Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson Read Free Book Online Page B

was aware of her calves in nylons and one-inch heels. They were being watched, moving.
    There was a kiss or almost, something between a bump and a kiss. She pushed her mouth down against his jacket. She tasted wool, the scent of tobacco, noticed the sunset playing out behind the smokestacks of Fort Howard, the paper mill on the river.
    The phone at last was ringing and she could untangle herself to answer.
    That day was more than thirty years ago now, but Bea remembers it exactly, as a specific declension of spring.
    When June Umberhum came over to the house that night, Bea didn’t speak of the incident. She wanted to wait until her mother went to bed, but she did work the conversation around to the subject of the Albertses’ marriage.
    â€œHe runs around,” her mother said again.
    â€œSo they say,” Bea challenged. “Or
you’ve
said.”
    â€œOh, he does,” her mother said.“I know from Mimi Platt.”
    â€œI don’t blame him,” June said.
    â€œNo,” Mrs. Maxwell agreed.
    â€œHe’s still not bad, even without the hair,” June said. “But she’s just a drudge. She really let herself go.”
    â€œA nothing,” Mrs. Maxwell added.
    â€œThey did have the four children in—what was it, five years?” Bea mentioned.
    â€œAnd that’s a mistake I made, too. Boy, I wouldn’t do that again,” June said. “Be all for the child and nothing for the man. He wanted to go out, but I said, ‘No. When I leave, she cries.’ Next time, I’d let her cry.”
    Peggy looked up from her book, and then there was a silence. June’s husband had left when Peggy was still a baby. Now she was eleven years old, sitting at Mrs. Maxwell’s dining room table, doing her homework.
    Slowly, the women’s talk resumed, a circular rambling Bea wouldn’t have had as a teenager, about hair and weight and clothes. These things were all analyzed as means, techniques toward a greater end. They wanted to talk about love, but that was harder; neither of them really knew how, though sometimes they found themselves there by accident.
    All along, there was the sound of Bea’s needles. She was knitting a moss-stitch throw for one of her buyers. Whenever she sold a house, she presented the new owners a “new home” throw with a label reading
A Bea Maxwell Design
. She used wool she had to send away to Italy for. She’d graduated from black to deep brown, a natural-looking uneven kid mohair and lamb’s wool blend that went from thinner to thick within the same skein. She imagined priests wearing cassocks made from it, roaming the ancient evening streets of Assisi, continuing long, meandering conversations. Father Matthew had found the vendor for her in an ecclesiastical supply catalog. She made coverlets for weddings, throws for house closings, and frocks with elaborate tiny shell buttons for newborns.
    Hazel thought even dark brown was a little grim for newlyweds and infants, and more than once she suggested a pale yellow, available all over, right here.
    They were students of marriage, in all its particulars. They still believed in the ideal, each of them, without saying so, but they also enjoyed their running count of the shams and disharmonies they observed around them in Green Bay homes. That was one thing that June had given Bea: a firm conviction that there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of marriages that she would not for anything in the world want to be inside.
    They also discussed the small slights and bafflements each of them endured during their working day. June had paid an after-school visit to one of Peggy’s classmates, whose mother had invited them to stop by for some cold turkey sandwiches. They’d arrived at 4:30 and she’d let them sit and sit, offering no refreshment. What had become of those cold turkey sandwiches?
    They talked next about dyeing their hair. The other kindergarten