Free Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson

Ping-Pong.
    By July, the year before, only Shelley and two of her brothers were still picking. At the end of that summer, the nursery had hired Shelley’s brother Tim to work year-round in their store. They couldn’t take Shelley because of the way she looked. It was a job serving the public. They told her as much and expected her to understand.
    So by the time George Umberhum hired her, she was doing yard work for all the neighbors. She raked and mowed lawns, shoveled and plowed in winter. When the mower or plow broke, she knew how to replace a belt or change the filter.
    She does a nice job with the yard,
they said about her.
    The women shook their heads.
If it weren’t for that leg
.
    George had a vision of what he wanted. He’d seen places, on vacation down in Florida and up in the Peninsula, where he and Nance sometimes went camping.
    He never before had built anything bigger than a model of the B-52, the Flying Fortress bomber. He sent away for brochures, and he and Shelley studied the possibilities that spring in the breezeway. There were different sorts of materials and shapes and sizes: rectangle, oval, kidney, L-shaped. Before they started, he checked out a stack of books from the library, written twenty and thirty years before, published in Florida and California. These showed pictures of families in out-of-date clothes gathered around their pools having luau parties.
    In May, they marked the site with chalk and began. They dug dirt out onto tarps and then dragged the tarps around the house to the front yard. Altogether, they moved more than 170 tons of dirt.
    â€œOh, it’s all real glamorous to her,” Shelley’s mother said.
    Working together every day, George and Shelley got to talking about almost anything they thought of, even about going to the bathroom and the problem of gas. Just because of the boredom of digging, Shelley knew everything.
    Nance didn’t let him touch her
there
.
    At first, way back when they were young, she’d told him it was because it tickled. For a while, he believed that. He even wrote away to a magazine to ask advice.
    â€œAnd what did they tell ya?” Shelley asked.
    â€œDon’t remember anymore. Couldn’ta been much.”
    Later on, Nance said she just didn’t like it.
    â€œShe thinks
she’s
holding on to the royal jewels,” he said. “Well, she can keep ’em. More like a fruit basket gone bad.”
    Whenever her name came up, Shelley’s mother always said Nance had been very very pretty when she was young.
    â€œMaybe her mother told her not to,” Shelley suggested.
    â€œNance’s ma? Naw. I’m sure she never mentioned a thing about sex.”
    There. There it was. The word. Sex for the pretty and the unpretty. Shelley supposed they’d had sex for the pretty.
    He told her about what he’d done in the war. They were stuck on an island where there were women who looked like a breed between regular boys and ponies, women with manes, who didn’t wear tops. And they let George and the other guys do all kinds of stuff to them, things he described, softly laughing.
    She shook her head. “I don’t think that way even about animals.”
    He looked up, penitent, young-seeming, even sweet. He waited a minute, as if this was something he’d never thought about before but now had to. “Well, they couldn’t even talk—English, I mean. They had their own language, I s’pose.”
    And what they then began was something there was no name for.
    Shelley started it. She was the one. They were working on a June day. They’d poured the concrete already and were setting in the tiles. It was hard to keep them at right angles.
    â€œHey, you over there, I’ve got an itch,” she said. She knew she could act that way with him, she didn’t know why. She was testing. The gate was always there for her to open. It was a delicious feeling, icy, and, like ice, it