realistic,” he said.

  During a phone call from Arizona, June sounded amazed to hear that Bea and Bill Alberts were seeing each other outside the office.

  “Just last Friday, he played at the Riverclub,” Bea said.

  “I hear he’s not even very good,” June whispered into the phone.

  Bea, aghast, felt her breath socked out of her.

  What did it matter? To have a lifelong interest like that was admirable, remarkable.

  The closest Bea came to that kind of devotion was—what? She wrote to the local government when she thought somebody deserved something. She still rode a bicycle (in brown corduroy knickers), still golfed, still skied. She signed petitions to preserve the city’s trees. She knit a blanket and a whole layette for the baby next door. Hundreds of Green Bay houses still displayed her “new home throws.” Mostly, she supposed, it had been a life of talking about other people, thinking about love, a kind of love, it turned out, she had never experienced.

  At times, she felt that was a failure of hers, some resistance, a hard piece inside her like the stones people got at her age, some mineral blockage. Other times, she thought probably all that would’ve been fine if she had a slightly more symmetrical face, more space between her top lip and nose.

  Most times, she thought it was the world’s problem, assuming that everyone had to be two by two, like animals boarding Noah’s ark.

  Bea supposed she used to be a gossip. June, even with the hardships she’d no doubt borne in the move, her child grown up and gone, had not lost her sly edge. And Bea had. With no attachments to speak of except to a dead mother and her friends.

  “You should see me now,” June said idly. “I’m unrealistically thin.”

  Toward the end of the call, when Bea thought it was time to hang up, June kept talking. “Say,” she said. “I’ve got some news. I told you about the person I’m seeing, Hank. Well, he’s a very nice man. And we got married. We just did it here at city hall, a Saturday morning, no big fuss or anything. He wanted to. So you’re it,” she said lightly.

  XVII

  There had probably been a thousand nights. Alone in the house.

  Bea now had her pattern. Home by dark, not before. Those late afternoon hours were deadly.

  Not for her the four o’clock walk along the river that Mabel Kaap and her brother had taken every day, looking at the garden flowers. Not that the gardens were so much to see anymore, since the young families had been buying up the old houses and moving in. They were too busy. Both he and she worked, and they had kids, too.

  Listen, I’m with you, Bea felt like saying. Bea wasn’t doing much gardening, either. She felt obliged to keep up her mother’s roses, but already the hedges were looking ragged. Rosemary grew like a weed. Maybe it was a weed; Bea didn’t know. Her mother had always invited the gardener in for a cold pop. Then she worked alongside him, in her patched pants and English gardening gloves. “If you don’t talk to people, you don’t get their best work out of them,” she always said.

  Men pay, Bea thought again; women give gifts. But gift giving was endlessly more complicated.

  She had observed her neighbors and clients. Most women still rushed about, yearning for permanence, with unstructured, flighty, busy days. The difference now was that it seemed children—their children’s lives—they were trying to perfect, not their homes, or not so much anymore.

  Of course, any of these things could be done professionally. You could be a decorator or even an architect if you really wanted to be in the business of making home beauty. You could be a teacher if you wanted to help children, or a camp director, or a librarian. From Bea’s experience, professionalism added a note of sanity to most pursuits.

  But any of the ladies Bea’s mother knew would have been insulted if you’d paid them for what they were doing. She’d made the mistake of trying in her early days, once or twice, as her mother became weak and couldn’t keep up the little touches in her house and garden the way she’d liked to. And Bea just didn’t have the knack for it. So at first, she attempted the Chicago solution: offer to hire some talented person. Well, that was a mistake. Here, they took it as an insult. Their eye, their taste, their exquisite placements for sale! No, they did it for love, and they most certainly did not love Bea. Once, June had been told, “She asked me to trim her tree. Can you imagine?”

  The house on Mason had changed since Bea’s mother died. Bea had kept Hazel’s housekeeper, Beth Penk, but she came only once a week now and Bea answered her own door.

