Off Keck Road Page 3

  The weight.

  Bea was not overweight by any medical measure. No, according to her father’s charts, she was right on the money for her age and height; and her mother never would have said she was overweight. In fact, a few years back, she and Bea had scoffed at the ridiculous energy so many of the girls seemed to spend worrying about their bodies.

  Jen’s girl—a cheerleader—did a chant with her friends and then fell over giggling.

  We must,

  We must,

  We must develop the bust.

  The bigger the better,

  The tighter the sweater.

  The boys depend on us!

  It was crazy. Just crazy.

  Bea’s mother had visited her friend Lil, whose twin girls—wraiths, practically—had just clomped in from a five-mile jog. They stood in the kitchen—polite, deferential, their clean hair soft on their shoulders—murmuring between themselves. At a cutting board, the taller sliced open a head of lettuce. She quartered it and they ate the wedges, standing there bent over.

  “That’ll probably be their dinner,” Lil said, shaking her head.

  Bea’s mother had been so appalled, she had to say something. “There’s nothing in that, Lil. Only water. They need protein and iron, vitamins. They’re still growing.”

  Lil never put a real dinner on the table—Lil always worked. She gave most of the girls in their part of town, Bea included, piano lessons. She had to—since the war, her husband had been handicapped.

  “But remember what we did?” Lil said, falling into her easy, cascading laugh. She reminded Hazel of the time they’d arranged their own Birthday Ball here in Green Bay, the night of FDR’s birthday. Hazel had tied her girdle so tight that she’d fainted and they’d had to walk her to Saint Vincent’s Hospital. She’d also accepted two prom invitations, one to her school, one to Catholic Boys’. They’d called it prom-trotting.

  But she hadn’t gone to either one, because that night, in Saint Vincent’s Emergency Room, she’d met the young physician.

  While the other girls were fussing, comparing breasts and ankles and every small knob of bone on their legs, Bea seemed altogether indifferent. She wrote a letter to Maurice J. Tobin, Truman’s secretary of labor, on behalf of Beth Penk, their housekeeper. Beth’s husband had been laid off from Nicolet Paper when a machine dislocated his shoulder. She talked her parents into raising Beth’s wage. Hazel had just wanted to give Beth a little something to help with the doctor bills.

  Hazel sometimes thought of her daughter’s letters, in the White House, in a mailbag with hundreds of others, her daughter’s collected dimes added onto a mound high as the coal piles.

  And she was still knitting—leg warmers, now, which she sent to Sister Kenny’s clinic in Minneapolis and the Gillette Crippled Children’s Hospital. Her pièce de résistance was a cape for a beauty queen in an iron lung, an Aran-stitched X and O cable.

  “Now when is she ever going to wear that?” Hazel muttered.

  It was as if adolescence—that new word that everyone all of a sudden knew—was a contagion Bea somehow had not caught. She agreed with her reasonable parents. She found high heels ridiculous. She ate casseroles and desserts with the abandon of a ten-year-old boy.

  And no, she wasn’t overweight, her mother conceded, but neither did she have the narrow profile, with long, thin limbs poking out of sleeves, that so many of the girls did then.

  It was a sign, a dance of mating, the way heels were and stockings and the square spot of purple on a female duck. A dab of makeup and the other little touches made a girl seem a normal girl, among the flock.

  Inside the music.

  Bea told her mother that people washed their hair more often than necessary because some businessperson had thought of a brilliant way to make more profit, off of women’s heads.

  “Well, we’re fortunate,” her mother said. “We can afford the shampoo. So go ahead and use all you like.”

  Her mother remembered that conversation a few years later, when Bea took the job with the advertising firm on Michigan Avenue, in Chicago.

  She hoped in Chicago Bea was washing her hair.

