“What now?” Linda asked, her hands in their familiar ten-and-two position on the steering wheel.
“I don’t care,” Jill said, slumping against the seat, defeated. “Anything’s fine.”
A bland-sounding round of “me, toos” filled the vehicle. The excitement of our second night on Drummond together felt like it was over. No one suggested we go back to Chuck’s, and Northwoods seemed too far away—eight or nine miles at least. Two-tracking was out—I’d sensed we all wanted to exit that stuffy car, not spend more time inside of it. It was much too early to call it a night, though, and too dark outside by then for even Bev to consider a walk in those unfamiliar woods. Linda started the drive back to the trailers.
“Don’t forget,” came a cheerful voice from the middle of the car. “I’ve got Pictionary!”
For all the island’s wide-open beauty, it’s surprising that my memories of those early years often center on compact indoor spaces. The inside of Linda’s and Andrea’s cars, the snug quarters of Frank’s trailers, the circle of lawn chairs, and the tables at Chuck’s and Northwoods we all gathered so tightly around. Back in Traverse City, I’d often longed for “space”—at work when trying to squeeze through the bar crowd to get to the kitchen, and at home, too, when I craved even a little time to myself.
When I was on Drummond Island with the girls, it was just the opposite. I reveled in the closeness we’d created, both emotional and physical. My friends didn’t want anything from me; they just wanted to be with me, and I felt the same toward them. As someone who was claustrophobic about putting on a turtleneck sweater, on the island I actually liked the feeling of being squeezed into Linda’s car with everyone else.
When the last of the natural light faded that night, it took every bit of warmth from the day along with it, and when we returned to Frank’s, the wall heaters inside the trailers had already kicked on. Pam, Bev, and Mary Lynn called it a night, but Susan talked the rest of us into playing her board game. The double bed next to the galley kitchen slid away to make room for a dinette table and the five of us gathered around it. If Linda, Susan, and I scooted in tight and Andrea used a cooler for a stool, we could all fit, and there was even a little room for Jill.
Susan pulled a rectangular blue box from her bag, unfolded the playing board, and handed out pads of paper and freshly sharpened pencils. Jill was antsy, though, and even after the rest of us had sat down and were ready to play, she stood in front of the open refrigerator and looked inside. I thought she was contemplating a snack. She was, but not for herself.
“If we can’t go to the bears,” she said, “I’ll make the bears come to us.”
“Oh, give it up, Jillsy,” Linda said.
Linda might have been the first to doubt the suitability of a board game, but that had been hours ago. Since we’d left Traverse City the morning before, she’d spent a lot of time driving, and now she was just happy to be out from behind the wheel.
We left Jill to her own devices, divided ourselves into two teams, and Susan shuffled the word cards, put them in the center of the board, and handed out the category cards. Some of the words were difficult to render, such as prophet or virtue, and others were easier, like sit or iron. Susan was about to turn over the top card when Jill pulled something out of the refrigerator, turned toward us, and held up her selection.
“Bear bait,” she’d said.
In Jill’s hand was the white plastic container of Linda’s sloppy joe meat. She spooned a small hill of the beef, green pepper, and ketchup mixture onto a paper plate, opened the trailer door, and walked down the steps.
There was probably a knack to baiting a creature as large and wild as a full-grown bear. Especially one with a $1,000 bounty on its head. I was close enough to the open door to see down the steps. From that vantage point it looked like all bear baiting entailed was setting a paper plate of meat on the ground one inch from the bottom step, then dashing back inside the trailer and slamming the door.
Jill’s giggle was infectious. In a few short hours, Megabear had become more legend than actual animal. He wasn’t real to us anymore, though Jill must have believed if anything could change him from a spirit bear into a real one, it was the sweet, sticky comfort of Linda’s secret recipe.
“Ground beef isn’t free, you know,” Linda said, sounding both annoyed and amused.
Jill ignored her.
“Now,” she said, “we just have to sit back and wait for nature to take its course.”
