All I wanted that year was one of those tall blonde
dolls, always pale-named Susie something, a doll
that bolted forward (“She’s magic! She walks! She
looks just like you!”) when you squeezed her hand
just so, one of those dolls with flat nightmare hair
the color of exploded corn and a dress that glowed
and crinkled and sparked. I wanted a perfect friend
to stumble ahead with, an unyielding plastic to wrestle
and wake against, all I wanted was blue flutter-lashed
eyes flapping little voodoo, I wanted to fall in love
with and be horrified by her, to search her mouth
for a full tongue, to grow to resent her, to grant her
mysticism and fury, to lock her up in my closet and
watch the doorknob all damn night, waiting for that
slow Twilight Zone twist. All I talked was Susie this,
Susie that, scrawling her in tortured block-lettered
pleadings with Santa, taking my father by the hand
and leading him past rows and rows of her shelved
at Kresge’s. I said I’d never ever ask for anything
else again ever, not knowing that Barbie, just one
aisle over, was sharpening her fashionable talons,
sniffing the air for fresh breasts and menstrual blood.
I wanted, wanted and prayed for something hard
and possible. My fresh mute walking baby woman.
But on Christmas Eve, when I snuck a peek through
my wishing window into the starry, slanted snow
and saw Daddy pull a want-shaped box from the trunk
of his Buick, it didn’t stun my belief in the annual
gospel of a porky, apple-cheeked Santa. You know,
I wasn’t stupid—at eight, I’d already signed on for
the miraculous black art of white men. They danced
in my cereal, sold detergent to my mother, this one
shimmied down tenement chimneys. I knew Santa
was still coming, tugged by huffing reindeer, fooled
again by my wide-eyed vow that I’d been an angel.
This gift came from another place, for another reason.
I folded my little body into the dark, kept watching.
When I glimpsed pink knees and a sunshiny coif
through the box’s cellophane front, I thought it was
only right that my father loved hard enough to introduce
Susie to the dim, resigned sigh of his daughter. All that
frosted night, they must have huddled, plastic against
pulse, discussing my sad soft, the out-loud mistakes
in my walking. Actually, only my father spoke. Susie
simply nodded, her stout legs thrumming, a warm
purpose trembling behind her slammed-shut tempera smile.