“Definitely not cool,” she’d said, eyeing my dual outline.
Among Andrea’s other friends—and as the life of any party, she had many—I was the only one with young children. Although motherhood was a big part of my life, I’m still not sure I would have considered it my defining characteristic. Andrea did. In her mind, even standing on that porch at 10:00 p.m., dressed in a short red romper dress and high-heeled sandals was not enough to remove me from that role. No matter the location or circumstance, if someone four feet tall was accompanying me, it had to be one of my sons.
I walked my companion toward the brass entry light and waited for her exasperation to morph into a full-face grin. Because my date had not come from my womb; he’d come from my wallet. “He” was a vinyl blow-up doll wearing nothing but inked-on curls of black chest hair and a gold lamé G-string.
“Andrea, meet… um…,” I said, thrusting his weightless body forward. I’d bought him but had forgotten to name him.
Andrea squinted, pursed her lips, and cocked her head to the side.
“Earl,” she declared. “You are definitely an Earl.”
Andrea wasn’t a large woman; she was slight and fine boned. Her laugh was full-throated, though, like a big wave capable of engulfing everything in its path. When I’d presented her gift, one of those laughs rolled out of her body, off that porch, and drifted into the night. She grabbed Earl’s free hand and pushed the restaurant’s heavy door open. Rock music thumped from speakers near the bar, I heard the sound of happy women celebrating, but just for a second, the three of us stood there, awash in the pale light.
My Lee Jeans, beer T-shirt, no makeup, hiking boot–wearing friend was a bride-to-be. And in that moment, she’d been transformed. For one thing, she had on mascara (mascara!), but it was more than just that. It wasn’t the ruffled blouse or the tight flowered miniskirt or even the nylons that made her seem so different. It was how she carried herself, how she moved, the proud set of her shoulders.
Usually so boyish, for the first time ever Andrea seemed not like a girl at all but a grown-up woman.
The moment lasted for only a second, but I knew even then I’d remember it later. Even though she was years younger than me, when we were together I’d often catch myself admiring her “jump first, look later” attitude. And the way she managed to remain unscathed by the consequences. When you were her, there never seemed to be any.
Other times, though, I’d feel maternal toward her, and now that she was getting married, I hoped she would escape making the same mistakes I had. In love at least. My marriage had started out fine, then faltered into disappointment. My husband never seemed happy and spent most of his free time sleeping. And I’d grown tired of asking him what was wrong.
I knew growing up when I saw it. And felt lucky to have been standing on that porch with Andrea when it happened to her. That the other witness had been a male blow-up doll wearing a perpetually surprised expression and pair of underwear appropriate for a traveling male stripper did not take away from the tenderness of the moment.
“Earl is one lucky man,” I told her, meaning it, before the three of us walked the gangplank into T.C. Traders, the door swinging closed behind us.
Buying Earl was so out of character for me, he had to have been Bev’s idea. I told her everything back then, and even though I was thirty-three and not thirteen, by the end of that summer, my friendship with her reminded me a lot of the one I’d had all those years ago with Mike. I didn’t stand in Bev’s garage and holler her name—Bev lived in an apartment; she didn’t even have a garage. But I had no qualms about showing up unannounced for no other reason than I simply enjoyed her company. She was enough older than me that I often considered her life a kind of preview for mine, and I liked what I saw. Bev was proof you could be a mom and be middle-aged, yet also be vibrant and fun.
Andrea and Bev’s friendship would come later, though Earl was just the kind of wacky gag she might have suggested. I do know I was scheduled to work at Peegeo’s the night of Andrea’s party, so I knew I’d be late getting there. My plan was to compensate by making a big entrance with a funny gift. It was probably Bev who told me about Traverse City’s erotic lingerie store, Ravissant. They had just what I was looking for—a four-foot Partyboy Doll who could be mine for $28.95 plus tax.
