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Barbie's Dream House |
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Monica Schaefer grew up in an era before American households became inundated with technology, before youngsters looked to video games, prerecorded movies, cable television, cell phones, personal computers and iPods for entertainment. Children in her day played with simpler toys: scooters, hula hoops, jump ropes, board games and Colorforms. When Monica was a little girl, she loved to play with dolls, and in the days before the advent of hi-tech toys, there were a large number of them from which to choose: dolls made of porcelain, vinyl, cloth and even paper. There were dolls that could walk, talk, cry, wet and drink from a bottle. Among Monica’s favorites were Raggedy Ann, Patty Play Pal, Tressy, Tammy, Thumbelina, Betsy Wetsy and Chatty Cathy. More than any other doll, though, she loved Barbie, Mattel’s eleven-inch-tall fashion doll. While her older sister owned the 1961 version with the ponytail and curly bangs, Monica owned the newer model, the one with a bouffant hairstyle often referred to as a “bubble cut.” Monica never tired of playing with her Barbie. For hours on end, she would dress the doll in a variety of miniaturized outfits, including a blue corduroy jumper, an apple print sheath, a red cheerleader outfit, and a pink satin evening gown, all accessorized with tiny shoes, hats, gloves, purses and jewelry. Using her imagination, she created all sorts of scenarios for Barbie: working, shopping, going out on a date and other activities little girls associated with being a grown up woman. These make-believe situations were easier to enact when Monica added Barbie’s best friend Midge, a freckle-faced doll with her hair worn in a tightly curled flip, to her collection. Midge was soon followed by Barbie’s little sister, Skipper, and, of course, Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken. Along with the new dolls, Mattel offered more outfits and accessories for the existing ones. Soon Ken, dressed like a football player, and Barbie, like a Japanese geisha, were riding across the kitchen floor in their own orange plastic Austin-Healey convertible. Once Monica became a teenager, however, she outgrew the desire to play with dolls and preferred to spend her allowance on clothes and shoes for herself rather than for Barbie. Adolescence brought with it a greater interest in school, girlfriends, rock ’n’ roll and boys. One boy, in particular, Justin Haggard, attracted her attention. At first, Justin was not interested in thirteen-year-old Monica, but once he entered puberty and Monica’s baby fat was redistributed to form provocative curves, he quickly changed his mind. * * * Inevitably, the sixties ended and the seventies began. Monica graduated from high school and started working as a secretary for a life insurance company. Just three days after her twenty-first birthday, she and Justin were married. Marriage brought with it overwhelming responsibilities. The Donna Reed days of the fifties and early sixties, where men were the breadwinners and women stayed home cleaning the house and baking cookies, were as much a part of the past as the bubble cut Barbie. It was now the age of the liberated woman, and Monica, after putting in an eight-hour day at the office, still had to come home each night and cook dinner, clean the house and do the laundry. Justin, a confirmed male chauvinist, was of little help. While he mowed the lawn, raked the leaves and shoveled snow when necessary, he balked at doing what he considered “women’s work.” During the early years of the marriage, Monica stoically bore the uneven workload without complaint. Once she and Justin became parents, she reasoned, she would stop working, and the balance would be restored, or at least shifted more in her favor. Fate, however, saw fit to make motherhood an unattainable dream. Though fertility doctors had given them both clean bills of health, the Haggards were never blessed with children. Men, in general, adapt to childlessness better than women do. This was certainly true in Justin’s case. What energies he might have spent being a father, he poured into his job. The upside of this situation was that the Haggards joined the upwardly mobile yuppies of the eighties. Not only were they able to purchase a house in the upscale Danvers Street section of Puritan Falls, but they also had money left over to spend and to invest for the future. The downside was that their marriage gradually disintegrated. With her husband working a sixty to seventy hours a week, Monica more often than not was left alone. With Justin bringing home six figures a year, there was no