Marlene Tholl: BABY DOLL • Cleaver Magazine

Marlene Tholl
BABY DOLL

Shanty Point

Labor Day. Surging swells, pale over dark, an outlook off into forever. My husband Augustus was surfcasting for striper with an eel on the hook. He pointed out the now mostly submerged rocks that marked the best hole on Shanty Point; waves curled over them, a bit off from shore to the north. I looked south across the estuary toward the long barrier beach where we often go for the day. What a different view of the world this was from the tip of the island.

We had suffered some to make it here, settling for a fly-bitten, windy shelf beach higher up on the island at first. While he was casting, I had slept fitfully in the car, swatting at the flies. After a while he had packed everything up, muttering, “Nothing. Not even schoolies. Not even a flounder.” This was a joke. His first catch ever had been a mistake, hooking an undersized flounder through the tail. He was trying to get me to smile.

In response to my pregnancy, he had spent the summer teaching himself to fish. He felt it to be a deep, visceral way that he could contribute to us, to what we were creating together. He had come away with nothing big enough to keep. Neither had I.

Nothing. Like on the last ultrasound done on Thursday, the day of the genetic testing. The previous scan from two months before, showing the growing embryo and egg sac, had reminded me, in its webbed coalescence, of the telescopic image of the birth of a star. This time the pitch black of my uterus had confused me. It was as though I were in an airlock, looking out a porthole into empty space. Except, according to the grim faces of the radiologist and my obstetrician, and the speed with which they scheduled me for an in-hospital dilation and curettage, that nothingness had threatened to be dangerous.

But my body felt differently. My body had loved being pregnant. How could I blame it for not wanting to let that little bit of nothingness go?

After stopping at the ranger station for an all-season permit, we trundled down the white dust road of the reserve, steadily getting more and more frustrated by the lack of parking. Just before giving up, we found a spot at the very end, Shanty Point, where I had wanted to come in the first place. As we emerged from the dunes… beauty. Spangled, shining, shingled beauty all around us. An inlet between bright sandbars, driftwood sculpted into obscure forms by the tides along the low strand, the few visitors worshipping the beach, quietly, serenely. Someone had erected a great puffing balloon-like shelter set on a driftwood base far off on the other side of the inlet. I could see lone figures wandering around it, some in silhouette, some sparkling against the liminal background of sand and wavering air and fanning, hissing sea.

August fished and wandered. I had ceased to bleed, but all I wanted was to sleep. So, I slept, fetal, like the baby seals one finds here temporarily abandoned on the sand, feeling at home now despite never having lain my body upon this patch of ground before.

I awakened finally, took the gold thimble locket on a ribbon from around my neck, opened it up and removed the red marble that I had chosen last spring for my hope of impending pregnancy. I had held it tight in my palm before we had gone to the hospital for the procedure on Friday. Now it was in my hand again, glowing, seeming to pulse, the symbol of a summer of miracles. It was all I had to prove to myself that it had happened.

I knelt facing the open sea. It occurred to me that I was exhausted not just from the physical trauma and the sudden crash of a summer’s worth of make-a-baby hormones, but simply from feeling so much, for this little nothing that had been everything. I looked down to find that I had been tracing an infinity sign in the sand with my right hand. This was the place then. My hand had decided.

I sang my very first ritual song. It had come to me many years before, long before I had ever envisioned that I might be able to be a mother as well as an artist, despite never quite succeeding in silencing the inner and outer voices whispering in counterpoint that down that road lay hardship, entrapment. Only years later do I have the perspective to note that, for some of us, all roads are similarly booby-trapped, whatever the choices we make, whether they be in self-preservation or exploration or in a confusion of the two. But, here and now, I sang the original song of my soul. It somehow held the entirety of my life’s yearning in its sustained, wistful notes. I sang it with surprise at my own remembering. And this is what I thought:

My little one, you swam in me. Your time was so brief, but it was a lifetime and I loved you within it. Here we are now, on the sand at the edge of the sea. This is as far as we can go. I am your mother and I love you and I will always be missing you.

I placed the red marble upon the crux of the infinity sign. Feeling a pang, I glanced up the beach. There was no sign of August. My song trailed off into a long out breath. I pushed the spirit remains of my last chance, my last child, into the sand.

