by Luke Geddes
Seymour, one arm akimbo, had a look of expectation. He was waiting for her to pay him back a compliment. She was not very good at being nice or sincere. She tried to do both and the words fell out of her mouth like a brick. “I liked the way you shook down Deen for that shitty doll.”
He brought his hand to his chest. “I want you to know that I’m not like the rest of these people. I’m not from here, and I was a young weirdo like you once. I grew up in Maryland and Massachusetts—and not so long ago. Wichita,” he said, gagging. “The ugliest word in any language. Witch-IT-Taw. There’s no way to say it without becoming slack-jawed.”
Was she supposed to be impressed he was from the East Coast? Good for him, who cares? “If you hate it here so much, why don’t you just leave?”
Seymour’s smirk vanished and for a moment he looked panic-stricken. “Why don’t you? For me it’s temporary. Money to be made in this here Midwest. People see someone like me shilling any old garbage from the Goodwill and all of a sudden it’s cute and camp and trendy and worth fifty times what we paid for it. I went to a liberal arts college. I liked to read Marx but in the same way I read poetry. In the real world, it’s hard to feel bad about making money, especially if you grew up poor.”
Despite herself, Ellie was starting to like him, or if not like, at least sympathize. She now saw the impetus behind his whole shtick and that they had something in common. Her makeup and his kitsch thing were force fields around the world’s stupidity. Let people judge them and assume they know who they are. From their vantage point, separated always by at least one layer of irony, they wouldn’t have to participate in the everyday social niceties that other people—stupid people, most people—engaged in as a method of deluding themselves into thinking they were good souls, contributors to society with rewarding and fulfilled lives. Nobody ever bought anything to make themselves happy. They bought things to fill, with a Rookwood vase or a Bakelite napkin ring or a complete set of Star Wars cards, an aching void in their curio cabinets, closets, hearts. “They call themselves collectors, but they’ve accumulated so much so mindlessly that whatever they collect doesn’t even interest them anymore, if it ever did,” she said. “Then they start to sell some of it, but they need to satisfy the compulsion to consume and gather and accrete, so they start buying things with the intent to sell them. Except most of them, they rarely ever turn a profit. So what are they doing with their lives?” It was more than Ellie had said to another human being in weeks, maybe months. She felt fatigued, thirsty.
“I’m calling you my friend now.” He squinted at the name tag her parents made her wear. “Ellie.”
She picked up her book and covered her face with it. “I’m not friendly,” she said.
“Unfriendly people only get along with other unfriendly people.”
The bells on the door jingled and Keith entered carrying a file box from FedEx Office in one hand while balancing a box of doughnuts in the other. It was custom for management to provide snacks on Dealer Association meeting days. All that fluffy sugar and fat cushioned the blow of being told you hadn’t sold enough to make a profit that month, that you were in fact in the red and owed back-rent on your booth. The way he grunted as he heaved the FedEx Office box onto the counter made Ellie want to stab her eardrums with a ballpoint pen. He flipped the doughnut box open and pointed it at Seymour.
“I’ll pass,” Seymour said after a glance at the Manager’s Special sticker.
Keith sat on his stool at the opposite end of the counter and took an indecent bite out of a stale cruller. He nearly choked struggling to swallow it all and had to wash it down by chugging coffee from a crusty old mug featuring the comic strip character Ziggy, a depressive endomorph. Ziggy reminded Ellie of Keith.
She put her book down on the counter and set her head against it. She had always gotten along with him better than with Stacey, but now she wouldn’t deign to talk to him or even look his way. Stacey was too distracted to even notice Ellie was icing her out, so she had no choice but to direct her guilt-inducing ire at her father. If she kept it up for a few more months, there was half a hope that she could wear him down enough to agree to sign those loan forms in time for the start of spring semester.
“Ellie,” her father said tentatively, in just the tone he’d used—four or five different times—to explain that the best thing for the whole family right now was for her to postpone her going-away plans and stick it out in Wichita. “Are you all right?”
