We had just arrived at my grandparents’ big house in Pueblo, Colorado. It was a hot July day that made the tall elms outside the open front door buzz with the electric sounds of insects. The grown ups were busy talking in the living room, their ice clinking in glasses. My older brother jumped up and down because he wanted someone to go outside with him.
I slipped away. Nobody noticed.
At four, I felt very small in that house. I ran up the grand living room staircase that curved into a long green hallway, up two more staircases and through a door that I knew led to the attic playroom with its grooved dark-wood floor. The room’s warm air had the familiar smell of wool and mothballs. I opened the white toy chest against the wall and there they were, the three of them, tangled together with doll clothes and doll shoes and stray toys. I carefully took them out, one by one. I hadn’t seen them for a whole year. I touched their chipped lids that clicked open and shut on blue doll eyes; I put my pinky in their pudgy porcelain hands. I kissed their tiny rose-puckered lips.
These dolls weren’t like the squishy, baby-clothes-wearing rubbery ones I had at home that came in pink, plastic cellophane boxes. These were grown-up girls dressed like no one I had ever seen, with important lives and big thoughts. In the worn paint and porcelain of their limbs, in their clothes’ age-stained fabrics and velvet cow-licked from years of touch, in the mechanical iris stripes of their eyes, these three dolls were real, and alive. When I hugged them, the wrinkled organdy that pressed against my neck felt like breath.
I rearranged their velvet hats, combed my fingers through their tangles of mohair floss and studied their gold-slippered feet. I laid all their outfits on the floor: mended petticoats over yellowed puffs of tulle, sealskin capes with real fur collars, gingham dresses, seersucker high-waisted sun shorts with blue anchor buttons, lace aprons, plaid picnic dresses, wool riding suits. My favorite took the center spot: a tiny blue taffeta gown, as delicate as a pressed flower.
Three flights below I heard a screen door slam and my mother’s voice in a strange, high pitch. I heard footsteps across floors, which matched the beat of the faint tick-tock of the attic’s old clock. I heard my name again and again, muffled by the dust that floated down from above.
“Do you love me?” I asked the silent orbit of dolls around me.
They smiled with outstretched arms and answered yes from quiet lips.
From an unintentionally creepy 1960s children's book called "Amy's Doll"
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