alara | Inktober 2019 #29: Injured

It began when you were 10. You were over Lisa’s house for her birthday, and she received a doll as a gift from her grandparents. Lisa was not known for her graciousness. “Euw! This doll is so creepy!” she complained, pushing it away from herself.

“Let me see,” you said, and Lisa gave you the creepy doll, which in your opinion wasn’t creepy at all. It was a blonde little girl with very large eyes, mouth partially open and visible teeth, rosy cheeks and pale skin.

“That doll is vintage,” Lisa’s grandmother complained. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong is that this doll is ugly and creepy and weird and I don’t want it!”

“I do,” you said. “I think she’s pretty.”

“Well, then,” Lisa’s grandmother said, “Courtney can have the doll.” She smiles benevolently on you. “Go on, dear. You can keep the doll.”

You smiled graciously. “Thank you!” you said, knowing Lisa had just angered her parents and grandparents by being so ungrateful. You wanted to make them feel better. “I know Lisa just gets weirded out by dolls sometimes. She didn’t mean to be rude.”

From Lisa’s glowering expression, it was obvious that she had meant to be rude, but you’d given her an out and now that her initial reaction was past and she knew she didn’t have to keep the doll, it seemed like she’d realized the tactical error she’d made. “I’m sorry, Grandma. Courtney’s right, I kinda get scared of dolls sometimes.”

“Well, what a stupid thing to be afraid of,” Lisa’s grandmother said, but she was plainly somewhat mollified. “Here. Since you apologized, I’ll give you some money for your birthday.” She fished a five dollar bill out of her wallet. “That doll was worth a lot more than this, but I suppose this is what you’d rather have.”

“Thank you, Grandma!” Lisa said, and the birthday party went on as scheduled.

The doll was quite old, so she needed an old-fashioned name, but one that sounded nice. “Her name is Betty,” you told Lisa’s grandmother later. “She’s really pretty. I’m sorry Lisa was so mean about it.”

“I am too. That child can be so ungrateful sometimes.”

“I’ve been telling Betty that Lisa didn’t mean to be so mean, she just had a bad reaction because she’s scared of dolls. Betty understands, but she’s glad she’s going home with me instead. Dolls don’t like to live with girls who don’t like them.”

“You understand,” Lisa’s grandmother said, nodding. “Dolls have feelings too. They deserve to be with girls who’ll love them.”

“Did you have a doll who looked like this when you were young?“

Her eyes welled with unshed tears. “I did. I lost her when we moved. I’ve been checking antique stores and thrift stores for years, hoping to find her.”

“What was yours named?”

“Eleanor. I named her for a queen, Eleanor of Acquitaine. Have you heard of her?”

You said no, so Lisa’s grandmother – whose actual name was Mrs. Shapiro – talked your head off about kings and queens of England for half an hour before you got a chance to go play.

Once you were home, headed up the stairs to your room, Betty complained. “Lisa’s ugly. And mean.”

“She didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. She’s actually a very nice person. She just… is scared of dolls.” You shifted Betty in your arms so instead of lying in them like a baby, she was facing outward, her back against your chest and your arm around her middle, so she could see the others. When you opened the door, you gestured at your other dolls, the ones on your bookshelves and on your dresser. “Hello, everyone! This is Betty!”

“Hi, Betty!” the dolls chorused.

“She’s the newest addition to our family, so I was thinking we could have a tea party to welcome her.”

“Great idea!” Mandy cheered.

So you got out the tea set, and arranged all the dolls on the floor, and the dolls who didn’t get tea cups because your tea set wasn’t that big, you gave mugs or glasses from your play kitchen, and you put plastic desserts from the toy kitchen on everyone’s plates.

“This is delicious,” Kyla said. “Did you make it yourself?”

You laughed. “Oh, no, no, it’s store bought! I’m a terrible cook.”

“You got that right,” Veronica, who was sometimes kind of a jerk, said.

“Oh, oh, wow! Veronica, you’ve got to be best friends with the new girl!” Eric said. He had been a girl when you got him, but you thought it was unfair to have nothing but girl dolls, so you hacked off all his hair and put clothes on him from a GI Joe you found in the mud near the playground, although they didn’t really fit. “Betty and Veronica! Like the Archie comics!”

“Archie is stupid,” Veronica said, but mellowed a bit. “But it’s very nice to meet you, Betty.”

“We’re going to be great friends, I just know it!” Mandy said.

Betty started to almost-cry the way Mrs. Shapiro had. “You guys,” she said. “This has been the best day of my life.”

One day Mrs. Shapiro brought you six more dolls while you’re over Lisa’s house. They were all vintage, and they were all damaged, from the one whose hair was falling off to the one with one eye that wouldn’t open to the one with a cloudy white film on her eyes. “Courtney, would you be interested in these?”

“Were they yours?”

She nodded. “I think they deserve to go with a girl who will play with them. I was going to give them to Lisa, but…”

“Yeah, Lisa won’t want them. But I love them! What are their names?”

Mrs. Shapiro said some of the names and visibly struggled to remember the others. You asked her, “Why don’t you play with them anymore?”

“Well, I’m a grown woman. Grown-up women don’t play with dolls.”

“But you could if you wanted to.”

“I suppose I could, but it would be a little embarrassing.” She chuckled.

