Doll Hearts

by Colleen Clayton

  DOLL HEARTS

  by Colleen Clayton

  For everyone who loved Sid.

  Meet Julianne. I hope

  you love her as

  much as

  I do.

  1.

  The way I see it, my mother had two choices last night. One: take a few lousy minutes out of her life to be my parent, go online, and deposit money into my school lunch account, or two, spend the whole evening obsessing in front of the QVC channel in hopes that Marie Osmond would slash the price on the Adora Belle Bea Happy Mop Top Doll.

  As usual, I lost to the doll.

  Google it, I dare you. Search “Adora Belle Bea Happy Mop Top Doll” and behold the horror of this purple-and-orange-fairy-clown-Bride-of-Chucky monstrosity that will, in five-to-seven shipping days, be sitting in my home along with thousands of other dolls that are equally disturbing.

  I live in Doll Hoarder’s Armageddon.

  I’m being raised by a lunatic.

  Usually, I’m kind of able to work around the whole nightmare but today it’s a problem. My mother’s insanity and inability to function in the real world has led to another day of zero lunch bucks which is presently leading to plummeting blood glucose. I have diabetes; low glucose is not just a problem for me but a Real Big Freaking Problem.

  I’m in Economics taking a final exam and I can barely hold my pencil because my hands are shaking so hard. Basically, I need to eat or drink something with some serious sugar in it and I need to do that now.

  My bag has some glucose tablets in it but it’s buried in the back of the classroom under a pile of other people’s stuff. Mr. Fitch is convinced that we’re all cheaters so he makes us put our bags and other belongings on a table in the back during test days.

  I try to focus and write about good old Theodore Roosevelt and the fiscal policies he supported during his presidency but my words look like the scrawling of a toddler cranked up on double-espresso. The more I try to relax and breathe, the more my hands shake. I should be scared but all I feel is unbridled rage, picturing that ridiculous, hideous doll. She had time to purchase demon-doll but didn’t have time to purchase me some food?

  I should have just swallowed my pride and charged my lunch again but I’ve already charged around twenty-five bucks in the last couple of weeks. I can’t charge anymore because tomorrow is the last day of school so there’s no more charging allowed. Everyone is expected to settle up their negative accounts today. I wasn’t about to go through that lunch line again and say: Sorry, I’m still broke. Can I get it to you next year? It’s embarrassing. I thought I could get by with eating some crackers that I had stashed in my locker but it obviously wasn’t enough. I’m headed into a hypoglycemic tailspin; I can feel it coming but I try to fight it back.

  Okay. The test. FDR. New Deal. Concentrate.

  My stomach growls then my vision blurs for a second. I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and tell myself to calm down because stressing only makes it worse. Julianne, you can do this, I say, settle down and focus. But I’m starting to get away from myself mentally and become delusional about being able to control my situation through the use of sheer will power.

  “Jules, you okay?” Lindsey whispers, tapping me lightly on the shoulder with her pencil.

  Lindsey Rourke sits behind me. We’ve been friends since the womb. Our fathers were roommates in college so she’s familiar with my condition. Especially since, at her eighth birthday party, I snuck into her bedroom closet and devoured a massive piece of strawberry cake and then chased it down with a massive bowl of strawberry ice-cream before falling asleep amidst her vast collection of Care Bears. I was newly diagnosed at that point so my parents were still getting a handle on my condition. They ended up hauling me off to the ER right in the middle of the party.

  “I’m fine,” I whisper over my shoulder.

  And now the other people around me are starting to notice. Brandon Wright glances up from his test and flashes me a pair of something-the-matter-Julianne? eyebrows. I flash him back with a pair of stop-staring-and-go-back-to-your-doodling eyebrows.

  After a minute or so, Lindsey leans forward again.

  “You don’t look fine. You’re doing that thing with your hair. That thing you do when you’re hungry.”

  “I am not,” I snap, my voice getting louder. I’m starting to get crabby and defensive. That happens when my glucose drops.

  I try to put my hand in my lap but, within seconds, it finds its way back to my head and resumes its finger-dance of messing with my hair. Lindsey reaches out and touches my shoulder again which makes me flinch and lash out at her.

