Hair of Freshly Cut Grass
The day her cancer came back, my mother entered life through a door closed to the rest of us.
Like the day she crawled into her attic and hauled down five cardboard boxes stacked with dolls I used to play with when I was five years old. No one had even peeked in the boxes in over forty years. I thought they’d been given away to the Goodwill years ago. But there was my mother sitting on the floor of the TV room in her blue terrycloth robe, with all my dolls surrounding her.
I only remember fragments of my life with those dolls. I remember the gauzy lavender dress on my Grandmother’s old antique doll smelled of somebody’s attic. I remember the doll’s cheek had a chalky taste when I licked it. The yellow lace around the edges of her lavender bonnet fraying and sticking to my fingers like a dead butterfly’s wing. My mother telling me the doll’s hair was from a person who had died long ago. Me sitting alone on my bed stroking the silky blond hair thinking—the woman who wore this hair is dead, but I’m holding her hair in my hands.
Then there was Cinderella in the stiff yellow prom dress Ma would never let me take off. I hated how her fingers were always frozen in that Arabesque pose. I hated her prickly, polyester, Tammy Baker eyelashes. I wanted to smear peanut butter all over her. I swore she’d been laying in the attic all those years staring into the dark empty space between her and the lid of the cardboard box, praying she’d become Miss America one day.
Raggedy Ann was more my style. I used to stuff her into my lunch box. So lumpy and floppy she was the only one lying down in the circle around my mother. Maybe I loved her so much because she was a strange early cross dresser, Raggedy Ann on one side and Raggedy Andy when I flipped her over.
But the only doll I ever remember falling asleep with was Mazy. Maybe it was because she had this ‘I’ve just been born’ look. A pudgy squashed in face that hadn’t yet decided what exact shape to be. Her red carpet hairdo felt so much like freshly cut grass I remember laying her down on the bed and running my bare feet through her hair. And she could pee. I’d climb on a chair, stick her open mouth under the kitchen tap and watch the water run out the hole in her bum.
Every morning my mother took one doll out of the circle and carried it to the bathroom. She scrubbed off the green mildew that had grown between the plastic toes and fingers after being cooped up in a hot Appalachian attic. Then she carefully scrubbed off all the crayon marks left on the doll as the memory of our past drawing days. Gram’s antique doll got a permanent. Mazy got a whole new set of pajamas: purple ice cream cones printed on soft pink flannel.
Each evening Ma lined the dolls against the pillow on Gram’s bed at the far end of the house.
The next morning she took them all out again.
One by one.
