The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  Still, it wasn’t often, if ever, that the ratio of one bloodline to another could be so minutely computed.

  “Well, what’s the other one percent, then?” Pam asked.

  “Washycocky Indian,” Bev said, expressionless.

  The name sounded ridiculous. And insulting. I waited for the punch line, but after several seconds there didn’t seem to be one. Then again, I’d started to notice that Bev’s stories took an increasingly long time to develop. Sometimes the point she was trying to make got lost in an elaborate soup recipe or a distant cousin’s overseas travel. Other times, she simply forgot it altogether, changed trajectory midway through, but stoically carried on, regardless.

  “Um,” Andrea finally asked. “So that’s, like, a real thing?”

  “When I was nine years old, I thought it was,” Bev said, her face collapsing into a giggle.

  Nine was how old she’d been when she’d asked a favorite uncle about her family’s heritage. Her uncle had told her she was 99 percent Polish, 1 percent Washycocky Indian, and Bev believed him. Which was understandable at nine, but at nineteen? It wasn’t until Bev told her husband about her supposed heritage that she’d finally learned the truth.

  “I was bragging,” she admitted. “I told him that if we ever had children, thanks to me they’d all be one-half percent Washycocky,” she said, sheepish at just how absurd that sounded now. “He burst out laughing, then did this…”

  Bev stood up, right there inside the Northwoods, and treated us and all the other patrons in that bar to an enthusiastic display of humping.

  It might have been just laying there, dormant for almost five decades, but thanks to her uncouth uncle, a green shower curtain, and a sarcastic ex-husband, Bev now had a Drummond Island nickname, whether she still wanted one or not.

  It never took much to get us all going once we were inside of Chuck’s or the Northwoods, and Bev’s new moniker had been more than enough to keep us out late. The next morning, she was already tightening the laces on her hiking boots, though, while I nibbled a bagel, sipped my coffee, and stood at the window, gazing at the cedar trees.

  It was the eastern red cedar that was native to Drummond, a tree that wasn’t a real cedar at all but rather a species of juniper. The stunted, hardy examples surrounding Fairview looked like senior citizen trees who’d weathered difficult pasts. Their trunks were contorted, their branches shooting out at odd angles, but their flat, scale-like needles were still a lush and waxy green. A late botanical victory after decades of patience and struggle.

  All Bev had to do was tip her head toward the door and raise her eyebrows and I ran upstairs to get dressed. I looked forward to our Sunday morning walks. It was good exercise; the scent of pine, fallen leaves, and lake air was always a remedy for what felt like a bottle-stopper of cotton in my morning-after head, but the best part was just her company. Any of the other girls could have joined us, but for this reason or that, they rarely did.

  Bev was confident on the trail the same way she’d been confident in the bow of her canoe.

  “You must have been a Girl Scout,” I said, as she strode in front of me down a rock-studded path.

  “Nope,” she said. “At Catholic school we never had anything like that.”

  Bev’s childhood had been an urban one of chores, family get-togethers, and daily Mass. While my family went on camping and backpacking vacations, hers drove to Miami. While we had sailed the Great Lakes, canoed the Au Sable River, and waded in Lake Superior until our legs grew numb with cold, she’d fished in city ponds with a safety pin on the end of a string. Yet she loved the woods as much as I did.

  “Then how’d you get to be so outdoorsy?”

  Bev had hopped over a log blocking our way, her boots finding purchase even over the slick moss.

  “My dad,” she said.

  The same man who’d inspired her to use an early marriage as an escape route had also shared his love of gardening when she was barely old enough to walk. Beyond grapes, Bev couldn’t remember everything he’d grown in their city backyard. As newlyweds, she and her husband had moved north, about as far as the knuckle on Michigan’s ring finger, and the time she’d spent in that garden with her father had morphed into a love of the woods.

  She liked to take walks alone, or with me. Bev had none of my angst over shunning an American-girl tradition, but she wasn’t much of a joiner, either.

  “I have a new fish tank,” she told me, apropos of nothing.