In 1995, Bev was single, worked as a legal secretary, and her children were grown so she had no one to provide for but herself. She was frugal, but that kind of expenditure may not have seemed all that prohibitive to her. I was a waitress with two young children. My average tip was five dollars a table, so for me, Partyboy was expensive—the equivalent of waiting on at least six tables. Money I could have used to buy groceries, gas, or put toward our electric bill.
I held up the box and pictured myself walking into Andrea’s party with it. In this daydream a hush fell over the room and Andrea shrieked with laughter and gave me a hug. She also tossed all her other gifts aside the second she saw mine. Her other friends might have been on time for the festivities, but they’d also wished they’d been clever enough to think of a blow-up doll.
Bev may have been vaguely aware of my insecurities where friends were concerned, though I’d never confided the reason. The right time for such a conversation had never presented itself. When you were a grown woman, how exactly did you say to another grown woman, “I’m really glad you’ve agreed to be my best friend because I haven’t had one since I was thirteen”? You just didn’t.
It was strange, I’ll admit, to be surrounded by garter belts, velvet blindfolds, and vibrating harnesses, yet engaged in a fantasy not about my husband, not about any man, but about making points in a platonic friendship instead.
I didn’t care. I pulled out my waitress bankroll, peeled off thirty one-dollar bills, dug around in the bottom of my purse for some change, and bought Earl. Later I decided not to wrap him up, but to have him arrive on my arm instead, fully inflated and wearing the G-string.
Once Andrea, Earl, and I were inside T.C. Traders, she introduced us to the dozen other women she’d invited to the party, then hooked her finger into the elastic of Earl’s underwear, stretched it away from his abdomen, and looked down.
Earl was the economy model—no bells, no whistle.
“So tell us,” Andrea probed, a talk show hostess now, playing it for laughs, all drama and fake sympathy. “Do you ever get that ‘something’s missing’ feeling?”
Bev was at home, Linda was out of town, and so except for Jill and the bride-to-be, all the other women at the party were strangers to me. But funny was funny. One woman spilled her drink and another yelled, with admiration, “Who brought that?”
We left T.C. Traders soon after, all of us and Earl packed inside an RV. Although Andrea’s parents were helping her pay for her wedding, she and her fiancé, Steve, were still on a tight budget. The vehicle she’d hired to convey us from bar to bar wasn’t the kind of RV you saw in television commercials or gleaming on the show floor of a camping expo. It was a bus. I don’t mean it was big like a bus or boxy like a bus, I mean it was an actual bus. An old Blue Bird school bus its mullet-haired driver had gutted, outfitted with camper seats, spray-painted a splotchy blue, then stenciled with fauna native to the Northern Hemisphere. Canada geese in flight, deer with ridiculously large antlers, black bears standing on hind legs.
The rear windows and the emergency exit underneath them were blacked out, and a bumper sticker offered this advice to tailgaters: “Don’t Laugh, Mister, Your Daughter Might Be in Here.”
Andrea had been in love with Steve for as long as I’d known her. They’d met when she waited on him and some of his friends. It was an instant sense of like between them that had quickly turned into love. She hadn’t dated anyone else since, and she said she did not want to memorialize the end of her single life by seeing some oiled-up stranger half-naked. She’d made both Jill and me promise: no stripper. She thought they were creepy, not sexy.
Jill might have been disappointed. I acte
d like I was but inside felt only relief.
I didn’t have much experience with the opposite sex. When other girls my age started dating, I was still playing kick the can, streetball, and building forts in the woods with the neighborhood boys. Even my best girlfriend, Mike, went by a boy’s name. I’d married a man I’d met when I was only nineteen. Just the idea of a male stripper gave me a shuddery feeling, the same sensation that came over me whenever I’d left a chicken breast in the refrigerator too long.
Earl, however, was safe. Nothing could have made him sexy, but he sure made those women I didn’t know funny.
Who blew up the skinny yellow balloon and stuck it into Earl’s G-string? I don’t remember. Did one of Andrea’s friends just happen to have a balloon stashed with her cigarettes, lighter, and lipstick inside her night-out purse? If not, what was a balloon a parade clown might use to twist into a wiener dog doing inside that crazy bus?
