My doll was always called Gwendolyn, never Wendy. What if I babied her and
then found out that she was a proud and magical princess? As soon as I did
believe she was magic, I couldn't stop. I had to devote myself to her.
Gwendolyn was tall, with auburn hair and green eyes that closed with regal
calm whenever I laid her down on her special pillow. Someone--an
aunt?--sewed her a dazzlingly white dress and a green cardigan.
Gwendolyn was always waiting when I rushed home after school to be with
her. I imagined her doll's heart to be warm, but unfortunately, her plastic
arms wouldn't hug me the few times I tried. Still, Gwendolyn deigned to
recognize me with a soothing, if elegant, glance. I dressed her up and took
her for strolls down the block.
When I dropped Gwendolyn into a greasy spring mud puddle and I ran home,
my mother rinsed her under cold water without taking off her doll
clothes. After Gwendolyn had dried out on my night table and the shrunken,
dingy state of her dress was obvious, and the tangled mat of her hair could
not be combed out, I silently showed the doll to my mother. Unrepentant,
she said, "You are too old to be carting that big thing around."
I considered Gwendolyn's bedraggled condition--her dress, her hair, even
the one eyelid that now drooped--and I felt afraid. No one treated a
noblewoman this way. My service was in question.
After all, the first Gwendolyn may have been the wife of Merlin the
Magician. Gwendolyn, Merlin, and King Arthur had all lived half way in this
world, half way in another. Sorcery was still everywhere. On my own street,
I saw crows cawing from the branches of trees. Outside my window, I saw the
moon as a thin sickle of supernatural light. I had an image of my
Gwendolyn in a sacred rite, of her summoning me out of my life, into a
netherworld procession of people in long cloaks disappearing forever into a
misty forest of oak.
It would happen.
I waited in dread.
My mother felt no fear and guarded no illusions. When I came home one day,
my mother had piled some puzzles, sweaters and Gwendolyn, face down into a
carton, to donate to the thrift store. I stared. My mother closed the
cardboard flaps and said, "Dear, this old junk has to go!"
Relief bubbled in me. As I climbed the stairs to my room, I could scarcely
feel Gwendolyn's demands! I should have known my mother was far stronger
than the call of any ancient enchantment. Gwendolyn's only power was
inscribed in runes I didn't need to read.
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