The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  “Jennifer,” my mother said. “That’s enough of that.”

  I decided to buy Barbie a present. I was at that strange point where I would have done anything for her. I took two buses and walked more than a mile to get to Toys R Us.

  Barbie row was aisle 14C. I was a wreck. I imagined a million Barbies and having to have them all. I pictured fucking one, discarding it, immediately grabbing a fresh one, doing it, and then throwing it onto a growing pile in the corner of my room. An unending chore. I saw myself becoming a slave to Barbie. I wondered how many Tropical Barbies were made each year. I felt faint.

  There were rows and rows of Kens, Barbies, and Skippers. Funtime Barbie, Jewel Secrets Ken, Barbie Rocker with “Hot Rockin’ Fun and Real Dancin’ Action.” I noticed Magic Moves Barbie, and found myself looking at her carefully, flirtatiously, wondering if her legs were spreadable. “Push the switch and she moves,” her box said. She winked at me while I was reading.

  The only Tropical I saw was a black Tropical Ken. From just looking at him you wouldn’t have known he was black. I mean, he wasn’t black like anyone would be black. Black Tropical Ken was the color of a raisin, a raisin all spread out and unwrinkled. He had a short afro that looked like a wig had been dropped down and fixed on his head, a protective helmet. I wondered if black Ken was really white Ken sprayed over with a thick coating of ironed raisin plastic.

  I spread eight black Kens out in a line across the front of a row. Through the plastic window of his box he told me he was hoping to go to dental school. All eight black Kens talked at once. Luckily, they all said the same thing at the same time. They said he really liked teeth. Black Ken smiled. He had the same white Pearl Drops, Pepsodent, Osmond family teeth that Barbie and white Ken had. I thought the entire Mattel family must take really good care of themselves. I figured they might be the only people left in America who actually brushed after every meal and then again before going to sleep.

  I didn’t know what to get Barbie. Black Ken said I should go for clothing, maybe a fur coat. I wanted something really special. I imagined a wonderful present that would draw us somehow closer.

  There was a tropical pool and patio set, but I decided it might make her homesick. There was a complete winter holiday, with an A-frame house, fireplace, snowmobile, and sled. I imagined her inviting Ken away for a weekend without me. The six o’clock news set was nice, but because of her squeak, Barbie’s future as an anchorwoman seemed limited. A workout center, a sofa bed and coffee table, a bubbling spa, a bedroom play set. I settled on the grand piano. It was $13.00. I’d always made it a point to never spend more than ten dollars on anyone. This time I figured, what the hell, you don’t buy a grand piano every day.

  “Wrap it up, would ya,” I said at the checkout desk.

  From my bedroom window I could see Jennifer in the backyard, wearing her tutu and leaping all over the place. It was dangerous as hell to sneak in and get Barbie, but I couldn’t keep a grand piano in my closet without telling someone.

  “You must really like me,” Barbie said when she finally had the piano unwrapped.

  I nodded. She was wearing a ski suit and skis. It was the end of August and eighty degrees out. Immediately, she sat down and played “Chopsticks.”

  I looked out at Jennifer. She was running down the length of the deck, jumping onto the railing and then leaping off, posing like one of those red flying horses you see on old Mobil gas signs. I watched her do it once and then the second time, her foot caught on the railing, and she went over the edge the hard way. A minute later she came around the edge of the house, limping, her tutu dented and dirty, pink tights ripped at both knees. I grabbed Barbie from the piano bench and raced her into Jennifer’s room.

  “I was just getting warmed up,” she said. “I can play better than that, really.”

  I could hear Jennifer crying as she walked up the stairs.

  “Jennifer’s coming.” I said. I put her down on the dresser and realized Ken was missing.

  “Where’s Ken?” I asked quickly.

  “Out with Jennifer,” Barbie said.

  I met Jennifer at her door. “Are you okay?” I asked. She cried harder. “I saw you fall.”

  “Why didn’t you stop me?” she said.

  “From falling?”

  She nodded and showed me her knees.

  “Once you start to fall no one can stop you.” I noticed Ken was tucked into the waistband of her tutu.

