I carried the plates the way I was taught: one on my left forearm and the other two in my hands. “Fried perch sandwich,” I said, and put one in front of Evan, “and a junior BLT burger, medium,” I said as I set another down in front of Dad, “with a side of fries,” and the last dish went between them. “Need another Coke or anything?” They shook their heads and I went back to the kitchen.
The Bear Lake Tavern was located on the Bear Lake Channel, which connects Bear Lake to Muskegon Lake. From Muskegon Lake you could head out to Lake Michigan if you had a boat, and everybody around here had one. It was like having a car in this part of the world. The Bear Lake Tavern was built in the early 1900s and hadn’t changed a lot since then. It was a roundish one-story building painted brown with red trim. The windows faced the docks, which were usually crowded. The lunch crowds were huge during the summer. The boats at the dock usually delivered hordes of Teds along with the locals. Inside, there was a dark wooden bar with a beer cooler, also trimmed in red, built into the wall behind it. Every other wall was covered with photographs of famous North Muskegon sports figures: the State Championship football team from 1918, the BLT “Brew Crew” softball team from 1975, a guy from NMHS who played briefly for the Detroit Lions proudly posing with a football. All were hanging alongside the many Michigan State University or University of Michigan pennants. One long wooden table ran down the middle of the room with other tables surrounding it. My friends and I had spent many a night at the long table laughing and gossiping. When we all went off to college we brought our new friends back with us to share the experience. I’m not sure they got much out of it; it was a tradition that came from spending your whole life in the town.
Sometime in the nineteen seventies, Tommy Loyse had bought the place. He tried to turn it into a restaurant and not a tavern, in his mind making it respectable for parents to bring their kids there to eat. But every family I knew was already doing that. Tommy had renamed the place the Bear Lake Inn. It was painted on the sign, but it never took. To the locals, it would always be the BLT, or the “Blit.” We didn’t just go for the Stroh’s. The Blit had the best damn burgers in the world. I mean that, really. Rumor was that it was because of the grill—that in almost one hundred years, the grill had never once been cleaned, and all that grease gave the burgers their distinctive flavor. Now that I worked there, I knew that was not true. But for whatever reason, the BLT burger and fries was about the best-tasting meal I’d ever had. The fried perch sandwich was a close runner-up.
The Blit was packed, and I was running my ass off. Evan hollered “Ketchup?” at me, and I tossed it to him from about six feet away. He snagged it with one hand.
“Miss, can we please order now?”
I turned my attention to a blond Ted. He was wearing a yellow Izod shirt with a light blue Polo button-down shirt over it—both collars up, of course—khaki shorts, and the requisite Docksiders, all brand new. I took his order for the French Dip sandwich, an order that confirmed the fact that he was not from around there. Who would order the French Dip? I turned to his friend, then stopped and smiled. I hadn’t seen Fudgie Shaw since Lucy and Chuck’s wedding. “Hey, Fudgie.”
“Hey yourself. How’s Lucy doing?”
“Good. Mom talks to her more than I do, but I got a letter. Said she’s studying twelve hours a day to pass her Russian finals. Her graduation from the Defense Language Institute is in about a month.”
“What’s Chuck doing?”
I was a bit fuzzier on Chuck. Lucy didn’t seem to talk about him a lot to Mom. “I think he’s finishing up, too. His two-year stint is about over.” I didn’t mention that Lucy had called Mom crying one night and told her that Chuck had been getting into fights on base and that he kept getting tossed into whatever prison the army had reserved for such offenses.
The bell in the kitchen rang, which meant that food was up and ready to be served. I moved away from Fudgie’s table after taking his order. “Hey, come see me soon. I have a question for you. It’s about Lucy.”
Fudgie waved and said, “I’ll stop by tonight,” as I ran back through the saloon doors to the kitchen. My shift was over around 4:30, when the lunch crowds had left and the dinner crowds hadn’t started yet.
Evan came back to give me a ride home, not that he really needed to. It was only about a mile walk, but he knew I’d be dead tired, because I’d worked a double shift. I’d gotten a call at 6 a.m. that morning from Tommy saying he didn’t have anyone to cover the breakfast crowd. Two of the waitresses had called in sick. More like they had called in “beach,” I thought, when I saw how sunny it was outside. Tommy knew I was the only one who wouldn’t hesitate to come in when it wasn’t my shift. He also knew that I could handle the entire restaurant by myself. He said it was like watching a perfect zone defense or something, the way I worked. I just got this rhythm going along with laser focus and somehow, handling twelve tables plus the dockside orders, I would not miss a beat.
I put fifty cents in the jukebox and watched the Violent Femmes slide into play. Evan and I sat in the now near-empty restaurant, both of us drinking coffee, since the Blit had no idea what Yogi tea was. “Let me go ooonnn, like a blister in the sun,” hissed over the speakers.
“Do you have to play such a head-thumping song right now?” Evan poured a good amount of sugar into his coffee.
“What’s your show going to be about tomorrow?” I asked to change the subject.
