Meg Richman
The lake smelled like overcooked vegetables without any sauce. It was the milfoil that grew thickly like seaweed from the muddy floor. Once you swam out about 15 feet it brushed against your legs, a slimy tickle. Some wouldn’t swim in Lake Washington for that very reason. Motorboats chopped it up, and shoreward it would come on their waves, a green and stinky spittle on the beach that marked the high water line.
Sally wore a horizontally striped TShirt over the one piece her mother had sewn for her. She felt modest. Not only was her escort her elementary school principal, but he was drunk. He slurred his words and his breath was overripe with liquor. She couldn’t say which particular one; she was only ten. He had insisted they come down to the beach, which was walking distance from her house. It was a sunny day in summer. Usually she came swimming with her mother in the afternoon, but this was morning. Her mother was at a meeting and Mr. Corwell was babysitting her. Or maybe she was babysitting him. She wasn’t sure, really, and she wished she could escape the situation because it was as claustrophobic as she ever remembered feeling. She didn’t see what her mother saw in Mr. Corwell. She thought he was disgusting. He had basset hound eyes and leathered skin.
Her only escape was the water, and she leapt in, leaving her towel and T at the water’s edge. The lake was cold and refreshing, like lemonade for the body, and she thought maybe she could stay in forever. She did the crawl out to the end of the dock, and then she floated on her back, letting the ripples rock her. To the south she could see the ice cream cone of Mt. Rainier. Sally was slightly plump, just the right density that the lake could hold her up and caress her indefinitely. She turned her head and looked back to the shore. Mr. Corwell was talking to three ladies who had brought a picnic with them to the beach, the only other people there. Two were sitting on their blanket on the grass, as he leaned down too close to talk to them. The third was standing, shading her eyes and looking at Sally. When the lady saw Sally looking ashore, she waved her in.
Sally reached the beach and quickly wrapped herself in the towel. The lady came down four cement steps to the sand. “That man says he’s with you,” she said. She was trying to hide her concern with a friendly tone, but there was a quaver in her voice. Sally felt tainted by the association. Head bowed, she nodded yes. Eying Sally closely the lady’s voice trembled: “We think we should help you get home.” This was before the age of cell phones; it was 1965. Though ashamed and feeling trapped with Mr. Corwell, Sally still thought this level of concern was going too far.
“I just live a few blocks away.”
“He didn’t drive you here?”
“We walked.”
The lady paused and looked back at her friends on the lawn listening to the slurry principal pontificate. She turned back to Sally. “Even so.”
The five of them squeezed into the ring leader’s Volkswagon Bug. Sally was relieved to sit in the back, far from Mr. Corwell who settled in the front passenger seat. It was a short drive home, though more circuitous than the crow-fly walking route which involved a stairway that cut up a cliff. Cars had to switchback around on the streets. Once parked in front of Sally’s house, one of the ladies walked with Sally and Mr. Corwell to the front door. Obviously Sally was from a decent family. She lived in a big house with a view. The women watched worriedly nonetheless as Sally and the drunk man went in through the heavy, unlocked front door.
Sally’s mother wasn’t home yet and of course her dad was at work. Her brother was off at football practice, and her sister had a summer job. Sally felt annoyed at the ladies. It would have been better to stay at the beach. She could have stayed in the water, and at least she wouldn’t have had to entertain him alone. But it turned out okay. He went straight for the liquor cabinet in the kitchen. And she went up to the bathroom and locked the door. Her mom was a lover of color. Mom had laid the pink fuzzy rug herself, using an Xacto knife to cut around the toilet, and the towels were an orchid and orange geometric print. Sally felt safe, like a baby bird in a tropical nest. She filled the tub with bubbles. Adding to her relief, she heard her mom coming in downstairs.
In her fresh shorts and T and wet hair, Sally found her mother smoking a cigarette in her armchair, looking over notes from her meeting and adding comments in the margins. Her mom was super smart and involved in good causes that took her to many meetings. Mr. Corwell was across from her, snoring on the couch. “He was drunk,” accused Sally.
Her mom exhaled, blowing smoke like a dragon through her nose, buying herself a moment. She smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. “Did you go swimming?” she asked.
“I was scared.”
Mom glanced over at the sofa. Corwell was out cold.
“It won’t happen again.” That was as close as she could ever come to an apology.
Sally went down into the cool basement where the sewing machine and all the arts and crafts supplies lived. One of her troll dolls was getting married next Saturday, and she was making new outfits for the whole clan. She and her best friend (well, besides her mother) Hannah each had over a dozen trolls; Sally had 18. Every troll had an elaborate backstory and a complex system of relationships with the others. This was all written by Sally in a large scrapbook. Hannah was an artist and illustrated the pages with winding curly-cues of flower vines and small animals like kittens and rabbits and sparrows. When the hawthorn trees bloomed on the parking strip of Sally’s house, it was wedding season, because hawthorn blossoms made perfect miniature roses for the bridal party to carry. Sally’s troll Bluenowski would marry on Saturday, and go to live at Hannah’s house with her new husband. Bluenowski was so named because someone had stained her flat troll nose with blue ink. Sally believed that if she was kind enough to her trolls they would eventually trust her enough to come alive around her. Badly treated throughout history, they currently pretended to be dolls in the presence of humans. Her parents were atheists, Jewish atheists, but Sally had faith. Bluenowski’s lace dress had a long train made of tulle.
