Photo by John Mark Jennings on Unsplash
It was the summer of 1974. The girl, only ten, did not know what a penis looked like before she viewed the centerfold. In the room littered with foam coolers and empty Stag cans, fishing hats pinned with orange deer tags, and crumpled bags of Utz chips, it was the Playgirl she paid attention to. It was wadded on the stained floor splayed partially open next to the checkered black and gold couch. She walked unhurriedly toward it. Not like the time, a few weeks ago before school ended for the summer, when she was at Gresham’s Food Store and one of her friends grabbed the new edition, rifled through it, giggled and squealed, and threw it back on the shelf as a parent walked closer to them. All before the girl got a chance to see the revealing photos. Now she looked at the exposed body parts and lingered and thought, so that’s what everything looks like, while a flushed warmth spread over her limbs.
The girl’s mother and father were outside talking about their summer trailer that had been ransacked over the winter. The intruders had stolen from the family and dragged the objects to another trailer only yards away and squatted there until spring. The view of the family’s trailer from the road didn’t reveal there had been a break-in.
The father had trudged up the small hill with a cooler full of Stag beers that he had planned to open once the station wagon was free of fishing tackle and beat up plaid suitcases. The girl had walked up the wooden uneven planks paying attention to the ground, so she could avoid snakes. Last year a corn snake had slithered across her toes. The mother slowed her steps when she saw it.
The yard was trashed. Grooves from the family’s own four-wheeler, that had been left in the shed, but not locked up, had burrowed troughs of mud across the half-finished deck. The bright blue trailer was streaked with mud. The black and white television the father received from opening a bank account at a Wells Fargo over twenty years ago had been smashed across the table he used to gut fish. They noticed the smashed side window and cut screen. The mother gasped, “Oh, my God!” and instinctively walked closer and reached for her husband’s arm. The father, stoic as ever, shrugged her away, jiggled the lock, and opened the door with his shoulder. He walked down the hall to the first bedroom. A gust of wind blew in through the shattered window. Where there used to be a set of bunk beds now stood cobwebs, a hornet’s nest, a lost toy fire truck, and a pile of used moldering towels. The second bedroom was missing two bedside lamps that the girl had overheard her mother say with a sly smile looked like they came from a bordello. The nightstand drawers were left open and empty like a gaping mouth. The tubes of the mother’s lipsticks named Madly Mauve and Bit of Berry and jars of honey-smelling lotions were opened and applied by one of the intruders, incense had been burned, and boxes of pastel tissues opened and discarded. The bed wore the intruders’ imprint with stained condoms stuck to the mattress and the pillow in which the girl’s mother had sewn “Home Sweet Trailer.”
The intruders not only pillaged the summer trailer, which was situated near the smokestacks, right across the street from the Lake of Egypt in Southern Illinois, they had stolen the family’s unused cans of robin egg blue paint and painted the trailer they had taken over the same achingly bright color. Upended trash cans littered both yards overgrown with weeds.
The girl put the magazine down and surveyed the rest of the room. She stood in the abandoned trailer that had been previously painted silver, now a copycat blue. Her parents were still outside. They drank Stag around the campfire and ya ya’d about the break in. She couldn’t stand to hear her father’s booming voice and her mother’s chirps. Every surface of the table and the counters were filled with smeared dishes. Scum congealed grease, bits of sausage, fried eggs, and bacon sticking to the containers. Half-filled cups of milk thickened like sour cream. Drinking glasses turned green inside. Grain beetles slowly moved across plates and the sticky floor. Burnt skillets. The stench was of dirty toilet paper, rotten milk, slimy gristled meat. Each of the moldy dishes were from the mother’s kitchen. The girl could practically hear what her mother would say when she would see this. “They’ve taken every goddamn pot in my kitchen. Have you ever seen such filth? Get our girl away. She shouldn’t see this. This is disgusting.” Piss marked the wall. Used condoms wadded on the floor.
On a side table there were the figurines from their kitchen that the mother had painted. Strange painted ceramic figurines, some ballerinas, others African Americans with pronounced lips. The daughter had always been embarrassed that her mother had thought it ok to paint them. “Why don’t you bring them home? Why keep these here at the trailer?” the girl asked her mother.
“Oh, you can’t decorate your house like that,” the mother says. “They’re only good for a fishing camp.”
