You won’t always think rubber when you think Barbie.
It was something her older brother had said to Kristin earlier this week, the Tuesday evening when she and Melissa had finally returned home to Bronxville and they’d found the used condom atop the box of Barbies. She’d phoned her brother because she wasn’t yet prepared to share this latest, lurid indignity with any of her female friends, but she had to tell someone. And her brother had listened, walked her in off the ledge, and told her before they hung up for the night that associations changed over time. Invariably they were diluted by experience. Someday, and it might take a year and it might take a decade, when she thought of her daughter’s Barbies, she would think once more of the hours she had spent sharing the dolls with Melissa on the living room floor and making up stories. She would think tenderly of the games they would play. The worlds they’d create. She’d think of the clothes and the cars and the furniture. She’d think of the shoes.
Now, as she stood with Melissa and Claudia before a long, wide wall of the dolls in the FAO Schwarz on Fifth, she decided her brother was wrong. At least he might be wrong. Who could say what she would think about as she neared fifty? When she was a grandmother at, perhaps, sixty?
She and the girls had wandered here not because they had any interest these days in Barbies, but simply because they were exploring the entire store. They’d strolled here after the second museum. Something frivolous after all that self-improvement. They’d gone first to the Apple Store next door, descending beneath the colossal glass cube, but the world below was like a subway car at rush hour. No technological marvel was worth the effort it would take to press through the human crush. And while the toy store was less crowded, Kristin guessed that the fourth graders beside her had already outgrown 90 percent of the inventory.
She sighed, half listening as the girls made fun of some of the Collectible Barbies. At the moment, it was the Twilight Barbies that were giving them the giggles. The Divergent Barbies. Carlisle. Edward. Tris.
Whatever happened to naming all the men Ken? Whatever happened to Skipper?
Near the Barbies was a wall of Monster High dolls, a group even more anorexic than the Barbies. The Monster High kids had emaciated stick-figure bodies and balloon-like, goth white heads that were dramatically out of proportion with their arms and legs. They had fashion model eyelashes and pouty red lips, miniskirts and high heels. Names at once ghoulish and suggestive. Honey Swamp. Draculaura. Catty Noir.
Beside them was a line called Fairy Tale High. The classics get slutty. The Little Mermaid in fishnets. Cinderella in leggings and a croptop. Alice in Wonderland in a blue-and-white-striped micro-dress that barely covered her ass.
“Emiko has those leggings,” her daughter was saying, as she pointed at Cinderella.
“I love them,” said Claudia. “I want a pair. They’re so hot.”
An expression came to her: You’re a doll. Translation? You’ve done me a solid. Thank you.
She’s a doll. Translation? She’s pretty. She’s compliant.
A doll. Synonyms? A babe. A chick. A sweetie.
Hours ago—museums ago—Richard had texted her that it was the girl he thought was named Sonja who he’d identified on the mortuary slab. The chemical blonde. She had not asked what next. What now. She had not asked whether this meant that the girl who had led him upstairs was still alive, or whether she was dead, too, and her body had simply not yet turned up. But it would. She had simply asked if he was okay. He’d texted he was.
Okay. She had no idea what that word meant in the context of a morgue.
“I like her dress,” Melissa was saying. She was pointing at Alice in Wonderland. Slut Alice in Wonderland.
“I like that outfit,” said Claudia, motioning at the vest that barely hid Belle’s breasts. Slut Belle’s breasts.
In all fairness, Kristin knew that once upon a time her Barbies had been pretty slutty. She had often undressed her Barbies and Kens, and allowed the dolls to go to town on each other. Spreading the girls’ legs as wide as she could. She’d been doing this while playing in the semidarkness underneath a robin’s-egg-blue blanket that she had draped across her parents’ dining room table.
Good Lord, it had only been two or three years ago that she and Richard had been laughing as the two of them polished off a bottle of wine at all the ways they had encouraged their daughter’s Barbies to perform unspeakable acts, while Melissa’s head was turned or she was searching for a particular Barbie gown in that Tucker Tote. It was how they kept their sanity, they had confessed to each other—yes, they both did it—as they sat on the floor with their girl and played with her dolls for hours.