The Volley of the Dolls

Or; Are 'Friends' Aquatic?

I was eight years old. I didn’t have many friends. Certainly not Melanie.

I didn’t choose to be her friend. She was chosen for me. I found myself spending weekly afternoons at her house for several summers in a row. It was a transactional relationship - I had a place to go, and my mom went to work. Her mom didn’t work. It worked out great.

I don’t know how my mom and her mom met. Waiting to pick up their kids at nursery school? In line at the grocery store? Our town had 2,200 people. It wasn’t hard to meet almost everybody.

Melanie’s family was rich – rich for rural Maine. Her dad had a construction company or something; I didn’t really know him. Her mom, the blond, tightly-wound Jacqui, drove a white BMW. One time when I was in the car with them, I spit my gum out the window and it stuck to the side of the car. Jacqui stopped the car, got out and furiously removed the gum from her precious Beemer, scraping at whatever was left stuck to the door with her manicured fingernails. She was mad at me for the rest of the day.

They had a gorgeous house, always decorated for Christmas like Martha Stewart; little string lights up the bannister, rustic-looking Santas on the fireplace mantel, a tree with all the ornaments store-bought and spotless. When that house wasn’t big enough, they built a brand new one not far away, with five bedrooms and a kitchen with cathedral ceilings and skylights. Melanie, like me, was an only child, but not only did she have her own bedroom - she also had her own entire playroom. She was spoiled in the truest sense of the word.

I loved toys. I didn’t discriminate between My Little Pony and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I had a bunch of my own Barbies, but Melanie’s Barbie collection dwarfed mine; an entire Barbie civilization, with countless outfits, cars, houses, accessories, playsets. She had the single largest Barbie mansion I’d ever seen. She lived in the biggest house I’d ever been in at the time. Melanie and Barbie had everything.

Melanie didn’t like me. I’m not sure she liked anybody that couldn’t give her something.

When we went upstairs to play Barbie, Melanie luxuriated in her opulent gated community, dressing her girls in beach wear, wedding gowns, ski outfits. She gave me her two shittiest Barbies to play with; both with snarled hair permanently messed up from being chucked at the bottom of the box, arms and legs and heads tangled together in an agony in polymer. She gave me a cardboard box for them to live in, with doors and windows drawn on them in red magic maker. She made me set them up in the closet.

I could see how the other half lived - they had white BMW convertibles and new Christmas ornaments every year and perfect plastic hair.

She had a few sleepovers; on the surface, a great opportunity to eat the finest in early 90s junk food, pet their beautiful, dopey golden retrievers, stay up late and watch a movie. In reality, a nightmare scenario in which Melanie sorted the girls by her preference, doling out places to sleep in her bedroom by who was the most favorite. Did I get to sleep in the bed? Nope. Did I get to have a sleeping bag next to her bed? Not a chance. Back in the closet I went. I stared at the ceiling until the next morning.

She made fun of me at school. I was too weird; too bookish. I didn’t know how to talk to people and have them like or even understand what I was saying – not everyone wants to learn about Ancient Egypt or rainforest ecosystems or the entire extended universe of Brian Jacques’ “Redwall” series just for fun. I was too smart, though my grades didn’t reflect that. I was fat, a sin too unforgivable for anyone jockeying for elementary school power to ignore. Melanie, smelling insecurity and the opportunity for cruelty, helped lead the charge.

Why did I return? Why didn’t I tell my mom that she was mean, manipulative and made me hate myself, and that I never wanted to go back? That I would never trust her, and that it would make me insecure for the rest of my life about whether or not anybody actually liked me, and that they were only hanging out because they had to, not because they actually wanted to spend time with a fat piece of shit like me?

Because she had one thing that no one else I knew had. Something that I wanted so profoundly, longed for so deeply, that I was willing to overlook the psychological abuse – to even accept it as the cost of doing business.

Melanie had a pool.

Most people in Maine don’t have pools, especially in-ground ones; it’s too much of an expense and a pain in the ass for something you might only use for four months of the year. Unless, of course, you’re Melanie and her parents, for whom money was seemingly no object. Their pool was immaculate; lined in a deep shade of cerulean blue that looked more like the ocean than the neon aqua of the public pool in the park. It had a slide. It had a diving board. As someone that would have gotten into the water first thing in the morning and not left until my lips were blue, I could justify the trauma of spending time with Melanie. It was worth it.

