Doll Hearts

by Colleen Clayton

  When I walk into my room, I wince. And not because anything has changed…no, no… everything is exactly the same. I look around and wonder what I was thinking when I decorated this room. The walls are covered in posters of screamo bands that I never even listened to. A dozen painted fish skulls are strung on Christmas lights and draped around the window. A collection of the ugliest, creepiest stuffed animals in the known universe sits on a black comforter on my bed. They’re all lined up and facing the same way, gaping at the door like some kind of demon monster brigade.

  I did all of this last summer just to mess with Melody. The first day of my visit last July, I combed the beach looking for fish skulls that had been picked clean by the elements. I soaked them overnight in a bucket of bleach water, dried them in the sun, and then sat at the breakfast nook obnoxiously decorating them while Melody made dinner. It didn’t work, of course. Whatever grossed-out, ticked off reaction I’d expected to elicit from Melody never surfaced. Sure, she looked a little unsettled and surprised by my new “hobby” but she never asked me to take my skull painting nonsense outside.

  I look around at all of this silliness and realize that it is pointless to try and antagonize Melody. Nothing rattles Melody, nothing. I mean if she can tolerate my dad’s den, which is a basically a shrine to the gods of taxidermy, my painted fish skulls are rather benign in comparison.

  So fine, no more antagonizing. This summer, I’ll behave and just try to steer clear of her. I have my own car now which gives me options that I didn’t have before, like employment. I think of the Envelope of Doom sitting in my suitcase.

  I need a job stat.

  I would love a job at Cedar Point, but the cost of taking the ferry with my car would amount to more than I would make. I checked on the ride over and it was just as I’d suspected. EXPENSIVE. So, Cedar Point is out. I could work at my dad’s sporting store. I enjoy fishing with him from time to time but being around fishing boats and sunburned, beer-drinking, middle-aged men all day long? Egh. I’ll check out all the places on the island before I go that depressing route.

  There’s nothing to be done on the employment front at the moment so I just busy myself sorting out my room. I set Lolo on the tall chest of drawers and then start taking the posters and fish skulls down from the windows and walls. I carry the stuffed animals and every other dumb thing in here downstairs and out to the trash.

  “Need help?” my dad says, looking up from his Discovery Channel show as I carry it all past him through the living room.

  “No,” I say, “Almost done.”

  When I get back to my room, I put my clothes away in the dresser. I stuff the Envelope of Doom inside the nightstand. Then I take a seat on the edge of the bed and look around at the emptiness. With the exception of Lolo’s cage and my laptop there is no clutter, no memorabilia, no junk. It looks like an old hotel room in here, no visible signs of Julianne Bell anywhere, and that’s just the way I want it.

  I take Lolo out of her cage and let her zip around on the hardwood floors while I pull out my phone to call Lindsey. My phone reads NO SERVICE.

  Another thing about this island, and this particular spot on it, is that cell phone reception is patchy and half of the time when you do pick up a signal, it’s crazy expensive because you’re borrowing signal juice off the Canadians or something. You actually have to walk outside and start randomly walking around in hopes that you’ll find a hotspot that doesn’t cost a hundred dollars a minute. I go downstairs and grab the landline from the kitchen.

  “About five to ten more minutes,” Melody chimes. “Do you like balsamic oil and vinegar? We have a couple of other dressings if you want—,”

  “Oil and vinegar’s fine,” I say, hurrying back up to my room.

  I call Lindsey and tell her to hop on Skype. Within a few moments we are facing each other through the screens of our laptops.

  “So,” she says, “Is it awful?”

  The sound is really loud so I turn it down because the kitchen is right underneath my room. Through the floorboards and vents, you can kind of hear everything that goes on in this old house.

  “It’s fine,” I say, “You know, same box of crap.”

  “Let me guess,” she says, “Melody beamed a sunny hello at you, swallowed you into an awkward embrace, and then immediately launched into what she’s cooking for dinner.”

  “I’m awaiting my roasted grouse and new potatoes as we speak.”

  “Grouse. Is that some kind of groundhog or rat?”

  “It’s like a flying chicken, only smaller. With a gamey sort of tang.”