Her task complete, Jill was content to let us absorb her into the game. It was Andrea, Jill, and Susan against Linda and me. Someone mixed the drinks, someone else opened Frank’s bottle again, just for a taste, and as the sand in the game’s little timer sifted down, we considered each word through the aperture of Drummond. The cards offered up images and actions that seemed ridiculous and silly, yet somehow preordained, too. Baby, wedding cake, adventure, confusion. It was as if a board game most of us hadn’t even wanted to play was now telling the story not just of our trip, but of our lives.
I’m usually so competitive, but that night it was just fun to guess, and I don’t think one of us even thought about trying to win the game. After our first turn, the very idea of teams faded away and together we guessed every word right. When it was Susan’s turn to guess, she made a big show of covering her eyes. Andrea pulled a card—punt. Besides me, Bev was the only other real sports fan of our group, and as the sand timer funneled the seconds away I wished she’d have stayed up with us. I couldn’t think how to show that kind of kick with a drawing and wished I had Bev there to help.
It might have seemed like just a game, yet between the five of us we’d so far guessed every word on every card that Susan had turned over. As the night wore on, all those correct and speedy answers had taken on a deeper meaning. They weren’t just part of some late-night fun, they were a reflection of how well we’d gotten to know each other, of how much our group had jelled after only a couple of days. I don’t know if the other girls felt that, but I did. To me, those answers were evidence of a commonality, a wavelength, a bond that hadn’t existed when we left Traverse City, but did now. The walkie-talkies had shown us how little we knew about each other’s pasts; the game that night proved we knew everything about the present.
The pressure was on to get Susan to say that word. The rest of us tapped our pencils, looked at the ceiling, and closed our eyes, just trying to think of something, anything, to draw, but papers stayed blank.
When a tiny divot of sand was all that was left inside the timer, Jill leaned back, set her pencil down, and clasped her hands behind her head. She glanced at the card one last time, looked Susan in the eye, and with complete impunity broke the most important rule of the game. Instead of drawing her clue, she said it, right out loud.
“This word rhymes with George’s ex-wife.”
Susan’s eyes flew open. “Punt!” she blurted.
The trailer shook with laughter. Andrea tipped backward off the cooler, rolled out the door, and down the steps, escaping injury and also missing the bear bait by inches. The game completely dissolved after that, Susan folded up the board and put it all away, and when we’d all calmed down, she and Linda returned to their trailer and we all went to bed.
For the longest time that night I couldn’t get to sleep. At home, my struggles with insomnia were frustrating, but I didn’t mind them on Drummond. I actually enjoyed just lying there, wide awake, replaying all the joy and silliness of the previous two days. The ride up, being able to share that first view of the island with Bev, the rare beauty of Maxton Plains, and then how warm and welcoming the inside of the trailer had felt. In that darkness, the tiny bedroom I shared with Bev felt safe. Like a familiar den.
Way too early the next morning I awoke to the sound of empty aluminum cans bouncing over on gravel.
“The hell?” Andrea groaned from somewhere up front.
It had been late when we’d finished playing, and I was surprised to hear her stirring so ear
ly. The noise outside was kind of loud, but Andrea could usually sleep through someone cutting sheet metal with a power saw during a thunderstorm.
After Susan had put the game away and she and Linda went back to their trailer, Andrea and Jill had removed the table, pulled the mattress back out, and slept in the double bed up front. I’d slept in the back bedroom, and it looked like Bev had moved to the pullout bench sometime in the night. I didn’t think anyone in the other trailer was up yet, so I tried to relax, turn off my brain, and go back to sleep.
In a perfect world, the Jack Daniel’s bottle from Frank would’ve been full, I would’ve grabbed a few more hours of sleep, and breakfast would’ve still been hours away.
But ours was an imperfect world. Where black bears dined on garbage at the town dump, marriages that had started happy and loving turned so gloomy and secretive that when you packed up in the early morning to leave for three days, that didn’t mean your husband would get out of bed and hug you good-bye.
