Meral

We weren’t allowed to throw that doll away, and even if we pretended to leave it behind in the playground, it always found its way back to the top of our dresser. We must have spent hours tossing in bed, the fear keeping us up, the fear of opening our eyes in the dark and finding its beady eyes staring right back. Those uneven black spots drawn on that small, hard head. Unblinking, its face blank, a red line mouth like a bleeding cut. No wonder the three of us, now grown, still have faint violet circles under our eyes.###

That doll had been a gift from Cousin Marie, a thoughtful middle school student who took on an extra credit assignment when I, the oldest of the three “baby cousins,” was born. As Marie did her work, my mother was lying in hospital for days after my monstrously stubborn birth. Twenty-four hours of labor followed by days of recovery, but still the visitors came. Round after round of aunts and uncles, all of them clamoring to see the first baby in the family in a decade, would lie to the nurses and pretend to be the proud grandparents. “That baby didn’t want to come out! Must be comfortable up there!” they would joke as the nurses waved them into the ward.###

When Marie came to visit with her parents, she had to lie and say she was my mother’s kid sister to make it past the waiting room with all those exhausted, sweating familial clumps. Reaching the maternity ward she trailed in slowly after her parents, her eyes half-shut, a trick she had learned in last semester’s health class. If you had to see something disgraceful, better to see only a little of it. ###

Sneaking closer to the bed, she handed my mother a misshapen gift tied with a yarn bow. Those beady eyes met my mother’s the moment she opened the parcel. “Oh, a doll--” Cousin Marie, eager for praise, finished the thought. “A doll for the baby! I made it myself.” My mother’s weak smile gave out. She looked down again at the doll, her newborn daughter’s first, and the damned ugliest thing you’ve ever seen.