Dolls Behaving Badly Read online

  When the doctor handed me to Mother, all wrapped in a pink blanket with a frilly cap on my head, Mother tittered and tried to hand me back.

  “I seem to have the wrong baby,” she fretted, still groggy from the drugs. “I ordered a boy and this seems to be, why, it’s a girl.” Her face was all scrunched up and puzzled, and at that exact moment Daddy took a picture, which is still plastered in the photo album, Mother holding me away from her body and looking at me with distaste, while I stuck out my tongue and crossed my eyes.

  Later, when the drugs wore off and it finally hit Mother that she was stuck with another girl, she worried about what to name me. “Charles is such a good, solid name,” she insisted. “It seems a shame to waste it. Maybe we should name her Charles anyway? If we gave it a cute little spelling…”

  Daddy refused. Even then he was secretly plotting to try again. So when the Mexican aide came in to change the sheets and pointed at me and asked Mother, “What you name,” Mother explained her dilemma. I don’t know how much the woman understood, but at one point she excitedly pushed back her massive braid and screamed out, “Carlita!”

  “Carlita? That sounds so, well, ethnic,” Mother replied, but when Daddy looked it up in the baby book and found out that it was the female equivalent to Charles, he couldn’t be swayed. So I ended up a Polish-looking child with a Spanish-sounding name in a family with a mother who put on airs and a father who bought me baseball gloves and took me to football games and couldn’t seem to remember that I was really a girl. You’d think that when Gene finally came along, three years later, he would have given up, but he dragged Gene and me to every sporting event possible, and instead of making us athletic, all it did was give us a lifelong aversion to any type of game that required a ball.

  Saturday, Oct. 8

  “Think you’ll ever get married again?” Laurel was splendidly attired in a navy blue Halston blazer and skirt so slim she was forced to mince her way across the kitchen. “I’m not getting personal. I just showed a newlywed couple a condo over in Independence Park.” She plopped down on a kitchen chair without bothering to brush off the dog hair.

  “So?” I took a savage bite of the peanut butter toast left over from Jay-Jay’s breakfast. I had been up late the night before, supposedly finishing a transvestite G.I. Joe doll order but actually working on my Woman Running with a Box painting. The box, now tied with red and yellow ribbon, was cradled against the woman’s chest as lovingly as if it were a child. I had no idea what was inside but believed that if I kept painting it would soon be revealed to me.

  “…out of my mind,” Laurel was saying.

  “Huh?”

  “The newlyweds. I can’t stop thinking of them. ‘Are you sure these are the counters you want?’ he kept asking. They were so endearing, so careful of each other’s feelings.”

  “Give them a few years and they’ll be fighting over those very counters,” I snorted.

  “Maybe not. If you find the right man it doesn’t have to happen that way.” Laurel’s voice was dreamy, as if she were talking from far away. I got up and stuck another piece of bread in the toaster.

  “The question is whether this is a sign or merely a coincidence,” she said.

  I didn’t know how to answer. Laurel has been acting strange, calling and asking off-the-wall questions: If I were a bug, would I rather be a beetle or a grasshopper? Were socks invented before shoes? And why do we care what color our car is when we can’t see it while we’re driving? These questions make me cringe. They’re like seeing Laurel without her bra, her pale, sad breasts forlorn and defenseless without their normal wedge of armor.

  “Some days I put on a yellow sweater yet all day I feel as if I’m wearing black,” she was saying. “Oops, there’s my phone.” The theme from Jeopardy! blared as Laurel pulled out her cell and hurriedly tapped out a text message reply. When she looked up, her face was flushed.

  “Where was I? Oh yes: if you had five hundred dollars, would you spend it on a swimsuit that makes you look perfect or a new radiator for the car?” She leaned back in her chair and flashed me a hopeful smile; lipstick gleamed against her teeth.

  If I had five hundred dollars, I’d pay off some of my credit cards and buy a new pair of work shoes, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant. “I guess it depends on how often I used the car.”

  Laurel’s face fell for a moment. “Okay, it’s your second car, the one you don’t use much. The one you keep for summer.”

  “Summer?” I repeated stupidly. I knew she was trying to tell me something but it was too early in the morning to make the kind of mental leaps I needed to understand my sister. I nodded and chose the swimsuit.

  “Yes!” She tapped the tabletop with her hand. “That’s exactly what I thought. So you agree, then? That I’d look good as a redhead?” She pulled a strand of her hair and stared at it with fascination.

  “We’re talking about hair?”

  “What did you think we were talking about?”

  I paused. “I thought Junior hated redheads.”

  “Oh, him,” Laurel said with disinterest. “I need something new, you know? Something bold. Something that shouts, ‘Here’s a woman who’s not afraid to take chances.’”

  Laurel was afraid to take chances, but I knew better than to point that out. “Red is bold,” I agreed. “But I’ve heard that it’s hard to cover back up.”

  “I know!” Laurel cradled her head in her arms. “It’s such a dilemma, Carly. I can barely sleep thinking about it. I want to look as if I’m in charge, but sexy in charge, you know?”

