Born Under a Lucky Moon (31 page)

I had sent the wrong artwork to print.

Chapter Thirty
November 1986

I
crossed another phone number off the Xeroxed list and listlessly picked up the phone again. It was a beige rotary phone and I used a pencil to dial so I wouldn't have to touch its germy face. It was my own fault. I never should have answered the ad in the student paper.

“Good evening, ma'am,” I started.

“Is this a sales call?” The female voice was pure vinegar.

What a bitch, I thought, but I continued, sugar sweet. “No, ma'am. I'm calling for the Lansing-area Sew-Bee's charity.” We were instructed to say that, even though it really was a sales call. I didn't want to give her time to hang up as I rushed on. I find most people are at least polite enough to listen to three or four sentences before they slam down the phone. “We have a coupon book for you with over one thousand dollars in savings at your area establishments!” The exclamation point was written on the script that was provided to us callers. I rarely sounded that enthusiastic, but my boss was standing over me observing. A dial tone was the answer to the exciting news I had imparted. I smiled up at my boss. “Now, ma'am,” I continued to the dial tone, “you can get a three-dollar coupon to the Smart and Sassy dry cleaner on Grand Avenue and that's only one of these great values!” My boss moved away to monitor the next caller. I hung up the phone and stretched.

I was sitting with twelve other women at long folding tables in the Ramada Inn conference room. The walls were beige, the floor was beige, and the phones were beige. The only thing with any color was my boss's shirt, an ugly polyester thing with swirling, swishing colors. He sat in front while he ate McDonald's fries. He wiped one back and forth in the ketchup that he'd squeezed from the little packet onto the wrapper from his Big Mac.

God, how much longer did I have to stay here? Lucy had landed a job as hostess at the restaurant in the Kellogg Center on campus. I envied her. Chuck would be at the house by the time we got there. He'd be sprawled on the couch that had provided years, if not decades, of flopping enjoyment to other students, watching
Wheel of Fortune
and drinking a Moosehead. It was the only thing I'd seen him excited about since we'd arrived at Michigan State—a Canadian beer.

I dialed the next number on the list. I was supposed to have had my very own place for the very first time in my life. My roommate and I had rented the top half of a house on Virginia Street, on the edge of campus. She was doing the fall semester overseas and wasn't going to be back until January. I would actually be alone. But when Lucy, Chuck, and I had arrived with our shared U-Haul, we had discovered that there was a mix-up with married housing. Lucy and Chuck were out of luck. Chuck hadn't sent in the deposit check.

“You told me you mailed it!” Lucy fumed while we sat in the parking lot of married housing just off Hagadorn Road. Other students teemed around us, shouting and laughing, playing Frisbee or carrying milk crates of personal belongings into the dorms. Somebody blared the MSU fight song from an open window. “
Go right through for MSU.
Watch the points keep growing. Spartan teams are bound to win
. . .” The song echoed through the streets. When it got to the part that goes, “
They're fighting with a vim!
” I thought, as I did every time, What the hell kind of word is “vim”? Why couldn't we have a cool fight song like the University of Michigan? “
Hail to the victors, valiant! Hail to the conquering heroes!
. . .” Now
that
was a fight song.

“What did you do with the deposit?” Lucy demanded. Chuck shrugged and put another pinch of tobacco chew between his cheek and gum. So they wound up living with me. They paid rent to my grateful, absent roommate and everyone was happy except me. But I never would have told them that. That might have made them feel bad.

When the clock finally said 9:00 p.m. I raced out past the full-sized, black plaster Angus cow at the hotel entrance and hurried to the Kellogg Center. Lucy was waiting for me out front. She threw her backpack into the backseat. Mom and Dad had bought us a sixteen-year-old Oldsmobile sedan so we could get around. Sometimes we had to start it by touching a screwdriver to the battery. We didn't know why that worked but it did. If you've ever trudged through two-foot snowdrifts, you'd know that you don't care what kind of car you're driving as long as it moves and has heat. Lucy and Chuck had the little red Ford they'd driven from Monterey, but Chuck needed it to get to his job at the Mr. Taco.

