I worked my whole shift. Nobody came near me. Nobody asked any questions. I thought I wasn’t in any trouble. I was extra careful with everything and nothing else went wrong.
Except that when I left my station and turned around to head to the locker room, I saw that something was sticking out of the trash barrel and that the men hadn’t come yet to empty it for the day.
I guessed that hard as they had pressed, the top hadn’t been pushed down all the way after all.
I knew I shouldn’t have touched it, but I also knew the “bad” doll was in there. I looked around. Everybody was lining up for the end of our shift, waiting to be clocked out. There were lots of girls near me, but they were pushing and shoving to be first in line and not have to wait for the whole crowd of us to be processed. Nobody was looking at me.
So I did it. I pushed the lid of the garbage barrel just a little bit aside. And I reached in and I grabbed the yellow cloth and I pulled the doll out of the barrel.
Of course I had to hide it and fast. If anybody saw me, I would be sent downstairs for sure. And I had to hide it not just from people who could see it, I also had to hide it from the checkers at the door.
I almost gave up. I almost threw the doll to the ground and pretended I didn’t know anything about it.
But then I got an idea.
There was a big crowd waiting in line to get out, to get checked and then to leave and go to the dormitories. There was such a crowd that people were standing really close together. So close that if I was careful, I could wait until someone ahead of me was checked and allowed to go through and then I could put the doll somewhere on them, get checked myself, then take the doll back before anybody could figure out what I was doing.
I wanted to make sure that I could do this without getting anyone else on my team in trouble. Just to make sure, I wanted to be next to somebody that I didn’t know. This wasn’t as hard as it might seem. There were hundreds of girls working on a lot of teams and there were also three other factories whose shifts ran at the same time as ours every day—and night, too, though I wasn’t yet old enough to do the night shift.
I pushed through the crowd, being very careful. If I made a mistake and either of us were caught with the doll, I couldn’t say what would happen. We all knew stories about girls who had done something wrong, even some little thing like going to the wash station instead of coming straight back from our ten-minute daily break. Those girls were never seen again – or so people whispered.
Anyway, I did it. I watched. I lined up behind the girls who were passing through the least scary of the guards. Everybody knew that he smiled a lot of times and that he wasn’t rough when he felt us all over to see if we were taking anything out of the factory.
At first I didn’t think I could put the doll anywhere on the girl ahead of me without her feeling what I was doing. I decided just to drop the doll and to step on it so that it would get at least a little crushed and maybe not look like a doll any more. I had almost decided this when the line moved forward fast all of a sudden.
Before I even had a chance to move, I got pushed from behind and the doll fell out of my hand. I thought I was finished.
But then a miracle happened.
Instead of falling to the ground, the doll slipped away and got caught in the uniform apron of the girl in front of me. I held my breath. I figured the guard would see it and she would get in trouble. I felt bad about this. As I said, I never meant to get anybody else in trouble.
I drew in a big breath.
And the guard heard me. “Something wrong?”
I shook my head. I thought he would pat all my clothes, the way he always did. But instead, he shook his head and made a sign with his hand that it was okay for me to move on.
By the time I caught up with the girl that was in front of me, the doll was gone. I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad.
We were almost back to the dormitory when the girl looked around to make sure nobody was watching, reached under her apron and pulled out the doll. She handed it to me without saying a word. Then she turned and walked away so fast that I couldn’t say a word to her, either.
The doll’s dress was torn more than it was before and there was dirt on the dress and on the face of the doll and the hair was pulled out of the ribbons that held it before.
But I didn’t care. I put it under my own apron and when I got to my cot, I put it under the sheet.
I went to supper and to our exercises and our confessions and I went to bed. But I didn’t go to sleep. Under the blanket on my cot, I played with my doll. I couldn’t say anything in case somebody could hear me.
But I could pretend without saying anything. I pretended I lived in the place that the other girls lived—the place where they had all the dolls they wanted. The place where they could throw a doll away if they got tired of playing with it. The place where they had a whole lot of dolls and not just one and not one that was dirty and torn.
I pretended I had pretty clothes myself and that I didn’t have to work in the factory and that I could live with my mother—or even just know who she was.
And I pretended that my doll was perfect. And that she could talk and tell me things about the place where she lived.
And I pretended that she could sing and dance and say my name.
And I pretended that I didn’t hear the boots on the stairs.
And I pretended that I didn’t hear the loud knock on the door.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, DEAR ORPHANS
As I sit here wrapping a gift to donate to my church’s collection of presents for children who can’t afford books, I suddenly recall the Christmas, sixty years ago, when the girls from my grade four class visited the orphanage in Buffalo.
Now all during our childhood we had been warned that if we didn’t behave we would end up at Father Baker’s. I know now what I didn’t know then. Far from being a tyrant who punished children relentlessly, who harbored delinquent fugitives, who was a figure whose abode was to be avoided at all cost, Father Baker was a saintly man who had died long before. His work rescuing abandoned children, at a time when thousands of infant bones from babies cast away by unwed mothers, were found in the waters off Buffalo, eventually led to the founding of institutions for the homeless and destitute that still serve Buffalo today.
