Dolls Behaving Badly

by Cinthia Ritchie

  “Car-lita,” he sang, drawing out a fake Spanish accent. “Feliz Navidad, my Mexican friend.” He raised his water glass to me and then set it down and patted the booth next to him. “Take a load off those feet, honey.” He grinned. He seemed in especially high spirits.

  “I can’t sit with customers.” I leaned across the table from him. “Mr. Tims would have my ass.”

  “And what a fine ass it is.” He leaned forward. “I’m drunk but don’t tell anyone, okay? The office party got out of hand.”

  “I thought you were up north.”

  “We celebrated on the plane down from Barrow. I was supposed to get off in Fairbanks.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Scenery’s better down here.” He laughed and handed me his menu. “Know what I’m in the mood for? A tuna melt with Velveeta cheese, like my mom used to make. With dill pickles.”

  “Closest thing we’ve got is shrimp fajitas. Should I order—”

  “Pickles!” He smacked the table with his palm. “I forgot to ask what happened to your sister.” He lowered his voice. “Did she go through with it?”

  “No, she’s having it.” I began to move away; Table Eleven was waiting impatiently for its check, and Table Nine needed more drinks. “I have to go. Do you want anything?”

  “Nah, I have to get back to the airport. I’m on standby. The place is packed, but I have Gold Wings status.”

  “See you.” I turned and dropped off the check at Table Eleven, pulled the empty glasses from Table Nine, and headed for the bar. I never made it. Francisco grabbed me, pulled me past the hostess station and out the front door. Snow blew across my face and my skirt flapped against my hips.

  “There’s my cab.” He pointed toward a taxi idling across the street, then grabbed my shoulders and stared at me hard. I was terrified that he would kiss me but he traced my cheek with his finger. His touch was surprisingly gentle. “You have the damnedest bones,” he whispered. His breath smelled of alcohol and mints, and I closed my eyes, tilting my face up toward him. “Such nice bones,” he murmured. My knees wobbled, my throat tightened. When he finally kissed me, it wasn’t a kiss so much as a flutter of his lips against mine, so soft and fleeting that it reminded me of holding a hurt bird in my hand as a child, how light the wings had felt, how delicate and warm and fragile.

  “Merry, merry,” he whispered against my hair. I watched him run across the street in his ridiculous sweater. He was slightly pigeon-toed, his left leg kicking back at an awkward angle, and this caused my throat to choke up. Part of me wanted to run after him, take a chance, be brave, but I was saved by Mr. Tims.

  “Table Twelve’s bitching about the red sauce and the woman on Table Nine says the halibut’s off,” he yelled, holding the restaurant door open for me. “Christ, you’re all wet.” He brushed snow from my shoulders. “Fucking Christmas,” he said, and I followed him back to the dining room.

  “What did he say?” Sandee asked when we met in the bathroom at the end of her shift. “Did he kiss you?”

  “Sort of.” I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “Ha! Now you know how it feels. Here.” She fished a cigarette out of her pocket and handed it to me. “Marlboro—unfiltered, too. A guy at the bar brought them up from Texas.”

  “Thanks.” I held the unlit cigarette against my mouth, the sting of tobacco puckering my lips.

  “No problem.” Sandee shrugged sympathetically. “You would have done the same for me.”

  Chapter 14

  Sunday, Dec. 25

  IT’S PAST MIDNIGHT and everyone is asleep: Jay-Jay, Laurel, and Stephanie. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, Killer curled across my feet. I can see the Christmas tree lights flashing in the living room, cheery smears of blue and green, the colors Jay-Jay insisted upon this year.

  It was a good day, and it all began with the Oprah Giant’s Christmas message.

  “The holiday season is about giving,” she wrote, and this time it was in red-and-green script with candy canes dancing about the periods. “Most of us think we are giving, but we’re not. We’re merely going through the motions.”

  She asked us to list everything we planned on giving this year and then list them in correlation as to how hard it was to give. I jotted down all the gifts I had bought, and I had to admit that beside the financial aspects, everything was lightweight. Nothing altered anything inside of me or made me feel as if I were changing a life, which the Oprah Giant said was the true meaning of giving.

