|
|
Everyone has heard the story of the Kelly Doll that the little girl buys that comes alive and starts to kill the family.
I have a different story.
Once upon a time, a family in the suburbs took their little girl to the city for the first time to go shopping for her Christmas present. The mother and father led their pretty blonde-haired blue-eyed little princess around to all the finest toy shops, yet there was nothing that she really wanted exceptionally, until, finally, she came upon the Susie Doll. This doll, much like the girl herself, was bedecked in the utmost of Aryan porcelain features, looking out from within a red, grey, and white petticoat towards the world. The whole family instantly fell in love with her, bought her on the spot, and took her back to the suburbs. There, the Susie doll was wrapped in especially nice shiny paper and stuck in the upper left corner of her parents’ closet, behind her mother’s hats.
There, she glowed her radiant beauty.
Christmas came and went that year and the Susie doll was the best friend of the little girl. The girl neglected her dull, cardboard cutout Barbies and single Ken, her Beanie Babies, and her Polly Pockets to play with Susie.
Yet as she grew older, she grew out of her toy and grew into clothes, her computer, music equipment, etc. Susie always stood there, watching out her vacant eyes.
The girl hit puberty and began to sparkle less. Her eyes grew grey and her hair dropped a few shades into not only dirty blonde, but light brown. Her parents still loved her, despite an onslaught of acne and hair frizz and braces into which she insisted on placing bright, alternating colors. Oh, she wanted a boyfriend. She yearned to be a beautiful movie star so she could go on dates and one day get married and later die and become an angel.
But she was beginning to realize that such a future was not going to happen for everyone, and, in the nature of all doomseeking moody adolescents, began to fear her own future. She feared dying alone, a virgin who’d wasted her time starving on the streets. She imagined herself ugly, crying in the bathrooms of her friends’ weddings to sweet successful, handsome men.
All day long, the Susie doll stared out at her blankly, prettily, just the sort of girl her faithful husband would be secretly sleeping with. The girl began to ask herself what she could do to make herself a successful socialite like Susie would be. For everything she wore: would Susie wear it? Would Susie have said that? How far from the ideal are you falling from Susie’s ideal?
Gradually, she fell into a niche of friends, and upon getting her first boyfriend, put the Susie doll away into the back of her closet. Later, her mother donated it to a local church.
She wound up going to a pretty good college and marrying her sophomore-year sweetheart. He was a nice, well-meaning, at times a little bland, but he brought in money and gave her all the effection a girl could realistically ask for. With due time, she grew pregnant and decided, on a whim, to name her child Susie.
The child came out of the womb brutually defective. So ugly, so warped, her skin was mottled and her body was twisted and her eyes did not open for four months. The girl, now a woman, was devastated, and put the child up for adoption through a local church, where, even if no one wanted her, they could raise her so selflessly to be a child of God and light from within.
She and her husband got into a rocky, smileless patch of marriage in which she dyed her hair blatantly blonde again. Men were suddenly attracted to her; even her appeared to be getting a new wind of affection.
She, gaining confidence, bought blue contacts, and, lo and behold, was followed about by men attempting to pick her up. She began thinking of herself as Susie. One afternoon, in a café, she met a playwright. By day, he worked at a toy factory, by night, he produced her dreams, so delightfully sweet were which that she abandoned hope in her marriage of four years and moved in with him.
Eventually, and quite by accident, she became pregnant again, and her idealistic lover asked her to keep it. Blithely, she agreed, re-dying her hair and buying brighter contacts to keep him from straying from her as she grew less appealing (in her opinion).
But he was eternally interested in her, including her pregnant appearance. He’d read her journals and had always wondered how she could have given away both her favorite doll and only child to cold, barren heirarchal churches.
Oh, she said, it was just some kid’s plaything my parents didn’t want to keep.
He shrugged and said it was influential on her early life.
Only her early life? she joked.
She began her contractions. They drove her to the hospital, where the doctors had difficulty extracting the child naturally. Gingerly, they suggested a c-section, to which she readily agreed. They plugged in an IV and cut away.
Bewilderment. Astonishment. Disgust.
Inside was a perfect baby, masterfully crafted out of porcelain and plastic. Its dewy eyes blinked vacantly and it began to scream a mechanical screech.
Somewhere a church bell rant. A defective little girl played with a perfect doll in a petticoat, imagining that she’s beautiful.
We all get what we want.
In some way or another.