So we had to be reassured that we were not going to that orphanage but to another where innocent little girls who had lost their parents—we assumed though death—were living peacefully under the watchful guidance of faithful and gentle nuns like our own teachers.
We started to get ready before Thanksgiving. We had lots of meetings. Being only nine years old or so, we had never been to a meeting except for Girl Scouts. Our trip to Buffalo, our helping those whom we came to consider “the poor” seemed far more important than learning how to tie knots or bake pies, which we did at Scouts.
Now I had never seen a poor person, let alone an orphan. I knew that in different parts of Niagara Falls where we lived there were “bad” neighborhoods. And some of the girls at school wore the same dress every time we were allowed to be out of our uniform. But that was about the extent of my experience of people whose means were far less than my own.
I have to admit, I didn’t know any rich people, either. Sometimes on Sunday after church, my father would take us for a drive. We passed big, fancy houses in Lewiston or on Grand Island, but the only one we ever went into belonged to my Uncle Sammy, whose real name was Salvatore and who looked like a genuine Italian with a little mustache and of whom I was completely afraid. I don’t remember why.
Anyway, at our meetings we discussed people who had less than us and what they might like that we could give them. We talked about clothes, but how could we know the sizes? We talked about candy and other things to eat, but how would we find out what was allowed in the institution? And we talked about books. To me, that seemed a very exciting gift, but a lot of the others thought that would be boring and that giving books would be like suggesting
that the orphans should be working harder in school.
In the end, we settled on dolls. My mother made a beautiful outfit for the doll I was to bring. It was red velvet, a gown with a cape that had a hood made of fake white fur. It had a matching purse and little red shoes that she made by covering the doll’s feet with fabric. I was almost sad to wrap this doll because I was so proud of the beautiful job my mother had done that I didn’t want to hide it with tissue paper. All the way to Buffalo, I held it in my lap and when we got to the orphanage, I was still holding it.
The orphanage must have been the biggest building I had ever seen. I thought it looked like a castle. It was red stone with towers and balconies and a driveway that curved up from the street under a wide canopy of what looked like carved stone.
The noisy chatter that had accompanied us all the way from Niagara Falls fell into a hush as we pulled up to huge wooden doors like the ones we’d seen in storybooks about Cinderella the night she met the prince. These doors were carved like the canopy was with clouds from which angels peeked at all who entered.
As we stood in awe, Sister Mary Martha, the day’s leader of our journey, reached as high as she could, took in her small hand a huge brass circle from its resting place on the door, then let it down with a resounding smack.
Now of course we had been prepared in what we thought was every way for this mission of mercy. We stood in two straight and silent lines while we waited for what seemed like eternity before the door creaked open and Sister Mary Martha’s Buffalo twin nun stood there, smiling and beckoning us in.
We expected to be impressed by the size and ornate decoration of the huge wood-clad hall. We were. We expected to be charmed by a giant Christmas tree covered with lights and ornaments. We were. We expected to be welcomed by five or six friendly nuns. We were. We expected to see lines of uniformed girls standing in an orderly display of welcome and—of course—gratitude. We didn’t.
Instead, before we could even get our bearings in the large and forbidding hall, we heard the racket of yelling voices, the pounding of eager feet down some long hallway. And then we felt it. Countless hands pulling each of us from different directions, girls screaming as they grabbed at our clothes, knocked us off balance and—above all—scrambled to get hold of the packages we carried.
Shocked, we stood still, though our hostesses, twenty little girls with the power of a multitude, swarmed around us, taking everything we had: the gifts we had so carefully wrapped, the “refreshments” we had discussed for so many weeks.
Our daintily frosted cookies were jammed into mouths when they weren’t being fought over and landing on the floor that, absurdly, I noticed was made of beautiful marble stars and crosses in all sorts of shades of pale red, gold and gray.
Sister Mary Martha clapped her hands. It took us a minute to recognize the sound but when we did, we lined up as we had rehearsed, getting out of the way of flying cookies, discarded wrapping paper, already broken dolls, ripped books, a couple with their covers torn off.
I had only a second to look down before I had to pay attention to Sister Martha’s conducting of our tiny choir. Before I did, I saw two orphans struggling between them for the doll that I had brought. Without thinking that I would get into trouble, I reached for my mother’s creation and yanked it from their hands.
It was too late. Already the red velvet dress was ripped; one of the little red shoes my mother had so carefully sewn was gone.
I felt like crying.
This was so different from what I had expected. Where were the angelic orphan faces? Where was the gratitude? Where was the honor we should have had because we had thought about somebody else’s needs instead of our own?
I tried hard to sing the Christmas carols, but all I could think about was how awful the orphans were. Even now, instead of singing with us, they were gobbling sweets and arguing over who had seen what first.