longer a need for her to work. Yet although she quit her job at the insurance company, she took a part-time position at a toy and gift shop on Gloucester Street, just so she would have something to do with her time. It was while working at this shop that she developed a renewed interest in dolls. Monica was surprised that to see that the modern generation Barbie bore little resemblance to Mattel’s original doll. Gone were the eyes heavy with mascara that always glanced haughtily to the side, the rosebud-shaped lips and the tight, brillo-like Saran hair that always held its shape. Where the early sixties doll possessed an air of sophistication, her eighties counterpart looked like a “dumb” blonde, with a massive head of hair that lost its style not long after the doll was removed from the package, leaving the world’s most famous fashion icon with a perpetual bad hair day. Like his famous girlfriend, Ken had also undergone an amazing transformation over the years—several in fact. The first version of the doll had always reminded Monica of Jerry Mahoney, Paul Winchell’s ventriloquist dummy. The original Ken had flocked, “peach-fuzz” hair that quickly wore off, leaving him as bald as Yul Brynner. (Alas, the first Ken had been designed before the advent of Rogaine.) The later versions of Barbie’s perennial “significant other” were a big improvement—hair-wise, anyway. The peach fuzz was gone for good; his crew cut was subsequently painted on. In some models, he had rooted hair similar to Barbie’s, only much shorter. In fact, the Mod Hair Ken even boasted a detachable beard and mustache, which gave him a strong resemblance to Charles Mason. Fortunately, the majority of Kens looked more like athletes, rock singers and movie stars and less like crazed cult leaders. Seeing the large selection of dolls Mattel now had to offer—a plethora of Barbies and Kens as well as friends, cousins, brothers and sisters in a politically correct mix of ethnicities—Monica decided to become a collector. Though she was a latecomer to the Barbie craze, in a relatively short period of time her collection grew to an impressive number. Thanks to doll shows, flea markets and eBay, she was able to purchase a large number of limited editions, annual holiday dolls, department store exclusives, porcelain reproductions of the classic Barbies and dolls wearing lavish costumes designed by Bob Mackie. These treasured collectibles—some so high in price that they were payable in monthly installments—were kept in their original packages and safely stored on a shelf on top of the guest bedroom closet. “Not another damned doll,” Justin complained one evening when his wife came home from the toy shop with a new acquisition. “Honestly, you’re a grown woman. Can’t you think of a better, more adult way to spend your money? If you must collect something, why not stamps or books?” “Doll collecting is a popular hobby among people of all ages,” she explained patiently. Justin shook his head with disgust and went to the den to immerse himself in paperwork he’d brought home from the office. * * * Despite the many incarnations of the Barbie doll, the simple act of looking at her doll collection brought back pleasant memories of Monica’s childhood. Too bad life as she had imagined it then bore little resemblance to reality. With each passing year, she and Justin grew further apart, and their arguments became more frequent and bitter. Monica would have preferred divorce to such a volatile marriage, but her husband wouldn’t hear of it. She had often thought about just walking out, but then she would remember what her husband had threatened on more than one occasion: “If you ever leave me, I swear I won’t rest until I find you. And when I do, I’ll kill you.” Monica had little doubt that was one promise he would keep. Time marched on, as the saying goes. The twentieth century was history, and Monica and Justin celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. There was little cause for celebration, however. In a quarter of a century, the once happy marriage had deteriorated into an endless series of lonely nights for Monica. Even on those rare occasions when Justin was home, their evenings usually were marked with either menacing silence or raging arguments. Once more, Monica brought up the subject of divorce. “Like I told you before,” her husband warned. “If you leave me, I’ll find you. And when I do, I’ll kill you.” So our miserable life goes on, Monica thought bitterly. Until death do us part. * * * One evening while shopping at the Puritan Falls Mall for a birthday gift for her sister, Monica saw a Barbie that was an exact replica of the one she’d had when she was a little girl. It had the same eyes