No, she was not all right. Not as long as she was awake and conscious of what her life had become. She recalled a Health Channel special on the sex lives of Siamese twins. In it, sisters who shared half a skull held hands with their respective husbands, lumpy acne-scarred men who glared at the camera with pride and embarrassment while explaining the mechanics of conjoined intercourse. “When it’s their turn,” one sister said, “I just tune it all out, let my mind enter into a place of nothingness.” Ellie lacked such a talent, but fortunately there were substances that could achieve similar ends, and she’d need them to get through this shift without smashing Margaret’s precious “Riverside Croesus” to pieces and slitting her own wrist with the shards.
6 DELORES
Delores shook her head at Keith’s offer of a doughnut, though she was tempted in particular by the one with pink frosting and teal sprinkles. It matched her outfit perfectly, a pink swoop dress under a teal cardigan and pink plastic poodle earrings, and so it seemed like it belonged to her, pink and teal her favorite color combination since the Christmas morning she’d received the original 1962 DreamHouse, with its glorious teal cardboard exterior and pink-accented furniture inside. The gift tag read From: Santa but really it was a hand-me-down, her mother’s own from when she was a girl. Delores’s friends, whose parents had been able to afford the then-current three-story iteration of the DreamHouse, had teased her, called her outdated version a “white-trash shoebox trailer.” She’d cried. But then she and her mother looked up the value of the original DreamHouse in a collector’s guide at the public library and Delores had the last laugh, for her mother took care of her things and taught Delores to do the same, so aged though the DreamHouse was, it retained its near-mint condition. And she still had that house today, along with every edition of the DreamHouse ever released, most in duplicates. One of each was just never enough, Delores thought. Ideally, she had to have three: one for her personal collection, one to sell, and—though it was naughty, foolish even, to take them out of the box—one to play with.
But then again, she could always burn off the calories doing an extra walking shift today. “On second thought,” she said, reaching for the doughnut that clearly was meant for her. She had to use one of the Lindy Bobo MISSING flyers from the counter as a napkin.
Keith smiled, revealing a slightly crooked canine tooth. The sight of people’s teeth unnerved Delores, as did wrinkles, moles, under-eye bagginess, nose hair, uneven five o’clock shadows, bald spots—human faces and bodies in general, unless they had been maintained to utmost perfection. “I’m glad someone appreciates them,” he said. “Post that flyer in your booth when you’re done. We need all the help we can get.”
She had finished only half before she was overcome with shame. The Barbies had been warning her to watch her figure. She wasn’t exactly the Original Teenage Fashion Model™ at her age (though the Barbies assured her that with the right makeup and ensemble, she could easily pass for thirtysomething, and in the right light on a good hair day, maybe even late twentysomething). The Barbies would smell it on her breath, spot the crumbs on her dress. The Barbies knew better than her. She ought to listen to them. “I’m watching my figure,” she said and discarded the remaining doughnut half on the counter. It was stale, anyway.
“No need to let it go to waste. We’re all friends here.” Keith shoved it into his mouth whole. Chewing patiently, he stared at Delores with dark eyes, pink frosting coating his mouth like lipstick. “I’m going to start setting up for the meeting as soon as Ellie
gets back from break. Anything else?”
“I need to check my sales for the month.” She drummed her painted fingernails on the counter as Keith dragged himself the few feet over to the sales computer. He typed in Delores’s name and booth number and then swore for a minute or two as the Antiques SOS program repeatedly crashed.
When he finally got it working, he said, a lilt of surprise in his voice, “Yes, actually. By god, you did make a profit.” He slapped his knee as if giving himself a high five.
Affability did not wear well on Keith, and Delores was not laughing. She combed her hair with her fingers, a nervous tic for which the Barbies frequently scolded her. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Just tell me… what sold.” This was bad. She wasn’t ready for this.
Keith narrowed his eyes at the screen. “Says here it was”—he took a deep breath and read the words as if he were reciting letters off an optometrist’s exam chart—“a 1966 A.G. ash-blond rare side-part variant low-color.”
Delores bit her lip. Not her, not the side-part. She hadn’t been ready to let her go yet. Sure, she had a duplicate in her personal collection at home, an exquisite never-opened new old stock piece she’d picked up at an out-of-business toy distributor’s warehouse in Missouri, but though all of her dolls were her favorites, she was particularly attached to her side-parts, Japanese-manufactured variations with a superior brushed-to-the-left hairdo that was difficult for American manufacturers to achieve. The one sold was not in ideal condition—significant facial paint loss, nose and chin nips, pinpricks in the right leg, sold nude without the multistripe swimsuit, turquoise open-toed shoes, and matching ribbon headband—but nevertheless, Delores preferred to be on-site when a sale took place. Most often she preferred to sell and trade with her fellow collectors at the conventions and toy shows. And now without warning she was gone, her ash-blond side-part, without ever having had a chance to say goodbye.
