The Barbie Head

Writing prompt: the first memory you ever had.

It took me a while to dig back to as far as I could remember. Things that stick out are some things that have some kind of trauma around them: the first time I saw blood, conceived of death, hated something or someone, felt terrible physical pain, etcetera. And before concepts, there were images. Dress hems, dogs tied to their house by a chain, a tall palm tree, the gleam of metallic balloons.

Dig past the gunk, dig past the gunk, I can’t go any further, and I find myself staring in terror at a Barbie head.

Not just a regular Barbie, but the cosmetic one. The life-sized head that was perfectly decorated with cornsilk blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes, an upturned nose, and the tiniest lips made you wonder if she could ever speak out of if she were real. The doll was made for girls to practice applying fake make-up. Girls could practice combing her hair to learn how to style their own. She was the beauty model every girl should have aspired to be; however, this doll looked like a sex victim.

I was sitting with girls a lot older than me, and I watched without saying anything. I don’t even know if I could talk yet. The girls were much taller than me, and they spoke loudly as they passed around the Barbie head. There were mascara smudges on her open eyes. Her hair had been cut so badly that all you could see were those sprigs of fibers that looked like hair plugs, and the teeth had been colored with a pen, so it looked like a few of them were missing. The rest were smeared with lipstick, since the lips had been colored over with a purple crayon, and her skin was smudged with blue and black ink. She looked beat up and bruised. Abused in many ways. She looked dirty and poor, and later on in life, I would see those same kinds of faces begging for spare change in the street, saying they needed the money to feed their kids. There were letters written on her face; only I didn’t know how to read yet. To this day, I wonder if the words were something beautiful or cruel.

I felt like I should have liked playing with the model, instead of looking at what happens to a girl who makes terrible life decisions. The girl that walked down the wrong path and grew up to be the used porn star, the prom queen in her 40s, the divorcee, the ugly lady when life came crashing down on her head when she is no longer Ms. America. I don’t remember anything but fear, disgust, and wanting to get away from that head that looked like it had been chopped off a doll’s body.

I caught a glimpse of my plainness in a mirror and felt a relief that I didn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes. Later on, I would grow up to have more respect for Jackie Kennedy than Marilyn Monroe because of this.

Every once in a while, that memory comes up the way long-forgotten things surface on some idle Tuesday afternoon to remind you how you became the way you are. Little moments of insights that have caused shifts, so great they alter your reality forevermore.

I don’t think I would have remembered the doll’s head if it had been normal looking, and I’m sure I looked at a lot of things back then, the way I do now. It seems that which sticks out and isn’t “normal” often catches our attention in unpleasant ways. Needless to say, I'm not too fond of Barbie. I never did. I found them an entrapment of what a girl needs to be and what she becomes when she obeys: fucked.

There were no dolls named for being writers, doctors, scientists, or inventors. No dolls that sparked the infinity of possibility that are in all humans alike. I have disliked dolls my entire life, and thanks to this writing prompt -I finally know why.