Living Doll

by Jane Bradley

  But a living doll chokes on water and dies if held under long enough. She struggles up for air, her belly, mouth, nose too full, too tight to smile. She fights back; crying, flailing against water, air, someone’s muscled hands, eyes staring up at the overhead light. She cannot be pulled up, out of water, made clean, and revived.

  My mother’s hands once pushed me under water, and I went numb, looked up wide-eyed through the water, felt heavy and weighted by the dense liquid cloud above. I saw her white round face, her blue eyes dead while she seemed to be looking only at the water’s surface. She couldn’t see my face. I looked up at her dead eyes, felt the digging grip of her palms against my chest bones, her fingers, long pink fingernails digging into my shoulders holding me down. A doll-girl, I didn’t fight, just wondered why this was happening. She was my mother and must have known about the danger underwater, must have known somehow that I was a doll, but still I was alive. My chest hurt; I shook my head, tried to get her attention, let her know I was underwater and if she didn’t let me up soon I’d drown. I squirmed, but she only squeezed my shoulders harder. It hurt, and I didn’t want my mother to hurt me, so I tried to lie still.

  And then it hit. Possession. She was not my mother, but a demon. It had to be. My mother was possessed. I tried to call her back to the living world. I shook my head and squirmed. I tried to pull her from this spell, tried to scream: “Momma, it’s me.”

  Finally over her shoulder I saw the darker shape of my daddy moving the way a mountain looms larger and clearer over the horizon as you drive. Suddenly she rolled, fell, was torn from me, and I rose up through the gray waves to the humid air. He grabbed her, pulled her up toward the rocky shoreline, and swung, her head rolling, snapping back with each smack of his fist. I watched and wondered whether her head would come off the way I’d torn heads loose from my dolls. I walked slowly up the shoreline, watching some strangers pull them apart. I heard screaming from a long distance. Then finally it was night, and somehow I was home.

  “Look,” Momma said when my daddy kicked the bedroom door in. With a snap of metal, a crack of wood, we looked in to see her standing by the bed, shaking the ice in her drink, and holding a chip of plaster in her hand. “Look what I did.” Then she turned back to the wall and loosened another chip of blue-painted plaster with her fingernail, pulled it loose, and widened the gray space of sheet-rock underneath the paint. She laughed and said again, “Look what I did.” I stood looking at the bed and floor covered in plaster chips. The once-painted blue walls scarred, patches and trails of gray sheetrock gouged as if a monster had tried to claw its way out. My mother grinned and sipped her drink.

  “You goddamned bitch,” Daddy said, and walked away.

  For once she had scared him. I thought he’d bolt across the room, and bang her head against the wall until she fell down dead. But the sight of her grinning, tearing at the wall, and calmly shaking the ice in her drink made him turn away. The truck started outside, and I heard him go. We walked in, drawn to her laughing, peeling at the wall like a devilish kid.

  “Try it,” she said. And it was easy. We used fingernail files, scissors, and combs from her dresser. Ruby stood on the bed to reach the high spots. Sally, Glenn, and I crouched on the floor to peel a wide gray river around the room, little streams branching off, a big gray river pushing forward and up to empty into Momma’s ragged, chipped sea. We sensed the sun rising at the window, knowing that it was another day when we wouldn’t have to go to school. My mother smelled like whiskey and sweat. Her fingers bled and her hands shook. I could see her cheeks sagging, puffy and pale, her lips fixed in that grin as she stared at the wall chipping away. I wouldn’t go near her, but I worked at that wall just the way I dried dishes, folded clothes, swept the floor. This was another job, and I knew she would scream, smack, whip me with a belt if I dared say no. So we stood, sat on the floor, or leaned on the bed and kept peeling, knowing that once we had walked in the room there was no getting out until she decided to let us go.

  Finally I stood, stepped back, and Momma glared. I smiled, waved my hand toward the wall, and said proudly, “It looks like a map of the world.” Then I told all of them how the unchipped blue spaces could be hunks of land, showed them the little finger of Florida reaching down into the gray sheetrock sea. I pointed out what could be South America, Hawaii, Africa, Australia, and Japan. I had studied the map of the world in my school books and had tried to imagine what was going on in a single moment all over the earth: Crocodiles sunning on the river banks in Kenya, Eskimos running dogsleds across snowy fields, tigers hunting Indian villagers, monkeys swinging in South American trees. I looked at the torn walls of the room and tried to see all the possibilities in the world. I was tired and thirsty, my fingers sore. But I waited for my mother to let us leave.

