The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  “Don’t worry,” Bev assured me, “you’ll go this year and it will be great. Like you never even missed.”

  In the weeks that followed, she’d often call or stop by unannounced, the way I had stopped by her place when we’d first become friends. She frowned whenever I complained of exhaustion or told her I didn’t think my husband was doing enough to help me. She preferred to talk about her favorite television shows, all her guy friends at Peegeo’s, and how absolutely enjoyable platonic relationships with men could be. She’d found a new aerobics class to attend and liked the music the instructor chose to accompany the routines.

  None of those things interested me, but she did, and her visits cheered me up in spite of myself. Pessimism was not my natural state of mind. It bothered me that my family, and even my mother, assumed I had it together. Probably because I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone that I didn’t. That would have meant I’d have to ask for help, something I’d always been loath to do. Bev was the only person who’d recognized I was struggling, even though she never came right out and said so.

  “You need some Mardi time,” she advised late that spring. “Not in October. You need it now.”

  It took me weeks before I had an opportunity to take her advice, but then one weeknight I said I’d meet her at Peegeo’s after my children were in bed. By the time I got there, it was quiet, most of the customers and even Linda had gone home, and it was just George and Susan at one corner of the bar, and Bev and me at the other.

  It was the first time I remember her stepping out from behind that sunny exterior. In March, her mother had died of cancer. Until that night, Bev hadn’t talked much about her, at least not with me. Part of my assessment was right—she did shy away from negative or difficult topics. Not because they didn’t exist, but because there wasn’t anything she could do about them. She couldn’t bring her mother back. She couldn’t make my marriage happy or help me earn a living while also raising three growing sons. Spending what time she could with me had been her way to forget what was sad or out of control. She wanted our time together to have the same benefits for me, too, and what I called working things out, she called dwelling.

  But sometimes I wanted to dwell. What made me feel better wasn’t pretending everything was fine, but rather knowing there was someone in my life who cared about me enough to listen to me. Even when I was sad, overwhelmed, or felt invisible.

  That night at Peegeo’s, Bev explained she’d been an unpredictable daughter who’d both enjoyed and suffered through a tumultuous upbringing in a large Polish-Catholic family. Her father owned a cab company in Southfield, a blue-collar city a sideways glance from Detroit. He wielded immense power over his clan, and in my imagination, he’d become this big, hulking ogre. But the next time I went to her house, I saw a single grainy photograph of him on her bulletin board. He was slim and photogenic, just like Bev. Handsome even, with a smile like Frank Sinatra’s.

  Bev had two brothers and one sister; her father had been controlling toward all of his children, she said, even after they’d become adults, and to wriggle out of his grasp, she’d married at nineteen. Bev’s mother stayed loyal to her father, and by the time of her cancer diagnosis, Bev was divorced, her own children were grown, and she invited her mother to move in with her. The experience had been challenging and fulfilling for both of them. Atonements were made, mistakes forgiven.

  “But what about your father?” I’d asked her.

  “Heart attack,” Bev said. “Took him out like a sledgehammer. Hey, did you know I have a canoe?”

  As time passed I would become if not comfortable, then at least familiar with Bev’s sudden breaks in logic. They were both part of her charm and what could happen when your best friend had almost two decades on you. By then I knew to expect that when she didn’t like where the conversation was going, she’d change the subject. Abruptly.

  No, I had not known Bev had a canoe. Or that she kept it chained to a tree at a rarely used public access on nearby Spider Lake. The following Saturday morning, I asked my husband if he’d watch our boys for a couple hours.

  There were few places I’d felt more at home than sitting in the stern of an aluminum canoe. Being on the lake with Bev reminded me of when my mother and I would slide my grandparents’ canoe out early, when the sun was just waking up but Duck Lake and everyone else in the house was still sleeping. We’d catch turtles, sneak up on blue herons spearing frogs, and pick a single water lily—only one, my mother always said, so there would be water lilies for other little girls’ breakfast tables. We’d usually let the turtles go but bring back our single flower. She’d trim off the stem and set the white bud in a clear globe vase, and it would slowly open into a white star that would last for several days.

