Off Keck Road Read online

  People thought you got it from not being clean. One of the ladies from the church came out and told Shelley’s mother it was because she didn’t wash her vegetables. And that wasn’t true. She always washed.

  In those days, they thought it wasn’t quite as good to eat garden food you grew at home. Everybody knew at the canning factory they sanitized with heat.

  Other people thought the polio came from swimming in the public pools. But out where they lived, they didn’t swim in pools. There was a public pool in a park but you had to pay to get in, and then it was another quarter to get the locker key. Plus it was driving distance away. Shelley and her brothers swam in creeks and quarries, wherever they found clear water.

  On the other side of the river, in a cluttered office, Dr. Herbert Maxwell gave the vaccinations one at a time, to children whose mothers brought them in by appointment. In 1961, he still gave shots for polio. He hadn’t switched over to the live vaccine. (Two years later, he would add it, keeping Salk’s as a booster shot.) None of the children on the register from his practice contracted the disease during the years he performed inoculations. In his file marked “Polio” was an article he’d clipped and underlined. “Before releasing the vaccine, Jonas Salk tested it in 1953 on himself and his own family, his wife and his three sons.”

  III

  What they said about Shelley on Keck Road was, She’s always by the gramma. She just likes the gramma.

  Even Shelley didn’t know how it started. Her dad told her she used to walk over to her grandmother’s house when she was only three or four. So it started before her leg was heavy or her smile dragged to the left.

  When Shelley was old enough to go to school, she worried about what her gramma had to do all day while Shelley, always the tallest, was sitting at her desk at the back, so bored that time became granular, round balls to touch and count. She thought her gramma and the grandmother across the road should do something together, whatever old ladies did.

  Gram Umberhum lived next to her married son, George. She wore rubber boots halfway up to her knees, and overalls. Shelley’s gramma put on stockings even under her robe, so her legs were the color of dark toast. She once told Shelley, “Always wear stockings. Under anything. Even pants.” There had been anxiety in the instruction—a comb lightly pressed into the skin of her arm.

  But even different, both ladies were grandmas, old and alone.

  Shelley thought her gramma might like to have a friend. They could go someplace together to eat, or join a card club where at the end they served a fancy dessert.

  Shelley loved her grandmother the way you love only one person, the person who would put your life over anything else. When her grandmother died, Shelley understood she would never be that way again, set apart.

  When Shelley suggested her gramma call the other grandmother on the telephone to make a plan, she answered, “She’s got her life and I’ve got mine.”

  That made sense to Shelley, as everything her gramma said did, only because she said it. Later, when Shelley thought of it, she told herself, Neither of them two had much of any life. But they did, she supposed. Just a kind of life that was hard to see.

  The two old ladies sometimes met when they walked out to their mailboxes. On those occasions, they stood on the road and talked.

  Once, when Shelley and Kim were over there baby-sitting, Peggy asked why their uncle Bob didn’t live with their gramma.

  Uncle Bob lived in the apartment over their gramma’s garage. In there was a room with a kitchen, and his own pots and pans hung on nails in the wall. Sometimes her gramma would cook extra for him and give it to Shelley to carry up in a pot.

  Why didn’t they live together? It was hard to say why, but they wouldn’t. They just never would.

  “It’s her brother, not her husband,” Gram Umberhum explained, turning from her stove. “There the husband’s dead, just like me.”

  The children were silent, absorbing the knowledge. Only husbands and wives lived together. Not brothers and sisters, when they were old. This still left questions. Why did Shelley’s gramma live in a nice house, with carpeting and her own TV in the living room and all the things houses had, and him in a room more like a shack, up in the garage?

  For that, nobody gave them any answer, and they knew enough not to ask.

  Shelley was her gramma’s favorite. After school, she went over and her gramma would fix her a liverwurst sandwich, slice it in four and cut the crusts off.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Shelley always said. “I eat crust.”

