Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [18]
I unwrapped my doll and looked her over carefully. It was immediately clear that she was superior on two counts. Not only was her dress pink, her hair was loose with a small bun on top, while my sister’s doll’s hair was in a cumbersome beehive. It was a red-letter day. I examined her lips and almond-shaped eyes, drawn in with the finest of black lines, and her skin as pale as a peeled egg. She was perfect in every way.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would look if I had a dress like that, long and fitted with the white trousers underneath. That night, I wrapped my sheet tightly around myself, right down to my feet, and looked at myself in the dressing-table mirror, holding up my hair with one hand. Our mother sometimes put our hair up in a bun for special occasions, using a thing like a donut to pull our hair through, then she’d spray it and all day you’d smell that sticky flowery smell and the pins would push into your head. My sister looked great with her hair in a bun, as cute as Gidget, but I knew that with my glasses I looked stupid, the way librarians always looked in comics, like someone to make fun of. I could have a compromise bun, though, like my doll’s. What I wanted most were her serenely uptilting, almond-shaped eyes.
When I took my glasses off and leaned into the dressing-table mirror and pulled my eyelids just slightly slanted, I looked totally different. It was hard keeping the sheet wrapped tight with both forefingers at the corners of my eyes, but I was oddly compelled towards this new, possible me.
After we turned out the bedroom light I lay with my fingers against the side of my head, pulling back my eyelids. I could stretch them into place, I thought. If I lay there all night and did it, it would work. My hands started to get tired and I began to experiment with positions where it wasn’t so uncomfortable. It would be worth it, having those beautiful, unusual eyes.
‘What are you doing?’ my sister whispered from her bed. She’d learned the perfect modulation required for icy contempt.
‘Nothing.’ But somehow, she knew.
‘That is so, so stupid,’ she said. She turned over, in her pink pyjamas, and we lay there as stiff as boards in our beds, me with my fingers braced in place, furtive and embarrassed but still soothed, somehow. It was almost like having an important job to do, something special entrusted to me.
But in the morning, my hands were under the blankets, tucked between my knees, the way I always slept. And my eyes, I noted miserably, were still round. Behind my glasses, they looked exactly the same.
Our dolls lived on a high shelf in our room, our belongings placed into their designated halves, surveying all that went on below, never played with, never mussed or ‘ruined’. They were too precious. I just had to smell their synthetic dresses and black, lacquered hair to conjure up the olfactory world of Vietnam—a world of women on tippytoes with pure white faces and eyebrows as fine as an upswept eyelash—it was warm and exotic there, and smelled like nylon and plastic and dust.
Our next presents arrived. Two square boxes this time, wrapped extensively in layers of protective paper and tape, with that same secret, spicy smell. We turned our backs to each other in tacit collusion so we wouldn’t see the other’s first. Under the layers were two identical black and red lacquered music boxes. When you wound up the brass key and turned the snib to open the lid, a tiny pink plastic ballerina pirouetted in front of a wall of mirrors to the tune ‘On the Street Where You Live’. When I heard that song and recognised