It had been so great to have the new girls along, but by Sunday morning I missed my sons, and was half-glad we’d be on our way home in a few hours. I heard Andrea and Jill stirring so I got up, too. Andrea wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and she and Jill and I rambled outside in our pajamas to investigate the source of the sound. Linda was already up and standing just outside the other trailer. The noise we’d heard was coming from the shed at the edge of the woods, and we walked over to have a look.
Hunched in the doorway with his back to us was Frank.
He was bent over, he was cussing, he was gripping a rifle, and he was wearing nothing but sagging tighty-whities and a pair of knee-high rubber boots.
The last man I’d seen in his underwear who wasn’t my husband had been Earl. Each of these sightings—Earl’s triangle of gold lamé and Frank’s Fruits of some aging and bedraggled Loom—would now be combined and forever branded onto my retinas.
“Bear!” Frank growled when he saw the four of us.
The shed’s screen door had been torn off its hinges. Scattered around the inside of the small building and between our two trailers were beer cans, food wrappers, soggy brown grocery sacks, and fish guts. It looked like a fairy-tale monster had clomped in from the woods, torn the door off, then grabbed several garbage bags in each claw and hopped around, shaking them to death. I could have retrieved my camera and taken a picture, but a man in his underwear carrying a gun and running down empty beer cans was not the native wildlife I’d had in mind. In what type of album would I have glued such a photograph?
Yet the same way that quarterbacks sometimes want to have a bad throw back, I think I’d like to have that moment back. In a do-over I’d look through the lens of that drugstore camera, depress the shutter, and develop the photograph, just to assure myself it all really happened exactly the way I remember it. Once the ball leaves your hand, though, it’s gone for good.
Those trailers were anything but soundproof and you would have thought at least one of us would have heard something. Without Frank’s hibernation helper, perhaps we would have. I wished the destruction had woken us up; at least then Jill would have seen her bear, but no one heard anything.
Andrea, Linda, and I stood there like posts, but Jill walked around, kicked at the grass, then peered into some bushes. After a minute, she picked up something thin and white in each hand and held the two items aloft. The torn halves of a paper plate, each with a big orange grease spot.
“I knew it, I knew it!” she hissed, whispering so Frank wouldn’t overhear. “I told you we were going to see a bear.”
Andrea and I rewarded her with our shock faces: jaws down, front teeth forward, but Linda wasn’t so easily impressed.
“Ah, maybe I missed something,” Linda said, “but we didn’t actually see anything.”
Jill just smiled, waving the torn pieces for emphasis. “Megabear. Was right. Here,” she mouthed.
It didn’t matter to Jill whether she’d seen it with her own eyes or not, Megabear had still walked past our trailer sometime in the night and taken the bait. It was Jill who’d had the feeling we were going to encounter a bear that weekend, and Jill who’d made it come true. It was also Jill who had ignored the one fast rule of the board game, and that morning those two acts of will seemed related. I didn’t know what was waiting for Jill back at home but I believed whatever it was, she could handle it.
Frank stomped over and marveled aloud what an amazing coincidence had befallen Barb’s Landing. The same night we’d wanted to see a bear, a bear had decided it wanted to destroy his new garbage shed.
“That was us,” Andrea confessed. “But hey. You gave us the moonshine. We can’t be responsible for anything that happened after that.”
Andrea declined to mention we’d engineered the shed’s destruction on only two sips apiece and that the bottle was still three-quarters full. She couldn’t tell him that. It would have made us look like sissy la-las.
Frank seemed unmoved by her confession and said nothing but held the garbage bag open for Jill. She disposed of the evidence, he tied off the bag, tossed it back inside his ruined shed, then opened his mouth as if he were going to growl at us some more. Not a sound came out, though, and he shook his head and walked away.
I watched him go. His shoulders lifted and relaxed, lifted and relaxed, as if he were laughing, even though one hand was pressed to a spot on his lower back and the other was using the butt end of his rifle as a cane.