“I could bring over my tea set and some dolls and you could play dolls with me. I want to know your dolls’ personalities. It’d be rude to tell them to be completely different people just because someone new owns them.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

In the end, you went over Mrs. Shapiro’s house yourself for the tea party, which Lisa thought was weird but Lisa could think whatever she wanted. Mrs. Shapiro put out a real-life tea set and filled the cups with Kool-aid, which was more verisimilitude than you’d ever managed. During the tea party she did voices for all the dolls, Hortensia who couldn’t keep her eye open and Emily who was losing her hair and Birdie who was going blind and Renee who had no clothes, just a washcloth around her body with safety pins holding it in place and Michelle who had one shoe and Lauren who kept falling over when she was put in a sitting position. You were very grateful; it really helped to know how the dolls sounded, their voices and personalities as well as their names.

And when you saw that now you had six dolls who were injured or lacking in some way, you realized what you wanted to do.

You went to Girl Scouts to learn to sew, because Mrs. Shapiro claimed to be terrible at it and wouldn’t teach you, and your own grandma worked and didn’t have time. You told the librarian about your quest, and she ordered you a book from another library about repairing dolls. It was intended for adults, and you were nine, but you used a dictionary and struggled through it because you needed to know. Your dad suggested that rubbing alcohol on a q-tip might help Birdie’s eyes. Birdie was so very grateful to you for restoring her sight.

After that, your parents would give you thrift store dolls, broken-down dolls who needed love and care as much as the pretty new dolls at the toy stores, for every birthday and Christmas, because you told them emphatically that that was what you wanted. “No one loves the ugly dolls or the broken dolls or the creepy dolls. They need someone to take care of them. They need love.”

And you had so much love to give.

Twenty years later you learned the hard way that a shop that fixes dolls doesn’t make any money. You branched into selling high-end, high-quality toys, as well as continuing to collect and fix up vintage dolls. You sewed beautiful new clothes for them and re-glued their hair and re-attached their arms and legs. You carefully removed their eyes and polished them, attached new weights to the eyelids to enable them to open and close, and sometimes heated and re-shaped the eyes in hot water so they would fit properly in their sockets again.

You sold the dolls to any child, or any adult buying for a child, who wanted one and was willing to pay your prices, which weren’t cheap after you’d done so much restoration work. But when the day was over and you’d done the receipts and closed the books and swept the shop and locked up, you took the dolls upstairs to your living space with you, and you played with them, because dolls deserved to be played with.

Men who found out about this hobby of yours found it weird and unpleasant, so none of your relationships lasted more than a few dates. You weren’t close enough to any of your friends for them to find out. You had pen pals, fellow doll aficionados, all over the world, but you wouldn’t admit even to them that you played with your dolls. By this time you had so many that you couldn’t possibly play with them all every night, which was part of the reason you’d been willing to part with some of them back when you’d opened the store. But you did your best to make sure they were going to good homes.

Forty years later the internet had nearly destroyed you, and then saved you.

It became so easy to buy vintage dolls, you overbought. You took on employees to help you repair them, but they didn’t love the dolls like you did, so they didn’t stay your employees. Then people stopped buying from the store because it was so easy to get even vintage toys online, at much better prices than you could afford to sell at. You sold through online channels yourself, but it wasn’t enough.

You expanded your offerings to hand-crafted children’s furniture and toys, working with artisans you met at a Renaissance faire or online, reselling their work. And you moved the doll repair business online. It turned out that the number of people willing to send their beloved childhood friend to a total stranger through the mail and pay a lot of money to have her restored was much higher than you’d guessed. You picked up more employees, this time to run the store so that you could work full-time on doll repair.

Fifteen years ago you’d gotten a cat, but she died of old age, and you didn’t replace her. Your doll friends weren’t immortal – you’d had porcelain-headed dolls shatter, you’d had to reluctantly tell heartbroken women that their childhood toy had been mauled too heavily by a dog to be saved – but when age damaged them, it could be fixed. They weren’t doomed to die like living creatures were.

You made sure to make time to play with the dolls every night, no matter how busy you got. Sometimes you hardly had time to do anything but choose a lucky few, dress them in nightgowns and caps for their hair, and take them to bed with you, but you always did at least that.

And then there was the day you heard a violent crash downstairs.

You were a woman living alone. You tried not to live in fear, but you knew you were vulnerable. The sound terrified you, so you called the police, and stayed upstairs behind your bolted bedroom door with two or three of your favorite dolls reassuring you, until the cops arrived.

They called you downstairs to see what you knew.

The man had had duct tape on him, and rope, and a knife. You were somewhat shocked that anyone would target you for such a thing, at your age, but the cops tell you that it was probably your age that drew the guy’s attention. He must have assumed you couldn’t defend yourself.

You could not explain why he was lying dead in a giant pile of dolls, his eyes punctured, his throat bruised, his neck broken. You hadn’t left your room. It was more than obvious that a small middle-aged woman couldn’t have done the kind of damage to the dead man that had killed him; the best anyone could guess was that he’d tripped over a rack of dolls and fallen on them so hard that hard plastic hands had jabbed his eyes out and then he’d broken his neck in the fall. But you knew better. The cops couldn’t possibly understand, but you did.

“Thank you,” you said to all the dolls, the creepy dolls you hadn’t yet repaired and the ones that you hadand yet children still called them creepy, the pretty vintage dolls and the modern dolls that had needed repair. “Thank you,” you said, weeping over the body of a porcelain doll that had broken, but she was the only casualty. Others had damaged hands and some had crushed plastic bodies and quite a lot of them had their clothes ruined by blood, but those were all things you could repair. “Thank you all so much. You saved me.”

“You’re our mother,” one of the dolls said.

“You saved me,” another doll, a repaired doll, said.

“We love you. We’ll never let anyone hurt you.”

You gathered your precious, precious dolls to you and hugged them, and cried. Oh, your dollies, all your beautiful dollies. You’d saved their lives, and now they had returned the favor.