Off Keck Road Read Online Free PDF

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.
    Â·Â Â Â Â·Â Â Â Â·
    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.
    â€œUch,” 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
    I n 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.”
    â€œWhy don’t you talk to them two?” Kim asked, nodding toward the room where Butch and Tim shared bunk beds. “Tell them the sins.”
    â€œThey’re boys.” Her mother shrugged. “Plus they know.”
    Shelley had been in the room all the time,