Read Online Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson - Free Book Online

studios.
    â€œWell, you don’t
sound
in love with him,” Mrs. Maxwell said.
    â€œI don’t even know what love is anymore.” June sighed. “At my age.”
    â€œYou’re not!” Peggy shouted from the kitchen table, where she’d retreated with her schoolbooks. “He’s a boob.”
    Mrs. Maxwell concurred. “No. Trust me, dear. You are not.”
    Bea hadn’t said anything. She didn’t want June to take him—it was a definite, stabbing feeling. She didn’t know why.
    That was 1972. They were each thirty-five years old.
    After he stopped trying—“a little soon, if you ask me,” June said. “I mean, if you really want something, and he did, I could tell, then go for it a little”—the two women went out one windy, wet, warm spring day and bought silver services at Bakes. Bea couldn’t admit she’d felt the same way, because she’d never really come out and told June he’d chased her, too. And now that it was over, she wished she had. It was a relief to be like June in this. Relief, at this age, almost equaled triumph.
    Not wanting to at first, but finally joking it was maybe inevitable, each selected the same pattern: the Normandy Rose. It was the most elegant. Bea just wrote a check, and June bought hers on time.
    It was a small step. A small step to settlement in this life.
    The old man at Bakes remembered Bea from her March of Dimes campaign. “I still keep a jar,” he said, showing her a small urn on the counter.
    They felt the regular measure of Peggy, who seemed to be growing up so much faster than they were. And her own life now, most of it, had been lived in this town.
    Bea was elected to join her mother on the board of the historical society, called Heritage Hill. She joined the club to find pickup games of golf.
    June read an article in
Life
about an East Coast wedding on Cape Cod. The caption said that baby lobsters—called crawdaddies by the locals, it noted in parentheses—were flown in from eastern Wisconsin.
Eastern Wisconsin? That’s here!
    So she started asking around. And sure enough, outside of town—farther out than Keck Road, where June’s mother and brother still lived—there were bars that on Friday nights served crawdaddies in baskets with your beer.
    They drove past the dammed banks of the Fox River on the east side, where the water was filled with bobbing logs ten to twenty feet long.
    â€œThat’ll all be paper,” Bea said. Whenever she could, she’d offer Peggy, in the backseat, bits of information. She’d noticed that June’s instructions were mostly improvements Peggy could make—to her behavior, her posture, her hair.
    Parked in front of the first bar, Bea was paralyzed by the powerful desire to stay put. Peggy was scrunched up, reading by the tiny car light in the backseat. “This doesn’t look so good, June. With Peggy?”
    She knew Peggy was June’s daughter, but she was with her a lot, too. Once or twice, she’d silently considered teaching Peggy to knit. She was waiting for the right opening to bring it up.
    â€œWell, we’re here,” June said. “We might as well try it. People are flying them in dry ice all the way to Massachusetts. If we’ve got to live here, we might as well get what’s best of it!”
    The first bar didn’t have any, but, from the bartender, they got directions to more distant and shabbier places, down close to the river. In the shack where they finally found the crawdaddies—they were called crayfish by
these
locals—it was all men except for one decrepit old woman in the corner, stationed in an armchair under the TV.
    But the men were eating baby lobsters, all right. June and Bea and Peggy—with a soda pop Bea had bought her—sat on bar stools, the briny juice tickling as it dripped down their arms, under their sleeves, to the elbows.
    On the way