The Doll

 

[Since last month's post was about writing, and this story was referenced, I thought I'd post it here. This was written for my first major course in Writing. I wa 18, so keep that in mind.]    

     Her name was Holly. She was born on Christmas Eve, and although she had ruined her parents' plans for that evening, they managed to forgive her for that. Then they named her in the true spirit of Christmas.

            She was now six, that novel age when she was "Mommy's big girl" while still remaining "Daddy's little angel". She was a vibrant child. Everything about her seemed radiant, including her long, brown hair that glistened red in the sun.

            She wore green well and almost exclusively; that was her mother's way of keeping Christmas around her all year long. Many of Holly's dolls wore pretty dresses of red or blue, but none dressed like Holly except one: her Christy-Anna doll. Christy was not only Holly's favorite doll, but she was also her best friend. Christy listened like none of the other dolls when Holly spoke – so Holly told everyone – and always had something nice to say. But Holly only reluctantly admitted that she had to pull a string to make Christy talk.

            Holly lived a very happy life with her dolls when she wasn't too busy entertaining her invisible friends at imaginary parties.  She was happy with her parents, too – when they weren't too busy entertaining their real friends at real parties. Like her mother, Holly often told her doll that if she were good, she'd get a piece of cake; then Holly would rush upstairs and try very hard to go to sleep.

            The Andersons were well known for their parties.  Their friends often envied their ability to entertain well. The Andersons, of course, enjoyed their popularity as much as children do.

            The day after a party, however, was usually a bad one for Christy.

            "Can't you ever do what I ask?" Holly would demand in sleepless irritability.  "You always have to make noise, don't you?  You always want the spotlight. Well, you're nothing but a brat. You'll learn that the parties I give are mine. You'll learn – you'll spend the day in your room." Then Holly would slap the doll's face.

            "Mama," the doll cried automatically.

            "Don't think crying will get you anywhere," Holly answered.  "You're a bad girl. You're no good at all."

            "I love you, Mama," the doll responded, and the worn record made it sound like the doll was crying.

            "I don't love you anymore," Holly said, then began beating the doll with anger unusual for a child her age.

            Poor Christy-Anna! When she was good, she was Holly's most beloved doll, but when she displeased Holly, she bore the brunt of the child's rage. Yet, for all the beatings the doll received, it still said, "I love you, Mama."

            Of late, the doll had stopped talking much. The string didn't always work. This annoyed Holly. She couldn't tolerate Christy being like the other mute dolls she had.

            "If you're not going to say anything, then go away," Holly said. But the doll remained in its place. Holly went about her work, ignoring Christy completely. Finally, Holly turned to the doll.

            "I'm going to have another party. This time, you're not going to ruin it for me."

            Actually, the doll never did anything to ruin Holly's parties.  She was very good, but some of Holly's friends became quite loud, disturbing the doll's sleep. An accidental cry of "Mama!" would send Holly into a rage, even though accidents of this sort often happen to talking dolls.

            Holly could be quite charming to her friends at a party, but coming back to the realities of life the next day had devastating effects on her. Days like that made Holly hate the doll. But then Holly would realize that her troubles were not entirely the doll's fault, and she would try to make things up to her.

            "Let's see my big girl smile," Holly said, hugging her doll.

            Together the girl and the doll would take imaginary shopping trips, and as far as Holly was concerned, things were all right again.

            Holly had another party, but this time things were worse than usual. One of Holly's imaginary friends got out of hand, and Christy, unfortunately, was not well. Holly was quite embarrassed, and the party ended early.

            The following morning found Holly out of sorts, a pounding headache adding to her tiredness. Poor Christy-Anna, who had, until then, looked like a normal worn doll, took such a beating that Holly's hands were sore.

            "You're not sick, you bad thing!" Holly shouted. "You've ruined everything. I hate you, Christy-Anna, I hate you! I wish I never had you."

            Holly beat the doll unmercifully. When she finished the doll looked frightful. The tangled brown hair fell over its face, the wrinkled green dress was torn, and the arms and legs flailed about with every blow.

            Finally exhausted, Holly threw the doll on the floor. As it hit the floor, it cried, "Mama," perhaps for the last time. That infernal squeaking voice!

            "Shut up!" Holly said, shaking the doll, and banging it against the floor. The doll was silent, and the blue eyes closed.  Satisfied, Holly left the doll lying on the floor, and went off to do her work.

 

            "Hi, hon," Tom Anderson said. "You look beat."

            "Oh, I've been cleaning up after that party," his wife answered. "Brad Quinton will never be invited here again after the mess he caused last night."

            "I agree. Where's Holly?"