  She wrinkles her nose and makes a gag face.

  “In other news,” I say. “My mom is on the verge of foreclosure. I’ll be homeless at the end of summer if it isn’t sorted out. I’ll have to live here, I guess. In this, this…Pottery Barn museum.”

  I start getting weepy. Lindsey starts panicking which only brings more tears. Within ten seconds I’m bawling and snotting into my shirt.

  “Oh, Jules, sweetie, oh, god…,” she says, blurring in and out of the screen, trying to touch me through cyberspace, feeling the utter helplessness of a BFF Skype crisis.

  I tell her about the Envelope of Doom. I get some of the indecipherable papers out and read them aloud. Notice of intent…blah, blah, blah…mediation…blah, blah, blah…sheriff’s auction…blah, blah, blah. She starts jotting notes and telling me she’ll do research. That she’ll try to ask her dad how to fix such things. He’s an attorney so knows about stuff like this.

  “But don’t tell him why,” I say. “He’ll blab to my dad and then my dad will freak out and call his lawyer. He’ll file for full custody.”

  “I’ll be sly about it,” she says. “Maybe he has something in his office, like a Foreclosure For Dummies book I can look at.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “Let me run to the bathroom and get some tissues. My shirt is getting yucky. Plus, dinner will be ready soon, I need to dose.”

  When I get back, she’s smiling at me through the screen.

  “I made something to cheer you up!” she says. “It’s in your email.”

  I open it up in split screen. It’s a cartoon of me and Brandon Wright. She’s cut and pasted our heads onto stick figures. The captions read: “I want your body, Joooolz!” “Kiss me, you fool! Hubba-hubba!”

  I bust up laughing.

  “So, how was your road trip?” she says, wiggling her eyebrows. “Did you let him cop a feel?”

  “What! NO!” I say. “How could he do that anyway? He was riding a motorcycle! I was driving!”

  I start telling her about my little rainy day Brandon adventure. Right when I get to the good parts under the bridge, we’re interrupted by a knock on my door, Melody sing-songing “Dinner’s ready!” from the other side.

  “Cominnng!” I sing-song back.

  Lindsey laughs and whispers, “Enjoy your gamey, tangy chicken.”

  “Bye,” I say, grinning.

  I close my laptop and head to the kitchen to endure the first of what is sure to be many painfully delicious, yet painfully awkward meals with my dad and The Step Melody.

  8.

  After dinner, when I’m sure they’re asleep, I sit in bed and try to decipher the Envelope of Doom. The stack of papers is thicker than the Bible and just as confusing. Before long, my eyes are blurry with it. There’s something called a “hardship request” that if I’m reading correctly (for the tenth time at least…) you have to go into the bank personally and do. It’s apparently supposed to buy you more time before the bank throws you out on the street. But if she sends a hardship letter and makes a “good faith” payment and then continues to make regular payments after that, she can keep the house. There’s information about a free agency called Consumer Credit Counseling, too, that can help her sort out any other credit problems. I quickly grow disgusted because all the forms she would need to fill out are full of questions I don’t know the answers to.

  Fixed Monthly Income v. Expenses? Don’t
know.

  Additional Lenders? Don’t know.

  Social Security Number? OAH Case Number? Loan Number?

  Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know.

  It’s making me want to scream and light a match; burn it all sky high. I’m going to strangle her for making me have to deal with this. I put the Envelope of Doom back into the nightstand. I’m going to fix this starting tomorrow. My crazy mom certainly has no will to do it. She barely has the will to shower on a regular basis.

  Dressed in a long Ohio State tee-shirt and fuzzy socks, I shuffle into the dimly-lit gourmet kitchen in search of a quiet, early morning glass of milk. As I open the fridge Melody says, “Good morning!” from the corner and scares me to death. Before I can respond, or say hi or good morning back to her, she immediately inquires, “So, what would you like for breakfast? Scrambled eggs and bacon, whole wheat pancakes?”

  She’s sitting at the built-in nook with a cup of tea. No newspaper, no book, no laptop. Just a cup of tea and an overly eager look on her face. It’s like she’s been sitting there waiting for me to arrive and rehearsing what she’ll say.

