Sure enough, her dolls were still there, some slumped and others standing tall.
Inspired by this quote from The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah, 2015.
The small girl sits on vinyl floors in the playroom downstairs. The playroom is hidden at the back of the split-level home; a different dimension, that is.
Her hair is curly as the Crayola squiggly lines kids draw on walls and dark as the VHS tapes displayed in the family den. Her eyes are brown and glazed—a delicacy—like chocolate cake donuts, and she wears the assured expression of someone who knows her beauty, as she lay on her protruding child’s belly, her calves kicking—mindlessly—the air, with a Little People play toy in each hand.
Beauty, of course, is yet of no consequence to her.
In her brutish grip, the Little People are face to face, barely two inches apart. They hop in place as they speak to one another. They’re fighting. The girl doesn’t know why; she hasn’t thought that far; a moot point. She hasn’t learned there’s motives to anger, to violence, to hurt.
The Little People lead, sovereign as they are. They conduct the show. They’ve got minds; they’ve got lives; they’ve got aspirations and journeys and all things we do but she doesn’t yet. She’s only got her learned reality; her child perceptions.
The small girl is only a vessel, only a watcher of the world, only a player of the characters. She’s giving them voice but she isn’t speaking for them. She’s watched her Little People in action—the Fisher Price movie—right on television, being sat down on the couch by her mother to nap, the film on repeat, with chocolate milk in her orange sippy cup on the ledge above. She trusts, of course, the Little People she holds are the same she watches. Just as human.
“Hey, stop being mean!” Little Person 1 says.
“No!”
“Why not!”
“Because I am mean!”
Uh-oh, she thinks. The villain is more ruthless than she’d thought. This may require some extra intervention.
She reaches over for an interloper from where her two active characters scream in the front yard of their white fold-out dollhouse with blue roof and pink windows, to the Fisher Price Farmhouse where the cow and donkey are paused in disbelief. When her forearm leaves the square inch it’d been resting for the last few minutes of action, she feels her skin unstick from the floor. On her arm is left a small piece of coal like a birthmark. She places the Farmhouse donkey directly between the two guilty perpetrators—like a magistrate—and re-positions her forearm a half-inch off from where it was. This new square inch of the floor chills her skin, not yet having been tenanted.
“Hey, be nice!” The interloping donkey says.
Her hands are again manacled on Little Person 1 and 2 as they hop out their disagreement.
“Yeah, be nice!”
Little Person 2 lets out a disgruntled “humph” in reply. This pulls at the first Little Person’s heart strings.
“I’m sorry if I made you mad.” Little Person 1 says, a textbook acquiescence. “But it’s not nice to be mean to people.”
“You’re right. I’ll be nice now.”
“Okay!”
“You wanna walk to school together?”
“Yeah, sure!”
They hop, side by side, past the Fisher Price Firehouse and Nativity Set to the set of Lincoln Logs which the small girl layered for their elementary school. She doesn’t realize the way her elbows repeatedly thud the wood with the players’ hops, or the strain and stretch of her body as she guides her pieces from one scenario to the next.
And that is all, all is good in the world.
There’s a small ringing in her head. The faint gnawing of a long day playing—she is tired. The sun is beginning to set, though she’s never watched a sun set. The world’s temporality is a trifle to her. Dad calls from the doorway behind her, “Dani, we’re gonna eat dinner in 5 minutes, okay? 5 minutes.”
She turns her head and nods. There’s a light smile in her nod, though she doesn’t intend it. She doesn’t wonder how long he was watching for, but it was for a few minutes that he was.
He thinks she’ll be a writer like he is. The created dialogue, the ability to see what’s not there, the desire to create life from the inanimate. Unintended anthropomorphism—the world is how she wants it.
He anticipates the child’s crowning.
I was always a doll gal. Little People, Barbies & Bratz, American Girl, The Sims 2 & 4. I had a small phase with Polly Pockets and another with Littlest Pet Shops, but they were more my sister’s thing so I let her have it.
The memory, pure bliss. I would play for hours. Of course I had no concept of time, but, hours—it must have been hours.
I was so adjoined in the Fisher Price world with my little rubber buddies and their perfectly domestic lifestyles, I never knew I was just a child. Just acting in this simulation. Just placed in front of a play set so as not to bother. To think the lives I cultivated through those playsets were simply a parent’s convenience. To think I was just acting in someone else’s mundanity.
My Little People hopped and hopped around their plastic abodes, pleasantly. That’s all there was, you know. Pleasantness. There was only my mind. Only the way I saw the world; only the words I knew; only the feelings I’d felt.
I didn’t have too many options for their homes. A small town, really; explains the drama. There was the fold out doll house with a blue roof and pink windows on a white interior. The firehouse. The Nativity Set. My favorite was the Fisher Price farm; it came with a cow and a donkey, and a duckie I sometimes bathed with. It didn’t matter they were animals—they had an equal consciousness; a fair autonomy. They all had the same lives. They’d drive to work. They’d get married. They’d take walks on the sidewalk. They’d go to school. They’d do their homework.
Sometimes the kids would cry, and their parents would comfort them. There’d never be a clear reason why the kids were upset, but the parents also knew why—their own, unsettling awareness—and they’d always know how to mend it.
I don’t remember the kind of drama there was. But I know the town was filled with drama. Couldn’t get away from it, really. May have been drama for drama’s sake. The dialogue would have looked like “oh no, they are fighting!” “Oh no!.” And then we’d overhear the fight, and that would sound like “you’re mean!”, “no! You’re mean.” And then the resolution would come (the Little Person with the red curly hair and glasses), “hey! Be nice!” “Okay!”.
Simple. A better world.
That’s all I know, really.
And that they were mine as much as I was theirs. I was theirs. These things, these play things with their own dominion. I held them in my hands and hopped them from place to place, but they dealt with their own issues. They had their own lives (we saw in their debut film).
And now here we are. Now I’m 24, and I don’t think about them often.
Gosh. Love doesn’t last.
I don’t think about them often, and when I do, I’m thankful. I’m thankful—of course I’m thankful—but I wouldn’t pick them up again. I wouldn’t know how to play with them again. I’m too self-aware. Too self-judging. Too awkward with myself. Even if I was alone. Even if no one was home and if my mother left me a letter on the door explaining her surprise of the somehow refurbished, donated fold-out Fisher Price Doll house, which was once again sprawled in the living room on the wood floors with the same Little pieces and the same comforting characters. I would touch them, I’m sure. I’d probably even motion a few little hops. But I could never speak out loud in their voices—gosh, what if god was watching.
They’d hate me now. I could never let their lives be simple.
Oh gosh. I hope, in fact, I never see them again. The simple, simple characters. They were so good, so innocent. I was so good, so innocent. I’d burden them with the way I see the world now; the words I know now; the feelings I feel now. I’d kill them, I bet. The Asian girl with the pink princess dress would have a death by suicide; the twin red-haired boy would be drowned in a lake.
If I could spin this into a fable—give this story a lesson—it would be about why we let things go when we grow.
I don’t know why it is, per se, but it’s simple and plain that memories—as much as we pine for them back; recall them with an unattainable sense of romance and beauty—are always sweeter in our pasts than they could be if their recognition deigned to catch up with our presents.