  “They catch you,” Jennifer said.

  I started to tell her it was dangerous to go leaping around with a Ken stuck in your waistband, but you don’t tell someone who’s already crying that they did something bad.

  I walked her into the bathroom, and took out the hydrogen peroxide. I was a first aid expert. I was the kind of guy who walked around, waiting for someone to have a heart attack just so I could practice my CPR technique.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  Jennifer sat down on the toilet without putting the lid down. Ken was stabbing her all over the place and instead of pulling him out, she squirmed around trying to get comfortable like she didn’t know what else to do. I took him out for her. She watched as though I was performing surgery or something.

  “He’s mine,” she said.

  “Take off your tights,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “They’re ruined,” I said. “Take them off.”

  Jennifer took off her ballet slippers and peeled off her tights. She was wearing my old Underoos with superheroes on them, Spiderman and Superman and Batman all poking out from under a dirty dented tutu. I decided not to say anything, but it looked funny as hell to see a flat crotch in boys’ underwear. I had the feeling they didn’t bother making underwear for Ken because they knew it looked too weird on him.

  I poured peroxide onto her bloody knees. Jennifer screamed into my ear. She bent down and examined herself, poking her purple fingers into the torn skin; her tutu bunched up and rubbed against her face, scraping it. I worked on her knees, removing little pebbles and pieces of grass from the area.

  She started crying again.

  “You’re okay,” I said. “You’re not dying.” She didn’t care. “Do you want anything?” I asked, trying to be nice.

  “Barbie,” she said.

  It was the first time I’d handled Barbie in public. I picked her up like she was a complete stranger and handed her to Jennifer, who grabbed her by the hair. I started to tell her to ease up, but couldn’t. Barbie looked at me and I shrugged. I went downstairs and made Jennifer one of my special Diet Cokes.

  “Drink this,” I said, handing it to her. She took four giant gulps and immediately I felt guilty about having used a whole Valium.

  “Why don’t you give a little to your Barbie,” I said. “I’m sure she’s thirsty too.”

  Barbie winked at me and I could have killed her, first off for doing it in front of Jennifer, and second because she didn’t know what the hell she was winking about.

  I went into my room and put the piano away. I figured as long as I kept it in the original box I’d be safe. If anyone found it, I’d say it was a present for Jennifer.

  Wednesday Ken and Barbie had their heads switched. I went to get Barbie, and there on top of the dresser were Barbie and Ken, sort of Barbie’s head was on Ken’s body and Ken’s head was on Barbie. At first I thought it was just me.

  “Hi,” Barbie’s head said.

  I couldn’t respond. She was on Ken’s body and I was looking at Ken in a whole new way.

  I picked up the Barbie head Ken and immediately Barbie’s head rolled off. It rolled across the dresser, across the white doily past Jennifer’s collection of miniature ceramic cats, and boom it fell to the floor. I saw Barbie’s head rolling and about to fall, and then falling, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was frozen, paralyzed with Ken’s headless body in my left hand.

  Barbie’s head was on the floor, her hair spread out underneath it like angel wings in the snow, and I expe
cted to see blood, a wide rich pool of blood, or at least a little bit coming out of her ear, her nose, or her mouth. I looked at her head on the floor and saw nothing but Barbie with eyes like the cosmos looking up at me. I thought she was dead.

  “Christ, that hurt,” she said. “And I already had a headache from these earrings.”

  There were little red dot/ball earrings jutting out of Barbie’s ears.

  “They go right through my head, you know. I guess it takes getting used to,” Barbie said.

  I noticed my mother’s pin cushion on the dresser next to the other Barbie/Ken, the Barbie body, Ken head. The pin cushion was filled with hundreds of pins, pins with flat silver ends and pins with red, yellow, and blue dot/ball ends.

  “You have pins in your head,” I said to the Barbie head on the floor.

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  I was starting to hate her. I was being perfectly clear and she didn’t understand me.

