Over the summer when I was ten years old, we spent the July 4th holiday week at Grandma Troll’s* house in Ohio (his mother). It was the Troll practice to spend this week with her ever since we moved back from Alaska. I always had the sense that his family was afraid of him. No one argued with him and they didn’t look at what he was doing too closely. This is the summer that I developed heat sickness (probably related to stress) on top of everything else. Mrs. Troll discovered I needed extra salt in my diet and encouraged me to eat potato chips. She also found out that cool/cold baths would help reduce the effects of being overly warm. Because I didn’t have much energy, they often left me alone at Grandma’s house while they all went out to King’s Island or over to our cousins’ house. It got very bad one evening when our cousins had come over. Downstairs where everyone else was, Mr. Troll acted concerned about my condition and told them he was going to take me upstairs and run a cold bath for me. As we went up the stairs, he seemed to transform more and more with each step he took away from the crowd. I didn’t want t be alone with him for any length of time regardless of who else was in the house. I knew I couldn’t cry out or scram or he would beat me for that later in addition to whatever he was going to do now. As he ran the water in the tub, he was stripping my clothes off me, running his hands over my skin (which was crawling) and telling me he was going to help me in the tub. I wished I had something in my stomach to throw up on him. He put me down in the tub and started “washing” me. REVOLTING! He put his hands all over me, touching my skin and pinching me. He put his finger inside me telling me he had to make sure I was clean. Mrs. Troll had told me to try not to think about what he was doing so that I wouldn’t remember it later. I told myself not to think about what he was doing. I put it out of my head for a long time afterward as I did all of his molestation.
*That side of the family has more Trolls than you can shake a stick at but it isn't really their name.