For years the silver trailer on the hill had stood abandoned. No one had ever stayed there as far as the family knew. The family vacationed at the Lake of Egypt for three weeks two different times during the summers, so the father could fish, and the mother could go swimming and drink cocktails all afternoon. The girl wasn’t interested in fishing or swimming. Instead, she brought her books, stretched out on a cot, and read. The television set had only one working channel, even after they wrapped foil around the rabbit ears. The girl missed The Sonny and Cher Show and felt lonely for her friends. It was a short two-hour drive south to the lake from their ranch-style house but felt longer. The setup was essentially a rundown trailer built up on concrete blocks, with easy access to a boat launch. The father always would say he’ll be back for dinner and always came in after dark, with the response like the fish were biting, or baby, I needed a beer at the clubhouse after fishing all day. The mother would cry, and the father would promise to come in tomorrow before dark and take them to the Ponderosa in town for dinner. A real dinner with baked potatoes and shrimp cocktail. Then, Jack and Cokes at Burke’s Tavern. We’ll get you a Shirley Temple, he’d say to the girl. He’d turn to the mother and kiss her long and deeply. What do you say? She’d wipe away her tears and sigh and nod. The daughter would roll her eyes behind her Wonder Woman comic books eating wax lips. Every summer that was the family’s routine in the blue trailer.
The girl gagged on the smell and turned toward the door and opened it. She kept her shirt over her nose. The cattails near the marsh rustled. This blue trailer, painted with the leftover stolen paint, was higher up on the hill and from this vantage point, the girl could see her parents sitting on plastic lawn chairs, the fire was being stoked in the fire pit by the father. The tiki torches lit by the mother. The girl could also make out the Lake of Egypt, a patch of blue through the pines. The trailers were only across the street from the water’s edge. The water carried voices, and she heard a group of people talking but couldn’t make out the words. A seething of insect noises began in the night air.
“She better not be over near that other trailer,” the girl heard her father say. “Little girls who go off exploring pee their pants,” he said.
“That’s what you’re going to tell her? She’s probably inside, making herself a snack. I’ll ask her to bring the pitcher down. I made some margaritas,” the mother said.
The girl thought the intruders weren’t far away. She imagined they were part of the group down by the water, the young women lathered up with pineapple smelling suntan oil and the men muscled and tanned, laughing and making fun of the middle-aged mother and father who discovered they had been taken advantage of and couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
The thought of their muscles gleaming made the girl blush. She stood popping her gum for a few minutes, wearing her terry cloth pink jumper. The swell of laughter floated toward her, the sway of the weeping willow beckoned her. She walked toward the docks. There were two young couples, tying down the fishing gear in the belly of the johnboat jettisoning precariously on the trailer. They were squabbling among themselves if they had attached the boat to the trailer correctly. Even from a distance, they looked intimidating. It was difficult to look at their faces, their eyes. The two men didn’t have shirts on, and she stared at their thin tanned chests. The women were dressed in bikini tops and cotton skirts.
The girl was flat-chested and wondered how it would feel to grow breasts. The idea of eventually filling out a bra was both a wonder and a huge source of embarrassment for her. She didn’t want to be seen and was as quiet and still as she could be. The couples’ going back and forth between grumbling and laughing drew her in.
She guessed they were around seventeen. A transistor radio was playing, “Come and Get Your Love.” One of the men, with reddish brown hair, swatted his girlfriend’s behind and squeezed. The woman, who had long brown hair brushed in two pony tails, laughed and moved closer to him and they kissed. The other man, taller and blond, walked away from his girlfriend and over to the couple who were kissing. He grabbed the lady’s bikini strap and untied it. As it slid off, she whispered to him to stop. She pushed the top as best she could back in place. But she was exposed and didn’t really seem to mind. She took her time tying the straps back together. The reddish-brown haired man resisted. “Hey, man, stop it.” But, his voice was slurred and weak from all the beer drinking, and the blond man easily shoved him back against the pickup truck’s open door and steering wheel.
Behind the cover of thick pine trees, the girl watched with rapt attention. The sun moved behind a cloud for a second. She smelled suntan oil and spilled beer, honeysuckle and lake scum. A boat sped by the channel, and the water lapped against the side of the boat dock. Silky deposits of silt blackened the water in the shallows. Over the years the water would erode the shoreline and the boat dock would fall in the brackish water.
The blond man walked back over to the woman and reached for her breasts and cupped them in his hands. He said, “Hey, are you sure you picked the right guy?” He held the woman in place with one hand, with the other hand holding a long neck, at times bringing his lips to the beer bottle and then to the woman’s breasts. Back and forth, all the while the blond man’s girlfriend shook with anger.