  “The hardest gifts are the ones that take away a piece of ourselves,” she said. “Not a monetary debt but a debt of our psyche.” She challenged us to give at least one such gift. “It might hurt,” she warned. “You might feel sad or even resentful, but don’t worry. The beauty of the universe is that when you give freely from your heart, you receive back more.”

  I was busying pondering this message when Laurel snuck up beside me.

  “Do you remember those purple mittens I used to have?” She sat cross-legged on the living room floor, where I had been sleeping on Barry’s old camping mat, my usual bed, now that Laurel had claimed my bedroom.

  “Shhhh,” I whispered, pointing up to where Stephanie snored happily from the couch.

  “Soft purple, not that hard shade they have now. Muted like a heartbeat. I wore them with my yellow coat, remember?”

  I nodded; I remembered no such thing.

  “That’s what I want for Christmas.”

  “Mittens from your childhood?” The idea appealed to me. Maybe this was what the Giant had meant. I could run to Fred Meyer tomorrow morning and buy a pair, check my good deed off the list, and be rewarded with instant karma.

  “Listen.” Laurel scooted closer until her butt nestled against my hip. “What would you do if someone said you could go back in time and change one thing? Would you do it?”

  “Jesus, I don’t know.”

  “But here’s the catch,” she continued. “You might not end up where you are today. Changing that one thing might make it impossible to get back to where you are now. But wait, you might end up somewhere better, the place you’ve always dreamed of.” Her voice rose, and she waved her hands excitedly.

  “Mom?” Jay-Jay called from his bedroom. “Can I get up now?”

  We have a rule that no presents are to be opened until seven a.m., though we never manage to stick to it. “Might as well,” I called back.

  Laurel tapped my shoulder. “Could you give up what you have now for the chance of meeting your utopia?”

  I stared at her dumbly. All I could think of was Insectopia, from the Antz movie. The ants’ paradise turned out to be the crumbs of a human picnic. I was explaining this to Laurel when Jay-Jay raced into the room, his face flushed, his pajama top turned inside out.

  “Time to organize the presents,” he yelled. Stephanie muttered but slept on. “Mom, you get the medium ones, Aunt Laurel the small ones. Me, I’ll grab the big guys. They’re probably for me anyway.”

  We grabbed presents and stacked them in piles according to the name tags. Jay-Jay’s pile was the biggest, of course; Christmas is for kids, after all. But Stephanie’s was nothing to sneeze about, either. Laurel, concerned about Stephanie’s welfare, had dragged herself out of bed last week to buy two hundred dollars’ worth of “top-notch teen clothes” at the Gap. I imagined Stephanie pairing a Gap T-shirt with a skirt made from old bath towels, or expensive low-slung jeans with a halter stitched from kitchen curtains.

  “Okay,” Jay-Jay shrieked, Killer dancing around him. “One-two-three: open!”

  He grabbed the first package, a medium-sized box from Laurel. “Wait! You gotta wake Stephanie. Everyone has to be up. It’s the tradition.”

  I reached over and shook Stephanie’s arm.

  “Huph?” she groaned. “Umpf.”

  “You need to sit up and open your eyes,” I told her. “Apparently it’s the tradition.”

  “Oh-my-god, it’s Christmas.” She flew off the couch in her men’s bo
xer shorts and sweatshirt that said, “Reindeers do it with red noses.” Her skinny legs were covered with inked fragments of poems she often wrote across her skin before falling asleep. “This is totally going to be the best holiday ever.” She sat down happily next to Jay-Jay, the Christmas lights flashing across her red-and-green-streaked hair.

  “Yours are over there.” I nodded with my head and Stephanie squealed.

  “Oh—Mrs. Richards, you shouldn’t have. You’re a single mother. You’re totally at the bottom of the economic infrastructure.”