“I’m not sure yet. The walleye are running pretty good right now in Lake Michigan. Nothing better than smoked walleye. And the blueberries are coming in, too, so maybe I’ll do the segment out at Blaine’s Blueberry Farm.”
“Could you get Mrs. Blaine to bake a blueberry pie for the show?”
“Nope. Already tried. I wanted to do a piece comparing Michigan blueberries to the poem ‘Raisin in the Sun,’ but she’s camera shy. Plus she said she doesn’t like my show.”
“How come?”
“She says I get too philosophical. Said if people want that they can watch Phil Donahue or something. She says if it’s a cooking show, then it should just be a cooking show.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, huh.” Evan grimaced at the coffee.
I heard coins drop into the jukebox at the back. The opening strains of a song poured out.
“Oh no,” we both said.
There had to be someone from the Upper Peninsula hanging out in the Blit. Nobody else would ever play that song. The upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan generated a rivalry like cross-town high school sports teams. We, from the Lower Peninsula, called them You-pers—this, not so cleverly, from a slurring of the initials U.P. They in turn called us Trolls because we lived under the bridge—the Mackinac Bridge that is, and please don’t pronounce the last c of Mackinac. It’s pronounced “Mack-in-aw.” The good folks of the Upper Peninsula petitioned every now and again so they could secede and become their own state, which of course they wanted to name Superior State. They said it was because of their proximity to Lake Superior. But everyone knew it was really a slap at us Trolls. It’ll never happen, though. Fifty-one stars on the flag would just be awkward.
But to play that song. And so early in the day. Usually it didn’t get played until about eleven at night when everyone was in their cups. Gordon Lightfoot had written it. It was about a shipwreck that occurred in Lake Superior. One of those big freighters that moved cargo from the locks of Sault Ste. Marie into the Great Lakes had gotten caught in a storm.
What people don’t realize is that the waters in the Great Lakes can become as ferocious as on any ocean. It’s particularly dangerous during the fall months, when the winds whip the waters of the Lakes into a frenzy. This particular freighter, the speculation went, had gotten caught between two gigantic waves. The waves each could have been about thirty feet high, maybe higher. Enormous waves can occur much closer together in the Lakes than they can in the ocean. Further speculation was that the bow and the stern had each become balanced on the top of a wave. The freighter then split in the middle and went straight down, with all hands on board. No survivors. It was an incredibly sad event in our history. The song continued, “. . . the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald . . .”
For whatever reason, this song had become the anthem of the You-pers. I looked around and saw three guys sitting at the bar waving their beer mugs back and forth. One of them was wearing an IRON MOUNTAIN IS MAGNETIC T-shirt, so that sealed the deal.
You-pers.
“Let’s go. I can’t take one more verse of that song,” Evan said as he grabbed his wallet and car keys. We wandered out of the Blit, and I threw some stale bread at the ducks waiting for their handout in the parking lot.
“Was that Fudgie Shaw who was in today?”
“Yeah, he’s coming by tonight.”
“I thought you were still dating Walker.”
“I am.” I poked him in the side and made him squirm away.
“What’s Walker got against us, anyway? He hardly ever comes around. You’d think we were contagious,” Evan said as he paused to light a cigarette.
“I don’t really know. I think he thinks we’re all disaster prone.”
“What have we ever done to him?” Evan asked.
I thought for a moment. “Remember that time we took our rowboat out on Muskegon Lake? And instead of buying a new boat plug Dad stuck gum in the hole? When the gum softened up, the boat sank and you, me, and Walker had to swim about half a mile to get to shore. We all had to take turns clinging to the Styrofoam cooler because we forgot the life jackets in the car.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Evan mused. “He lost his dad’s lure box, too. Must’ve taken his dad all winter to hand-tie all those flies.”
“Two winters,” I muttered. Walker never let me forget it. Evan got in the car and leaned across the seat to unlock my door. I slid in. “Anyhow, I wanted to ask Fudgie a question. When we were at your wedding he gave Lucy something. I wanted to know what it was.”
“Nosy.”
“Yep, and speaking of nosy, why were you late for your wedding?”
Evan and Anna had only just returned from their honeymoon and I hadn’t had time to talk to him.
“I don’t really want to say. It was about Father Whippet.”
“What about him?” I prompted.
“Doesn’t ‘I don’t really want to say’ mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“It was sort of like he had lost his robes. And we were helping him find them.”
“Lost his robes? Like at the dry cleaner’s or something?”
“No, not quite like that.” He pulled up at the house. “Here you go.”
“Thanks, Evan.” I got out, slammed the door, and made my way up the walk. The back door was locked, but everyone in town knew that if you gave it a sharp bump with your hip it opened. Which is what I did now. I thought about my brother. Evan was a ship’s captain and a food show TV host. He meandered around with a philosophy that life was meant to be lived. But the TV show only reflected one part of him. The other was dressed in starched whites with his captain’s bars attached to his shoulders in very straight lines. He demanded a great deal from his crews and he got it. People just naturally loved Evan. He could read the Raytheon radar better than anybody, tell a story that would have you laughing so hard you would beg him to stop talking so you could catch your breath, tell from the waters when a storm was coming or the fish were running and at what depth. He knew that sometimes during a snowstorm the waters of Lake Michigan could turn the brilliant blue of the Caribbean. He taught me how to read a barometer and he knew how to steer by the stars with a sextant. Not many people knew how to do that anymore. He captained research vessels for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the government can sometimes be too damn cutesy, as the acronym NOAA is pronounced “Noah”), and he captained party boats and private vessels.
