Clothes

Each month, The Sun Magazine has a section called Reader's Write, and readers write short autobiographical essays around a theme.  If your piece is chosen, you get a year's subscription to this excellent ad-free literary magazine.  I've had two pieces published here in the past, and my subscription is running out, so I wrote the following short essay and popped it in the mail.

If you're interested in doing this, the topic due August 1st is Clothes; the topic for September 1st is First Love. They want it sent by snail mail, double spaced, to:

Readers Write
107 North  Roberson Street
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27516

                                                           Clothes:

I spied the doll at the pharmacy, posed beside the cash register. My heart leapt in recognition; she was exactly what I’d ask for the next Christmas. My daddy was dropping off a roll of film and a prescription, but I made sure he noticed that this was the exact doll I wanted more than anything in the world.

She was eighteen-inches tall, and she and a pre-Barbie shapely grown-up body, like a miniature Miss America. She wore high heeled shoes and a string of plastic pearls. Her eyes were auburn to match hair that fell softly over her perfect plastic complexion.

On our next trip to the drug store, she was gone. I still believed in Santa, or pretended to, and I never doubted that she’d find her way to my house.

What I didn’t expect, what thrilled me more than any Christmas gift ever, was a red metal trunk filled with doll clothes.  A wedding gown, silky pajamas, and an entire wardrobe of tiny clothes, each garment hanging on a metal clothes hanger.  I buttoned and unbuttoned every dress, changing her attire over and over. I loved that doll and her clothes!

I pretended not to notice that some of the dresses were made of fabric exactly like dresses my mother and I wore. I pretended not to notice little bits of rick-rack and leftover buttons beside my mother’s sewing machine.  The grown-up doll with breasts even had a dress quite like my recital dress—blue taffeta with a net skirt.

The following summer, our church asked each family to invite orphans from the Georgia Baptist Children’s Home to spend two weeks in our homes.  We got Margaret and Emory, a girl playmate for me, a boy for my brother.  The idea was to give them a taste of family life.

Margaret had a speech impediment, but she insisted every night that we try calling the town her mother might still live in and ask the operator to find her.  “Say Baxley, Georgia,” she pleaded, as I dialed information in search of her mother.  Since I wasn’t quite sure she was pronouncing the name correctly, I called every Georgia town that started with a B, or could even remotely sound like Baxley. As I dialed, Margaret looked on with pleading eyes while dressing and undressing my grown-up doll.

She gently pulled the doll’s arms into the sleeves, then smoothed the bodice over the breasts and smoothed the hem.  “Maybe she’s moved,” I said, when over and over the operator said, “There’s no one with that name in the book.”

“Try again,” she said.  “Maybe you didn’t say the name right.”

I never found Margaret’s mother, but on the night before she was to return to the orphan’s home, I had a sudden burst of inspiration and spoke before I’d asked my mother for permission. “You can have my doll and all her clothes,” I said.  I expected her to be euphoric, but she wasn’t one to show strong emotion.  She simply began packing the clothes into the trunk and snapped the latch closed. At that moment, I desperately wanted to retract the offer, but it was too late.


The next day, I couldn’t quite read the expression on my mother’s face when she saw Margaret packing up my doll and treasured trunk of clothes.  Was she proud of my generosity or did she think I’d gone too far?  What she didn’t know—what even I didn’t know—was that it was the only way I knew to give Margaret any semblance of a mother was to give her a closet full of clothes.