The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  Somehow, the Skipper managed a speedy three-point turn. A marvel, because the road was so narrow it would have been a difficult maneuver for a car.

  The dump truck rumbled away then, leaving waves of heavy dust in its wake.

  “He wanted me,” Bev said, fluffing her hair.

  Next to her, Jill’s hand relaxed and the rock she’d been holding rolled out of her palm, landing on the ground with a soft thump.

  CHAPTER NINE 2003

  Andrea (with me about to join her) on top of the Northwoods bar, celebrating The Pledge.

  Who was in and who was out?

  It was a question I didn’t want to ask out loud, but one I was also sure had to be on everyone else’s mind, too. We’d been going to the island together for ten years. Drummond was supposed to be an automatic on our annual calendars. You made a New Year’s resolution, you celebrated Christmas and the Fourth of July, you took your husband out for dinner on his birthday, you shopped for the kids’ back-to-school clothes in August, and on the first weekend of October, you gave it the gas to Drummond.

  But with Jill’s repeated absences and returns and Mary Lynn’s death, it felt like our once-sacred pact was starting to erode. It had been a decade since Linda, Andrea, Jill, and I had sworn our oath. When Bev, Susan, Pam, and Mary Lynn joined us, they’d promised to keep coming back, too. Over time, things had changed, and the “pregnant or dead” clause wasn’t funny anymore.

  “We have to face the fact that Mary Lynn is gone,” Andrea said. “Are we going to add a girl or what?”

  There had been years when substitutes were invited to take the place of someone’s unavoidable absence. During my pregnancy and Andrea’s, while Jill struggled with her homelife difficulties and Mary Lynn battled her financial ones. Often it was Andrea who’d suggest this friend or that one, assuring us they were the perfect new person to bring along. Sometimes we’d agree with her and other times we didn’t, but whether a substitute was along or not, on any given year we remained optimistic that any true Drummond Girl’s absence was only temporary.

  Then Mary Lynn died. We discussed inviting someone new to join us permanently, but the talk didn’t get very far. Mary Lynn was irreplaceable. All eight of us were. Except that now, we were seven.

  That ended the topic for the rest of us, but not Andrea. She said later she felt like we needed to renew our commitment. To the trip, to each other, and also to our friendship. She’d always been the one to set a lot of stock in our rituals, even the seemingly trivial ones like playing Led Zeppelin while we crossed the bridge, sharing a Jell-O shot in the parking lot, and then calling our husbands and boyfriends from the pay phone in the Northwoods parking lot as soon as we arrived. These small gestures, re-created year after year, held meaning for her. She wanted a new ritual that would solidify our pact for another ten years and beyond.

  And so on an old computer she kept in her basement, she started the work of drafting an official Drummond Girls’ pledge. She looked up pledges that other groups used and tried fashioning one for us based on those, but she wasn’t too happy with the result. They succeeded in the loyalty department, but sounded formal and serious, and not like us at all, so she threw them out and started over.

  “I wanted ours to have a rhythm to it,” she said. “And I decided the only way it could be just for us was by including as many Drummond-isms as I could think of.”

  Andrea’s basement computer didn’t have a very good printer, so when she’d finally written something she was satisfied with, she e-mailed it to Susan, and then swore her to secrecy. The Pledge was going to be a surprise. She’d unveil it to us all sometime on the trip, but even Susan didn’t know when that would be.

  Susan had a brand-new printer, bought some nice card stock, printed out seven copies, decorated them with stickers of fall leaves, had them laminated, and gave them back to Andrea for safekeeping.

  “This is for us and for the car behind us,” Andrea said, handing the tollbooth operator six dollars. “Tell whoever’s back there that the money is from a woman named Mary Lynn.”

  When we parked at the Michigan Welcome Center, Andrea said she had an announcement. “Okay, my sisters,” she announced in an uncharacteristically solemn tone, “get a Jell-O shot and gather round.”

  We looked at each other—she’d sounded so serious!—and while Susan must have known what was coming, she didn’t say a word. The rest of us were mystified. Was Andrea mad that we hadn’t added anyone to the trip? Was she going to give us an ultimatum, or worse, was Andrea the Confronter about to appear?

  We didn’t know, but followed her direction anyway. I opened the cooler and pulled out a plastic bag of Black Raspberry, Berry Blue, and Strawberry Jell-O shots and passed them out. Andrea’s face stayed serious as she moved among us, squirting a floret of whipped cream on top of our shots. When everyone was taken care of, she put the whipped cream away, reached into her back pocket, pulled out what looked like a stack of bookmarks, and handed one to each of us.

  “This is a sacred time in our history,” she said. “We’ve lost one member and another has returned. It’s time for us all to recommit to this trip. If you’re ready to take the Drummond Girl Pledge, repeat after me…”

  By then we’d started reading what she’d written and were already giggling at some of her words, laughing out loud at others, and then I felt tears unexpectedly sting my eyes. Perhaps she had become the Confronter, but it was about something we all needed to hear, whether we knew it or not.

  Andrea seemed to ignore all our varying emotions and remained standing military-straight in front of us, and then she even raised her right hand. When we didn’t react, she said nothing more but jerked her chin at us until we, too, held our hands up and stood at attention.