He was commissioned to deliver a boat from Muskegon down to Fort Myers, Florida, once. Dad went with him. They crossed Lake Michigan to the Chicago River, then to the Mississippi, and then on down into the Gulf of Mexico. They had bikes with them and at every port they would ride around and talk to the locals, buy fruit from the roadside stands, and get a feel for the place. They were both pretty bummed out when they finally had to fly back home. Evan would tell tales of captains and their ships lost in the Great Lakes and of dead bodies floating up against the bow. He told stories of strange flying objects and of counting hundreds of shooting stars over Lake Michigan in late August.
And he tolerated me. He may have actually liked me. I’m nine years younger than my brother. Certainly when I was six and he was fifteen, we didn’t have a lot in common. He moved in and out of the house like an apparition. But by the time I was nineteen and he was twenty-eight, we actually managed to carry on conversations.
Fudgie Shaw came over that evening. “Hi, Mrs. T,” he said to Mom, and gave her a hug. Then he opened the refrigerator. “No beer?” He looked at Mom.
“In the downstairs fridge,” she said.
After Fudgie got his beer, we went out back and sat in the glider and looked at Bear Lake. Fudgie waved at Terri Worthington, who was out in her family’s Chris-Craft. It was a wooden classic from the twenties that I had always loved. She squinted up at us with one hand over her eyes, then waved back and continued on, leaving a slow wake after her.
“How the hell did you come to be at Lucy’s wedding? Her first one, I mean?” I cut to the chase.
Fudgie rocked the glider with one foot. “I was getting kind of burned out at U of M so I decided to hitchhike across the country. It was actually pretty easy getting rides. You wouldn’t think that in this day and age. My mom flipped. She said I’d wind up murdered and in a ditch and would have to be identified by my dental records.” He took a sip of beer. “Anyhow, so I’m pretty tired and really dirty and I had just gotten dropped off in San Francisco. I had stayed with people I knew across the country or their parents or their friends or whoever I could bum a night with. But I didn’t know a soul in San Fran. Then I remembered Lucy was in Monterey. I hopped a bus and rode for an hour, then walked to the base. Helluva walk, I gotta tell you. Long way. I got there and asked for Lucy. She comes down with this guy who turns out to be Chuck. We do the usual ‘Omigod, I can’t believe you’re here’ and whatnot; then she tells me that they are on their way to the justice of the peace. Since I don’t have anywhere to go she tells me to come along and I can be a witness. They needed one anyway. They were just going to pick somebody up at City Hall but Lucy said if I was there I might as well be it.”
“Didn’t you ask why? I mean, why she was getting married?”
“Oh sure. They were both laughing and hooting it up in the car. They told me that it was going to be a quickie wedding so that Chuck wouldn’t be shipped out to Germany. Then they’d get it annulled when Chuck’s girl showed up to do the real honors. The whole thing was pretty damn funny. That’s why I was kind of shocked to see the whole deal happening back here. I guess they really fell in love, huh?”
“Um, yeah.” I wasn’t on solid ground here.
“Whatever happened to the chick Chuck was supposed to marry?”
“Lucy said she never showed up.”
“That’s weird. Do you suppose she really exists?”
I thought about Chuck’s phone conversation in my parents’ bedroom. “Yeah, I think she exists.”
“We had a blast that night. Got them married and then we had a reception.”
This startled me. They had a reception? Before I had a chance to imagine a small, intimate setting complete with a string quartet, Fudgie went on.
“We went to Chi-Chi’s—you know, that Mexican chain. A bunch of their friends from the base showed up. We did tequila shots and danced around to the mariachi band.”
I revised my initial thoughts. This reception sounded like fun, not like the usual WASPy thing we had around Muskegon—although the receptions that were held at the local Polish Falcon Hall were a lot of fun, complete with polka bands and dollar dances with the bride.
“Then this guy shows up dressed as Cupid. One of their friends had hired him. Cupid comes out and sings a song and then we got him drunk, too. It was a fun night.”
I thought about how different this bride seemed from the sullen Lucy I had grown up with. The Lucy I knew was one who had steadily waged war with every one of her high school teachers. The same teachers I would inherit two years later. When I arrived in their classes, they would look down at the attendance list and say, “Jeannie,” long pause, “Thompson?” The long pause always tipped me off. They were already thinking how much they hated me. The French teacher, on the very first day of class, had seated me in the last row while the rest of the class occupied the first two rows. Since there were six rows in total, I spent a year staring at empty desks and the backs of everyone else’s heads. In a school that was only composed of about ninety students per grade, it was hard to escape a teacher who hadn’t had Lucy in class. It didn’t make for a great four years. But I tried my best to be a model student and not bring any attention to myself.
