Little Traverse Point, A Novel by Randy Evans

Chapter 31

Bright Stars

Mikage, Victoria, and Zizi decided to have dinner at a local seafood restaurant in Holland on the channel leading in from Lake Michigan to Lake Macatawa.   Along the way to the restaurant along Ottawa Beach Road, Victoria noticed the local yacht club workers busily lowering boats into the water in advance of Memorial Day Weekend.  Captain Sundae, the popular ice cream shop, opened the new season.  A line formed in front, and children sat on picnic tables licking cones and dipping plastic spoons in paper cups.  As they sat down at their table, a middle-aged waitress was tying an apron over dress clothes.  “You were at the memorial service, “ Zizi said.  

“Yes, I waited on Tom Albers and his family for over twenty years.  He was a good man...the best.  After his children died, and then his wife, he used to come here alone every Thursday night until he ended up in the nursing home. He loved to flirt with me in his own harmless way, and I loved to flirt back. He used to say I was beautiful, inside and out.”  Her eyes watered as she changed the subject, “See the boat replica on the wall up there?  Tom’s boat.”

The women looked up.  The walls of the restaurant were covered with the model boat hulls.  The name of Tom’s boat was printed on the stern:  “Bright Stars.”  

Tom called his daughters his “bright stars,” the waitress said.  

After the waitress left the table, Zizi said, “He called me his “Bright Star” when he gave me the eagle key chain.”

“He did the same with me,” Victoria said.

Two tables over, German tourists were having difficulty with the menu.  Mikage excused herself, and translated for them.  The German couple were from a little town on the Bodensee near where Mikage had lived with Axel before their divorce.  They had a short, fun conversation about three favorite German conversation topics--beer, bread and cars.  She recommended they order perch or walleye.  Mikage returned to the table as the dinner salads arrived.  

The three women all felt the need for comic relief from the heaviness of the service, so Mikage entertained them by recounting the plots of Hindu soap operas she enjoyed viewing on the Internet.  “It must be so much fun knowing all these languages,” Zizi said.

“I have a special gift.  I plan to use my gift and my love of good food together in my business.  I intend to attract people who are more fluent in languages other than English to a new restaurant, and fix them their favorite foods,” Mikage said.

“You can make it happen!” Zizi said.  Just as Zizi had said to Walt when he wanted to change his life, Zizi used her mantra of encouragement, “You can make it happen!.”  “Why don’t you move to Northern Michigan so I can help you?  The hospital’s heart and vascular center is drawing patients from all over the world.  I could refer them to your restaurant...as long as you don’t give them fried food.”

“Would you like me to move to Northern Michigan, Victoria?” Mikage asked.

“Of course, I would like to be with you in any place...I’m just unsettled right now.  The time with my father is temporary...a visit until I figure out what to do.”  Victoria had difficulty giving direct, clear answers.  Rather than a resounding, “Yes!,” Victoria saw the world in nuances, qualifications, complications, and shades of gray.”  

“Well, if I move Up North, and Zizi is already Up North, we will have to capture you so we can all be together,” Mikage said.

“You have always taken good care of me,”  Victoria said.

 “Tomorrow you both will have great food for breakfast at my place,” Mikage said.  “In honor of my new Egyptian friend, we will have an Egyptian breakfast:  bean cakes, eggs, pickles, and tea.”

“I have not eaten bean cakes since I left Cairo...thank you, Mikage.”

Before Victoria and Zizi went to bed in Mikage’s extra bedroom, they placed their open palms together under a lamp with one eagle key chain in each hand. The key chains belonged together.  Rather than reflecting light, the turquoise eyes of the eagle and the gold beaks emitted light like sparkles from a web of stars.  Now the two young women, Tom’s adopted “Bright Stars,” had a connection not only through Victoria’s father, but through this mysterious new connection to Tom, their mutual benefactor. They were talking quietly from either side of a queen bed, when Mikage entered the bedroom.  Mikage was thirty years older than the two young women.  She walked over and tucked the blankets in around Victoria, then kissed her on the forehead, and did the same for Zizi, as if she had found two lost, motherless children.  This night, for all three women, the hard edges of loneliness disappeared, past failures dulled and the future did not threaten. When the women slept, their dreams were peopled with a healing web of friends and family.

