NOW AVAILABLE — Marty’s new short story collection, When Paris Beckons

From “The Lettuce Grave”

That night after the season’s first dinner on the deck, we flipped a coin to see which couple got the primo bedroom—the one with the canopied bed and little terrace, décorated with an old lithograph of a castle in Scotland, on the banks of Loch Ness—Boleskine, the caption read, and the one with the en suite bathroom. The only other bathroom was downstairs, just past the kitchen.

After a quick huddle, we called heads. We lost. We got the second bedroom, which belonged to the owner’s young daughter. The high-riser bed wasn’t too bad, as the mattresses were actually newer and firmer than the lumpy old bedding that graced Ken and Jan’s canopied canoodling center.

Our room was cozy, but lined with flouncy, bouncy, girly things: a plastic tea set, a little vanity table with combs and brushes, and a big mirror. Worst of all, though, were the dolls, rows and rows of horridly painted, wicked little dolls tossed haphazardly on knotty pine shelving, their faces angled so as to leer at me from every angle. 

“Don’t these dolls bother you?” I whispered to Roxy, putting my Redbook Garden Guide down on the white wicker nightstand. It was late, but I was unable to sleep. It was taking time for me to acclimate to nighttime in the countryside. The front door had an easily defeated snap lock, and the windows had no locks at all. I was a city boy, used to multiple Segal locks with laser cut Medeco cylinders, backed up by a Fox Police Lock, with an imposing steel bar placed in the foyer floor plate. 

It all conspired to unnerve me: the moonlight bathing the treetops and fields, no police or fire truck sirens piercing the night, no peels of drunken laughter from throngs outside the bars in the streets below, no breaking glass, no car alarms. We were all alone, and this might as well have been the Overlook Hotel. Lurking somewhere out there was Jack Torrance and his bloody axe.

I motioned for Roxy, nearly asleep, to come over the bed-divide to my half of the high-riser, as I shut the tiny table lamp. “Honey, I don’t really feel like it tonight—are you mad?” she asked sleepily, her hair tousled upon her pillow. She apparently was too tired to hear the Jan show, with the incessant, rhythmic boom-boom-boom-boom from next door, interspersed with the oh-oh-oh-oh-OOOH Ken, oh Ken, oh Ken. 

I put my head under the pink flannel blanket and prayed for sleep to deliver me from the live sexcapades, horny as I was, but after what seemed like an hour under there, it became too hot, so I sprouted my head back up. 

I had to pee. That meant walking through dollyland barefoot, in pitch darkness, going downstairs to the bathroom and coming back up again. I tried to postpone the inevitable. I stared around the room. The noises from next door had subsided, replaced by Roxy’s light snoring. The poor kid was exhausted, I thought. So much fresh air activity clearly knocked her out.

My eyes swept the room, methodically examining every nuance of every artifact, hoping not to see one of the dolls move. Left to right, and right to left, I scanned rows and rows of painted faces, little booties, tiny curled fingers, and curiously canted bonnets. 

Worst of all were the ghastly faces of the clown dolls.

Those were positioned throughout the room, wedged between the more innocuous baby dolls; sick, twisted sentries surely purchased to haunt my night, their smiling faces frozen in manic glee. Their seemingly random placement insured that in order to monitor the clowns completely, I had to examine every row of dolls throughout the room. Each one capable of moving an arm, or winking an eye, or pirouetting, bowing dramatically and tipping its cap, as I lay there, loveless, in the Connecticut moonlight, having to pee, while listening to bugs and bullfrogs—and Ken and Jan—mate.