The mosquitoes were starting up in earnest now. Fudgie and I slapped at them and I lit the citronella candle on the porch. It never helped, but we always used them.
“I wanted to ask you what you gave Lucy the night of Evan’s wedding.”
“A picture. One I took the night of the reception. I figured that that was what you wanted to know so I brought a copy with me.” He pulled it out of his shirt pocket. I looked at it in the waning light. It was a photo of Lucy and Chuck holding up their marriage certificate and yukking it up pretty good. Lucy had on a blue ruffled shirt and her best Jordache jeans. Chuck was in a white T-shirt and a sombrero. Behind them was a man painted blue, sporting a skimpy Cupid outfit and pointing a stuffed satin bow and arrow at the smiling couple.
“She’s wearing my shirt,” I said. “I’ve been looking all over for it.”
“How are they doing?” Fudgie asked. “Now that they’re living together and all.”
“They aren’t. When they got back to base, the army didn’t have anything available in married housing. So she’s still in her barracks and he’s still in his. But they’re both getting discharged soon.”
“Then what are they going to do?”
“Good question.” I’d have to ask Mom whether she knew. Fudgie drained his beer and stood up. “I have to go back for my mom’s birthday festivities. Tell Lucy I said hi when you talk to her.” He strolled across the backyard to walk the three blocks to his parents’ house.
“Bye. And thanks,” I called after him.
He waved his hand in reply as he walked. I went back into the house to escape the mosquitoes. Dad was on the phone and rubbing his forehead. Mom was sitting at the table and watching him intently.
“Can’t they find another place for her?” I heard Dad ask the person on the other end of the line.
“What’s going on?” I asked Mom. “Is it Lucy?”
“Shush, I’m listening.”
“But she’s just not right in the head . . .” Dad continued
“Is it Elizabeth?” I asked Mom.
“No, now shush.”
Dad talked for another few minutes, then hung up the phone. He and Mom regarded each other grimly.
“They say it will only be for two months,” Dad said.
“Two months of what?” I demanded.
They both turned to me wearily. “It’s Grandma Thompson. Her nursing home has been temporarily shut down for renovations to bring it up to code.”
Grandma Thompson lived in Michigan City, Indiana, about three hundred miles south of us. She had refused many times to come up to Muskegon and live with us or in a local nursing home. She preferred to stay in the city she had grown up in and close to her other son, Robert, Dad’s brother.
“Were you talking to Uncle Robert?”
Dad nodded. I asked, “Why doesn’t she stay with him? She doesn’t like us anyway.”
“Jeannie, don’t say such things.” Mom sighed.
“But it’s true!”
Grandma Thompson had always had a bug up her butt about our family. When Mom was pregnant with Lucy, she had given her a handbook on birth control. When Mom got pregnant with me, Grandma Thompson didn’t speak to our family for five years. People often asked my mom if we were Catholic. She would just laugh and reply, “Not Catholic, just careless.” Uncle Robert’s family was correctly composed of one boy and one girl.
“Robert can’t take her. He doesn’t have an extra room.” We all got coffee and sat down at the table. Dad started tracing the rooster in the corner.
“What about his kids’ rooms?” I asked.
“He’s turned one of them into a model train room and the other one into a sewing room.”
“Hazel has never sewn a stitch in her life,” Mom muttered.
“It’s only for two months. Then she can return to the nursing home.” Dad rotated his coffee cup on the table between his palms. Mom stood up and rubbed his back.
“Of course, Harold. She’s your mother and we love her and we’ll do everything to make her welcome here. When does she arrive?”
Dad looked at her miserably. “Tomorrow.”
I left them to plan bedpans and wheelchairs and complicated prescription medicines. Later that night, I lay in bed and stared at the wall. As the others had gradually moved out of the house, Lucy and I had finally gotten our own bedrooms. Hers was better. For one, it had heat. I’d wake up on winter mornings and see ice on the inside of my windows. Dad swore up and down that he had rearranged the ducts but nothing ever worked. Since Lucy had left, I slept in her room. Now I stared at her wallpaper. She had chosen white wallpaper with funny drawings of desserts all over it. Under each éclair or chocolate cake was written things like “No! No! No!”
Mom cracked open the door. “Are you asleep?”
“No.” I sat up. She came and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Jeannie, having Grandma here will be fun.”
“Uh-huh.” I couldn’t tell where this was going.
“She can tell you all kinds of family stories.”
Like the one about Dad bringing Mom home for the first time to meet his parents? And Grandma taking Mom to see Dad’s ex-girlfriend’s house? She had told Mom that that was who Dad should have married. It didn’t give her a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings toward Grandma. Mom should have gotten mad about that but she had just been sad and felt she could never live up to expectations. I decided not to bring up that particular family story right then.
“Sure, Mom. I’ll listen to her.”
“The thing is, you might be with her a lot.”
