Dolls

                                                                  Women must labor to be beautiful.                                                                                               -W.B.Yeats

                                                                  Teng ai, a love imbedded inpreverbal knowledge,                                                                   accompanied by unspeakable pain, and shared                                                                       only through the empathy between the two bodies                                                                   (mother and daughter) alike.

                                                                   —Wang Ping

             

              I.

Take care of your little mother, my aunt told me

shortly before she died. My little five-foot-four-inch mother,

whose clothes I outgrew when I was ten, already

proud ofmy big bones—(Nothing could overpower

me if I was made ofmy father's bones). My mother was astounded-

I should put bricks on your head & she kept dressing me

in pinafores & ruffled socks. Toi, she called me,

as if I was supposed to stay small.

              II.

Sometimes it seemed I couldn't have come out of

her, that something was wrong. When I stood behind her I felt

ungainly, like something that flopped about without

gravity. I was excessive, too much.

I thieved her clothes until it was impossible to make them

fit—hers was the only body I knew how to make beautiful.

           

            III.     

My grandmother bought me a doll I couldn't touch. She

had peaches & cream skin, breasts, a taffeta dress,

& porcelain green eyes. Her fingers were delicate & curved

like eyebrows. I broke my dolls, so we had to put her up

high to admire, like a storeowner sticks a manikin

on a black pole to show off what he's got.

                   

           IV.

My mother gave me dolls that peed, that you had to feed,

that you had to bathe in a little plastic Bathinette.

Everything smelled clean like rubber. You had to

learn to be a mother. Even the pee. One of the bottles

refilled itself when you turned it upright. It was o.k. for a

doll to pee. The more work you did the better mother you were.

              V.

I was hard on my dolls. The ones that had stuffed bodies

came up missing arms. Monkey-bear had his insides ripped out.

Big Rabbit couldn't stand. His legs & feet were

bent forward so that, when we played school—with his

Little Buddha smile that,

no matter how much I swung him around in a circle & beat him

against the floor, just stayed there—he would topple off his

seat & have to be shaken again.

              VI.

The dolls that cried mamma came up with a busted rattle in

their throat, their eyes clunked open so that they couldn't go to

sleep but stared perpetually up at the ceiling like middle-aged

insomniacs. One doll had a problem with her eyes, they were out

of kilter, so that they didn't open unless you whacked

her on the back. Then they were stuck open, so she seemed

dead. We had to work on her too hard to make her do the most

ordinary things—just to open her eyes! Her eyes clunked shut &,

way back in the pit of her skull, we could hear her thinking.

              VII.

When I was born my mother sat up, hysterical, on the delivery

table. She said it was the drugs. She couldn't stop laughing.

Her toxemic body had been pumped out & I was a robin's egg

blue, a pale, delicate thing whose blood vessels you

could see from the outside. My "inner life" stared up at you

through translucent skin, the way you can see a face

floating up to a lake's surface.

                                                     I put my inner life right in her hands.

              VIII.

No, that isn't the way my father saw it. He said

when he looked in the nursery he saw a baby so hairy

he thought it should be swinging from a chandelier.

Though he really loved me for my excesses—

for eating too much, for stealing French fries from his plate

(That girl can really hold her liquor, he'd brag

when I was twelve. They call her old hollow leg),

& even my hair—he'd lift me up by it

& carry me up four flights of stairs. He loved my hair.

              IX.

My mother suffered, oh did she suffer, the way all

light-skinned women were supposed to suffer. She suffered that

& more. She proved that she didn't like it. She proved that of all

the un-black women, the ones babies didn't just come

popping out of—

                                 & even of the ones that babies came roaring

through like a train, of even them—she was one of the most,

most suffering.

              X.

During pregnancy, she wore the right shoes. She ate the

right foods. She read the book that the doctor gave her with

pictures of white women in plain suits. She tucked it in a place

sacred & hidden, in her sewing box. She pierced it with needles

& thread either punishing it or marking it

with a hundred little, colored banners.

                                                                           She used to like sex, my

father once said, puzzled.

              XI.

My mother with the peaches & cream skin, my mother with the eyebrows of a blackbird's wing, my mother with eyelashes that brushed halfway down her cheeks, my mother with the high, creamy breasts, my mother in her slip & socks on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, or weeping in the doorway,

my lovely, delicate, little mother.