  Momma liked to write on walls: phone numbers, messages, grocery lists, doodled hearts and circles, always curving flowering shapes winding around. The kitchen wall was yellow-painted paneling, thick with the grime of grease and smoke farther up toward a ceiling that darkened each year like a storm slowly moving in. But down by the counter was a history of messages, phone numbers without names, drawings, peace signs, dark-lined cat eyes, stick men and women, cats, bunny rabbits, boats, clouds, and suns. Everyone who used the phone had left a mark there. Like the walls of a public toilet, anyone could write anything that came to mind.

  Our walls could tell you stories: the smack of plaster cracking, the crash of dishes, pots, bottles, a cat, a head, a shoulder, a fist. Anything gravity didn’t lock in place could wind up smashed against the wall. There were bullet holes in most rooms, the smattering of buckshot scars on the dining room wall, a place in the living room behind a door where my mother shot a .22 and made a hole just large enough for me to stick my little finger through and feel the dark cool space behind. I could hide things there, tiny rolled-up messages, crumbs of bread, and the loose pills I’d found that had rolled across the floor from Momma’s stash of drugs.

  I hid things in the walls. I wrote secret messages on them behind the furniture, took a red marker and wrote, “I love you, your secret admirer,” behind the chest of drawers. I wrote, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” wherever no one else would think to look. I told myself fairies lived in the walls and they would help me when I needed them, but only when nothing else would work. I took care of my fairies, knowing nothing came from nothing, that even fairies gave only if you had something to give. I wrote them messages on tiny pieces of paper and pushed them through the holes. I dropped them cookie crumbs, tiny purple violets from the yard, crushed balls of aluminum foil, wrapping paper, tiny scraps of cloth. I knew my fairies would watch out for me if I took care of them, if I kept them secret and didn’t tell.

  I tried to forget that my own hand had written those love messages. I convinced myself sometimes that it was fairies that sneaked out in the dark and wrote me love notes in secret places. I told myself that in my dreams they showed me where to look when I needed to know that I was loved.

  Everyone wants to run when they can’t convince themselves that it’s worthwhile to stay. Even Shirley Temple ran in Our Little Girl. And it was an act of defiance that lifted Dorothy out of Kansas, spun her in a black cloud and dropped her crashing safely to a foreign land, through a dark forest, along a yellow brick road to Oz. Huck Finn did it. Cinderella too. And Wendy led the others out the window to fly away with Peter Pan.

  I was fourteen and had been sucked, poked and fingered more times than I could count. But I told myself I was still a virgin. When they pulled at me, tried to shove their tongues between my teeth, I held my mouth firm like the pearly-chip teeth of Chatty Kathy who resisted any penetration with that solid pink mouth. Like Chatty Kathy I spoke with my mouth tight, my voice prescribed sounds coming from some distant speaker in my belly. I was a dead thing with a pink-painted mouth, white chips for teeth sealed in, speaking only when the string was pulled, saying only what the factory man
had programmed me to say.

  “Don’t that feel good?”

  Every other night was a party at Momma’s house. Daddy worked those nights at the firehouse — planning, I figured, how the next night home he would beat her for her boyfriends, plotting how for every night of her parties without him, he’d give her one night of revenge.

  One day, I told a boy I hated my life. He told me he loved me, wanted to kiss me, said he wanted to be my friend. But I turned away and said I loved everyone in a spiritual way. I told him not to touch me because I was dead. He offered to take me home to his mother and said she’d adopt me because she was a good Christian woman and she would take me in.

  So I brought my sister Sally who was eleven, with the boys already smooching at her, stroking her butt when she walked by. She knew what was coming. She’d seen the wrestling in the bunk beds, she’d seen the breasts, butts, and cocks bouncing naked down the hall on the party nights. She wanted to run too. My mother didn’t notice when we walked out to my friend’s car with a change of clothes and our toothbrushes in brown paper bags.