I sat up straighter in bed. “What does that mean?”
“We can’t leave her alone, honey. And I’m working now.”
“But I work, too!”
“Only part-time. I’ll talk to Tommy Loyse tomorrow about your hours so that you can be home during the day.”
I wasn’t sure which was more insulting, the fact that I was now de facto babysitter to my senile grandmother, or that my mother thought she had to call my boss for me like I was a ten-year-old. I decided not to argue right then and switched the subject. “What’s Lucy going to do when she gets out of the army?”
Mom stroked my hair. “She’s not sure. She’s talking about finishing up her degree.”
“That would be good. She only had a year left at Western.”
“Oh, not Western. She wants to go to Michigan State. They have an advanced Russian language program.”
That was news to me, but I wasn’t exactly on an inside educational track at MSU. “What’s Chuck going to do?”
“He said he’s willing to come along. Said he doesn’t have anything better to do.”
“Wow. Well, I guess it’s good that he supports Lucy.”
Mom smiled and tapped my nose. “Get a good night’s sleep; tomorrow is G-day. Grandma is coming.”
She looked out the window at the trees and the street beyond. “Did you move the lawn furniture into the garage?”
“Yeah,” I said wearily. It was a nightly ritual. A few years back we had discovered a lawn chair directly underneath Lucy’s bedroom window. It had been dragged over there from its proper place about twenty feet away. Mom called the head of our neighborhood watch, Mr. Moorepark. We called him Mr. Moorebutt because of his large posterior. She informed him that we had a Peeping Tom and could he please keep a careful watch on the house. But the chair kept reappearing under the window, generally on the nights when one of us inadvertently forgot to close the blinds. Finally, my mom and I had hidden in the bushes one night, determined to catch the peeper. A figure had eventually appeared in the darkness. Mom clapped a hand over my mouth to keep me from yelling out a snide comment too early. The bushes were scratching my face and my knees were about to give out from crouching so long when the silhouette grabbed the chair and lugged it over to the window. Mom flicked on her flashlight and caught the culprit full in the face.
“Mr. Moorebutt!” she gasped. He blinked for a moment, either from trying to absorb the situation or at the crude reference to his behind.
“Mrs. Thompson, this isn’t what it looks like. I was just testing out a theory about how difficult it is to move this chair. For instance, how strong a man would have to be.”
Since the chair was made of lightweight aluminum and a four-year-old could have moved it, I didn’t think this was much of an argument. Mom was torn. On the one hand, this was such a lame excuse that she had him dead to rights. On the other hand, he was a neighbor she’d have to see every day of her life. She decided to let it go. “If you’re finished, then you should move along. Everything is okay here.” We waited while he hustled back to the street and disappeared into the shadows. Now, every single night of the summer, Mom made me drag the chairs into the garage and back out again in the morning. Mr. Moorebutt continued as the head of the neighborhood watch, although Mom made it clear his services weren’t needed at our house.
“Good night then, sunshine.” Mom kissed my forehead and closed the door quietly behind her.
I woke up at 8:10 a.m. to the high-pitched whine of a buzz saw. I groaned into my pillow—now what? I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and went to the kitchen. Mom and Dad were already having coffee and watching Evan’s show. Not that I could tell what Evan was saying because the buzz saw was so damn loud. I watched his mouth move silently while he demonstrated pouring a bottle of beer over wood chips. Ah, he was going with the smoked walleye segment after all. The trick was to soak wood chips in beer for about twenty-four hours, put the chips in the Weber Smokey Joe, and presto, smoked walleye.
The buzz saw whined down and then stopped. Tom bumped his hip on the locked back door and walked in. It was too early for me even to ask what they were all up to now. Tom got some coffee and the newspaper and we all watched Evan. He laid some fish on a grill. Then he put the cover on it and lit a cigarette. He sat on a picnic table smoking and regarding the grill. “Corn would be good with this I guess,” Evan mused.
I could tell he was ad-libbing. His philosophical inspiration hadn’t been with him much lately, he had complained to me privately. “But it would be better to wait until August when the corn is good and ready to be picked. In the meantime, some fried squash will do fine,” Evan continued. We watched him stub out his cigarette on the ground, then pick up the butt and put it in his shirt pocket. “Have to be careful of the environment,” he murmured. Then he wandered back into the kitchen TV set. The cameraman followed him. The camera bobbled up and down as we heard the cameraman sneeze.
“Bless you,” Evan said as he picked up a yellow squash. He sliced it very thin, dipped it in water, and then rolled it in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. Then he threw it all into a pan and fried it in butter.
“That’s my recipe”—Mom nodded proudly to Dad—“straight from West Texas. I told Evan I thought it would be good with walleye fish.”
“Do you know how walleye got their name?” I asked Tom.
“Nope.” His attention was on The Muskegon Chronicle.
“Did you know that Muskegon is actually a Native American word that means ‘swamp’?”
“Like I give a sparrow’s fart.” Without taking his eyes off the paper, he reached for his coffee mug and took a sip.