One of the only times Melanie could actually be nice was in the pool. Jumping in the deep end, over and over again, numbing ourselves to the sting of chlorine creeping into our nostrils. Diving to the bottom to retrieve something from the floor, tightly-affixed swim goggles leaving deep marks in our cheeks. For a little bit, it seemed normal. Maybe she could be my friend? Maybe something hurt inside her, and it made her cruel.

Or maybe she knew this wasn’t friendship; this was enforced proximity for the sake of adult convenience. She had no reason to care about me. I didn’t belong there, anyway. We were two dogs from separate packs, and I, the interloper, was always on her territory.

Resource guarding is when animals become aggressive when their ownership of an item deemed valuable is threatened. Any new element introduced to the mix is a chance to reestablish dominance. One time the valuable item was a cousin of Melanie’s from out of town, who she wanted to impress by throwing her weight around. Another time, it was an inflatable pool toy, which I was not allowed to ride. But it all came to a head with the mermaid.

She was a doll – a mermaid, with a shimmery tail, the shell bra that all mermaids in the “Little Mermaid” era wore, and long, flowing blonde hair, which over the summer turned green from the bleach. Her doll body did not belong in the water, per se, but her spirit belonged to the sea; the wine-dark, chlorinated sea. We both coveted her; me, because I could see myself as a mermaid, and Melanie because it belonged to her.

A fight ensued. Typically, such fights ended in her getting her way, and me resigned to playing with whatever third-rate toy she deigned to let me handle. This time, Jacqui, her mom, was on the poolside patio, and witnessed the argument. Though I didn’t believe Jacqui ever truly had my back, in this instance, she laid down the law: Melanie would play with it first, and then she had to let me have the mermaid.

I jumped into the water a few times. Melanie played with the doll. I eyed her each time I resurfaced. I got up the nerve to ask if I could have the mermaid.

She threw it at me. She informed me that I was fat and stupid, and nobody liked me, and that the only reason I was there was because her mom said I had to come. She got out of the pool, stomped up to the patio, and angrily plopped herself in the hot tub.

I didn’t really know how to name my emotions at that age, other than “bad,” or “good.” I know now what I felt then, though, sitting in the pool with the green-haired mermaid: shame and self-hatred, yes, but also anger. Blinding, hot; neurons surging with electricity, creating new pathways in my nervous system.

Melanie was 15, maybe 20 feet away? I saw her sulking in the hot tub. I raised the mermaid up out of the water, grabbed her by the bottom of the tail, wound up behind me, and threw the doll as hard as possible towards her. My rational mind turned off. I was the dominant.

The doll sailed through the air in a perfect arc, her scales shimmering in the summer sun. She landed, hard, directly in Melanie’s face - her upper cheek, to be exact, and her eye. Direct impact. Real pain.

A shocked wail erupted from the hot tub. The mermaid bobbed in the bubbling jets. Jacqui rushed over to Melanie, utterly confused, trying to see what happened and where she was hurt. I stood in the pool in disbelief. I wasn’t even sure what I’d done. Something else took over.

Through big, wet gasps, Melanie told her mom that I hit her in the head with the mermaid. Jacqui shot her glance toward me, my hair dripping down my back, swim goggles around my neck. What did you do?

I stammered. I was playing with the mermaid, I said. I was throwing her in the air, for some reason. I misjudged how far I threw it. It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hit her. Really, I didn’t.

Melanie - who was fine, of course, but was putting on a big show - was gently removed from the hot tub and placed on a chaise lounge and was wrapped in a beach towel.

I got out of the pool and sat at the patio table. There was a bag of Doritos held closed by a chip clip. I opened it and ate a handful. Melanie was looking at me, her face red from crying.

She looked like she was going to say something. She didn’t. Neither did I.

School was starting in a few weeks. As it turned out, she had the other fourth grade teacher that year, so I wouldn’t be spending as much time with her. I found two new friends that fall; one who would turn out to be the only openly gay kid in school, and one who I’d eventually play Dungeons & Dragons and smoke weed with. That made a lot more sense.

Next summer, I didn’t go back to Melanie’s.