Doll
1954
I t was the first cold night of the winter and Priscilla lay in her bed listening to the gentle clanging of the radiator. Her eyes were shut tight, but sleep wouldn’t come. Mrs. Lloyd always told her to talk to Jesus when she couldn’t sleep. Just tell him your troubles, she would say. That evening before she left, Mrs. Lloyd had sat with her on her bed and sang “In the Sweet By and By.” And Silla had sung with her. She had a pretty little voice.
Silla tried to talk to Jesus that night, but she couldn’t think of what to say. She didn’t know what was scaring her. She couldn’t identify that it was some unnamed stirring in the world of adults that had upset her, only that things didn’t seem right. The feeling was instinctual, like the way birds always seemed to know a storm was coming, the way they seemed to disappear from the sky half an hour or so before it grew dark with clouds. In the amorphous thing that was time to a four-year-old, Silla couldn’t attach spans to the events of the past few weeks. She knew that her parents had gone away and come back, and gone away and come back again. She knew that her father had been spending more time at the house, pouring tall glasses of whiskey and sitting out on the front porch. She knew that her mother had seemed nervous, burning food and spilling things and staying in the bathroom for hours at a time. And that day, she had been walking around the house in circles. Just around and around the outside of the house.
Priscilla heard her door open. “Silla?” her mother whispered.
Priscilla opened her eyes to see her mother’s face in the crack of the door, the hallway behind her as dark as the bedroom.
“Can Mama come in?”
Silla nodded and her mother, who was in her nightgown, came and curled up next to her on the bed, resting her head on her daughter’s small stomach.
“Silla, they’re going to try and fix me tomorrow.”
Silla thought about this for a moment. “Are you broken?”
She heard her mother’s soft breath. “I think so.”
“Where?” asked Silla, looking down at her mother’s hair, at her soft body. When things were broken, there were cracks and chips and fissures. Her mother looked perfect.
“I’m scared,” said her mother.
Silla thought for a moment, twisting her fingers in one of her mother’s curls. “Mrs. Lloyd says to talk to Jesus when you’re scared.”
Priscilla’s mother pushed up with one hand, then the next, and looked at her daughter. “I don’t want to go,” she said, looking at Silla as if Silla might save her.
That unnamed fear surged up in Silla’s stomach. “Are you coming back?”
Her mother nodded. And Silla felt the fear ebb. “Well,” she said, reaching around for the doll that sat next to her on her nightstand. Her father had given it to her for her fourth birthday. She had round eyes with thick lashes, rosebud lips, and bright red hair. She looks just like you, he had said.
“Take Suzy,” she said now, looking at the doll for a moment before holding it out for her mother. “She’ll make you feel better.”