It Runs in the Family

Caution: baby-doll horror story ahead!

Y'all. My sister called me today with a Story. (You think I'm the only one in the family with crazy stories, but that is Not So. Not So, But Far Otherwise.)

Sister is Pixie's mom, my little niece who is nearly 2. Pixie (not her real name) has had this crazy--ugly dolly forever that is a soft-bodied doll with a "lifelike" head - you know, the creepy baby dollies that every little girl has to carry around with her. It's called Baby. It has sausage-shaped stuffed legs and a "bodysuit" which is really her body. But most of all, thick, creepy, rubbery fake skin on her head and hands.

Baby got newsprint on her fake-creepy skin when daddy laid her on the newspaper one day. Baby had part of the Miami Herald just over her left ear, a tattoo of Today's News. (Good thing it wasn't an obituary.)

Baby got a hole in the back of her head when she got shoved under the couch one day. Just a tear in the skin, but these things have a way of getting worse.

About two weeks ago, Pixie walked in holding Baby by putting her fingers through the hole in her skin. My sister got a little freaked out about her possibly ripping off the skin and swallowing it, so she decided to have a Baby Operation and just take the skin off.

Having absolutely NO IDEA what it would look like, she peeled and peeled. Pixie watched her, and (understandably) freaked out when her precious Baby began to look even crazier and frightening. Unfortunately those fellas at the Acme Toy Company just went ahead and put a horror-monster baby in there under all the fake plastic skin. Baby's plastic skeleton didn't look all that different from our real ones. Pixie yelled "EYES! EYES MAMA! EYES!" and she went into unconsolable hysterics, just as you would if your dear mother pulled the skin off your darling baby doll's head. (Why she did not wait until Pix went for a nap I'll never know, but she swears she thought it would be just fine under there.) And obviously, Pixie has no idea that it's just a doll, to her it's a real live baby, and her mother just did something terrible to it.

My sister put it in a closet under a blanket hoping she'd forget about it, like you do. (Dear sister: Why the heck didn't you toss the doll in the trash?) Pixie occasionally walked over to the bump underneath the blanket in her closet and yelled "EYES! EYESSSSS MAMA!"

She was clearly not forgetting. Fearing for her child's eventual sanity and imagining the bills she might one day face when Pixie got to her twenties and had to go to counseling because of the Great Baby Doll Skinning of 07, my sister got the baby out of the closet (Pixie grabbed her and wouldn't let go, and kept looking at my sister like "How could you DO THIS?"), wrenched her away with a promise that Baby was going to the hospital to get fixed, and drove like hell to the Toys R Us two towns over for a replacement. Armed with a trash bag and a pair of scissors, my sister marched in and bought a new doll. The kind ladies at the store were not overly judgmental of my sister when she showed them what she had done to Baby, got the new doll out of her box, took the clothes off Baby and put them on her replacement. She folded up the new clothes, put Baby into the trash bag, tied it up, grabbed New Baby, and drove like hell back home, hoping that Pixie would accept the almost-identical replacement.

When PIxie woke up from her nap, her eyes lit right up at her new Baby. She listened all wideeyed as her mama told her the Baby got fixed and got a new outfit at the hospital, and wanted to put on Baby's new clothes. (We are clearly horrible people, but you'd probably do it too.) All afternoon she's been playing with her new Baby, occasionally stopping to hold her at arms-length, during which she appears to admire her new skin, then give her a big hug.

Well, you would too, if your mama made your Baby look like this.

I have already laughed until I cried several times today, and believe I have come up with a Life Lesson for my sister: The next time this happens, do not skin the doll. Go directly to Toys R Us, and save yourself the grief. My 11-year old nephew, Pixie's big brother, wanted to keep the doll for himself. (Clearly why my sister thought taking the skin off would be okay in the first place.)

ETA: This really is how Southerners give directions. I can't do the regular kind anymore. Here is the associated story.

The mitten box

I was going to tell you about how I was wondering why the astronaut chick had a bb gun with her, but then I remembered that a colleague at work shot his own front teeth out when he was a kid in a bb gun mishap. I guess maybe she figured that if she couldn't kill her, she could at least take out a few teeth.

Then I was going to tell you about how when my sister was little she called her throat her "teledirt." None of us have any clue why, or what she might have been mispronouncing, and even my sister to this day has no idea. (I think she was saying "throat hurt" because moms like to say "does your throat hurt" and touch your neck, so maybe she thought it was the name.)

But then I called my dad tonight and he said it's been -17 all week back in Michigan, and I couldn't think of anything except walking to school in the freezing cold, occasionally with my hair wet so it would freeze (hi, 4th grade) but more often in one of those blue snowmobile coats with the hood that was a mile long and trimmed with fur and the lining was orange, and I had a string in my coat to hold my mittens on. And THAT got me thinking about the mitten box.

We always had a mitten box in our mud room, and it's a good thing they were all tied together with idiot strings because there were a lot of mittens. I also had a blue ski pair that had clips on the wrists and I am not sure what they were for but I used them to clip the mittens to each other when I took them off so I wouldn't lose them. When I came in from the back yard, my first stop was that box. I've dreamed about it - in one I was digging through the mitten box in the back of Outback Steakhouse, where I waited tables in college. It was one of those dreams where you have 5 ungreeted tables and they just sat you with a party of 12. And I was digging in my family's mitten box. And the mitten box reminded me of ice skating.

Dad put a skating rink in the back yard every year - maybe I have told you that. He had a gigantic plastic tarp and he carved out the space with a shovel and laid down the tarp and sprayed it with the hose until there was a lot of ice. And when that wasn't working I went down to the high school with my skates and spent hours whirling around on their rink, frozen and with my stupid mitten strings banging against my legs. I was a skating fool - backwards, forwards, spirals, speed-skating, you name it, I was out there perfecting my technique. Then I saw Ice Castles on HBO around 1980, and I didn't skate anymore. What happened to Lexie was just too awful. A few months ago I watched that movie again, laughing at Robby Benson's crazy hair and how her hairdos got better the more successful she got, and then there was that awful jump and the chain and - laugh at me if you will - all my love for skating left me.

I never had a thing for Robby Benson, but a skating career made her lose him. I knew even back then the movie was super cheesy, but it was just so sad.



This is a picture of me and my sister in the back yard. I am guessing because of the moon boots that I was 9 and my sister was going on 4. That would make it 1979. I would guess it was pretty early in the winter based on how smooth the snowman is. We lived in a house that was built from a giant lumber baron's mansion - four houses were built from what they salvaged from it. (My hometown was a lumber boomtown back in the day.) The garage behind us was the carriage house. We had a dog named Butch who lived at the end of the garage and never came in the house. He was a collie, I guess, but mostly brown. One day he just wandered off and never came back. He was deaf, we couldn't find him. I like that we put whiskers on the snowman.

Anyway. I don't remember those mittens at all, but see how we are both wearing snowpants? How cool dippy is that? And those moon boots? My friend Jennifer Jo and I took her paddleboat out on their stinky-arse pond one day and I stuck my foot in. After that the boot stunk, and I had to throw them out. But Napoleon would be proud!

Ice Castles, moon boots and the mitten box - I've destroyed all my street cred with y'all, and you know all you'll ever need to know about me.