Off Keck Road (7 page)

To what, exactly, was hard to imagine. But she could easily come up with dialogue.

“But you're a priest!”

“Even priests are men. You are the first woman to . . . ”

She had ideas, of course, from magazines and the movies. As she lay in bed in the dark trying to sleep, she couldn't hold the images of models and actresses for long (she could picture them in a pose or a contained movement, but she couldn't make them improvise past what she'd already seen), so she shuffled to parents and her friends. For her, it was difficult to imagine most people in bed, hard to think how they moved, what they felt. The only person she could envision was June. It was easy to picture June unzipping her side-zip pants, moving like a flexible doll into all the positions Bea could think of that a man would want. She saw her friend June's mouth, slack and open, craving.

That was another way Bea used their friendship, all those years, without June ever knowing.

When Bea began to announce her affair to her mother and her father—Father Matthew ceasing to be Father Matthew, giving back his cassocks in a long, flat cardboard box,
but to whom?
—Bea's fantasy tripped her into a state of sit-up alarm.

No, it was impossible to think of an ending together without a degrading scandal. Perhaps that was one reason the culmination had never yet occurred, even in her before-sleep moments of unraveling wishes, taking out her precious jewels on a plate, just to look at. Her fantasies halted. They could kiss but not finish. Her imagination stopped at the place on the neck where a necklace cut.

Now that June was gone, Bea remembered her rules as if they were commandments. She'd broken the ban on calling him—that made no sense; they'd been regular friends for too long—but she'd silently replaced that restriction with the edict that she would never be the one to make a pass.

It had been so long, she was quite sure things would remain more or less how they were. Or, if not forever, at least today. Each time she saw Father Matthew, change seemed less likely. Yet, a few years back, it had seemed impossible that they could endure another talk without touching.

She made a mental note to put Donna on her Christmas list—maybe a muffler.

Though by now, the city and her parents had lived through enough scandals that a little flare-up began to seem as if it might have been worth it.

The protagonists of the local disgraces Bea had watched so far had ended up married and late-middle-aged, concerned with property and money and barbecues, more or less like everybody else.

XI

B
ea was offered the listing for June's brother's house in 1975. Nance called her up at the office and said they were moving to Florida. She wasn't sure she wanted to sell; she just wanted to see what kind of money they could get.

“Just sniffing around,” Bea said. “All right.”

The mother's house, next door, had been sold a few months earlier. Bea looked up the file to see the square footage and the price. June had wanted Bea to list her mother's house, but at that time, Nance and George had given it to someone at another firm, someone Nance played cards with. Which was why the call now was surprising.

Even on the telephone, Bea shied away from the listing, saying (diplomatically, she thought) that it was hard to work on a property you'd known so long yourself.

She'd heard enough from June about Nance. Of course, by then June was gone. She'd moved to Arizona right after her mother died. She used the money she inherited to pay the first and last months on a commercial lease, to open her flower store. Peggy was no doubt already getting used to her new school. But they seemed to Bea somehow diminished, on their own, so far away. Was that because she had most often seen them in her own mother's house, in De Pere?

After all, June had chosen to go.

But Bea regretted now that she hadn't learned more about the financial side of June's life. Likely as not, she could've helped her find a location to open a flower shop here and even gone over the financing.

Bea drove out to June's old road to take a look. It was April but still cold, a hint of ice in the wind. The colors, in the country, seemed full of browns, under the pale blue sky.

Nance met her at the door, holding her lilac cardigan closed at the neck. The minute Bea stepped inside, the woman began following her. She was a person who stood too close behind you. It was an ordinary six-room ranch built in the late forties and now decorated and added on to. Bea had been in the house less than six minutes when Nance asked, “So what do you think we could get?”

Not that Bea couldn't have told her after two.

They were standing in the bright, clean kitchen, walled with sliding glass doors, which gave out to the pool and backyard compound and didn't do quite enough to insulate from the sharp wind. The stove was dry and still. No tea was offered.

“I've pulled the comparables, from your mother's house,” Bea began.

“Mother-in-law,” Nance corrected. “And, with the pool and all, this'd be worth a lot more. He's sure put a lot more into it.”

Speaking of
he,
Bea was thinking, where was he?

“I can see” was all she said. You couldn't not. Cement surrounded a kidney-shaped pool enclosed by a wooden fence crisscrossed with lights. There was also a two-story pool house, winterized, with a Ping-Pong table set up inside on the first floor.

“I'm in a birthday club,” Nance said, “and one of the other girls just bought a house with a pool. And they paid over a hundred thousand dollars for it!”