“It’s a young man’s game,” he grumbled.
I didn’t know if he meant women were a young man’s game, renting out trailers to eight of them was, or defending your turf against Megabear. Maybe he’d meant all three.
The four of us headed back inside our trailer. The other girls weren’t awake yet, but they would be soon, and we decided to get breakfast started. Linda and I offered to help Jill cook while Andrea folded up the bed, reinserted the table in its place, then wrapped herself back up in the blanket.
“Drummond just keeps getting better and better,” she said dreamily. “I’d sure like to see ahead to next year. Just to know how we’re ever going to top this one.”
Maybe that was just a figure of speech, but I didn’t understand why some people wanted to know the future. I never really understood the point of crystal balls, tea leaves, or palm readers. As the smell of eggs, ham, and peppers filled the trailer, it was the certain but unknown changes ahead that seemed delicious to me.
I didn’t see how we were going to top ourselves, either, but in the months ahead, when the wind would pin me inside, when there’d be several feet of snow on the ground, and I’d be spending my nights washing greasy fish platters and my days trying to balance a teetering checkbook while my husband argued with the TV news, I sure planned to enjoy imagining the possibilities.
CHAPTER THREE 1997
Pam, aka “The Sheriff.”
My thoughts of snow materialized not too long after we returned home in 1995, and winter came early two years in a row. The blizzard of ’96 lasted well into ’97 and was lumbering and destructive. Roofs were caved in by heavy snow, tree limbs broke under the weight of ice and landed on power lines, and schools were closed for days on end.
Pregnant with my third child, I’d left my waitress job at Peegeo’s, found work as a freelance editor, and many days that winter I remember standing with my sons at our living room window, as snowflakes the size of pennies tumbled past the beam of our porch light. Behind us, three pairs of mittens steamed in front of the fireplace while their father slept on the couch.
On one of those evenings I stood all alone at the kitchen counter instead, and dug my fingernails into the butcher block. Hours later my third son arrived—a breech and beautiful blue-eyed present. I was thirty-five then, an “older” mother, and my husband stayed with me all through the difficult birth. Afterward, he only left the hospital once—to buy me flowers. When he returned, he asked the nurse for a vase so he could arrange the three blue carnations and one red rose into a
bouquet for my nightstand. He was making an effort, but I didn’t get it. Every woman knows there’s nothing in a florist’s case cheaper than carnations; I’d thought he’d been trying to save money, not trying to say something.
Who could have predicted it’d be me, the “old” mother of two, and not the childless and much younger Jill or Andrea, who’d be the first to make use of the Drummond Girls’ “pregnant or dead” clause?
“At least it was the former!” Bev had said when I replayed for her the details of my emergency C-section.
She’d come by with a twenty-four pack of Luvs, Rose’s lime juice, and a bottle of Absolut; we’d been in a gimlet phase when I’d gotten pregnant. Now that my son was here, and healthy, she saw no reason not to return to it.
Sitting on my living room couch, Bev oohed over my perfect baby, assured me that sons were easier than daughters, then kindly but firmly suggested I put the difficult birth behind me. I should think only positive thoughts and just accept that Y chromosomes were going to dominate my life for a while. When I pointed out that she couldn’t possibly understand what I was going through, that it had been a quarter century since she’d cared for an infant, she readily agreed. That was no reason for me to act so depressed or refuse her offer of a cocktail. So what if it was the middle of a weekday afternoon; even modern babies took naps, didn’t they?
I found her logic crazy, quirky, and impossible to argue with. Our friendship grew, even though with three sons I had less free time and felt frustrated by Bev’s habit of trivializing serious topics. If anyone wondered what could possibly overwhelm my optimistic, goal-oriented, and indefatigable self, by that spring I knew the answer. Three sons under the age of seven, an emotionally absent husband, a new career as a magazine editor, a wardrobe of clothes that still didn’t fit, and a longing for Drummond so acute it felt like physical pain.
The Drummond Girls Page 9