            "Upstairs. Do you know that fake wasn't sick last night after all? She just wanted attention. And to make matters worse, this morning she broke that stupid doll,"

            He stood looking at her oddly for the comment. Why was she talking about a child's doll? It made no sense, and didn't explain the anger he'd heard in her voice – the sudden realization of the reality beyond the words pushed through the years of denial.

            "My God!" he said, horrified, as he dashed upstairs.

            When he reached the room, he found Holly on the floor where her mother had left her, still squeaking "Mama." He scooped her up, and laid her on the bed as he looked pityingly at her battered body. He pushed her hair from her doll face.

            His wife watched, unmoved, from the doorway. "I told you you never should have given her that doll," she said.

 

 

                                                                          END

                                                                          1973

Odd Moments in Summer

 

            "They've won the  ride of a lifetime," Kiera said to herself, as part of the game. She loaded two small dolls into the wicker half-circle basket tied to the back of her bicycle seat.

            Although the streets bubbled with the laughter, the shouts of other children in the neighborhood, Kiera had spent the entire day in her tree fort or under the hose, depending upon her mood, but alone, entirely alone. Her mother's conviction that a child who couldn't amuse himself couldn't be amusing to anyone else had helped to develop Kiera's somewhat overactive imagination, but did little to improve her social skills with other children.

            It annoyed Kiera that other children couldn't see trees or snow for what they were: something other than trees or snow. Or that the other children didn't think the way she thought, always pretending to be free thinking individuals rather than actors under her direction. She hated the way the other girls – she was forbidden to play with boys, although she sometimes did – wanted to bask in the sun when they went swimming. They expected her to do the same. She didn't like the heat without the water, and while they turned tan, she turned orange. Why would they want to be tan? They had great pools. Who would want to roast in the heat when they could swim? Why pretend she wanted to? Because she wouldn't play along, her unnaturally tan friends stopped inviting her to swim in their pools.

            So, on sultry summer days she could lie in the grass and watch the heat rippling up from the streets, or climb into the tree fort and pretend to be Paul McCartney – her friends wanted to marry the Beatles, but she wanted to be one – or fly to Mars in her imagined spacecraft. Now, after dinner, she had played out the fort for the day. She needed excitement, a race down any hill she could find. This idea occurred after a game where the dolls were her audience, so she decided to take them with her. It was foolish, but she did it as part of the game. Once around the block would do for the dolls. They were getting to ride in the limo with the rock star.

            Of course, on her way around the block she had to pass Helen Broderick and Joan Rafferty, two on-again, off-again friends, both with pools presently off limits, both waiting, she thought, for a chance to ridicule her about something. She passed as quickly as she could, which wasn't fast, considering she traveled uphill. Too slow for them to miss seeing the dolls in her basket. How would she ever live it down? It was bad enough they laughed at her and called her movie star as a taunt because she had her sunglasses on, but the dolls –

            She reached her house as quickly as she could, and threw the dolls into their toy cribs in the playroom. It shouldn't work like this. She would have to ride back the way she came around the block to unravel the invisible string that determined the length of her life. (Her theory was that each person was born with a ball of invisible string. To go back the way one came allowed one to re-roll some of what was used, giving one a longer life. When the ball was completely gone, one's life ended. She wanted to out-live the girls who had been so cruel but didn’t know about the string.)

            As Kiera remounted her bike, she saw Joan pass on her bike. Joan said, "Are you taking your babies for a ride again?" To hide the disgrace she felt, and to show her contempt for Joan, she stuck her tongue out at her.

            "Joan the bone, dial tone," she said to herself in time with her pedaling as she whizzed past Helen. Helen made another remark about Kiera acting like a big shot, but Kiera swerved in time to avoid hitting her, and rode on. They simply wouldn't exist. Not Joan the clone or Helen, Helen watermelon. She'd show them all. She was the best bike-trick kid on the block, she thought, as she rested her feet over her handlebars. Losers, all of you. Big fat losers. Brown as a clown, and hair like straw. Who needs you and your swimming pools?  I can make up my own friends.

            She rode up one hill and down another, first one way, then back the way she came. She stopped once again at home to clothespin baseball cards against the wheels of her bike so that it would sound like a motorcycle. The other kids had already done it, and now she would, too.

            She rode up and around until she reached the top of the big hill on Park Avenue. She'd race down it. No, she decided, she'd turn at the first street and do the hills on Summit Avenue.

            She turned, and almost immediately changed her mind. Still at whizzing-down-the-hill speed, she made a U-turn and started back to the big hill. Without stopping, pedaling to pick up speed, she started around the corner. She rode too close to the gravel and skidded down, the bike falling on top of her. She fell, face-first onto the road.