Each of them seemed to have an armful of items.
It wasn’t until we finished singing—and also praying—and were zipping up our coats that I saw a tiny girl sitting on the floor by the door. This orphan had empty arms. All the stronger, braver girls would have taken away anything she might have gotten her hands on.
As I passed the little girl--our neat line now headed for our bus-- I leaned down and handed her the doll with the ripped red dress and the single shoe.
She stopped crying. She stared at this gift. A look I couldn’t read passed her young face.
She looked up at me. I couldn’t read her expression. But whatever it had been, it suddenly changed to a look of fury. She grabbed the doll and she threw it at me as hard as she could.
All the way back, I tried to hide the fact that I was crying. And when I got home, I had to hide the fact that the beautiful doll my mother had dressed was now hidden in my coat.
It stayed there for a very long time, until it, and the true story of the trip to the orphanage were forgotten.
Until today.
I thought those awful little girls who grabbed our gifts with such abandon were greedy. I thought they lay in wait for us, like an ambush. I thought they didn’t appreciate all we had done for them.
But when I look back now, I wonder. Was their explosive response to our well-meant kindness greed?
Or was it a kind of joy?
TAKING OFF
I only signed up because my husband was constantly on my back to do something “meaningful” with my retirement.
It had been a couple of months since I’d left the library. As much as I had enjoyed most of my career, which had been spent with the silent companionship of thousands of perfectly arranged books, I was getting fed up by the end.
Quiet had become a thing of the past with noisy school groups and old people’s book clubs and so-called “clients” (which used to be “readers”) talking to each other or listening to music through ear-phones that never quite cut out the sound that was supposed to be private.
Not to mention the fact that books were constantly “disappearing”, were being dumped wherever the reader happened to be when he or she lost interest. In fact, it was pretty clear to me that books were just about to go the way of the dodo bird—not that anybody remembered what that meant.
So the minute I could get my full pension, I fled.
The two or three months I’d spent at home had been wonderful. Gardening, cooking. No pressure. No expectations.
“Look,” my husband said, “these sound interesting.” He attempted to hand me a fistful of brochures that I was sure featured all kinds of “activities”. I didn’t want an activity. I wanted peace and quiet in my own home.
“I’m beating eggs for meringue for the lemon pie,” I said. “I’ll look at them later.”
He nodded and put them down on the coffee table in the living room where I would see them when I passed by—spread out in a nice fan-shape on the table top. One thing I found I could finally do now that I didn’t have a job was to dust the furniture on a regular basis. The first couple of times had been challenging. It’s amazing how dust piles up after a month or so.
The pie was delicious. One good thing about being an inveterate reader is that you can follow instructions with no trouble. My husband loved the pie. He loved it enough to have a couple of pieces with a nice cup of tea, a snack that made him sleepy. When he woke up from his nap, he’d forgotten all about the brochures.
After I’d done the dishes, scoured the stove and sponged out the microwave, I sat down for a brief rest in the living room. My eye fell on the fan of brochures.
There was one from the university. The continuing education courses offered there sounded intimidating, even guilt-instilling. “How will we save the earth from the damage of carbon? Join this discussion on a weekly basis to learn our fate and our responsibility.”
No thanks. I didn’t want to learn how to save the earth or write a novel or do beginning calculus or study the historical implications of immigration.
I took a look at pamphlets from
the so-called “community colleges”. These courses were sure not to have any papers or exams or deep “discussions” about the fate of the world. Or so I thought.
“Multicultural quilting. Learn to sew the new history of Canada.” No. “Writing your life. See how journaling can help you live more fully.” No. “Recycling. Saving our children’s future.” No. No children.
I was about to throw the whole lot into, yes, the recycling bin, when my eye fell on one that I had missed. It wasn’t slick like the brochures from the university and the colleges with their colorful photos of happy, fulfilled students. In fact, it looked like somebody had produced it on their own computer.
This school seemed without a name, but it did have an encouraging slogan, “Learn from the experts.” It featured only four courses. One was about how to get a job at the doughnut shop of your choice. Two others were about wise grocery shopping and getting the best value at the pharmacy.
I almost tossed this pamphlet too.
Then my eye caught the title of the fourth course: “Taking off: Learn to love your body with tips from a professional.”
Now, a woman my age—that is to say on the wrong side of sixty—has pretty much come to terms with her shape. It had been a long time since I’d believed that I could do anything—beyond modest exercise and a “responsible” diet to become, as the course outline promised, “more positive and accepting about the way you look.”
The course was only four weeks long, four Tuesday mornings, and it wasn’t on any university or college campus. It was down the street at the community centre.
I decided to go for it, just in case my husband asked.
As it turned out, he saw me writing the cheque. He peeked over my shoulder to see to whom it was made out. “Wonderful,” he said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with your body.”
I smiled. I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was I guess we’re going to see about that.
The Midnight Boat to Palermo and Other Stories Page 11