  Bea had never been truly oblivious. It would have surprised Hazel to learn that for two years of high school her daughter had considered herself to be in love with Alexander Pray, a delicate boy she could barely speak to. Her body changed when he passed by her in the school hallway. She sweated behind her knees; her mouth went dry. He was a high note. Other boys—the ones who helped her on the prom committee and followed along to meetings for the March of Dimes—hardly registered as notes at all; they were only rhythm, everyday comic noise. Burps, suction, a can opening.

  Alexander went along on the overnight trip to Michigan. Right before they left, as they were packing their duffels into the hold of the bus, Bea’s mother stood talking to him, alone. She lectured him, telling him that her daughter had no experience of overnight outings with young men and that she expected her back in one piece.

  Sometimes, Bea knew that Alexander was out of her league. Other times, she thought it was just possible he liked her.

  On that trip, they’d sat together. His arm had flung around her—or was it just resting on the top of the high bus seat? They’d slept with their heads together on the bumpy ride home.

  Did anything happen or not? Could it have? To this day, Bea wasn’t sure, although one night, in their forties, in a bar, Alex Pray told her about Hazel’s warning.

  No, Bea had kept him secret, an arrogant secret, the pure high note. Later, she was ashamed to talk about it because of how little there had been.

  It had happened in Chicago, too. The head of the firm; married. He probably never knew how much she felt.

  During the years her daughter was away, Bea’s mother had gone with several of her girlfriends out to the ecumenical church by the college. The services there were just different—less organ music and more about people’s real problems, the kinds of problems they didn’t talk about themselves yet but heard talked about on TV.

  There was a wonderful young priest, Father Matthew. Now that Bea was back, more stylish, if not much slimmer, her mother thought she’d have him over to dinner one night. Maybe he could help her daughter. He had grown up here. He must know people. His friends couldn’t all be priests.

  Not much was going on in the dating department.

  Bea’s mother now blamed herself. She’d done too good a job raising Bea. Half of rearing a girl was scaring her into not crossing the perilous line between popular girl and loose, sex being the line itself. The good popular girls, Bea’s mother noticed, suggested sex, implied it in their movements, even in the chiming music of their voices as they ambled together in a group like a cloud. But God forbid, they knew better than to give it away, to allow their bodies to be used.

  · · ·

  One constant: the knitting.

  While she was gone, a TV show came on the air out of Milwaukee, called The Busy Knitter. One of the girls in Bread and Book watched and knit along with the hostess, making the Scandinavia sweater. But when the show went off the air, she was only at the underarm. She called the local station, and they said, “That’s all the cans we have,” and so Hazel sent the whole mess, needles and everything, to Bea in Chicago. When Bea sent it back, she’d whipped off a hat to go with.

  She said she’d knit through important meetings in Chicago. But now all her yarn was black!

  Since she’d been back, Bea always looked like she was going to a funeral. Black eyeglasses, black sweaters, black slacks.

  Even in her late twenties, Bea was nowhere near the line. If the popular girls—or women, I suppose, her mother thought—flirted with the line, touching it and then jumping back, Bea was at the other end of the field altogether.

  And now that she was back, the pond seemed still.

  Maybe it was too late. Maybe they were all already married.

  But then Bea began palling around with that divorced Umberhum girl, who’d also been away
. And the Umberhum girl was dating, all right. Bea’s mother heard she was doing quite a bit more. But she supposed that was different. She’d already been married, had a child.

  Bea’s mother was pretty much resigned to the idea that this so-called friend who was always slapping her own hip in her sharkskin slacks, this June, would get married again for the second time before Bea ever got her first turn. But now that Bea was almost thirty, her mother felt she couldn’t say much. It was hard for Hazel to think of her daughter’s virginity. Was it still a good thing?

  For a first-time marriage, yes, it had to be. But not for too too much longer.

  Stumped, Hazel had to take the pins out of her bun and shake her head. She always pictured a clear liquid in a jar that, shaken, revealed flakes of sediment.

  In her own day, a girl like that, who’d had a husband leave his marks and shape, given birth already, was nothing a decent man would look for, in a wife.

