The Doll Room

Ruthie's doll collection took up most of her room and she treasured each one, the damaged ones more so than the intact ones. After her father's death, she had quietly packed each and every one in boxes stuffed with straw and moved them to the basement where they remained until she married and moved to East Ferry. Then, one by one, they began to reappear.

There were ragdolls and baby dolls, dolls that cried and wet and blinked their eyes, costumed dolls and ones that said Mama if you pressed their bellies. Some were missing arms or legs or eyes, some wore torn clothing, one had been sliced open and jaggedly restitched with red thread - the scar went from throat to thigh - and each had a name and a history. Ruthie had swept and dusted and painted a room in the attic, put up curtains and built shelves, added a rocking chair and a small tea table with two mismatched chairs, a day bed with a gingham cover. Here she arranged and tended her dolls, repairing what she could, covering what she couldn't, and remembering. It was a room built on pain and intense, overwhelming sadness, buried memeories of incest and alcoholic rages and helplessness, of a child's inability to fight back and a mother's failure to protect. It had ended with a death and a secret burial but for Ruthie the abuse remained fresh, the damage had been done. She had salvaged what she could of her childhood and her dolls and tried to start again but as little as a raised voice - if only in exasperation -
could take her back and she would run to the attic in tears, run for the safety and sanctuary of her dolls and the illusion of being happy. Her husband and daughters were troubled by her behavior and mystified at her refusal to talk about it - they learned to let her be and work through it alone but they watched and worried, fearing that one day she might not want to return from the doll room.

If it had been twenty or thirty years later, Ruthie might have found a counselor or a therapy group or a friend who had similar experiences and who would understand. She might have confronted her demons and beaten them back but she was a rural and poorly educated woman from a tiny island community that kept its secrets well. Appalling as her childhood had been, no one would have welcomed her making it public. So she kept her doll room, even after her daughters were grown and raising families of their own, even after her husband had given up and turned into little more than a bewildered but companionable stranger.

Ruthie died in her doll room one late summer night. Alone and without ever having found the strength to speak of her abuse, she simply climbed the attic stairs, gathered her most loved dolls, and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. The letter she left for her husband told it all - everything she had kept secret for all her life spilled out in graphic detail. I love you and I'm sorry, she wrote, but surviving has gotten too hard. Throw the dolls away, they don't work anymore.