  Next to her white, silver-rimmed teacup is an empty mug that has a green and yellow fish for a handle. My dad’s coffee mug. He left for work already and his mug is sitting next to her teacup as opposed to across from it.

  They do that. They sit next to each other in restaurants, too.

  “Anything is fine,” I say, forcing out a smile.

  Even though I don’t want her cooking for me, I need to eat, especially if I’m going to be job hunting all day. And it will hurt her feelings if I say “no thanks” and then proceed to make something right in front of her.

  “Okay, scrambled eggs and bacon it is!” she says, getting up and heading to the cupboards.

  The strained enthusiasm with which Melody speaks to me always makes me feel like she thinks I’m seven; like she’s the nervous new babysitter and I’m the unfamiliar, potentially bratty charge in need of immediate distraction and entertainment. I guess that’s not far off. I have been bratty in the past. Not anymore though. Now I’m shooting for aloof. Or, better yet, invisible.

  While I pour my milk, I look at the clock.

  Ten ‘til eight.

  Way too early for all of this mental effort.

  She drifts past me as I take a seat at the breakfast nook. I nurse my glass of milk while she cooks. I look at her delicate bone china teacup nestled in its matching saucer and then over at my dad’s souvenir fish mug that says KISS MY BASS on the side and wonder what on earth the two of them talk about all day long. While she scrambles the eggs—grating in some kind of weird cheese—she chatters on about the unseasonably warm weather we’ve been having this year and how much it hurt the local ice-fishing business this past winter.

  “But dad’s store is okay, right?” I say, sipping my milk.

  “Oh, yeah,” she says. “Ice-fishing is more Ted Porter’s thing. It’s a big part of his yearly income.”

  She pours the egg concoction into the pan, and then freezes, looks at me and says, “You like smoked gouda, right? I remember you liking smoked gouda.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, nodding then taking another drink of my milk.

  This is so excruciating. For both of us. I can’t believe I have to do this every morning for another seventy-plus days. I need a job ASAP.

  “Ted owns the café, too, right?” I say, thinking about how I’ll be going to the Island Café later on this morning to beg for work.

  “For twenty years. Since I was a girl,” she says.

  Then, after ten more minutes of obligatory conversation about the weather and what she’s making for dinner, she says, “Here you are!” and sets a plate of cheesy, smoky eggs in front of me along with perfectly browned triangles of rye toast, and some perfectly crisp bacon. Oh, and a jar of sugar-free loganberry jam that I’m sure she bought solely for my benefit.

  I resist the urge to ask her what a loganberry is while looking at my food. She really does think of everything. Her plating is spot on. My breakfast looks like the cover shot of a menu.

  “Wild boar?” I say, picking up a slice of what looks and smells like regular bacon.

  “Technically, feral hog,” she says, smiling, sipping her tea.

  I laugh and then catch myself, cut it off before it gets away from me.

  While I’m eating, she tries to keep our respective dialogue balloons filled to capacity; she keeps pumping air into our meaningless conversation which is in a constant state of deflating in on itself. It’s a little chitchat dance that we do. We’ve kind of perfected over the years. She searches for things to say and I reply back with statements like: “Uh, huh,” “Oh, yeah?” and “That’s cool.”

  She talks about how she is looking into buying a horse, how she’ll obviously have to board said horse on the mainland, but how she really, really misses riding so will just have to make the trip once or twice a week to Port Clinton.

  This is Melody’s biggest problem in life. Figuring out how to buy and board a horse.

  Must.

  Be.

  Nice.

  “Won’t it be nice, Julianne? You can take riding lessons this summer!” She looks at me and talks to me like I’m a seven-year-old who is still daydreaming of pony ownership.

  “Uh-huh. That’s cool,” I say.

  “So what would you like to do today?” she asks. “We could take the skis out. Or go have fish and chips at Walleye’s.”

  She’s assumed that we’ll be spending the day together. Sorry, Mellie, Julianne has bigger problems to deal with at the mo.

