Little Boy Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

too. The richest girl in town, and we got the same thing for Christmas. We would run as fast as we could, whoever got through Christmas first, to each other’s houses to show off our dolls.”
    I went back to concentrating on following the string from the left hand to see if I could find what was mangling it in the other knotted strings. I had heard the doll-and-oranges story several times, enough to know where it was going. Mother sat up to smear more cocoa butter on her legs. The smell filled the windless afternoon. We were waiting for Uncle Tom to come back from the store with the watermelon. Mother was reading a biography of Franklin Roosevelt for her U.S. history class in summerschool, and I hoped she would tell me more about how Roosevelt got polio after he left his wet bathing trunks on too long after swimming, but instead she began to talk about the Depression, and how no one who hadn’t lived through it could understand it, and how they had made do with nothing.
    “Stephanie has three Barbies,” I announced suddenly, before my mother could get around to the trove of toys gathering dust in my closet.
    “Who is Stephanie, honey?” my mother asked in a tone that blended—I never figured out how she did it—indifference and irritability.
    “Stephanie Garner? She lives—”
    “Oh, the Garners, yes.” The Garners lived two doors down the road from my aunt and uncle, who were now ten miles out in the country south of Lexington. Stephanie’s mother ran a beauty shop in one room of their house, and I was allowed to play with her because she lived nearby and her parents went to Uncle Tom’s church.
    “She has a Ken, too.”
    “Kenny?”
    “Ken. Barbie and Ken. Ken is Barbie’s boyfriend. He has a car and he comes to see her in her dreamhouse.” I had spent Wednesday afternoon after school at Stephanie’s, because my aunt had her ladies’ church circle meeting and my uncle had to make hospital visits. It had rained, and we stayed inside for two hours. She had just gotten a new Barbie, and she dressed and undressed one doll after another, pulling tiny outfits from the pink suitcase that turned into a closet and a chest of drawers with a little mirror when you opened it up. While I waited for the wardrobe changes, I drove Ken around in his sports car until itwas time for him to visit. Then Ken and Barbie had to have coffee together, and then it was time for Barbie to comb her hair. I had never had a playdate with a girl before, and by the time Ken had come over for coffee the third time, I thought I was going to go out of my mind with boredom.
    “Maybe they could fight,” I suggested at one point, but Stephanie acted like she hadn’t heard me and just went on fitting a tiny pair of pink plastic shoes on Barbie’s pointy toes. Then, when she told me it was time for Ken to drive over again, I said Ken had a flat tire and we were fixing it.
    “I thought you liked dolls,” Stephanie said. “Mama said.”
    “They’re all right. I think you ought to be able to bend their arms and legs.”
    “She can bend over and turn her head. Mama said you had some dolls.”
    “They’re not—no, I don’t.”
    For a moment she just stared at me blankly, a tiny torso gripped in one hand, a tiny hairbrush gripped in the other. “Mama said you had a lot.”
    I paused, trying to think of an answer, and then I saw her rise and I knew what was coming next. She would go and get her mother from the beauty parlor in the front of the house and bring down upon my head the whole adult apparatus of questions and answers to “sort this whole thing out,” as my teacher at the new school was fond of saying when no one stepped up to confess. And so I panicked. I said the first thing that came into my mind, just to keep talking, to keep her in the room with me. “I’m just saying—I don’t know who told her that, but they were wrong. They’re not dolls. They’re marionettes,” and as soon as I said it, I felt tired, sick of