  Bev had a strong, assured stroke; she sat up straight and, like my mother and me, knew not to bang the gunnels with the paddle blade. It made an awkward and out-of-place human noise that would scare everything wild away. She and I were in unison that morning, her vessel balanced us naturally in the water, and our practiced strokes felt as if they were being made by two women who’d canoed together for years.

  “I was adopted,” I blurted. “When I was a kid, we moved around a lot. And I didn’t live near my relatives like you did.”

  Anyone raised near water knows that sound travels over the surface of it quickly and in unpredictable ways. Someone could be standing on their dock humming, and people across the lake might hear it clear enough to recognize the tune. I knew that, but on our shoreline paddle, Bev sat in the bow and I told her straight back how those high school girls had dumped me. Eighteen years had done surprisingly little to dilute the memory, and it took that moment in her canoe for me to realize I’d subconsciously aligned the two. It probably wouldn’t have seemed related to anyone else, but being given up for adoption and being asked to leave that teenage clique had wounded me in similar ways.

  Bev didn’t say anything right away, but she didn’t jump out of the canoe and swim to shore or suggest that I should, either. She didn’t tell me I was crazy, that I needed therapy, or to stop complaining and count my blessings. No rogue wave swamped the boat, no lightning bolt electrified us in our metal seats. I’d dared to share a hunk of my damaged soul, out loud, with another woman. And survived it.

  “It hurts to be a girl,” Bev said after a few minutes of easy silence.

  Then, “Is that a stick poking out of the water or a turtle’s head?”

  Summer ended, my two older boys went back to school, and when it came to Drummond, Bev turned out to be right. I’d been stashing money away and baby or no baby, when the girls left for the island, I planned to be with them.

  That was not entirely amenable to my husband, however. What exactly did I think I was doing, a mature mother of three now and yet still planning on some juvenile, irresponsible weekend up north? My husband did not come right out and ask me that, not in so many words, but I could feel him thinking it. I called my mother and asked for her advice. I could only dream of having a marriage as strong as my parents did. She told me she thought the rest of the girls and I must have rocks in our heads to do some of the things I’d told her about. But she and my dad would drive to Traverse City, stay for the weekend, and help out my husband while I was gone. They’d make dinners, carve Halloween pumpkins, change diapers, catch me up on laundry, and do whatever else needed doing.

  When my first son was born, I’d somehow managed to repel the new mother guilt that television commercials (bathe baby morning, noon, and night); women at the food co-op (baths dry out the skin); my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother (baby needs more formula); the breast-feeding bullies (baby shouldn’t have any formula!); and even my father-in-law (let baby wail or baby will be a spoiled brat) aimed my way.

  I didn’t have a sister or any girlfriends with newborns, and so the first infant I’d spent any time around was my own son. It was mostly ignorance, not confidence, that allowed me to disregard all that conflicting advice and trust my own i
nstincts. In 1990, childbirth, babies, and parenting didn’t attract the hand-wringing preciousness they do today. When my second son was born, two years of personal experience worked even better at stiff-arming the meddlers.

  Then I had to go and give birth to son number three.

  There were frightening delivery complications and something must have happened to my own brain in the process because all of my calm assurance evaporated. Over twenty harrowing minutes spent under the lights of an operating “theater,” I became a worrier. I just knew my baby slept too long, but that he also didn’t sleep enough. I was sure I’d squish him in our bed or he’d stop breathing if left alone in his crib. He looked too chubby one day, too skinny the next. He was hyper; no, he wasn’t, he was slow.

  The truth was, he was perfect—healthy, willful, and cute. As he grew, I let some of my anxiety go, but with three sons to care for, my physical needs, my emotional desires, and even time to think my own thoughts were eliminated in favor of caring for my children. My devotion wasn’t extraordinary; it was just what mothers did. Not because a television commercial or a lactation consultant or a family member told them to, but because of an innate and exquisite craving to care for one’s own pink, plump, drooling, and smiley kin.