  And so we commenced to open. We thanked and remarked and complimented and appreciated. Even Laurel seemed genuinely pleased with her gifts, most of which were for the baby, the sex of which was still undetermined, though Gramma had insisted it was a girl. Jay-Jay gave me the framed mathematical code he had fashioned out of macaroni, Laurel gave me a gift certificate to Safeway, and Stephanie handed me a book of self-published poems titled seals and smells of water. It was cheaply put together and didn’t contain any capitals; tears came to my eyes as I browsed through it.

  “I’m totally in love with E. E. Cummings this month,” she said with a blush. “Last month it was Adrienne Rich even though she’s, like, super old.”

  Jay-Jay made out with the laptop Barry and I got him, plus computer gadgets, video games, and a horrid brown sweater from Laurel that he immediately pulled on over his pajama top. Jay-Jay is like that, considerate of others’ feelings. Later, he’ll complain about this sweater, but he’ll never let on in front of Laurel.

  Hammie and Sandee showed up for dinner, though Barry wasn’t able to make it. We normally shared half days on holidays, which usually meant we ended up spending them together; it was easier that way. This year he had headed back to see his folks in Idaho, and his plane had been delayed in Seattle.

  “I’m afraid of what Joe got me,” Sandee said, as we relaxed around the table with red wine after dinner. Jay-Jay was out in the living room playing Paper Mario with Steph and Hammie.

  “Men aren’t the best shoppers,” Laurel agreed. She was drinking grape juice with seltzer water and let out a soft burp every now and then. “Junior once got me a book on sailing and I don’t even own a pair of deck shoes. Can you imagine?” She swilled half the glass before slamming it down. “Well, fuck it,” she said. “Fuck them all.” She smiled bravely with grape-stained teeth.

  Barry called a few hours later and asked if I could pick him up from the airport. His voice sounded shaky; turbulence had been bad.

  “Guy across from me shot his drink right out of his hand, all over this fat lady sitting next to him,” he said when I met him at the baggage terminal. His face was pale and he needed a shave. “Next thing you know, they was cozy and laughing. Heard him ask her out.”

  He grabbed his suitcase, which was duct-taped across the front. “How’s your mom and dad?” I asked.

  Barry sighed. “Good as can be. Dad’s thinking of retiring.”

  “He says that every year.”

  Barry grunted. Outside, the wind was sharp, the sky clear, the stars opaque in the city lights. By the time we got to the car the windshield had frosted over.

  “Gonna come over?” Barry asked.

  Another holiday tradition was that Barry and I always fucked on Christmas, during the long lull of the evening after the presents had been opened and our stomachs were bloated from too much rich, sugary food. I gripped the steering wheel and drove slowly over the icy roads until we hit the turnout area for Earthquake. I pulled in and turned toward Barry.

  “We have to stop,” I said.

  “I know.” This was his usual reply. I took Barry’s face between my palms, the face I knew so well, the one I used to trace with my tongue, the face I used to love to wake up to each morning, a lifetime ago when we were different people who wanted different things.

  “I’m stopping,” I said, leaning forward and kissing him on the mouth. His lips were chapped, and I drank in everything I once loved about him, everything that I once hated. Then I pressed my lips harder and gave him back the parts of myself that cherished him: I gave him back my adoration, my love, my belief in his stumbling goodwill.

  “But it’s Christmas.” His voice was slightly whining, with an edge of disbelief.

  “That’s why,” I said. I didn’t say more. Maybe I would tell him later, when we were older and Jay-Jay was grown and we were both married to other people. I’d tell him how leaving for good, stopping all traces of sex between us, was my gift to him. It was the one thing he needed me to do, the one thing he couldn’t do himself, so I gave him his freedom and with that the possibility of finding someone who loves him the way he deserves to be loved, fully and completely, with no holding back. I couldn’t do that when we were married. I don’t know if it was because I didn’t have it in me at the time or if he was never the man for me. It’s almost as if we were children together, and once we grew up, we looked around and wondered how in the hell we had ended up together.

  “We’ll still see each other,” I said stupidly. “We just won’t, you know. Fuck.”

  Barry didn’t say anything. His jaw was rigid and terrible.

  “Say something, damn it,” I yelled.

