Dolls Behaving Badly

by Cinthia Ritchie

  “Ask me some spelling words while we’re waiting for breakfast but make sure you pronounce them right. I don’t want my brain messed up so early.” Jay-Jay was favored to place high in the upcoming Alaska State Spelling Bee and had been memorizing spelling words for weeks.

  “Anaglyph,” I said. “Chinchilla. Brachylogy. Acropodium.”

  Jay-Jay spelled them all without a hitch.

  “How long have you been practicing?” I worried he was studying too hard. “You don’t have to win, you know? We love you no matter how you spell.”

  “I know that,” he said. “Ask three more but don’t go in order.

  “Cetology. Axunge. Blatherskite.”

  “Did you know,” Jay-Jay said after he finished zipping through his words, “that a blatherskite is an incompetent person who talks too much?”

  “You trying to tell me something, mister?” I leaned over and ruffled his head.

  “Mom!” He jerked away. “Words are funny, aren’t they?”

  I told him that they most certainly were and to please run down the hall and wake his aunt for a special breakfast treat. When Laurel straggled in, we all sat down to a surprisingly pleasant meal. Stephanie read her poem and Laurel talked about the cute crib she had seen at Burlington Coat Factory, and the apple cakes filled our mouths and melted against our tongues, and each word we spoke tasted of burned sugar.

  Gramma’s Szarlotka (Polish Apple Cakes)

  6 peeled apples, chopped

  ½ cup sugar

  2 big handfuls raisins

  2 handfuls almonds

  2 eggs

  3 large handfuls flour

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  Splash almond extract

  Splash cinnamon and nutmeg

  ½ cup brown sugar

  Preheat oven to 400˚. Throw everything into a big bowl, push up your sleeves, and knead like crazy. Pour into a pan, cover with brown sugar, and bake about 45 minutes. Tuck a napkin under your chin and eat with a large spoon. Need extra sugar? Plaster the top with whipped cream or Cool Whip. Share with good friends and family. Laugh. Always have seconds.

  Lesson Six

  The Hard Task of Happiness

  So you think you want to be happy? Sure you do! But looking for happiness is like shopping for a swimsuit in the middle of January. The stores are loaded with cashmere sweaters, and the few swimsuits to be found are the wrong size, the wrong color, or the wrong style for your figure. Here’s what most people don’t realize about happiness. That it’s hard work. That the quest can leave you exhausted. That once you find it, there’s no guarantee it will still fit the following year.

  —The Oprah Giant

  Chapter 22

  Friday, Feb. 3

  I SAT IN THE KITCHEN in a Francisco-induced haze. Last night we had cuddled in his car and kissed until my mouth ached and my lips puffed up, until my head swooned and all I could see were colors swirling my eyelids: pinks and pale yellows, blues with their edges muted soft.

  Then the phone rang, and I lunged for the receiver, sure it was Francisco. An unpleasant nasal voice filled my ear instead.

  “Clara Richards? This is Betty Blakeslee over at Artistic Designs. My apologies for calling so early but the eggshelled dick collapsed last night and we had to call in a cleaning crew.”

  “It’s, you know, um, Carla,” I sputtered. Betty Blakeslee had the power to reduce me to a blabbering idiot.

  “The artist wanted to change the show to a Humpty Dumpty mosaic, but I put my foot down and told him to get his dick out of my gallery.”

  “Well, of course,” I blathered.

  “We’re out a show for March and have no time to look for anyone else. Our fliers have to go out by next Thursday. Timothy will contact you about the artist statement for your collection of…” She grappled to find the right word.

  “Dirty doll paintings,” I said. “The dolls are included as a subtext emphasizing the plight of—”

  “Just make the deadline and we’ll get along fine,” she sighed. “I’ll need ten to twelve quality pieces by the end of February.”

  After she hung up, I stood in the middle of the kitchen, unable to move.

  “Mom?” Jay-Jay had come in from his bedroom and now tugged at my sleeve. “Your face is bloodless.”

  I sat down in a chair and smiled weakly. “I’m okay, honey.”

