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An Account in Her Name
- Wayne State University Press
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An Account in Her Name The village hadn’t changed much since I’d last been there. The campground was still wedged between the old railroad and the beach, though it appeared to be more suitable for RVs now than campers or tents. And the village park and public swimming area looked much as it did in its heyday, when it attracted enough tourists from downstate to sustain three short blocks of businesses along the shore of Crystal Lake. Or at least how I remembered it looked in the off-season. The white, sand-coated dock was gone, of course. As was the diving platform. But the swings near the bathhouse squeaked in a familiar pattern, and the tennis courts beyond the parking lot puddled in a familiar way. The Beulah Drugstore looked much the same as well. I parked on First Street—where vacant spaces were numerous, as they had been thirty years before—and, for nostalgia’s sake, I wandered in the side door and through to the front, passing bins of ten-cent candies, racks of comic books, shelves of plastic beach toys, t-shirts and hats that exclaimed There’s Only 1 Crystal Lake, and counters crowded with refrigerator magnets or Peto- In Which Brief Stories Are Told 58 ) skey stones shaped to look like Michigan’s mitten. It was a little eerie, in fact, trying to sort the current version of the place from my memory of when we hung out there as kids, drinking phosphates or hiding behind the magazine rack to read the comics without buying them. The only difference I could tell—beyond the tenfold increase in candy prices—was a liquor counter where the soda fountain used to be. But the restaurant was gone. From the drugstore’s front entrance , I could barely make out the building of my father’s folly beneath the brown-shingled siding of the Benzie County Abstract and Title Office. The railroad tracks that once cut diagonally across Main Street, passing closer to the restaurant than the drugstore, were gone as well; in their place, a bike trail led eastward toward the old muck fields, which, by the waft of onions in the air, I assumed were still there. For a moment I missed the place—the rattle of dishes when the coal train rumbled to Elberta with its cargo for the ferry. But the moment was brief. And it may not have been the place I missed as much as it was my sister. The summer before my sister disappeared, she worked for the village of Beulah as a lifeguard and swimming instructor at the public beach. She had talked about trying to save enough money so she could study abroad her junior year of college—Germany, if I recall—and she knew that if she worked just for Dad she’d never see any hard cash. That she was able to do both—help at the restaurant and maintain her job at the beach—not to mention take care of her younger siblings—is nothing short of remarkable. But that’s the kind of person Edie was. Dad had had good intentions, of course. He’d bought the restaurant—one of only two in Beulah—upon negotiating the sale of Industrial Steel, the company he’d operated in Detroit since my grandfather’s death. He’d envisioned the purchase of a “long-established family-style restaurant with prime loca- [34.229.223.223] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:32 GMT) An Account in Her Name ( 59 tion and faithful clientele” as a sure thing, a way of investing in a simpler—“better”—life for his children. In a single act of patriarchal responsibility, he relinquished the migraine of corporate presidency, eliminated what he’d often called the “certain heart attack” of commuting the length of Woodward Avenue six days a week, applied the equity from the sale of our Bloomfield Hills house toward restaurant refurbishment and equipment, and then moved the whole “fam-damily” north, where we crammed “temporarily” into my grandmother’s two-bedroom cottage (with sleeping porch) on Platte Lake. Dad had planned to run the restaurant as a family business, providing his older children with employment and engendering in all of us good work ethics and responsibility. But being that we were family, he seldom actually paid anything .Instead,hepromisedthatourwageswouldbe“reinvested” for our own good. He said that when we were three-starred in the Michigan Travel Guide...