Delores’s breath went short, her stomach clenched. With numb hands, she wiped the sweat from her forehead, dabbed at the slickness with her fingers. Panic attacks were unbecoming, unladylike. The Barbies had told her so. She dug into her cardigan pocket and removed a key chain on which no keys were kept but instead a pair of Barbie doll legs (the bendable type) and a single crook-elbowed arm. She put the feet in her mouth, chewed on the sweet soft plastic, running the tip of her tongue along the ridges of the toes. She began to calm but not quickly enough, so she shoved the legs in deeper, chewed on the knees with her molars, the feet nestled not disagreeably in the sensitive gummy areas where her wisdom teeth had been.
“You know, it’s always amazed me how much some people are willing to pay just for a little piece of plastic.”
Delores was too red-hot with anger to be embarrassed. She pulled the legs out of her mouth, a strand of saliva settling on her chin. “And you’re just a piece of flesh!” Delores noted the feeble comb-over on his down-turned head. She was breathing too heavily, too man-like, but she couldn’t help it. Saliva dripped off her chin. With a vague sense of defiance she refused to wipe it clean.
“We’ll get that check to you at the meeting. Congrats on the sale,” Keith said.
Delores pocketed the feet. She couldn’t stand for this. It was outrageous, him talking about ash-blond side-part that way. She ought to let him have it. She had never liked Keith, never liked, in fact, much of any man, save for Ken and Alan and Brad and the rest. But then she thought better of it. If ash-blond side-part were here, she’d remind Delores that those sorts of outbursts were unbecoming, that if she (ash-blond side-part) had behaved that way to her boyfriend, Ken never would have asked her to the prom, and then where would she be? Besides, Keith was pretending she was no longer there, evidently exhausted by their exchange, gazing into the open doughnut box trying to decide which to eat next. “Thank you,” Delores decided to say, with as much poise as she could muster, and left it at that. The Barbies would be pleased.
When she returned to her booth, a pink oasis of cellophane and plastic among the drab, haphazard booths that surrounded it, Delores was once again dizzied by all the voices coming at her at once.
“These shoes don’t match my hair, and my hair doesn’t match my earrings, and my earrings…”
“… me out of here. I want to play and…”
“Come on, Dolly, chew my feet. Wreck me. I don’t wanna be mint condition no more. Pull my hair out. Pluck my head…”
“… fries with that…”
“… the real Barbie. The rest of you phonies can go…”
“… your favorite, right, Dolly? Please, tell me I’m your favorite. You know I…”
“… why I’ve been born if this is the life I’ve been burdened with. As Aeschylus wrote…”
“… don’t belong here, not a doll, not a doll, not a doll. You all are the crazy ones…”
“… so come on and take it off, Barbies. Maybe all I’ve got is this bump, but I’m still all man, certainly more than this Blaine fairy over here…”
“Who you calling a fairy, you blimey little bugger? I oughta…”
“Math class is tough!”
“… can’t see. Where am I? What’s happened to me? I remember Christmas, the pine smell of the tree…”
“… itches. This price tag, worse than VD.”
“… so unbecoming, so unladylike…”
“Wanna have a pizza party?”
“I love shopping!”
“… put on a few pounds, well then I’d just about die…”
“Dear diary, I did it. I killed…”
“Over here, Dolly. Listen to me when I talk to…”
“Oh, what a lonely way to start the summertime…”
“… and then she said and I was like but he was like and I was all yeah but and she’s like…”
“… can’t see… think I’m going blind! Who will love me now?”
“… tips for healthy girls. Step one…”
“I’m talking to you, Dolly. Pay attention.”
“… one ever cares about Midge. Midge can’t get a date on a Saturday night and meanwhile, Barbie… It’s always Barbie, Barbie, Barbie…”
“Party dresses are fun!”
“… on fire. Feel like I’m burning up…”
“Look at me, Dolly. Over here. Over here.”