  Worry, though, had turned me into an insomniac. I would tiptoe into my sons’ rooms, one after the other, and watch them sleep. A half hour in this one’s, another half hour in this one’s, a third check in that one’s. I’d hear their even breathing and feel the weight of their lives heavy upon me. I needed to set that weight down for just a bit. I needed Drummond. I needed the girls.

  In September I confided to Bev that I was afraid if I went to Drummond, I might never want to come home again. She told me not to worry.

  “You won’t go one night without saying how much you miss them,” she’d said.

  I searched my dark and selfish heart for a sign she was right. I didn’t find one and worried some more. What if there wasn’t anything there to find?

  Two weeks before our departure, Linda called me with some bad news. Jill wasn’t going.

  “Is she pregnant?” I asked; when you are a new mom, it’s hard to believe that any other state of being exists.

  “No, thank God.”

  It was just the exact opposite. Jill and Marty were getting divorced.

  “That’s an even better reason to go,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what I told her,” Linda agreed.

  I could believe Jill was getting divorced. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t coming to Drummond. The very woman who’d inspired our sacred pact was going to break it. She wasn’t pregnant, and she definitely wasn’t dead, but she also wasn’t going to Drummond. The bear-baiting woman who’d been so bold and brave was gone, Linda said. The woman who’d taken her place was subdued, hesitant, and troubled.

  I barely knew Marty, and the few times I’d seen him in Peegeo’s he’d acted like Mr. I’ll Buy the Drinks. Jill’s husband was friendly, had twinkling brown eyes, freckles, and an infectious smile that seemed to dwarf his small frame. And now I hated his guts.

  It was official, Jill told Linda when she’d stopped in to pick up a to-go pizza. She and Marty didn’t even live together anymore. Jill hadn’t said where she was living and left so quickly that Linda hadn’t had the chance to ask her. Maybe she just needed to talk. Maybe if one of us encouraged her, she’d find the will to come along exactly because life at home could sometimes be so tough. But I couldn’t get in touch with her even if I’d wanted to, so if encouragement was all she needed, it wasn’t going to come from me.

  How could I not have her phone number? How had I not made a point of staying in touch with her, especially since I knew she was going through difficult times? Maybe those girls from my high school had been right. It apparently didn’t matter that almost two decades had passed since I’d slunk my tall frame out of that bedroom. I’d been so wrapped up in my own problems I hadn’t taken the time to ask Jill about hers. Eighteen years since that night, but right then it felt like I’d learned exactly nothing in all that time about being someone’s friend.

  That year, Linda still owned her silver Explorer, and planned to drive like always, but Andrea had sold the Chuck Truck and was in between vehicles. I didn’t have an SUV—I drove a red, mom-friendly Subaru station wagon—but it was roomy and the girls asked if I’d be the second driver. Once on the ferry, I viewed Drummond’s coastline again, this time from my new spot behind the steering wheel. I’d felt both happy and daunted by my new responsibility and the moment revealed something I hadn’t consciously acknowledged before.

  Bev was sitting next to me, Jill wasn’t even along, we were in a different vehicle, and I’d missed a year. Time was passing. Our lives were changing. And yet, up ahead of us, there was our island, in the same place and anchored as solidly as always, not a rock out of place.

  I remembered when its forests were a green mystery, wild and tantalizing. I remembered imagining myself fleeing into those woods and escaping from my own life. Now, that seemed unimaginable. What had I been thinking? That I’d raise my children in those woods?

  I had a new baby at home; escape, for longer than this one weekend, wasn’t an option. Had never been an option, regardless of how disconnected I felt from my husband. He was unhappy, too. With me, with himself, with life. He needed constant reassurance, fussing over, and pampering, and I wasn’t the pampering type. When the island came into view that year, I didn’t even get out of my car.

  “What’s the name of that bar—Northern Lights? Northerly?” Bev asked, laughing at her own forgetfulness. “The North Pole?”

  “Northwoods!” Andrea and Pam called from the backseat.

