Doll Hearts

by Colleen Clayton

  I haven’t been on a roller coaster in a while. The last time I went to Cedar Point was with my dad two years ago. Melody ducked out of that particular outing so I got my dad all to myself that day. She blamed her lack of enthusiasm on chronic motion sickness and a life-long fear of heights. I think she just didn’t want to go. Amusement parks are way too pedestrian for someone like Melody. People like Melody only wait in lines for special exhibits at the Cleveland Museum of Art or for prix-fixe menu nights at French restaurants. The point of spending forty-five minutes being herded through a sweaty ride queue in order to take a four minute roller coaster ride would be lost on her.

  We park in the designated employee parking lot near the employee building. Brandon takes his things out of my car then tries to pay me for gas.

  “No,” I say, waving off his attempts to hand me ten bucks, “You provided a lifesaving meal and hobo entertainment. However, I do need to use the bathroom again. You think they have one in the office?”

  “I’m sure they do,” he says, stuffing the money back into his pocket, “Come on. We can get you a job application, too.”

  I walk two steps and remember that I have a live animal in my car and its eighty-four degrees out.

  “Wait. Lolo. It’s too hot to leave her out here,” I say, going back and grabbing her cage out of the back seat. Then we schlep everything towards the front of the building.

  “You can’t bring a hamster in here!” a lady in a red polo shirt says as we walk into the crowded office. Her gold nametag reads Alberta Biddleton, Human Resources Director. The office and lobby are full of college-aged students who are milling around, signing forms on clipboards, and stacking luggage against the walls, in corners, and under chairs.

  “Pets are prohibited in the dormitories,” Alberta says, holding out two clipboards.

  “She’s not an employee,” Brandon says, taking one of the clipboards from her, “She’s just dropping me off. She needs to use the restroom. It’s hot outside and she didn’t want to—,”

  “It’s down the hall,” she says, interrupting him. “Hurry up, you need to get that rodent out of here. You. Fill those out and give them to the girl over there.”

  She points Brandon toward the receptionist desk where a girl with a cute black bob and bright red lipstick is organizing papers and punching information into a computer like her life depends on it. Alberta marches away to lecture a rowdy group of future employees about their gratuitous use of the F word. “The only F words we use at Cedar Point are Family and Fun!” she barks. They all zip their mouths and huddle together like spooked cattle. Brandon and I exchange a telepathic look of Jeez, what’s this grouch’s problem?

  I hand him Lolo’s cage and then hurry down the hall. The bathroom is full of girls, all of them gabbing and fixing their makeup. I wash my hands and then head into a stall to pee, fingerpick and dose. Unsanitary, I know, doing all of this on a public toilet, but sometimes you don’t get to choose where you medicate. I mean, it’s not like I’m a total bag lady about it, I use alcohol wipes.

  When I get back, I scan the crowded room. Brandon is sitting in a chair across the way, the clipboard of papers in his lap. Lolo’s cage is at his feet and a couple of girls are sitting to either side of him. The one, a brunette, has Lolo cupped in her hands, nuzzling and cooing to her. Brandon’s smiling and they’re all laughing. He’s obviously enjoying himself a great deal. He sees me and stands up, waves me over. The girls stand up, too. They’re both tall and have that glamorous look. Flat-ironed hair, full makeup, nails. I wonder if either of them has ever mowed a lawn or eaten a Cheeto in her life.

  “Hey, Jules, all set?” Brandon says, as I approach.

  I immediately think sooo…its Jules, now, is it?

  “This is Adriana,” he says, “and this is…how do you say your name, again?” He’s referring to the blonde, the taller and slightly less stunning of the two.

  “Rigmora,” she says, enunciating each syllable. Rig. More. Ah. And of course she has an adorable foreign accent, of course she does.

  “Rigmora, right, sorry,” he says. “Anyhow, this is Julianne, we went to high school together. Adriana is from Toronto and Rigmora is from Russia. They’re skaters at the ice theater in the park.”

  Adriana’s eyes move down a beat, taking in my stained clothing, green knees and feet.