  By then I was no longer startled by her abrupt changes of subject, especially when our conversation had ventured close to the roots. I silently congratulated myself for being so present, for not taking it personally, not overthinking it, and instead just accepting the psychology of the moment. This was her coping mechanism, one I did not share but could appreciate and understand.

  “I’ll have to come over and see it when we get home,” I said, past the fallen log and astride her now. “I love watching fish. It’s so relaxing.”

  “Yeah,” she said, in a tone almost professorial. “It is supposed to be real good for mentally slow people.”

  I stopped walking right there in the middle of the trail. She kept going, but glanced over her shoulder and tossed back a victorious smirk. If there had been a merit badge for gullibility, it wouldn’t have gone to Washycocky that morning. It would have gone to me. Even the cedar trees seemed to be snickering.

  CHAPTER SIX 2000

  Mary Lynn.

  In all her forty-nine years on the planet, Mary Lynn told me, she’d never experienced anything like it before. Finally, some doctor had come up with a diet that really worked! Eat all the bacon, deviled eggs, and pork rinds you wanted, and hey, drink a tub of gin, too, if that turned you on, and still lose weight.

  Bev and I had just popped into Peegeo’s for a quick beer and to say hello to Linda when we’d also noticed Mary Lynn sitting at the bar. She was with her husband, Jimmy, and the two of them were having dinner together. His plate was covered with a napkin—a signal to the bartender that he was finished—but she was still eating, and I watched her fork up a bite of hamburger, dip it in yellow mustard, and pop it in her mouth.

  Perhaps I’d eyed her entrée strangely, because without preamble she’d started in about the diet she’d been on. As long as you replaced the tonic water in your gin with club soda and ate no bread, rice, or potatoes, she said, this eating plan sucked the fat off you like a goddamn vacuum cleaner.

  “It’s all scientific,” she’d explained in her squeaky voice. “Carbs are evil, butter’s good, and sugar’s like the Antichrist.”

  Science had been one of my better subjects in high school and that didn’t sound like a provable hypothesis to me. But then again, one look at an organic chemistry textbook and I’d switched my major from biology to journalism, so what did I know? Plus, there was no arguing with Mary Lynn’s results. Her diet might have sounded crazy, but it was working.

  Mary Lynn had never talked about her weight with us, but she’d been sedentary and a little bit round for as long as we’d known her. Short, pinkish, freckled, and unyielding, she dressed in a kind of uniform—ankle-length skinny jeans decades before they were in style and always a pair of flat, pointy-toed Keds on her tiny feet. On top, an oversized sweatshirt, perfectly ironed, and often decorated with a lace collar, embroidered flowers, an inspirational quote, or a basket of teddy bears.

  I wanted to ask her for more details, but not in front of Bev. I’d struggled a bit with my weight, too, ever since the birth of my third son, but whenever I’d mentioned it to Bev she would just tell me she couldn’t relate to that problem at all. “I eat to live,” she’d say. “I don’t live to eat.”

  I didn’t live to eat, either, but for some unknown reason, my jeans didn’t get that.

  As the weeks went by, Mary Lynn stuck to the diet and it continued to work. She still wore the same kind of jeans—just several sizes smaller—and the preppy blue sneakers, but she’d traded the shapeless sweatshirts in for sleev
eless blouses with jaunty collars and fitted V-neck sweaters. And she smiled. A lot.

  “What’s that diet again?” I’d asked the next time I saw her at Peegeo’s.

  Bev wasn’t with me that time; I was alone, so I felt freer to discuss it. I no longer went to Peegeo’s to work or to escape a crying baby—my youngest son was four years old. I went there after the boys were in bed to get away from my husband. All we did was bicker; at least at Peegeo’s, no one told me I was incompetent, mocked my dream of someday being a writer, clapped their hands and asked me to snap out of it, or suggested I think about washing the windows once a decade.

  That night, I’d seen Mary Lynn dine on pizza—after she’d asked for an extra plate, scraped the cheese and toppings onto it, then handed the naked-looking crust back to the waitress.

  “Atkins,” she’d said. “A heart doctor invented it. Basically, it’s meat, cheese, and liquor. Later, you get to have vegetables. If you’re good.”

