Living Doll

by Jane Bradley

  My mother bragged that when I cried as an infant, her raised hand alone could make me stop. I must have been a smart baby to know the sign and consequence of that raised hand. I was rarely whipped — the belt curled in my mother’s purse was enough warning for me. I could feel it lashing at the back of my legs while my mother held my arm, me trying to run as she gripped me and we turned round and round in a circle, my mother at the center turning with me as I tried to run away.

  I can still remember the time she slapped my face so hard I fell off the kitchen stool. I had talked back, had told her I was going to play at Kathy’s house when she had just told me no. “Don’t you ever talk like that to me!” One flicker of will, and a slap that took my breath, sent me to the floor, a time I took the hit, didn’t have a chance to see the hand raised.

  I never knew my daddy, but carried the legal name of my older sister’s daddy. Jack Stone. “Daddy Jack” I called him, but my sister, Ruby, had the high cheekbones, that rich coffee skin of her daddy’s Native American blood. I was fair, with a face like the Little Dutch girl on the can of powdered cleanser. I didn’t look like Ruby in the least, nothing like the daddy they said was mine.

  I didn’t belong to my stepdaddy either. The father of my little sister Sally and my brother, Glenn, he dated my mother when I was a baby. He took me on dates with them, treated me like his own at the start, fed me cups of vanilla ice cream, then later peanuts and popcorn. This was the man I felt was my daddy, the one who taught me numbers, who kept treats for me in the glove compartment of his truck, the one who showed me card tricks, taught me to catch a fish with a cane pole, let me play all I wanted with the carton of worms.

  I had the legal name of one daddy, loved the man who raised me, but never knew my own. Like a doll rolling off the assembly line, no single pair of hands made me. I was adjusted, attended to, made, and sent on. My legal daddy belonged to my sister. He took her places, brought her presents, brought me something once: a big stuffed Yogi Bear when he brought Ruby the Huckleberry Hound. A sudden gesture of equal affection, but it was Ruby he spent the day with. I stood at the window and watched them back out the driveway, Ruby bouncing behind the windows of his shiny blue car. Later I would stare at the huge stuffed Yogi Bear, watch the wide-open friendly plastic brown eyes. I knew a piece was missing. My mother was my mother; I had two daddies, one by name, one by habit, but even then I knew something was wrong. I was fifteen before I learned the name of my blood daddy, the man who came in between.

  I was in my mother’s car once, watching the sky change. I was waiting. She had picked me up at the bus stop, said she wanted to run into a place just for a minute. “You’ve got a snack,” she said. She tossed me the keys and said, “Listen to the radio a little if you want to, but not too long or you’ll run the battery down.” I watched the sky fade from bright blue to gray to purple night when the neon lights flashed on. I saw the letters V.F.W. in red block letters above the blackened glass door. I knew it was a bad place, knew it was where the man I called my daddy went to drink. They went dancing there sometimes and always came back in a fight.

  I watched a small square window behind black bars. I saw a Miller beer sign in gold letters and the blinking red, white and blue colors of a neon can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  I ate the peanut butter cheese crackers she’d bought me and drank the bottle of Coke. My snack became my supper. In the dark I wondered what my sisters ate for dinner, wondered if she called them and told them we’d be late coming home.

  She was still in there. I’d been watching. I saw her tight blue dress go in the black glass door under the V.F.W. sign. I sat, stared at the letters, squinted my eyes together to see the color bleed like red ink spilled across a table. I squinted until the letters melted to a pool of color, then compressed into one thin line. I kept at it as long as I could, until I couldn’t deny my hunger and my need to pee. I tried not to think about it, and I kept my eyes closed.

  I felt the cold hard push there up under my belly and kept telling myself it wouldn’t be much longer, that she had to come out soon. Unless she’d forgotten. But she’d remember, it was a school day. She had picked me up at the bus stop and left me in the car with only crackers and a Coke. Surely she couldn’t forget.

  I turned on the radio, told myself she would be back before the end of five songs, but I’d played this game already, once right after she went in, then two times more. I watched the door for movement. Two men went in, a woman with teased red hair. Five songs. She’d come, she had to; I had to pee and bit my lip to keep from crying, told myself if it got real bad I’d pee outside. But it was dark and I couldn’t see where I’d do it. I was afraid to go behind the building, and I couldn’t do it in the parking lot. Not even a dog would want to pee in a parking lot. Even dogs need a tree, a wall, a clump of grass.

