Eve never talks about it. There isn’t time
now to remain in that bedroom with the peach floral wallpaper and the matching
peach floral bed set, as if the bed was just an extension of the walls. It was
too anachronistic for any child to want to play in, with its porcelain dolls
and lace tablecloths. You could smell the dust and the carpet was rough, making
your skin itch and raw if you laid on it too long. Eve remembered the way those
dolls looked at night, the way the moonlight reflected on their glass eyeballs
so that all you could see was the glimmer of their eyes and their vague
silhouettes.
Eve wishes the same would apply to her,
but so often when she is home she feels that she isn’t at all. She’s back in
that stupid room that she grew up in. She thinks about those dolls again, how
she hated them all but loved them anyways: Sophie, Dianne, Lana, Emily. Her
main reason for disliking them so much was that she wasn’t allowed to take them
off their metal stands. Instead, she would turn them so that they all faced
each other and make them have conversations in which they had very complicated
friendships. Sophie’s best friend was Emily, although it used to be Lana
which was why Lana didn’t like Emily. Dianne was not easy to talk to so they
didn’t pay much attention to her, but Lana on the contrary could be very haughty
because she had a nicer dress than the others and this would get on all their
nerves. Sophie was usually sweet but would suddenly lash out at them at times
for no apparent reason and Emily would get very upset for long periods of time
in which she demanded lots of consoling. They were all in their own way
miserable. Eve at times would want to bash their heads in and end their pain
and the horrible fascination she had with them, but she knew she’d get in very
big trouble if she ever did that. She would have probably regretted it either
way, even without her mother’s punishment. They were the only thing in her room
to entertain an eleven-year-old.
Ivy holds out a doll.
“You want me to play?”
She nods in agreement causing her soft
blonde curls to sway. Eve takes the blonde doll in a sparkly hot pink dress
from her little hands.
“Can she be Tiffany?” It doesn’t matter to
Ivy. She leads her into the house and they pick their rooms. “Let’s eat,” Eve
says after a moment, bobbing her Barbie up and down to indicate she is talking.
They stand next to the table. There are no chairs.
“Mmmm…” Eve says as if the Barbie was
really enjoying herself.
Ivy mimicks her for a bit in her mmm-ing
and Eve feels that they are having a moment together however brief. Ivy’s doll
leaves the table without excusing herself. She takes her upstairs to take a
shower and then puts her to bed. It can be a tiresome task playing with her.
It’s because she never actually lets you play with her; she is too far off in
her own world, following her own logic of what needs to be done. You can only
really play next to her. Eve in resignation hums and makes her dolls go through
the same motions as Ivy’s does, saying something only when she is going to make
her doll momentarily leave and come back.
Dianne, even though she didn’t make her
talk much was always Eve’s favorite doll because it looked the most like her.
She had tan smooth skin and chocolate brown locks of wavy hair. Her eyes were
amber-colored and had many marble-like designs running through them especially
when they were in the light. Her lips looked like they were squeezed closed.
She wore a burgundy dress as if she were ready for Christmas, but one
couldn’t be sure since there wasn’t any other ornamentation to suggest this. It
was like she didn’t know what to do with herself or where she should be. Her
face had a look of slight confusion, as if the painter had slightly made one
eyebrow too high on mistake.
The others were classically Victorian with
puffy multilayered dresses with large bonnets. They looked like the type that
gossiped about suitors and drank tea all day. Eve never played with them in
their proper time setting. She didn’t know enough about it or how to do a
British accent. No, they went to school just like her and talked in just the
same way she did. Sometimes Eve’s mother would enter the room and see her
standing over her dolls and ask her if they were at a tea party. They never
were. They thought tea was gross and that it wasn’t anything to party about.
Eve would tell this to her mother in some way or another each time, but Eve’s
mother would always forget and continue to ask it.
At night Eve would crawl into her bed
without being tucked in. She never asked because she never wanted to knock on
their door, knowing that he was behind it too. She would go under the covers
and pretend that she didn’t live in this world or that no one would ever find
her, that her bed would become one with the walls and that she would live in a
parallel universe where she was free from everything. She felt that though her
bed camouflaged with the walls she couldn’t ever be hidden enough. It was
always difficult going to sleep knowing she wasn’t safe.
Eve stops trying to play with her and goes
back to just watching. She gazes at her playing so quietly and sweetly but
can’t help but feel a sense of anxiety. She thinks to herself that innocence is
so precious and so unstable, that time is constantly picking away at it, and
that she could never be able to protect her from all the evils in the world.
But Ivy is a happy child. There is no reason to worry, only she can’t help but
feel that the child will never fully let her in to her world—that she will
always remain on the outside and have no idea what she is thinking or feeling
or what is happening to her, the way her mother hadn’t.
Eve watched the door slowly open and
prayed that it was only her mother. He came to her bed and put her hand to her
mouth. She wished dearly that the blankets would protect her but they were
never enough of a barrier to keep him from getting through. There were no
witnesses, save the dolls.
Ivy holds out a doll.
“I’m sorry dear. Mommy doesn’t feel well enough to play.”
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