The store-bought doll came in a box with a plastic viewing window on the front. She was
wrapped and given to Jewel by her maternal grandmother when she was five years old. Jewel had
been reminded many times about the special measures her grandmother had taken to be sure that
her brother and she would be among the few to own an original Cabbage Patch Doll.
The doll was beautiful. Her tan skin, green eyes and pigtailed, light-brown, yarn hair were
soft and clean and new. She was just the right size to hold and hug and she fit naturally in Jewel’s
embrace, like a soul mate. The doll’s name was completely original and rang out with the idea
that she had been hand picked just for Jewel. Her doll’s name was Felicia.
Then Jewel grew up. She grew up faster physically than a lot of the children in her class.
This proved to be a disadvantage when she was sexually abused by one of her mother’s many
boyfriends at age nine. After months of counseling and a few runaways, Jewel finally came home
and settled down for awhile when she was twelve. She came home to a room that was hardly hers
any longer. Her mother, pained by her daughter’s long periods away from home, had packed all
of her little girl’s toys and dolls in black plastic garbage bags and tucked them away into a closet.
Jewel continued to grow up and was married at the age of nineteen to her steady high
school boyfriend. While moving into her new home (a rancid smelling, roach infested apartment),
she took what was left of her childhood room out of the garbage bags her mother had so hastily
stashed. The second bag she opened held the precious childhood doll her grandmother had given
her. She reached in and took it out carefully, scared she might damage something she once
thought was indestructible.
She couldn’t remember when it had happened, but somehow Felicia had gotten dirty. Her
skin had become splotchy with situational dirt and she looked as if she had been infected with
melanoma. The strings that had once held her wrist and ankle in perfect form had let go and her
arm and leg appeared to be plagued with Elephantiasis. Jewel couldn’t remember when either of
these things had happened. She still remembered Felicia with her clean, fresh pigtails and crispy,
blue, starched dress. She only noticed the damage now, as she looked back at the doll with fond
distance.
Jewel had many dolls, but Felicia was the first official member of her dilapidated doll
collection. When her family found out that she had an interest in doll collecting, she started to get
dolls as gifts for every holiday a gift could be justified for. Many of her new dolls were frilly and
had glass faces and appendages. Felicia had a plastic molded face and a cloth body, but she meant
more than all the beautiful dolls Jewel had ever received. The difference was that Felicia had been
real to her. The others were simply dust collectors that added to the quantity of her collection.
Jewel didn’t keep Felicia on her top shelf. She didn’t even place Felicia in a stand. Felicia
was kept in a cardboard box with several other childhood playmates and lots of memories. Felicia
had been the most played with of the dolls in her company, though. The title on the box said,
“Fragile! Bedroom closet.” None of them had been made of glass, yet what was fragile about
them was that they had known Jewel’s deepest secrets and inner thoughts. Sometimes at night,
when Jewel would leave the closet door open by accident she would think about the dolls in the
box marked “Fragile.” She could almost hear them gossiping about the days gone by: fleeting
whispers of dainty doll voices.
“Felicia still believes in me,” Jewel would think to herself on quiet nights when her
husband was gone working one of his many overnight shifts. “Some of the others I bought when I
was twelve --attempting to hang onto my lost youth by my dolls’ hands-- probably laugh at
Felicia’s confidence in me, now.”
“She’ll never play with you again. You’re all dirty and you don’t even do anything
special. You’re just a floppy old Cabbage Patch Doll,” the dolls on top of Felicia chant, inside the
box marked “Fragile.”
“I’m an original Cabbage Patch Doll!” Felicia says. Even after all of the time she had
spent in the black plastic garbage bag, she couldn’t lose hope that one day Jewel would play with
her again.
Then one day, after spending a very long time in the box marked “Fragile,” the box is
opened. Small familiar hands embrace Felicia and glittering baby blue eyes bring her back to life.
“Sara? Where are you?! It’s time for dinner!” Jewel yells up the stairs of their new
condominium to her four-year-old daughter.”
“Yes, Mom!” the little girl proclaims, tucking her new treasure beneath her tiny sweater.
Then she heads to the kitchen, walking innocently past her mother as if the doll-shaped protrusion
on her chest is invisible. Jewel plays along and ignores her daughter’s mischief.
Later, as Jewel is striding past her daughter’s room, she is alarmed to hear two distinct
voices coming from inside, where the little girl is alone. She stops and peeks her head around the
corner of the door and there on Sara’s lap is Jewel’s dear, old friend -Felicia.
Like Sleeping Beauty awakened from her eternal rest, Felicia lives anew in Sara’s eyes.
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Copyright 2001 by Jennifer Mertz