House on the Lake

I busted my chin on the stone steps. I don’t know how old I was, but I was racing up the steps from the dock because Gargoyles was coming on. Watching the show was a treat each time I went to my grandparents’ lake house—usually a long weekend, but up to a month during the summer. It came on every weekday from three p.m. until four p.m. One hours of pure bliss when I could sit alone, away from my siblings and parents, in the back bedroom and watch the show I loved so much. A towel tripped me, striped in blue and orange. Caught up under my feet, I’d been sent hurtling towards the edge of a stone slab. 

I missed that day’s episodes. The hour was spent crying and screaming hysterically in the kitchen. Seated on the meat block, blood streamed down from my chin. My neck turning red, I screamed louder. 

The lake house was an escape. Built in the seventies, it was one story and made of stone. The same stone that served as the stairs up and down my grandparents’ yard, which sloped down into the water. Inside was a small kitchen with green cabinets and the walls of the whole place were paneled in blonde wood. At the center was a meat block. Sloped in the middle and stained, dark, from years of bloodshed seeping into the pores. 

There was a dining area, and a piano beside the table where my grandmother set up seasonal decorations: patriotic flags, and blue-and-red-colored lights through summer; silk leaves, colored so they looked freshly fallen, and scavenged pine cones from the yard after Labor Day; a porcelain, snow-covered village with twinkling music and lights during Christmas. The 

living room was dominated by a stone fireplace with a thick mantel and a mouth that gaped, dark and open, but never held flame. 

The dining room spilt into the screen-in porch, where we had most of our meals. It was cool in the mornings while we scooped soft-scrambled eggs and hot chocolate in our mouths; warm for lunch over hot dogs and Splenda-sweetened tea. At night, the porch got loud with cicadas screaming and wind blowing through the trees; the hammock’s metal chains groaning and rattling. When I got stung by a bee—my first and only time, God willing—Dad was outside, leaning against the wooden supports of the screened-in porch. He heard me and took me into the kitchen, sat me on the meat block, and used his cigarette to stop the spread of any bee venom, to relieve itching. The spot on my wrist swelled and stays red. 

We had a forest-green table, padded on the top, with legs that folded in and out. Situated on the patio outside the screened-in porch where the stone steps ran up from the lake to the house, I learned to play rummy. The card game was a favorite of my parents and grandparents, and once I learned to play I was unbeatable. My streak lasted forty-ish games—I won each hand, beating my older brother, parents, my uncle. 

The yard sloped away from the house in all directions. The porch was ten—twenty feet at best, from a cliff that dropped forty feet to a smattering of rocks where the lake water lapped when a stray boat passed by. There was a spot in the yard marked by a pile of stones where a Dachshund was buried, I don’t remember its name because my grandmother had several. When my first dog, a Maltese from Mom’s college years, walked off the cliff and dropped forty feet, we buried him in right next to the Dachshund under a new pile of rocks. I remember looking over the edge after my uncle had whispered, ineffectively, to my grandmother that he’d spotted the mass of white fur down on the rocks. He didn’t look like a dog anymore, and looking at the 

mangled fur made my chin hurt. My uncle and dad set off in our green canoe to retrieve the body, armed with an orange-and-blue striped towel. When they came back, the dog was bundled inside and us three kids were shooed into the back bedroom while they dug a hole. 

The back hallway was always dark, no lights and caged by the blonde paneling. With three or four bedrooms branching off—I don’t remember because us kids were only allowed in the first room, ours, and the last, my grandparents. That’s where I watched my shows when the television set on the mantel in the living room was busy with football or cooking shows. There was a screen-in porch attached to their room, too, but it was dedicated to storage: a maze of stacked boxes and old water toys we didn’t use. If you looked out, you saw straight off into the lake where boats pulled tubes and people on wooden skis. 

It’s still quiet there—the cove over which their house loomed from the cliff remains calm. The house is still there, but changed so much by the next owners that it’s unrecognizable. They took down the hammock, altered the boat dock. There is no more stone siding—we can’t go inside, but Mom says that pictures from Zillow show the fireplace has been changed too. I wonder about the dogs a lot. What happened to them? We left them when we moved away. Left them under two-feet-tall mounds of pale rock. The new owners must’ve seen them. I like to think they kicked the stones off the cliff and let them sail into the water, leaving the two dogs untouched. But I can’t know.