Ford Road by Amy Kenyon

Author:Amy Kenyon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

HEAT WAVE

KAY AND JOE HAD PLANNED A ROAD TRIP TO WESTERN MICHIGAN, where they hoped to spend a few days exploring Ada's hometown of Middleville, in Barry County. They were put off, in part, by the weather. There was a heat wave during the last two weeks of August, pushing daytime temperatures to the high nineties.

Garden City was a ghost town, its sidewalks deserted by the residents of every street as they took shelter behind canvas window awnings and blinds. Only the concentrated whirring of fans and airconditioners broke the still of Maple Court. At Westland and Wonderland, the local shopping malls, indoor fountains sprayed against a soundtrack of pop classics piped in to soothe customers coming in from the baking parking lot for the end-of-season sales. In Kroger's supermarket, shoppers lingered in the frozen food sections. But most people simply disappeared inside their climate-controlled offices and houses.

Some of the neighbors spent their time belowground, in cool basements that had been “finished”—as people used to say—probably some time in the sixties or early seventies. That was the era of cellar paneling, to be followed by an era of building “additions” or extensions onto the little bungalows, creating spaces that came to be known as family rooms or recreation rooms. Jake and Marion never built an addition onto the Maple Court house, but in 1961, they redecorated the living room and, at the same time, finished the basement, paneled its walls in oak veneer, and laid red linoleum tiles over the concrete floor. Then, they hung ceiling-to-floor bamboo curtains in order to divide the large room into two spaces and functions.

On one side of the bamboo—the side Kay thought of, in those Cold War years, as East Berlin—Marion had her washer and dryer and a huge, deep, casket-shaped food freezer. The furnace that made Sid and Kay jump when it roared into action was also on that side. They both feared being sent downstairs to fetch a package of frozen beef or pork chops. Having steeled their nerves to cross the bamboo curtain, they needed added muster to lift the heavy freezer lid and reach inside the compartment. They came out in goose bumps as frosty light escaped from a bed of hard, ice-crusted provisions, illuminating the cobwebs on the ceiling and causing the hunched furnace to gleam in its shadowy corner.

On the friendly side of the bamboo curtain, West Berlin, Marion made a sitting area, cosily arranging an old sofa and chair, a candy-striped throw rug, and the Segers' first TV set, items demoted when Jake and Marion purchased a new television and more elegant furniture for the living room upstairs. But not long after, events conspired to make Kay as uneasy in West Berlin as on the other side. It was there, in August 1962, at the age of eight, that she watched the newscast of Marilyn Monroe's overdose, tried to imagine the star's puffy flesh in death, and overheard the adults commenting that it came as no surprise, as though there were something about Marilyn that had predetermined such an end.

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