  Her gramma would open the kitchen window and throw the crusts out onto the snow, for the birds.

  After her snack Shelley would go out and work in the yard. She and her dad took care of the outside for her gramma. Shelley was the one who learned. Her oldest brother, Butch, tried, but their dad always scolded and he’d end up running inside. Pretty soon, they started calling him Boo Boo because he was always blubbering. Her second brother, Timmy, could do anything, but from when he was seven or eight, he was working for the nurseries, for pay. In summer, Shelley mowed; in fall, she raked; in winter, she shoveled. Even with the polio, she was strong. She once hacked a boulder out of her gramma’s garden and hauled it all the way out front, next to the mailbox, before anyone noticed.

  Her gramma would make dinner. She never let Shelley help her cook or even do the dishes. Shelley waited in the living room for everything to be on the table, the way a man would after coming back from work.

  She walked home from her gramma’s when it was falling dark. Between the two houses, there was old land. To Shelley, that undivided land meant the seasons. In autumn, it looked like Halloween, the big branches black, orange in the sunset sky. Later in the year, it would become a dark, clear blue.

  During a storm, her grandmother stood at her door, watching her, her little porch lamp on, making the snow where the light fell look fake, like Styrofoam.

  They didn’t have sidewalks. When it was clear, small stars were so numerous and bright, Shelley could hardly believe she wouldn’t have something in her hand just from seeing them.

  Winter was the longest season where they lived. At dusk, there were depths in the banks of snow, curves upon curves, a frozen sea, blue and more blue receding out the long plains, with no edges. The snow softened roofs and silos, blunting trees, shearing particulars as far as you could see.

  If you were outside, you were apt to be alone. There was the poignance of ending and faint yellow lights in the distance.

  Somewhere else, women were cooking in kitchens. Miles from here, men sat stiff-armed, driving their cars.

  You could see: The world would freeze again before it melted.

  Her mother always sighed when she saw Shelley come in, thinking how she could best use another pair of hands. There was always so much to do. An old playpen stayed set up in the middle of the living room. “Shelley, you give the baby his bath tonight,” their mother would say. “Kimmie, you heat up the bottles.” After the dimness of her gramma’s house, with only the light from the TV, there was too much noise and color.

  From the small square window in the corner room she shared with her sister, Shelley could still see the blue faint television light ghost over the snow.

  Once, Shelley’s gramma said, “Why don’t you go out and play with the kids your age?”

  Shelley didn’t think of it until later, but it was the same as Shelley saying that she should do something with the other gramma. Maybe it was natural if you loved a person to want them to have somebody besides just you.

  But Shelley didn’t want to. There weren’t many kids her age on Keck Road. Across the street, the youngest Umberhum was Nell, and she was years ahead, already at college. Petey was the age of her brothers. Down at the far end of the road, two kids lived in the house that was a tavern at night, but they belonged to Church of Modern Day Christ, which in those days made them seem like completely different people.

  The only kid on Keck Road who was in her
grade at school was Buddy Janson, a white-blond boy who wore black glasses and stayed inside all day with his fat mother. He would hide under her skirts, and he even wore skirts himself. He’d tip around in her high heels. And she just smiled, the fat mother, while this was going on. The other mothers shook their heads whenever they talked about it.

  His little brother, Wesley, was the opposite, always outside doing wheelies, even on the ice.

  IV

  In college, Bea and June Umberhum never became close. A few times, they veered close to being close, but it never stuck.

  But somehow now they were, because they both had been away. It was not only that they were from here and here again. They were back, they would each say, with a falling sigh meant to imply that the ends of their stories, the portion that included the startling redemption, had not yet begun.

  They both lived downtown, in apartments. Bea’s was on the top floor of a new building. June rented the second story of a house owned by a couple with a grown daughter, who could sometimes baby-sit Peggy.