  When Bea was young, there had been an old woman, Mrs. Hennigan, who lived two down in the shingled house. She invited everyone in at Halloween for apples and popcorn. Apples and popcorn! Who wanted that?

  But the parents made their children stay a respectable fifteen minutes before running off, disguised, into the wild night. “She’s lonely,” they explained. “She’s all by herself. She doesn’t know what kids like.”

  The neighborhood had changed, turned on its axis, become young again. Strollers and bikes littered the front lawns. A couple from California had moved in next door. The woman was the new local TV anchor. They’d explained to Bea—she’d sold them the Patricks’ house—that they didn’t intend to stay more than five years. She—the wife—needed experience in what they called “a secondary market.” She got up at four every morning and ran out to her car dressed up above the waist, wearing sweats and sneakers below.

  Bea liked that. She had read, in New York magazine, all about the young women wearing suits, black stockings, and running shoes in the subway on their way to work. Some people had written in against it; others thought it was fine, the only sensible thing.

  Her neighbors had two children and he did something at home all day on a computer.

  To them, Bea realized, she was the old woman. So she tried not to be like Mrs. Hennigan. She never offered the children anything even vaguely healthy, never inquired about their piano lessons and did they practice?

  No, the deadly afternoon hours belonged to children sluffing home from school and gardeners turning on automatic sprinklers. They stretched on, the sunset behind the smokestacks morosely slow, the faint tinkle of the ice-cream truck grinding on your chest.

  Bea thought it was just her. Because she was alone and didn’t have family. But the dad from next door told her he hated those hours, too, those long hours hanging like wet sheets. “All the moms do,” he said. “And I count myself one of them.”

  Apparently, this had come up in the sandbox. Every day, he packed up the kids and drove to the mall, just to have someplace public to be.

  Bea liked to step outside downtown, where people who worked at shops were taking their coffee breaks, talking animatedly about what was going on sale, then walking back to work. No, downtown, it was not the end of the day yet.

  She understood why Bill Alberts lingered in his office and then strolled over to Kaap’s or Bosses for his dinner.

  She’d taken to staying longer, too, heari
ng the odd note of his jazz come pinging through the open door like a rubber band snapped across a classroom. Some nights, she wandered out with him, both of them carrying papers on clipboards, their work still with them the way their notebooks had been, in college.

  As a woman, though, she could not eat out as often as he did. Not if she hoped to keep her shape. She’d spent years building a wardrobe, piece by piece; she wasn’t about to start over now, in a size 12 (the size, she’d read, Marilyn Monroe had worn). Most nights she ate a salad at home. She’d learned to make a dressing she liked. Her mother had always just bought dressing at the supermarket. Hazel had been a convenience cook. She’d used lots of cans and mixes—“There’s no difference,” she used to say derisively about the ridiculous people who insisted on making it all from scratch—and concentrated on spectacular-looking desserts and salads with Jell-O.

  Bill Alberts didn’t eat out every night, either, not anymore, now that Shelley had become such a cook. Bea had been over there once or twice and seen her barefoot in the kitchen, a bandanna around her head, throwing things into a wok, all without measuring.

  Bea usually went to bed with a magazine and a glass of wine. Although it was a large house, Bea lived in it as if it were a one-bedroom.

  Most of what she did at home, she did from bed.

  Monday was a good night because her New York arrived. She would tuck under the covers and try to read slowly, to make it last. It usually took her a full week to work through the Sunday New York Times, which they ordered for her at Bosses. She particularly enjoyed the real estate listings in the back of the magazine section. You could hit the million-dollar mark there with one sale, even half of one.

  Her long phone calls to June in Arizona took place on top of her comforter, in white pajamas. Bea had taken to calling or, when June phoned, making some excuse to get off and call back in a few minutes—she realized that June was probably worried about the expense. “I need to pee,” she liked saying, until June, who, with her portable phone and the time difference, was often at the shop making floral arrangements while they talked, said, “Oh, go ahead and pee. Live a little.”