A PERFECT DOLL

“Promise me that you won’t take offense to this, Hannah” my grandmother slurred, and before I had time to stop her from saying what I knew would surely gut me, she asked, “have you noticed how she is developing a strong unibrow?”

Across the room my three-year-old daughter played with a cluster of dolls that consisted of tiny ceramic gnomes, nude Barbies, and small woodland animals. They took turns using the potty in the Dreamhouse.

“FLUSH,” Izzie screamed.

“I know how she looks and she is just perfect.” I sighed, then added, “plus, she’s three. I’ve got to go, Gram.”

“Well you know if you take care of that unibrow she won’t just be perfect, she will be a perfect doll, dear” she said.

“Thanks, Gram. I’ll keep that in mind. Really busy here with her. I’ll talk to you later,” I replied.

I wouldn’t pick up the phone the next time she called. Gram raised me but once I started therapy and had a kid of my own, it was hard for me to choose her. Plus, she developed a pill addiction, a habit that made for the most painful conversations possible between us, at least for me.

The drugs might have numbed her out, but I felt every bit of the hurt she didn’t want to feel. Even from over a thousand miles away, her words sent barbs straight to my stomach. Once I had Izzie, talking to her felt like that lonely, sinking sensation whenever something bad happened to me. I wiped away the tears welling in my eyes after I hung up the phone.

I couldn’t protect Izzie from everything, but I’m glad she didn’t hear what my grandmother said about her eyebrows. Even as a feral toddler, Izzie seemed to understand the most subtle of conversations. If she caught wind of remarks about her eyebrows at all, it would stick with her for life. I knew this.

My grandma had her problems, but she treated me a lot better than her daughter, my mother, ever did. My mom birthed me as a teenager, very much against her will, so my grandmother raised me in those cub years. After diapers my mom and I moved into an apartment together, and then one volatile situation after the other. I had this fantasy where my mom would call me and say “hey, sorry for stripping you nude, taking off all your bedsheets, water torturing you with a pink plastic pitcher, then unscrewing the lightbulb to leave you shivering in the dark because you didn’t eat your entire cheeseburger at the restaurant when you were six. I messed up badly there and I’m really working on myself as a person and a parent.”

Instead of the ownership of her actions that I desperately craved throughout the years, though, my mother said things like “I hoped so badly that I never had to give you a name,” or “I hoped you would die in me.” At the time it seemed cruel, but having children in my thirties allowed me to empathize with that incomprehensible part of her. Doing anything as a teenage girl sucks. Giving birth probably sucks above most other things teen girls do. Don’t let the pro-life billboards of Middle America tell you any differently; motherhood blows in a lot of ways.

When I started therapy I would discuss dreams. They would go like this: a feral child with puff ball hair roamed through whispering grasses, crunching leaves, and sloshing puddles until she stumbled upon a domesticated bear of a mother who had escaped to the wild. She found her bear mother in a cave. The bear mother told her you will be reborn someday and yes, I will love you. Then, the cub emerged from her bear mother rice-grain small and unaware of all of the pain she felt before. Yet,this cub could still feel the tight muscles in her new bear mother’s body. The cub tightened her own too.

“What was your mama like?” her cub asked.

The mother bear told her curious cub: “my mama left me in a stream as a cub, and then my angry father bear caught me because I waded in his territory of fishes. I freed myself and ran through the woods, foraging on what I could to survive until I came upon music and glowing green lights in the sky.”

After relating my bear dreams, my therapist asked, “Are you the child or the bear?”

“I am both,” I replied.

People tire of reading about dreams, but dreams are the only way to get close to a person.

Oh, dreams. Where did this come from? Barbie? My mother looked just like that perfect doll with long legs, tight clothes, and perfect makeup. The only indication that she was human and not plastic was that her long blonde hair frizzed all the way down her back.

My mom cooked up a career plan for me from birth: be an object of the male gaze.