  Long gone were the days when I could justify my large ass as simply a counterweight to a pregnant belly. I wasn’t much for fad diets. I wasn’t much for diets, period. Bacon, pizza cheese, and liquor? It was hard to believe anyone could lose weight that way. Yet Mary Lynn definitely had.

  I didn’t ask her how much, but I would have bet it was forty pounds. Maybe more. On her five-foot frame the results were dramatic.

  “I’ve got the book,” she said to me helpfully. “You can borrow it if you want.”

  There’s a book? I thought. Now she’s speaking my language.

  The following day I went to Mary Lynn and Jimmy’s house. She answered my knock and I stepped into their foyer. I’d long known where she lived, but I’d never been inside of her house before. Although the Drummond Girls were close as could be on the island, back home our lives were busy; I didn’t work at Peegeo’s anymore, and so months often passed without me seeing or socializing with some of the girls, her included. Whenever I was with Mary Lynn, it was usually in a big group—either at Peegeo’s, at a backyard neighborhood party, or with the girls on Drummond.

  She and Jimmy lived in a well-kept 1970s-era bi-level on a hill. It was near George and Susan’s house; I’d seen it plenty of times from the road, and their big bay window made the place look cozy and inviting. So I was shocked to see that inside, her house was so devoid of furniture that when I said hello it echoed.

  “Are you moving?” I’d asked.

  Before me lay an endless expanse of sculpted beige carpeting, broken up by only a couch, an end table, and a lamp. At first she looked puzzled by my question and scanned the space purposefully, as if seeing her own living room for the first time.

  “Oh!” she said cheerfully, waving my question away. “No, no. We like it like this. Less to clean.”

  The place was immaculate. Not a dust speck, cobweb, or window streak anywhere. Would my own house ever be so freshly scrubbed? I thought of the three small pairs of perpetually dirty hands and the pile of my husband’s dirty clothes piled on top of the hamper and scattered on the bedroom floor and seriously doubted it.

  Mary Lynn didn’t invite me to sit down, but put a worn yellow paperback—Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution—in my hand and wished me good luck. Back home I started reading and pretty quickly realized Mary Lynn had given me her interpretation of the cardiologist’s nutritional philosophy. It was not really the bacon-and-liquor diet. Those items were allowed, but liquor especially was to be consumed in moderation and only after the first two weeks. You were supposed to eat lean meats, fish, nuts, and salads and no bread, potatoes, white rice, desserts, or fruit. And by the end of chapter 4, I still hadn’t read one single word about pizza.

  But here was the more interesting news. According to the doctor it was not my fault that at the age of thirty-nine, my once normal-sized ass looked like two picnic watermelons wrapped in a wrinkled tablecloth. Sugar, as Mary Lynn had already explained, was indeed the Antichrist. To make matters worse, my fat cells were dumb. They couldn’t distinguish between sugar from fruit and sugar from a doughnut or a chocolate chip cookie, two items I’d banned from the house in my efforts to slim down. No, all those apples, peaches, bananas, and yes, watermelons I’d been eating for good health were turning my body into a cellulite factory.

  I opened my cupboard doors, looked inside, and spied Satan’s playground—breakfast cereal (nonsugared), bread (whole wheat), and granola bars (organic)—and made a new kind of grocery list. Ground chuck, rotisserie chicken, jumbo eggs, cheese sticks, salami. I studied Mary Lynn’s book, vowed to become a pillar of protein-satiated willpower, and dreamed of a future in which I was five feet eight inches of hard muscle, strong nails, and long glossy hair. Nothing else had worked; maybe that would improve my husband’s mood swings.

  The book did warn about the side effect to following its extreme low-carbohydrate eating plan. Constipation.

  Oh, what a small price to pay, I thought. We’d be leaving for Drummond in three months and that seemed like plenty of time for the diet to work. I had saved a pair of my favorite jeans I used to wear on the island but that no longer fit. Mary Lynn’s diet might back my system up tighter than a holiday cheese log, but no matter. I would be wearing those jeans by the time we drove onto the ferry to Drummond.