  He ran out to the living room, where I could hear him rousing Stephanie from the couch. “Wake up. Mom is totally vamping out.”

  Stephanie staggered into the kitchen, her hair matted, poetry stanzas smeared over her arms. “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. R, you in there?” She waved her hands in front of my face. I smiled a dumb, loopy smile.

  “I got it,” I said in a faraway voice. “The giant dick collapsed. I fucking got it.”

  “Do you think we should call my dad?” Jay-Jay said, worried.

  Stephanie leaned closer until I could smell her stale, morning breath. “She’ll be okay. I think it’s something about her art.”

  “Betty Blakeslee,” I murmured. “On the phone. Got. The. Show.”

  “Oh-my-god!” Stephanie squealed. “She got the show,” she cried to Jay-Jay. “Do you know what that means, Mrs. R? We are both going to be totally famous.” She paused to spread cream cheese over a bagel. “Everything comes true if you work hard enough,” she told Jay-Jay. “My dream of meeting Tobias Wolff? It will totally happen. Like, it might not happen the way I imagine, but it will happen. Oh, wow, Mrs. R, this is so totally huge for you!”

  I told Sandee about the show during our first cig dig. It was a brutal shift, and neither of us was in a good mood. She was happy for me, but I could tell she was distracted.

  “Have you heard anything from Toodles yet?” I asked.

  Sandee slumped against the wall. “I haven’t called back. She’ll probably charge in here looking for me. She seems the pushy type.”

  “Determined, not pushy. There’s a difference.”

  “I suppose.” She looked so miserable that I decided to cheer her up with my own insecurities.

  “It’s hard to be happy about the show when I know I got it by default.” I tucked in my blouse and prepared to go back out to the dining room floor. “If the collage guy’s penis hadn’t collapsed, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “So?” Sandee grabbed a tray and wiped off the crumbs. “Life isn’t fair. A lot of people get things by default.”

  “The other artists will sneer. ‘Oh,’ they’ll say, ‘she only got the show because the other guy’s dick went limp.’”

  “Stop.” Sandee’s hand covered my mouth. It smelled of tequila and salt. “You worked your ass off for this. Look at your hands.” She grabbed my left hand and we both stared at the chapped skin, the swollen knuckles, the burns and scars from working on my doll art. “You deserve this, Carla. We’ll go out tonight, we’ll celebrate. Because you’ve friggin’ earned it.”

  Later that night Sandee came by the trailer to pick me up for our night out. On the drive downtown, she veered off onto Thirteenth Avenue and headed down a curved side street. “I’m, ah, picking up Joe,” she said. “I had told him before we’d go out to eat tonight, so you’ll have to meet him.” She sounded unhappy at the prospect.

  “I thought he was mad about the Randall mess.”

  “He is, but he’s working on it. That’s what he said, ‘I’m working on my anger,’ as if he had just finished reading a self-help book. That was after I told him about Toodles. ‘Oh, a private eye,’ he giggled, and I almost smacked him. He thinks it’s an old guy in a wrinkled suit, like Columbo. I didn’t mention it was a woman. I didn’t want to push the issue.”

  Joe was waiting outside a nondescript blue house. “Hey,” he said to me as he climbed in the backseat, “you must be Carla. I’ve heard so much about you.” He stuck his hand through the space between the two front seats and we shook as Sandee backed out of his driveway. “Sandee says you two are like sisters. That’
s cool—you can never have too many sisters. I have five myself.”

  “Five? I can barely handle one,” I told him.

  “Well, they’re all back in Ohio.” Joe was tall and solid, with a friendly, bearded face and dark brown eyes. He wore a black flannel jacket, jeans, and huge leather boots. “Heard you’ve got a show next month. Congrats. Betty Blakeslee is one tough lady. She hit a moose a couple of years ago, totaled her car, and stood out in the snow, forehead bleeding, shoulder hanging all crooked, and know what she says? ‘I hope that moose had liability insurance.’” He and Sandee laughed as if this were the funniest thing in the world.