  I turned off the radio, squeezed the car keys in my hand. I wondered if I’d explode if I held it long enough. Ruby had told me it happened sometimes. “Just like a water balloon,” she had said. “If you hold it too long, you’ll explode.”

  I opened the car door, stepped out, and crouched down, the partly open door pressing against my shoulder. I tried to imagine myself pulling down my panties, my butt bared in the night, my pee gushing splashing against my legs and spreading out into a puddle around my shoes. I couldn’t do it. I slipped back in the car, closed the door and cried in little sobs, not tears, just sob sounds tearing at my throat. I looked in the back seat for a cup, a bottle, anything I might pee in. But there was only my Coke bottle, and I’d never get it right. I’d miss, and the pee would splash all over my hands, make a mess all over the car. My mother would smell it, and she’d whip me, tell everybody about the time Shirley peed in the car like a dog. I couldn’t do that. I’d be too ashamed.

  I wondered if somehow my mother had left when I wasn’t looking. Was she sick inside? Had she fallen down dancing? Did someone hit her head and leave her knocked out in a corner on the floor?

  I could see it in the paper: “Girl Explodes in Car. Mother Found Dead.” Everyone would know. Ruby would laugh: “I told you, I told you, I told you. If you hold it long enough, you’ll explode.”

  I got out of the car and walked up to the black glass door. I stood there, counting to twenty, giving her one last chance to come out. I could smell the smoke and beer, hear the twanging of the jukebox, the talking laughing dancing noise. Using both hands, I pushed the door open, stepped inside, and was swallowed by the thick warm air, the darkness and smoke, the white faces that floated like nightmares above my head. The faces turned, froze, stared down at me. A path opened as I walked slowly, looking up, trying to find my mother’s face in the crowd. They were silent and stepped back from me as if I were some spirit that suddenly appeared. I kept moving, watched the walls for a bathroom door. Surely the women had to pee sometime. I wondered why my mother didn’t remember how Coke always made me need to pee.

  Then I saw her. She was sitting on a man’s lap at a table, her dress pulled up, her thighs huge and white, the skin bulging a little over the tight band of her stockings. She frowned, stared at me, then jumped up, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me toward the wall. Her fingers stung my arm. She whispered low and mean, “I told you to wait! I told you I’d be right back, damn you!”

  I couldn’t stop crying. I tried to say it, but they were listening. She shook my shoulders and stared at my face. I saw the wrinkles, straight lines between her eyebrows, thin and hard. She said, “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  I took a breath, tried to say it clearly so she’d understand and stop yelling. “I. Have. To. Go. To — ” She yanked me hard then pushed me through a door.

  Inside there was a black-haired woman smoking a cigarette. Another one was putting on lipstick. They both stared at me. I turned away, keeping my head down as I moved toward the wooden door of the stall. I locked the door and sat on the toilet. Leaning forward, I tried to pee, but it wouldn�
��t come out.

  “What’s that kid doing in here?” one of the women said. Then I heard laughter, and finally the creak of the closing door. I closed my eyes, straining until I could feel the hot release.

  A doll can be put away in a closet. A doll doesn’t need to be fed. It doesn’t cry when the sometimes loyal turn away; it stands there, face blank, a benevolent smile maybe, palms patiently waiting for the next offering whenever, however it may come. A doll has no voice, makes no demands. A doll is a dead thing. It never needs to pee.

  Appetite was Shirley Temple’s only bodily function. Or a thin gloss of sweat maybe to be wiped with her chubby forearm as she paused in a dance routine. Sweat maybe, hunger, a need for sleep, but not once did I see her need to pee. I sat on the couch with chocolate milk and peanut butter crackers and watched Shirley win hearts and break obstacles with her pouting lips, sweet voice and round cheeks. Our Little Girl taught me the reward of a girl’s struggle to keep her parents from divorce. She won, of course, with her luck, faith, and smile. She declared in the end, “Oh it’s the best, the best ever.” She posed her reunited parents for a picture, wouldn’t allow her mother to cry from relief. Shirley shook her finger and said, “You’re not supposed to cry, Mommy. You’re supposed to smile and laugh.” Mommy smiled on cue, and the picture sealed the promise that in Shirley’s world all was well.

