The Doll Box

by John Dutton

She opened the door to her grandfather’s workshop. As always, with her eyes closed. She never got used to – never wanted to get used to – the memory-filled sawdust air. She breathed him in. His sweat, long fallen; the dust of his skin, long flaked off.

She flicked the light switch. Waited an extra second before opening her eyes. The magic never happened. Time edged ruthlessly forward.

She was fifteen when he died. Eight years after his death she still entered his workshop every day. For the first year or so she had sat on the bench, a toddler once again, watching snowflakes collect on the tiny window pane or the sun illuminate an abandoned web. She didn’t remove his tools. Didn’t touch the half-finished bird box that rested, roofless, at the far end of the long bench. She just sat. Eventually her grandmother would appear at the door:

– Come back upstairs now, Nickie love.

She started modifying dolls just after her seventeenth birthday. At first she used the ones in her collection. As a child she loved playing with dolls, and every year her grandfather had given her a new one for her birthday. They were her friends, her playmates, her muses. In art class at school she drew her dolls over and over, capturing them the way she saw them in her mind. Childishly beatific faces atop womanly curves, with clothing too sensual, too mature. But always surrounded by a suffocating dark rectangle. The art teacher would admire the execution, then frown.

– Did you think about adding something, Nickie? A background, a context? Another canvas?

Nickie hadn’t. Eventually the teacher gave up, not wanting to press the issue or deprive Nickie the orphan of her outlet. When she was ready, Nickie took these dolls to her grandfather’s workshop where she undressed them and transformed them.

Descending the last two bare wooden steps, she unconsciously rubbed the thin, scratchy fabric of the doll’s dress between her thumb and forefinger. This one would be Katya. As she set it down on the bench next to her knives and brushes, she still had no idea how she was going to turn this plastic female homunculus into a traveler, an explorer, a space probe.

Somehow every doll’s personality emerged naturally. Like random gene combinations, Nickie’s memories, hopes and fantasies cascaded into the stream of her creativity. Each doll came into being as familiar and surprising as a newborn looks to its parents.

She got to work, cutting through the original dress with a Stanley knife and dropping the rag into the decapitated industrial chemical container that held the rest of the off-cuts. This was her raw material. An eBay doll, this one, originally from Latin America, with dark, rounded features and impossibly long eyelashes. She’d gone through the dolls in Gaspé’s one toy shop and the Canadian Tire years ago. Then she’d mail-ordered from ToysRUs until she’d exhausted the Canadian market.

Holding the doll in both hands, she stared at its face. A fleeting shard of memory and she was twelve years old again: her parents laid out in the funeral home after the crash, Nickie wishing she could scrape away the waxy, inhuman sheen on their cheeks and see their faces shine with life again.

– I’m sorry for your loss.

What had she lost? The dimly-understood magic of life insurance had provided financial security. Her loss was temporal; the future no longer a slow-flowing river, but a precipice. Clinging to it, feet dangling over the abyss, she was unable to let go. If Nickie’s childhood had ended that evening in the funeral home, surrounded at a respectful, fearful distance by whispered regret and downcast gazes, it wasn’t erased and replaced by adulthood. It was frozen in time – a frame paused forever on the screen of her life. Each doll somehow gave her the chance to recast the possibilities that were stolen from her by the truck that rammed her parents’ car.

She gripped the doll’s head and pressed in both cheeks with her thumbs. The rubbery plastic rebounded. She unwound the vice, the steel lever falling back through the eyelet with each turn. The doll’s head fitted perfectly, and she tightened a quarter-turn, clamping the forehead. The drill was already plugged in, the one-sixteenth bit attached. She aligned the tip to the doll’s left cheek and squeezed the trigger. A buzz, a blur. She moved forward steadily. A whiff of friction-heated plastic hit her nostrils. With practiced precision the bit emerged at the equivalent point on the doll’s opposite cheek.

Withdrawing the drill, she righted herself, replaced it on its hook, and reached for a bird-bone-thin bolt from the container. She inserted it in the cheek-hole with a surgeon’s steady hand. Pushing in the other cheek until the bolt end poked through, she carefully screwed on the matching nut. Tightening, tightening, the cheeks sucked inward. She peered at the deformed face, satisfied with the new features; the high cheekbones, the haughty demeanor. The extraneous threaded metal beyond the bolt was briskly snapped off by wire cutters gripped tightly in her pale hands.

This doll was a baby, but she wanted to age it. She encircled the waist with a tie-wrap, pulled it tight and snipped off the end.

Now the feet. She lit the blow-torch and adjusted the flame. Her grandmother had long ago stopped complaining about the smell drifting upstairs through the floorboards, and Nickie paid no attention to the carcinogenic air entering her lungs.