“On the West Side?” Bea murmured. “I know the property.” There weren't that many swimming pools in northeastern Wisconsin. Bea could name each one. The first one in Green Bay was built by the Bishops—wealthy Catholics who had seven kids—during the polio summers of the early 1950s. Bea remembered because some children she knew hadn't been allowed to go to the public pools. Green Bay wealth was not extreme. There was a country club with a pool, yet before and after the polio scare, even girls from Bea's neighborhood went to the public pool in the park, rented lockers, and pinned the keys to their suits. Bea was always allowed to go. Her father believed, as an officer of public health, he had to let his own daughters swim there unless he forbid everyone and went to the city council to see about closing it down. Bea's mother wanted her to stay away and just do other things instead those summers, but as her father's emissary, Bea walked to the public pool and swam. Once, at the height of it, her father rode his bicycle along with her. It was practically a ceremonial occasion—an ordinary July day, and Dr. Maxwell climbed slowly to the top of the high board. When he made a perfect arcing dive, people clapped. For a while, children were supposed to shower before stepping into the pool. After that, they had to stand in a second shower, where they were sprayed with a blue disinfectant. People told their children not to drink from bubblers. “Don't kiss boys or you might end up with a crooked leg,” Hazel said. That was at the same time the county passed an ordinance to pick up all stray cats and put them to sleep. Bea and her father were against this measure, too, and they drove out together at night, slowing the car and looking for stray cats to adopt before the animal catchers found them.

The pool Nance was talking about was new, in a wooded development opened up seven or eight years ago, when the highway was widened. The house was architect-designed, redwood.

“So I was thinking,” Nance said, “we may as well ask something like that. Maybe even a little more, cause they're getting more land here?”

All Bea wanted was to leave politely. She intended to behave decently to June's brother's wife, as a matter of honor; at the same time, also as a matter of honor, she didn't want to collude with her in any way.

“Maybe a hundred ten?” Nance whispered.

Where
was
he?

This house was a case of serious overdevelopment.

One of the hallmarks of Bea's practice had always been fair pricing, and she often spent quite a bit of time with owners before she agreed to list a house. For Bea, most of the work came before. She hired a niece of Beth Penk's to do a thorough cleaning for her open houses; this woman knew to stack things so they looked nice, even if the owners didn't. Bea herself went through and rearranged, tied together bundles of
National Geographic
s and piled them in the garage. In almost every case, she made the houses barer. One of her clients had coined the term
Maxwellize,
from the dry cleaner's “One-Hour Martinizing.” Two times, couples changed their minds about selling after Bea's ministrations. And her sellers almost always resented the new owners, feeling they would get something out of the house that they themselves had, in their years of possession, missed.

By the end of the day of an open house, Bea usually had her sale. She presented the new owner with a dark brown “new home throw,” something several sellers told her they acutely coveted. But I can't start doing both, Bea told herself.

They'd built quite a compound here. Back behind all the carnival effects of the pool, with its clown colors and uneven cement, Bea could see the hedge of currant bushes and, beyond that, the field and then the highway, looping around to the overpass going to Sheboygan.

“George says we can get a hundred thousand,” Nance said.

A hundred thousand, my foot,
Bea thought. She doubted George even knew about this meeting.

“I'm not the right agent for you.” She had to say it. “We tend to stay very close to the comparables. That's too conservative an approach for some sellers. You may want a more aggressive agent.”

Nance gave her a look. More aggressive than
you
? it seemed to say. You with your job like a man who did Lord knows what in Chicago.

“Well, how does it work?” Nance finally said. “Don't we tell you the price?”

Bea looked down.

“Because I don't know why we wouldn't get what the other one with the pool got.”

Asked so directly, Bea murmured something about the location, being farther away from things downtown. That house being newer, too.

“Why don't you just put it up and try? What work is it for you? You've already got the signs and all.”

“I won't list at a price I'm not confident of getting. Now, believe me”—Bea jittered into an imitation of laughter—“I've often been wrong.” Not true, not true, bells were ringing.

Nance didn't like her. Bea could see it around her mouth. Fair enough.

A good many people disliked her and Bea knew it. They considered her dangerous. A gossip. A snoop. All because she was thirty-eight years old and remembered a thing or two.

At the door, before leaving, Bea couldn't resist. “What do you hear these days from June?”

“Oh, you know June,” Nance said. “Same as ever. Peggy's real good, though. Doing all honors in school.”

