Born Under a Lucky Moon

by Dana Precious

  I put fifty cents in the jukebox and watched the Violent Femmes slide into play. Evan and I sat in the now near-empty restaurant, both of us drinking coffee, since the Blit had no idea what Yogi tea was. “Let me go ooonnn, like a blister in the sun,” hissed over the speakers.

  “Do you have to play such a head-thumping song right now?” Evan poured a good amount of sugar into his coffee.

  “What’s your show going to be about tomorrow?” I asked to change the subject.

  “I’m not sure yet. The walleye are running pretty good right now in Lake Michigan. Nothing better than smoked walleye. And the blueberries are coming in, too, so maybe I’ll do the segment out at Blaine’s Blueberry Farm.”

  “Could you get Mrs. Blaine to bake a blueberry pie for the show?”

  “Nope. Already tried. I wanted to do a piece comparing Michigan blueberries to the poem ‘Raisin in the Sun,’ but she’s camera shy. Plus she said she doesn’t like my show.”

  “How come?”

  “She says I get too philosophical. Said if people want that they can watch Phil Donahue or something. She says if it’s a cooking show, then it should just be a cooking show.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah, huh.” Evan grimaced at the coffee.

  I heard coins drop into the jukebox at the back. The opening strains of a song poured out.

  “Oh no,” we both said.

  There had to be someone from the Upper Peninsula hanging out in the Blit. Nobody else would ever play that song. The upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan generated a rivalry like cross-town high school sports teams. We, from the Lower Peninsula, called them You-pers—this, not so cleverly, from a slurring of the initials U.P. They in turn called us Trolls because we lived under the bridge—the Mackinac Bridge that is, and please don’t pronounce the last c of Mackinac. It’s pronounced “Mack-in-aw.” The good folks of the Upper Peninsula petitioned every now and again so they could secede and become their own state, which of course they wanted to name Superior State. They said it was because of their proximity to Lake Superior. But everyone knew it was really a slap at us Trolls. It’ll never happen, though. Fifty-one stars on the flag would just be awkward.

  But to play that song. And so early in the day. Usually it didn’t get played until about eleven at night when everyone was in their cups. Gordon Lightfoot had written it. It was about a shipwreck that occurred in Lake Superior. One of those big freighters that moved cargo from the locks of Sault Ste. Marie into the Great Lakes had gotten caught in a storm.

  What people don’t realize is that the waters in the Great Lakes can become as ferocious as on any ocean. It’s particularly dangerous during the fall months, when the winds whip the waters of the Lakes into a frenzy. This particular freighter, the speculation went, had gotten caught between two gigantic waves. The waves each could have been about thirty feet high, maybe higher. Enormous waves can occur much closer together in the Lakes than they can in the ocean. Further speculation was that the bow and the stern had each become balanced on the top of a wave. The freighter then split in the middle and went straight down, with all hands on board. No survivors. It was an incredibly sad event in our history. The song continued, “. . . the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald . . .”

  For whatever reason, this song had become the anthem of the You-pers. I looked around and saw three guys sitting at the bar waving their beer mugs back and forth. One of them was wearing an IRON MOUNTAIN IS MAGNETIC T-shirt, so that sealed the deal.

  You-pers.

  “Let’s go. I can’t take one more verse of that song,” Evan said as he grabbed his wallet and car keys. We wandered out of the Blit, and I threw some stale bread at the ducks waiting for their handout in the parking lot.

  “Was that Fudgie Shaw who was in today?”

  “Yeah, he’s coming by tonight.”

  “I thought you were still dating Walker.”

  “I am.” I poked him in the side and made him squirm away.

  “What’s Walker got against us, anyway? He hardly ever comes around. You’d think we were contagious,” Evan said as he paused to light a cigarette.

  “I don’t really know. I think he thinks we’re all disaster prone.”

  “What have we ever done to him?” Evan asked.