  “Quit touching me!” I say in a sharp whisper.

  Lindsey is going into parental mode which makes me crazy. She gets like that, starts thinking she’s the boss of Julianne. My heart is racing and my hair, god, it’s all over the place. Why in the world do I keep it this long? I twist at it with my fingers and try to push down the dizzy sick feeling washing over me. I need my bag. I need a glucose tablet right now.

  “Mr. Fitch?” I say, standing up. “I need to get my—,”

  But before I finish the sentence my knees buckle like two bendy straws and I get tangled in my desk and chair. Brandon jumps up and Lindsey yells for Mr. Fitch to call the nurse and the next thing I know I’m flat on the floor looking up at the ceiling. Lindsey tells Brandon to hand her his hoodie and he unzips and is out it faster than Superman in a phone booth. He starts clearing desks and gawkers out of the way. Lindsey rolls up the hoodie and puts it under my head. Then after a flurry of commotion she tries to put something in my mouth which makes me completely flip out, press my lips together, and push her hands away.

  “I can do it myself!” I growl through gritted teeth. “I’m not a baby!”

  But I can’t do it myself and I’m too proud and too spaced out to let her help me.

  “Jules, Jules, you’re okay,” she says in my ear. “They’re looking for your bag. To get glucose tabs. But we don’t have time. So, right now you need to open your mouth. Opennn. Yourrr. Mouuuth….”

  The world starts fading and it’s like I’m sinking into a cold, dark ocean. I lay shivering in my underwater grave, listening to the muffled, hurried voices, my eyelids fluttering closed, the lights going out, out, out.

  Then sweetness floods my mouth. Something soft and sugary oozes between my cheek and tongue and I can feel the world swimming back again. It tastes like strawberries, the whole world tastes like strawberries, like the cake and ice-cream at Lindsey’s eighth birthday party.

  I open my eyes to see Mr. Fitch looking down at me like I’m a freak in a carnival side show. The room has been cleared except for Lindsey, Mr. Fitch, and the school nurse. The nurse gives me a Glucagon shot which is like the silver bullet of emergency glucose boosts. I feel it working immediately, my head clears and I sit up. The nurse and Lindsey help me up off the floor and over to a chair.

  “That was close,” the nurse says to Mr. Fitch.

  “Should I call 9-1-1?” he asks.

  “No!” I say, looking up in panic.

  “I’ll take her down to the clinic and call her mom,” the nurse says. “This happens at times to people with diabetes. She’ll be okay.”

  She sends Lindsey to the clinic for a wheelchair. I protest and tell the nurse that I can walk but she insists.

  “Just for now,” she says, “In case you get woozy we need you in the chair.”

  I sigh, sit in the wheelchair, and fold my arms. Everyone is outside in the hall whispering and I’m sure I hear a giggle. As they wheel me down the hallway, past all my classmates lined against the wall, I look up for a second and lock eyes with Brandon Wright. It’s like he’s watching a corpse roll by. I try not to get teary but my quivering chin gives me aw
ay. I clear my throat and look down at my knees again. I want to curl up and die of embarrassment. God, I’m so humiliated.

  2.

  After feeding me some cold pizza from the cafeteria, the school nurse calls my mom to come pick me up because I’m not allowed to drive myself home. Usually my mom just pulls up to the curb when she has to pick me up from school or anywhere else but, because I’m considered “ill” right now, I have to wait in the nurse’s office for my mom to sign me out.

  I sit in the chair along the wall and chew my thumb cuticle. The nurse has a few desk toys that will snag my mom’s attention when she sees them—a stress ball, a take-apart plastic model of the human brain, and then one of those swinging metal bead-smacker things. Newton’s Cradle, I think they’re called. My mom can sniff out this kind of junk from miles away. She doesn’t understand that the owner of said junk doesn’t really give a crap about it. What is simply an amusing bit of workspace color to the nurse will become the focus of an in-depth, bizarrely one-sided conversation about the history and physics behind the Newton’s Cradle and then a million questions about that model brain. Where did you get it? How many pieces are there? Who manufactures them? Can I look at it? This is so neat! I’ve seen it happen. At doctor’s offices, car dealerships, in line at the grocery store. The other person will smile and nod and go along with my mom’s prattling enthusiasm but within a few moments, the conversation takes an awkward turn. The person will get this frosted-over, confused look in their eyes like “What is this woman on? It’s a bendable Gumby figurine…a Mickey Mouse keychain, a fuzzy pencil, a fidget spinner…calm down, lady.”