That night her parents had a fight. Sally would sit at the top of the pea green carpeted stairs and listen when they fought. Her brother and sister made themselves scarce, listening to soul music on the stereos in their bedrooms. But downstairs, her father complained, “You want to look good for everyone else, but you come to bed like that.” Sally could see her father’s point. Before going to bed her mother put her hair up every night, in a half wreath of tight coils from ear to ear, made with crossed bobby pins. Mother would take them out in the morning and brush out lovely curls. Sally knew about the birds and the bees, and realized her father was begging his wife to be pretty for him. “It won’t happen again,” she said. She would put up her hair when they were done. Her father also complained that he had to wait until she went to bed at midnight – he was an early to bed, early to rise guy – for her. Sally knew he meant for sex. Her mother agreed she would come to bed earlier when he wanted her to. Just say the word. That was the resolution they reached. Sally went to bed and watched the shadows move on her ceiling. She listened for the rats who sometimes gamboled in the attic but maybe the poison had worked because the house was quiet. She heard her parents go into their bedroom together. She presumed they would be doing it. She didn’t want to imagine that so she planned the menu for her troll wedding, and gradually drifted.
She woke when she heard her mom going downstairs again. She heard murmuring from the living room. Her mom was on the phone with Mr. Corwell. He would get drunk and call for her pity. She would try to talk him out of his darkest thoughts for hours.
They held the troll wedding at Hannah’s house. Hannah’s house was full of secrets. Her mother Lenora was a Kimball, a direct descendent of Brigham Young, but an apostate from the Church of Latter Day Saints. Maybe some lingering sense of guilt from that break gave their near-mansion its sticky feel. Or maybe it was that Hannah came from Lenora’s second marriage after a divorce, and there was a mysterious older half-brother who had fled to Toronto to dodge the draft and couldn’t come home. There was an elevator that the invalid who originally lived in the house a half century ago had needed, a creepy and creaky magical machine trimmed in brass. A cat-walk led from the garage to the third floor elevator entry (the house was built on an incline). The cat- walk was draped in wisteria, and it was here that Bluenowski married Henry Troll. A lace veil, a bouquet of hawthorn roses, accompanied by Cat Stevens singing Moon Shadow. Their love would last forever.
A week later Sally’s parents were fighting again. From her post at the top of the stairs she could hear most everything. It started with a confession. Her father admitted, somewhat tritely, that he had been having an affair with his secretary. He felt terrible about it and wanted to recommit to their marriage. To his surprise, his wife was actually relieved. She said so. “I’m actually relieved,” she said. Because she had been having an affair too. With Mr. Corwell. Sally almost fainted from horror. The way he inhaled his cigarettes as if he were sucking a baby bottle. How could her mother… Her father, well, who cared, but how could her mother… Father seemed to share Sally’s asymmetrical feelings. He howled with rage. “Do you want me to leave,” her mother asked. He howled more. “It won’t happen again,” she said. He raged. He threw his scotch glass across the room. Sally was so scared that she went back to her room and shut the door. In bed she tried to hear nothing more, but there was a distinct scampering of rodent feet chasing back and forth in the attic above her head.
By daylight, when they were alone, Sally confronted her mother. She wanted to know. How did they carry on this affair? Where did they go? How many times? For some reason, her mother answered her questions. They had gone to a motel. Just a couple times. (Yeah, Sally thought, and ten thousand hours on the telephone… Were you at a hotel that time you missed my ballet recital?) “He was impotent. Do you know what that is?” Not that her mother really explained it when she said she didn’t. “He needed help, and I wanted to help him.”
After that her mother was no longer her best friend.
Sally was really freaking out about the rats. What if they came into her room through the heat vent? She no longer liked to be in the bathroom alone because she knew rats could come through toilets. Maybe they could come through the shower head. She began to imagine them coming through the faucet. She couldn’t stand to take a bath by herself. She would beg her older sister to sit with her, and her sister would, because she was kind. Kathy would sit on the toilet and do her homework while Sally washed and rinsed her long brown hair in the bathtub. Some nights her sister felt impatient and would protest, insisting that Sally go bathe by herself, but Sally would persist in her nagging until Kathy relented. Her brother and sister didn’t know what Sally knew. She knew it all by herself. It was sticky like the secrets at Hannah’s house.
Her brother found her down in the basement the next day, playing with her trolls. “Let’s have a beauty pageant,” he said. Once in a while he was super nice to her like this. Even though he claimed he couldn’t tell the trolls apart, last time they had a beauty pageant he had chosen Champagnee as the winner. That was totally predictable, because she was the sexy, glamorous one. Not the prettiest, but the one guys would like. She was a little zaftig and had a fetching white streak in her thick grey hair. They had the evening dress contest first, eliminating half the female trolls, and then a bathing suit contest for the remainder. It was down to three so then it was the talent portion. Mrs. Troll did an Irish jig, Angelina (she had magenta hair) read an original poem, and Champagnee sang Moon Shadow. Of course she won again, though Sally’s brother didn’t remember she was the previous winner.
After that Hannah came over and brought her trolls, so Sally could visit with Bluenowski, whom of course she missed. The girls made popcorn and watched Star Trek on TV. An alien fell in love with Mr. Spock, but he was too logical to reciprocate. Sally was thinking he was probably right. But then Bluenowski caught her attention with a tiny wave of her hand. “Of course I miss you, but I’m really happy, Sally,” she said. “We’re really very happy.”