But today I know those three days were the most fun she’d ever had on the island. The usual stiffness she’d battled against when getting in and out of Linda’s car had diminished. One morning she’d even gone partway with Bev and me on our walk. At Chuck’s, she’d ordered shots of something we’d never tasted before called Tequila Rose (lots of carbs, but she was splurging) and seemed surrounded by a happy glow from morning to midnight. Her voice had lost some of its shrillness, and she actually posed for our pictures that year instead of hurrying away anytime someone pulled out a camera.
For perhaps the first time since we’d known her, Mary Lynn was proud of how she looked, proud of her new wardrobe, and of how much more active she’d become, and it showed.
In my favorite photograph of her, she’s standing sideways but looking right at the camera. Her shoulders are arched, and her head is tilted, almost as if a professional photographer had posed her, and yet she looks relaxed and natural, too. She’s got a pair of sunglasses hanging from a strap around her neck and her hair doesn’t look quite so sprayed. There are maple leaves on the ground, and they’ve already changed from green to red and gold. She’s happy. You can see a bay of clear water in the background, and whoever pasted the picture into our photo album added a heart sticker on each corner.
After Mary Lynn hollered that drink order from our table all the way across the room to the bar, Beth the bartender came over and the rest of us ordered a round, too. Then another and another. At one point I noted an empty basket of onion rings, an empty basket of deep-fried cauliflower, and the wounded remains of a plate of French fries that had been soaked in melted cheese and a ladle of chili. Off to the side languished the cheese “turds,” as we’d taken to calling them. I tried to bounce one off the bar’s wood floor to see how high it would go. Pretty high; at least to my knee and once all the way up to my thigh.
According to the trip’s log, by the end of the night our bar tab for food and drinks for eight women was $149. And although I would not have known the sum as we left the Northwoods and headed home to Fairview that night, I did know something. The notion I’d had earlier of feeling old was gone. By then we had a reputation on the island as hard partiers and good tippers, and we lived up to it that night.
Both Andrea and Linda were fine drivers, and I never worried about our safety on Drummond Island’s unlit and winding roads. There was little traffic; often we wouldn’t pass a single car between the bars and Fairview, and neither Linda nor Andrea drove fast. Drummond was the one place where we were never, ever in a hurry. Once, according to the same trip log, on the rocky and sometimes nearly impassable Sheep Ranch Road, it had taken us twenty-three minutes to go five miles.
But on the way to Fairview that night, Andrea missed our turnoff, recognized her mistake right away, and attempted to right it with a quick stop and a three-point turn. It would have worked, too, if Drummond’s road builders hadn’t made the route to Fairview Cove so darn narrow and if the car builders Ford employed hadn’t made Bruno so darn big. Instead, his heavy hind end backed a swift four feet straight down, coming to rest steeply in a ditch.
“I am not pushing,” I said, which came out, “Eye an gnat pushkin’.”
Angels can fly, the saying goes, because they take themselves lightly. How many angels can dance on the top of a gas pedal? Just enough apparently, because Bruno’s engine revved, his beefy tires grabbed that swampy grass, and we rose from the dark and oozing depths as if by divine intervention.
Back at Fairview, we tumbled out of the car and Jill motioned us to the back, saying she’d brought along some secret snacks. Andrea opened the hatch and Jill rustled around amid the coolers and Bev’s extra rolls of toilet paper. After a minute, she pulled a Tupperware container out of a tote bag and eased open the lid. The night was cool and damp, and a perfect amount of humidity was in the air to carry forth the glorious and forbidden smell of chocolate.
“How many carbs in a pot brownie?” Jill asked, giggling.
“Eat one,” Andrea said, “and you won’t care.”
If a woman had ever uttered a more effective diet-destabilizing sentence to me, I couldn’t have told you what it was. I couldn’t have told you anything. My face was numb, my body more relaxed than a vat of mashed potatoes. And for the rest of that night all I did was laugh.
I didn’t think about menu planning, getting enough fiber, or the size in the label of my designer jeans. I just stayed up late with Jill and Andrea and laughed.