  Thankfully, the nurse is in the back room tending to a girl with swollen neck glands when my mom pokes her head in and sort of knocks on the open door. As usual, she’s a hot mess; her hair is bunched up into a tangled topknot and she’s wearing mismatched sweats. I jump out of the chair, bag in hand, and point her to the sign-out sheet.

  “Oh, okay,” she says, walking over to the counter, all befuddled like she’s completely unfamiliar with the whole sign-your-kid-out-of-school routine.

  When she’s finished, I grab her by the sleeve and hurry us out of the office, glad to avoid any kind of interaction with the nurse.

  “You feeling better?” she says, reaching over to rub my shoulder as we head out the main doors. “Do you want to hit Mickey D’s?”

  I shake my head because I don’t want to go anywhere with her right now. I’m too angry. Plus, she looks like she’s just rolled out of bed. The only thing missing is a fuzzy robe and slippers.

  “The nurse gave me pizza,” I say, “But my car is in the student lot, you need to drive me over there.”

  “You’re okay to drive? We can come back later for your car.”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “The nurse blew this out of proportion. I could’ve gone back to class. There’s less than an hour left of school for God’s sake.”

  She shrugs and walks along next to me. She looks up at the sky, her hand shielding her pale face from the sun. The circles under her eyes are like bruises. My anger softens a bit because I realize she’s following me and I don’t even know where she parked.

  “Where’s the car, mom?” I say, and she snaps out of her daze and starts walking with more purpose toward the left side of the visitor lot. She pulls her keys out of her pleather handbag, a faux snake skin number with gold buckles all over it. Handbags are the only thing she cares about appearance-wise anymore. She switches her bag out about once a week.

  “Over here,” she says, thinking she knows where she’s going. After we walk around for ten minutes, we finally find her car on the other side of the school, in the student lot, four spaces down from mine.

  On the drive home, we pass a homemade sign posted on a telephone pole. MULTI-FAMILY GARAGE SALE! ANTIQUES, COLLECTIBLES, APPLIANCES! with an arrow pointing the way down Waterbury Road. I look into my rearview mirror and see my mother’s car starting to slow down. I honk my horn to keep her focused.

  When we get home, we have to enter the house through the back sliding door in the kitchen. Our front door hasn’t been functional in forever; there’s too much stuff barricading it. Even the back door only slides open halfway because of the junk piled up around it. We have to shove our way in. I shuffle behind my mom while we make our way through the crowded kitchen.

  “You want me to order something? A pizza?” she says.

  “No. I just ate pizza,” I say. “Did you not hear that part when we were coming out of the school? I was given cold pizza by the nurse because I didn’t have money to pay for my lunch, remember?”

  “Oh, I’m…J-bear, I’m sorry,” she says, bringing her knuckles to her mouth, her eyes filled with remorse. “I sent a check but for some reason it didn’t clear. Or maybe I forgot to send it. I don’t know. I just…,” She doesn’t know what else to say so just starts fishing through her purse. She holds three wrinkled dollars out to me like a sad peace offering.

  “For tomorrow,” she says, her eyes searching for forgiveness.

  I sigh and take the money; stuff it into my bag.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” I say, turning to walk away, but then I pause because I can’t leave her with such a miserable, deflated look on her face. “We can play Yahtzee in my room later if you want,” I add.

  “Okay,” she says, and the wrinkles on her forehead smooth a bit. “I’ll pick up some take-out around six. Pad Thai.”