            She screamed before she felt any real pain. Joan rode by as she did. She hesitated a moment, then stopped, but didn't help Kiera up. Instead, she said she'd get Kiera's father, then left the girl alone on the road, humiliated beyond her pain.

            It took a minute before anyone came to see if she was hurt. Amy, a girl Kiera knew vaguely as one of the bigger kids, and Amy's father crossed the street to where she lay.

            "I can't get up," Kiera managed to say.

            Amy’s father picked the bike up, then helped the ten-year-old Kiera. They walked Kiera to their car. While Amy walked the bike to her house, her father drove Kiera home.

            Kiera was calm, but her cheeks, knees and hands were embedded with cinders. Her mouth dripped blood, and for a moment, Kiera thought she'd faint, but she managed not to.

            "I lost my sunglasses," she said.

            "You broke your front teeth, too," Amy's father said.

            "Oh, no," Kiera said, looking out the window, and seeing her father walking toward the approaching car, "my mother's going to kill me."

 

Of Holy Communion, Confession and Second Grade

Children dream big. It is only later that reality crushes those dreams out of existence.

When I was very small I knew what I wanted to be: I wanted to grow up to be Ricky Nelson. So what if I was a girl? Did it matter that I was denied the basic training for music, dance and acting as a child? You can, I was told, grow up to be anything you want to be.

           

Stages never scared me. How wonderful it is to stand on a stage and perform. It wasn’t frightening, like walking up to a child you didn’t know and asking if you could be friends, knowing rejection was the most likely outcome.

When you performed on a stage, people came to see you and paid money for the privilege. They weren’t waiting to boo you or walk away. Instead, they would applaud and smile and ask for your autograph.

           

I lived a good bit of my childhood in my head, turning the names of my brothers’ friends into characters I could become as I played alone in the back yard or swam in the pool.

The pretend world I created was so vivid to me that I usually forgot that any other children were not privy to it, and when I said something related to it, they didn’t know what I was talking about. Instead of asking, they’d look at me oddly and tell me I was weird.

           

I was used to that. My brothers called me worse things than weird, and even my own mother told me I was strange. Repeatedly.

If I didn’t know something, my brother would say I was stupid. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t learned it yet because he was four years older. The fact that I didn’t know everything he did meant I was stupid.

           

School was a different matter entirely. It wasn’t everything I was promised. We learned something new and then spent the next two weeks having it repeated eternally, so, I assumed, even the most brick-headed student would know it.

This of course caused me to miss the fact for years that I can’t memorize things by reading them; I memorize by hearing things. While I think I have somewhat of a photographic memory, often the photos don’t turn out.

Because of the slow and repetitious nature of the classroom, added to the fact that my bad handwriting caused me to have to write my homework over several times before my mother was satisfied with it, my hand spent more time in the air than folded in obedient stasis on my desk. 

When called on in class, I could give the answer. It wasn’t a matter of pride to me; hearing the same thing droned into your ears day after day, how could you not give the answer?

Yet for all of my shrugging off answering in class, I was hounded and what would now be called bullied for doing well in school.

           

“You think you’re a big shot,” was hurled in my direction more often than, “Hi, how are you?”

           

Why would I think I was a big shot? Because I could spell? Because I got 100 on a math test? Because I could tell which verb part to use in a sentence? Because I was almost never called on to read, since the teacher knew I could? Because I was sent to the back of the room for talking? 

My art projects were always failures, and I could never manage to write on the lines. Those were the important things to me, and in those matters I was a failure.

Big shot? School felt to me like hanging from a window sill, afraid that someone would slam the window down on my fingers.

I tripped up the stairs. I couldn’t cut on or color inside the lines. I didn’t know how to jump rope. I was a slow runner, and therefore, always “it” in a game of tag.

I essentially had no friends. Yes, I was allowed to hang around with someone for a week or two, but that was it. That wasn’t being a big shot to me; that was total failure.

At home, there were no girls in my neighborhood who were my age, and I was forbidden to play with boys. Most of the girls on my block and the next were a year or two older than I was. Until the teen years, that’s massive.

The rest were a year or two younger. That’s also massive, but younger was easier to get along with – until they decide they don’t want to play with you. Then you’re a big shot.

Then there was my big, empty yard to play in, with swings, a sliding board, a tree fort and a sand box. How could I possibly need other children?

           

When I was seven, there was a five-year-old girl who liked me. She was allowed to cross the street to come to my house to ask if I could play (when I was five, I wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone). 

My mother discouraged me from playing with her because she was so much younger than I was, but if she came to my door and I was home, it meant I had no one else to play with, so my mother didn’t want to be so cruel as to forbid me from going to her house. Her name was Sheila.

           

Sheila would play with me for about ten minutes, and then lose interest and go off somewhere else.

