Living in a Barbie World

I didn't want to think about the woman whose life goal is to be a human Barbie. When a Facebook friend posted a link about this creature earlier this week, I learned that [name redacted]  devotes long hours and copious amounts of energy into making herself resemble the plastic doll. She's being discussed on the internet this week because of a newly released photo shoot and interview with V Magazine. I won't post her pictures here because they are too disturbing. I looked at them against my better judgment. Seriously, I wish I could unsee that shit. Instead, let's have a picture of my Malibu Barbie from the 70s, dressed in the lovely dress I knitted for her when I was 10.

Malibu B. sure is a woman on the go, walking across my windowsill. She is cute, and fun to dress, but I wouldn't want to turn myself into her. Because, she is, you know, plastic. And can't walk by herself. Or wear flats. Or talk.

The Barbie-emulating woman, I learned from the interview, which I read even though I don't want to think about her, practices astral body projection or some shit. This is a telling detail. After all the energy expended into torturing her physical body, she wants to get out of it.

Once, in college, I was having a conversation at a bar with a guy I worked with on the school newspaper. Giving my thigh a squeeze, he said, "For all of your feminist rhetoric, you really are just a Barbie doll of a girl." It was a confusing moment. I didn't know how to handle this insult wrapped in a compliment wrapped in an insult. On the one hand, I had been attracted to this guy for years and was thrilled that he finally seemed to be reciprocating. On the other hand, "staunch feminist" was a core part of my identity, so his words made me furious. Especially this one: "just." "JUST a Barbie doll of a girl." Nothing much of consequence. You know, I might say I had all these opinions, but the physical evidence was to the contrary. I wish I could tell you that I decimated him with my rhetorical skills before throwing a drink in his face and stalking out.

No, I did not leave. Or argue. Not at all. I can still conjure my 21-year-old self in that bar: the darkness of the room, the lateness of the hour, my black tights and Esprit mini, my soul sliding out of my ass. I don't want to think about that any more than I want to think about the lady in V Magazine. Instead, let's regard B. in some 1970s issue mismatched hostess pajamas. She looks like an extra from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Fabulous.

The House

In case you had any doubt that I was/am a giant nerd. Click on the photo for a clearer view of my amazing penmanship.

My mother has finally sold her house. She's getting older (her age is not for publication), and has many many health problems. She fell down the stairs last year, and even before that, the place had become a burden. So after years of deliberation, mom put it on the market. Now she has to vacate by the end of the month.

Our family moved into this house on August 25, 1972. There is my artist's rendering in the diary entry above. I was nearly 11. It looks like the work of a five-year-old. The four of us had been living in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. I shared a bed with my brother; my parents slept on a pull-out couch in the living room.

I liked the apartment; it had a terrace, and we lived across the street from a big, beautiful park. Still, it was a huge deal to move into a house with a yard, with a lilac bush and peonies. Their sweet smell filled the house when my parents would cut them and put them in a vase on the dining room table.  Flowers from our own garden! A neighbor baked bread, wrapped it in brown paper, tied it with string, attached a hydrangea and left it on our front step as a welcome gift. So quaint! So picturesque! This is the way people with houses did things, I thought.

My brother and I each had a room. I got the larger room, as I am the oldest, and also a princess, and I certainly needed more room for my canopy bed and Madame Alexander dolls. I believe my brother still resents me for this 40 years later, and I don't blame him.

The dress I knitted with help from mom and grandma

Malibu Barbie in a kicky hostess gown

My mother has been cleaning out the place for a decade, hauling things to Salvation Army and bringing me boxes of my childhood stuff. That's where I found the above Barbie, dress and diary, in which I frequently apologized for not writing often enough, as if the diary were a living being. Clearly, writing infrequently has always been a problem. In the diary,  I don't mention the bullying I endured as the plump new girl. I hadn't gotten to the point of using writing as a way to vent.

I only lived full-time in the house for 7 years, but it's always been where the extended family gathered for holidays and graduation parties and barbeques and funerals. My father died there.

I didn't choose to raise my family in the town where I grew up. The reasons are complicated, and as my mother has gotten older I've often questioned that decision. When we were shopping for our home, we would run into the older widows who were reluctantly selling their family homes. I always felt sad for them. Now my mother is one of those women, leaving the place where she raised us, cooked delicious meals, played pinochle, and argued politics with her friend Cathy over Sambuca.

Disturbing Dawn Doll

I would like to introduce you to this maimed Dawn doll from my childhood. I have no memory of how she lost the bottom half of her arm, and I was not one of those kids who engage in doll abuse. I do admire her chutzpah in wearing a newly fashionable cold-shoulder dress.

I was reunited with Dawn three or so years ago. I think it was Mother's Day, and I was at Glen Island Park in New Rochelle, N.Y. with my mother, my grandmother, my kids and my husband. As my mother and son fished, my grandmother reached into her pocket and handed me the doll.

I was startled by her hacked off stump, and I didn't recognize her. It's certainly possible that we used to hang out, as my once photographic memory has gotten a bit wobbly. I do recall playing with Dawn, the more diminutive Barbie knockoff, just not an injured one. "When her arm broke your mother didn't want you to have it any more," Grandma explained. "So I put it in a drawer." This did not surprise me, as the woman saved everything. She hung onto Dawn for almost forty years! She actually packed it and moved with it, twice. I imagine her thought process on this: "Some day Chrissy will find a man, God help her, and maybe she'll squeeze out a daughter before her ovaries dry up, and that daughter will certainly want the opportunity to play with a one-and-a-half armed doll from the late sixties." Grandma wanted permission to give Dawn to my daughter Violet, so I said ok. My mother, cranky from chemo, shook her head disgustedly.

The other day Violet and I were playing, and she wanted to develop a story line about how Dawn lost her arm. I suggested that she was injured by a shark while surfing, inspired by an article we had done while I was at ym. Violet loved that.

You've got to cherish your family heirlooms, such as they are.