Raye Hendrix, “Deliquescence #2”
In the beginning there is the mother and the baby.
I love you so, sings the mother, so, so, so much, mothertongued, in a language where the word for “love” is the same word for “want.”
The baby emerges, ripping her in half, its head coated in gooey hair.
The mother has to be sewn together with silk. In her convalescence, she can only feed the baby. She shoves her swollen teat into the baby’s mouth to stop its screams. No avail.
The baby screams for a year. In the winter, the mother’s teats dry up, and she shovels snow.
At the end of the year, the baby stops screaming.
*
An aunt visits and is startled when she walks in. She sees the loveliest doll in the world. This stirs desire.
Rosy, round cheeks. Shirley Temple locks. Sitting upright in a red-and-gold chania choli. The skirt a perfect circle on the floor. The doll’s eyes, large and peering, feel lifelike. She bends down to pick it up—perhaps it is the baby’s doll?—and then it contorts in her arms, like a bony, thrashing changeling.The skirt falls off in a ruinous pile on high-pile carpet, sodden with foot-trafficked dirt. Cheap efficiency unit apartment fare in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “Sorry,” says the mother. “We don’t have a vacuum.”
The aunt regards the baby’s diaper, a cloth one, stained and thin. “Let me buy you some stuff.”
The mother cheers. The aunt drives them to a Goodwill and gives her twenty dollars.
“This should do it, yes?” The aunt casually looks away from the mother, and the facade of the thrift store. “You and your baby doll can get so much stuff.”
The mother is uncertain, having never been given twenty dollars of her own to spend. “I wouldn’t know,” says the aunt. “I have to go to a surgery, anyway.” The aunt drives off. They are miles from home.
The mother turns, and is horrified to see the baby doll is missing. Frantically, she runs up and down the thrift store parking lot. In such sun, a doll could melt. And then she notices it in the window, next to a mannequin.
*
Is there a father, if there is the mother? Baby Doll couldn’t tell you. It doesn’t speak.
*
“Children are great until they start talking,” says the mother jadedly over a meal. She says this to the Baby Doll, who has unfortunately lost weight and gained height. A catastrophic problem, that one cannot stay small forever. Baby Doll glowers at her but refuses to speak. It eats tandoori chicken in pointed silence. Its fake eyelashes drag up and down in slow blinks.
A woman with a child comes up to their table, lowering her four-year-old boy to the table. The boy reaches over and grabs the mother’s teat, and gives it a squeeze.
“You fucking sick fuck,” says the Baby Doll. The sick fuck’s mother is shocked at Baby Doll’s language.
“Control your child,” says the woman to the mother, dragging her pervert away.
The Baby Doll heats up, and a crack emerges. It slices right through its face. It sucks on the marrow of the chicken bone, breaking it in half with simple bite force. The mother cannot bear to look at it, its beauty marred so. She stops caring, in a way, about ruining Baby Doll. What a release from the compulsion to keep what is pure, pure. What’s done is done.
*
“I want it all gone!” announces Baby Doll, ripping its hair out of tiny porcelain pores on its legs. It is in a white bathtub surrounded by moldy grout. The aunt stares at it with a degree of disgust, masked by a leer.
“It’s such a shame your doll is getting so rough,” says the aunt. “You can always tweeze out the hair.” The aunt leans over and grabs the Baby Doll’s belly. “You can’t even say this is baby fat anymore. Dolls shouldn’t be so fat.” The aunt appears to be a specialist in what makes a Baby Doll beautiful and perfect. Every woman is an expert in beauty.
Raye Hendrix, “Deliquescence #1”
The Baby Doll spits at the aunt and gets two slaps in return—one from each woman. Crack/crack.
*
The mother emerges from a shower, her hair tossed up, body heavily scented. The Baby Doll is transfixed by the mound of hair on her pubis. “What is that?” it asks, and the mother retorts, “Nature’s own protection!” Against what, the Baby Doll wants to know, but the mother refuses to answer and instead bans it from bath time.
The Baby Doll must shampoo itself now. It can never remember which comes first, the shampoo or the conditioner, but it knows one does. It knows there are rules to these things in this world it has found itself in.
Surely there is some rulebook, somewhere, that the Baby Doll has no access to, not yet, one that tells you how to be a person. How to be a woman. How to be around women. Baby Doll has heard womanhood is precious, to be protected, but it has only experienced it as highly surveilled, deliriously plotted.