CHAPTER SEVEN 2001
Crossing the Mackinac Bridge with Linda in the lead.
Was it only after September 11 that I’d started to truly fear the bridge?
Or had I been feeling increasingly anxious about crossing it even before that?
All I knew for sure was that less than a month after that terrible day, on October 8, 2001, I was sitting in Andrea’s passenger seat and preparing for her tires to syncopate over the bridge’s grates when an unprecedented attack of vertigo made me nauseated. I tried to tell myself fear was irrational. The terrorist attacks had been horrific—and far from this exposed yet relatively anonymous spot in northern Michigan.
I’d never, ever looked down when we were crossing—who wanted to do that when the view up ahead was so spectacular? Green shores, sandbars, and all that beautiful water. On a clear day if you stared at the horizon long enough, you could just make out the curvature of the earth.
But something had gone wrong inside of me that day because not only couldn’t I look down, I could barely stand to glance out the window. In any direction. If my pride hadn’t stopped me, I would have dissolved in fear and just lay down on the floor of Andrea’s Bronco.
“I’m not saying I’m a great driver,” Andrea said, turning up the music. “I’m saying I’m a grate driver.”
She was joking, and I mentally willed her to leave the radio alone and put two hands back on the wheel. For all the miles usually so filled with joy and anticipation, hers was the only moment of levity I remember on that whole trip up. I supposed I should have been thankful. If she was joking, it meant she didn’t have any idea how knotted up my insides were.
Every year we crossed the Mackinac Bridge. It was just part of our routine, part of what made the island feel so separate and far away. The only other routes to Drummond from Traverse City were to head southeast by way of Toronto or southwest through Chicago and Wisconsin. That would have been ridiculous—hundreds of miles out of our way, hours wasted, along with several extra tanks of gas.
In 2001, I was closing in on my fortieth birthday. A time when I guessed that it was probably normal for a woman to start worrying. About her looks, about her life, and truth be told, a normal time to start worrying about death. Yet before September 11, the list of things that made me anxious was blank. Now, it had started growing at an alarming rate. Elevators, left-turn lanes, gas grills, odd numbers, stadium crowds, the checkout lane at Kmart, air travel, and crossing the Mackinac Bridge.
The bridge is four lanes across, two each going their separate ways, and as Andrea approached, she had two choices. She could take the right lane closest to the edge, the one with certain death right out the passenger window, but also the one with solid concrete under her tires. Or she could take the left lane, which was a good eight feet in from the edge and usually buffered by another car. The left lane seemed the obvious choice until you realized the devastating trade-off for being away from that edge. The material under your tires wasn’t concrete anymore but a series of interconnected metal grates. Grates! So transparent, passengers could see through them straight to the long screaming plunge of watery nothingness below.
I tried not to think about that Detroit waitress. I tried not to look down. I tried not to look anywhere. Not over the edge, not into the grates, not even at my own toes clenched inside my hiking boots.
This was all just irrational, anxiety-soaked thinking, I told myself. The bridge was safe, meticulously maintained, and certainly after 9/11 being constantly monitored
for suspicious anything. But our local paper, the Traverse City Record-Eagle, had run an article about one of the hijackers, I remembered that chilling face staring defiantly from the front page, and it felt like we were driving across a mammoth bull’s-eye.
I never said any of this out loud, though. Not even to the women who’d long ago become my closest friends. I wasn’t going to miss the trip just because five miles of it now scared the shit out of me. I was not a sissy la-la, had never been a sissy la-la, and even a suspension bridge two hundred feet in the air that swayed—yes, swayed—in the wind was not going to turn me into one.
There had to be drugs for this kind of malady. Real drugs, prescribed by a real doctor, and not baked by my friend into a box of Duncan Hines. I vowed that next year, I’d be on some.