  I looked at Ken. He was in my left hand, my fist wrapped around his waist. I looked at him and realized my thumb was on his bump. My thumb was pressed against Ken’s crotch and as soon as I noticed I got an automatic hard-on, the kind you don’t know you’re getting, it’s just there. I started rubbing Ken’s bump and watching my thumb like it was a large-screen projection of a porno movie.

  “What are you doing?” Barbie’s head said. “Get me up. Help me.” I was rubbing Ken’s bump/hump with my finger inside his bathing suit. I was standing in the middle of my sister’s room, with my pants pulled down.

  “Aren’t you going to help me?” Barbie kept asking. “Aren’t you going to help me?”

  In the second before I came, I held Ken’s head hole in front of me. I held Ken upside down above my dick and came inside of Ken like I never could in Barbie.

  I came into Ken’s body and as soon as I was done I wanted to do it again. I wanted to fill Ken and put his head back on, like a perfume bottle. I wanted Ken to be the vessel for my secret supply. I came in Ken and then I remembered he wasn’t mine. He didn’t belong to me. I took him into the bathroom and soaked him in warm water and Ivory liquid. I brushed his insides with Jennifer’s toothbrush and left him alone in a cold-water rinse.

  “Aren’t you going to help me, aren’t you?” Barbie kept asking.

  I started thinking she’d been brain damaged by the accident. I picked her head up from the floor.

  “What took you so long?” she asked.

  “I had to take care of Ken.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’ll be fine. He’s soaking in the bathroom.” I held Barbie’s head in my hand.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  Did my little incident, my moment with Ken, mean that right then and there some decision about my future life as queerbait had to be made?”

  “This afternoon. Where are we going? What are we doing? I miss you when I don’t see you,” Barbie said.

  “You see me every day,” I said.

  “I don’t really see you. I sit on top of the dresser and if you pass by, I see you. Take me to your room.”

  “I have to bring Ken’s body back.”

  I went into the bathroom, rinsed out Ken, blew him dry with my mother’s blow dryer, then played with him again. It was a boy thing, we were boys together. I thought sometime I might play ball with him, I might take him out instead of Barbie.

  “Everything takes you so long,” Barbie said when I got back into the room.

  I put Ken back up on the dresser, picked up Barbie’s body, knocked Ken’s head off, and smashed Barbie’s head back down on her own damn neck.

  “I don’t want to fight with you,” Barbie said as I carried her into my room. “We don’t have enough time together to fight. Fuck me,” she said.

  I didn’t feel like it. I was thinking about fucking Ken and Ken being a boy. I was thinking about Barbie and Barbie being a girl. I was thinking about Jennifer, switching Barbie and Ken’s heads, chewing Barbie’s feet off, hanging Barbie from the ceiling fan, and who knows what else.

  “Fuck me,” Barbie said again.

  I ripped Barbie’s clothing off. Between Barbie’s legs Jennifer had drawn pubic hair in reverse. She’d drawn it upside down so it looked like a fountain spewing up and out in great wide arcs. I spit directly onto Barbie and with my thumb and first finger rubbed the ink lines, erasing them. Barbie moaned.

  “Why do you let her do this to you?”

  “Jennifer owns me,” Barbie moaned.

  Jennifer owns me, she said, so easily and with pleasure. I was totally jealous. Jennifer owned Barbie and it made me crazy. Obviously it was one of those relationships that could only exist between women. Jennifer could own her because it didn’t matter that Jennifer owned her. Jennifer didn’t want Barbie, she had her.

  “You’re perfect,” I said.

  “I’m getting fat,” Barbie said.

  Barbie was crawling all over me, and I wondered if Jennifer knew she was a nymphomaniac. I wondered if Jennifer knew what a nymphomaniac was.

  “You don’t belong with little girls,” I said.

  Barbie ignored me.

  There were scratches on Barbie’s chest and stomach. She didn’t say anything about them and so at first I pretended not to notice. As I was touching her, I could feel they were deep, like slices. The edges were rough; my finger caught on them and I couldn’t help but wonder.

  “Jennifer?” I said, massaging the cuts with my tongue, as though my tongue, like sandpaper, would erase them. Barbie nodded.

