Horrible Thing I Have Done #27

Horrible Thing I Have Done #27
Gillian Brockell

There was a day in high school when I made all of the girls admit that their Barbies had had sex. I didn’t have a class during eighth period and could have left school an hour earlier than everyone else, but without a car or a license there wasn’t any way for me to go. Most days I would stand by the back door between the theatre hall and the student parking lot, waiting for the bell to ring, for all of my friends to come flooding out, to make gossip with them for a few minutes before I casually tried to bum a ride home.
This particular day I had company, some sophomore who was also finished early and was occupying my spot. She was annoyingly naive, her knit shirt tucked into her tapered pants and an actual ribbon in her hair, but there was no one else to talk to, so we talked. My mission in life was, is, to travel, but, being prevented from that, I had to settle for the second-best thing--to shock. If I couldn’t leave, I could at least make it seem as though I did not belong there. Having no access to drugs, sex or tattoos, my main modus operandi were weird outfits and salty language. I don’t know what I was blathering on about this particular day, but I recall that I was wearing a leopard print bathrobe and ended my sentence with, “You know, like when your Barbies had sex.”
The girl’s cheeks turned pink and she vociferously denied that her Barbies had ever done anything inappropriate like that, since they were good Christians, so my mission for the rest of the afternoon was to shame her, and to prove that it was she, and not me, who was the true freak. Every girl who walked down the hall for the next fifty-five minutes, I pointed a finger at and yelled, “YOU! Your Barbies had sex, didn’t they?’” I made sure to smile, so that they knew it was okay to admit the truth.
And they did. Every girl confessed that yes, even before they knew the exact particulars of thrusting, orgasm, even before they realized that Ken actually can’t have sex with his feckless mound, their dolls got naked in a horizontal position, said they loved each other and rubbed.
What I didn’t say to anyone that day, for surely I’d’ve been found out, was that while sex sometimes occurred between my dolls, what mostly happened was kidnap.