I went back to watching Evan’s show until a commercial came on. “So what’s Tom making out there?” I asked Mom.
Mom explained, “Sometimes Grandma needs a wheelchair to get around so we had to make a plywood ramp for the back steps. She’ll be arriving in a couple of hours. Dad is going to pick her up. Can you stay with her this afternoon?”
I knew it wasn’t really a question. I would be staying in with my grandmother on a beautiful July afternoon.
“Come on, Mom. Walker was going to come by this afternoon.”
“Then you can both stay with Grandma,” Mom said and the case was closed.
“All right, but I’m still getting my hair done this morning.” I had finally saved up enough tips from the Blit to try to repair my damaged hair.
“Then could you stop by the church and ask Father Whippet to come over? I’d like him to meet your grandmother.”
Mom had apparently forgotten that there was a little invention called the telephone, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. I drove to Alan’s Beauty Shoppe and arrived to find a line of women waiting in front of me. They were seated reading Redbook and Good Housekeeping and the Enquirer. Alan was busily trying to shepherd a few women through their hair rinses while his assistant blow-dried another. I walked over to Alan, who had his hands deep in a shampoo.
“I have a ten o’clock, Alan. What’s up with all this activity?” Usually I could stroll in without an appointment.
Alan rolled his eyes. “I have no idea, darling. You would have thought the word was out that they were discontinuing the blue rinse at midnight.” He glanced down to make sure the woman he was shampooing had her ears covered in soap. “Can you come back in an hour? I’ll have the ladies done by then.”
This seemed doubtful to me, but I figured I’d run over to St. Peter’s to talk to Father Whippet. I walked across the town park, skirting the World War II memorial, to get to the church. The Muskegon Seaway Festival was in a few days, and people were everywhere erecting booths and tents in the park. The festival usually had a couple of amusement park rides, an art fair, and, by far the most popular attraction, a beer tent. North Muskegon countered with an ice cream social up at the high school, followed by fireworks. Since these events were two of the few big things that happened in either town, they were well attended. The other big thing was the Polka Festival, which was a few weeks later.
I went in the side door of St. Peter’s and down the corridor to Father Whippet’s office. The outer office, where his secretary sat, was empty.
“Hello?” I called out. Nothing. I entered the office and knocked softly on the door leading directly to Father Whippet’s inner sanctum. “Hello?” Again, nothing. His office hours were clearly posted and he was supposed to be there. I put my ear to the door and heard a gasping noise. I recoiled. He could be having a heart attack. One of my mother’s relatives had died that way. He was in the bathroom, but they just thought he was having trouble doing his business. Nobody checked on him until another family member got anxious to pee.
I knocked again, but still just heard the same gasping noise. I jiggled the handle, but it was locked. Then I thought of my own family’s door and I gave it a sharp knock with my hip. It bumped open. I moved inside the office, which was clearly empty. The lights were off, and only dim, filtered sunlight came through the lead-paned windows. The gasping noises had abated. I stood in the middle of the room not sure what to do.
He might have fallen behind the heavy antique desk. I moved around it but Father Whippet was not lying prostrate on the floor. I pulled the chair out from the desk and got down on my hands and knees to check the leg area. Maybe he had slipped down there. Nothing. I put my hands on the edge of the desk to hoist myself up, then I saw the papers on the desktop. They were drawings that could have put the Kama Sutra to shame. They were crudely drawn and involved poses that I didn’t think were actually achievable between a man and a woman. I didn’t get to see much more because at that moment Father Whippet opened another door that led to his office. I realized then, of course, that he had been in his private bathroom. He must be constipated to be making so much noise. He stood stock-still, staring at me with the papers in my hand, and I stood stock-still, staring at his secretary, who emerged from the bathroom, too.
Father Whippet took the offensive. “What are you doing in my office!”
If I’d had my wits about me, I would have retorted, “What are you doing with your secretary in the bathroom?” Instead I took a step back. “My grandmother is going to be staying with us for a few months. Mom wants you to come by to see her.” I dropped the papers, edged toward the door, and bolted out.
I took a deep breath back out in the sunshine. It couldn’t possibly have been what I thought. Father Whippet and his secretary having sex in the bathroom? It was too bizarre. I didn’t know what to make of the drawings. I scuttled back across the park to the Beauty Shoppe. The overhead bell rang as I entered. Alan waved me to a chair and then flopped down in the one next to it. “What a morning. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Me neither,” I said heartily.
Alan reached over and picked up some of my hair. He let it fall again. “What demon gave you such a bad haircut?”
“You did, Alan,” I said wearily.
He didn’t flinch. “I must have had a good night the night before. This only happens when I haven’t slept.”
“Have you slept now?”
“Yes, and we’ll make you look fab-o. But tell me I didn’t do that to your bangs.”
“No, that was me.”
I was still thinking about Father Whippet. Mom always said I had an overactive imagination. Sammie even teased me, saying, “You are the biggest exaggerator in the whooole world.” Clearly, I was just putting two and two together and coming up with seven. It was just too absurd to think that the good Father had something going on the side. I turned back to Alan.
