I Don't Have a Happy Place Read Online Free PDF

outrage.
    â€œBut Samantha has twenty-nine!”
    â€œI don’t care if Samantha has one hundred twenty-nine. Barbie makes girls feel bad about themselves,” my mother would say, struggling with her clothes or hair. “Uch, I look terrible.”
    â€œI think you look great,” my father would say.
    â€œOh, please,” she’d answer, rolling her eyes.
    When it sunk in that I was getting nowhere with Gloria Steinem, I was forced to call upon my street smarts. My Barbie desire was pretty modest. One. I just wanted one glorious plastic whore. How hard could it be to bypass my mother? I began my crusade close to home, approaching the one person I knew who could grasp my need to gussy up and accessorize better than anyone: my dad. He was a bit of a Ken doll himself. How could he say no?
    Well, he said worse than no. He said he’d ask my mother. Uch . He was off the list.
    Next up, four solid contenders: the grandparents. Why hadn’t I thought of them first? Family members, yet out of the daily fray, always willing to bring gifts—they were ideal candidates. The answer to which of the four to choose came swiftly: Nana .My father’s mother. People pleaser, pillar of the synagogue, Nana just wanted everyone to be happy (and marry Jewish). Sweet as a Bartons Almond Kiss, possibly illiterate in a few languages, she’d ask the fewest questions. Plus, she lived across the street from the mall.
    I decided that after getting the Barbie, I would leave her at Nana’s, in the depths of the basement, where the cat lived and my mother refused to frequent. I drew a map in my diary, a diagram of where Barbie would be sequestered. I approached my grandmother with saucery eyes and smiled during the squeeze of the face by her slick-with-chicken-grease fingers. That’s all it took. The job was done. I had sandbagged my nana.
    I was finally in the Barbie game.
    And it wasn’t long before I was out.
    My mother caught me with Barbie and there was an exchange of words and instructions for Nana to bring that thing back from whence it came. I was inconsolable after that, moping around the house for weeks singing Barry Manilow ballads to ease my pain.
    That was two years before I became a latchkey kid. And even though I was now nine, an age at which one’s Barbie interest should start to wane, mine was more ramped up than ever. I flipped through the toy catalog, and just seeing the little blond girl models polluted with sunshine and bliss as they curled the hair on the ginormous Barbie Styling Head, sweeping electric-blue shadow across her eyelids, made me want to stick forks in my eyes. Women’s lib might have empowered ladies all over the country but it was ruining my free time.
    It’s not like I wanted much. Just Malibu Barbie, complete with fringy yellow towel and pink bulbous sunglasses, who could potentially hang out with Superstar Barbie in Cher’s dressing room, where they’d meet and befriend the Cherdoll herself and argue over who gets to wear the Bob Mackie dress and whowould sport the fancy Indian headdress and sparkly jumpsuit when they had a soiree at the exquisite BarbieTownhouse, the one with the yellow elevator (dolls sold separately), and home of the new, dashing tenant, the Six Million Dollar Man (with bionic grip), who was angling to date all the Charlie’s Angels dolls so he could have someone to make out with in the back of the orange Country Camper (with vinyl pop-out tent).
    Nine years old and twenty-eight minutes into this Phil Donahue–­imposed life of solitude, I made a decision: feminism was stupid.
    3:43 p.m.
    Ace’s wallpaper was hot dog mustard yellow with a continuous pattern of broad orange plaid squares. The brown shag was wall-to-wall and a KISS Destroyer poster hung on his closet door. I pretended to browse around the room like I didn’t know exactly where I was headed, but I knew full well what interested me in that room and