He slammed the door of the smoker and sat down on the picnic table. Picking up a mug, he slurped his tea in the way people do when it’s really hot. “Sometimes you have to look at your life from a new angle too. Because people might be telling you one thing when in fact they mean something else entirely. So you have to see through what they are telling you to find the truth.”
“That boy isn’t making any sense,” Grandma announced.
“Shhh, this is how I find out what’s happening in Evan’s life,” Mom said. Our eyes were all fastened to the TV on the kitchen counter.
“Here’s an example,” Evan said. “As you all know, I was captaining a boat down from the U.P. last week. I’m headed south on Lake Michigan, and I’m smack-dab in the middle of the lake, fifty miles from either the Michigan or the Wisconsin shore. It’s twilight, one of those beautiful nights when you just want to get your downriggers out to snag a couple of coho salmon. Then I see it. Right there, not two hundred yards off starboard. Milwaukee. I can see the buildings and the streetlights and the cars. I’m wondering if I’m hallucinating.”
Evan took another sip of tea and added fresh basil and chunked heirloom tomatoes to his pizza. He gestured to us with a lemon in his hand. “Then I realize the entire crew can see Milwaukee, too. The engineer comes up to me in the pilothouse and whispers, ‘Do you see that?’ We both checked the radar and our charts to make sure we weren’t off course. Nope, we were in the middle of the lake. I didn’t know what to do. If I called the Coast Guard, they’d think we were all crazy. But I didn’t want to keep moving in case it was real and we hit a building. So we stopped. Twelve of us watched the lights of Milwaukee, which were supposed to be hundreds of miles away. Then the sun went down. No more Milwaukee.” Evan pulled the pizza off the grill and squirted lemon onto it.
Finally, Joe the cameraman asked, “What the hell was it? Was it really Milwaukee?”
“Yes and no. It turns out that there is an unusual phenomenon of refracted light over water that can make an image literally appear miles away from where it really is. So yes, it was Milwaukee. But no, it wasn’t really there.”
Evan sliced the pizza in the manner favored by our family—with scissors. He took a bite and smiled. “Milwaukee looked like it was right there, when the facts said it wasn’t. Too many people forget the facts in their life and want to believe the mirage that’s presented to them.”
“That’s pretty existential for this early in the morning.” Dad yawned.
Joe seemed to be having the same thoughts. “What does a mirage have to do with pizza?” he asked from off-camera.
“Nothing much,” Evan said through a mouthful. “But you do have to be willing to take a new look at something to figure out if you’re seeing it from the right angle.”
Dad, Grandma, and I sat around the kitchen table in baffled silence. Finally I asked Mom, “Does this have something to do with Florida?”
“Could be,” Mom said as she separated bacon by the stove.
“Why does Anna want to go?” I asked.
“Because we live here, not there.”
Now I got it. Anna told Evan she wanted to be near her parents, but that wasn’t the truth. Evan knew it was a Milwaukee.
I thought about the other Milwaukees going on right now: Elizabeth coming home soon and telling everyone that it was because she wanted to be close to Mom during the pregnancy. But no one besides me knew why Elizabeth was really coming home. She had also told me that Ron had stopped paying for health insurance months ago. The baby was going to be born here, which would be cheaper than if it were born in Los Angeles. But Elizabeth would blow into town like she was Jackie O., complete with pearls and big sunglasses.
Then there was Lucy. She kept trying to hang on to a marriage that had been a Milwaukee from the beginning. She ignored the fact that Chuck had been and might still be in love with someone else, that his IQ was barely body temperature, and that she didn’t want this baby or any other baby.
I thought about myself, too. I pretended that everything was white-picket-fence fine in our family. I tried to persuade Walker that we were all normal while I kept everyone’s secrets. I told Walker what he wanted to hear instead of hoping he would accept my family as it was. I was torn between jumping into the exhilarating dog pile that was the real world of my siblings and pretending that we put up our storm windows in September and extended our pinkies with the best of them at the country club. My family was like the Mud Bowl at the University of Michigan. It was an annual football game that looked like a ton of fun from the sidelines, but you just weren’t sure you wanted to get that messy.