  In fact, I thought of using sandpaper, but didn’t know how I would explain it to Barbie: you have to lie still and let me rub it really hard with this stuff that’s like terrycloth dipped in cement. I thought she might even like it if I made it into an S&M kind of thing and handcuffed her first.

  I ran my tongue back and forth over the slivers, back and forth over the words “copyright 1966 Mattel Inc., Malaysia” tattooed on her back. Tonguing the tattoo drove Barbie crazy. She said it had something to do with scar tissue being extremely sensitive.

  Barbie pushed herself hard against me, I could feel her slices rubbing my skin. I was thinking that Jennifer might kill Barbie. Without meaning to she might just go over the line and I wondered if Barbie would know what was happening or if she’d try to stop her.

  We fucked, that’s what I called it, fucking. In the beginning Barbie said she hated the word, which made me like it even more. She hated it because it was so strong and hard, and she said we weren’t fucking, we were making love. I told her she had to be kidding.

  “Fuck me,” she said that afternoon and I knew the end was coming soon. “Fuck me,” she said. I didn’t like the sound of the word.

  Friday when I went into Jennifer’s room, there was something in the air. The place smelled like a science lab, a fire, a failed experiment.

  Barbie was wearing, a strapless yellow evening dress. Her hair was wrapped into a high bun, more like a wedding cake than something Betty Crocker would whip up. There seemed to be layers and layers of angel’s hair spinning in a circle above her head. She had yellow pins through her ears and gold fuck-me shoes that matched the belt around her waist. For a second I thought of the belt and imagined tying her up, but more than restraining her arms or legs, I thought of wrapping the belt around her face, tying it across her mouth.

  I looked at Barbie and saw something dark and thick like a scar rising up and over the edge of her dress. I grabbed her and pulled the front of the dress down.

  “Hey, big boy,” Barbie said. “Don’t I even get a hello?”

  Barbie’s breasts had been sawed at with a knife. There were a hundred marks from a blade that might have had five rows of teeth like shark jaws. And as if that wasn’t enough, she’d been dissolved by fire, blue and yellow flames had been pressed against her and held there until she melted and eventually became the fire that burned herself. All of it had been somehow stirred with the lead
of a pencil, the point of a pen, and left to cool. Molten Barbie flesh had been left to harden, black and pink plastic swirled together, in the crater Jennifer had dug out of her breasts.

  I examined her in detail like a scientist, a pathologist, a fucking medical examiner. I studied the burns, the gouged-out area, as if by looking closely I’d find something, an explanation, a way out.

  A disgusting taste came up into my mouth, like I’d been sucking on batteries. It came up, then sank back down into my stomach, leaving my mouth puckered with the bitter metallic flavor of sour saliva. I coughed and spit onto my shirt sleeve, then rolled the sleeve over to cover the wet spot.

  With my index finger I touched the edge of the burn as lightly as I could. The round rim of her scar broke off under my finger. I almost dropped her.

  “It’s just a reduction,” Barbie said. “Jennifer and I are even now.”

  Barbie was smiling. She had the same expression on her face as when I first saw her and fell in love. She had the same expression she always had and I couldn’t stand it. She was smiling, and she was burned. She was smiling, and she was ruined. I pulled her dress back up, above the scarline. I put her down carefully on the doily on top of the dresser and started to walk away.

  “Hey,” Barbie said, “aren’t we going to play?”

  Yours Truly

  A. M. Homes

  A. M. Homes (b. 1961) is an American writer, known for her controversial novels and unusual stories. She released her first collection of short stories, The Safety of Objects, in 1990. In 2013 she won the Women’s Prize for Fiction with her novel May We Be Forgiven.

  I’m hiding in the linen closet writing letters to myself. This is the place where no one knows I am, where I can think without thinking about what anyone else would think or at least it’s quiet. I don’t want to scare anyone, but things can’t go on like this.

  Until today I could still go into the living room and talk to my mother’s Saturday morning Fat Club. I could say, “Hi, how are you. That’s a very nice dress. Magenta’s such a good color, it hides the hips. Nice shoes too. I would never have thought of bringing pink and green together like that.” I could pretend to be okay, but that’s part of the problem.