  “I play Snow White in the Grimm’s Fairy Tale Revue,” she says, “Rigmora, she plays Rose-Red. It’s different than the Disney version.”

  I smile and resist the urge to snatch Lolo out of her hands.

  “That’s really cool,” I say, and I try to be super nice and genuinely interested in Adriana and Rigmora, gorgeous ice-skaters from exotic lands—and okay, maybe Canada’s not exactly exotic, but still, I try not to be who I really am at this moment, which is slightly jealous, grimy short girl from Ohio who is coated in the dust of a thousand Cheetos.

  I so need to be out of here right now. I’ll apply to Cedar Point online. Or maybe just skip it altogether. The logistics of getting to work would undoubtedly be a nightmare. But I endure a few more minutes of pleasantries which consist of Adriana discussing the particulars of her illustrious skating career and how she’s sooo sad that this will be her last year at Cedar Point but, hey, she needs to start serious training if she’s going to compete again.

  When she finally takes a breath, I say, “Well, I have to run. The ferry’s waiting,” and I reach out and take Lolo. Out of the corner of my eye, I think I see Brandon’s face fall a bit but then convince myself that I dreamed it, that he doesn’t care that I’m leaving, that he’s just fine with his shiny new girlfriends to keep him company.

  I shouldn’t be irritated by these girls but I can’t help it.

  I think that I’m more irritated about the fact that I’m irritated. I mean, why should I care if Brandon Wright is talking to these girls? Even though we went to school together for umpteen years and sat next to each other every day in Econ, I barely know the guy and will likely never see him again after this. Whatever. The Summer of Suck has officially started, what better way to kick things off than to have my silly five-minute boy crush stomped out by a pair of sparkly ice-skaters. It’s better this way. Better to embrace the suck than fight it. I have bigger fish to fry anyway. Adulting to do. Employment, mortgages, foreclosures.

  I put Lolo back in her cage. I give them all some friendly direct eye contact, smile as agreeably as possible and say “Well, it was nice meeting you girls. Have a great summer everyone,” and then turn on my heel. Just as I reach the door, a fresh throng of noisy young recruits floods in. I pretend not to hear it when Brandon calls out my name.

  7.

  I see him before he sees me. Well, actually, I smell him before I see him. He’s standing against the fencing that surrounds the ferry access, looking out at the lake, and puffing on his pipe. My dad is only forty-two but he’s smoked a pipe ever since I can remember. I mean who smokes a pipe nowadays, especially someone who’s only forty-two? Peter Bell, that’s who.

  “Hey, dad,” I say and he turns around and smiles at me.

  “Hey, J-bear, you made it!” he says.

  “Yep,” I say, a tight smile. “Drove on the big scary freeway and everything.”

  “J, I didn’t mean it like that. I was just worried.”

  I shrug and look out at the lake.

  “So, where you parked?”

  “In the run-off lot,” I say, nodding across the street. “Lolo’s in the car with the windows cracked.”

  He puts one arm around my shoulder and kisses my forehead.

  “Alright, then,” he says, sliding his pipe between his teeth, “Let’s get your car and Lolo onto the ferry. Melody’s making dinner so we need to get home.”

  Hearing Melody’s name makes my shoulders shrink inward.

  “Aw, come on,” he laughs, taking his pipe back out and pausing to look at me.

  “What?” I say, hoping I can fake my way out of the impending conversation.

/>   “Don’t what me,” he says, “I felt that. The mere mention of her name makes you cringe. It’s been over five years. What could you possibly have against her after five years?”

  “I don’t have anything against her,” I say, “I like Melody fine.”

  He sighs, puts his arm back around my neck and continues walking us along.

  “Spare me,” he says, “You can’t stand her. And I don’t know why. She’s always been good to you, J-bear. She’s a good person.”

  “I said I like her fine, dad. Melody’s great.”

