There is a very odd stuffed doll who watches me by day and by night from a high place in my boxroom. A guardian angel of a doll. She perches on top of one of the library bookshelves beside the clock that used to hang in my classroom. I made her when I was 22 years old. I was in graduate school in creative writing, and I was writing a very odd piece of writing about the birth of a doll.
So I decided to give birth to one.
I will call her the sawdust doll because when I first made her, I made her out of sawdust. I wanted a real sawdust doll, just like in the olden days.
I didn't have a car, so I had to walk or ride the bus to get all the supplies for her: the sawdust, the fabric, the acrylic paint for her face.
I bought a bag of sawdust at a hardware store downtown and brought it back to my rent house on the bus. I don't have any sawdust on hand for a photo, but the tray in my pencil sharpener was full of shavings, and these will have to be close enough for today.
How lovingly I filled her little body with these golden powdery particles!
And how shocked I was to discover, one by one by one, the realities of a sawdust doll:
First, she was almost as hard as a block of wood. Second, tiny little bits and pieces of sawdust flakes stuck through the fabric like so many teeny-tiny needles. And, third, she sifted everywhere. Little telltale trails of golden dust wafted behind her, as if she were afraid of getting lost and wanted tracks to follow to find her way back.
Who knew?
So I gave birth to her all over again, and this time I stuffed her with cotton batting.
She is exactly as tall as a yardstick, from the tip of her sunburst hair to the tips her red-painted toes. The exact height of a two-year old child. And overnight I decided that I would make a living selling dolls, not her, of course, but dolls like her. So I took her to Dallas to Nieman-Marcus, of all places. I carried her in my arms up the escalator, and I actually met with one of the Marcuses, a son or grandson, perhaps, a very nice man who listened politely to my marvelous idea.
But then he showed me a very pink stuffed doll with yellow yarn hair that they were selling for $25. He seemed to think that I would understand that no one in their right mind would prefer my doll to their doll.
And then he put the matter in different terms. If they were to sell my doll, which they couldn't on account of people preferring the pink doll, they would give me half of the $25, or $12.50, from which I must subtract the cost of materials, leaving me with, I don't know, maybe $2.50. And if it took me a week of hard labor to make one doll, I could hope to make $10 per month selling dolls.
He really didn't think I could live on $10 a month.
You might have thought I would have been discouraged. But not really. I was so sure, you see, that I could make a living as a writer, instead.
In my story that I was writing, the doll was born "in the greening" of a pond. My story doll was stuffed with pond grasses and the dried petals of flowers. This is a photo of the kind of pond I had in mind, Moses and the bulrushes, perhaps.
When I went to pick out colors for the doll, I only remember that the fabric for her body had to be blue-flowered. I wanted my doll to be neither white nor black nor brown, and certainly not pink.
The fabric for the dress, I have long thought, was simply chosen to match the blue of the doll.
But now I see that the dress is the color of a pond! I wonder if I was aware of this at the time? I only just today, in gathering photos together, remembered this photo (above) of a nearby pond. In pairing it with the photo of the dress fabric, I'm so surprised at the matching colors.
I made an "A" on my rather lengthy prose-poem of a story, but, honestly, my professor should really have sat me down and had a little talk about character development and plot and the advisability of actually making sense.
Well, the story is long-lost, but the doll has lived a very colorful life as a witness to and a courier of secrets.
She has been dragged all over the country and back for some 44 years. For the first ten years of her life she served as a kind of piggy bank, for I tried to keep a hundred dollars hidden inside her. I ripped an opening into a side seam, and kept tucking money inside her, then taking it out, then putting it back. This was not mad money, but rather "last resort" money. I was sure that a hundred dollars was enough money to get me safely home from wherever I might be.
But where was home??
I didn't really know where home was for the longest time. This doll was my home, my writing was my home.
Her face is a mystery to me. I would never have designed this particular cartoon face on my own. It came about by accident, for bending over her blue-flowered face, I painted an oval of yellow flowers, the sun and the sky, I was thinking, and I let the blue sky come through her eyes, I gave her a smile, but there is a trail of black tears from her eyes to the tips of her smile, black-painted flower tears, with red-painted roses in her cheeks.
And when I stood back to survey my work, I saw only painted flowers afloat in a blue-flowered sky.
She is like a character in a work of fiction who takes on a persona that you never intended. Her all-knowing cartoonish expression has been the strangest comfort to me in the most terrible of times. It is hard to be completely distraught in the face of her wide-eyed smiley countenance.
I have posed her above in the wilds of our backyard, the "sawdust" doll on an old sawhorse. Isn't she jaunty, with her legs crossed like that, and her head tilted in that flirtatious manner? And, oh my goodness, that plunging neckline! How risque!
I might let her wander the house today before I put her back on her shelf. I might let her peek into my computer and see what the world has been up to of late.
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