Evan’s show was ending. The theme music played and he cleaned up the dishes as the credits rolled. Then the phone on the set rang. Evan used it for viewers to call in with questions, and the caller’s voice was broadcast over the air.
Evan picked it up. “Michigan Bass and Buck Show.”
“I cannot believe you would air our marital problems on TV!” Anna’s voice rang throughout the studio and over our television set.
We had all been standing up to get on with our day but we quickly planted our butts firmly back down.
“I know exactly what you’re talking about with all of this Milwaukee business! You think that moving to Florida isn’t about my family, it’s about your family!”
Evan looked at the camera and motioned to Joe to turn it off. He didn’t.
“I was right!” Mom exclaimed.
The credits stopped running. The Michigan Bass and Buck Show, for the first time in history, was going to stay on the air past 9 a.m. If Evan had his wits about him, he would have just hung up the phone. But he didn’t, and Anna didn’t let him get a word in edgewise.
“At least my parents don’t let their relatives run around naked or demand my wedding dress on my wedding night or try to buy a World War II submarine for a tourist attraction!” Anna’s voice rang out.
Mom looked at Dad, who looked away guiltily.
“Why can’t your family lead nice, quiet lives like the rest of us? Why does every little thing have to be a drama?” Anna was really on a roll. She must have been saving up all this for a long time. I knew how she felt.
Evan finally interrupted. “Anna, you’re on the air.”
Silence followed, then a small gasp, then, “But the show’s over.”
“Negative. The station kept us on the air.”
A dial tone came over the airwaves. Evan hung up and the phone promptly rang again. It was a viewer calling to offer his opinion.
“I like the pizza idea. The Milwaukee bit confused me though. But I gotta tell you, Evan, I don’t blame your wife. Remember when you and your dad decided to get certified for scuba diving? But you wanted to do it in January, for some goddamn reason, and you had to cut a hole in the ice? And then the Worthingtons’ ice boat hit the hole and fell through and sank?”
“That could’ve happened to anyone,” Evan said. “The boat could’ve just as easily hit a hole cut by an ice fisherman.”
“But it didn’t, did it?” the caller continued. Evan hung up the phone again, and it rang again.
This time a woman’s voice said, “Your family is the kindest, nicest family I know. Without you guys we’d never have any fun in this town. Or have anything to talk about. And everybody knows Anna’s family has a stick up their—”
Evan cut her off, too. This continued for a while as various townspeople debated the pros and cons of family (deal with it), Florida (too humid), and marriage (again, deal with it). Nine thirty rolled around too soon for us, but Evan had been surreptitiously glancing at his watch. The theme music came back on and Evan skedaddled off the set with the phone still ringing.
He showed up at our house fifteen minutes later.
“That wife of yours is a bitch,” Grandma said.
“No, she’s not, Grandma. She has a point. Maybe we should move to Florida,” Evan said dejectedly.
I answered the phone on the second ring. I heard Ann
a’s frosty tones. “Is your brother there?”
“Yes, just a minute.”
“Just pass a message along. Tell him to stay there!” I pulled the receiver away to save my eardrum as she slammed down the phone. I wished she would stop doing that.
I turned to Evan. “I don’t think you have to worry about Florida anymore.”
Mom and Dad were about to have four of their kids back at home. “Has anyone spoken to Sammie lately?” Mom asked.
“Yeah. She got a dog. A big Husky,” I said.
“Well, thank God one of you is okay.”
“I’m okay, too,” I said. I was wounded. I prided myself on being the normal one. “I’m the only person who’s still supposed to be at home in the summer!”
Dad and Evan took their coffee down to the gazebo for some noninterrupted nonconversation.
“Is the nursing home almost finished with the remodeling?” Grandma asked. “This household is getting to be too much for me.”
I sat back and regarded my grandmother, who had created the last couple of blowups. No one could say we didn’t come by it honestly. I handed her a deck of cards because I knew it would shut her up.
