A cardboard box, the size of a footlocker, is brought to my door. It has been re-enforced with fiberglass straps, and bulges to the point of bursting. I had ordered a book from Amazon.Com. This package could contain a small library. The name of the sender is smudged. I sign for it anyway, and the delivery man lugs it inside.
“Any idea where this comes from?” I ask the UPS guy.
He looks at me through narrowed eyes. “I ain’t no information bureau,” he says and takes off in a disconcerting rush.
I’m afraid to open the thing. I’m afraid to touch it.
For God’s sake, I think, do you imagine the box is booby trapped? That is precisely what I imagine. Since calling a bomb squad on that basis might prove embarrassing, I force myself to get a serrated knife from the kitchen, and go to work on the fiberglass straps. A tick-tock type sound comes from inside the box. A bomb? A tell-tale heartbeat? My own heart starts tick-tocking like mad, but I continue cutting away. All at once, the top flies off, and a blizzard of Styrofoam peanuts erupts. I drop the knife, squeeze my eyes shut, and shield them with both hands. In a minute, the peanut squall stops. I wait, keep my eyes shut, and covered by my hands. Nothing happens. I uncover my eyes, open them, look into the box, and scream.
I am not a hysterical woman. True, I once carried on hysterically at the sight of a rat in the kitchen. A rat, however, is one thing. A corpse that’s arrived via UPS is something else. I should tape the cover back down. I should Krazy Glue it. I should I call the police. Having run out of ideas about what I should do, I take another look. What I mistook for a corpse is a life-sized doll in a fetal position. I couldn’t very well leave it in the middle of the floor. Getting it unpacked and unfolded is hard, sweaty labor but I persevere. Throughout, the doll stares at me with an air of superiority as though to say, I don’t sweat.
“I don’t usually sweat either,” I tell it when I’m done and have sat it up. It’s eyes follow me as I get a broom, and sweep up the Styrofoam peanuts. They sparkle with a life-like intelligence, a seeming invitation to… To what? To take it seriously? I have seen ads in The New York Times for look-alike dolls for little girls. All you have to do is send $500 and a photograph of your child. This creation does not resemble me as a child. It’s a dead ringer for me as I look now. It’s wearing a striped bodysuit, white socks, and scruffy white sneakers—as I happen to be wearing at the moment. I can’t imagine who in the world would shell out $500 for such an item. Certainly not my ex boyfriend, the movie-star-handsome sharpshooter. All he shelled out for during our exuberant liaison were three boxes of .38 Special cartridges during a visit to the pistol range.
The doll reaches into the top of its suit, withdraws a greeting card, and hands it to me. I could be dreaming. Or hallucinating. But, I doubt it. When the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver threw a shoe in one of the weekly episodes, the TV station was deluged with horseshoes from concerned listeners. I was not one of them. Even as a child, I could distinguish between fantasy and reality. Not knowing what else to do at the moment, I take the greeting card.
“Why don’t you read it,” the doll says.
“I beg your pardon?”
“No need to beg,” it says, its mouth moving quite realistically. Its voice, on the other hand, is slightly nasal—rather unlike what I care to think of as my own.
The card has a full color photo of balloons, and I love balloons. The handwriting inside, reminiscent of my mother’s florid script, is smudged. Like the sender’s address, it’s difficult to read. Happy Birthday sweetheart is what I think it says. My mother occasionally called me sweetheart. But she would not have written this card. She, more than anyone, would have known that today is not my birthday.
I once told her I’d like to have a sister. I was three years old at the time. World War II was in progress. My father had been drafted and was overseas.
“Let’s wait until Daddy comes home and discuss it with him,” my mother said. “Oh no,” I answered without hesitation. “Let’s surprise him.”
Could this doll (a surprise to me, if not to him) be a delayed response to that request?
“What are you made out of?” I ask, despite my aversion to be conversing with a doll.
“Do you want the truth or polite conversation?” it asks.
“I want the truth.”
It coughs delicately. “I wish I could say I was 100% fine bone china, but a large part of me is ordinary plastic.”
I’ve always loved dolls, and have quite a collection—mermaid dolls, fairy dolls, Pierrot and Pierrette dolls, even a Madam Alexander doll in a green velvet dress. I am, however, far from eager to add this one to the group.
“I can speak French and German as well as English, do higher mathematics, and discuss the Dialogues of Plato—of which my favorite is The Apology.”
