Eleven Dolls
For example, its eyes were made of teeth and its lips blue medicine bottles. Also its blouse was made of butcher’s paper still wet from the blood of its previous owner, its toes were made of watches that ticked all day, its kneecaps were moon rocks nailed to the diving boards of its legs, its stomach was a flying saucer, its fingers soiled paperback books, its hair rotten alfalfa, its thighs the stuffing of movie seats. The doll’s cries spoke volumes of comedies, its fingernails were seashells, its tongue an emery board, its rump was a radiator, its ears the Webster’s International Third and Fourth dictionaries, respectively. Best of all, its nose was a clitoris and its smile could eat you alive.
A man applied for a job as custodian for a school of dolls. “The job’s yours, if you’re willing to live on the grounds.” But the living quarters were very small. Every day his stoop increased, until one day he no longer noticed how bent he was. When the dolls walked past with their clumsy, clacking gait, all he could see were their black plastic shoes, their white ankles, calves, knees . . .
Happiness, for Kafka, comes in many shades. Somewhere he speaks of breaking his leg as the most wonderful experience of his life.
Once I found a child’s doll in a black ravine. Her clothes were torn, her limbs ripped apart and scattered in the weeds. When I lifted her head off the ground, I saw that someone had put cigarettes out on her forehead and cheeks, someone had gouged out her eyes, someone had ripped off her ears, and someone (I turned my face away) had pissed on her.
That night, for the first time in days, I slept peacefully.
A man planted his daughter’s doll in his garden. The next day the head of his daughter bulbed up, her eyes crusted with dirt, worms in her hair, her mouth a nest of mulch, her eyes bug-riddled.
In the meantime, his daughter with the head of the doll now where her head once was, crowds against her father’s thighs and begins to lick his spade.
Stop that stop that stop that!
Father and dollhead daughter look back at their house and see the doll, with the head of father where dollhead’s head should be, in the doorway shouting, This is my doll house, not yours!
An automatic doll came into our house, leaving in its wake the skulls of other dolls. Then rain fell in the hallway (but only in the hallway), and strings of misery whipped inside us as if buffeted by a big wind. No one wound the doll, no one spoke to it, no one even opened the door to it. Its eyes caked over with mucus, its tongue spilled like wet leather over its red lips, its arms flayed the air—or was it trying to speak to us, to genuflect?
After a while, unable to make sense of the automatic doll, we pulled it to pieces, limb by limb, then examined each piece for its nonexistent meaning.
A doll placed me in her lap and slipped one hand into my mouth and the other into my anus. This is when I became aware that the doll was really two dolls, that is, she was simultaneously terrified and domineering, a bloody countess and a lamb. In humans this combination can be fatal, but it didn’t bother the doll, who continued to nuzzle and penetrate me—O doll, doll—until I didn’t know which end was up.
That, though she loved her doll, she made it pray beside her bed each night . . .
That she held the doll’s tongue between her thumb and forefinger and squeezed as hard as she could . . .
That god is of a wickedness unknown to man, for which she loved the doll . . .
That one day, like Nerval his Aurelia, she overheard the name of Jesus on her doll’s lips . . .
That the music she hears is not of this world, nor the tongues she speaks, nor her eyes . . .
That when asked by guests what she wanted to be when she grew up, shouted, “Many! Many!” then peed in her panties. . .
A doll’s head upon a hill under an open sky, the air thick with hours. Behind the head, a toy wagon upturned, its single wheel spinning. The wind, as always invisible, strains at the edges of No Turning Back. Within the head, a moment’s calm, clouds passing, eyelids closing, clacking open again.
My lips are coated with pearls, my eyes with clay. Is that your blood or mine on my hands? It doesn’t matter. The gate of my self shivers when you touch it. You’re not dead, are you? Cobwebs coat my throat, lace through my lungs. How gorgeous I am, don’t you think? “I can still move, I just can’t sing, can’t cough.” Did my mother say that, or yours? Will you love me for always? At night I squat over the sink in your bathroom and give birth to a stream of iridescent, blue frogs.
Dolls want to call up another world. They want to be Japanese. They want to tell your mother and father what you did to them last night, the little things, the secret things, in your dreams. They want the moon to take your eyes, the earth your heart. They want you to lose yourself in some dark alley, to call out for their help which they cannot give even if they wanted to, which they don’t. They want you to tease them with your little doll lies, to strip and display them, memorize and mark them. “O look at my little dollie. Isn’t she pretty? Isn’t she mean?” They want you to burn them. They want you to blow on them. Because they love you, they want your indifference, your disdain. Whatever you can’t give, that most of all they want.
We sit in the window of an antique store on Reinsburgstrasse in the west of Stuttgart, along with old teddy bears, a monkey named Jocko, and variously dilapidated Santa Clauses. My sister above me warbles in Russian that only faith makes possibility. My sister below me twitters in German on unbridled individualism. I sing in my own language.
The sky is gray, as gray as the street, as the air we breathe. Not much foot traffic on this corner of the world.
Needless to say, we never move, my sisters and I, or not so as you can see it. But listen. Put your ear to the window, press it hard to the cold glass, and you can hear us singing.