  Without Jill, our collective energy felt a little diminished, but we made our traditional stop there, toasted our traditional toast (“Drummond Girls, long may we reign!”), and later that night, the seven of us really did escape. Back home, my car was just a mom-mobile, a grocery-getter, a car-pooler; but it did have a red button in the middle of the stick shift labeled “4WD,” and that night, I pushed it. We rode deeper and deeper into those woods, I drove faster and faster and let the island’s wildness engulf me once again.

  This time, though, I was at the wheel and felt more than free; I felt unleashed.

  Linda, Mary Lynn, and Susan soon tired of rambling through that dark forest, but I continued to navigate its curves and switchbacks with abandon. Bev, Andrea, and Pam didn’t mind and even cheered me on. We dipped down into mudholes and bounced up over tree limbs, jerked one way and dodged another, shrieking over the music, over the sound of my tires in mud, over the gears working harder than they ever had before. It felt like nothing would dare try to slow us down that night.

  Then my chest grazed the steering wheel and I felt more than saw the heads of my passengers, my best friends, the women I was responsible for, whiplash forward and then back and then forward again. We’d hit a rock. Not head on, but underneath.

  There was a pause, and for a few seconds all I registered was the sound of heavy bass from the stereo.

  “We’re stuck!” Andrea hollered, and the rest of us laughed as if that were the funniest thing we’d ever heard.

  It should have been frightening, but we could hardly catch our breath. A station wagon didn’t have the clearance of an Explorer or a Bronco, and I hadn’t seen the rock beneath the tall grass. The front end had become lodged on a flat boulder, and try as I might, I couldn’t go forward or back. My passengers got out and lifted my whole car, with me in it, off the obstruction, then posed like they’d just raised a flag on the moon.

  I can still see Bev, standing in the gleam of my headlights, her foot on that boulder, her fist held high in triumph. She still had her long hair then, and in the light her blond waves reached all the way to her shoulders. She looked beautiful and capable and even sophisticated to me, despite what she was wearing: an oversized sweatshirt with tabloid-yellow text on the chest that read “Beer Contains Vitamin P.”


  The P stood for pee, of course, an apt statement from the woman whose contribution her first year had been extra rolls of toilet paper. But right then it could have stood for propel, promise, or even purge. Maybe that’s what I was on that night, vitamin P. Maybe that’s what we were all on. It was two or three o’clock in the morning, yet the exhaustion I felt all the time back at home was gone.

  “I miss my baby,” I’d said later, when we were back and settled in for the night. “I miss my boys.”

  I wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. For once, what I was thinking had just come out of my mouth, easily and with no forethought at all. Bev wasn’t usually a hugger or physically demonstrative, a trait I appreciated because I wasn’t either. But my longing to hold my son in my arms was like missing a limb, and I remembered her assuring me I’d feel just like this.

  Everyone was busy taking off coats and shoes and putting on pajamas and I didn’t think anyone heard my lament. Or, if they did, they didn’t let on. Then Bev put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

  “Holy crap,” Bev said, pointing. “What is that?”

  It was late the next afternoon, and we were just pulling into Wazz’s Party Plus to restock our coolers when there in the parking lot was a watercraft that looked like it could’ve navigated the bubbling waters of hell. It was hunter green, spray-painted over with amateurish black squiggles. In the belly of the vessel was a compact tentlike thing covered in netting. On the side facing us was a man-sized flap with fake foliage stapled onto it.

  “That’s what I love about this island,” Andrea said, after I’d parked between Linda’s Explorer and the vessel. “We could come up here for a hundred years and still not know what we’re going to see.”

  The island itself had seemed so constant. It was the people who changed. Us, but the people around us, too. I think that’s why we tried so hard to re-create the same experiences year after year. Not all the changes we’d experienced had been bad or difficult. Many of them weren’t, and some we even celebrated. George and Susan had gotten married, I’d had a baby, and Andrea had left waitressing and opened a preschool. Yet good, bad, or just plain different, I think we were only beginning to accept the randomness of life, and we redoubled our efforts at keeping our Drummond Island weekends exactly the same.