  His mother stared at us from her kitchen table with the “Serenity Prayer” plaque hanging, painted white hands sweetly praying, on the wall. I knew she’d never play mother to us, not with that pink pantsuit, her hair sprayed tight as a helmet, and those lines around her mouth fixed in a straight thin line. “Take them downstairs,” she said. She gave us apples, milk and cookies on a blue plastic tray, and said, “Take them downstairs, Randall. We have to talk about this.”

  So we sat in the finished basement, a small room with brown carpet, brown paneling, and the color TV with game shows turned on. We waited wondering, and when we looked up to footsteps on the stairway, I couldn’t see beyond the policeman’s uniform, his black leather holster, gun, nightstick, the gleaming badge.

  It was my first ride in the back of a police car. I saw no door handles; I couldn’t roll down the window; I was locked behind a wire screen, with the heater cranked high, the air thick and dry. I squeezed Sally’s hand on the car seat beside me. I couldn’t look at her, but knew she was crying. I stared out the window at the cars going where they wanted, the people walking down the sidewalk, waiting to cross a corner. They smoked cigarettes, held newspapers, carried purses, briefcases, had a life.

  Downtown near the police station, the courthouse, post office, the official business part of town, I knew he would arrest us, detain us, lock us in jail. We were caught, dumb as dogs about what would happen next. When he parked near the dog pound, I wondered if this was where they took runaway girls too; feared that they would gas us the way they did dogs that nobody claimed.

  He led us up the sidewalk without a word, pressed a buzzer, and looked past the curtained glass door behind wrought iron bars. I stared at the brown concrete between my feet, felt Sally’s hand sweating in mine, couldn’t look up, couldn’t ask a question, a doll again that did nothing, simply waited to be placed where someone wanted her to go.

  A big gray-haired woman opened the door, looked at the policeman and said, “Bring them in,” as if we were blind, deaf, and dumb things. I looked up, read the plaque by the door as we entered: Chambliss Children’s Home. A jail for children, a Christian prison they called a home.

  In the foyer, the woman squinted down at us and ran her hands over our heads. She turned to the policeman and said, “They look clean.” She led the way, walking ahead, whispered with the policeman, exchanging and signing papers, her face locked, it seemed, in a permanent frown. “Come on,” she said to us finally as she walked up the stairs.

  In The Little Princess Shirley Temple was banished to an attic servant’s room when orphaned. She had to clean, be polite to everyone, build fires in other girls’ rooms, carry and shovel buckets of coal. She did it, only cried once alone in her room, and she was saved in time by a foreign stranger who brought gifts as she slept. I was Shirley Temple. I kept my head down, stayed polite, pasted a smile on my face and turned to Sally, squeezed her hand and said, “Don’t worry. It will be all right.”

  The woman took us to a room, a big closet with shelves of shirts, pants, socks, shoes, and a rack of dresses along one wall. She gave us each a paper bag, and told us to take off all our clothes. “I’ll give you new ones,” she said, not wanting an argument as she turned and grabbed up an armful of underwear, socks, and nightgowns. I watched the flab of her arm shake as she quickly went through the dresses on hangers above our heads. She yanked two off, held them in front of us to gauge the fit, then shoved it all at us, saying, “Hurry up and put these on.” We stared at her, standing in our underwear. “All of it,” she said. “It’s the rules. Don’t worry. When you leave you’ll get your clothes back.”

  I swallowed and held onto those words: “When you leave.” We would leave. It wouldn’t last forever. But when? I looked at Sally chewing her lip and nodded. We bent to pull down our underwear and put on the ones the lady had shoved in our hands. She led us down a hallway, opened a door with a key, and prodded me in, saying, “This is your room.” Then without a word she led Sally away.

  That night, sealed up, locked tight in my room, I sat on the floor and stared up out of the thick wire-screened window, watching the humming bright white streetlight outside. I squinted my eyes to lose focus and told myself it was the moon. I was a prisoner locked in a tower, sentenced to die for some brave act, and I was sending my prayer to the moon.