June could be exasperating; no one knew that more than Bea. But she was the best friend Bea had ever had. In the months she'd been gone, Bea had done a great deal of thinking. She remembered, in particular, how her mother had talked June out of Bill Alberts.

It was true enough; June hadn't loved him. Not in the way they'd wanted love and still hoped for it. But that day when she'd imitated him, she'd been flimsy. They probably could have convinced her in his favor, too. And how different her life now would be, and Peggy's.

Still, June wrote with their news, accepting Arizona as their life, as if there had been no possible other.

June had asked them, trusting. And Bea and her mother had decided it for her. Yet June might have loved living here, along the river, gathering red and brown leaves for centerpieces at the Harvest Moon Ball, as Mrs. Bill Alberts.

Bea had always had her parents' house.

June called, once a month or so, always on weekends, when the rates were down, to hear the gossip. Even though Bea and her mother had perhaps taken something from them, something large, June showed no blame.

Bea knew her own reasons, obliquely. She needed Bill Alberts where he was—for a little longer. But what was her mother's motive? Certainly her mother wasn't thinking about love—not that kind of love, not then, at this time in her life.

Could June have come to love him, later, in a different way? That was an old model of marriage, not much in favor now, based on an exchange of work and gifts, a system of gratitude, but one that would probably go as well as any other, from what Bea observed.

“Well,” Bea said. “I guess she's having a success with her store.”

“Oh, that she can do,” Nance said.

Bea clutched the wheel, driving too fast down the small road. She had it in mind to call June, or type her a little note. June would get a kick out of the circus lights, the hurried tour, the whispers, George nowhere to be seen.

This listing, Bea was glad to forgo.

There were no mysteries in pricing, to her mind. None. A little room for romance on the edges: a good wooden floor, a mature garden. Trees. Bea sometimes took over a bread pan and a loaf of the bread Hazel bought frozen but not yet baked, but really, no smell could ever spirit away Highway 141 or the house near the end of Keck Road with broken dolls and car-body parts rusting on the front lawn.

That day, turning onto the highway, she passed an unusually handsome boy, who must have been thirteen or fourteen, with his arm flung around a girl, their bodies tall and so perfect, they actually looked plain—as if the ordinary human model should be
this
.

I should have told them to wait, she thought. Pools don't show well in winter. The trick to selling that house would be to ring those handsome country kids around that pool. Then she wondered if the pool had ever really been used. Maybe they'd had parties—barbecued on the cement, passed out leis and hot dogs, roasted marshmallows, but it was hard to picture. From what she remembered, they'd built that pool just a few years back.

Bea's judgment proved right.

She followed the property. The house wasn't listed at all until 1979, and then they had it with someone at Knoll, Handower. It was for sale over a year before they came down on the price. In the end, they sold to an assistant manager at Shopko for $43,000, less than half of what they were first asking, only four thousand more than the old mother's house next door.

And June really had gone away and stayed gone.

All the years she'd talked with June those nights in her mother's kitchen, the thing they'd wanted, the thing endlessly analyzed, the thing they both held up as the prize, was love. Of the married-and-living-together-in-a-house-in-Green-Bay variety.

They were both keenly sensitive to shams and spent more of their hours picking apart the marriages they knew and wouldn't want than enunciating the secrets of the ideal they both still pretended to believe in.

When June left for Arizona, she was thirty-seven.

After a while, Bea wondered if that kind of love still was the real prize or if it had been like the committees she'd joined in high school and clubs in college—a subject to trade wits on, to organize daily talks, to help her make a friend. Even later, it occurred to her that it might still be that, for others, too, not only for herself. June, in their conversations from Arizona, also sounded distinctly less inclined toward romance.

Of course, Peggy was growing up. Peggy's upbringing—achieved on her own, supported now by the flower store—that was most of June's life.

Getting out of teaching and opening a flower shop—those had always seemed June's driving goals. But now that she had one, the shop became a duty and an agitation, like any job. It struck Bea that June's real concern all along must have been her daughter. Maybe flowers were merely her best means of supporting her child. And from what Bea heard, that had worked. Her business was booming, and in college, Peggy was able to afford many of the normal things a girl would want, things June couldn't have provided on a teacher's salary. “I'd hoped to do it in high school,” June said over the phone, “when she'd still be here, so I could see her in the clothes.”

What had Bea been thinking all those years, with her grand romance about flowers?

No, sending Peggy off to college was an achievement for June, as much or more than any love they'd talked about. Why was that the only thing, marriage? Bea had friends, work, hobbies, golf, loads of laughter. Bea looked back at those promising conversations they'd had with a certain bitterness. They'd assumed such
futures
.