  And I can’t help but think, yes, she’s so great. Especially since she’s rich and moved you into the most stylishly decorated island home on planet earth. Seriously, their house is like Pottery-Barn-On-The-Lake, only better. She inherited this huge Victorian house from her grandma who I guess was some kind of pioneer in Ohio’s niche wine-making industry. She also inherited parts of South Bass Island across the bay. Melody’s what you call Old Money. She owns umpteen rental properties and is a “silent partner” in umpteen businesses.

  I was there when she and my dad first met at her wine shop on South Bass. He’d rented a small cottage for the summer; a place to get away from my mom and “figure things out.” We were buying his pipe tobacco and a bottle of sparkling grape juice to celebrate my eleventh birthday. He and my mom were legally separated but not divorced, so he still came back to Lakewood a lot. He even spent the night sometimes, on the couch, but still. At that point, I had high hopes they might get back together.

  But when my dad bumped into Melody as she was carrying a case of cigars around an aisle it changed the game completely. Their eyes met and it was like electric rose petal confetti had just fallen from the sky. Insta-love on a molecular level. In all of my life, I had never seen my dad look at my mother that way. Then we kept running into her—Melody at The Island Market, Melody at The Snack Shack, Melody at The Village Pump. By the end of the weekend, I knew that my parents’ marriage was finished. My dad filed for divorce a few weeks later.

  “If you let it, this could be a fun summer, honey,” he says, puffing on his pipe, “A time to really get to know Melody. You just have to give her a chance.”

  I don’t say anything back. I just try to enjoy having my dad’s arm hugged around my neck and his special dad smell because in an hour or so, it will be gone. He’ll be working most of the time and I’ll be stranded in my princess tower with only The Step Melody to keep me company.

  As much as I don’t want to enjoy the view from the ferry deck, I can’t help but take it all in. I lean into the rail, the breeze in my hair, and look at Middle Bass resting on the blue-gray lake water. It’s like a floating emerald and the tree line is thick but broken here and there with lavish homes. The winery sits on the shore like a mansion and inside the harbor, the sailboats, yachts and fishing boats glide around while little knots of geese and seagulls bob in between them. It’s all so nautical and cheery it looks like a moving postcard.

  “Beautiful, huh?” my dad says.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  Looking at his face, it’s like he’s seeing Middle Bass for the first time. My dad has always loved the Islands so he’s pretty much living his dream now that he’s a permanent resident. The islands are clustered in a group and it’s easy to hop between them all by boat or jet-ski. From Melody and my dad’s dock, you can see all the way to Pelee which is in Canada.

  My dad knows the lake like the back of his hand now. He used to take my mom and me camping on Kelley’s Island, which is a little farther east and huge. It was kind of awesome. My mom liked it too, for a few years anyway, before she started her slow crawl toward hoarder-dom.

  The last camping trip we took, I was nine and she completely spoiled it. We ended up coming home two days early. She couldn’t relax, couldn’t just shut her trap and enjoy herself, or at least shut up so that my dad and I could enjoy ourselves. She kept obsessing over all of her “babies” back home. At that point, the amount of dolls she owned qualified as an enthusiastic collection, not a hoard.

  The worst part about that trip was that she only felt guilty after we got home, when she realized that all of her stupid dolls were right where she left them. She felt awful and apologized for days. But on the trip home, the ride where I cried in the backseat because our vacation was ruined, the ride where my dad nearly wrecked because he was so frustrated with his lunatic wife, none of that fazed my mom one bit.

  She gets like that over her dolls and junk. When there’s something my mom wants, an item on TV or an eBay auction bid, nothing else matters. Everything and everyone disappears from her radar until she can no longer see what she has but only what she doesn’t have. She won’t rest until the item is in her possession. And now look at the mess she’s created because of it. She’s ruined her life and mine over non-recyclable pieces of crap manufactured in southeast Asian sweatshops.

  I don’t understand it. I really fucking don’t.

  “Ready?” my dad says, pushing away from the railing. I nod and follow him back down to the car deck. Our father-daughter bonding for the summer has officially ended and now it will be the three of us.

  We pull into the carriage house and start unloading my stuff.

  Yes, I said carriage house, like in a historical novel or something.