“There’s lots of topless bars. They’re tasteful. You don’t have to show too much and you make good money,” my mom once told me while we brought in the scarcest of groceries under the unforgiving desert summer sun.

“Mom, I’m ten. I’m in the fourth grade,” I replied, putting away the box of cereal bars that would be our meals for the week.

“You’re much closer to an adult than a child, my dear,” she said, pointing at my new and embarrassing boobs, then continued, “there’s lots of nice, classy bars. After all, you are growing up and I need you to think about your future.”

To jumpstart my burgeoning stripping career, at age four, my mother started me in child modeling. She loved taking photographs of everything, a trait she inherited from her father, a three-time war veteran who screamed his head off all day about mundane threats befalling our family. His favorite phrase was “watch out,” words that would haunt me for the rest of my life. All of the things he warned us to watch out for: bombs that strangers might leave in our garage if no one was home, choking on popcorn, going to the mailbox without his armed supervision, never came to pass.

My mother and I bounced from one awful apartment complex to the next in the Inland Empire and the high desert. I probably visited every ridiculous ghost town. I touched so much fool’s gold. Riverside, California always felt like home, though. A lot of people called it an awful place but I remember the citrus trees and the roses. I remember the Mission Inn and the sound of its many bubbling fountains.

My grandmother raised me, but she started working long hours with the county so I spent most of my time with my shell-shocked Grandpa Benny. He was over twenty years older than my grandmother. He had a mustache, fun suspenders, and a different vibrantly colored plaid shirt with every outfit. He kept a camera wrapped around his neck, which seemed artistic, but he mostly used it to take pictures of suspicious license plates. He also took many happy baby photos of me and the family, so I guess the paranoia gave me full access to a nostalgia for a childhood I never really had. He also usually wore a little ball cap with a call back to one of the wars he fought in: Korea or World War II or Vietnam. Grandpa Benny took me to Ruby’s diner almost every morning so he could have coffee and split toast and eggs with me. On occasional, special mornings, Grandpa Benny treated me to a waffle. One waffle morning we visited his mother from Hungary’s grave.

“That’s enough now,” Grandpa said as he patted my shoulder after I put the hundredth dandelion on her in-ground headstone.

I turned four in my grandparents’ household but shortly after that we moved into a little one bedroom apartment complex that felt as damp and moldy as a garden fountain. Hard up for money due to working at Nordstrom and the Kodak store in the mall, my mom thought it would be a great idea to take me to get some headshots.

“I promise you can get whatever treats you want after this. We have to make outfit changes and do a lot of poses. It won’t take long. What do you want the most?” she asked.

“I want Taco Bell. Cheese quesadilla.”

“I promise you can have two Taco Bell cheese quesadillas, even, as long as you listen to Mom and we get some good pictures,” she promised me, placing mascara on my lashes in the least delicate way possible. She poked me in the eye. I started to cry.

“Models don’t cry, baby,” she snapped. I wished she would hug me and say we could get Taco Bell without any makeup or pictures, but that would never happen.

Over the course of an hour, my mother leaned over me with her scratchy hair, brushing my face with various powders and brushes. I sneezed several times before she yelled at me to hold it in. At the end, she pulled out a golden tube of red lipstick, then smeared it over my lips.

“You look like a perfect doll,” she said.

She put me in a little black dress, black panty hose, and black kitten heels. In front of me, my mother wore a similar outfit with stilettos.

“Now strut like me. Follow my movements,” she instructed, then added, “If you’re lucky you’ll be tall like your dad and we can do something with all this, but we have to start somewhere,” she said.

I didn’t even remember my dad and my mother had no pictures to look back at, so I took her word about how he looked. To her dismay, I barely cleared five feet by a few inches at my adult height. I gravitated toward a heavier body, too, despite her early interventions that kept me bony until puberty hit me early at age nine. Most days, we barely ate collectively: just health bars, plain popcorn, and the occasional peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“Mommy, my feet hurt. Can I take off the legs thing?” I asked.