The flame brushed the plastic and the tiny toes melted away from the doll’s left foot. A drip fell to the concrete below, joining the stalagmitic accumulation. She sculpted the softened plastic with a knife, lengthening the foot. Then the other foot.

She liked the doll’s thick, brown hair, but trimmed and styled it anyway. The asymmetrical swept bangs of a Latina pop star she’d seen in music videos. Katya was almost complete. Nickie unscrewed the pot of modeling clay and scooped some out with her middle finger. She applied it to each cheek, covering over the bolt heads, smoothing and blending the edges of the clay flush with the plastic.

Now the makeup. Partly to cover the clay, partly to uncover the sprite inside the plastic. She took out three tiny pots of enamel paint from among the two dozen that lined the drawer under the bench. Gold, indigo and hazelnut. Her face only two inches from the doll’s, she carefully applied radiating flecks to each iris with a fine-tipped squirreltail brush, wiping it on a rag between colors. She moved back and squinted at the doll’s eyes, then bent over it again and added some more indigo to each eye.

Katya’s outfit was already sewn. Nickie still had a closet-full of her old teen clothes to cut and re-stitch. Her grandmother’s sewing machine ran as smoothly as it had five decades ago, and her seamstress DNA was alive in Nickie’s own hands.

She removed the doll from the vice and dressed it in the black skirt and deep purple fur-lined jacket, fastened by a single hook-and-eye. Two black pumps were slipped over the congealed toes and pressed against the heels so that the glue would set. The shoes were the only part of the dolls that left her dissatisfied. They didn’t measure up to the rest of the outfit. She’d developed the black pump as a reasonable fall-back, but she always had to glue them on.

Next, the box. She worked swiftly, wrenching off the sides and pulling the protruding nails out of old lobster crates with pliers. One crate made three twenty-inch-long doll boxes. She trimmed the planks with the circular plytooth saw, pushing each one steadily through the blade. The bottom and the sides were trimmed and nailed together in less than ten minutes. The lid needed more effort and more care. The eye slit had to be at exactly the right level. She measured and marked the area to be cut, changed the one-sixteenth bit for a quarter-inch and drilled four pilot holes. Inserting a jigsaw in the first hole, she started to cut out a rectangle, beveling its edge slightly. The box was ready to be assembled. She nailed the sides onto the back, then placed the lid on top to make sure of the fit.

Her box-painting area was a tea chest missing one side. Her grandfather had never said where it had come from, but it had traversed the ocean, that she knew. He had used it for lacquering his bird boxes, and the interior was patterned with a maze of hypnotic, lustrous shadows from the sweeping clouds of his lacquer and her paint. She dragged it into the middle of the workshop, then placed the box and lid inside. She shook the paint can rhythmically, the aerosol ball rattling like a heartbeat. She pried off the cap, checked the arrow alignment and started to spray. The chestnut-colored vapor clung to the box in a thin coat. In places the wood grain remained visible, like lines of tensed muscle under skin. She turned the box and lid around to cover the remaining surfaces. The paint dried in minutes.

Back at the bench, she wiped her hands on a rag and lined the bevelled edge of the eye slit with glue. Working quickly, but carefully, she extracted a school-grade microscope slide from its container and checked it for scratches. She bent over the transformed lobster crate and placed the slide into the eye slit aperture, gently pressing the sides until the glue set. She screwed two tiny brass hinges and a matching brass clasp onto the lid, positioned it exactly, then attached them to the box.

Now the name. Metallic gold paint. Calligraphic letters formed with practiced ease. No guideline. Her hand remained steady as she brushed each letter of Katya’s name under the eye slit. She’d been told by the owner of the store in Greenwich Village that it was the hand-painted names which drew customers to the doll boxes on the shelves. Nickie had seen photos of the store, the track lighting aligned precisely with the names, the boxes in a row on the long shelf in the narrow store, a pair of customers staring into one of the eye slits.

She opened the clasp, lifted the lid and lined the box with burgundy velveteen. She placed Katya inside. This was the picture she’d drawn a hundred times in art class.

This is what she hadn’t been able to express in drawings, what she couldn’t make her art teacher understand. The teacher conceived of her job as opening doors, loosening the bonds of imagination. She didn’t understand the power of peeking through a crack.

One last breath of air for Katya. Nickie shut the lid and closed the clasp. She leaned over to look through the glass at Katya’s hazelnut, gold and indigo eyes. Soon, they’d be reflecting the light from a different world. Was the slit for looking out or looking in? In the morning, she would pack Katya up and ship her off. Every silent goodbye was a bon voyage to a child crossing an ocean, a prairie, a desert.

Nickie closed her eyes, smelled the scent of her grandfather’s hands, felt his rough fisherman’s fingertips on her chin. Clanging pots overhead signaled suppertime. She turned off the light and carried Katya upstairs.