  And Bea?

  Bea became good friends with the priest.

  That priest who was supposed to be helping her.

  But—what do you know?—it seemed Father Matthew liked to go for Chinese, too. They drove to the place a Hmong family had opened outside town, surrounded by snowy fields, Bea, June, Father Matthew, and Lord knew who else. So Bea had her group again.

  “Uch,” was all Bea’s mother would say. She would not drive to the ecumenical center anymore.

  Her friends, who were sensitive women, stopped going, too.

  V

  In 1967, Shelley’s mother explained the whole system of female sins. She illustrated them on Shelley’s little brother’s blackboard, just as she had with the planets and the different branches of our government. That had been hard to listen to. Shelley’s attention had drifted, much like it did at school.

  Sitting on their lap was a form of petting, egging them on. Letting them touch you or put their tongues in different places, your ears or arms, say, was also dangerous.

  Kimmie was invited to a party at a house way out in the boonies, where there were going to be boys.

  Their mother got a ragged laugh when she said, “Oh, they’ll try, all right.”

  “Why don’t you talk to them two?” Kim asked, nodding toward the room where Butch and Tim shared bunk beds. “Tell them the sins.”

  “They’re boys.” Her mother shrugged. “Plus they know.”

  Shelley had been in the room all the time, sitting on her bed holding her hands in her lap like two big leather mitts.

  She was already taller than both of them, and strong. Recently, she’d lifted a nine-foot hickory limb felled by lightning.

  “What about her?” Kim pointed.

  Their mother’s mouth pulled down. Maybe she was thinking of it for the first time. “Don’t you let anyone fool with you, Shelley,” she said quietly, but stern. “Some boy may try, but it’ll only be to laugh at you for it later.”

  Shelley saw herself considered with a new consternation—a tooth mismatched with a lower tooth, making her mother’s whole face look broken.

  Shelley knew she wasn’t pretty. Not from looking in the mirror; she stared at her reflection in the bathroom medicine chest door many minutes of those days, but—to herself—she looked just about like everybody else. No, she understood from how boys at school were with her and her sister. Here at home, on Keck Road, it was easier. But in school, Shelley had to do more to get their attention. She had to rush hard to be in the right place; she had to say something; she could not let up. Kimmie, she just got it all coming to her from different directions. Kimmie was the center of a star.

  But her mother was still looking at Shelley, worried now.

  So there was sex for the pretty and for the unpretty, too. You weren’t entirely spared either way.

  Shelley could tell it would be different for her than for Kimmie or for June across the street and her daughter, Peggy, whose clothes were as clean and sugary as molded Easter eggs with paper scenery inside them. With them, she thought, it would be quaint like a valentine. Precise touches, trembling, hummingbirds eating from flowers.

  For Shelley, though, it would be something else, a way of catching her, getting her down to hurt her, dust in her mouth and dry heat, a rubbing.

  She had seen it with animals. Once it was started, they couldn’t stop, even if people shouted, even if everyone was looking.

  She’d seen dogs like that in George’s yard, the one on the bottom looking out at you with big eyes when you clapped or called, hanging helpless because it needed that hit hit hit.

  It was hard for Shelley to be around people her own age. Those occasions made her excited and sad, sometimes alternating, sometimes all at once.

  Most of the time, she kept quiet in school and on the playground. But when she said something, it could come out wrong—a rectangular bar that stayed in the air and made people look at her acutely. That was her experience: people not looking at her at all and then full on, suddenly sharp, as if she was a danger.

  It was a little better out Keck Road in her old clothes. The kids ran together down to the railroad tracks. Sometimes they shot skeets. Shelley was a straight shot, but she never got her own gun, like her brothers. And later on, different as she was, she sided, the way the other girls and women did, with the birds, that they should have a finished life, complete, just like a person, dying when they were already old, for them, in their years. Let the birds be, she said.