  By the time we left the restaurant after our dinner, I staggered from too many glasses of wine. The sidewalk swayed deliciously as Sandee grabbed the keys from her purse and steered me toward the car. I slumped against the window while she drove to Joe’s house and watched them walk to the doorstep, lingering for a kiss that made me suck in my breath, even in my sorry state. When she got back into the car she cleared her throat.

  “Carla,” she said as she pulled out onto Arctic Boulevard. “You aren’t going to like what I have to say but I need to say it anyway.” She braked for a light and looked over at me. Her lip trembled lightly. “I love him, okay?” She stepped on the gas and squealed across the intersection. “I hope you’re happy now.” She cut off a blue sedan and grazed the bumper of a brown SUV. “I hope you’re fucking happy that I’m so miserably in love.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

  And I was, too.

  Letters forwarded from Jimmie Dean

  (Letters #9, #10, and #11)

  Dear Dirty Girl:

  I love you nasty thing please send your wrinkled pants and shirts I have an ironing fetish and will make them smooth and crisp.

  This will cost you nothing but my love.

  Arnold J. Reynolds

  Bliss, Idaho

  Dear Really Real Doll creator:

  I am a freshman at the University of Florida working on an alternative women artist project.

  Please submit two photographs of the back of your head to the e-mail address below.

  Sincerely,

  Jessica Boogey

  Dear You:

  Did you get the dirty underpants I sent? Please send pictures of you in my underwear. I’ll give you $20 for each one.

  If you sit on the toilet I’ll send $40.

  Sincerely,

  Bille Fosterhood Jr.

  Highbee, Missouri

  Sunday, Feb. 5

  When good things happen, they don’t necessarily leave you happy. That is a myth, a mistake in thinking, according to the Oprah Giant.

  “Happiness can’t be measured by how you look or how much money you make,” she wrote in next week’s blog (I snuck a peek ahead, hee-hee). “If you think that job promotion is going to make you happy, think again. You might be able to afford nicer outfits, but you’ll be stuck in your same own self.”

  Maybe that’s why I feel so ornery and unsatisfied, so anxious and irritable. I’ve finally been awarded an art show, something I’ve dreamed of for years. Yet I still have a leaky toilet, a dog that won’t stop chewing my shoes, and a pregnant sister hogging my bedroom. My life is the same; the art show simply adds more worry to the mix.

  “You’re totally looking at it wrong,” Stephanie said as she made coffee this morning before church. With her odd clothes, her eccentric stories, her badass background, she’s the only one of us who sees fit to visit god on a bimonthly basis. “You don’t have to totally worry about the show. It will be, whether you fret or not. Why waste the energy?”

  She sounded suspiciously like the Oprah Giant. “Have you been peeking at my laptop?” I asked her.

  She gathered up her purse and slipped on a pair of clunky-heeled boots. “Okay if I borrow the car?” I pointed toward the cupboard. She picked the keys up and then paused at the door. “I’ll light a candle for you, Mrs. Richards, but I think it’s going to take way more than that.”

  I was still feeling down when Francisco picked me up for a run on the Campbell Creek Trail. “You look like shit,” he said. “You sick?”

  I wiped my hand across my chin, where I was getting a pimple. “You’d think I’d be happy about the show, but I’m not. I mean I am, but I’m not. I wonder if I’m a chronic under-happier, like an underachiever.”

  “It’s complicated.” Francisco lifted the lid of the cookie jar. “Got any snacks? I forgot my Sport Beans.”

  I heard Laurel’s feet padding down the hallway, so I pushed Francisco toward the arctic entryway. “Out, now!” I hissed. Laurel had woken me the night before to share her plans of eating her placenta after the birth, and I wasn’t eager to hear her repeat the news. Francisco had Abraham and Mamie with him, so I brought Killer. They sat sizing each other up in the backseat. When we got to the trailhead, Francisco turned off the car and tucked the key in a clever pocket at the waistband of his expensive running tights. “Maybe you’re overthinking it,” he said. There was something in his voice that I didn’t like. “A show doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

  I watched as he pulled on a pair of lightweight gloves and wanted to kick him. “How far you want to go?” I asked. I wasn’t much of a runner. I preferred Rollerblading, where the wheels did most of the hard work.