I took a deep breath. Let it out. Took another. Andrea really was a great driver. She liked cars and had a natural affinity behind the wheel. As the bridge started to slant toward the safety of land and those grates changed into pavement, I heard Led Zeppelin thump from her radio. They were my favorite band, and it’d been a tradition to play something by them when we crossed the bridge ever since I’d first tossed that cassette into my duffel bag. It was CDs now, and their music had probably been playing the whole way over, but I was so deafened by my own blood rushing through my eardrums, I hadn’t noticed. “Trampled Under Foot.” That was the song and that was exactly how I’d felt.
Since Michigan was a border state, details of increased national security in our area of the country following the attacks had dominated our local news. The day after the Twin Towers went down, all of the Great Lakes shipping lanes came under new scrutiny. Commercial freighters’ homeports were from all over the world, including cities in the Middle East. The Coast Guard announced it would be conducting surprise inspections of ships sailing in the St. Marys River, the body of water that made up Drummond Island’s northern shore. I pictured armed officers boarding the ships Bev and I used to love to watch, looking for bombs or terrorists. And after that, the attacks didn’t seem so far away anymore.
I made it across without either suffering a heart attack or covering Bruno’s car mats with my body, and when Andrea drove up to the tollbooth, there was a great big American flag, hanging vertically, affixed to the front of it. It hadn’t been there any other year, and I haven’t seen it since. Andrea slowed and unrolled her window to hand the operator our three dollars (the fare had increased to $1.50 per axle) but the woman in the booth just smiled and shook her head no.
“The car ahead of you already paid,” she told us.
We looked up the road. Pulling away from the tollbooth was a rusty pickup truck with a camper on top. Not a vehicle any of us recognized or that looked as if its driver had money to spare. A complete stranger, yet he or she had still paid our way.
At the Welcome Center, Linda’s car was already in the parking lot waiting. When we got out to stretch, we told the others about the stranger’s generosity and they were as moved by it as we had been. Then Linda took me aside, her eyes big, her usually tanned face a startling white.
“I don’t know what it is,” she’d said through clenched teeth. “But my stomach just churns when I have to cross that bridge.”
The drive north that year had felt off and out of sorts for another reason, too. Neither Mary Lynn nor Jill was with us. Jill was dating a new man; they were busy building a house, and because all her money and time were going toward those things, she said she wasn’t going to be able to go.
Mary Lynn had never missed before, but in the weeks leading up to our departure, she’d made repeated comments about money. Specifically, about not having enough of it. Her job was secure—she worked in quality control at a printing company—but her husband Jimmy was a freelance graphic designer and his workload had fallen off. They were going through some financial difficulties and had to cut back on anything that wasn’t a necessity.
The two of them had stopped going to Peegeo’s for dinner, and whenever one of us had seen her out somewhere, she’d looked worried. The $275 apiece Linda had budgeted for the kitty that year was a sacrifice for many of us. For Mary Lynn, it was an impossibility, and Linda, Andrea, and I had gotten together to discuss what to do about it.
“I’m worried about her,” Linda told us. “She’s put a lot of pressure on herself to come up with the money. We need to let her know it’s okay if she doesn’t go, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”
“Why don’t we all just pitch in a little extra and cover her share?” I’d asked.
I wasn’t made of money, either, and taking more out of our family budget for Drummond would not make my husband happy, but if it would help Mary Lynn, I’d do it. With seven of us contributing, if we each put in an extra forty dollars, it’d cover her share.
“I already tried that,” Linda said. “She wouldn’t hear of it. Wouldn’t even let me talk to her about it.”
We didn’t bother suggesting Linda try again; we understood that kind of pride. A Drummond Girl paid her own way. For our trips north, but for the obligations we had in our daily lives back home, too. Financial and otherwise. We would have been willing to cover anyone’s share who’d happened to be in a bind, and yet we were also sure we’d never have to. Not one of us would have accepted the money.
“I’ll talk to her,” Andrea said. “I’ll go to her house right now if you think I should.”
It wasn’t Andrea the Confronter who visited Mary Lynn, it was Andrea the Comforter, and afterward she’d told us Mary Lynn had gotten tears in her eyes when they’d talked, yet quickly wiped them away, she was so overcome with relief. She’d assured Andrea that her financial situation was temporary, and she’d be back with us as soon as she could.