“No, Hannah. Remember Taco Bell. The quesadillas,” she responds.

My mouth watered. I hadn’t had something to eat that wasn’t Weight Watchers-related in so long, so I straightened my back, then walked up and down our 70s shag apartment carpet until she sighed, “Just stop! I thought you would be better at this, Hannah.”

I stared out the window at a Daddy Long Legs colony scurrying across the patio we never used. Our apartment complex had a stream filled with thick koi. I wondered if the spiders would make a good snack for them, therefore I decided I would put them in a box and bring them to the stream while Mom took her midday four hour nap.

Another dream I told my therapist goes like this: a toddler picked up a glass and banged it all around until it broke into her hands because she didn’t know any better. Her mother warned her about playing with dangerous things, but to no effect. The girl looked into a crystal ball. A witch told her that one day the glass must break and she must hurt, as her mother had before her. Suddenly, an all-white dog stepped on glass because they didn't see it as a threat, they even lapped some of it up, like ice chunks. The mother euthanized the dog. The toddler cried. I thought the dog knew better than to eat glass, the mother said. In this way, the pain came later. The toddler learned to evade the glass, but what is made of glass? A jar? A cup? A serving dish at a holiday where the mother stays silent, merely smiles and says she’s as good as she’s ever been?

One time my mother threw our cat Freak into that koi stream for scratching her. It wasn’t deep enough for him to drown, but I never saw him again.

“Keep in line for Mommy or I’ll throw you in there too,” she used to say.

I wished this threat could come true. I wished I could turn into a thick koi in an apartment complex stream. They seemed so happy and they didn’t have to model for Taco Bell.

Shortly after my introduction to catwalk modeling, we exited my mother’s purple Cavalier, which I called the Barney car, to a strip mall under the glaring desert sun. Even in the springtime, the asphalt made my jelly shoes melt. We entered a building that felt and looked like a cave inside. It took several minutes for my eyes to get over the contrast of desert sun and bat cave.

A man with a red silk shirt, goatee, and ponytail greeted us with a simple “welcome to my studio.”

“Rob, thanks for meeting us on short notice. There’s a couple modeling show deadlines coming up and we need some headshots ASAP, so thank you. Plus a couple commercials are auditioning close to here.”

“Of course, Elise,” he replied, hugging her then letting his hand linger on the small of her back.

He seemed older than my mom by a lot but not as old as my grandpa. Unlike grandpa, he had no grey hairs. A black cat wove in and out of his feet with a tiny bell ringing from her collar.

“Sorry. That’s Beverly. I’ll put her in the next room,” Rob said.

“I want to pet her,” I offered.

“Now, we’re in a hurry,” my mother started.

Before she could really object, I dropped to the ground, scratching Beverly under the chin and giggling wildly.

“Hannah, get up. Let’s go, go, go. Remember Taco Bell.”

Whenever I saw any cat I always thought about Freak, cold and wet in that stream. In my dreams some nice old lady took care of Freak. In my dreams Freak stayed safe from rushing water and glass.

Defeated, not unlike my maligned pet cat, I rushed over to the staging area where light equipment shone on a little stage. Out of a bag, my mother pulled out three feather boas: white, black, and red.

“Which one’s first?” Rob dangled the boas in front of me with a smirk on his face.

All I could think about was quesadillas and anything but the scratchy tights and poking heels I had on.

I pulled at the black feather boa. I knew what to do. I wrapped it around my shoulders and pouted.

“Perfect,” Rob and my mother recited in unison.

At the library my mom liked to rent old Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Temple films.

“The ship has sailed for me to be like them, but maybe you can try,” she said with a green beauty mask on her face and blue rollers in her hair.

“I always wanted to be like them, but my parents wouldn’t let me,” she added.

Grandpa would not approve if he knew Mom was getting me into modeling. One time at his house we watched the news, and on it they featured JonBenét Ramsey, the most famous dead child beauty queen, strutting across the screen.

