Dolls Behaving Badly

by Cinthia Ritchie

  I followed Francisco back inside, and he showed me what he was working on, a series of flint points and tools excavated around Aialik Bay. “And here’s my baby.” He opened a dim drawer and brought out a padded box. “This is from the Smithsonian Institute, from a site up in Greenland. We’re comparing cold climate growth patterns.” His hands reached carefully inside the box and brought out a partially reconstructed skull and set it in my lap. The empty eye sockets stared outward, and part of the mandible was missing. “Of course this is all cast; the real set is too valuable to send across the world. Still, there’s something here, can you feel it?” He picked up my hands and placed them on either side of the cranium, which was cool and hard beneath my touch. “Now close your eyes and imagine this woman’s life. She was about twenty when she died. Stress fractures on her humerus indicate she carried heavy objects, I’d guess stone and wood. The lifespan back then was about thirty, so she died midway through, though still considerably young.” He patted my hand. “I’ll shut up now so you can concentrate.”

  I closed my eyes and waited. At first there was nothing but the sound of the air vents and muffled traffic from outside. Then I felt it, a flicker like a breath, followed by another, and another.

  “Feel that?” Francisco whispered into my hair. I could smell the musty, stale smell of his sweat, slightly moist but not repugnant. I moved closer, laid my head against his chest, listened to the secret rhythm of his heart: ta-da-dum, ta-da, dum. I thought of Laurel’s baby and then of Jay-Jay, the first time the midwife put a stethoscope to my ears and let me listen to the heartbeat, so familiar that it was as if I had been waiting to hear it my entire life.

  “It’s the sound of the past,” Francisco said. “We can all hear it; most of us just don’t know how to listen.”

  I turned and kissed him. We held each other for a while and then I asked if he’d like to see the painting that would help conclude my Woman Running series. “I’m not sure what it means,” I told him with a shrug, as if it meant nothing, as if showing it to him was as easy as smiling. I pulled off the paper, set the painting against the smudged counter, and stared at it with alarm. My Woman Running stood on top of a mountain dressed in a puffy down jacket, the wind flying her hair out from her head. Her back was half-turned so only her profile could be seen. Her hands were raised, her feet perched at the edge of the drop-off, her muscles tense. She looked poised to jump but was throwing dirty dolls off the side of the mountain. They tumbled through the air, their skirts flung up, their genitals exposed. The woman, from what could be seen of her face, wore a look of terrified joy. Behind her, a bear approached from one direction, two men with rifles from another.

  “Holy fucking Jesus.” Francisco whistled. “It’s not what I expected for an ending, yet in a way it’s exactly what I expected. It’s so visceral and primal.” He squeezed my hand and we sat and stared at my strange painting. The woman’s hair almost glowed, and there was a power in her jaw, a fierce determination, as if by hurling the dolls over the side of the mountain she was, what? Releasing her fears? Her past? All the things she wanted but knew she would never have?

  “I’m not sure who the woman is,” I told him as we unwrapped the sandwiches. “She looks a lot like me, doesn’t she? At first I thought she was my grandmother, then I thought she was my grandmother’s sister; remember I told you she was lost in the war? No one knows what happened to her, can you imagine?” Francisco set the bone into my lap, as if it were a baby. The slight weight was comforting, familiar. “I used to help Gramma write letters to relief organizations, but there was no record of Lizzie.”

  My sandwich lay next to the bone. It was an odd juxtaposition, something ancient and something modern. I could hear Francisco’s breath, the slight wheeze when he exhaled; he must have been catching a cold. I clutched the bone tighter to my belly, hoping it would speak, tell me the secrets of life. I sat with it for a long time. When I looked up, everything appeared drearier and shabbier.

  “I’m getting old,” I said. “I’ll be forty in two years.”

  “I’m forty-four,” Francisco said. “You’ve never asked, by the way.”

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It’s just that I thought I’d know more by now.”

  “Sometimes,” he said as he leaned forward, as he began to take me in his arms, “I carry around a piece of bone in my pocket or sock.” His mouth was warm, warm. “It makes me feel less alone,” he whispered against my breast, his lips tickling.