As the driver careened through town, those women fondled Earl’s dachshund in a display much cruder than anything they would have attempted with a real live stripper. Andrea had indeed ignored her other presents after I’d presented her with Earl, and after each place we stopped, he’d become more infused with our group. By the end of the night, Earl was simply one of us. A foil to our exaggerated laughs, a silent participant to our elaborate toasts, a dance partner for our bumps and grinds.
If he had been Bev’s idea, he was a good one.
Even though she wouldn’t have known the other women along, either, she must have known a fake man in a sagging G-string would be silly fun for anyone. What no one could have anticipated was how other people would react to him.
“What’s with the fag?” some guy in jeans and a rodeo belt buckle wanted to know.
“You’re an idiot,” Jill told him, putting her face aggressively close to his until he walked away.
“Baby, I been lookin’ for you all night,” said a middle-aged redhead, inside Traverse City’s only dance bar.
Both reactions had fascinated me. Socializing in large groups with people I didn’t know did not come naturally to me, so I concentrated on observing people instead of obsessing over my own awkwardness. Today, I’m more comfortable with it, but that night I said little—easy to manage when the music is loud enough to erase the history of human speech—and instead watched how strangers reacted to Earl.
An idea began to form. I put my hand on Andrea’s shoulder and decided to share it with her. “Earl should go to Drummond,” I yelled over the music.
She stopped moving in her chair for a second, looked at me, and her eyes grew wide. Then she hurried out onto the dance floor. The redhead protested when Andrea yanked Earl away, but the house lights went up soon after, and the music was turned off. Even in my temporary deafness, I registered a sound.
Andrea had popped open the valve on Earl’s back. We both massaged him, and once he was deflated, she packed him away in her purse.
A week later, Andrea was standing up straight, sober and lovely at the front of the church. Her alabaster dress contrasted with her black head of curls above, and what was easily a good half acre of red carpeting below. The dress had been her mother’s, and she looked stunning in it. I’d already seen it once—at the seamstress’s house for her final fitting—but it sure hadn’t looked like this. Regal, tight, perfect. “Something old and something borrowed,” she’d said, proud of her own practicality.
The pews inside Christ the King had filled with guests; then Jill and three other women from the bachelorette party lined up along the communion rail, beaming as Andrea and Steve prepared to take their vows. Jill was the maid of honor, and she and the other bridesmaids wore strapless black dresses, heavy black gloves stretching all the way to their elbows, and white pearl chokers.
I’d arranged a babysitter for our two boys; the wedding was like a date for my husband and me, and we were seated in a pew near the front. He had a fresh haircut and looked so handsome in his pressed white shirt. Then the bridesmaids turned sideways, angling their bodies toward Andrea, and he caught sight of their shoulder tattoos. There was a butterfly on one shoulder, a half-naked Tinker Bell on another, and a long-stem rose with several of its petals detaching on a third. Next to me, I felt him stiffen. When I looked over at him again, he didn’t look quite so handsome anymore.
“Carny rats,” he griped under his breath, scowling.
Exceptions were made for war veterans, but otherwise he didn’t think much of people who had tattoos. Duty, he understood. Female emotion expressed with a needle and permanent ink, he did not. I just hoped none of my friends had heard him.
There were all sorts of people he dismissed—country music fans, cigarette smokers, Republicans, hunters, fishermen, high school dropouts, heavy metal music fans. His prejudices were so specific I shared none of them and at the sight of those tattoos only remember thinking, Something blue!
Philosophical differences like this between my husband and me always seemed to present themselves on special occasions. Was it okay to watch football and eat Thanksgiving dinner at the same time? (Him—no; me—yes.) Should our children be able to pick what they wanted to wear on school picture day? Even if that meant a pajama shirt with their favorite superhero on it? (Him—no; me—yes.) Was it okay for him to arrive stoned at my family’s annual Fourth of July gathering, just so he could endure all that togetherness? (Him—yes; me—no, no, please, God, no.)