It was only years later that Andrea had the heart to tell us what else she’d seen on that visit. When Mary Lynn came to the door and let Andrea inside, the sight that greeted her seemed too private somehow even to share with the rest of us.
If you needed to make some quick money to pay a utility bill, catch up on an outstanding debt, or get something out of hock, fall in northern Michigan is not the easiest time or place to do it. Our unemployment rate was always several points higher than the rest of the state, partly because our region was fueled by tourism, which plummeted after Labor Day. There were a few short-term jobs to be had picking apples, delivering newspapers, or sealing the roads before winter, but those are not realistic endeavors for a diminutive middle-aged woman with an uneven gait and long fingernails.
What Andrea saw was Mary Lynn and Jimmy sitting on their couch together, TV trays in front of them stacked high with envelopes. They were putting on stamps to make a few extra dollars. They’d sat down with similar stacks from a local direct mail company every night that week, Mary Lynn had told Andrea, and were earning just a couple pennies apiece.
In light of Mary Lynn’s troubles, in light of the fear and anxiety over 9/11, that three dollars from the driver of that old pickup truck in front of us at the tollbooth now seems to me an incredible act of generosity. It couldn’t have come at a better time. It wasn’t the extra money—even without Mary Lynn or Jill, our budget wasn’t so tight that a few dollars would make much difference—it was the idea that someone would do something so unselfish. For people they didn’t even know, would never know.
I don’t have many regrets where our Drummond Island trips are concerned. More than anything else, the annual sojourn has taught me to live in such a way that you don’t have regrets. But I do have one. I wish we would have pushed Mary Lynn a little harder to accept our help. I wish we would have told her how much we needed her along. I wish we said she had to go. Or given the money to Jimmy for him to give to her. I don’t care how we did it, I just wish she would have been on the island with us for one more year.
As many times as we’d arrived at the line for the car ferry, we never knew what we were going to find when M-134 made its sharp right turn into the town of DeTour Village, population 325. From the bridge,
DeTour was a one-hour drive on the coastal highway edging the northern shore of Lake Huron. The view out our windows was of the Les Cheneaux Islands, some thirty pads of land of varying sizes, inhabited mostly by pine trees, moss, and shore birds. It was the quiet part of the drive, with little if any traffic and no scheduled stops. The only time Linda or Andrea took their foot off the gas was to pass through the small towns of Hessel (population 1,264), and Cedarville (population 1,337).
On one of our first trips, back when there’d been only four of us, Linda, Andrea, Jill, and I had stopped at the Cedarville Bar. That was also when Linda had insisted we leave before dawn in order to wring every possible second out of those precious three days off. No one else liked getting up that early, but it was years before we’d be brave enough to challenge her on it. When we finally did, Linda’s answer hadn’t been to leave later in the morning, but to leave the evening before, which was how we’d started arriving on the first Thursday of October, instead of the first Friday. Our goal had always been to arrive on the island before the sun went down. Usually we made it but some years we didn’t and had to dock in the dark.
But when we stopped in Cedarville that year it was a Friday and only eleven o’clock in the morning. At Linda’s suggestion, we peeked into the octagon-shaped windows of the Cedarville Bar to see if the place was open. There inside, working a bar rag over the counter was a man with glasses, a collared shirt with a pocket protector, and an expertly arranged comb-over. He waved us inside; we sat at the bar and ordered Bloody Marys. The place was empty except for the four of us, women obviously not from his town, but the bartender nodded approvingly and said we’d chosen our beverages well. He didn’t use a premade mix, he explained, but created his special tomato juice, spice, pickle juice, and vodka concoctions by hand, one at a time. We told him they were delicious—we meant it—and he basked in our praise.
“You may find this hard to believe, ladies, but I am not only a bartender,” he’d said, assuming an air of mystery. “You can call me Mayor Bob.”
The Drummond Girls Page 16