  After college, Bea had worked in Chicago as a copywriter in an advertising agency. Then, when she was twenty-seven, her mother called one week and said she couldn’t peel the potatoes, her hands were so stiff. The next week, she couldn’t clean herself after defecating. Rheumatoid arthritis. Even with the special treatment other doctors gave Hazel because of her husband, they determined she could no longer drive. Bea’s omnipotent older sister was already married, living in Minneapolis, her first baby on the way.

  Bea resigned from the agency—offering two months’ notice; she felt that was enough, given the nature of her reason—and returned.

  Her father was against it; weirdly, she thought.

  “Come up for a visit, but whatever you do, don’t quit your job, for Pete’s sake. Older people get these things. Feet, fingers, teeth. She doesn’t need you to live here.”

  For years, Bea and her mother had puzzled over the myriad details the doctor deemed unnecessary. There was very little to do with anything but acute illness that was, to his mind, necessary.

  At first, Bea worked for The Press Gazette, reporting on the controversy surrounding the Reforestation Camp, built by inmates of the penitentiary. She also took photographs, the way she had for De Pere High’s Sentinel. Hers was the front-page picture of the children lighting candles on the Norway spruce in front of City Hall.

  This job allowed Bea time to drive her mother to her club meetings, to arrange her flowers (according to her directions; no, the iris taller, there, a bouquet has to have height at the center)—to do the small tasks that mattered but that the doctor could never have done. Bea followed instructions, even when they drove her crazy. Her mother was a member of the Saint Fialcra Gardeners Club, Bread and Book (“where we read and eat,” Hazel explained), Doctors’ Wives, and several bridge leagues.

  Those first years, Bea dated a few of the boys she’d known in high school, who were also home again. At least it seemed to her mother that she dated them. She never really had a steady, not that her mother knew of, not in the way other people meant when they used that word.

  Bea herself had often been unsure whether a Sunday-night excursion to the movies was an expression of romantic interest or of the more simple need for companionship.

  This uncertainty made Bea’s mother shake her head warily; in her day, there was no such thing as a coed excursion to the movies that was not a date. “What else could it be?” she’d say as they talked afterward at the kitchen table, drinking Ovaltine. Hazel always kept a store of Girl Scout cookies. She believed the girls of this generation, some of them, had let the young men get what they wanted too easily, spoiling it for everybody else.

  Bea’s mother had been careful to raise her with the right amount of fear, for a girl. And she’d found her intelligent daughter to be a quiet, absorbing student.

  She’d had smug moments of triumph when Bea was in high school that now pained her to remember. A number of her friends had had problems with their girls.

  “Boy-crazy,” she’d said then, in the car, on their way home from Lil’s house. It never seemed to happen that Bea was truly friends with a daughter of one of her friends, but the girls had known one another all their lives and could certainly entertain themselves together while their mothers talked downstairs.

  And her mother didn’t worry too much that Bea made other, different friends. Bea seemed, well, better than her friends’ girls were turning out.

  They were all tizzying about hair and makeup and dances. Her daughter showed the normal teenage excitements, too, but over different things. She loved sports and went cross-country skiing at night. She was active in the March of Dimes, and in 1953, she collected $428 worth of dimes, making the rounds of all the downtown shops and then bicycling out to collect from farmhouses and gas stations along the old highway. She was photographed for The Press Gazette with her dimes stacked up in towers; her mother sent a copy of that picture to Eleanor Roosevelt, who, eleven months later, sent one back of herself, standing with Adlai Stevenson and Franklin Jr., her signature in white ink!

  Bea was always a member of one committee or the other at school, and often an officer. Before some event, a volley of phone calls would ring through the house.

  But it seemed Bea needed to be given a subject. The other girls, her friends’ daughters, made up their own sneaky subjects, which they wouldn’t tell you, even if you asked what they were talking about. “Nothing,” they always answered.

  About the middle of Bea’s junior year, her mother began to worry that she’d done too good a job. She hadn’t wanted boy-crazy, but was it altogether natural for a girl to be so moderate?

