The Doll’s Alphabet

by Camilla Grudova

  Baron was able to recover: a photograph of himself as a boy dressed as a peasant, a glass bottle of witch-hazel, a Vienna bronze bear whose stomach contained a compartment holding digestive tablets he had bought in preparation for the gastric novelties of European restaurants, and an extremely delicate and realistic cupid made out of colored beeswax in a glass, coffin-shaped box. He returned home with each remaining possession taped to his chest underneath his fur coat, and never left again.

  THE MOTH EMPORIUM

  It had been five years since I went into the costume shop. It was only a few blocks away from my mother’s house, but I always hurried my pace when I walked by it. It was in a converted Victorian house, the exterior was painted gold, turquoise, and black, like a cartoon version of an Egyptian tomb. In the window, between two sides of a thick purple curtain, a mannequin wearing an eighteenth-century wig with devil horns, gold snake-shaped jewelry and a black lacy dress held a sign that said

  COSTUMES, VINTAGE AND UNIQUE FINDS

  The shop was surrounded by a fence of dismembered mannequin limbs painted blue. They were female limbs, slim, ideal ones so unlike my own that to see them, even out of the corner of my eye, made me self-conscious. If the weather was nice, there were clothes outside, racks of coats and dresses, colorful bins of scarves, and rows of cowboy boots, as if the owners had been forced to take them off before entering, never to return. The upmost window, belonging to the attic, was covered with a poster of a grinning turn-of-the-century moon.

  The shop was both tempting and sickening, like a gingerbread house. It was owned by a horrible couple—two immense Germans with blonde hair. They looked like they ate a lot of sausages. Their faces, their hands, seemed larger than most. The man dressed in black Oxford shirts, black jeans, and black leather vests—he could’ve been mistaken for a pastor, if you squinted and did not notice his black snakeskin boots and the sinister rings which covered his knuckles like gold and silver warts. He resembled, if such a thing existed, a male witch. The woman wore lots of leather, and black stockings with complex patterns on them. Her make-up was always blue, beige, red, and around her wide waist was a belt made out of bullets.

  I had only been inside once. My younger sister had wanted a mask. I was seventeen and she was fifteen at the time. We never went to costume shops because our mother made most of our costumes, skeletons, moons, witches, ladybirds. But a mask was beyond our mother’s skill—the papier-mâché one she had made, using water and flour, hadn’t dried properly and became mildewed. My sister and I both had dark brown hair like our mother. My sister had acne scars, but she was so pretty, it looked like decoration on her face. If anyone needed a mask, it was me. My face looked like that of a very thin elephant, large ears and nose, small eyes. I hated wearing costumes, I hadn’t done so since I was eight: I believed I was so ugly, I couldn’t disguise myself as anything else. The shop smelled like nag champa, mothballs, and face make-up. There were wings, white, red, black, pink, made out of chicken feathers, plastic noses, piles of Russian navy shirts and knitwear from northern countries, gowns, boas, leather jackets, top hats, frills, ribbons, shoes, corsets, such variety of segments, pieces, slices, scraps, strips, it was hard not to think of a butcher’s shop.

  There were crinolines, like multi-colored clouds seemingly floating across the ceiling of the shop, but which in fact dangled off hooks. There was no one in the shop when we went in, only a plaster Elvis bust on the countertop, a female mannequin with a beehive wig, and a male mannequin in a giant gold birdcage wearing a green-feathered outfit.

  At the back of the shop was the wall of masks, wood, rubber, leather, Venetian, Mexican, Indonesian. The rubber ones were the most frightening because they were misshapen without heads wearing them, like flayed skin. I thought I saw the eyes of a mask move, but the floorboards of the shop were so uneven, the wares so overwhelming, it must have been a trick. My sister went towards them, and grabbed a grey wolf mask made out of wood, holding it against her face, and howling.

  I looked at the crinolines. There was one that was grey, like a pouf of smoke escaped from a train in which one could disappear. With my sister’s encouragement I pulled it down and went into a changing room while she went to look at the masks. I put the crinoline over my clothes, but it looked messy—like I was a doll covered in cobwebs pulled out of an attic—so I took off everything I was wearing, even my bra, my stockings, and underwear. I put the crinoline back on, and looked at myself, unexpectedly entranced in the changing room mirror. We didn’t have a full-length mirror at home—you had to stand on the toilet to look at yourself in the small round mirror above the sink.

  Behind me, there was no longer a curtain, but a glaring, toad-like face and a black, religious-looking hat. I turned around, covering my breasts with my hands. He closed the curtain again.

  I hurriedly put my clothes back on and stepped out, leaving the crinoline in the changing room. He was waiting there, his arms crossed. He pointed to a sign which read

  PLEASE ASK BEFORE USING THE CHANGING ROOMS

  My sister, watching us, dropped the mask. It broke into three pieces.

  The woman appeared out of nowhere, screaming at her that the mask cost three hundred dollars and we would have to pay for it. My sister ran past her, and grabbed my wrists. We ran out together.

  They didn’t follow us out—I don’t know why, perhaps there was a law against chasing children. They must have been watching us on a security camera, said my sister. We laughed, and laughed, out of fear.

