She eased him out of the center of attention and over to the bar. He looked at his savior with relief. Mom walked away from him shaking her head while Jeff downed a glass of champagne. Mercifully, the guests didn’t stay long. There was only one incident, when Mrs. Long stepped into a gopher hole and twisted her ankle. But since she lived next door and she said she had an ace bandage there, we were okay on that count. The family flopped in the living room while Lucy and Chuck opened their gifts. I was rubbing my feet when Lucy held up the white Lenox plate I had selected for her. “What’s this? Couldn’t you have registered me for some Pfaltzgraff? At least that’s useful.”
Part II
The Pressure Cooker
2006
The Worst Summer Ever
1986
Chapter Fifteen
April 2006
After much pleading and apologizing on my part, Aidan finally forgave me for the debacle on the night of his premiere. I told him that I blamed the pressures at work for making such a dumb decision. Once he saw the email that Katsu had undoubtedly sent out to the entire studio, he started to understand what I had been going through.
“But why is he doing this?” Aidan wondered aloud. “They do need the two of you. You’ve been bitching for years that you have too many movies. And he’s already at the executive vice president level, so what is it he wants?”
Neither of us could answer the question.
Elizabeth was a different story. I thought she would be more understanding about the night of Madison’s ballet performance. After all, her own marriage had flamed out years earlier and a big reason was that her husband was too nervous around our family. It had proven to be an enormous stress between them.
I had finally broken down and told Elizabeth that I thought Aidan would be scared off much like my first husband, Walker, had been. Certainly, I had thought, she could see my point.
Instead she had surprised me by stating coldly, “Aidan, I presume, is a big boy. If he can’t handle a couple of crazy relatives, then que sera, sera and all that. But you, Jeannie, you can’t keep treating us like this.”
This time she didn’t hang up the phone on me in anger. We managed to say our good-byes politely if stiffly. Neither of us had been in touch since then.
Now Aidan and I slouched in theater seats with our heads together. “Pass the popcorn. You’re hogging it.” Aidan poked me with his elbow.
“You’re the one who snarfed down all the Sno-Caps.”
“You don’t even like Sno-Caps.”
“Yeah, but it’s the princip—”
“Shhh!” came an admonition from a few rows in front of us.
My face grew hot and I slumped down even further in my seat. “What are you doing?” Aidan whispered down at me.
“I’m so embarrassed. I forgot I was in a movie theater,” I said, almost inaudibly. I hated being rude. I poked my head up to see whom I had offended. A middle-aged woman two rows ahead of us was still turned around, glaring at us.
“I’m so sorry,” I called to her softly.
“Shut up!” was her response. Then my cell phone rang from somewhere in the depths of my purse. I had forgotten to turn it to vibrate.
The woman was now pointing me out to her friends and shaking her head. I grabbed my bag and stumbled over Aidan and out into the lobby. By the time I got to my phone it had stopped ringing and the message icon was flashing.
Aidan joined me on the bench. “Are you always that nice to people?” he asked, referring to the woman inside the theater.
“No. Only to strangers.”
“You should have told her to go fuck herself.”
“Aidan! I’m from the Midwest. People in the Midwest are actually nice. Just like people in New York are actually jerks and people in L.A. are actually liars. It’s a regional thing.”
“You are nice to a fault, though. You never tell anyone no and you hardly ever say what you really think except if it’s about work. No wonder your insides are all twisted up.”
That was true. Some people hold their stress in their backs. Me, it’s in my gut. I could win the Olympics if they had an event in constipation.
“You’re probably right,” I said, “but it’s nothing that several years of therapy shouldn’t be able to knock out of me.”
“You would never make time for therapy. You never make time for anything except work and”—he smiled and tossed popcorn up in the air and tried to catch it in his mouth—“me.” He missed the kernel and laughed.
