Forgotten Dolls
The day they stormed the capitol building, my mother sent a group text to my sister, niece and me. She doesn’t watch the news, but she has good instincts for tragedy.
The message seemed innocuous at first. We knew she’d been cleaning out the house like most of us — disposing of our baggage as the world came to an end. We can’t use that ripped tent our ex-husband bought for a camping trip to save the marriage. We didn’t even like camping. We can’t keep that box of Band-Aids so aged that the glue had turned brown. We can’t give away the half-chewed dog bed that belonged to a dog we no longer had. And there was no need for the cake pop maker — remember when that was a thing? Eating cake on a stick as the world comes to an end would be asinine.
These objects were painful reminders of a life we’d outgrown, memories outweighing the weight of these things. To grasp the full scope of the seemingly benign inquiry from our mother I will share screenshots here.
Her question: “Which one of these babies, if any, do you want to keep?”
Apart from it looking like a fetus trying to escape at the bottom and an already-operated-on Madeline without clothes, there was Baby in Pink, who had a party three decades ago and made the life-altering mistake of passing out early while Bonnethead — the unimpeachable — scribbled sh*t on her face. (Baby in Pink is pointing her out in the shot.)
But who knows? Maybe with that inked teardrop, she really did murk someone. A secret fascist toting a Zweifinger mustache.
This was a motley crew of rejects, and Raggedy Anne’s blissful smile with bovine eyes conveyed she did not grasp the gravity of the situation. Her look suggested a happy surprise: “Are you my mother?”
When I received the text, I was working on a story where a family in Texas had passed down a century-old record book to the oldest living daughter in the family — a five-hundred-page manuscript of letters between ancestors detailing their triumphs and tragedies, marriages and deaths. A real heirloom.
I couldn’t help but compare our families and marvel at what we were passing down to our descendants. Obviously the babies were from the 1980s and had “seen some sh*t,” so could not possibly belong to my niece, Aaliyah, who promptly responded: “None.”
But the simple word stung. She wanted none of these broken babies. She had nothing to do with their sad existence and by no means saw them as keepsakes. Understandably so, but rejection was rejection.
Aaliyah, a teenager, proceeded to inform us that the Raggedy Anne doll “Grammy had been hoarding for 30 years” had become the star of the horror film Annabelle; that she’d been moving around unprovoked in a house until the owners were so “creeped out” that they put her in a padlocked cage and gave her to a museum.
Aaliyah suggested burning it. She added: “Talk about something that should have been recalled.”
My sister and I did not respond to the text for a day. We did not know how to proceed. There was something fragile in the message. And if our childhood taught us anything: fragile was something to be feared. It was like an antique vase breaking in the dining room of our youth. Someone was shuffling around in the dark and knocked it over — maybe by accident, maybe on purpose — but we all heard it. We all saw the shattered bits across the floor, and we couldn’t ignore it.
A text like this needed a response. Especially with my niece’s rejection. She knew Grammy, but she didn’t know her like we knew her. There would be repercussions if we didn’t respond. Emotional repercussions. And who were we kidding, those were the worst kind.
Our silence, in a sense, was also a rejection of our childhood and the family heirlooms.
My sister: “I don’t want any of them, but thank you though.”
Polite. Direct. Okay, we have recognized and dealt with the situation.
No response from Mom.
A couple of hours later, I added: “Next time I am home, I can go through any keepsakes.”
Crickets.
Were they keepsakes? Could disfigured dolls nearly thirty-years-old be keepsakes?
And then it shifted, that horrible part of the brain that feels things flickered on. You know the spot — the place we store regrets, where guilt blossoms into a thorny entanglement of alternative realities. Where old versions of ourselves and past belief systems blink back in the dark recesses.
Sh*t.
Maybe I wanted the dolls, I began to think. Maybe one day I would hold them in my hands and show children I would never have a piece of my childhood. Hadn’t Bonnethead gone down that plastic blue slide in the backyard? Hadn’t Madeline sat for family portraits, confident in her nakedness, her clothes lost at Cedar Point? Hadn’t Baby in Pink been buckled in the car to see our grandmother at the cottage, unashamed of her tattoos? It was something she was going to have to live with — forever. Blue ink does not come off plastic easily. There was no choice. This was her look from here on out; these were her battle scars. And if Raggedy Anne took on the alter ego of Annabelle and started on a murderous rampage, who would have been surprised?
As the world went to hell — as half of America was convinced that the presidential election was rigged, and as we struggled to disseminate a vaccine that would slow the pandemic but not stop it — there was a strange comfort that formed in the back of my head, a comfort in knowing that these dolls were still out there, albeit in the basement of our childhood home.
“Which one of these babies, if any, do you want to keep?” was the question.
The answer: “Every last one.”