“Her parents’ negligence killed her, goddamnit,” he yelled.

“Dad, whoever killed her, killed her,” my mother replied.

Grandpa grunted then said, “her good-for-nothing parents invited that monster in with all that makeup. She looks twenty-five for Christ’s sake.”

Twenty-five sounded so old to me, but I agreed with him. She certainly didn’t look my age. I only saw voiceless clips of her modeling ridiculous white dresses in red lipstick on Access Hollywood, but it even seemed like her voice might sound like Marilyn Monroe’s, not like the other kids at preschool. Yet, she looked so beautiful and I so desperately wanted to look like JonBenét because I hoped that rather than my mom sleep the day away in our little damp apartment, she might play with me if I looked and acted like JonBenét.

I wanted to spend time with my mother every moment, and yet I flinched away whenever she brushed my face with makeup or brought the eyelash curler near me. In those moments, all I wanted to do was play with rolly-pollies in the dirt, to have my mother look at them with me, then admire how they rolled up at the slightest whisper of my hand. We had a little dirt patch in front of our apartment. Mom would send me out to the damp muck with old Gerber baby food jars so I could put rollies in a habitat of sorts when random guys came over to have alone time with her. She would puncture the top of the jar with scissors so they could breathe. In the jars I put sticks, dirt, and bits of grass.

Before I ran outside Mom told me “put your rollies in here, that way you can watch them and keep them forever.”

When I thought they were thirsty, I splashed some water in the habitat and set them in my room overnight. All the rollies died, so I cried.

“It’s okay,” Mom patted my head, “that sometimes happens,” and she walked away.

After I started modeling, Mom discouraged me from playing in the dirt so much. She said “it messes up your manicure. You know nail polish ain’t cheap.”

I didn’t know about the cost of anything, really, but I knew we didn’t have money for a single thing. Every night we either skipped dinner altogether or if we wanted real luxury, we had Cup Noodles. At preschool we learned that families had three meals a day together and snacks, which was real news to me. At my grandma and grandpa’s house we lived that way, but now at Mom’s the fridge had a little milk and some condiments most of the time.

I knew Mom had to stay thin for her new stripping job. She never stopped talking about it. The stores at the mall just weren’t paying the bills. Whenever we went over to my grandparents’ house for dinner on Sundays, Grandpa got on her case about how she never ate anymore.

“You’ve got a little girl to keep up with, you gotta eat something, Elise.”

Before dinner, Mom always applied red lipstick and throughout the course of the meal it never faded.

We went back to see Rob, but the second time we went to his house and not his studio. Beverly in all her furry void glory greeted us at the door.

“Now you watch a movie with Beverly. We’ll be right back,” my mom said.

Rob popped The Little Mermaid VHS into the player then pulled up a bean bag chair. I settled in. Beverly sat on my lap.

For the duration of the movie I heard my mother’s intense groans like always whenever we went to visit guys she met at work. We went over to Rob’s several times. Eventually she asked that he would watch me while she went to dance at the club.

“I don’t think this is a good idea, Elise. Doesn’t your mom stay home and can’t she watch Hannah? I don’t know shit about kids, really.”

“Hannah is easy,” my mom replied, “she never whines or complains. You won’t even know if she’s hungry because she doesn’t even say anything.”

The first night my mom left me with Rob I watched The Little Mermaid again. He went to his bedroom and talked loudly on the phone for hours.

In the middle of the night he walked out to the living room. I woke up to a black screen.

“Your mother will be here soon,” he said.

“I miss her,” I replied. I didn’t miss her, but I did want to leave.

“You know, you look like a perfect doll,” he said.

Then he unboxed me.

Dr. Rae A. Piwarski is a literature PhD graduate from The University of Texas at Austin. She loves to read and write in a style that she describes as neon gothic: that is, she is intrigued by dark themes painted in neon colors. She lives in Montana, where she spends her time gardening, hiking, writing, and painting alongside her husband, two small children, and many pets.