Missing you missing you always be missing you… How sad to see it disappear into the earth. How final. I wanted it to rest awhile, undisturbed by the tides, so I pushed deeper again. As my fingers moved to brush the sand over it, I was suddenly in shadow and my husband’s hand was covering mine; from nowhere expected, his arms were around me and we were patting the earth closed together. I buried my tears in his neck. His kiss was long and sweet.

To Think That I Saw it on Maybell Street

She was sitting upright, in the center of a patch of lawn at the corner of Maybell and Elm Streets. She was naked. I was maybe five. We were taking the back way from church. To avoid the traffic and those irritating red lights in the center of town, Dad would drive the Volkswagen bug too fast out the other end of the parking lot, past the hospital administration building where Gramma worked, past the hospital itself, then around the corner past Friendly’s Ice Cream and over the train tracks, clickety clack. The dirty old white house stood far back from the road just beyond the tracks, with its wide unused yard running down to Maybell Street. I looked up from kicking my Sunday patent leathers against the back of the driver’s seat and saw her there, alone, abandoned, unclothed. The child had left her sitting up, one ball and socket arm extended slightly.

Mum was a member of the Parish Committee. She had stayed behind to serve coffee and danishes in the Parish Hall. It was just Dad and I driving home, where my own dolls were dressed and waiting, tucked snugly both at the head and foot of the Bo Peep doll bed. It may have been that this drive was a periodic occurrence, because it is always Dad and the red bug I remember, again crossing the tracks, clickety clack, and then there she would be, the grass growing up around her, arm extended in that slight appeal. Leaves collected round her in fall, her hair increasingly matted from the rains and standing on end from the wind. When we passed by in winter, she was half buried, with a heavy, icicle-laden cap of snow. It was this sight, I remember, that finally brought me to tears. I do not remember whether anyone tried to find out why I was, for a time, inconsolable. I was a communicative child; maybe I volunteered the reason for my grief. I can’t recall. It is her that I have never forgotten.

Toys in the Attic

“A branch from the 1865 oak broke through the roof in the storm.”

“Oh, my god.”

“Tremont came and got it off the roof with a crane. And the roofers are coming on Monday. You’ve got to get your stuff out of there.”

“Oh, so it’s that corner of the attic?”

“You’ve got to clear it out before they come.” My mother sounded terse, pressured. She was going away for the weekend.

Another summer, seven years on from the day at Shanty Point. I was spending it liquidating Peggy’s estate. My beloved elderly friend had died in the spring, and my attention and nostrils were full up with the dust-laden archaeological dig that had been her home and painting studio for fifty years. The last thing I wanted to deal with now was boxes of my own past. But I did, and fast, gaping at the breadth of sky visible through the clear tarp thrown over the gash in my mother’s roof. I hoisted box after box from the attic to the car, and then back into the city, where I left them piled in a corner of the large studio until I could tend to them. In the meantime, the cats climbed upon them, soiling their paws with the dust and tar that had sifted down through the roof-cracks over the past three decades. Lovage, in particular, sniffed and sniffed at all the openings in the rotting cardboard with the avidity of a sommelier. She lifted her head up, eyes wild, pink nose working. Mice!

Crime Channel

It was months later when I finally tackled the boxes, ripping the first few of them open to find a treasure trove of books. The collection spanned my childhood and early youth, picture books to chapter books. Mrs. Molesworth, Tasha Tudor, The Green Fairy Book, Rabbit Hill, Goodnight Moon. Oh, the richness of remembering, as I handled them, smelled them, dipped into their pages here and there. I arranged them upon the lower shelves of one of the ceiling-high bookcases that had come from Peggy’s. I imagined my nieces and nephews, or other children who had not yet entered my life, reading them, taking their favorites, cherishing them as I had. I looked forward to rereading them myself.

The next couple of boxes were full of board games and puzzles. Easy to either donate to charity or send to the kids in my eccentric Auntie Christmas packages, a “slow play” alternative to their handhelds. I decided to keep only the Masterpiece game, finding myself curious to play it again after the months spent cataloging and dispensing with Peggy’s art collection as well as her own paintings.

I contemplated the last two boxes with the beginnings of exhaustion, even some dread. As I pulled the flaps back on one, the scent that Lovage had been so enchanted by wafted out. The box’s interior looked like a hay barn. My stuffed animals were littered with the cotton and straw of their own innards. The pièce de résistance was in a little wicker cradle that I had hurriedly tucked between the plush of their bodies thirty years ago. All these messy efforts at stuffing retrieval had gone to the making of a nest so flossy, so inviting that I might have wanted to curl up in it myself, except for the smell that emanated from its recesses. Neither awful nor overpowering, it was more like the memory of a smell.