  I watched her movies and followed the camera to her panties, clean white cotton panties, her little round butt. Her face always beamed when men lifted her, twirled her, held her, cuddled, kissed, the camera always holding that butt and her soft sweet lips. “Why do we keep seeing her panties?” I asked my mother once. She smiled and kissed my head and said simply, “Because a little girl’s panties are cute.”

  Not to me. I wouldn’t show my panties to no camera, no man, nobody. I kept seeing my mother’s white cotton panties hidden in her daddy’s pocket where in secret, in public, his thumb and finger could reach in the dark folds to fondle and rub.

  At his funeral someone lifted my mother from behind and told her to kiss her daddy goodbye. She did it. She leaned from the waist and stretched to kiss those lips that burned her skin with chemicals that had been pumped in to hold off decay. She kissed, jumped back from the cold stiff feel of him, then ran crying. She said her lips burned and peeled for days.

  I hear my uncle saying, “Don’t that feel good, don’t that feel good?” I can’t speak. I nod as he smiles at me, moistens his fingers in his own mouth, pushes again under the elastic of my panties and wiggles, breathing on me as he probes his way in.

  “Daddy Gene,” my legal daddy’s brother, liked to do it at the kitchen table. He’d sneak under it, slide his finger up my shorts into my panties and wag the finger back and forth slowly in between. He was sneaky when my sisters were around, more bold when he was supposed to be taking care of me. “Y’all go on; I’ll watch Shirley,” he’d say when they went off to the farmers’ market and left me with him alone. He was a policeman. He wore a black leather holster and smelled like the oil of gray metal handcuffs, the slick heavy gun. He let me load it once, let me palm those heavy bullets, roll them, feel the slick solid weight of lead, slide the copper-based, silver-tipped shape of them into the chambers as I sat on his lap at the kitchen table. I felt him breathing, then slid off his legs to get away from the smell of his sweat.

  On one arm he had a tattoo of a girl in a bathing suit, her breasts spilling out across the brown muscle of his arm and on the other arm a heart with my aunt’s name curled at the center: “Sweet Sue.” He had an ashtray he kept by his chair in the living room, a naked woman lying on her back, her ceramic white limbs sprawled long and open. You put the cigarette out in her crotch and smoke would curl up through tiny holes in her breasts. He would demonstrate laughing: “Ain’t that something, now ain’t that something else?”

  He held me, his shoulders bare, muscles and chest damp with sweat under that white tank undershirt cut to show his hair curling, his muscled tattooed arms. “Don’t that feel good,” he’d whisper needing only one hand to hold me, keep me still where he spread me on the table, scooped at me sliding back and forth with his finger, then his tongue, whiskered face rough against my thigh as he lapped at me. “Don’t that feel good?”

  His arm jerked at his open pants, the belt buckle jangling, slapping a metal sound against the rim of the red Formica table. I turned my head, stared at the calendar on the wall, saw the smiling face of the girl in the yellow bathing suit bent over a little, butt round and high from the push of her high-heeled sandals, breasts pushing the limit of the yellow cloth barely held together by a yellow bow. She was smiling for the camera, tiny white teeth, pearly, like the teeth of my baby doll. The table rocked hard against the back of my head, so hard I couldn’t feel him, only smell the sweat of him, the table pressing as my head rocked back and forth with the push of his head. I thought of puppies pushing at the teats of our dog with their paws as they sucked, eyes closed, mouths pink and milky. I thought of puppies as his head moved against me, and I stared at the girl in the bathing suit, red mouth smiling. “Don’t that feel good?” I tried not to feel the table, hard and rocking, metal squealing as it hit the wall and pushed, pushed, pushed into the back of my head.

  I tried to be the girl who beamed “just like Shirley Temple,” the living doll. I tried to force the face of Shirley Temple over my face, the Shirley who sometimes ran screaming in circles, shaking her hands as if burned, the girl who threw up almost daily, the girl who once on the way to Daddy Gene’s house yanked the chrome handle of the car door and tried to throw herself out. No matter how tough the story got, Shirley Temple would never do such a thing as that. It was my sister, Ruby, who grabbed me, pulled me in as my daddy stamped on the brakes. “The door flew open,” I said, big-eyed, staring up at them, while seeing in my head the black asphalt flying under, reaching up, moving like a fast dark river. Suddenly I knew it would have hurt. The road would have cracked my skull wide open, would have burned and torn away my skin.