*
“I never got the manual. I don’t know how to live,” announces the Baby Doll in school, where it is accosted by rowdy boys and flittery girls, all of whom laugh in a particular way that makes Baby Doll feel they must have received instruction on how to be boys and girls. Perhaps someone will share the mystery of existence with it.
“You fucking fur ball,” says one boy, the tall one good at soccer and already a sleaze, and he yanks at Baby Doll’s legs. He pulls three strands of hair out of its brown legs. Everybody laughs.
“At least you’re lucky you’re such a darkie,” says the red-haired girl everyone has a crush on. “If I had so much hair I wouldn’t be able to hide it. Yours kinda blends in.” Everyone simpers.
Baby Doll receives one lesson at the end of the first day of third grade: “Go home!” It is not home, this country, its midwest.
For every strand of hair pulled from its leg, it must spend more time in purgatory.
*
Baby Doll and the mother try various techniques to return Baby Doll to factory perfection.
One of them is hair removal.
» They bleach it. The hair turns gold but still grows fast, showing roots and giving Baby Doll a peculiar appearance.
Baby Doll wretches at the smell of ammonia. Its skin trembles under the crust.
» It decides to shave its legs. This results in prickly skin, but most importantly, accusations of sexiness.
Who is Baby Doll trying to impress?
*
Baby Doll is made of porcelain with thick curly eyelashes and glassy brown eyes that do not swell with tears.
It grits pearly teeth and goes on strike.
No brushing—hair or teeth.
No friends—after all, there is nobody quite like it, nobody it has met yet.
How can intimacy exist where there is no overlap of experience?
No care. Cracks and all, it’ll take them.
*
Baby Doll’s supposed peers are unconcerned with the whys of their growing up.
Baby Doll had assumed so far that its lack of knowledge of the ways of life was due to a missing manual given to American students. But there’s so much it doesn’t know about the world, and when it “goes home” to India, it is still lost.
It goes to a classmate’s house and is stricken by a sight: the classmate, lying down, a stylist ripping sheets of cotton and wax off her skin, leaving angry trails. Apparently, everyone hairy does this, everyone it knows. “The mother is so negligent,” says the classmate and her stylist. “It is a mother’s responsibility to make sure that the baby is perfect until it is ripe.”
What makes a baby ripe?
The classmate evaluates Baby Doll. “You should ask the stylist to help you be pretty since you need a lot of help.” The stylist agrees but says Baby Doll needs to also visit a dentist, a cosmetic surgeon, a dermatologist, a soothsayer, and a matchmaker.
» Eventually they will wax Baby Doll’s body, but the holes bleed freely, and the porcelain begins to resemble thin paper, paper that rips, not cracks.
The curse does not lift, and Baby Doll is damned for life.
*
It takes a village to make a lady.
It takes a village to make a lady pretty.
*
When Baby Doll loses its status as Baby Doll, how long will it take for it to realize its own great loss? Does it realize it when a new Baby arrives, one more perfect and loved than the last? A boy, at last—not a halfling? A boy the Baby Doll must take care of/for it is preordained that it will be a her, a her that is a mother?
*
Baby Doll is a bitch now, though, and it laughs when the waxing bitch misses a month of school because of a chemical relaxation process gone awry. The classmate, still visibly bald but with a thicket of hair growing again, says she went to London on vacation. “The river Thames didn’t agree with my hair.”
Was your hair so horrible to begin with? asks Baby Doll, not knowing the section of the manual instructing girls to be more passive aggressive with their snideness.
*
Perhaps missing from this tale is how much Baby Doll enjoyed its perfection. It went on strike because it did not know what to do/how to return to Babyness, to never be accused of wanting to be sexy sexual sexed.
*
This fairy tale is about
one Baby Doll, not a girl
Such things happen.
Did the mother fail the Baby Doll, or did the Baby Doll fail the mother?
Aditi Natasha Kini is an undisciplined writer. They edit Lumpenpockets, “a non-quarterly sick rag.” They’ve done both NYC and the MFA (at University of California, San Diego). They’re at work on multiple projects, all at once. One may read their words in Lithub, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, The New York Times, and soon, Essay Press. They are blessed with two dogs, Lucy the Happy and Charly Kong, who make life worth living.