In Florence’s honor, I would open a sewing machine museum, which would also provide me with a steady stream of seamstresses. I would call it the Florentina Museum, an iron and glass building resembling a magnificent web. My patronesses loved the idea, though they had never sewn themselves. It would be recognition of women’s work, and they gave me the money I needed. The museum was planned under my direction, and sewing machine manufacturers donated models and further funds.
The seamstresses came to the museum on weekends in droves, either out of a strange curiosity to see machines unlike the ones they worked with or because they were scared of being away from their machines. No one would love them, so they pushed their affection towards the very machines that destroyed them. They didn’t have sewing machines at home, they couldn’t afford them. Simple needles and threads wouldn’t do, and so they came to my museum in their free hours, their lonely hearts longing to see a treadle, a wheel. The machines had disfigured the seamstresses, they put all their beauty and youth into dresses, curtains, and suits. It was easy to spot them, the pale skin, the tired eyes with purple half-circles underneath like violent-tinted spectacles, the squinting, their fingers worn thin, almost needles themselves, hidden in cheap gloves, the shaking legs that would have been muscly from pumping had they had more meat to eat.
The museum had a café, where I now went every weekend for anise and pistachio éclairs and coffee in small black and gold cups. The seamstresses sat at the arabesque iron café tables, their legs moving up and down underneath. They wore hats and shoes made out of black cardboard and carried little pouches filled with iron pills or tonic, often given to them by their factories to keep them alive, and took them with their coffee.
“If you could do a quick sewing job for me, I have a machine, some silk pajamas that have ripped, what fine fingers you have, I will pay you of course, and give you dinner too, a fine steak, some roast chicken.”
They lost track of time, there were no clocks in my apartment for this purpose, the curtains were shut, the air was heavy from the stove and gas lamps. I worked them for days and they became hypnotized, as did I, watching the beautiful iron limbs of Florence move.
But the point came when, watching the girls wilt with exhaustion, watching the machine consume them, feeling the cloth covered in gold, black, green, and red stitches wasn’t enough any longer. I wanted to be involved in the process, to be touched by Florence.
I cut open my leg with a pen knife and said to the current seamstress sitting in front of Florence, a weak thing with a thin black braid, “Sew it, sew it up, my dear. No, there is no need to call a physician, just sew it up for me, dear, on the machine.”
Without wiping the blood away, I stuck one of my legs underneath, pale with black hairs, like a roll of cloth that had been slept on, and commanded the seamstress to sew, the cold metal of Florence’s flesh poised above me. What relief, what joy, what pain with the first stitch!
They were love bites, to me. They weren’t as legible or as even as the stitches on cloth, but just as beautiful.
Soon, all eight of my legs were covered in stitches and scars, like a ragdoll, Florence’s kisses. The loss of blood weakened me immensely. I started to walk with two canes instead of one, and I partook of iron pills and tonics, just as the seamstresses did. I barely had any appetite for food, I was too lovesick. For my visits to the zoo, I bought a wheeled chaise which one of my servants pushed me in, but otherwise I did not leave my apartments, I refused invitations, no longer did any modeling. Only my creatures in the zoo understood, I thought, my consuming desire for Florence, my endless hunger for cloth covered in her stitches, for her stitches in my flesh. I brought a bag of wigs for the moths, sausages for the rats, and a cage full of kittens for the fleas. I watched them eat, then returned home.
The few times I had visitors over between seamstresses, so as not to raise too many suspicions as I had previously been so sociable, I covered Florence with a cloth. I didn’t want them to see something so intimate to me.
Disposing of used seamstresses was exhausting. I bought a larger stove, saying I suffered more and more from the cold. I couldn’t even ask my servants for help. I let go all but one, who drove my carriage. Visiting my doctor, I was reluctant for him to see my legs. I told him I was attacked by the dog of a woman friend. My doctor told me I had to stop seeing her at once, and to stay away from dogs. I couldn’t afford to lose more blood, I needed more than the average person with my extra appendages; my heart was overworked.
Oh indeed it was, but he did not know how much.
He was disgusted by my stitches. What awful, back-door surgeon had I visited and why? Why did I not visit him, my trusted doctor since childhood? He gave me a bottle of antiseptic liquid to put on the wounds. I vowed never to visit him again.
I had piles of telegrams, invitations, letters, newspapers, but the only thing I read was Florence’s cloth, yes, and her lovebites, I think she is beginning to love me, I feed her, she writes she writes.
The last page ends with an indeterminate smudge, whether blood, ink, or alcohol, it is too aged for the naked eye to determine.
READER’S GUIDE
1.Many of the stories in The Doll’s Alphabet are set in uncertain time periods—they could be set in a version of the present day, the early twentieth century, a more general past, or a version of the future. What do these uncertain settings achieve? How does displacing readers in time change the way they experience the story?
2.Gender roles play a big part in these stories, particularly in “Waxy.” Do the confines of how men and women operate and relate to each other in The Doll’s Alphabet offer ways for you to think about gender dynamics in the world we live in? How so?
3.Many stories in The Doll’s Alphabet feature strong elements of dystopian fiction. Could these stories imagine a pos sible future, or perhaps an alternative past? Do they gesture toward a moral or a possible cause of their dystopian reality?
4.What do you make of the shortest story in the collection, the title story, “The Doll’s Alphabet”?
5.The Doll’s Alphabet has much in common with fairy tales and Franz Kafka, both in its oddness and its sly comedy. In such precarious circumstances, what role does a sense of humor play?
The Doll’s Alphabet was inspired by:
•Edward Gorey, Amphigorey Again
•Barbara Comyns, Sisters by a River
•Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual
•T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays
•Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor
•Samuel Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks
•Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop
•Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories
•Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse
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Camilla Grudova lives in Toronto. She holds a degree in art history and German from McGill University, Montreal. Her fiction has appeared in the White Review and Granta.
The Doll’s Alphabet was designed by Alana Wilcox.
Text is set in Whitman.
The Doll’s Alphabet Page 14