  I thought for a moment. “Remember that time we took our rowboat out on Muskegon Lake? And instead of buying a new boat plug Dad stuck gum in the hole? When the gum softened up, the boat sank and you, me, and Walker had to swim about half a mile to get to shore. We all had to take turns clinging to the Styrofoam cooler because we forgot the life jackets in the car.”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” Evan mused. “He lost his dad’s lure box, too. Must’ve taken his dad all winter to hand-tie all those flies.”

  “Two winters,” I muttered. Walker never let me forget it. Evan got in the car and leaned across the seat to unlock my door. I slid in. “Anyhow, I wanted to ask Fudgie a question. When we were at your wedding he gave Lucy something. I wanted to know what it was.”

  “Nosy.”

  “Yep, and speaking of nosy, why were you late for your wedding?”

  Evan and Anna had only just returned from their honeymoon and I hadn’t had time to talk to him.

  “I don’t really want to say. It was about Father Whippet.”

  “What about him?” I prompted.

  “Doesn’t ‘I don’t really want to say’ mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “It was sort of like he had lost his robes. And we were helping him find them.”

  “Lost his robes? Like at the dry cleaner’s or something?”

  “No, not quite like that.” He pulled up at the house. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks, Evan.” I got out, slammed the door, and made my way up the walk. The back door was locked, but everyone in town knew that if you gave it a sharp bump with your hip it opened. Which is what I did now. I thought about my brother. Evan was a ship’s captain and a food show TV host. He meandered around with a philosophy that life was meant to be lived. But the TV show only reflected one part of him. The other was dressed in starched whites with his captain’s bars attached to his shoulders in very straight lines. He demanded a great deal from his crews and he got it. People just naturally loved Evan. He could read the Raytheon radar better than anybody, tell a story that would have you laughing so hard you would beg him to stop talking so you could catch your breath, tell from the waters when a storm was coming or the fish were running and at what depth. He knew that sometimes during a snowstorm the waters of Lake Michigan could turn the brilliant blue of the Caribbean. He taught me how to read a barometer and he knew how to steer by the stars with a sextant. Not many people knew how to do that anymore. He captained research vessels for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the government can sometimes be too damn cutesy, as the acronym NOAA is pronounced “Noah”), and he captained party boats and private vessels.

  He was commissioned to deliver a boat from Muskegon down to Fort Myers, Florida, once. Dad went with him. They crossed Lake Michigan to the Chicago River, then to the Mississippi, and then on down into the Gulf of Mexico. They had bikes with them and at every port they would ride around and talk to the locals, buy fruit from the roadside stands, and get a feel for the place. They were both pretty bummed out when they finally had to fly back home. Evan would tell tales of captains and their ships lost in the Great Lakes and of dead bodies floating up against the bow. He told stories of strange flying objects and of counting hundreds of shooting stars over Lake Michigan in late August.

  And he tolerated me. He may have actually liked me. I’m nine years younger than my brother. Certainly when I was six and he was fifteen, we didn’t have a lot in common. He moved in and out of the house like an apparition. But by the time I was nineteen and he was twenty-eight, we actually managed to carry on conversations.

  Fudgie Shaw came over that evening. “Hi, Mrs. T,” he said to Mom, and gave her a hug. Then he opened the refr
igerator. “No beer?” He looked at Mom.

  “In the downstairs fridge,” she said.

  After Fudgie got his beer, we went out back and sat in the glider and looked at Bear Lake. Fudgie waved at Terri Worthington, who was out in her family’s Chris-Craft. It was a wooden classic from the twenties that I had always loved. She squinted up at us with one hand over her eyes, then waved back and continued on, leaving a slow wake after her.

  “How the hell did you come to be at Lucy’s wedding? Her first one, I mean?” I cut to the chase.