* * *

When I was four I dreamt of being kidnapped. Not the reality of child abduction, mind you, what with the rape and murder and ditching of my body parts, no. I wanted the cartoon version of kidnap, an adventure, where I would be removed from my mean mother and held for ransom, taken on a great journey far away from my landlocked hometown, away from the mountains, preferably back in time and onto a pirate ship. I would prove myself instrumental to my captors and they would come to trust me. Eventually, I would escape and find my way back home, where I would be a star and my mother would never, ever yell at me again because she would just be so glad to have her baby back. At night, when my family slept and I would play dollies by myself, they were acting out this narrative for me.
My mother had a network of other single mothers she knew who would take turns baby-sitting the whole lot of us while they went on dates. There was Mary, who was white but had three black sons the same ages as my sisters and me. They had better toys than we did, a rocking horse, and guns, and a radio that played Lionel Richie and Stevie Wonder. Mary would often leave us alone to “go to Seven-Eleven” for hours on end. As soon as she left we would be showing each other our peepees, or making pizza.
The last night we stayed at Mary’s we were frying a pizza in a pan when it caught on fire. My eldest sister had learned in the third grade that very day that you should not put water on a grease fire, but baking soda, and she and the eldest boy jumped onto the counter rifling through the baking items in the back of the cabinet before putting it out. At the time, it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me and the highlight of my life thus far. To everyone I told the story of how the kids put out the fire all by themselves, which I am sure Mary did not appreciate.
Most of the time we stayed with Cheryl and Becky. I don’t remember the name of their grandmother, who took care of us, only that she was cranky and scared me. Cheryl and Becky were my sisters’ ages, so I was always treated like a baby, which I hated. I was sure that I was just as sophisticated as the big girls, even though I was more interested in My Little Ponies than Bon Jovi.
My favorite thing to do was to explore the ditch behind their house. I do not know what purpose the ditch served, but I fear it was likely composed of the runoff of the neighborhood’s gutters--rainwater, car cleaner, cooking oil, piss and litter. Now sometimes in the van on the way to a hotel I will see a ditch similar to that one and it will turn my stomach to think that I played in that, that I had adults around me who would let me play in that. But when I was four, the ditch was the most mysterious place on earth, the high mark of adventure. I would wade through the waters, touching the soft, slimy patches of neon green algae with my fingertips, opening and closing my toes in the mud, standing still until the frogs came out, peeking my head into the pipe where the ditch flowed underground, wondering if mermaids could live in fresh water, or if it had to be the salty ocean.
One day, Cheryl and Becky’s grandmother gave us permission to ride bikes around the block without her supervision. There were only two bikes for the five of us, and I was too small and didn’t know how anyway, but we were all very excited to be granted the freedom. I was hoping that we would run into a band of child gypsies (I was sure they existed) and run away with them to their abandoned boxcar home in the woods.
I must have said as much to the big girls, because I remember that they were laughing at me and teasing me for being a baby. They said that I couldn’t walk with them because I was too embarrassing, didn’t know a thing about Bon Jovi. I stomped ahead and pouted, thinking, “How did I get jumbled up with this bunch of idiots? How dare they ignore me!”
I turned a corner far ahead of my sisters, which must have been one of my first moments in my life under no one’s supervision or protection. By this time I already knew never to talk to strangers, never to get into a stranger’s car, even if they tell you they have a puppy. But I wished that I would be kidnapped, so that the big girls would regret having been mean to me.
I watched the road to my left as a car stopped at a stop sign. Another car, a long tan sedan, pulled up and stopped behind it. After a few moments of waiting, the man in the sedan got out of the car, stalked up to one ahead of him and yelled something into the driver’s side window. He looked like the photographs I had seen of my dad (whom we couldn’t visit because he was sick)--balding, broad shoulders, big brown mustache, wearing a button-down and khakis. I hoped it was him, coming to take me away to his place called Texas, where they had beaches. I stood behind his car and waited for him to notice me.
After that, everything happened very fast. The first car drove away, the man stalked back to his car, the big girls came around the corner, the man got into his seat, slammed the door, and pealed away, making a screeching a noise with his tires, I turned around and ran up to the big girls and screamed, “That man tried to kidnap me!”
I know. It gets worse.
I told them that he had told me that my mother was in the hospital and that he was sent to take me there, but that I said no and kicked him and ran, and he drove off. They had seen him get into his car and speed away, so it seemed true. My sisters were insane with panic, which was all I wanted. I was noticed again. But then they grabbed my hands and we ran back to Cheryl and Becky’s house, where they told their grandmother what had happened, and the grandmother called the police.
By the time the officers arrived, my eldest sister, who even then was showing a prodigious talent for figure drawing, had made up a sketch of the man and his car. I was interviewed by the police where I repeated my lie again and again. I vacillated between panic at being discovered as a liar, wanting to scream out that I was lying, and almost convincing myself that my lie was true. After all, that man had gotten out of his car in the middle of the road, which was kind of weird.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next thing I remember is waking up in my mother’s arms as she sat on the couch, talking with the police. She told me that they had found the guy and we were going to identify him. She carried me to the back of a police cruiser, and we rushed through the streets of my sleepy town, sirens blaring.
We arrived at an intersection that had been blocked by a ring of police cars. An officer handed me a lollipop and told me to be brave. I had already decided that no matter who they showed me, I would say it wasn’t him. I was terrified that it would be him. They walked me up to a man in handcuffs and I thought, Not even close. He had a mustache, sure, but he was blonde, and wearing a cutoff Harley tank top and jeans. He looked terrified.
“No, that’s not him,” I said, and buried my head in my mother’s hip.
“Are you sure?” they asked me, and shined a flashlight into his face.
“I’m sure.”

* * *

That is all I know about what happened. I don’t know if I was discovered as a fake and the case was dropped, or if some cop worked it for months until there were no more leads. I don’t know if it was in the newspapers--I’d yet to learn to read-- but I can imagine the headlines: “AREA GIRL ESCAPES ATTEMPTED KIDNAP”, with my sister’s drawing as an inset. Or perhaps it was “FOUR-YEAR-OLD LEADS COPS ON WILD GOOSE CHASE”. I have never discussed it with my mother, never told her I was lying. I think she would still be mad if she knew the truth.
It was about the time in high school when I made everyone admit their dirty dollies’ past that I confessed this secret to my middle sister. She was surprised, entertained, an awkward mixture of both laughing and aghast. She advised me not to say a word. At this point I was on probation (which is another story entirely) and we were afraid that if the cops found out, I’d end up in juvy.
Sometimes at night I think that one day when I am respectable, I will hire a private investigator to learn the consequences I was protected from knowing. I will ask for the name of the man the police detained. It seems wrong that I don’t even know the name of the person on this earth whom I screwed over the most.