  With the exception that it is located in the Rust Belt of the good old U.S. of A, the house in which I will be residing for the summer is basically a scaled-down version of a Victorian manor. There are fireplaces in all six bedrooms.

  Well, except the one I sleep in.

  That one’s been closed off and filled in with bricks because I nearly burned the house down trying to start a fire with the phone book when I was twelve. You don’t need to use the fireplaces, there is modernized heating now, but I fancied myself a Dickens’ orphan or something. I wanted to burn a fire and sit by it and warm my hands and feel sorry for myself. I wanted to dramatically rip pages out and pretend they were secret documents or a scandalous diary. All I ended up doing was sending a cloud of black smoke rolling through the house. I didn’t know about chimney flues.

  We grab up everything from the car and head towards the house. When we walk in, just like with my dad’s pipe, I smell her before I see her. The scent of Melody’s favorite candles permeates every inch of the house. Diptyque Paris. Roses three-wick jar candle.

  One-hundred.

  Twenty.

  Dollars.

  I set my stuff down in the doorway and look around the living room to see what’s new since I was here last. The accent pillows are different. There’s a white vase that I haven’t seen before. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same. Pottery Barn on caviar-laced steroids. Like always, it is meticulously textured and impenetrably beige. And I don’t mean beige like in a clueless-I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing-so-I’ll-just-do-nothing kind of way. Melody, she knows how to do beige; elegant and calming with notes of seafoam and lavender thrown in.

  Elegance is Melody’s milieu. And not just in home décor but in everything. The way she moves and talks, the clothing she wears, the meals she prepares, her herb and flower gardens, the books lining the library shelves, it all has the same composure and luxuriousness to it. It’s like Melody was born at a high-end yoga retreat and never left, like her whole life is just one really long trip to the spa.

  “Julianne!” she says, coming out from the kitchen. She floats across the living room wearing loose white linen pants and a champagne pink blouse. She reaches out to hug me and even though I don’t want to, I let her wrap her willowy arms around me. I give her a quick pat on the back and then pull away. Looking at her, I wonder if it is possible for a thirty-one year old woman to still be growing. She’s taller than she was at Easter, I swear it.

  “I’m making roasted grouse, new potatoes, and an arugula salad for dinner. It’s around forty carbs give or take. I also got some of those raspberry sorbet popsicles you like so well.”

  Melody always feels the need to announce t
he menu to me and how many carbs are in the meal. She runs down the list of what I’ll be eating every four to six hours. I know it’s her way of showing concern for my condition but the dogged predictability of it grates on me.

  I look up at her face. If Charlize Theron and Gwyneth Paltrow made a thirty-one year old baby, they would name it Melody Stroudman-Bell. Even after five years, her face makes me go all mesmerized and loopy. Each time I see her after not seeing her for a few months, my brain goes: Holy smokes. Pretty. How someone can look as good as Melody and not be famous, or at least married to someone famous, is a mystery to me. I love my dad and he’s a great looking man and all, as far as dad’s go I mean, but still, I often wonder what she sees in him. He’s eleven years older than her and he isn’t rich or anything. I mean, I guess he might be considered a little rich now, but he certainly wasn’t when they met. When they met, he’d just moved to Middle Bass to start his career as a professional outdoorsman. Melody could have anyone, George Clooney or Johnny Depp even. So why is she with Pete Bell, Ohio Hunter and Fisherman Extraordinaire?

  Lindsey thinks she must have daddy issues of some sort. I don’t know if that’s true or not but what I do know is that whenever I see Melody’s face and whenever I am in her home and surrounded by her things and engulfed in her Melodyness, I’m reminded how my mother is everything opposite. My mother is the un-Melody in every way. And when I think of this, which is basically every single moment that I’m in Melody’s presence, I want to run away. And it shames me a bit to say this but whenever I enter Fancy Beige Melody Land all I want to do is run back to the crazy, messy doll house. All I want is my crazy, crazy mom.

  My dad helps me upstairs with my stuff, setting everything in the hall just outside my room.

  “I’m glad you’re here, honey,” he says, kissing my forehead and heading back down the stairs.