  After that, whenever we broke something around the house my sister would scream in a fake German accent. It had become funny to us, but still—we never went back inside the shop, and avoided walking past it.

  When I returned, those years later, the costume shop looked gloomier than I remembered it, the clothes on the racks appropriate for scarecrows, the colorful paint flaking, the moon poster covering the attic window wrinkled like a grape. There was a sign that said

  2 FOR 1 CASHMERE

  —that was what drew me in. They surely wouldn’t remember me, I was almost twenty-two.

  I had gone away to university, while my sister had stayed home. She chose the same art college our mother went to, only fifteen minutes away by bicycle. I went to a small university in a small town, with nice old stone buildings and very cold weather—it was on a lake and one felt the cold lake wind even in the library. I studied Scandinavian literature, so the setting suited me. I never had the money to go on an exchange to anywhere in Scandinavia, or even visit. My specialization was Danish literature, I could read very well, and write, in Danish. I wasn’t Danish myself, but I had learned about Denmark as a child through blue tins of butter biscuits, and Hans Christian Andersen. I was writing a novel in Danish. One of the characters was a beautiful door knob who moved through various houses and apartments, that’s all I’ll say. I received a rejection letter from a Danish literary magazine, for a short story. They had written back to me in Danish though I didn’t have a Danish name, which I was proud of.

  After graduating I had nowhere to go but home. I hadn’t found a job yet, though my sister worked part-time in a shop selling tea and crystals. She painted very small pictures of foxes, bears and other woodland creatures having tea parties among the trees; if you looked closely you could see the contents of the teacups were red, and if you looked even closer, you could see a little girl’s shoe or ribbon somewhere in the painting, hiding in the grass or hanging from a branch. Our mother was an artist too: she taught art at a Russian private school. Under her instruction they mostly painted pictures of horses and copied Andrei Rublev icons.

  Since I was thirteen I had always worn the same outfit: drab brown skirts and black sweaters from the Salvation Army. I wanted to think about clothes very little, and be noticed as little as possible. In the shop again, I chose two black jumpers, but didn’t try them on: one seemed very large, the other small, but I didn’t care. To my relief, there was a pale and sour-looking young man with a blue Mohawk behin
d the counter instead of the Germans. He wore a pinstripe suit with a waistcoat and a spiky dog collar. He rang my sweaters through without looking at me and put them in a bright yellow and red bag which I stuffed in my purse as soon as I was outside, standing on the steps. I didn’t like colors, and I didn’t want my sister to know where I had been.

  He was there, the German owner, crouching—he was repainting one of the legs, with a tiny bucket of blue. He stood up when he saw me, so suddenly that I jumped, and asked if I wanted a job. His name was Wolf.

  I thought that he wanted me to work to pay for the mask my sister had broken, but he didn’t seem to remember who I was. Instead he told me he paid above minimum wage, that it wasn’t a difficult job, that he really needed help, it was only him and the young man, Raven, inside. He didn’t ask whether I took an interest in fashion (I didn’t) or knew how to sew or use a till. I said yes, to the job, I didn’t have any other opportunities, besides my Danish novel, but I wouldn’t have if it didn’t seem like the German woman was gone. I looked up at the store, at its windows, for her face. There was only the moon, like a death mask.

  It was easiest to sell the clothes that were second-hand as people couldn’t ask for different sizes and we didn’t bear much responsibility for the personality of the clothes, how they were made and looked. They were simply passing through us, as if we were a train or a steamship. Wolf washed and patched them up but made no drastic changes. Also easy were the cheap costumes that came in plastic packages: Frankenstein’s monster, witches, nurses, they couldn’t be returned if opened. The imitation eighteenth-century garments made me nervous, they were soft and difficult contraptions, heavy as bodies themselves. There were drawers full of buttons shaped like moons and Alice in Wonderland characters, and drawers full of ties, cufflinks, and garter belts. The countertops were glass, and filled with rings, brooches, and necklaces. Earrings hung from a string above the counter like tiny clothes on a laundry line. Behind the counter, Wolf kept a bottle of castor oil in case anyone tried on a ring too small—the oil helped slide it off.

  I brought a notebook with me to the shop and made lists of clothes to use in my Danish novel: braided military coats, plastic Viking hats, neckties, striped stockings, white ruffs, long blue dresses.

  There was an old computer underneath the counter that played songs in a continual loop: April Stevens, Patsy Cline, the Beach Boys, “The Monster Mash,” the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, Dion and the Belmonts, and other music typical for a costume shop. I longed for Schubert, Schumann, and string quartets by Tchaikovsky. I played them on my music player when no one else was there, hooking it up to the speakers.

  Backstage, there was an elaborate amount of traps and poison to keep vermin away, moths, rats, and mice. The costume shop was between a Chinese shop selling eggs and tofu and a natural foods bakery, so there were always rats around. We burned nag champa to cover the smell of mothballs. I hated disposing of used rodent traps. We also sold oversized rat and mice costumes—ears, long rubber tails.