Yes, I worked. And worked and worked. Now, with Katsu analyzing my every move, I worked even more. I had dragged myself home last night—or should I say this morning—at 4 a.m. It wasn’t frivolous. A trailer was in trouble and had to be up on screens in just a few weeks. Normally I might have stayed at the ad agency with the unfortunate editor until midnight, then gone home while he still slaved away; I would console myself that, if he was lucky, he could grab a few hours of sleep in the morning, while I had to be at the studio. But now I was in the habit of staying to the bitter end.
I started putting in these kinds of hours when I was married to Walker. It felt like everyone at the studio relied on me, and Walker didn’t seem like he needed me that much.
Aidan lived pretty much the same life I did, except that his long workdays came in spurts. Then he had several weeks off before the next crisis. But it seemed like every time I worked on a movie, the studio heads would solemnly call me into their offices and inform me, “If this movie doesn’t open, this studio may have to close its doors.”
So I would arrive at eight in the morning and leave anywhere from nine at night on a good day to midnight on a not-so-good day. And I worked on anywhere from twelve to twenty films at a time. Several times I would have just arrived home only to receive a frantic phone call from a producer or studio head. They had a new idea for a TV spot, and could they see it first thing in the morning? And when they said jump, I jumped. It never occurred to me to say no. I would call in the ad agency people—I had their home and cell numbers memorized—and we would work all night.
Walker, on the other hand, had had a nine-to-five job as an engineer. He used to say that we were like two gears. I was running at high speed and he was running at low speed and we could never mesh. He also said he hadn’t bargained for this. While he was at Princeton, he was the one who was going to make it big. I was a lowly art student who couldn’t seem to get my act together. He expected it to be the pattern our lives would take after we married, too. I would stay home and raise babies and figure out new ways to make zucchini bread. He hadn’t planned on my making more money or working more hours than he did.
He thought I would always be the same girl who hadn’t questioned him when he informed me that the order of priorities in his life was: 1. Fishing, 2. Sailing, 3. Work, and 4. Me. (Later, when Walker acquired a dog, I moved into fifth place.) We were drinking Long Island Iced Teas at a crowded Princeton watering hole at the time.
I had looked at him and laughed, thinking it was a good joke, because who would really say such a thing? Unfortunately, he meant it. Maybe somewhere deep down I did know that, but didn’t think enough of myself to consider the issue in an in-depth way. After all, he had been the valedictorian at the private school Cranbrook, then Mr. Princeton, and he had a bright, shining future. I just had that damn book What Color Is Your Parachute?
I looked at the phone number of the call I’d missed. It was my boss—at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night.
“Why do your work crises only happen at night when I’m with you?” Aidan asked.
“They don’t. They happen every minute of the day and night.” I listened to the message and, as I had feared, Rachael, the president of marketing, was calling to give me a heads-up on a brewing storm. I turned to Aidan. “There’s a problem with the TechnoCat trailer. The director saw it play in front of an audience tonight and says that they ‘didn’t feel the emotion.’ He wants it revised immediately, as in now.”
�
��I thought that trailer did extremely well in research testing.”
“It did. It was through the roof. I saw it myself in a theater and the audience was cheering.” My cell phone rang again. I hesitated when I saw the caller ID. “Hello?”
“You’ve ruined it! You’ve ruined my movie!”
I held the phone slightly away from my ear. “Stripe, the trailer is getting cheers. People are throwing popcorn in the air and banging on their seats. You don’t get a reaction like that very often.”
“That’s just it. They are cheering. TechnoCat is a movie about internal struggle and angst and finding the courage to fight evil. The audience should be embracing the film’s profound intensity. This could be my Academy Award picture and you are ruining it.”
Academy Award picture? Profound intensity? Was this guy on crack? It was a summer blockbuster complete with B-level stars and lots of special effects and explosions. This wasn’t a Civil War period picture with A-level stars practicing their accents and dying on-screen. That was Academy material.
