The Bride Doll

Momma, do remember Willie, our next-door neighbor, when we lived in the duplex on Jefferson? How did she get in and out of her second-floor apartment in a wheelchair without an elevator? I don’t remember a wooden ramp, but it must have existed. If so, who built it for her? Did she have a husband?  I don’t remember.  I still have the bride doll Willie gave me. It’s stored in your battered red doll trunk, along with  your Toni doll and all the doll clothes Grandma made for you. I don’t remember either of my daughters showing much interest in the dolls, which is why they now languish in that trunk somewhere in the garage. 

I remember Willie telling me that the bride doll once belonged to her daughter, who grew up and moved away from home. I met her once, although I don’t remember her name. She seemed perfect to me; a young version of her mother, with kind eyes and a generous laugh. Only, Willie’s daughter stood up straight and tall. Her legs worked. Willie’s daughter either went away to college, or had a ‘career.’ Maybe she did both: two of the three things I wanted for myself when I grew up. The third was to have children, only I would adopt. I was so afraid of the pain of childbirth. 

I loved going next door and visiting Willie, and I cherished the bride doll with its soft touchable skin and its sparkling green glass eyes fringed in thick black lashes. Her eyelids opened and closed. I would gently lower and raise her to watch the sleeping beauty wake, like in a fairy tale. Her synthetic hair fell in lush auburn curls and brushed her plastic shoulders. “She looks like Maureen O’Hara,” you said.  I only knew the actress in black and white, as Esmeralda in an old movie I watched on our small TV, but I agreed. How I wanted green eyes framed by thick, black eyelashes like my brother David’s lashes. His brown eyes were flecked with gold. Like yours. As you dressed for a date, I watched you apply your black mascara. “Why do boys always get the beautiful eyelashes,” you often complained. But you were lovely, and I was sad I would never be beautiful like you, or like the bride doll. My eyes were pale and insignificant, unlike the bride doll’s emerald eyes, or like David’s and your dark eyes.  David, who’d died and gone to heaven, taking with him thick lashes as black as Willie’s wheelchair.  

I still breathe deep the heavy scent of honeysuckle vine leading up the back porch steps to Willie’s kitchen, its small flowers the same color as the bride doll’s ivory lace wedding dress and bridal veil. The doll had a missing hand hidden by a small bouquet fastened to the sleeve in order to hide the doll’s only deformity. I remember Willie offering the doll to me as she leaned forward in her wheelchair, apologizing for the missing hand. I thought the doll perfect, and fell in love with the bride immediately.  

Momma, when I saw Willie in her wheelchair, I thought of how you were lucky. You said the doctors told you that you would never walk again. “How I hated my wheelchair,” you said, “and later, the leg brace and crutches.” You hid the brace beneath your first wedding dress, and even when you no longer needed it, I never saw you wear shorts. I think you once told me that even when making love, you would try to hide your skinny polio leg from your boyfriends and husbands. 

The boyfriends never wanted to leave, and none of the husbands/fathers stuck around for long. Four children, three fathers, one stepfather. How strange it is to think now about how much I loved the bride doll—my only doll that I never named—since I had vowed that I would never get married like you. Weddings were your thing, not mine.

Now you are gone and I have a scrapbook you saved with your eight marriage certificates and your eight divorce decrees. I have a wedding album filled with photographs taken at my first wedding to a man I met in high school who gave me three children now grown. At three months of marriage, I knew I had made a mistake. But I did not want my own divorce scrapbook. We stayed married for over nineteen years. 

None of the children, who are in long-term relationships and two with children, are married to their partners. 

I did remarry. He is a wonderful man who holds me close at night and sorrows about the fact that at our age our marriage will not be a long one. I did not wear a white wedding dress like you did at most of your weddings, and I still do not believe in happily ever after, but when I watch my husband fill the birdfeeders outside our kitchen, or lovingly tease our grandchildren, I want this happiness for everyone—my children, their partners, our grandchildren, my ex-husband, every hurt and damaged person on the planet. With or without legal documentation, someone to hold them close. How I wish you could have danced at our wedding, that you were with us now. 

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Robin Michel grew up in a railroad town in Utah, and now lives in San Francisco, California. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies; and her creative nonfiction has appeared in Dreamers, The Lindenwood Review, Sand Hills, and elsewhere.