  Two

  My mother believed in spirits. She taught us that it was a common thing to be possessed by something, a demon, a force, a wandering soul looking for some moist soil, an open wound in someone where it could take root and grow. My mother told me sometimes she thought my daddy was possessed. How else could a man have the strength to rip a dishwasher from the wall, the door twisted, metal hinges bent? He tore it, lifted it, somehow threw it into the backyard. We later played with it, put our Barbie dolls in it, gave them rides on the round plastic-coated glass rack, sending them flying, limbs stiff as they stared ahead into the air, spinning around.

  Possession. That explained things, why sometimes my daddy who flipped pancakes high in the air just to make me laugh, could suddenly in a rage throw a cat flat against the wall or circle the house, yelling, shooting his hunting rifle at the house. Possession. That explained why he’d pull me on his lap and cover my mouth, choke me with a deep wet kiss that took my breath away with the smell of beer, sweat, his cigar, his stubbled face tearing at my cheek. I would walk away wiping the wetness from my mouth with the back of my hand, and put a cool rag to my burning face. I’d walk, silently, down the hall, out the door, in whatever direction seemed safe.

  Possession. That explained why Daddy Gene would sometimes hold me, the hard table rubbing a knot into the back of my head, why he made me nod yes, mouth tight, jaw clenched to his demand, “Don’t that feel good?”

  Possession explained why my mother who taught me about guardian angels could suddenly turn mean. She shined my shoes, curled my hair, starched my dresses so they’d stand out like Shirley Temple’s. She bought me lace panties to match the lace on my soft thin smooth nylon socks. She rocked me, stroked her fingers lightly on my back until I fell asleep. Only possession explained why some nights suddenly she’d pull the covers off of us, yelling, “Get up and find my bottle! Get your asses out of that bed!” I thought it was demons who came and hid
the whiskey for a trick. They took over my mother and made her face twist like that, made her scream, and stand in the kitchen and stare. We looked under cushions, felt the backs of drawers, reached under the sink, or behind the canned soup in the cabinets. We looked everywhere until one of us called, “I found it.” She’d walk hard across the floor, footsteps shaking the walls, grab the bottle, and without a word walk away. We would stand there looking at each other, relieved. Then hearing her quietly make a drink in the kitchen we would crawl back into our bunk beds, turn off the lights, and clutch a few more hours sleep. Possession. Only demons could make the ones who loved me do such things.

  Sunday mornings my mother watched The Oral Roberts Show. I sat next to her, bare feet curled under me as I nestled at her side. With her arm around me, we stared at the black-and-white TV screen and watched the Reverend Oral Roberts grip the victims’ heads between his hands and tearfully pray, squeeze and sway the rocking victim with his tight hands. Sometimes I thought he would twist their heads off, and the demon would suddenly leap out in a cloud of smoke. I waited to see the devils let loose on TV, but it never happened. The victims were young, old, men, and women. Some throwing off crutches, rising and running out of wheelchairs, would be healed. The possessed babbled, screamed, shook, and foamed at the mouth, spitting strings of spit. They were spitting demons out, my mother told me, but it only looked like strings of spit to me. The TV doesn’t show it right, she said, and I believed her. I believed when suddenly the victims stopped fighting and tearfully hugged Oral Roberts, thanking Jesus for setting them free.

  My mother also believed that some people were blessed. Sometimes she said I was a cursed child, and other times she said I was the greatest blessing she ever had. She held me in her arms, saying I was a gift from God and that at any instant he could snatch me away. She said I was a “sickly” child and had to be careful, that I was open to infections, damaged, fragile, weak. My bad health was her warning, like the screaming voice of my grandmother: “One day you’ll learn to appreciate things!” My mother would hold my head between her hands and pray with Oral Roberts. Once she made me put my hand on the TV screen against the image of Oral Roberts’ healing hand held up to the camera. I knelt before the TV to let his blessing cross through the humming black and white dots on the cold glass surface of the screen.