Oxford Pictures had everything riding on TechnoCat. It was our one and only big summer movie, and it was opening on the coveted Fourth of July weekend. Film production was already topping $175 million, and everyone was stressed. Entertainment Weekly predicted disaster, making snide remarks about the special effects and calling it TechnoDog. Access Hollywood had taken to doing nightly reports on the cost overruns of the film along with updates on the affair between Stripe and the film’s young starlet. This would have been all right except that Stripe was separated from a big-time executive at a rival studio. So his soon-to-be ex-wife wanted this film to fail and was feeding Access Hollywood every negative tidbit she could think of. I knew that the Oxford publicity department was working overtime to control the bad press.
“Stripe,” I said in an even tone, “if you recall we did create the trailer you are talking about. The research showed that people wouldn’t go see the movie based on that trailer.”
Stripe continued his rant. “You just didn’t do it right! I want this trailer re-edited and this time with the emotion of Cat’s mother dying of cancer! I think you are losing your touch. I saw that nutty photo of you from Aidan’s film premiere!”
I gasped. The gall of the man. Enough was enough. Time to find my inner rudeness.
“I’m sorry, you’re breaking up. I can’t hear you anymore. Hello? Hello?” I said into the phone, then tapped END.
“Bad reception?” Aidan asked as he opened the car door for me.
“No. Stripe just said I was losing my touch and mentioned that photo. My saying I had bad reception was the new me being confrontational.” I leaned back in my seat and rubbed my eyes. They were always red because I usually forgot to take out my contacts.
“We’re going to have to work on your definition of confrontational,” Aidan observed.
He put the key in the ignition. “Come on, I’ll drive you home so you can get to your meeting Monday. And look, I understand that you’re going to be running your ass off from now until the Fourth of July. But Jeannie, you are going to have to slow down long enough to talk about this marriage thing soon. I’m not getting any younger and I really would like to start a family. A family with you.” He was staring out through the windshield. Then he shook his head sadly. “God, I sound like some of my old girlfriends. Now I know how they felt.”
I felt a cold prickle of fear run up my scalp. Aidan wouldn’t leave me over the marriage proposal, would he? I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t love him. Why couldn’t everything just stay the way it had been six months ago? The space between our car seats suddenly felt like a million miles. “I finally talked to my dad about all this,” Aidan continued. “He said that when I found the right girl, it would be obvious to both her and me.”
“Of course he’d say that,” I snapped. “He has the perfect wife, the perfect kids, and the perfect life.”
Aidan turned and looked at me for a very long time. Finally he said, “He didn’t always have the perfect family.” He looked at his watch. “I’m going to go pick up Montana from the airport now. She’s coming in from Prague tonight.”
“Can’t she take a cab?” I was glad to switch the subject but wasn’t sure I was glad it got switched to Montana.
“The guy she was seeing broke up with her. Said she was too needy. So she’s been crying on my shoulder. I keep telling her there is some nice unattached guy out there for her. But she says that the good ones are taken, so it’s easier for her to steal someone else’s guy.”
As long as it isn’t my guy, I thought, staring out my own window. Finally I said, “Tell you what. I’ll ride with you to the airport. We can both pick up Montana. That’ll give me a chance to give you another chapter of my story.”
“You want to ride with me all the way out to the airport? That’s not really necessary,” Aidan said as he put the car in gear.
Oh yes, it is, I thought as I fastened my seat belt.
Chapter Sixteen
July 1986
I carried the plates the way I was taught: one on my left forearm and the other two in my hands. “Fried perch sandwich,” I said, and put one in front of Evan, “and a junior BLT burger, medium,” I said as I set another down in front of Dad, “with a side of fries,” and the last dish went between them. “Need another Coke or anything?” They shook their heads and I went back to the kitchen.