Should I just throw it away and not look? Without consciously deciding, I was nudging the swaths of stuffing aside. And there they all were, massed and pink, but not moving, beginning to shrivel with time and the heat of the past summer. Their mother must have been out foraging when I had absconded with the box and the nursery within it. I had a vision, undoubtedly suggested by the images I had just perused in my own Mousekin books, of the little mother returned, on her haunches upon the dusty boards of the attic, delicate paws clasped together, nose twitching. Did she feel bereft? What mother, newly robbed of her purpose, teats throbbing, would not? It seemed to me that it was not a question of bereavement, but of the length of time spent in pain, the persistence of one’s memory.

The last and largest box revealed itself to be its own kind of tomb. There, when I pulled out the wads of old newspaper packing, sat the Bo Peep bed, with each doll dressed in her best. I had laid them out shoulder to shoulder at both the head and foot to fit them all in, tucking them carefully under layers of baby blankets. No grave-robbers had disturbed the scene, but there had been visitors. When I lifted the bed out, tiny, desiccated turds lay scattered about at the bottom of the box.

The dolls varied, from pink babies to toddlers with full heads of hair, all made of ball and socket plastic. There were a few Raggedy Anns and an Andy, and some hybrid dolls, partially of plastic, partially of cloth. The most impressive of these was the very last doll that I had ever asked for. She was exactly life-size and authentic looking, with a soft cloth body that, when pressed and cradled, inspired the tender, molded plastic limbs to move in the most realistic way, just as a sleepy baby stirs in her mother’s arms. The face was rosy and long-lashed, the head large in relation to the body, as an infant’s head is. Most of the other dolls had seen hard loving in their time. She was without blemish. Having received her at the age when I was close to growing out of dolls altogether, I had barely played with her.

I held the dolls, put my face to them. Their scent was memory. I fingered the folds of their dresses, some of them painstakingly made for me by my grandmother, from Liberty prints, with delicate lace trim and wee crystal buttons. The realistic baby wore my own baby clothes. I recalled the stations of my childhood in which each doll had starred, and these recollections were heavy, dripping with a strange feeling of guilt and an undiminished longing. After all, why had I kept them? For the same reason that my mother had kept her eyeless, threadbare teddy bear and the two dolls that had survived her childhood. She had kept them for me.

I had kept them because, prior to understanding what seemed like immutable stakes, prior to making choices and having other choices made for me, that was how a life was supposed to go.

I did put three or four of them up on the shelves above the books, the ones that passed muster as collectors’ items or decorative objects. But what to do with all the other babies, scarred and weathered from the force of my love? The Goodwill website strongly refused dolls that were not in pristine condition, nor would it take anything, doll or animal, made of cloth. Thinking of nests and offal, I understood why. And I was tired at this point, so tired, as I hauled the boxes over to the trash room.

Our landlord owns the line of three houses running from ours out to the main street. The house next door holds the common trash room in its bowels. The basement of the next house is taken up by a laundromat, with a junk-filled alley running between them. As I finished the quick and painful work of stuffing the boxes’ contents into the already full trash barrels, I glanced up through the open doorway to see a car pulling into the alley. The woman in the driver’s seat was young but matronly. She was probably parking briefly to load or unload her laundry. As she opened her car door to get out, our eyes met. I was surprised to see a look of horror pass over her face. I glanced down to find myself pressing the authentic baby further into the overfull barrel, her realistic limbs sticking out the top and squirming with a life of their own in response.

My Bloody Valentine

We were doing exercises at the barre when the photographer came in to get some shots for the yearbook. I was nineteen. I could hear my ballet teacher whisper, “Get some of her. She has excellent form.” Then the photographer was kneeling at three-quarters to me as I did my sequences. Plié. Click. Tendu. Click. Battement dégagé. Click.

I had rid myself of my pesky virginity the year before. The golden, strapping president of the Pi Eta Club, his disbelief at my warning, the bloodied sheets, his visible shock at what he had done. Then, cowed by my own bravura, I had spent the rest of that year doubling down on my still entirely intact emotional virginity. Homework in the dorm with my best friend Beryl, the sensual pleasure of corn muffins filled with jam, running lights for the spring musical, sweet and hesitant lunches with the set carpenter.

