Under a pillow. Under a bed. Pieces at first, and then all of you, as you came into being, and then pieces of you again. At the kitchen table. In the old toilet. Beneath a bowling alley approach (lane one). That was good, close to family, you could hear them overhead though you are only a doll and you know it. Only a doll means you are ignored more and caressed more than any other member of the family. In the coat closet. In a bed, at last, under the eiderdown, pawed and beloved. In the bathtub, damp-bottomed. In a chair, in the basement, in a chair, in the basement, under the eiderdown, in the bathtub, in the basement. Wired to a cast-iron column. Then higher on the column. On a glass counter, nothing worse, nobody knows how to take care of you. In a suitcase. In a kitchen, in a suitcase on a trolley, under the ground. Love and lack of love and love again.
You can tell when you’re underground even if you’re also in a suitcase, even if you’re made of wood and cloth. Sea air. In a penny arcade. In a glass coffin. (Not a coffin, a box. What’s the difference? Dolls don’t have coffins.) All along, one arm off, back on, one elbow broken, one foot on backward, eye gone from abuse, mouth half rubbed off, breast torn, brains leaking out. People think you’re funny. People think you’re unsettling. They are dismayed by your proportions. They want to lift your skirt. They don’t want to think about what they’ll find there. Do you have organs? A bowling ball, a small one, carved into the shape of a heart. Rubber, of course. Rubber and wood and cloth. How can they string you up so, when you’re made of movement and clatter.
Sea air, sea air, years of it. You are the mascot of Arrison’s Arcade, on Revere Beach. Suitcase, trolley, subway, trolley—all the same line, all the same car, just above and below and above again. Not carried kindly but with competence. Swung down the street and LuEtta Pickersgill Mood Arrison sets you down in the early morning in front of what was Truitt’s.
LuEtta Pickersgill Mood Arrison’s hair had gone roan with age. She was tall and lean, one of those women in her fifties whose figures had flattened, but glamorously. She gave the suitcase a pat and fought the urge to peer at the doll of Truitt one last time—she had taken its presence in her penny arcade for granted for so long she no longer knew how she felt about it, though when Jeptha had brought it home ten years before she’d wanted to give it a Viking funeral: obliterate it, but with respect.
Jeptha was dead, had gone to the hospital because he was dead, the Salford Hospital where he’d slept beneath Bertha Truitt’s bed; then he had gone to the Salford Cemetery, where he owned a plot next to his first wife. He and LuEtta had lived these past years near the beach. They owned a little arcade that included eight Skee-Ball alleys, which LuEtta occasionally ran for the pleasure of her customers, op op op, center ring every ball. At Arrison’s Arcade you could walk away with evidence of your good time: a gleamingly damp fragrant strip from the photo booth; a metal token stamped with a message you chose one letter at a time from the ID machine; a penny smashed into a lozenge, on one side raised letters that said SOUVENIR OF REVERE BEACH, on the other a faint elongated leftover Lincoln.
Carmine, her son, was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia. With Jeptha’s death LuEtta was officially alone. She’d lost plenty of people—Truitt, Moses, Jeptha, and first and always Edith—but there had always been somebody else hanging around, heart-in-hand, asking for love. She’d thought then she was grateful. Now she was ashamed to discover how much she liked solitude, silence, the loneliness that Truitt had talked about as a pleasure.
It was two hours before opening. She planned to set the suitcase with the doll of Truitt down in the tiled trapezoid in front of the doors, to escape before seeing another living person. But as she came up Mims Avenue, she saw a slumping, smoking figure rattling his keys in front of the door. Not Joe Wear, though for a moment—Maybe time travel was possible, Jeptha. A teenaged kid. He had the look of somebody who’d been out all night and had come to sneak home before his mother found out. He looked up and saw her and gave a tired smile.
All right then: she’d deliver it, in Jeptha’s name.
“Hey,” she called. “You’re one of the Truitt boys.”
“Arch,” he whispered, wincing up at the windows over the alley.
She nodded. They stood together on the worn-down black-and-white tile spelling out TRUITT. She would not look through the window; she handed the boy the case. She must have seemed to him an apparition. “From Jeptha,” she whispered.
“What is it?”
“Look.”
He balanced the case on one knee—it was difficult, he was still full of beer—and opened it, and saw the battered avid face, and though five minutes before he would not have remembered the doll on his own, he felt that swoony sensation of childhood unexpectedly returned: as though she’d fallen through time, back into his arms. Ever since Arch had been stood up by a ghost, he’d been unmoored, had twice been found by the police passed out in places he shouldn’t have been—first in the passenger seat of a truck owned by his friend Phillip, who was busy stealing a rocking chair off somebody’s back porch; then in the white leather examination chair of his girlfriend’s dentist father at four in the morning. But this doll. He was drunk. He thought it might reform him. He looked up to thank the apparition—LuEtta was right, that was what she seemed like—but she had already gone.
LuEtta Mood Arrison was nearly to the trolley station when she thought she should have asked the kid to let her take a look inside Truitt’s. Empty, she might have been able to bear it. Maybe Jeptha was right, and on the other side of some door at the alley, Bertha Truitt was straightening her clothing. Flying through time will knock the hat right off your head! It will twist your skirts! It will unbutton everything! Get yourself straight: then open the door and look for the people who love you.
Except of course everyone was gone. Leviticus dead, Jeptha dead, all of the cats of her personal acquaintance, her daughter gone. Why would Bertha time travel here? They had already missed her. Go back further. Use all your celestial stereoptical gizmos to find the right spot. Your darlings are alive, plenty of future ahead of them. It isn’t too late to change things.
Don’t go back for her, LuEtta. Remember what happened the last time you looked.
Betty Among the Pins
Minna had a trio. Margaret remembered her saying so but didn’t know what that meant until one Saturday matinee at the Gearheart Theater, when she watched a wartime comedy featuring some dumb comedy team, a fat man and a thin man in suits. In a musical number set at a USO show, there was Minna in a cocktail dress, playing the drums behind a bass player and saxophone player, and singing: Swing me, Daddy, to a reveille beat. A trio. Three of them. A family. She watched Minna greedily, and though she knew it was impossible she believed in some way that Minna was able to see her in the Gearheart, would be able to sense her love. In the credits: Minna Sprague and her Canadian Cats. It was shocking to see a woman drum the way Minna did, with rapture and abandon. That was the province of men.