  I was at loss for words. Except for the few days before her period, Laurel doesn’t allow her emotions to get the best of her. She’s logical and precise and careful. Yet there she was, sitting in front of me and revealing more moods then she’d had in years.

  “The time!” Laurel stood up and pranced her way to the door without bothering to rinse out her dirty coffee cup. “I’ll call you,” she yelled over her shoulder. “About the hair, okay?”

  The slam of the door, followed by the purr of her car’s expensive motor as she glided down my driveway. I watched out the window and wondered what was going on in my sister’s mind. Women always try to change their hair when they really want to change their lives. I did this myself, back before the divorce, before Barry and I dared utter the word, when we were still rolling it around on our tongues with an almost frenzied joy, each of us sure all our failures were the other’s fault. Instead of bringing up the subject of divorce, I began cutting my hair. It had been long when I married Barry, down past my waist, and I often wore it in a fat braid that hit comfortingly against my spine. I loved my hair. It was a shiny, dark blonde that picked up yellow highlights in the summer. Sometimes I wove ribbons through it or curled it in a mad array around my face.

  “Getting loose,” Barry yelled when I let my hair down. “My baby’s a’gettin’ loose.”

  I sacrificed my hair to free myself from my marriage. I hacked away, inch by agonizing inch, with Jay-Jay’s toenail scissors, ripping and tearing until my hair lay in uneven strips across my back, slowly creeping up toward my shoulders. Barry never uttered a word, not even when my hair littered the bathroom floor and stuck to the sides of his socks.

  To retaliate, or maybe to keep up, he started killing things: a few spruce hens here, a rabbit or porcupine there. King salmon so fat and heavy the middle of the kitchen table sagged, and then a coyote, a lynx, and—god help us—a sheep and finally a caribou. The day I walked in the bathroom and found a moose head floating in a cold bath was the day I knew we had gone far enough. Next time, it could only be a person.

  That night I waited up for Barry, who was working an insurance salesman banquet. I waited until he walked in the door, his ridiculous chef’s pants dragging on the floor, and then I coughed, cleared my throat.

  “Divorce,” I said, and we both froze, the silence between us thick and dangerous. I said it again. It was as if I had no control over my mouth.
/>   “Divorce, divorce, divorce,” until the very word became strange and blurry, like something you might read about in the newspaper.

  “Shut up!” he screamed, which made me scream even louder: “Divorce, divorce, divorce.”

  He finally had to hit me to shut me up, a gentle tap that didn’t even leave a mark, but still my eyes watered and I stared at him, momentarily betrayed. How dare he!

  I kicked him, sly and quick, but he didn’t bother to fight back, just stood there, his shoulders slumped, his chef’s hat sagging against his neck. I hated him then, hated him with a passion so extreme that if someone had handed me a knife, I wouldn’t have hesitated to stick it in.

  “You win,” he said in a horrible, gravelly whisper. “Happy now, god damn it, are you fuckin’ happy now?”

  But I didn’t win. We both ended up losing more than we ever imagined, more than we even knew we had. Divorce sounds so simple, a two-syllable word about two people breaking apart. It’s not simple, though, and the break is never clean. And just when you think it can’t possibly hurt any more, it hurts more than is bearable, more than you can take. But you do take it, and that’s the worst part of it all.

  Chapter 4

  E-mail #1

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: What the fuck?

  C:

  Your order is late again. Get your fucking ass in gear. Now!

  On a cheerier note, the last batch looked good, especially the Hanging Low, Hanging Hard for Big Daddy military doll. The camo dick rocked, as did the rocket-flared cock ring.

  Keep it up,

  Jimmie Dean

  President, Thinking Butts and Boobs

  www.thinkingbuttsandboobs.com

  Tuesday, Oct. 11

  I can’t seem to finish my dirty doll orders. For the past two nights I’ve sat at the table, X-Acto knife in hand, and accomplished nothing. Oh, I did manage to slice open Ken’s buttocks and insert a small wedge of latex to give him a plumper, sexier behind, but my heart wasn’t in it and poor Ken ended up with lopsided cheeks and an ugly scar, which I didn’t bother to cover with dabs of flesh-coated tint. Instead, I stapled Ken’s mouth shut. Then his eyes, and his ears and hands, all the while wondering: what is it I don’t want to see or hear or touch or say?

  My dolls are a camouflage, a distraction. They keep me from seeing my real self. But what if I were braver? What if I dusted off my brushes and concentrated, really concentrated, on the Woman Running with a Box painting? Finishing it would make it permanent, and permanence scares the hell out of me. Which is ironic, because one of the reasons I yearn to be an artist is to leave something behind, a record of my life, a yell in the dark: I was here.

  Gramma was the one who first put a crayon in my hand when I was two, and forget the fact that I ate the first couple she handed me (primrose, followed by burned sienna and then midnight sky), I soon began coloring everything in sight, from Mother’s good white slip to the bathroom walls.

  “Ach, you got the gift,” Gramma said, oohing and aahing at every smeary new creation. “You are a gifter.”

  Gramma always believed I’d make it as an artist. She was the only one in the family who believed I would amount to something; she said she knew it the first time she plopped a piece of honey-glazed cabbage into my mouth. I sucked it slowly, intently, as if trying to draw out every single flavor.