“Are you ready for your test?” I asked her.

She blew on her hands, rubbed them together, and then held them up to the semi-useless heater vent. “Not even close. I put in thirty hours at work this week.”

Lucy studied religiously every night. She had been getting straight A's while pulling a full load of classes and working almost full time. She refused to take money from Mom and Dad for rent or school, and I knew it was tight for her and Chuck. I had to pay for my books, food, and entertainment by myself, but Mom and Dad handled the rest. I often told Lucy she was making me look bad.

Chuck didn't even look up from the television when we came in. He just shouted, “Shut the door! It's fucking freezing out there. I don't know how people can live in this weather.”

Lucy kissed him on top of his head. “How was work?”

“Shitty.” He tipped the beer bottle up and sucked. He reeked of taco meat and cigarette smoke.

Lucy went to the kitchen, which was separated from the living room by a counter, and put a frozen pizza in the oven. “Does your boss still want you to wear that foam thing?” she called over the counter. Chuck's only response was to start flipping channels via the remote.

I sat on the stool at the counter. “What foam thing?”

“You know, like one of those costumes that people wear. They go out on the street corner and wave at passing cars dressed like a giant hot dog or, in this case, a giant taco. It's supposed to bring customers into the store.”

“Why? Because seeing a guy dressed in foam is so appetizing?”

Lucy shrugged and bent over her books. I picked up the mail lying on the counter. Flipping through it I saw that the phone bill had arrived and slipped it into my pocket. I had noticed that a strange long distance number had showed up on the last two bills. Last month when we got the bill, I called information and found out that the area code was for Illinois. I called the number, and when a woman answered, I asked formally, “To whom am I speaking?”

She replied, “Carla,” and not knowing what else to say, I had abruptly hung up the phone.

I didn't know if this was the girl whom Chuck had been seeing when Lucy married him or a new one. No time seemed like a good time to confront Chuck, so I'd been stashing the bills away for the past couple of months. I couldn't afford to pay them by myself. So I figured that when the phone company turned off the phone that would be a good time to have the discussion.

The next morning I made my every-third-day phone call to Walker. Since he didn't work—the pressure of Princeton, he told me, meant that he had to concentrate every second on school—I picked up the tab for the phone bills. I never asked what he did with the money his parents sent him from home. He sounded drowsy, as usual.

“Sorry I'm so out of it. I was up late last night studying with Cynthia.”

Cynthia was a sharp-nosed, dark-haired debutante who most likely had grown up learning her abC's and numbers by managing her stock portfolio. I had met her on my last trip out to see Walker. We had entered a bar on Nassau Street and she had been draped around a booth drinking a Kir Royale with her perfect, ultra-cool friends. I was wearing jeans and she was wearing thousand-dollar black pants. It would have been hard to be skinnier than this whippet, but, I consoled myself, at least I had breasts. Walker had whispered to me that her father was the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He had been on the cover of
Newsweek
a few weeks before.

“How is she?” I asked.

“Jeannie. Enough.” I held the phone tightly. Enough of what? I hadn't said anything. I hadn't even had an undertone to my voice.

“You brought her up,” I snipped.

The rest of the call was not pleasant either, so I cut it short by reminding Walker that I had an early morning class. Leaving the car for Lucy I headed out to the Kresge Art Center for my four-hour History of Art class.

I cut across campus to get there. Michigan State has arguably one of the prettiest campuses in the United States. The Red Cedar River meanders through it. Most of the architecture is classic red-brick-and-pillar set among broad lawns and woods. It had, however, been a shock freshman year to suddenly be in a classroom that had more students in it than had been in my entire elementary, junior high, and high school rolled into one. I dug my mittened hands into the pockets of my pea coat. Damn, it was cold. It was almost December and the temperature was already in the twenties in the morning.