  I nod and head toward the stairs. She heads over to The Nest, a place that, in a normal home, would function as a living room. When I say Nest, I’m not joking around. Her recliner and its immediate vicinity are literally a nest filled with everything a human being might need, outside of bathroom facilities, to exist indefinitely in one singular location. Blankets, pillows, water bottles, remote controls, tissues, a telephone, hand lotion, dental floss, cigarettes, ashtrays, and a buffet of snacks and candy. She even sleeps there nowadays because her room is so packed with crap that she can’t find her bed anymore. And then surrounding The Nest are shelves, bookcases, tables, windowsills, and sofas lined with my mother’s personal retail heroin: collectible dolls.

  Most of the dolls are boxed up and shoved into haphazard stacks in other parts of the house. But the dolls that don’t have boxes, the ones that are worth nothing at this point, those are out on display around The Nest. That is, if you consider dolls crammed all over a room and piled three feet high on the floor a display.

  As I head to my bedroom, I hear the TV turn on and then the flipping back and forth between home shopping channels. I tunnel through the house, through the tidal wave of boxes and bags. While dolls are her primary drug of choice, she also dabbles in lesser fixations like waterglobes, ceramic figurines, holiday ornaments, commemorative plates and the dreaded lifestyle-enhancer contraption, meaning the kitchen gadget, exercise equipment, all-in-one tool, foot-and-neck massager sort of thing. The evidence of her addiction lines the floors, walls, hallways, and everywhere. Our home is like a bizarro game of home shopping Tetris, a labyrinth of overpriced kitsch, a junkyard of tacky knick-knacks. Boxes, bags, and bins of all shapes and sizes are puzzled together into a floor-to-ceiling booby trap that is just dying to cave in on someone. Stuffed between all of it, like Krazy Glue mortar or something, are the packages of size ten clothing that my mom never even wears because, besides garage sale-ing on weekends, she never goes anywhere these days. Blouses, pants, jeans, sweaters, coats, shoes, dresses, purses, scarves, and clothing of every kind are everywhere. With the exception of the dolls in The Nest, most everything in our house is unopened and still in the original packaging, the price tags still on.

  It wasn’t always like this. This house used to be somewhat organized when my dad was around but since their divorce, it has metastasized into a landfill. Every time my mom catches me trying to get rid of even the smallest, most useless thing she loses her freaking mind. I tried to throw away a garbage bag of doll parts once; literally it was a bag of damaged pieces-parts—
limbs that had been chewed off at the feet and hands; random heads and torsos—and she went into a nuclear meltdown; had a wilting, fall-to-the-ground, bawling fit until I brought the bag in from the curb. She goes through the trash methodically every week now to make sure I’m only throwing away real garbage, meaning food and things that can spoil. At this point, I just try to get from Point A—the back patio—to Point B—my bedroom—without causing trouble or being buried alive.

  Squeezing through the barrage of impulse purchases lining each side of the stairs, I turn to my side to get to the upper hallway that leads to my room. Even though I’m short and slim, it’s still tricky to negotiate my way through the maze of misfit toys.

  A lot of the doll boxes are turned outward, so my mom can “visit” and “enjoy” and “keep tabs” on all of her “babies.” As I pass by the shelves that line the hall, hundreds of unblinking marble eyes look out at me from their cellophane coffins. They follow me as I navigate the cramped passageway. Their porcelain, ceramic, and plastic faces are all frozen in a collective state of creeptastic joy, as if to say: Nice to see you, Julianne. We’ve been waiting.

  I pass the door that leads to the barely functional main bathroom, ignoring the ever-smiling, unblinking faces, until I finally ferret my way to the master bedroom.

  The master bedroom.

  Serenity.

  Mine.

  This is an arrangement that I struck with my mom about two years ago when things got so bad in the main bath that I couldn’t use it without stuff falling on top of me. Once inside, I shut the door and lean against it, close my eyes, and breathe in sweet relief. Then I head over to Lolo’s cage and take her out.

  “Hey, girl baby,” I whisper in her tiny ear, nuzzling her close, letting her quills tickle my cheek. While I cuddle my hedgehog, I scan the room to see if anything has been disturbed.

  Bed is made. Dresser is clean. Closet is shut.