  He reached out and traced my cheekbone with the tip of his finger, almost the same gesture Francisco had made.

  “Remember them peanut butter cookies?” Barry said.

  My stomach lurched with grief, and suddenly I understood that this was a real gift, the kind the Oprah Giant had been talking about.

  “Yeah.” I wanted to reach out and take his hand, but I didn’t. “Those were the best cookies.”

  And they were. Because here’s a shameful secret, one shared by no one but Barry and me: I almost didn’t have Jay-Jay. I almost had a second abortion. We weren’t in a good place in our lives. We had no money, we were living in a roach-infested apartment, and I was terrified of having a child. Barry was the one who saved me. Barry, who had never stuck to anything in his life, who was the king of noncommitment. He rubbed my feet when gas pains tore through my belly, carried the TV in from the living room on those days when the nausea swirled my head and I felt marooned to my bed. He soothed me with navy bean soup and Parker House rolls, vegetarian lasagna and garlic biscuits, and later held my hair back away from my face when I threw up those very meals he cooked with such attention.

  My morning sickness never subsided after the first trimester, the way all the books promised it would, and the doctor, a cheerful young woman from Georgia, simply shrugged her shoulders and said that it happened sometimes. I quit my waitressing job, stayed home, and read romance novels with covers of brooding dark men chasing women whose boobs were about to bounce out of their dresses. I touched myself and imagined old lovers with a yearning that bordered on the obsessive.

  Meanwhile, Barry worked two jobs to save up for the baby. He had become an almost model employee, showing up on time and not hiding out in the bathroom during the more tedious chopping and dicing that took place in the beginning of each shift. He worked banquets and large weddings and volunteered for the governor’s banquet even though he wasn’t a Republican.

  At night when I felt lonely and scared and woke Barry and asked him what he would do if I died in childbirth, he said all the right things, explaining how he would have my body cremated and scattered over the beach down in Homer, and how he would tell our daughter or son all about me, and that while he might marry for the child’s sake, he would never, ever love anyone as much as he loved me. Right before I’d fall back to sleep he’d put on his bathrobe, clomp on down to the kitchen, and take four peanut butter cookies from the freezer, microwave them for fifteen seconds, and bring them up to me with a mug of milk. Barry made these cookies on the weekends, and they were sweet and rich with chunks of almonds and walnuts and just the faintest twinge of banana extract. I’d wake hours later to the smell of peanut butter against my nose, reach out my tongue, and lick the crumbs up in the dark.

  Barry’s Peanut Butter C
ookies

  1 cup margarine

  2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  2 eggs

  1½ cups crunchy peanut butter

  1 cup whole wheat flour

  1 cup white flour

  1 cup brown sugar

  1 cup white sugar

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  Pinch of salt

  ¼ cup chopped walnuts

  ¼ cup chopped almonds

  ¼ cup chopped peanuts

  Splash banana extract

  Preheat oven to 350˚. Mix margarine, vanilla, and eggs, slowly folding in peanut butter. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Slowly add to the wet mixture, along with the nuts. When the dough is smooth, roll out small balls, crisscross with a fork, and place on an ungreased cookie sheet to bake at 350˚ for 10–12 minutes. Eat while still warm and then sit back, fold your hands over your stomach like a smug little Buddha, and smile.

  Lesson Five

  Loosening the Load

  It’s time to clean out your emotional wardrobe. That cowl-necked resentment from the ’80s—good-bye! Those high-rise ambitions that pinch your waist—so long! That flirty boyfriend with last year’s hemline—​good riddance! Girlfriend, don’t stop now! Those stodgy self-concepts, those self-pitying accessories, those unbuttoned morals—​gone, gone, gone. The next time you dress, your emotional self will finally match the well-groomed person you see in the mirror.

  —The Oprah Giant

  Chapter 15

  Tuesday, Jan. 3

  “YOU GOT SOMETHIN’ UP FRONT,” the hostess told me, as I hurriedly slammed side salads onto my tray. “That blond guy? He says to give it to you ’fore you left.”

  “Francisco? He’s supposed to be in Fairbanks.”