No snow yet, though. Dad had called me to tell me there was a false alarm at the BLT in regard to the Squirrel Board. Several people thought they saw snowflakes, but it turned out to only be ash from someone illegally burning garbage. Tempers flared since the pot was up to $2,810.

At least, I thought, Evan and Anna had plenty of firewood for the winter. Their 150-year-old oak tree had to be taken down after we had unwittingly set it on fire. My sisters and I had bought a weeping willow to replace the oak. We had stuck it in the gigantic hole, stepped back, and stared at it. It looked like that tree Charlie Brown brings home at Christmas.

Evan spent his next two cooking shows on the subject of the ephemeral nature of, well, nature. How something has always been there, and you think it will always be there, and then
poof.
Gone. At first, the callers were deeply sympathetic. They knew the close relationship a man can have with his yard. But then they turned on him, told him to pull up his bootstraps and start talking about how to properly freeze venison. After all, they currently had bucks hanging upside down from their own beloved trees and the deer had all just about drained of blood. It was time for the butchering and the subsequent storage of meats in the Deep-freezes kept in their garages.

I arrived at class, actually participated in some of the discussions, and left the room feeling proud of myself. Lucy met me at the student union with the car. We usually had lunch there before I dropped Lucy off at the Kellogg Center and went to work.

“How'd the test go?” I asked as I stuffed a French fry in my mouth.

“I'm pretty sure I aced it.” She grinned.

“Excellent!” I sat back. “Maybe we should go to Dooley's tonight to celebrate. It's dollar beer night.”

She reached out to swipe some of my French fries while we talked a while about our classes. Then Lucy stood up and grabbed her coat off the back of the chair. “Come on, I can't be late for work.”

I dropped her off and drove to the Ramada Inn. The workday started with the Bossman asking who wanted to do his laundry instead of dialing the phones. My hand shot up, but not fast enough. I lost out to a middle-aged woman who simpered like Ed McMahon had just come to her door in the prizemobile. It's a sorry state of affairs when sorting the dirty underwear and sweaty polyester shirts of a stranger is preferable to dialing number after number. I picked up my sheet of phone numbers and began. By the fourth hour I had sold three coupon books, which was pretty good. I had laid my head on my outstretched arm and held the receiver to my free ear. “ . . . and you also receive a coupon for ten percent off a one-night stay at the Daisy Motel in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.”

“Why would I be going to Gatlinburg?” the voice asked.

I dialed the next number without picking up my head. I was more than halfway through my script when my victim interrupted me. “Could you repeat that?”

“Sure.” I yawned. “You can get a two-for-one dinner of mouthwatering Penis Chicken at Penis Barbecue.”

A chuckle came over the phone. “Honey, I'm not sure if I should call the cops or ask you for a date. But I think you mean Penni's Barbecue. It's that joint on the highway.”

My hand came up to my mouth as I stared at the script. There was a typo: one of the
n
s was missing, so it read
Peni's
—or, as I was pronouncing it, “penis.” I hung up the phone. How many people had I read this script to? Two thousand? Three thousand? Did they think I was selling them something entirely different from a coupon book? Bossman saw me and came marching down the narrow aisle.

“Why are you just sitting there? Dial!”

I stared at the gold chain resting in its nest of black chest hair. “Jeannie, I've never told you this, but you are my number one seller. So come on, let's look alive.” He walked away. I was perplexed. How could I be his number one seller? Then I realized. Penis Chicken. For the first time in my life I recognized the power of marketing to an unsuspecting consumer.

After work I met Lucy and Chuck at Dooley's. They were a few beers up on me and were nuzzling each other so I headed to the bar to escape them. I was trying to get the bartender's attention when a waitress slid up next to me. “You with them?” she asked, jerking her head at Lucy and Chuck's booth.