“Why the run on the blue-hairs today in the salon?”
“They acted like schoolgirls, but”—he saddened—“not a bit of gossip. Every one of them just said she got in the mood to have her hair done. That, and something about Father Whippet and some kind of secret event.”
When Alan finished my hair it looked marginally better than before. The color was back to a more-or-less blond color and he had trimmed the frizz off my bangs.
I was crossing the Causeway back to the house when I decided to pull over. I loved the Causeway. It crossed over the Muskegon River, connecting greater Muskegon to the tiny slip of land known as North Muskegon. The lanes going in either direction separated to go around a small island in the middle of the river. Then they rejoined on the other side.
The local VFW hall was in charge of the island’s upkeep, and since the Fourth of July was upon us, lots of volunteers were busy getting ready. I watched the women as they bent over to plant the flagstaffs, their bottoms straining at their polyester pants. Every year, the entire perimeter was lined with two-foot-high American flags. Literally thousands of them fluttered in the sunshine as I looked out the driver’s-side window and pondered my day.
So Father Whippet was having an affair with his secretary and had written some sort of sex ritual and a whole group of elderly women from the Linen Guild were involved. What could they be doing? Having sex orgies down in the basement where we have our bake sales and sell crocheted Christmas ornaments? Even my overactive imagination couldn’t quite believe all that.
Three men in khaki army hats were standing by the main flagpole. One of them—the one with the portable oxygen tank and red suspenders stretching over his belly—seemed to be in charge of unfolding the flag. My dad had taught me to fold an American flag when I was six years old. First, fold the stripes over the stars lengthwise, and then take one striped corner to the other side so you form a triangle of fabric. Continue with the triangle back and forth until you have a little flap of stars left. Then tuck the star flap into the crease. Never let it touch the ground. He taught me that when the flag has done its duty to the country, a good American honors it with a ceremonial burning. Never throw it in the trash. The men in khaki hats successfully snapped the flag onto its hooks and ran it up to the gold-painted American eagle at the top. Then they all smartly saluted. I looked over my shoulder to see if any cars were coming, then pulled back onto the road.
Dad was digging a hole down by the lake when I got home. “Dad, have you noticed anything weird about Father Whippet lately?” I asked him.
He didn’t even look up. “Weirder than what? His usual self?” He stopped digging and pondered the bottom of the hole he was standing in. “Do you see any water yet?”
“No,” I said, looking five feet beyond him at Bear Lake. I decided not to ask the obvious. I tried to bring him back to the subject I was interested in.
“Hand me that hose, would you?”
I handed him a coil of black hose. “Okay, I give. What are you doing?”
“Digging a well.”
He was about two feet below me and the sun glinted off the comb-over on top of his head. “The water pressure for the sprinklers is low. Somehow the pump just isn’t pulling in the water.”
“What’s the difference if the water is coming from Bear Lake or if it’s coming from a well five feet from Bear Lake?” I asked.
“I have a theory I’m working on”—he leaned on the shovel—“but it’s a bit too early to see if it’s going to pan out yet. Why don’t you go up to the house and say hello to Grandma?”
I know when I’m being dismissed. I trudged up the stairs and went in the house through the sliding doors. Walker was sitting at the kitchen table with Grandma Thompson. A deck of cards was spread out in front of them. “You see here? Three nines together. That means you’ll be taking a long trip.” Grandma had her nose down close to the cards so she could see them.
“Hi, Walker.” I kissed him on the cheek. “Hi, Grandma.” I pecked her on the cheek, too. “What are you doing?”
“I’m reading his cards. What’s it look like?” Grandma picked up the cards from the table. “I’ll do you next, Elizabeth.”
“Jeannie,” I corrected.
Grandma tipped her head down and looked at me over her bifocals. “Oh, yes,” she said, “the fifth one. What in the world were your parents thinking?”
They probably weren’t thinking, I thought. I was conceived a few years after the Pill hit the market. Mom had said she was too busy with three little kids to get to the doctor for the prescription. That’s when Lucy was born. Then Mom said that she got the birth control prescription but couldn’t find the time to get to the pharmacy. That’s when I was born. Dad got a vasectomy after that.
Dad came into the house and, after shaking hands with Walker, went to the TV room and settled down into his favorite red chair with a book.
Grandma tapped the deck. “Sit down. I’ll give you a reading. What time were you born?”
“I don’t know. Just a sec.” I wandered out to the TV room. “Dad, what time was I born?”
He didn’t hear me. He and I had something in common—we both read like madmen and used it as a way to tune out the chaos around us.
“Dad?”
“Huh?”
“What time was I born?”
He put his book down on his lap. “You were born at 6 p.m. I remember we couldn’t find a babysitter for the other kids and—”
“That was Sammie.”
“Are you sure? I thought that was you. Well, then you were born at 7 in the morning because the doctor had to get out of bed and he was late and your mother almost had you on the gurney out in the hallway.”
“That was Lucy.”