  Fudgie rocked the glider with one foot. “I was getting kind of burned out at U of M so I decided to hitchhike across the country. It was actually pretty easy getting rides. You wouldn’t think that in this day and age. My mom flipped. She said I’d wind up murdered and in a ditch and would have to be identified by my dental records.” He took a sip of beer. “Anyhow, so I’m pretty tired and really dirty and I had just gotten dropped off in San Francisco. I had stayed with people I knew across the country or their parents or their friends or whoever I could bum a night with. But I didn’t know a soul in San Fran. Then I remembered Lucy was in Monterey. I hopped a bus and rode for an hour, then walked to the base. Helluva walk, I gotta tell you. Long way. I got there and asked for Lucy. She comes down with this guy who turns out to be Chuck. We do the usual ‘Omigod, I can’t believe you’re here’ and whatnot; then she tells me that they are on their way to the justice of the peace. Since I don’t have anywhere to go she tells me to come along and I can be a witness. They needed one anyway. They were just going to pick somebody up at City Hall but Lucy said if I was there I might as well be it.”

  “Didn’t you ask why? I mean, why she was getting married?”

  “Oh sure. They were both laughing and hooting it up in the car. They told me that it was going to be a quickie wedding so that Chuck wouldn’t be shipped out to Germany. Then they’d get it annulled when Chuck’s girl showed up to do the real honors. The whole thing was pretty damn funny. That’s why I was kind of shocked to see the whole deal happening back here. I guess they really fell in love, huh?”

  “Um, yeah.” I wasn’t on solid ground here.

  “Whatever happened to the chick Chuck was supposed to marry?”

  “Lucy said she never showed up.”

  “That’s weird. Do you suppose she really exists?”

  I thought about Chuck’s phone conversation in my parents’ bedroom. “Yeah, I think she exists.”

  “We had a blast that night. Got them married and then we had a reception.”

  This startled me. They had a reception? Before I had a chance to imagine a small, intimate setting complete with a string quartet, Fudgie went on.

  “We went to Chi-Chi’s—you know, that Mexican chain. A bunch of their friends from the base showed up. We did tequila shots and danced around to the mariachi band.”

  I revised my initial thoughts. This reception sounded like fun, not like the usual WASPy thing we had around Muskegon—although the receptions that were held at the local Polish Falcon Hall were a lot of fun, complete with polka bands and dollar dances with the bride.

  “Then this guy shows up dressed as Cupid. One of their friends had hired him. Cupid comes out and sings a song and then we got him drunk, too. It was a fun night.”

  I thought about how different this bride seemed from the sullen Lucy I had grown up with. The Lucy I knew was one who had steadily waged war with every one of her high school teachers. The same teachers I would inherit two years later. When I arrived in their classes, they would look down at the attendance list and say, “Jeannie,” long pause, “Thompson?” The long pause always tipped me off. They were already thinking how much they hated me. The French teacher, on the very first day of class, had seated me in the last row while the rest of the class occupied the first two rows. Since there were six rows in total, I spent a year staring at empty desks and the backs of everyone else’s heads. In a school that was only composed of about ninety students per grade, it was hard to escape a teacher who hadn’t had Lucy in class. It didn’t make for a great four years. But I tried my best to be a model student and not bring any attention to myself.

  The mosquitoes were starting up in earnest now. Fudgie and I slapped at them and I lit the citronella candle on the porch. It never helped, but we always used them.

  “I wanted to ask you what you gave Lucy the night of Evan’s wedding.”

  “A picture. One I took the night of the reception. I figured that that was what you wanted to know so I brought a copy with me.” He pulled it out of his shirt pocket. I looked at it in the waning light. It was a photo of Lucy and Chuck holding up their marriage certificate and yukking it up pretty good. Lucy had on a blue ruffled shirt and her best Jordache jeans. Chuck was in a white T-shirt and a sombrero. Behind them was a man painted blue, sporting a skimpy Cupid outfit and pointing a stuffed satin bow and arrow at the smiling couple.

  “She’s wearing my shirt,” I said. “I’ve been looking all over for it.”

  “How are they doing?” Fudgie asked. “Now that they’re living together and all.”

  “They aren’t. When they got back to base, the army didn’t have anything available in married housing. So she’s still in her barracks and he’s still in his. But they’re both getting discharged soon.”

  “Then what are they going to do?”