It always took a while for the noise to settle in her mind enough that Delores could concentrate on one at a time. A 1967 “sun-kissed” Twist ’n Turn Barbie, the first with real fabric eyelashes, called to her. She followed her voice, a pitch lower than most, sultry like a lifelong smoker, scanning the rows until she found her, between a Twist ’n Turn PJ and a nearly identical non-twisting 1967 standard. When Delores picked her up, her thumb and forefinger around her svelte waist, Barbie released a girlish sigh of pleasure. Delores understood; it was so nice to be touched once in a while—or at least it would have been. She began to comb Barbie’s platinum-blond hair with her fingers.
Barbie scowled, only she couldn’t rearrange her static features into a scowl. Rather, she made the sound of scowling. “I hope you’ve remembered to clean under your fingernails like I’ve told you, Dolly. Dirt streaks in the hair is not an appropriate look for a young woman like myself.”
Delores examined her fingernails. “Of course,” she whispered. She had learned as a child not to speak too loudly when talking with Barbie. “They’re clean. I used a Q-tip like you taught me.”
“Very well,” Barbie said, allowing Delores to continue combing. Sharply she added, “Do I smell sweets on your breath?”
Delores reminded herself that Barbie was just looking out for her, the way she had since she was a child. After all, someone had to. Delores had no memory of her father, and according to her mother she was better off that way. Her mother worked three jobs and put herself through night school, was rarely home, and couldn’t afford a babysitter. But she was never lonely, not with the Barbies around, along with all their boyfriends and little sisters and brothers and girlfriends and pets
and cousins, with all their outfits and accessories and vehicles and DreamHouses.
“I had a doughnut. Only half of one,” she whispered into Barbie’s baleful, unblinking eyes. “And it was small. I’ll walk it off. I’ll skip dinner.”
“I love you, Dolly. That’s why you’ll do what I say when I say you’ll skip dinner and breakfast. And extra time on the treadmill tonight.”
“Yes, Barbie. Thank you.”
“And?”
Delores smiled, patted Barbie’s head. “I love you.”
“Your roots are starting to show.”
Delores was about to ask Barbie what color to dye her hair next when Pete Deen, Dealer Association president and toy collector from booth #2-232, approached, his distinctive waddling walk—thud-thud—sending tiny vibrations through the floor that rattled the tiny plastic pieces set neatly upon Delores’s shelves. Although he had a soft voice, he was such a loud and heavy-seeming person. His presence, frequently uninvited, carried with it a dank, almost subterranean quality; he was a dim, musty basement personified. He breathed heavily, a perspiration of accomplishment shining over his eyebrows.
“Hi,” Pete said and nothing more. Just slow, labored breathing. Everything with him, the slightest gesture or movement or bit of speech, seemed to require an enormous effort. He held in his hand a Ken-sized doll with an African American skin tone, its gold box pinned in his armpit by his elbow. The first black male Barbie doll, Delores noted to herself, was Brad, introduced in 1970, friend of Ken and boyfriend of Christie. But this wasn’t Brad. Nor was it Curtis or Steven or Jamal or Alan, all of whom Delores had plenty of, not even Blen, an early knockoff that only reached a select few southern markets before infringement lawsuits took it off the shelf entirely. For a moment Delores was only intrigued, but then unladylike anger coursed through her. Who was he, Pete Deen, with all his boys’ toys, to have something Delores lacked? He wasn’t even a true collector, she thought. A true collector focused on one type of thing and appreciated each piece as an individual, understood it—or her, as it were—down to every last detail and variation, could name her entire inventory and describe the condition of each item—or girl, as it were—from memory. Pete Deen, on the other hand, was an accumulator, a hoarder. So long as it could conceivably be classified a toy, he’d buy or sell it, whether it was old or new, valuable or worthless, boxed or unboxed, in mint or used condition, whether he really cared about it as a person or not. Stuff is what he called his inventory, as in, “You interested in any of my stuff?” “I can give you a good deal on that stuff over there.” “I got some more stuff under that stuff.” Stuff was all it was to him. Delores had once found a Color Magic Barbie sitting in his booth mislabeled as a Color Stylin’ Barbie and had disliked him ever since. (She’d liberated the doll, and now she stood, leaning against her wire stand in Delores’s second-to-bottom middle shelf, accurately labeled.)