  That weekend, her tall, longhaired daughter was moping around the house in her kneesocks.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she’d said.

  “No one wants to do anything. I wanted to go cross-country skiing, but everyone just wants to stay home. There was some dance last night and they’re all tired.” She shrugged her shoulders.

  To Bea’s mother, it was clear; the group was breaking down into couples—two and two and two.

  And somehow, Bea was left alone. Bea seemed untroubled that she wasn’t pairing up herself; she was only bewildered that everyone else seemed to like this new kind of game.

  Perhaps she’d gotten used to groups; she was too good at being a team member.

  Still, maybe it was best, Bea’s mother told her husband, whom she talked to as a way of talking herself into things. Maybe the really nice kids didn’t start in on all those shenanigans until senior year. Or even college.

  College, then, it would have to be, because senior year seemed to go much as junior year had. Bea was on the girls’ golf team and also served as class vice president. She organized a busful of students to ride all night to a Michigan elementary school, to help with the U.S. Public Health Service’s field trials. Once there, they were put in charge of changing an ordinary playground into a clinic. They swept, hosed, and painted while nurses inoculated 291 children in the first three grades. Half were getting the real McCoy, half just some ordinary liquid. No one knew which was which. Bea and the other Wisconsin seniors mopped, folded tables, and then rode home again, singing on the bus. Bea was codirector of the decorations committee for the prom.

  Still, there was something not quite normal in it, her mother sometimes feared.

  Around two o’clock, day of the prom, she received a call from the beauty shop. Bea was not yet there for her appointment, and it was already sixteen after.

  Well. Fortunately, Bea’s mother kept a standing appointment with Rolf (bumper sticker: I’M A BEAUTICIAN, NOT A MAGICIAN) at four o’clock every Saturday. At worst, she could give her daughter that and just go in with her for the manicure.

  But she drove the Oldsmobile over to the school right then and found her daughter on top of a ladder in the middle of the gym, delivering orders to two bespectacled boys who probably played violin in the orchestra. They were hanging bunch
ed-together sheets spray-painted blue to resemble waves. The theme was deep undersea life, and Bea was apparently unsatisfied with the boys’ painted renditions of whitecaps. In the corner, near the door where you walked in, was an ocean-bottom treasure chest to collect dimes. That in particular unnerved Hazel. Charity was a good thing, but enough was enough. A prom was a prom.

  But this was how her daughter was most herself. In her dungarees, sneakers, no makeup, long, thick hair rubber-banded. Shouting to befuddled friends who came from uncertain houses, who couldn’t have ever been admitted to the top crowd.

  That was what had always galled Bea’s mother. Bea could’ve run with that crowd. Effortlessly. Why didn’t she? her mother wondered, while also admiring the squarish, stylized orange goldfish her daughter had cut out and painted the previous weekend at home.

  That night, as Dr. Maxwell took Bea’s photo standing with Ned Phillips (just a friend, also on the decorations committee), a corsage on her wrist, her hair “done” by Rolf, feet jammed into the silver high heels her mother had selected at Kendalls, she looked like half of herself.

  Those boys—the prom helpers—would have asked Bea out, but she had a way of discouraging them. She seemed not to understand their innuendos. Her demeanor with them was the same as with everyone: happy, cheerful, busy, occupied, oblivious to the whole underworld of flirtation, as if she were missing the receiving wires.

  Hazel thought the boys were daunted because they never saw Bea’s hands still. Now she’d taken up knitting. The home economics teacher at school taught her how. She’d read somewhere that the first person they tried the oral vaccine on, after cows and chickens, was a feeble-minded boy in a state institution. They slipped him the vaccine in chocolate milk. Bea was knitting that boy a scarf.

  Another concern tagged Bea’s mother that spring and summer before college, when a good deal of her time was spent on lists and labels, packing up her youngest to go away.