The girl inhaled deeply as she watched through the weeds in the sweltering heat. She felt toward her lower belly, instinctively, not thinking, and pressed against herself. She felt angry for the blond man’s girlfriend, at the same time, a flame was turned on inside of her. She could feel the girlfriend’s jealousy and the heat between the kissing man and woman, their bodies and how they swayed together. When the girlfriend walked over and slapped the other woman, the girl stopped and felt a strange shivering and clenched her teeth together. Sluggish warmth made her legs buckle, and she sat on the ground, feeling frozen to the spot. Sitting on the ground, she couldn’t really see the two couples through the weeds, only heard the words being yelled, and the man’s laughter and beer bottles shattering against the pavement. Undercover, she sat for a few moments.
She wanted to continue to watch, but she also wanted to get away. She didn’t want anyone to see her. Eventually, she heard truck doors open and close, and the sound of an engine being revved up. Whoever the driver was, they were gunning the sputtering motor. The girl wondered if these were the squatters, for everyone seemed to know everyone else in this small fishing community, but she hadn’t ever seen them before. She heard them yell to each other to help push the truck. That they hoped, once they got past this hill, they could get away. The girl watched the sunburnt bodies struggle. When they got to the top, the red-haired man banged on the bumper. They all piled in, and the music faded as they backfired down Lake Shore Drive. She staggered toward the dying embers of the campfire. The sloppily painted blue trailer that was perched on the top of the hill looked like a prow of a ship. Silver flakes of paint lurked beneath the bright blue. The blue doors contained the secrets of her and her parents alongside the secrets of the intruders.
At first the parents enjoyed telling the story of the break-in to each other. Then, the humidity increased, and the drinking continued. They rehashed their opinions on a number of topics that they knew would eventually cause a fight. They turned to the war and the girl’s uncle, “Shit for brains, the damned draft dodger,” her father said. The mother believed in people objecting and the father laughed her idea away. “Of course, you would. You’re just like your brother.” These talks whirled together and collided with past slights that they had committed against each other. Those talks made the girl recoil. “How dare you flirt with that waitress again,” followed by, “Well, don’t be so frigid.” As they talked, the intruders had gotten away and the girl was growing restless. No clean-up had been attempted, both trailers were in the same state as when the girl left the camp to spy on the teenaged couples.
Later that night after the father crushed the last beer can into the fiery coals and the mother downed the final margarita of the night, the girl walked to the makeshift outdoor shower stall. Bedsheets strung across some ropes tied up to form a quasi-stall. The trailer didn’t have good plumbing, running water at the sink only. When they had to go relieve themselves, they had usually gone up the hill in front of the abandoned trailer and squatted, carrying toilet paper with them and a trash bag.
The girl warmed up the water in the teakettle and poured it in a basin. She dipped her fingers in the basin and hummed to herself. She leaned over and opened the icebox full of beer. She ripped open the tab and took a long drink. She coughed a bit. She didn’t want to admit she didn’t like the taste. Instead, she took a longer drink from it. Then, another. The fireflies flickered against the purple skyline. The moon was huge and low on the horizon. It was the time of night she liked best. She felt a delicious taste of freedom. There weren’t many lights on near the trailer. The campfire, citronella candles on the picnic table, one single light bulb hanging over the door of the trailer. But no light near the shower stall. If a car came around the hill flashing headlamps, they’d see the silhouette of a young girl behind the shower curtain.
It was quiet in the trailer and even quieter in the trailer on the hill. She didn’t want to hear her parents’ buzzy snores and smell the white mold growing beneath the wallpaper. The clouds gathered and blocked the starlight. The mosquitoes began feasting on her, and she gave up and walked inside the darkness and lay down on the cot, breathing in the smells of fish guts and fried onion rings. She will grow up with the memory of this summer night. She will imagine herself as that girl from time to time, wondering if the teenagers were the intruders. The girl will tiptoe through the briars and get chigger welts on her wrists and strangely, hip bones. The couples will still be on the shoreline as she gazes through the cascades of hollyhocks and the weeping willow tree, the scents of youth and sweat hovering. She will still wonder why the intruders had cut through the flimsy screen barriers, fingered their belongings, and left their mark on mattresses like dogs. She will wonder who, in the midst of a harsh Illinois winter, would seek shelter in this place.
Susan Isaak Lolis placed as a finalist in the William Wisdom-William Faulkner novel contest and long-listed in the Santa Fe Writers Project Novel Competition. One of her stories, 'Vivien's Sister,' won the James Knudsen Prize for Fiction and is published in Bayou Magazine. Her work has appeared in New Madrid: Journal of Contemporary Literature, Yemassee, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the River Styx Microfiction Contest and the Mighty River Short Story Contest. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Miami. While there, she was a James Michener fellow and won a University of Miami fiction award.