heavy with mascara, glancing off to the side, and the same platinum blond, bubble cut hairstyle. Mattel had dressed this special edition collector’s doll in reproductions of two vintage sixties outfits: Silken Flame (a white silk evening dress with a strapless red velvet bodice) and Red Flare (a full, red velvet coat with matching pillbox hat). Buying the doll put her in a good mood, but seeing Justin’s Lexus in the driveway when she got home from the mall quickly disheartened her. “What have you bought now?” her husband asked when she walked through the door with a J.C. Penney bag in her hand. “A doll.” “Christ!” he spat. “What difference does it make to you what I buy?” “It doesn’t. I just think it’s pathetic for someone your age to be playing with dolls.” “I don’t play with them, but even if I did, I don’t see where it’s any of your business.” The argument continued through dinner. When Justin finally went to bed, angrily slamming the door behind him, Monica picked up the bag containing the new Barbie and took it to the family room where she had her less-expensive dolls displayed on shelves. Getting the doll out of the box was no easy task. She had to first remove all the twist ties, plastic strips, cardboard tabs, elastic bands and strings that were holding the doll in place. Having finally set Barbie free from her packaging bondage, Monica closely examined the doll itself. “I’ve got to hand it to you,” she said. “You’ve certainly aged better than I have. There’s not a gray hair in that platinum blond bubble cut, not a wrinkle on that vinyl face, not an ounce of fat on that perfect hourglass shape, and, despite all the wedding dresses you’ve worn during the past forty years, you were smart enough never to get married. How I envy you!” As she spoke, Monica lovingly touched the doll’s outfit, delighting in the softness of the red velvet coat. Finally, she sighed and put the doll in the living room of the three-story Dream House, which stood on a coffee table in the center of the room. When Monica leaned forward to peek inside the Dream House, a sudden sharp, stabbing pain gripped her chest, causing her to clench her teeth, catch her breath and close her eyes. When the pain finally subsided, she exhaled and slowly opened her eyes. A moment later, she opened them wider in amazement. She was no longer standing in the middle of her family room. Impossible though it seemed, Monica was inside the doll’s house! She glanced down. On her hands were long, white gloves; on her feet were red, plastic high heels; and over the Silken Flame evening dress, she was wearing the Red Flare velvet coat. Am I dreaming? she wondered as she reached her hand up to her head and felt a velvet pillbox hat placed atop a stiff bouffant hairdo. Trembling, Monica walked to the full-length mirror in the Dream House’s bedroom and peered at her reflection. She gaped in awe at what she saw in the mirror: Barbie’s long, shapely legs; unnaturally tiny waist; full, silicone-free breasts; long, graceful neck; and high cheekbones. It was a perfect body and a perfect face, crowned by a no-maintenance, platinum blond, bubble cut hairstyle. Through some wondrous, inexplicable miracle, Monica had become Barbie! “I must be dead,” she surmised after contemplating the situation for several minutes. “That sharp pain in my chest was probably a heart attack.” Death didn’t worry or frighten her. On the contrary, she had a smile of peaceful contentment on her face as she walked across the miniature bedroom and, like a child unwrapping presents on Christmas morning, threw open the wardrobe doors with cheerful anticipation. Inside the closet were some of the most exquisite outfits ever designed for a doll. “I am going to spend eternity in satin, lace, velvet and silk. I’ll wear evening gowns morning, noon and night. Best of all, I’ll never grow old, and I’ll never get fat!” Monica laughed with delight as she realized she would never have to cook another dinner for her ungrateful husband, endure another domestic argument or suffer through another day of an unhappy marriage. “I have died and gone to heaven!” she exclaimed. “I can live here in Barbie’s beautiful Dream House without a care in the world.” Her joy was cut short, however, when the plastic bedroom door was forcefully thrown open. Monica Schaefer’s heaven instantly turned to hell when into the scaled-down room of Barbie’s Dream House walked the flocked-hair Ken, who smiled malevolently and asked, “Didn’t I tell you I’d find you if you ever tried to leave me?” BarbieTM is a registered trademark of Mattel, Inc.
Salem tried to turn himself into a Barbie doll, but the spell didn't work too well.    
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