Dad sighed and picked up his book. “I don’t know, Jeannie. Ask your mother.”
“She’s not here.”
He peered at me over the latest Helen McGuinness mystery. He finally seemed to really be considering my question. “I remember now. You were the one when the headlights didn’t work.”
“Excuse me?”
“It was two o’clock in the morning. I left the other kids with a neighbor next door and got your mom into the car. But after a couple of miles the headlights on the car went out. We almost drove into a ditch. It scared your mom and me half to death. We stopped the car by the side of the road trying to figure out what to do. Your mom’s contractions were coming fast. Then all of the sudden the moon came out from behind the clouds. It was a full moon and it lit the rest of the way to the hospital pretty as you please. You were born just a few minutes after we arrived and I remember your mom saying you were born under a lucky moon.”
I did vaguely recall Mom mentioning something about a full moon so I figured this story must be my own. I went back into the kitchen.
Grandma shuffled the cards with a professional flair. I thought she probably would have loved Vegas. I could just see her with a little green visor telling the dealer, “Hit me.” She laid out the cards row after row and studied them.
“You’re going to die soon,” she announced to me.
Walker reared back at the death pronouncement, but I just pulled out a chair and sat down.
“No, I’m not, Grandma. You say that every time,” I said.
“Don’t anger the spirits. I just tell you what they tell me.” Grandma was getting huffy. She studied the cards again. “You may be right, though. It might not be you. But somebody close to you is definitely a goner. See, the ace of spades is upside down between the jack of diamonds and the queen of hearts, and the queen of diamonds is just below the ace. It’s as clear as day.” She tapped the cards with her index finger.
“Um, Jeannie? Do you want to go to the Whippi Dip for an ice cream? Or out to Lake Michigan or something?” Walker stood up, clearly ready to leave the nut house I call home.
“I can’t. I have to stay here with Grandma. Why don’t you just hang around with us? We can watch TV or something.”
Walker rolled his eyes upward behind Grandma’s back and shook his head. He came over and kissed the top of my head. I trailed after him out the back door and walked him to his car. “Do you really have to go? Come on, it won’t be that bad. I just have to be here in case something happens.”
“Jeannie, something always happens in this family.”
“We prefer to think of it as excitement,” I said stiffly.
“I’m sure your grandmother is very nice, but I don’t want to stay inside and watch As the World Turns on a beautiful day. Or any other day for that matter. I’m gonna go sailing with John.” Walker got into his Pinto and pulled away. He stuck his hand out the window and waved. I waved after him and turned to go back into the house. I broke into a jog when I heard the phone ringing.
I bumped through the back door and grabbed the phone in the hall.
“Hello,” I gasped.
“Jeannie?”
“Yeah, hi, Sammie,” I answered.
“Have you or Mom talked to Lucy lately?”
“I talked to her about two weeks ago and I think Mom talked to her last Sunday. Why?” I fiddled with the tangled-up cord of the wall phone.
“I think something’s wrong with her. She called me today and sounded really down. She wouldn’t say what was going on, but she definitely sounded not so good.”
I stretched the cord as far as it would go so I could look into the kitchen to make sure Grandma was all right. I couldn’t see her. I went the other way into the dining room, but couldn’t see her there either.
“Speaking of something wrong,” I said, “have you talked to Evan? He seems a little off lately. His show just doesn’t have that spark right now.”
“People get creative blocks. Nothing to get worried about,” Sammie said. “Anyway. Lucy. She did say that something was up with her and Chuck. I think she’s going to try and come home soon.”
I walked back to the kitchen as Grandma wandered back into view. I eyed her warily. She was removing her panties, which was the last stitch she had on.
“Sammie? I really have to go.” Grandma’s droopy rear end was facing me now. She walked over to the sliding glass door and pressed her body against it. I wondered how that looked from the other side and winced.
“Anyway, I wanted to give you guys a heads-up,” Sammie said.
“Look, Sammie, Grandma is buck naked here in the kitchen and I have to go deal with that.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Sammie said calmly. “Just let Mom and Dad know I called.”
I hung up the phone and ran to Grandma, picking up her clothes from the floor as I went. “Grandma? Grandma? Are you okay? Why did you take off your clothes?”
“It’s hot. The window is nice and cool.”
I held her housecoat open for her but she darted away. I barely managed to stop her from opening the front door. “Grandma, no! You have to put your clothes on.” I tried to wrestle one of her arms into the sleeve but didn’t get very far. She had become a squirmy two-year-old who doesn’t want to put on her shirt. She wiggled away and then stiffened her body so that I couldn’t get the housecoat on her.
Thankfully, Mom arrived. She dropped her bag of groceries on the table and ran over. Grandma suddenly became compliant and allowed Mom to dress her. Darting her eyes over at me, Grandma whispered to Mom, “There’s something wrong with that girl. She told me to take off all my clothes.”
I went back into the hall and took the phone off the hook. Holding it by its cord, I let the receiver dangle. It began to spin, untangling its knotted cord. I watched it spin and spin until finally one thing in my life was all straightened out.