  On that dead-end street, what the children spoke of, fought over, taunted one another with all the time was money. Funny to think of on a road with eight houses, none of them worth much, off the highway running east–west, almost out of town. The first house as you turned in was the Keck house, a small box of cream color. Then there were empty wooded lots until Dave Janson, who lived with his fat wife and two boys. At the end was the biggest yard, first cleared by Phil Umberhum, who had worked for years as a guard in the tower of the penitentiary. Now his widow lived there alone.

  Once, at a picnic, his grandson Petey brought a jar of olives. People talked about those olives for years. That kind of money was what made George’s family different.

  The kids climbed over creeks on rocks and cement drainpipes; they built forts in trees—and all these things Shelley could do. She knew to just be quiet and wait for them to notice the work she’d done. Her grandmother had told her a long time ago, when she was a kid and came running inside because the neighbor children and her brothers and sister, too, were playing Polio and wanted to make her be it.

  “Don’t let ’em see that it bothers you. Go right back and say, ‘Okay, I’m it.’ Say that like you don’t give a hoot. If they see they can get you riled up, they’ll just keep piling on more.”

  So for years she’d played Polio. She was it.

  The only place she had full relief was in her gramma’s house.

  There was nothing Shelley could say that her gramma would mind much, and over there she didn’t get the urges she sometimes had at home and at school to sass back.

  And her grandmother let her flick her foot. She’d had only a little polio—so little it seemed it was something about herself, and not the polio, that made her strange to other people. It was as if a feather had brushed her with the sharp edges of each tiny thread, so fine were its marks and traces. Only one leg from the shin down, mostly the foot. And her mouth dragged a little, too, on the left.

  But while she watched TV or just did nothing, she liked to flick that foot. Everyone always said, “Stop it; you’re doing it again. Stop it with the foot.”

  Butch, her oldest brother, used to hold his shooter. Her parents said the same to him.

  “Keep your hands off of it.”

  Then, when Shelley was fourteen, on March 16, 1971, her grandmother died.

  It was a Tuesday. Shelley came home that afternoon and walked across the yard. The only snow left was gray and porous, in drifts plowed by the side of the road. Oozy black mud showed through last year’s grass. She felt, the minute she let hers
elf in, that the house was empty.

  Her gramma had had a stroke in her car, the toe of her right shoe daintily pressing down the brake pedal. On the seat next to her were two envelopes she was taking to the post office and her list—“coffee, oranges, oleo.”

  Shelley lifted her just the way she was into the house. By then, Shelley had already grown to be over six feet.

  VI

  In December of her third year back, Bea received a change-of-address card from the ad agency she’d worked for in Chicago. The agency had moved to New York City, to an address on Madison Avenue!

  This required a special session with June at Kaap’s, where they resolved to plan a shopping spree in Milwaukee.

  Bea had always wanted to live in New York City. She and June worked for hours on an appropriate card to send the woman who had been Bea’s boss (bribing Peggy with dimes, one at a time, buying themselves the few minutes it took her to walk to the long cases at the front of the restaurant and select a candy).

  The woman who had been Bea’s boss had always liked the Green Bay side of her. At first, Bea had knitted only with her hands beneath her desk, but when the head of the firm caught her at it and complimented her garter stitches, she began to purl in the open. At her wildest, she’d stuck her hair up in a bun, with a Takuma bamboo circular needle. Her boss eventually worried, as Bea’s mother had, about her personal life. “How’s your weekend?” she’d say. “Having fun? Good.” At the office, there was a young assistant in the art department who stopped asking Bea to lunch after their meals turned out to be, well, only lunches. Married man, the boss decided, and didn’t press it.

  Bea and June wrote the note to her on a Green Bay postcard that showed the bridge over the Fox River lifting up in two parts as a tall boat went through.

  Congratulatory but not fawning. Jaunty—with the implication she might soon be back on board, in New York. At the same time she mailed that card, Bea posted a check for a subscription to New York magazine.