As usual, when he grumbled too loud at Andrea’s wedding, I sat quietly next to him, not wanting to cause a scene. The church lights made Andrea and her bridesmaids glow, and I focused on that instead. Later, Andrea would confess she and the other women weren’t exactly radiant; they were perspiring like wrestlers in the ring. Being surrounded by carpet, velvet, and satin on a humid August afternoon had made them so overheated that all during the ceremony a river of sweat had cascaded from their foreheads, down between their boobs, and trickled all the way to their knees.
Sitting in the third pew back, all I saw was beauty, happiness, and skin decorated with tiny blue wings and blue flower petals floating on a blue breeze.
At the reception, I was in charge of the guestbook and made sure everyone signed, even the popular DJ hired to play dance music. The guestbook from my own wedding had been a strange net-wrapped contraption created from two pieces of glass by an artist friend of my husband’s. Our guests took one look at its sharp edges and were afraid to touch it, let alone sign their names. No real record existed of who came to my wedding, and I vowed Andrea and Steve would not suffer the same fate.
The next day, they drove to New York City for their honeymoon, by way of Canada and Niagara Falls. Neither of them had been out of the country before and had no idea what to expect at a border crossing. After they came home, Andrea told us what happened when Steve pulled up to the Canadian line.
A guard in full regalia approached their car, bent at the waist, and peered into their window, his nose barely an inch from Steve’s startled face.
“Citizenship?” the guard barked.
In Andrea’s retelling, Steve stared straight ahead. “Yup!” he confidently replied.
She heard the assurance in her new husband’s voice and a great rush of love plunged through her. When she met the officer’s eyes, though, a giggle attack took over, along with a urinary close call.
“That’d be a great one to tell our kids someday, huh?” she’d said, imagining the headline: “Bride Pees at Border Crossing, Causes International Incident.”
The officer had wanted to know what country Steve belonged to, not whether he belonged to one at all.
“The United States of Andrea” is how he could have answered, because he belonged to my friend now.
While Andrea was away on her honeymoon, Linda was busy making final plans for our third trip to Drummond. Our departure date was in less than a month, and she called Frank, finalized our trailer reservations, checked on the price of gas ($1.20 a gallon), and watched grocery store fliers for a sale on ground ch
uck. Sloppy joes were easy, filling, traveled well, and Linda had her own secret recipe.
By cooking some of our own food instead of always eating out, we’d saved enough money on our two previous trips to carry a balance from year to year. It was only thirty or forty dollars, but Linda deposited it into her savings account, where it made a couple bucks interest and was waiting for us when we needed it. Having a little something in the kitty before we even left town bolstered our pact and gave our trip an added sense of continuation.
“Have you talked to Jill?” Linda asked me one night at work.
“Not since Andrea’s wedding,” I told her.
Jill and her husband, Marty, had rented a house, moved to a neighboring town, and she’d left Peegeo’s to work at the Hoffbrau, a bar closer to their new place.
“I ran into her in Kmart,” Linda said, “and it doesn’t look good.”
It was the end of the night when Linda told me that, and we were working through our cleanup list. We were both in the kitchen and I had a dozen ketchup bottles stacked and balanced, mouth to mouth, “marrying” the contents. The caps soaked in a dish of piping hot water while the red paste dripped from the bottle on top into the bottle on the bottom.
Jill and Marty were not doing well, and although she assured Linda she was still planning to go to Drummond—she needed the trip more than ever, in fact—the encounter worried Linda. She was concerned about Jill, but also about our trip’s finances.
Since the beginning, she’d budgeted our money as carefully as she could, but even with her knack for money management, the only way for us to afford everything—gas, groceries, the bridge toll, the ferry, two nights in the trailers, and our bar tabs—was if all four of us went on the trip and paid our share. If anyone dropped out, or couldn’t come up with the full amount, it would put our whole trip in jeopardy.
The Drummond Girls Page 5