  But I couldn’t think for the yelping and howling of the caged dogs at the pound next door. I could see them talking to each other in dog voices, sending messages unknown to human ears, calling for help like those cartoon dogs in the movies. I knew that if I were in a movie it would be all right, someone would magically help us, we would be happy, playful as 101 Dalmatians, and we would be safe.

  In the courtroom, our parents wouldn’t look at us. I watched them, pale and yellow-looking in the hard light. They stared out at nothing as they sat next to what had to be a social worker with those pink lips, black pumps, navy suit, and sprayed hair. I sucked air in gulps to keep from crying, gripped the wooden bench beneath me to keep from running away. Finally they stood, and the judge shouted at them. He told them they would lose us for good if this happened again. He said that he was disgusted, that they ought to be ashamed.

  We all rode home in silence, Sally and I staring out our windows, Daddy driving, viciously sucking his fat brown cigar. Momma stared straight ahead. I looked up at her blue-black hair and wanted to throw my arms around her neck, hug her just to breathe in her realness, her familiar smell. But I feared she’d slap me. I felt even in the back seat the threat of a hand raised.

  I’d never run away again. I would take anything they gave me. I’d never run away to be locked up next to howling dogs. Never. I would go through anything to be near them, let them rip my head off, drown me in the tub, make me squirt water, watch me pee. I’d do anything, take anything. Nowhere else would I find a mother and a man to call my daddy. Anything was better than being abandoned, locked up like a lost dog, alone.

  The truth of my real daddy came with flashing scissors. I was fifteen, shocked and ashamed of the way my mother had used a young black lover to run my daddy — the one I called my daddy — out. He did it with a baseball bat. He told my daddy that my mother was a mother and that nobody should hit a mother. I had never thought of that. I wondered if a man could hit a woman if she wasn’t a mother, the way a man could eat a girl if she weren’t a girl but a little doll instead?

  Her lover never hit her, but he didn’t need to. Once in place, he took power like some great daddy-man-king. She did anything he wanted. He didn’t need to hit. He was my mother’s savior, the first good man she said she’d ever known. But I knew better. I saw the savior become a sneak. I’d seen him selling her pot, making deals in the backyard, then come in, kiss her, tease her, love her up as he asked for money to buy cigarettes, beer, and gas. I wondered if Momma was cursed to make men who once lo
ved her turn mean. They all did it. I watched her for some sign to show me that it was something she did.

  Ronnie moved my mother out of her old bedroom. He said he hated sleeping with those scratched up walls. So they slept on the foldout couch, the mattress permanently unfolded, covers tossed from their screwing, their teasing, their fighting, their sleep. We had to be careful in the morning not to see them doing it in the living room as we went to the kitchen to find something to eat. We listened, stood in the hallway, and waited for the thrusting and groaning sighs to die.

  He didn’t mind walking around the house naked, dangling his penis, eyes grinning, proud. He and my mother opened the house for parties, “socials,” he called them, group highs. The music was Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Isaac Hayes. The drugs: Marijuana. Malt liquor. Cherry vodka. Gin. High school boys grabbed me in the hall, wet mouths pressing, tongues pushing, hands prying into my clothes. “Don’t you like black boys?”

  “That’s not the point, that’s not the point,” I said. “I don’t like anybody. That’s not the point!”

  Once I screamed at my mother that she didn’t act like one, that she was high all the time, and was sleeping with a man half her age. “It isn’t right, you don’t act like a mother at all,” I said. Then she came at me with scissors, flashing silver sewing scissors ripping the air with her hand. Eyes cold, mouth twisted, she reached, swiped, and jabbed at the air. I ran to my room, scrambled up and crouched in the corner of my bunk bed where I swung the guard rail like a weapon, my mother’s words stinging: “You little bitch, you piece of white trash shit, who the hell do you think you are?”

  It was then she told me my legal daddy wasn’t my daddy, not the man I called my daddy either. She said I was a bastard, no better than white trash, a goddamned little bastard bitch. She screamed at me, scissors jabbing until Ronnie came, and glaring at me, pulled her off and took her away in the car. I watched them back out the driveway. I could hear her voice still screaming: “You don’t know shit, you little bastard. You don’t even know who your daddy is!”