  “I, state your name…,” she said. Her voice was so loud that several people—strangers—standing outside their cars looked over.

  “I, state your name…,” the rest of us responded.

  It was too much, and Andrea dropped her guard and burst out laughing. We were supposed to say our own names but we’d been so caught up in the moment that we’d followed her, word for word, instead.

  That was typical. While we had shared a few serious moments on our way to the island, they’d only felt that way in retrospect. In the present, whether we were twenty-one or fifty-one, the trip up had always been giggles and glee, just two cars full of warm clothes, rock-and-roll, and us, high on a drug called anticipation. The serious things—the health problems, the life problems, and even the absence we surely felt that day without Mary Lynn, would only be acknowledged late at night, or not until the drive home.

  When Andrea regained her composure, she tried again. And we all raised our right hands, remembered our own names, and said the pledge together.

  DRUMMOND GIRLS PLEDGE

  I, state your name, pledge upon a Jell-O shot

  A Drummond Island Girl I’ll be

  Beginning from this spot.

  If I choose to vow upon a shot of any Pucker

  I know I may be called

  A “Sawed-Off Little Fucker.”

  I also pledge to thee

  A “Cutter” I may be

  And when that cutting does take place

  I’ll keep a smile upon my face.

  I pledge that what goes on

  Beyond the bridge above

  Stays above the bridge

  And it’s all about the LOVE.

  I pledge that as a Drummond Girl

  One thing will come to fruition.

  I promise to each one of you

  There will be too much blood in my alcohol system.

  As it was in the beginning

  I pledge with all my might

  To remember the Drummond Island phrase

  “Wohelo, let there be light.”

  I pledge that when each evening’s through

  To each of my sister witches

  A loving phrase of a sister gone,

  “DOOR, BITCHES!”


  CHAPTER TEN 2004

  Me vs. Tennessee, Chuck’s Place, October 2004.

  I wanna play her,” the skinny man leaning up against the pool table said.

  We were all at Chuck’s and the stranger had already dispatched his third or fourth opponent but then pointed his cue stick directly at me.

  I was sitting with the girls, admittedly only half listening to their conversation because I’d been so intent on watching him instead. It wasn’t his good looks that had attracted my attention—he was squirrelly and strange—it was his ability on the pool table. He was an accomplished if spastic player, and he’d had plenty to drink, I could tell, but even cheap liquor poured into that fence post of a body couldn’t erase the hours he’d spent at a pool table. Probably at many pool tables.

  The drink hadn’t affected his break any, and he could bank the ball really well, too. A skill that, despite my success in our home league, I was still vexingly deficient in. I just couldn’t visualize the angles, though it wasn’t from a lack of trying. The only reason I knew this guy had spent long hours practicing was that I’d put in so many of my own. Like recognizes like, and again he pointed the tip of his cue my way.

  “You been watchin’ me,” he said in a Southern drawl that sounded out of place at Chuck’s. “Now it’s your turn.”

  Our brief exchange caught Bev’s attention, and she called out a flirty hello to him. She said she liked his accent, and asked him where he was from, but he ignored her.

  “Get some quarters, girlie,” he said to me instead.

  “Rack ’em,” I said, holding out four shiny ones I peeled from the ten-dollar roll in my pocket.

  “Here it’s winner breaks,” he said, as if educating me. As if Chuck’s was somehow his bar and not ours, as if his soprano twang and toothpick Wranglers and tucked-in shirt belonged anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  “You can break your own rack,” I said, staying in my seat. “I’m okay with that.”

  His face brightened—breaking your own rack gave a player the advantage because they knew exactly what to expect—and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Linda and Susan exchange a look.

  “Here she goes,” Linda said with what sounded like a mixture of pride and resignation.

  There’s almost zero strategy to bar pool. The tables are too small to maneuver the cue ball much—not at all like the nine footer I’d learned to play on. Winning in bar pool was a matter of breaking well, making the obvious shots, and keeping the cue ball out of the pockets and on the table. Against a good player, a scratch would kill you. Banking was helpful because it gave you more options, but you could win without it.

  Skinny, as I’d come to think of him, had a short length of string attached to one of his belt loops and a hollowed-out square of blue hung from the end of it. He chalked his cue stick with it, racked the balls, then took his stance and aimed.

  His break was a gun. Besides the moment earlier in the day when we’d all taken the pledge for a second time, I’d been in a fog that entire weekend. My husband and I had argued only minutes before I’d left home, and the tension still hadn’t left my body even two days later. But when I heard those balls explode, my mind immediately cleared. I loved that sound. It was what had kept me in my basement late at night, what had inspired me to sign up with Bev for that coed pool league, what had led me to check books about pool out of the library, and to start paying part of my money to Drummond’s kitty in quarter rolls. That way, I wouldn’t have to ask the bartender for change.

  There’s no ladies’ tee in pool. It might have been played in a bar, and not on a court or a field, but it was the only sport I knew of where women competed equally with men. And won.

  “You ain’t gonna be able to cut that,” Skinny said, regarding a shot I’d been considering.