  We are always alone. I understood that even as our bodies came together, even as they fit so naturally, even as we strained and cried out and our sweat dripped over each other and I sank so deep inside of him I swear I could trace the shape of his bones with my teeth. We are always alone. But still. Sometimes, we aren’t.

  Lesson Seven

  Moving On

  Endings aren’t easy. You have to let go, and who ever teaches you how to do that? But you did it, girlfriend, you were brave enough to look deep inside and reclaim those parts you lost or left behind. From here on, you will walk backward and forward, and every step will be bathed in the beauty of your true self.

  —The Oprah Giant

  Chapter 28

  Wednesday, March 1

  I WOKE EARLY. The sky was clear, the moon curved low in the sky as I sat in the kitchen, just me and the dog and all that quiet. I was still sitting there when Jay-Jay, all scrubbed and ready for school, slid into the chair next to me.

  “Meriwether Lewis killed himself,” he said as he reached for the cereal box. “You know, Lewis and Clark? Three years after he got back, though some people think he was murdered.” He munched thoughtfully. “He couldn’t handle his job after being out in the wild. Mr. Short says he was ill-suited for bureaucracy.”

  “Like Thoreau,” Stephanie yelled from the living room. “They say he totally died a virgin but everyone treats him like a god. Then there’s poor Emily Dickinson and all those snide remarks about her editor.”

  Jay-Jay ignored her and kept talking. “He was staying at this inn and there was a guy that didn’t like him…”

  I nodded and stuck four pieces of bread into the toaster. Today was the day I had to drop my paintings off at the gallery, and I needed the comfort of toast.

  “…but they didn’t do a very thorough investigation,” Jay-Jay was saying. “They didn’t have CSI back in those days. They didn’t even know about fingerprints.”

  “Or germs,” I said.

  “I think he was murdered,” he continued, as if I had never spoken. “’Cause who is going to shoot themselves two or three times?”

  With that he grabbed his books and went out to the living room to wait for Stephanie. After they left, I carried my paintings out to the car. Each one was lovingly covered with brown packaging paper, the edges folded and taped as if gift wrapped. I pulled down the backseat and stacked them carefully, remembering how I used to strap Jay-Jay in his car seat, how I checked the latch two and three times, worried that it might come undone, that I might lose him. I locked the car (in case someone was waiting to steal my work), then went back inside and pulled on my hat and scarf.

  Before I could drop off my paintings, I had to suffer through my newspaper interview. I had fretted for hours over what to wear. Francisco, who has been interviewed by national magazines, said to wear whatever reflected the tone of the story. I had no idea what this meant, so I asked Joe, who often appears in the newspaper chiding people for careless behavior after a bear attack.

  “Speak definitively,” he said. “Reporters try to get you to say what they want you to say, so don’t let them lead you on.”

  All of this terrified me, and when I showed up at the newspaper, my hands were clammy with sweat. The lobby was high ceilinged, with a security guard sitting behind the desk. I was given a visitor badge and directions to the newsroom. Inside was a madhouse of phones ringing, computers beeping, and people talking and shouting. James was younger than I expected, and had blaring red hair and freckles
across his face.

  “Carla!” He stood up and shook my hand. “Let’s go somewhere quieter.” I followed him down the hallway to a cafeteria area with large windows. “I apologize for not being able to meet at your house.” He stopped at the far table. “I have short deadlines and need to turn this around.”

  “That’s okay,” I murmured, imagining this man in our trailer noticing the ripped linoleum, the sagging furniture, the mismatched dishes. “The house was kind of a mess.”

  The interview began better than I expected. James’s questions were easy, and the more I talked about myself, the more relaxed I became. I balked when he mentioned my dirty dolls. “I, ah, well…” I paused and then thought, The hell with it, and so I told him the truth. I told him that I lived in a trailer, worked as a waitress, and was a single parent, and one night while looking for ways to make extra money, I came across Thinking Butts and Boobs’s contest announcement and entered. I told him how I kept this hidden for years, how I was afraid what people would think, how it felt to work on the dolls late at night when everyone was asleep: how freeing it was, and how it opened up something inside of me, as if by confronting taboos I was able to knock down the spaces of my own fears and limitations.