  “A couple of miles.” He unzipped his jacket and pulled on a bright yellow Windbreaker. “You wearing that?” He nodded at my fleece top. “You’ll be too warm. A tech shirt and Windbreaker would be sufficient. The rule is: if you’re not cold the first mile, you’re overdressed.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Running Man.” My voice was sarcastic, but as we headed down the hill at the beginning of the trail, I felt better. The snow crunched beneath our shoes and the cold air felt good on my face. Francisco kept the pace light and I ran slightly behind him, thinking of colors, not the whites and grays and tans of the winter woods we ran through but bold and vibrant purples and yellows, strung-out-on-a-mood shades, Picasso’s crazy mind colors.

  “To the left, to the left,” Francisco yelled, pulling me out of my daydreams and over to the deeper snow on the side of the trail. Up ahead, a moose cow with a yearling calf lumbered toward us on their ridiculous legs, their awkward knobbed knees looking too insubstantial to hold their weight. “Grab the dogs and stay back,” he warned, holding his arm out as if to shield me. The cow lurched closer, stopped, blinked, and turned back to the alder tree she had been munching on. There were faint white markings around her mouth, which looked bored and slightly laconic, like a teenager.

  “Watch the calf,” Francisco hissed. It was almost near enough to touch, and Killer, Lincoln, and Mamie strained so hard against my grip that my fingers ached. “Back,” Francisco said. “Slowly.” We inched our way backward on the trail, the cow lifting her head and watching us suspiciously.

  “Shit, wish I would have brought my camera. My mom’s got a thing about moose.” Squatting there in ankle-deep snow, I realized that I knew very little about him. That’s the way it is in the beginning, you think you know the person but there is something more to learn, and something else after that. It’s like walking down a hallway with doors on either side. Sooner or later you have to decide to keep walking or open each door and find out what’s inside. Francisco helped me up, and we brushed snow off our legs, turned around, and headed back where we had come from. “We’ll take the Coyote Trail loop and head out behind the science center,” he said. I released the dogs and we started running again. “Once, a few miles up from here, I was charged by a cow when I was on my bike,” Francisco said, and I grunted. Such stories were commonplace in Alaska. Moose were touchy and temperamental, and most folks were more cautious around them than around bears. My favorite story was about a woman who had been bitten in the ass as she walked down the street. I opened my mouth to share this with Francisco, but he turned and told me that I shouldn’t be afraid of success, that I needed to accept my potential.

  “Potential? You sound like Dr. P
hil. ‘Go forth and accept thy potential,’” I mocked in a deep voice. “If it were that easy, do you think I’d be struggling?”

  Francisco shrugged. “Maybe you like to struggle. Maybe you’ve gotten so used to it that it’s a comfort.”

  Well, that was easy for him to say. He owned a nice house, drove a decent car, made a decent salary—what the fuck did he know about eating generic spaghetti sauce? A sly voice in my head said that if I hadn’t spent so much on art supplies over the years I could probably afford better spaghetti sauce, but I ignored it and concentrated on resenting Francisco. “You wouldn’t last a day in my life,” I snapped.

  “You’re not so special,” he said. “You aren’t even that poor.”

  I didn’t know what to say so I kicked him instead, a clever little kick that looked like a trip, but he knew better. “Ouch,” he yelled. “You did that on purpose.”

  “I slipped,” I protested.

  “You did not. That was deliberate. I can’t believe you kicked me.” He sprinted away before I could defend myself.

  “Go faster, see if I care.” I was furious. I wish the moose had bitten him in the ass. “Killer,” I yelled but she had taken off with the other dogs after Francisco, and I was alone. I could vaguely make out Francisco loping up the last hill, looking as smooth and relaxed as someone from a Nike commercial. I decided to hate him. What did he know about my life? What did he know about me? I fumed and stumbled down the trail, nodding at a couple on skis and moving over for three women walking abreast. When I got back to the car, Francisco sat inside reading an anthropology magazine. The passenger side was locked. I knocked on the window and he looked up in feigned surprise, but I knew he had locked it on purpose. We had both been through enough relationships that we were well practiced at such nonchalant battle maneuvers.