  He’d made a ball in on the break, then made several successive shots, but hadn’t run the table—all my balls and the eight ball were still in play. In my first turn I’d sunk several shots and that plus his constant chattering had attracted attention. The girls were all watching us play, but the people sitting at nearby tables and up at the bar had turned in our direction, too.

  “C’mon, Mardi,” Bev urged. “Beat this guy.”

  I had one ball still on the table before I could shoot the eight, and it was wedged tight against the rail at a terrible angle. Skinny would have banked it and probably made it, too, but that wasn’t an option for me.

  Like banks, there’s a science to rail shots, too, even the seemingly impossible ones. You can run an object ball all the way down the rail, from one end of the table into the corner pocket, if the cue ball strikes the object ball and the rail at exactly the same time and with just enough force. Too hard and the object ball will either pop into the middle of the table, or bounce off the felted point near the pocket, instead of going in. Too soft and it wouldn’t have enough energy to go the distance.

  I’d played a lot of pool against both men and women, and in my experience, when faced with a tough shot, men were bankers and women were cutters. Men tried to force things while women finessed them. Perhaps that’s actually true, or perhaps my thoughts on pool back then reflected my thoughts on relationships.

  I took the shot, and it felt like the whole room watched that ball amble down the table and drop into the pocket. It hit bottom with a satisfying thud.

  “She’s a cutter! She’s a cutter!” Bev cheered.

  The eight ball was next, an easy straight-in shot, and Skinny had his quarters out and resting on the table’s edge even before I sank it. Some places money breaks, some places winner breaks, but in every place I’ve ever played, losers pay for the next game.

  “I’m Tennessee,” the guy said, giving me a fist bump. “And I ain’t lettin’ you break your own rack.”

  As the night progressed, Tennessee and I traded victories. But despite the outcome of our first match, his wins soon outnumbered mine, and while at first the girls had all cheered me on, after several games only Bev was still watching. Beyond a few moments of high drama, pool is not much of a spectator sport. But for people actually playing the game, time is absorbed into that rectangle of green felt as if hours were minutes. My enthusiasm for beating men (and it was always men who played in bars back then) was boundless. It was the one place where I felt I was in control of my life.

  “Okay,” Linda called to me. “Last game. Beat him, and then let’s go.”

  She’d said it as if a final victory was a foregone conclusion, as automatic as paying the bill or getting out the car keys. I did have a reputation for making sure a night of pool ended for me on a high note, but Tennessee wasn’t just any player. He had an abrupt style that was deceiving and he was superior to anyone I’d played on the island, better even than most of the men in the Tuesday night league back home.

  “She can’t beat me,” he bragged to Linda. “She ain’t got the stuff no more.”

  Mostly I was a quiet player, and in contrast to Tennessee’s flamboyant chatter, I tended to be a lot more reserved during a game. If I had a winning streak, I might swagger a little when I walked around the table sizing up shots, but the energy some players put into talking, I put into thinking. “Overthinking,” my husband would have said. I’d talked him into playing in the league for a while, but he’d quit after getting into arguments about the rules with several of the other men.

  Linda’s faith in my ability, Tennessee’s cockiness, vodka, and thinking about my husband must have combined that night to embolden me. That’s my only explanation for what happened next.

  “Not only can I beat you,” I said, grabbing the handle of something I’d seen leaning against the wall. “I can do it with this!”

  In my hand was a bristle-headed push broom. When the girls saw what I was holding, they whooped out their encouragement and some of them even stood on their chairs.

  “She’s a sweeper! She’s a sweeper!” Bev called with glee.

  The jukebox at Chuck’s is all computerized now, b
ut back then it was dominated by Detroit rock and roll—Bob Seger, Mitch Ryder, Grand Funk, Alice Cooper, and Ted Nugent. Andrea found the button on the back that controlled the volume and turned it up as loud as it would go. When Tennessee saw my new cue stick, he danced a jig, but I didn’t care. I started to unscrew the bristled head from the handle, but Tennessee waggled his finger.

  “Oh no. You said you’d whup me with that. No changing it around now. You gotta use it just like it is.”

  My break sucked. It’s impossible to get any power behind the cue ball by poking at it with a back-weighted broom handle. But Tennessee’s victory dance had been premature. After he missed his first shot, I sunk balls one after the other and then even banked in the eight.

  Since that night, I’ve won local tournaments, won bets on games, and even placed in the Michigan Women’s Eight Ball Championship one year. But not one of those victories was as sweet as the night on Drummond when the North defeated the South once more.

  In the car on the way back to the house, I picked slivers from that broom handle out of my palm. Some were big and deep and my hand was sticky with blood, but I’d been so focused on the game I hadn’t even noticed them. Andrea and Jill narrated the night’s highlights, and I basked in their enthusiastic replay.

  “He was all ‘I can kick your ass.’” Jill said. “But did you see the look on his face when you won?”

  “Dude, Dixie is goin’ down!” Andrea said. “Our girl will take you down with a broom!”

  Back at the house, the girls all congregated in the kitchen for drinks and snacks while Andrea and I relaxed in the living room, reliving the night.

  “Mardi and Andrea, get in here,” Linda said.