  “Greedy for life,” Gramma called it. She insisted it was a sign of a strong personality, someone with the gumption to go out and get what she wants. Poor Gramma, with her messy hair and unshaven legs and ugly flowered dresses clinging to her massive hips. Poor onion-smelling, mole-spotted Gramma. She was never good at predicting anything, not even the weather. If she said it was going to be sunny, we all made sure we carried our raincoats that day.

  Friday, Oct. 14

  “Midway through your diary writing you will be surprised by offerings of mysterious gifts,” the Oprah Giant wrote. “It could be money, free car repairs, or a letter from the sister you haven’t spoken with in years.”

  When this happened, she continued, it was our obligation, our duty, to offer up praise.

  So praise be the mailman with his balding head, his shuffling gait, his knobby knees (in the summer) and big red ears (in the winter). Praise be his little truck that creeps and coughs up our road each morning before I leave for work. Praise be his gloves with the chewed fingers and his cheery “Good morning, Miz Richards” and his breath that smells of butterscotch candies.

  Praise be to you!

  Because today you brought me two Alaska Permanent Fund dividend checks, each made out for the whopping amount of $845.76 and tucked inside a small envelope with stars from the Alaska flag running up the side.

  In Alaska, October is a holy month. It’s when every man, woman, and child, plus a few dogs and hamsters squeezed illegally into the system, gets a portion of the oil profits from the North Slope. Forget the fact that those same oil companies pollute our waters and kill our wildlife. Most of us are happy to receive this money we didn’t do a damn thing to deserve. We feel vindicated, as if it is our right, our pat on the back for having suffered through winter after dark winter, along with crappy springs and too-short summers. These checks usually average around a thousand dollars, though they’ve been known to soar past the fifteen-hundred-dollar range.

  For a short space each October, the financial burden lifts from my shoulders and I am left feeling light and airy, as if I can accomplish anything. It’s an illusion, of course. Still, it’s a welcome reprieve. I buy balloons and decorate the kitchen.

  “We’re rich,” I sing, dancing around the kitchen with Jay-Jay and Killer. I order take-out pizza—a luxury—and we sit on the worn linoleum and look through catalogs, deciding what to do with this windfall, this gift from god and the state and our pigeon-toed mailman. Jay-Jay usually buys video games and I always buy art supplies.

  So thank you, Mr. Mailman. For the filbert brush and the bone-​handled fettling knife, the Schmincke soft pastel set and the Totally Hair Ken doll, and especially for the 1966 blonde ponytailed Barbie I won on eBay, which is splendid and glorious and should arrive in your humble little truck sometime next week.

  Monday, Oct. 17

  Phone call at 8:03 a.m.

  “Carla Richards?”

  “Mmmmmm.”

  “This is Darlene, over at Alaska Consumer Credit Counseling. I see by my records that your dividend checks were scheduled to arrive this week.”

  “Oh. Right. Yes.”

  “Wonderful! Do you still have a copy of our payment budget?”

  “I-I guess so.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll e-mail you another.”

  “Uh, okay.”

  “You need to send out your payment checks the minute you cash your dividend, and I mean the minute. This way you can get your foot in the door, payment-wise.”

  “Sure!” I lied heartily.

  “Now, have you…” I heard papers rustling in the background. “Have you looked into further education to procure better job opportunities?”

  “That’s next on my list,” I lied again.

  “I must say, Miss Richards, you are doing exceptionally well. If you only knew some of my other clients, why, they’re practically helpless. But for someone who works in the service industry, you seem to have things well under control.”

  “Yes.” I could almost feel my nose growing longer.

  “I’ll call in January, to see how you’ve survived the holidays.” She gave a little laugh and hung up.

  My hands were slick with sweat by the time I put the phone down. Gramma would have sympathized. Her spending habits were as sloppy and unpredictable as mine. Every Thursday she “borrowed” a handful of bills from the cash register of the deli where she worked and bought as much hamburger as it would cover. Then she cooked up huge vats of goulash and soup, which she took down to the park and left for her poor neighbors. She left dishes as well,
bowls and spoons and even cloth napkins. She never worried that people might take things.

  “Just ’cause they ain’t got money don’t mean they ain’t got hearts,” she’d say, chopping onions and celery, her fat hands moving so fast they appeared to blur.

  No one ever stole anything from Gramma, even though she lived in a rough neighborhood and never locked her door. She was esteemed, like Mother Teresa or Gandhi. Even the street punks nodded when she waddled past. They called her Grannie P, for Gramma Polack.

  “Hey, Grannie P, what’s shaking?” they yelled, giving her high fives.

  Gramma pinched their cheeks and asked about their mothers. She knew everyone’s names, even though she lived in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood and few people spoke English. How they understood my grandmother’s butchered speech is beyond me. Maybe food speaks louder than words, for at the beginning of the month when the men lucky enough to have jobs got paid and the others received their welfare checks, the women left offerings on Gramma’s doorstep: a bowl of fried rice, a jar of homemade salsa, a plate of green chili tamales. Gramma and I ate these in front of the TV while watching The Price Is Right. Gramma had a crush on Bob Barker.