Zizi dreamed she danced through the garbage, the garbage city filled with bright, cheerful colors.  The best of the old times came back.  She was a girl with pretty bare feet, riding a mule with her brother behind her with his arms holding on tightly around her waist.   Her father led the mule with a rope, walking beside her mother.  A princess from a fairy tale wearing a paper-thin shawl, she looked confidently for a bright-eyed girl friend, feeling sad and pleasurable at the same time.  Around her, the mounds of garbage transformed into castles, cathedrals, museums, and stately homes.  She rode gently over the rough landscape, and the garbage smelled like the sweetness of spring, and everything...everything was holy and good.  She slept with a smile, and woke smiling.

The next morning opened bright and sunny.  Victoria and Zizi wore their best clothes to meet with the lawyer, then walked over to Mikage’s diner where she had arrived two hours earlier to prepare food for the day.  Victoria pointed to the factory windows of her former loft apartment, “I lived up there for ten years while I worked at the paperboard mill.”   She was going to say more, but her throat choked up.  From a loft just above them, there were cries of a child, and splashing water, a mother bathing a small child;  from a distance, the thumping sounds of cut-off presses from the board mill, and everywhere, the noise of a new work week.  The steam whistle from the mill sounded the change of shifts with a single note.

Only a few weeks ago, her becalmed, inert life had been predictable, under control, here in this small town.  Now Victoria felt suspended, uncertain about the future.  Like a spring sapling with dull roots stirred by rain, Victoria was in grave danger of growing beyond her well-constructed defenses.   Her life seemed out of order, outside the acceptable limits of her personal quality of life control chart.   Like an awkward limb reaching to grow, she felt a faint disturbance inside--deep in her pith.  She felt strange to be in this familiar place with unfamiliar feelings.

When Victoria and Zizi entered the restaurant, Mikage was so excited she dropped a white plate on the floor.  It shattered.  Not stopping to pick up the shards, she came around the counter and hugged them both.  

“I hope you slept well last night.  I’m sorry I had to leave so early...it’s necessary when you do everything yourself.”  She poured coffee and placed a teapot on the table for Zizi.  “Now tell me how you two happen to know each other.”

 “We met by accident...my accident,” Victoria replied.

“You ran into her in your car?”

“No, in a boat.”

“In a boat...”

Victoria explained the surprise visit to her father, the crash landing on the deck, and her discovery of Zizi at her father’s place.

“How did you arrive in Northern Michigan from Cairo?”

“Tom Albers visited me when I worked in a rug factory as a little girl.  He gave me this key chain.  He told me the eagle would protect me, and give me strength and courage.  Every month thereafter, he sent checks.  The money allowed me to go to school, and later the university and medical school.  I received a fellowship to finish my residency in general surgery at the regional hospital in Petoskey.   Just as your special gift is speaking many languages, my special gift is through my hands.  Weaving rugs and mending hearts are much the same.”

Mikage smiled, and began to converse with Zizi in Arabic, one of the nearly fifty languages she had mastered with her polyglot brain.  Speaking Arabic thrilled Zizi, because she loved to speak  her native language, and hear its ancient rhythms from others. 

Mikage returned to English, “And now we will fill our empty bellies.  Ten minutes later, Mikage returned with the bean cakes, eggs, pickles and sweet rice for desert.  

“So what you are doing for me now, talking in Arabic and serving Egyptian food...this is your dream of a future restaurant,” Zizi said.

“Yes, this is my dream, but also my plan.  I intend to purchase a restaurant property between Petoskey and Mackinaw City,” she said.  I have saved for years for a bigger place.  I want a business where I can prepare local food for local people, but also attract new people from outside the area...tourists, other visitors, and someday, people who come to Northern Michigan mostly to dine at my restaurant.  I have planned to do this for the past two years, but I needed to find a new place.  When I rented a cottage in Northern Michigan last summer, I decided to move.  I have already purchased a two-bedroom house on Burt Lake, and two days ago, I closed on some commercial property just north of downtown Petoskey.”

“Wow,” said Victoria.  “Why didn’t you tell me when I left to visit my father, you intended to move up there?  

“I wanted to surprise you,”  Mikage said, “and I wasn’t sure my plans would work out.”

“It is strange,” Zizi said.  We are all displacing ourselves, either by accident or design, making our up here, just as your father did, Victoria...and Stretch.”

“What an odd name...who is Stretch?” Mikage said.  

“He’s my father’s best friend and neighbor...a tall native Texan, a little older than you.”

Zizi concluded the breakfast by raising her tea cup in a morning toast.  “If I have learned nothing in my life, I have learned one thing:  ‘Celebrate the temporary!’”

The young women raised their mugs:  “Celebrate the temporary!”

When the three women rose from the booth, Victoria picked up the pieces of broken plate, as customers began to arrive.  Zizi cleared the table.  They said their “goodbyes” to Mikage, and were off to Grand Rapids.