I returned to school the next fall and finally embraced a newly understood freedom. I had somehow been developing a manifesto in the darkroom of my heart, a commitment to wildness as spiritual practice, and it is what I lived by that first semester of my sophomore year. I was a woman. I was an artist. My body and mind and soul were mine, mine, mine. I was the explorer. I was the laboratory. I was the bud releasing into the flower.

I was pregnant. It happened on Thanksgiving break, the very first time I spent the night with a new boyfriend. My father had allowed me to go. My mother, who had been out that evening, met me with cold fury on my return the next morning. It was the first time and the last that I heard her utter the word “slutty.”

I knew almost immediately; as callow as I was, I knew. My body knew. But the urine tests proved negative, again and again. And I began for a time to think that I had been mistaken. Until I returned to school after winter break and found myself barely making it to the shared dorm toilet to vomit in the early mornings. Until my willowy frame began to thicken at the middle.

I also knew what I had to do. My body and mind and soul were mine, and I knew how I wanted my life to go. This did not prevent my world from turning upside down. My mother wrote the check, but with a face of stony condemnation. For the first time, and, I hope, my last, I listened to my father weeping over the phone. Valentine’s Day. Rumbling back to campus on the trolley afterwards, aching and bleeding, with Beryl at my side, I wept too. She and a carful of commuters were awkward witnesses as I drowned in the grief of my choosing.

I look at that yearbook photo now. I don’t see a girl with excellent form. I see the slight bulge in the leotard at my waistline. I see eyes cast downward and in, eyes full of lonely knowledge, but the eyes of a child nonetheless.

All My Children

When August and I were first dating we visited a Chi Nei Tsang practitioner together. She was silent as she palpated and massaged my belly, but when she got to the area around my ovaries, she said with wonder, “I see all your children. So many children.” I glanced through the open doorway, where August lay on a massage table being worked on by her partner. His eyes were closed. Most likely he hadn’t heard. Her wonder was contagious, inspiring, even though I was already on the cusp of forty at the time. Later, after so many years of hopes raised and dashed, doors opening only to close again, it would strike me as cruelly ironic.

Now, though, it feels anything but ironic, when I am lounging on the back porch, pen in hand, journal in lap, doing the bidding of the internal family systems therapist. I have long conversations with a child whom I call Little Gee, my parents’ nickname for me when I was tiny. She has a lot to say, being very angry and very sad as well as spilling over with the raw joy of being alive. And what real girl in this real world would not be?

One of these sessions is interrupted by a needle-sharp ambush, right through the cloth of my cut-offs to my backside where it is exposed through the cut-out in the wicker chair.

“Someone wants your attention, Mama Cat.”

I turn to find Lovage, on her haunches, paw still raised in mid-swipe and her mouth slightly open in a sotto voce appeal. Beyond her, Korku, a tabby twice her size, stretches his full length along the sunlit flags. The long fingerlike digits of his paws splay luxuriously, inviting August, who sits smiling at me from the top porch step, to rub the striped belly at his peril.

Lovage complains about getting the very thing she has wanted as I scoop her up and bury my face in the impossible softness of her ruff. Once I’ve established her in the chair opposite with sufficient cooing and slow blinks, she settles into a fluffy comma and naps. August chases Korku back inside the house. A soft but persistent wind rises from the west, nudging the old chandelier that I’ve suspended from the porch overhang into motion. Its crystals are ruby red, glowing as they catch the sun, and the wind sends them dancing, knocking each other, creating a variable, delicate, somehow tender music.

I return to the conversation at hand. Where were we now?

We spend a lot of time in the journal hashing things out, my girl and I; I with my right hand, she with my left. The moments I most love, whether on the page or with my eyes closed, are when I imagine holding her in my lap, feeling the solid reality of her little body in my arms. She turns her face up to mine, I caress the silken curls upon her sweet head, gaze into her eyes, tell her how much I love her and how I will keep her cherished and safe always.

Speaking now as her mother, this is something I can do.

Marlene Tholl is a writer, musical and theatrical performer, producer and freelance editor. Her published works are the newly released burn night, a darkwave/poetry EP with Boston-based band Shadowmerge, and Kore, a solo multi-media album, among others. Recently, her poetry was included in The Hole: Mining Portals of Vulnerability, a traveling installation out of New York City; and she received two honorable mentions, for her poetry and fiction respectively, from New Millennium Writings. She is working concurrently on short story/novella and poetry collections. This is her debut as a fiction writer.