The Bear Lake Tavern was located on the Bear Lake Channel, which connects Bear Lake to Muskegon Lake. From Muskegon Lake you could head out to Lake Michigan if you had a boat, and everybody around here had one. It was like having a car in this part of the world. The Bear Lake Tavern was built in the early 1900s and hadn’t changed a lot since then. It was a roundish one-story building painted brown with red trim. The windows faced the docks, which were usually crowded. The lunch crowds were huge during the summer. The boats at the dock usually delivered hordes of Teds along with the locals. Inside, there was a dark wooden bar with a beer cooler, also trimmed in red, built into the wall behind it. Every other wall was covered with photographs of famous North Muskegon sports figures: the State Championship football team from 1918, the BLT “Brew Crew” softball team from 1975, a guy from NMHS who played briefly for the Detroit Lions proudly posing with a football. All were hanging alongside the many Michigan State University or University of Michigan pennants. One long wooden table ran down the middle of the room with other tables surrounding it. My friends and I had spent many a night at the long table laughing and gossiping. When we all went off to college we brought our new friends back with us to share the experience. I’m not sure they got much out of it; it was a tradition that came from spending your whole life in the town.
Sometime in the nineteen seventies, Tommy Loyse had bought the place. He tried to turn it into a restaurant and not a tavern, in his mind making it respectable for parents to bring their kids there to eat. But every family I knew was already doing that. Tommy had renamed the place the Bear Lake Inn. It was painted on the sign, but it never took. To the locals, it would always be the BLT, or the “Blit.” We didn’t just go for the Stroh’s. The Blit had the best damn burgers in the world. I mean that, really. Rumor was that it was because of the grill—that in almost one hundred years, the grill had never once been cleaned, and all that grease gave the burgers their distinctive flavor. Now that I worked there, I knew that was not true. But for whatever reason, the BLT burger and fries was about the best-tasting meal I’d ever had. The fried perch sandwich was a close runner-up.
The Blit was packed, and I was running my ass off. Evan hollered “Ketchup?” at me, and I tossed it to him from about six feet away. He snagged it with one hand.
“Miss, can we please order now?”
I turned my attention to a blond Ted. He was wearing a yellow Izod shirt with a light blue Polo button-down shirt over it—both collars up, of course—khaki shorts, and the requisite Docksiders, all brand new. I took his order for the French Dip sandwich, an order that confirmed th
e fact that he was not from around there. Who would order the French Dip? I turned to his friend, then stopped and smiled. I hadn’t seen Fudgie Shaw since Lucy and Chuck’s wedding. “Hey, Fudgie.”
“Hey yourself. How’s Lucy doing?”
“Good. Mom talks to her more than I do, but I got a letter. Said she’s studying twelve hours a day to pass her Russian finals. Her graduation from the Defense Language Institute is in about a month.”
“What’s Chuck doing?”
I was a bit fuzzier on Chuck. Lucy didn’t seem to talk about him a lot to Mom. “I think he’s finishing up, too. His two-year stint is about over.” I didn’t mention that Lucy had called Mom crying one night and told her that Chuck had been getting into fights on base and that he kept getting tossed into whatever prison the army had reserved for such offenses.
The bell in the kitchen rang, which meant that food was up and ready to be served. I moved away from Fudgie’s table after taking his order. “Hey, come see me soon. I have a question for you. It’s about Lucy.”
Fudgie waved and said, “I’ll stop by tonight,” as I ran back through the saloon doors to the kitchen. My shift was over around 4:30, when the lunch crowds had left and the dinner crowds hadn’t started yet.
Evan came back to give me a ride home, not that he really needed to. It was only about a mile walk, but he knew I’d be dead tired, because I’d worked a double shift. I’d gotten a call at 6 a.m. that morning from Tommy saying he didn’t have anyone to cover the breakfast crowd. Two of the waitresses had called in sick. More like they had called in “beach,” I thought, when I saw how sunny it was outside. Tommy knew I was the only one who wouldn’t hesitate to come in when it wasn’t my shift. He also knew that I could handle the entire restaurant by myself. He said it was like watching a perfect zone defense or something, the way I worked. I just got this rhythm going along with laser focus and somehow, handling twelve tables plus the dockside orders, I would not miss a beat.
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