Mom zipped upstairs to get the laundry and then took it back down to the basement. She thought best when she was doing the wash. I called Elizabeth to get her involved in the bedroom arrangements. When I told her we would have her, Evan, Lucy, Chuck, Grandma, and me all home at the same time, she cheered up enormously. This was what she lived for: herding large numbers of people in a specific direction. She got off the phone with a promise to work out a plan. Ten minutes later she called back and informed me that I would have to stay at Evan’s house, that our house just couldn’t accommodate everybody.
“Have you not been listening to me?” I was exasperated. “We are not in favor with Anna right now. None of us can stay there, including Evan.”
“Good point. I’ll call you back.” She was giddy with the excitement of a problem to be solved. No matter what she figured out, I knew I was going to be back on the couch. I was always the one on the couch, or in a chair, or the occasional bathtub. I knew this from our road trips with Dad.
Dad loved to drive and would pile all of us into the station wagon and just go. He never really had a plan; he just wanted to get out and see the world. We kids all fought to have the very back seat, the one that faced out the rear window. Later in life I would wonder at the wisdom of this seat. The kids would be the first ones to go if there were a rear-end collision. But seeing as how we never used seat belts back then either, I guess Mom and Dad had the ultimate faith that nothing would happen to us.
Every night we would stop at a Holiday Inn, with its big green arrow sign. Then, being the smallest, I would spend a luxurious night sleeping either in the bathtub or on two chairs pushed together. This wouldn’t have been so bad except that modernity had struck America. The chairs had square metal arms and very little in the way of padding. I preferred the bathtub. So the fact that I would be the one without a bed had been established since I was out of the cradle. That’s just the way it was.
I heard the front doorbell ring and knew there was no way that I was going to answer it. Buddy was on the prowl somewhere, and I didn’t want another confrontation with super-cop Marv Carson.
“Hel-lo,” a voice sing-songed from the hall. It was Grandma. I peeked around the door and saw her ushering Father Whippet in. I had been studiously avoiding him since that day in his office, and I wasn’t going to be cornered now. I ran to the basement and pulled wrinkled jeans and a BLT shirt from the dryer. I changed fast, put on some old tennis shoes of Lucy’s I found, and pounded up the basement stairs and out to the gazebo.
“Warning: Father Whippet is in the house,” I panted. Then I saw that he wasn’t in the house; he was sitting right there with Dad and Evan. Rats.
I tried to recover quickly. “I mean, I wanted to let you know Father Whippet was visiting.”
Father Whippet grimaced at me, his excuse for a smile. “I was explaining that your grandmother called me and asked me over. She felt your father needed comfort during this difficult time.”
I paused. Which difficult time was he referring to?
“Harold”—Father Whippet turned to Dad—“we have job counseling available at the church.” He eyed Dad’s rumpled clothes and unshaven face. “You can’t let yourself get depressed, hanging around the house and letting everything go to pot.”
Dad was trying to be polite. “It’s Saturday, John. I’m not hanging around the house. I live here when I’m not at work. And these are my gardening clothes.”
Father Whippet patted Dad’s knee like he was a small child. At that point high-pitched squeals came from the bird feeder. A gray squirrel had managed to get his head into the feeder by hanging over the top of its roof. But then his fat rear quarters had flipped over and landed on the perch, which triggered the Plexiglas shield to come down smack on his shoulders. The more he struggled, the more firmly stuck he was.
“Aw, for Christ’s sake.” Dad ignored Father Whippet’s horrified look at his taking the Lord’s name in vain and hauled himself to his feet. Dad rambled over to the feeder with Father Whippet flapping behind. “Be careful! This is one of God’s creatures!”
Dad analyzed the situation with a coffee mug and cigarette in one hand and the other hand on his hip. We watched Dad try to lift the squirrel’s butt up off the perch. He couldn’t get it with only one hand so he passed his mug and cigarette to Father Whippet. The squirrel was twisting every which way, and Dad was trying to soothe it. “All right, little guy. I’m gonna get you out of there.” He managed to pull the squirrel free. It bolted over Dad’s shoulder, down his back, and off toward the nearest tree, where it raced up to a high branch and chattered at us furiously from above.