  “What about the sexual components?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you making a statement behind the sex, or using the sex to make a statement?”

  “Ah, both,” I said. “I mean, sex is everywhere, and it influences everything we do. Yet we have to pretend that it isn’t there and that we’re using our heads and our logic, when we’re actually reacting on primitive urges we can’t really control. It’s kind of absurd, when you think about it. In this day and age, when we’re supposedly so liberated, a woman still can’t like sex too much or she’s labeled a slut. Yet if she doesn’t like it enough, she’s labeled frigid.”

  “So you consider yourself sexually liberated?”

  “I don’t even know what that means. Does any women really know what it means to be sexually liberated, when we all model our behavior around the desires of men?”

  I had no idea where my ideas were coming from. It was as if all of the time I had been working on my dirty dolls and painting I had secretly been filing words away, hoarding them in my skull until it was time to use them again. By the time the interview was over, I was exhausted. I drove like mad to the gallery, where Betty Blakeslee was waiting. She didn’t look pleased.

  “A man with large feet dropped off a bone,” she said. “I hope it’s not authentic. I don’t have the paperwork for human remains.”

  “Francisco is an anthropologist,” I said, as if that explained it. “Besides, it’s not real, it’s a cast of this woman who lived—”

  “Spare the gruesome details.” She nodded at my paintings. “Take those to the back, Timothy is waiting. Chop, chop.” She clapped her hands as if to hurry me along.

  “Good stuff.” Timothy whistled as he tore off the wrappings. “Color scheme is justified, and these figures speak to the alter ego.” He closed one eye and then the other. “There’s this underlying sadness or grief…Whoa, what’s that you’re holding?”

  “A bone.”

  He waited for more.

  “A skull from a woman who lived in Iceland centuries ago. Her bones were discovered during road construction.”

  “Can I touch it?”

  “It’s only a cast,” I said, almost apologetically.

  He reached over, smoothed his hand across the edge. “Pow-er-ful.” He smelled his hand, as if for verification. “Maybe I should work in bone, can you dig it? Animal bones reaching toward the mythical heavens.” I pulled the bone protectively toward my chest and hurried off to the bathroom, which was one of those one-room multisex types with no stalls. I placed the bone on the toilet, where it stared at me with blank eye sockets as I washed my hands. When I turned around a young woman with my grandmother’s eyes sat smoking on the toilet, the bone placed securely on her lap.

  “So you’re the artist,” she said, and I knew right away this was Lizzie, my grandmother’s sister, the one who was lost in the war. “I thought you would be taller. And bustier.” She had a slight, musical accent, nothing like my grandmother’s guttural English. She was thinner, too, with the athletic build of a dancer. She puffed on her cigarette, which emitted no smoke, and sighed.

  “I used to draw, did Anka tell you?”

  “Who’s Anka?”

  “She changed her name?” She barked out a laugh. “Anka was always the storyteller.”

  “Gramma? Her name was Bethany because the midwife—” I stopped suddenly; how was it that I had never realized Bethany wasn’t a Polish name? “I suppose your name isn’t Lizzie, either.”

  “It’s Elka, but people call me Lizzie.” She paused to rearrange her legs. How odd that both she and my grandmother had chosen to come back in a bathroom? How many ghosts sit on toilet seats?

  “Anka thinks I left because I was worried about Mama’s safety, but really it was because of a boy. Jerzy was older and in the Żegota, the Polish resistance. He had higher aims than love; he was trying to save lives. But I was barely sixteen. I had never been with a man before; I couldn’t think straight.

  “I followed him around the country, sleeping in fields and wading through the underground sewer tunnels; often I was the only girl. When he asked if I would carry papers to Warsaw, I brushed off the dangers. I was sure his love would keep me safe, I was that silly.

