Off Keck Road (11 page)

XVII

T
here 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, hearing 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.”

She used to eat in bed, but that had had to stop. Though she'd been careful about crumbs, some ants had come anyway. Her mother had never had ants. In fact, the idea of them had inspired her particular snobbery. “Once you get them, they'll never leave,” she'd been fond of warning, believing that their house, built in 1911, had never had a single one.

But Beth Penk, the housekeeper, was older now. Bea still paid her the same salary, but asked that Beth come only Saturdays, when she could be home. The two women sat at the kitchen table and drank a pot of coffee together before the day began.

Bea didn't believe that ants never left. Selling houses, she'd arranged for enough extermination tents, but she was unlikely to go to such measures here. Now. It was an old house. She imagined the ants marching in neat straight lines.

Every so often, Bea wanted to One-Hour Maxwellize her house. She, too, wanted that clean, chemical,
mint
quality. But maybe, she thought, houses were ruined for her. She knew too much about the stagecraft of improvement. Perhaps selling anything eventually spoils it for you.

She'd read once that many prostitutes couldn't enjoy sex. In the same article, it said that most of them refused to kiss their clients, keeping that one small favor for their real boyfriends.

Bea thought to herself that she should have saved back one room to enjoy.

The bedroom. But no, in the houses she listed, she'd done up every part.

One night, she called Father Matthew. Late, for no reason she knew. With no question, no plan, she found herself blabbering, trying to improvise. Then, she blurted, “Could you just come over?”

And he said, “Okay, yes. I'll be there.”

She got out of bed then, after she hung up, agitated, and started to try to clean her room. Which was where she lived. Which was a mess.

She whirled through piles at a tearing speed. First the bed, then stashing magazines in the closet. Finally it was all done.

And he was still not there.

All of a sudden she remembered his driving. She could see the twin slow headlights moving through the darkened streets; she could draw his car on a map, stopping at every light, waiting at four corner crossings even when there was no other car. For miles.

He's a priest, she told herself, and always will be.

She could imagine the two of them in her neatened bedroom. She could. There would be something mandatory about the act, a certain amount of shame. Heads down, stepping out of trousers. Like children in a locker room, made to change for PE. He would be pale, too, both of them white-legged. They would slow together, not knowing how to move. She thought of Bill Alberts's kick, the way he'd grab her arms and twirl her around, whistling a show tune. Her mother had always said Father Matthew was handsome, but of course she was thinking of him in black and white, in his priest's clothes.

She sighed, heaving herself to the kitchen to measure the ingredients for hot drinks.

She'd have to think fast, concoct some reason for this ridiculous visit.

At her mother's table, pouring the Ovaltine from the warming pot, she dribbled some on his sweater. She dabbed at it with a paper napkin, which shredded on the black. Where was a clean dish towel? When her mother was alive, these things just
stayed
where they should be. The background of the house receded, perfectly, to let you think about nothing but conversation.

Still swabbing at his shoulder, she said, “All these years, have you ever thought of us as . . . ”

“Yes. I have,” he said, looking down at his lap.

His neck remained in that sloped angle as they drank from their warm cups. Not ten minutes later, he stood up and left.

The way rain makes a path, branching on a windowpane, something started inside Bea, that small a trickle.

The next month, Shelley called up on the telephone. She needed help with
him
. She was driving to Florida; she'd be gone for four days or maybe five. Going to a funeral.

XVIII

N
ance was the one who phoned to tell Shelley that George was gone. She called at Shelley's parents' house.

So Shelley heard it from her mother, who told her in a measured-out, cautious voice, afraid to learn any more.

“She just thought you should know,” she said. “I told her you can't make it to the funeral, working and all.”

“When is the funeral?” Shelley asked.

“Well, it's down there, day after tomorrow. But I told her you've got a job. She doesn't expect you to go all the way to Florida. He never did pay you for all your hours.”

Shelley supposed Nance understood some of what had happened.

“I'll go,” she said. “I can make it if I drive all night.”

The funeral took place in a small cemetery adjoining a golf course. He had already been cremated before Shelley arrived.

“I just don miss him,” Nance said out in the bright air, sounding as if that were a thing to wonder about. She kept shaking her head, amazed.

He had been hard with her; Shelley didn't doubt it.

At the end, Nance had had to do everything for him, even when he went to the bathroom, Petey told her.

Petey—now a middle-aged man with a beard, wearing a Hawaiian shirt—said that dressing George took an hour and then, when it was done, he'd kick his legs and pummel his arms, shouting, “No, no, not this. Take it off.” Nothing was ever right.

Shelley nodded. “I used to say to him, ‘Who made you God?' ”

“Yah,” Petey said. “You knew him all right. Built that pool.” He shook his head. “She went through a lot with him.”

“But she never stood up to him, though,” Shelley said. “There's probably ten tape measures with my skin on 'em around your old place, but see, I'd throw it back at him. There's the difference.”

“He tore the phone out,” Petey said.

“I s'pose” was all she finally answered. She shook her head. “To build up a place like that.”

She remembered his telling her she could go there anytime. He couldn't imagine dying. Not then. And that wasn't so long ago. Fifteen, sixteen years.

“Well, you did it with him,” Petey said. “I wasn't gonna.”

Now Nance was going around with an old guy who was from Green Bay, too. They had worked together at Kendalls—in the notions department—before she was married, forty years ago. And they both loved Florida.

“So you don't miss Green Bay at all?” Shelley said.

“With this weather,” Nance said, “I could never go back. You know, I got pains in my hands. The tops. Like an oval disk. Right here.”

Shelley had heard about this. When you were a nurse, people told you their ailments. She picked up Nance's hands. They were small and plump, with fancy pink nails and age spots. She began to rub them. “But the sun makes it better?”

“Yah, the heat helps. Up there, I was getting so I just stood by the grate. Here it melts away.”

“Then you should stay,” Shelley said.