“Why don’t we just feed the birds and the squirrels?” I asked Evan. “Mr. Long feeds the ducks.”
“That’s so they’ll be used to him when duck season opens in the fall.”
I stared at him. “Do you mean to say that Mr. Long—sensitive Mr. Long next door—is luring ducks to their death?”
“Yep.”
“You’re not allowed to fire a rifle within city limits,” I protested.
“You can if nobody sees you.”
“What about the noise?” I countered. “Everyone would call the cops.”
“During duck season?” he asked.
He had me there. From late October through early November, far-off rifle shots regularly woke up everyone in town.
“Fath-er Whip-pet. Yoo hoo!” Grandma was calling from the sliding doors.
“What’s she doing?” Evan asked.
“Beats me.” We sat back to watch the show. She attempted to prance into the yard but had to settle for shuffling. She had on a clean housecoat, but I noticed she had one pink curler dangling from her hair.
She took Father Whippet by the arm. “Would you like to have coffee with me? I have some things I’d like to discuss with you. I hear you’re very attentive to older women.” While she batted her eyes at him and led him away, Father Whippet looked over his shoulder directly at me. At that moment, I knew that he knew that I knew. I just didn’t know exactly what.
Chapter Twenty-five
August 1986
Late August is a magical time in western Michigan. The nights are filled with fireflies and meteor showers and dances at the White Lake Yacht Club. The days slide by while you’re watching Sea Scout sailboat races or swimming at the country club pool or windsurfing through Muskegon Channel. For me, it meant that I would soon be done with Grandma and the Bear Lake Tavern. Soon Walker would return to Princeton. I didn’t go back to college until mid-September, when MSU started its fall semester.
I wiped down the ketchup bottles fast to hurry and escape the Blit. The lunch crowd had died down and I figured Tommy wouldn’t mind if I left a half hour early. Lucy, Chuck, and Elizabeth were due in to Muskegon at the end of the week. In anticipation of their arrival,
I had promised Mom I would help her clean up the house after Roxie, the maid, had left. Mom didn’t like the way Roxie cleaned, or didn’t clean, as the case may be. But every time she attempted to fire her, Roxie would laugh and say, “Oh now, you don’t mean that, Mrs. T.”
I wanted to get the cleaning done fast because Walker had asked me out that night. He said it was going to be something special. He seemed to be getting over all the hoopla we had endured over the summer. I filled out my time card and was leaving the Blit when Tommy said casually, “Hey, Jeannie. Time to get out the Squirrel Board.”
Not the Squirrel Board. I closed my eyes. “No way, Tommy. It’s too early for the Squirrel Board. We need to wait another couple of weeks.”
“I felt a crisp in the air last night,” Tommy said firmly. “I can’t disappoint my customers.”
I trudged to the metal shed across the parking lot. It was full of spiderwebs and dirt and dried-out paint cans on makeshift shelves made out of lumber and cinder blocks. A few times during the summer, during various fits of angst, I had contemplated cleaning it out. But I’d thought better of it after Tommy suggested that, if I had so much energy, I could scrape the eaves on the building too. I found the Squirrel Board way in the back behind a broken neon Budweiser sign. I yanked and tugged and managed to get it out into the parking lot. Dragging it in the door, I yelled, “Where do you want it, Tommy?”
He stared at me from his place at the bar, where he was counting receipts. “How about the same place it’s been for about a hundred years?”
I rolled my eyes and cursed him under my breath. I struggled to get it up onto the waiting hooks. Tommy tossed me some chalk and I drew a line vertically down the middle dividing the chalkboard into two halves. On the left side, I wrote BLACK SQUIRRELS, and on the right side I wrote GRAY SQUIRRELS.
Born Under a Lucky Moon Page 24