  “There’s something new on this menu I want to try,” Linda said after we’d pushed two square tables together at the Northwoods and sat down. “Cheese curds.”

  “Those are good,” Pam said. “I’ve had them before. Not here, I had ’em somewhere else, but yeah, let’s order some.”

  “They’re like these big orange hunks of cottage cheese,” Mary Lynn explained. “But dry. Kinda rubbery but still not bad.”

  I was sitting quietly and just listening. There is a vocabulary to dieting, one that involves certain word choices as well as a particular cadence or tone. It was like a secret language. A secret language that could only be translated into meaning by other dieters. And they were speaking it.

  “How many net carbs?” I’d asked, and three heads snapped in my direction.

  “Zero,” they’d said in unison.

  There was an awkward pause before the four of us chuckled a little sheepishly. Supposedly, we shared almost everything important that happened in our lives with each other. Our marriage failures (or near failures), our new careers, our new houses, our planned (or surprise) pregnancies. And yet, diets were apparently off-limits because 50 percent of the Drummond Girl membership roster was on a low-carb one, and besides my brief conversations with Mary Lynn, none of us had spoken a word to each other about it.

  I suppose that actually wasn’t too surprising. We were not women who dieted; we were women who lived. We counted the number of good men we’d loved, the number of children we’d borne, our record tip nights (mine was $185), and our consecutive trips to Drummond Island (eight). We didn’t count mistakes, failures, do-overs, or meltdowns, and we didn’t count calories, carbs, grams of sugar, points, or portion sizes, either. We were supposed to be perpetual party girls, not a traveling Weight Watchers meeting.

  But I was wearing those jeans. My husband didn’t seem much happier, or for that matter, to have even noticed I’d lost weight, but all the clothes in my closet fit. I’d taken a good look at my low-carbing friends and could see they’d lost weight, too. The island was supposed to be where no rules applied, though I’d never before thought of that in terms of eating. But when it came to successful dieting, hard-fought momentum was difficult to relinquish, even on Drummond.

  But I was not so taken with my reappearing hip bones that I didn’t recognize something else important had changed, too, and despite feeling good about getting my pre-baby body back, I wasn’t sure it was a change for the better.

  We’d asked our waitress for menus, we were talking about food and planning out what we were going to eat in great detail, instead of just ordering what we were hungry for, when we were hungry for it. As party girls, that was a bit of an embarrassment. We were thinking about food before we
’d ordered a single drink.

  So, that’s how it happens, I thought. That’s how you get old.

  One minute you were kidnapping an off-duty cop and dumping him in the woods, and the next minute you were sitting in a bar drooling over rubbery cheese.

  “Have you tried that cheesecake recipe?” Pam asked. “I took it to a barbecue once. They scarfed it right down. No one even knew it was low-carb.”

  I recognized the recipe she was talking about—a ground almond and butter crust with a cream cheese, egg, and artificial sweetener filling. It was in the book Mary Lynn had lent me, but I’d never made it. Still, might be a nice addition to my current options of cheese slices wrapped in lunch meat one day, lunch meat wrapped in cheese slices the next.

  “Yo!” Jill suddenly called out from the other end of the table. “Are you old biddies going to order some drinks or what?”

  “Yeah,” Andrea said. “How many carbs in a Michelob? I hope it’s a shitload.”

  Easy for them to talk. Andrea only had one kid, Jill had none; they were still in their thirties and probably wearing the same size jeans as the day they’d graduated high school. But I did take their point. Diets had rules and Drummond was supposed to be our one rule-free zone. If we really were going to start having rules to obey, one of them should have been not talking ad nauseam about your diet within earshot of your younger, skinnier friends.

  “I’ll have a gin and soda!” Mary Lynn bellowed, turning her face in the direction of the bartender.

  “Zero carbs,” she added to Andrea and Jill.

  No one asked Mary Lynn whether that year’s trip had been her favorite. Why would we have? There were going to be years of trips yet to come, so there wasn’t a need for any of us to single out just one.