HAZEL BEGGED AND SCREAMED FOR DIANE TO LET GO OF HER ARM, as though the doll were a hairless, giant-breasted attack dog; Hazel pulled her off the bed and began kicking her, then started knocking Diane’s head against the wall before trying a few other actions that illogically supposed Diane capable of feeling pain or losing consciousness. Hazel then attempted to break the doll’s head open on the nightstand like a piggy bank, but Diane’s exterior proved to be almost indestructible. This made Hazel realize Diane’s makers had designed her to be able to withstand incredible beatings, which made Hazel sad for humanity. And what does that say about you, humanity, Hazel thought, that a grown woman whose arm is stuck down the throat of her elderly father’s love doll feels sorry for you? It was not a spirited advertisement for mankind.
Next, in a sort of conjoined-twin crawl, Hazel dragged Diane out of the bedroom and headed in the direction of the bath, stopping in the hallway for a moment to sit and have a break and look at the family portraits lining the walls. “That was my aunt Lena,” Hazel said to Diane, pointing with her free hand, even though Diane’s head was not facing in the picture’s direction. Aunt Lena was dead, and Diane wasn’t alive or sentient so it wasn’t the most utilitarian introduction, but Hazel was sick of everything needing to have a function. Function was the only thing Byron cared about. His first question to everyone, always: “What do you do?” by which he meant, What can you do for me? Hazel wanted to make a real effort from now on for her words, actions, and existence to be as pointless as possible. From this day forward, she vowed to be a living middle finger of inanity raised in the direction of either Byron or his grave.
But of course she was going to die before Byron did, whether he took her out or not. Technology was on his side, as were any/all powerful forces of evil in the universe, whether real or metaphorical.
“Aunt Lena had the longest braid I’d ever seen,” Hazel told Diane, grunting and dragging her a few more inches down the hallway. The doll’s fingers made a musical xylophonic sound when they moved over the top of the heating grate on the floor. “Uncoiled, her braid probably would’ve hung down past her feet like a tail. As a kid I wished my hair was as long as hers so I could do that—tuck it into the back of my pants, then cut a hole in between the rear pockets of all my jeans, and pull the braid out of it so it hung there like I was part horse. Only a small part, since it would just be the tail and nothing else on me horse.” Hazel gave a final lengthy tug and at last she and Diane reached the bathroom entrance where the hallway’s carpet transformed to tile. Hazel felt breathless; she lay down next to Diane with her cheek on the floor so the heat could transfer out of her face against the cool linoleum.
It wasn’t a position void of intimacy there on the ground with Diane. Hazel’s face was so close to the doll’s that even in the relative dark she could see the tiny raised buttons beneath Diane’s hair where a wig snapped onto the scalp. Being on the floor of her septuagenarian bachelor father’s personal washroom, Hazel also noticed upsetting body hairs strewn about her field of vision. Nothing was worse for one’s emotional comfort than scrupulous observance, Hazel reminded herself. So instead of indulging in the sensory information around her, Hazel gazed deeply into Diane’s nearest eye. She tried to think of Diane as less sex and more doll, to make the percentage more 20/80 than 50/50. Though there were things Hazel would’ve liked to change about Diane’s functionality in that moment, such as equipping Diane with an “autoregurgitate” button so her arm could be readily extracted from the doll’s throat, Hazel certainly could not critique Diane’s listening abilities.
“Aunt Lena never took advantage of my horse-jeans idea,” Hazel continued. “What she did instead was wear the braid pinned up into a domed mound on the top of her head. This was her hairstyle from when she was sixteen or so until emphysema killed her in her sixties. She smelled like smoke all the time. I tried one of her scarves on once and it smelled so smoky that I had this image of her braid-dome being filled with emergency rations of cigarettes, like her own sort of camel-hump storage unit to fall back on if resources ever grew scarce.”
Hazel sat upright and looked over at the tub, which was outfitted with large silver handles and a bench seat for her father’s safety. Her idea was to try submerging Diane’s head in hot water to see if it made the doll’s rubber throat any stretchier. Hazel still had to foist Diane up, over and into the tub, so instead of wasting her strength standing them both up again to turn on the light, she grabbed Diane’s long right leg with her free hand and operated it like an extension wand, finally thonging the light switch between the doll’s big and second toes.
Getting Diane inside the tub was a less dainty production. For whatever reason Hazel had an absurd paranoia that water was going to make the doll freak out, so she tried to talk in the soothing, even tone a professional animal groomer might use with a stray cat. “This will feel great,” Hazel encouraged, “to take a nice, relaxing bath.” She heaved the doll inside then climbed in after her and powered on the faucet. But watching the water rise over the doll’s nose and mouth gave Hazel an unsettling homicidey feeing, so she grabbed some shower gel. Maybe bubbles would make the scene more festive. “Smell that, Diane?” Hazel asked. “Freesia!” The bath products had probably been her mother’s, kept but unused in the years since her death.
It seemed like the closer Hazel’s father came to his own expiration date, the more he granted everything around him an endless life span. Yesterday she’d found a box of cereal in his pantry from Smather’s grocery. “So?” he’d questioned. “That store closed over a decade ago, Dad,” she’d said. “The chain went bankrupt.” “Well, has the box been opened?” he asked. It hadn’t, so Hazel knew that was the end of the conversation. “I actually don’t even think I like that kind of cereal,” he’d added. “When I die, that’s all yours.”
AS HAZEL WAITED FOR THE TUB TO FILL, SHE THOUGHT ABOUT A story Aunt Lena had told her, an ancient punishment for murder. If you killed someone, the decomposing corpse would be strapped to your body so infection from its rotting matter would eventually spread to you and take your life as well. The foreboding tale had always stuck with Hazel. But she’d never felt that the way Aunt Lena tried to make the metaphor relevant to Hazel’s own childhood made any sense. “Killing them would kill you, in other words,” Aunt Lena liked to stress as a follow-up, “so be sure to keep your room clean! So just say no to drugs!”