  “I’m going job hunting,” I say, hoping she’ll get the message that I mean alone. She doesn’t.

  “Oh, yeah? Terrific. I can drive you and we can—,”

  “No!” I say, then try to dial it back. “I mean, no, you don’t have to drive. It’s nice out and I kind of wanted to do some bike riding in between the job hunting. Decompress after a long school year.”

  I look into my plate so I don’t have to see her big green eyes falling.

  “Oh,” she says, and then after an uncomfortable pause, “Okay. Sure.”

  I feel a bit jerkish now. But not enough to take it back because there is no way I’m job hunting with The Step Melody in tow. I look around at the custom kitchen she designed by knocking out a wall to an adjoining sitting room. The six burner stove, industrial-sized fridge, and endless granite counter space. I look at her supermodel body, her expensive-looking pajamas, her long, naturally blonde hair, her huge wedding diamond and think about my mom who is stuck back in our dumpy, soon-to-be repo’d house with nobody to eat breakfast with but her dolls.

  “Okay, well. I’ll see you later today,” I say and take my plate and glass to the sink. “Thanks for the eggs.”

  She has her back to me and I think I hear a hiccup in her voice when she says, “Uh-huh,” but I tell myself that I dreamed it because Melody Stroudman-Bell is just fine. Melody Stroudman-Bell has everything.

  It’s one o’clock and I’m standing at the counter of the Island Café waiting for my takeout order. They’re not hiring. I’ve been to every business on the island, two restaurants, a pizza shop, two clothing boutiques, and the general store. No one is hiring. Apparently, any summer jobs for teenagers on Middle Bass, of which there are few to begin with, got snapped up a few weeks back. The rest of the jobs require you to be able to sell alcohol. Most people recognize me as Pete’s kid so they keep asking why I’m not working for my dad in the sporting shop over on South Bass.

  “I thought it might be good to get work experiences somewhere else. You know, at a place where my dad’s not the boss.”

  I said this because I thought it might make me sound like a go-getter who isn’t looking for special favors from her daddy. Nobody cares about that, they just want to know how old I am.

  Seriously, it’s all about the alcohol. These islands are party central in the summer. They’re floating on a mini-ocean of wine, beer, and liquor
. People keep pointing in the direction of Put-In-Bay, bringing up ideas about mini-golf, gift shops, and ice-cream. Those are a few of the businesses that don’t serve copious amounts of booze and might be inclined to hire a teenager. I’ll check it out tomorrow, hop a ride over with my dad in the morning or grab the water bus. It’s only five bucks to get over there; you can practically swim it. I pay for my lunch—a turkey wrap, an apple, and a bottled water—and then head back outside to my bicycle.

  I check my phone. No signal.

  I’ve been able to pick up a signal at various points in my trek so have left my mother three messages. I also left a message for a loan officer at the bank. I pretended to be Christine.

  To my knowledge, neither have called back. I shouldn’t have blown my cover right out of the gate with my mom, though. The first message was just me yelling into the phone: We’re losing the frigging house! What the shit, mom? Now she’s just going to hide out and turn her home-shopping up a notch. That’s what my mother does in times of stress or confrontation. Like whenever she loses a job, or whenever my grandma Judy calls from Florida to complain about her declining health or the fact that my mother never visits, my mother climbs into her home-shopping tent and zips the flap. She burns up the phone lines and orders everything that comes across the screen.

  I tuck my phone into my backpack. My job hunt is over for the day, I guess. I’m freaking exhausted. My legs are noodles and my car is low on gas. You have to bring gas in with you. There’s no station on the island. And you’re only allowed to bring two five gallon containers on the ferry so I have to conserve.

  I take a detour through the bird sanctuary. It’s a wooded nature trail and part of the state park system and circles around to this little beach. It isn’t a “beach-beach” with sand; it’s really just ground up zebra mussel shells that are like broken shards of glass. You can’t walk on it without wearing flip-flops or those hideous water shoes because you will shred your feet. I step into the water a little bit with my flip-flops and it’s freezing. You kind of have to keep an open mind around here about what “swimming” means. The beaches are rocky; there are algae beds, and schools of very unafraid fish.