  “The mind is a terrible thing, Carla. It can make you believe whatever you want.” She sighed. “For months I travel back and forth to Warsaw on the trains smuggling papers in my coat lining. Things in the city are terrible, many are people dying, and many more are hungry. The ghetto is hellish but it’s not so good for us Poles, either—we are being squeezed from both sides, the Russians and the Nazis; there is little left for us.

  “A few weeks before Christmas I am stopped as I get off the train. Maybe someone turns me in, who knows? So many people are starving. The Germans make rules about food rations, maybe 250 calories for Jews, 650 for Poles, over 2,000 for Germans. Turning in Jews and the resistance is good money. You think, Oh, I would never do that. But your son or daughter is starving, think of what you might do, eh?

  “They grab my coat, rip the lining, and it all falls out: fake birth certificates and German citizenship papers. I know I am dead and it is going to be bad; they are not going to do it quick. I push away and run, zigzagging the way Jerzy told me, so the bullets will have a harder time catching me. It is the strangest thing, running like that, it is like I run forever, and even though I am scared, I also feel the peace, as if everything in my life has led up to this moment of me running. The first bullet hits me in the side, it is a burning pain, and then two more in my leg and hip. I keep running, and then I am down in the snow; it is red—how did the snow get red? I am crawling and there is a light in front of me, and so much warmth down my sides, like angels heating my skin, and right before it goes dark I think, Now Anka will live.”

  My aunt folded her hands around the bone. I waited for more but she appeared to be done. “Gramma waited all those years,” I told her. “She kept the kitchen light on so you’d be able to fix yourself something to eat.”

  She looked over at me and sighed again. “I couldn’t visit Anka. It would have destroyed her. Yes, this is true. We cannot always handle the things we think we want.”

  “So you had to tell me? The day before my opening?”

  “You wanted to know. You asked in your paintings. A woman running with those funny little dolls.” She stood up, set the bone back on the toilet seat, and peered at herself in the mirror again. “What do you think of my hair?”

  “You’re dead,” I snapped. “Who’s going to see you?”

  “That is no reason not to look my best.” She sounded so much like Laurel that I wanted to slap her.

  “But you’re, you’re…” I stopped and took a breath. “You tell me this tragic story of dy
ing young and then worry about your hair?”

  “It happened a long time ago.” She shrugged. “If I did not die by the Germans, probably I die by the Russians or starve. People ate grass and tree bark. We were so hungry for so long. That is why Anka kept herself so fat.”

  I stared at her in disbelief.

  “How I die, that is just part of my history. It is not so very much, really.” She turned her head slightly. “It is not my face you have painted,” she said. “Many women are running.”

  Her hand reached for the doorknob.

  “You can’t just leave,” I screamed. “You can’t tell a story like that and just leave.”

  The next thing I knew Betty Blakeslee was shaking me, and I opened my eyes to her face, so close I could see the tiny hairs beneath her face powder. “If you’re taking drugs please don’t flush them down the toilet,” she said. “The last girl caused a flood.”

  “I fell asleep.” I pulled myself up off the cold bathroom floor. “I was talking to my aunt and fell asleep.”

  Betty Blakeslee glanced around the room and sighed. “Preshow jitters. November’s artist collapsed in the middle of the street and was almost hit by a bus. Imagine the lawsuit.” She marched toward the door. “He was a bleeder, and anemic, too. I was hoping you would be normal but I suppose that’s too much to ask.”

  The door slammed and I was alone with the skull bone again. I watched it out of the corner of my eye as I washed my hands, willing it to bring back my aunt, but of course that didn’t happen. It must have been a dream—the idea that my aunt had been part of the Polish resistance was preposterous. Things like that didn’t happen in my family.

  I carried the bone back to the gallery space, where Timothy Tuppelo was busily shuffling my paintings around the room. “The order isn’t that important,” he said, as if I had never left. “Most people have the attention span of a fish. What they need are small, isolated moments.” He grabbed my shoulder and yanked me to the right. “That wall?” He pointed to a bare space in the corner. “You want to make sure that each turn reveals a strong piece. Art clientele are snobs and first impressions are everything.”