  I hated the fur coats, which hung like giants’ beards, and the saucy people who came in and bought them, men with moustaches and female models who looked like long, bony fingers, or insects.

  I sometimes dreamt that I put one of the coats on and Isak Dinesen mistook me for a lion and chased me around the shop, trying to shoot me.

  I watched Wolf closely. His face reminded me of a bust of Beethoven I had seen at university. He wore the following rings: one of the glass eyeball rings that were popular sellers in the shop, a silver ring shaped like an eagle, a gold ring with a hunk of amber, another gold one with a tiny circle of ruby, and another silver ring shaped like a wolf’s head. He was very tall, with a large belly. He wore the same things every day, like me, his uniform of black trousers, a black vest, and a white shirt. The only thing that changed was his hat, but each was made out of black felt, as if it was the same hat shapeshifting according to his mood. A black bowler, a black tyrolean hat with a black feather on its brim, a capello like a Catholic clergyman. The rare times he wasn’t wearing a hat, his hair was white, and combed in an old-fashioned manner with oil I imagined was popular when he was a boy. On his vest he often wore a gold brooch in the shape of an elephant’s head.

  There was something creaky about him, I wondered if he had a wooden leg, a glass eyeball, a piece of metal somewhere inside his body holding things together, a fake tooth, an organ that once belonged to someone else.

  Raven wasn’t happy I was given the job. He had been working there since before Eule—that was her name—died, and was made full-time when she became ill. He told me when Wolf wasn’t there. Raven was older than I originally thought. He was like an antique porcelain figurine of a child with cracks in it. He talked about Eule with admiration, a lot, about how she threw wild costume parties, had interesting tattoos all over her body. He talked about her so much that I had a dream I found a mask of her face at the back of the shop. It screamed at me with its big red mouth, and I threw it against the wall. It broke into pieces, but still screamed, the bits of mouth splitting into their own voices, a choir of screechy German.

  Wolf was going for periods of time, from days to a few weeks, leaving Raven and me to run the shop. He was buying things around the world to sell in the shop from milliners in Switzerland, jewelry-makers in Morocco, mask-makers in southern Germany. That’s why the shop wasn’t like anywhere else, though he wasn’t above plastic stuff made in China—we sold that too. Wolf left and returned wearing a great, long overcoat, and carrying a shabby-looking olive military knapsack. He was followed a few weeks later by crates and boxes.

  I made a lot of mistakes. I rolled an expensive Edwardian dress into a messy ball and stuffed it into a plastic shopping bag. I also put a top hat awkwardly into a bag though there were special hat boxes for them to be carried in. I spilled a box of fake pearls which rolled into the wide cracks of the floorboards and had to be cleaned up with a vacuum. Wolf split the vacuum bag with a knife like an animal’s belly and emptied the pearls into a jar, but didn’t give me a harsh word, let alone fire me.

  He never yelled, and he was never angry. When I told him I studied Danish and planned on being a Danish novelist he laughed at me, not in a cruel way, and told me he would help me to learn German too, it wouldn’t be so hard if I already knew Danish.

  He lived above the shop alone, on the top three floors. He sometimes invited me upstairs, before and after work, for black coffee and black bread, or apple pancakes. His apartment looked like a continuation of the shop, mannequin heads, boxes full of wigs and shoes, great piles of fashion books—the kind of books that seemed like useless, colossal monsters in comparison to the ones I loved. The walls were covered in pictures, probably cut out from magazines, and even books. He had Sid Vicious, Pee-wee Herman, David Bowie, Siouxsie Sioux, Elvis, Marc Bolan, Twiggy, Andy Warhol—people like that, whose height of fame and sometimes death happened before I was born, but not too far in the past to interest me. There was also a large poster of Betty Boop, posters for the films Pink Flamingos, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Dracula, and a cartoonish painting of a sausage with a smiling face. One wall was covered in halves of doll faces. The ones with eyelids batted their eyelashes when you walked by, as the floor was so creaky.

  The kitchen was filthy, the cupboards and stove were covered in grease the color of earwigs, but one hardly noticed at first because of all the interesting stuff: a bowl full of plastic fruit with faces—the apple had buckteeth, the banana leopard spots and fangs; a Felix the Cat teapot; Frida Kahlo, pin-up girls, and cartoon animal fridge magnets; the colorful cans of fish soup I expected would never be opened, they had rust along their rims. The bottom half of the kitchen window was obscured by enormous glass jars full of pickles with bits of garlic and dill dancing around inside. On the table was a wooden incense smoker shaped like a shepherd with a long beard, holding a pipe, and a nutcracker wearing a hussar coat.

  It happened on a slow day in the shop. It was raining
outside and I had to rush to take everything in, the racks and shoes now crowding the front of the shop made it hard to navigate. I grabbed one of the braided military jackets, royal blue with gold, and slipped into a changing room. In that moment I imagined wearing it in my Danish author photo, like some sort of Hamlet. As I had years before, I took off almost everything before putting on the coat, and like years before, he appeared out of nowhere, opening the curtain. Instead of screaming, I turned around, and grabbing him by the shirt, pulled him in with me.