“How fortunate that you didn’t turn up years ago,” I say. “It would have darkened my childhood significantly.”
The doll flicks a styrofoam peanut from its bosom. “Why is that?”
“Because I would have been deemed even more of a disappointment than I was. You see, my parent’s—or, more specifically, my father’s desire was for me to be an academician.”
Silence.
“I could recite Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire by heart, but managed to flunk French. I flunked Ancient History so badly, my final exam essay was read aloud to the class for its comedic value.”
More silence.
Obviously, the miserable doll feels superior to me. My immediate instinct is to insult the hell out of it. Of course, that would prove nothing. I still count on my fingers to add or subtract. I got kicked out of college in my Freshman year. I learned no Spanish beyond ‘No hablo español,’ when it would have been easy because I was married to a Spaniard. I’ve muddled along at a freelance art career, content to earn a pittance. “I am honest, dependable, generous, and compassionate,” I tell the doll in my defense. Unfortunately these qualities, measured against the doll’s attributes, strike me as insufficient. “I keep my promises, and don’t make myself out to be more than I really am. I can speak two languages, had two children, was an okay mother, sewed dresses for my daughter until she claimed to hate dresses, took my son to his tennis lessons until he decided not to be the next John Mackenroe. I work at cultivating a sense of humor about the inch and a half I’ve lost in height, and the fact that I don’t look eighteen anymore even though I’m asked to show proof of my age when I want a senior citizen discount at the movies.”
In the midst of this ardent defense of my worth, the doorbell rings.
The doll jerks to its feet like a puppet on suddenly taut strings, and goes to answer it.
“Don’t!” I yell.
Its head swivels around with an audible creak. “Don’t open the door?”
“How do you expect me to explain your presence here to whoever is out there?”
“My presence here is self explanatory,”it says and opens the door before I can stop it.
“Bon jour,” my father says with a wide, somewhat crooked smile. He leans on his walker with one hand and reaches for the doll’s hand with his other. His Parkinson’s symptoms have become noticeably debilitating. Not one of his aides (he has three of them for alternating eight hour shifts) is in sight. Did one of them drive him here, drop him off, and simply leave? I can’t imagine him managing the five mile walk over here from the care facility on his own.
“Mon chef d’oeuvre,” he says, bringing the plastic hand to his mouth and giving it a kiss.
The doll giggles, takes him by the arm, helps him into the house, gets him seated on the couch and puts his walker in the corner. “What a surprise,” it says, plopping itself next to him.
For a good ten seconds, he looks at me standing in the kitchen doorway. That there are virtually two of me here doesn’t seem to register on him. He has complained of seeing double, but it’s a stretch to suppose that’s how he explains this sight.
Turning to the doll, he says, “I’ve come because there’s something important I have to tell you.”
He doesn’t say anything. Time passes. He seems to have lost his train of thought. It’s not uncommon. His illness, his heavy medication, his ninety one years, are formidable antagonists.
“It’s hard… to find the words I want,” he says, his face so pained with the effort to express himself, I have to admire his determination even when it is the doll he’s addressing.
“How did you get here?” it asks, evidently aware of the difficulty involved—aware, it appears, of a great deal, considering it is a doll .
“I… don’t… know.” He articulates the words carefully. “Maybe I’m not here,” he says less distinctly. On and off, the Parkinson’s affects his speech. Sometimes I have to guess what he’s saying. Now, for instance, he’s started mumbling what I interpret as, “Sensate experience is unreliable. Reason provides only the form.” Long pause, followed by what could be, “Like Descartes, I believe that reality lies beyond the senses.”
“How’s that?” The imitation me leans toward him to get what he’s saying better.
He smiles, his mouth pulling slightly to the right, his eyes suddenly alive. He has remembered what he came here to tell me. “In the little time we have, we should be kind to each other,” he says with absolute clarity.
The doll nods in agreement.
“I love you,” he says to it.
What else is new? I think, not particularly moved. He never used to says ‘I love you.’ But he’s said it so often in the past year, I see it as a substitute for his half of a conversation.
He turns and looks directly at me.
I know he sees me. Who he thinks he’s seeing, how he explains the phenomenon of my double, I don’t know.
“I love you too,” he says.
Do I believe him? I believe he is a man who means what he says. The question is, what does he actually mean. Is it me he loves? Or is it only an image that he perceives as an extension of himself? His “chef d’oeuvre.” I don’t know.