That didn’t bother me. She had a seven-year-old brother who was in my class at school. He and I got along very well, and he was always interested in playing some game or other with me when I came over – in fact, I think that’s why Sheila went off somewhere else.

The other children in school would tease that Michael was my boyfriend. He wasn’t. We were just pals. We played cowboys or soldiers or tree climbing or whatever other things I wasn’t allowed to play at home.

He never kissed me or tried to. In fact, that kind of thought never crossed either of our minds. He was the one person who didn’t mind that I could answer questions at school, who never, ever called me a big shot.

           

My parents were surprised when I was invited to Michael’s eighth birthday party. I was surprised that they let me go, since I wasn’t allowed to play with boys. And it still rates as one of the best birthday parties I ever attended.

           

I never told my parents that I spent my time playing with Michael and not Sheila. They wouldn’t have let me go to his house if I did.

I didn’t think of that as lying. I could never understand how not volunteering information was lying when you didn’t actually say anything. It might be a sin, but it wasn’t lying.

           

Sin was a big deal in second grade, although now I’m not sure whether or not a seven-year-old is capable of actual sin. I was far more afraid of my parents than God, if he existed – although I believed he did, just in case, since I’d never actually met him – and at the time I was a bit skeptical of whether or not people in history, like Caesar and George Washington were real.  I thought maybe they were like fairy-tales, and teachers made them up so they’d have something to teach.

I had already learned that a little lie that didn’t hurt anyone but kept you from being punished was preferable to having a grownup make a big deal out of something that wasn’t important, and hounding you about it for a year.

Like the time I went to a report card conference with my mother when – other than art, handwriting and orderliness – history and geography were my only two bad grades. I was in fifth grade by then.

The teacher asked me if I liked history and geography. That particular year, I did not. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by expressing hatred for something she taught, and I didn’t want to have to hear about it every time I answered incorrectly, so I said, “I guess.”

           

Now, I knew lying was wrong, but I figured I could make up for something that small long before I had to apply for my ticket to heaven. God wasn’t going to give me extra homework or yell at me as my parents or teacher would, so I decided to tell the lie and do the Hail Mary to make up for it instead.

But back to second grade, I tried to be an accurate student.

           

I found my First Communion prayer book not too long ago, with its pre-Vatican II Latin responses and pictures of a much different-looking Mass than what people see today. I also found, tucked in the pages, a paper with a list written in my second-grade handwriting.

It was a list of sins I’d committed since the previous visit to Confession. I wanted to be accurate so I wouldn’t commit an additional sin of lying to the priest in Confession by giving an incorrect account of my failings.

I’m not sure whether or not I brought the list with me to Confession, but it’s  documentation of what I thought I was doing wrong at the time.

           

Children’s understanding of wrongdoing is amusing. I wonder if other children thought to impress the priest by confessing to a murder or theft they hadn’t committed (I never did).

But so many of the commandments, at least the way they used to be worded, were difficult to understand. I knew lying was wrong, but I could never find a commandment saying that. There was one about bears, which made no sense to me.

And my classmates didn’t understand the word “covet”. They usually mispronounced it as “cover”. What would be wrong with covering your neighbor’s things? What if it was raining? Should you just leave them out there to get wet?

           

God had some strange rules. His were even odder than the ones my parents had, like looking up and down before you crossed the street. Shouldn’t you look for cars? But then, God could turn into a wafer, so I wasn’t too surprised.

           

By second grade, I was pretty good at riding my bike. The training wheels were gone and I had even learned to ride around corners.

I still had minor accidents, like the time I decided I was going to let go of the handlebars because I wanted to learn to ride without holding on, as I had seen some of the older kids do. I wasn’t sure how that was accomplished, so I decided to let go and count. As soon as the bike got a bit wobbly, I’d grab the handlebars again. Once the bike was steady, I’d try again.

           

I could ride for a fast count of ten. My goal one day was to wait until I reached twenty. So, as I started down my street, I let go. I reached ten.

On the next try I was almost able to reach fifteen.  Almost was close. I let go again, determined to reach twenty. The road slanted down slightly as I counted. I could feel the wobblies return, but determination won out, and I didn’t grab the bars.

As the bike started to fall over, I was only to eighteen, but I grabbed the handlebars once again, just as Jimmy, a seventh-grade boy who lived across the street was walking past. I was too late, and the bike went completely over, with me on the street below it. I couldn’t seem to get myself up, and Jimmy didn’t give me a second glance.

Finally, I called out to him, and he grudgingly, picked up my bicycle so I could stand up. As soon as I was off the road and able to take the bike, he let it go, leaving me to my cuts and scrapes, and went on his way.

           

School might be easy, but being a second grader was definitely difficult.