  “Good question.” I’d have to ask Mom whether she knew. Fudgie drained his beer and stood up. “I have to go back for my mom’s birthday festivities. Tell Lucy I said hi when you talk to her.” He strolled across the backyard to walk the three blocks to his parents’ house.

  “Bye. And thanks,” I called after him.

  He waved his hand in reply as he walked. I went back into the house to escape the mosquitoes. Dad was on the phone and rubbing his forehead. Mom was sitting at the table and watching him intently.

  “Can’t they find another place for her?” I heard Dad ask the person on the other end of the line.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Mom. “Is it Lucy?”

  “Shush, I’m listening.”

  “But she’s just not right in the head . . .” Dad continued

  “Is it Elizabeth?” I asked Mom.

  “No, now shush.”

  Dad talked for another few minutes, then hung up the phone. He and Mom regarded each other grimly.

  “They say it will only be for two months,” Dad said.

  “Two months of what?” I demanded.

  They both turned to me wearily. “It’s Grandma Thompson. Her nursing home has been temporarily shut down for renovations to bring it up to code.”

  Grandma Thompson lived in Michigan City, Indiana, about three hundred miles south of us. She had refused many times to come up to Muskegon and live with us or in a local nursing home. She preferred to stay in the city she had grown up in and close to her other son, Robert, Dad’s brother.

  “Were you talking to Uncle Robert?”

  Dad nodded. I asked, “Why doesn’t she stay with him? She doesn’t like us anyway.”

  “Jeannie, don’t say such things.” Mom sighed.

  “But it’s true!”

  Grandma Thompson had always had a bug up her butt about our family. When Mom was pregnant with Lucy, she had given her a handbook on birth control. When Mom got pregnant with me, Grandma Thompson didn’t speak to our family for five years. People often asked my mom if we were Catholic. She would just laugh and reply, “Not Catholic, just careless.” Uncle Robert’s family was correctly composed of one boy and one girl.

  “Robert can’t take her. He doesn’t have an extra room.” We all got coffee and sat down at the table. Dad started tracing the rooster in the corner.

  “What about his kids’ rooms?” I asked.

  “He’s turned one of them into a model train room and the other one into a sewing room.”

  “Hazel has never sewn a stitch in her life,” Mom muttered.

  “It’s only for two months. Then she can return
to the nursing home.” Dad rotated his coffee cup on the table between his palms. Mom stood up and rubbed his back.

  “Of course, Harold. She’s your mother and we love her and we’ll do everything to make her welcome here. When does she arrive?”

  Dad looked at her miserably. “Tomorrow.”

  I left them to plan bedpans and wheelchairs and complicated prescription medicines. Later that night, I lay in bed and stared at the wall. As the others had gradually moved out of the house, Lucy and I had finally gotten our own bedrooms. Hers was better. For one, it had heat. I’d wake up on winter mornings and see ice on the inside of my windows. Dad swore up and down that he had rearranged the ducts but nothing ever worked. Since Lucy had left, I slept in her room. Now I stared at her wallpaper. She had chosen white wallpaper with funny drawings of desserts all over it. Under each éclair or chocolate cake was written things like “No! No! No!”

  Mom cracked open the door. “Are you asleep?”

  “No.” I sat up. She came and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Jeannie, having Grandma here will be fun.”

  “Uh-huh.” I couldn’t tell where this was going.

  “She can tell you all kinds of family stories.”

  Like the one about Dad bringing Mom home for the first time to meet his parents? And Grandma taking Mom to see Dad’s ex-girlfriend’s house? She had told Mom that that was who Dad should have married. It didn’t give her a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings toward Grandma. Mom should have gotten mad about that but she had just been sad and felt she could never live up to expectations. I decided not to bring up that particular family story right then.

  “Sure, Mom. I’ll listen to her.”

  “The thing is, you might be with her a lot.”

  I sat up straighter in bed. “What does that mean?”

  “We can’t leave her alone, honey. And I’m working now.”

  “But I work, too!”

  “Only part-time. I’ll talk to Tommy Loyse tomorrow about your hours so that you can be home during the day.”