The Good Doll

My daughter had a nice doll, her first good doll, a doll for which I had to take quite a few shushing banknotes out of my battered red wallet, on which the clasp didn’t work and I had to carry around a pen to push it out every time I had to open it. But I carried a pen around all the time anyway, and a notebook, I was a writer after all, so it wasn’t a big deal. The day before the events in this story I looked at a cute set of toys for my daughter’s nice doll: a pink baby bath, a bar of pink soap, blue and green bottles of talc and baby cream, a tiny snow white towel to wrap the baby up snugly after the bath is done. I told her we would get it when my next check came in. I imagined a quiet time with my daughter when I finally got to play with toys I never had.

Before we went to that dreadful movie, that I am destined to hate forever, my daughter demanded to take the doll and her neat pink pram with her. I was firm: we were going to the movies. She demanded to take the doll then, without the pram. I tried to fight but she was stronger. She got her naps, she got her night’s sleep. I got neither. It was only a doll. What could happen?

I had a bad feeling all along. But we did see, well, The Princess And The Frog, some German flick about the little brother becoming a dog, Babies (an almost silent French documentary about, err, babies), Ponyo, Belka And Strelka, Shrek Forever After, Toy Story Three (twice), Cats And Dogs, Step Up 3D, The Karate Kid, etc – all in the theatre, all without any problems at all. And then again my friends took their one-month old to Avatar, he did well and was shut up by his mother’s tit every time his little mouth opened. So I wasn’t particularly worried. I finally began gaining my life back. I tried to blame random waves of nausea on my erratic eating habits, which weren’t exactly a matter of choice either.

Now some ladies at the Belarus movie theatre I just have to admire. They smile at me and the kid, they praise her curly hair and her bubbly personality. But that day it wasn’t one of them. The lady at the door snapped: ‘Where have you brought her? She’ll be bored stiff. Bring her to Karate Kid’ (been there, done that). It wasn’t quite as nasty as ‘I recommend to make sure you child doesn’t talk during the show. I will not stand any complaints’ icy shower we got before Step Up 3D, at which we brazenly danced and sang along in our seats – on purpose – to Empire State Of Mind – my daughter’s favourite song (it goes like yooooou yaaaaa, kunli junl wa dleems aa made aaaav) but it gave me a little tremor that only got worse as the evening slid downwards.

The trailers were always a menace. I brought her to see one movie, but instead she had to endure four. And three of those horror, and all Russian. Werewolves, bare breasts, women getting raped – does that shock anyone anymore? Yep, my child. I covered her eyes and ears and tried not to look at the people horrified she had to go through this. When the main feature started I relaxed a bit and my daughter was quiet for a while. Pretty soon it became apparent that The Switch wasn’t exactly a kid’s movie. A single New Yorker deciding to get pregnant on her own, her best friend not good for insemination because, yawn, he is just a ‘Best friend’… you know the rest even if you haven’t seen it. Jennifer’s looks impressed me, the semen jokes – not so much.

The dialogue they are having in the café was something I have heard so many times. ‘What are you doing? A kid needs a father.’ On the screen I saw a woman who was desperate to bring a child into this world just like I was desperate to bring some normality into the life of my daughter. I saw a woman who was tired of hearing how things were supposed to turn out because they weren’t turning that way out for her. The dating scene with the pretty dark haired girl where the jokes are wearing thin and the whole shebang of romance is in desperate need of a botox lift was a bitter sneer at the institute of the traditional relationship. The dialogue they are having about the boy coming one day from school, taunts and nasty nicknames on his mind, about wanting to bring children into this world and then trying desperately to protect them from it – oh, boy, did I really need the recount of my own fears on a Sunday evening?

I felt so smug when I said ‘we’ll see’ to the ticket lady trying to warn me. I felt so smug in front of the sandpit ladies who turned on the satellite channel cartoons for their kids. As smug as when a younger and stupider myself told anyone who wanted to hear how obnoxious and irresponsible it was for women to have children without any tangible father figures in sight, and how I, if ever I was going to have children, which I doubted very much, would have one only as part of an old-fashioned unit of society, the traditional family. My ass.

But the atmosphere in the movie theatre was sobering. I felt like I was so different from the people surrounding me my skin was purple or green. I felt like everyone was staring at me. I never knew such hatred in my life. My skin itched from the inside.

Poker-faced, we peacefully chewed potato chips through semen jokes and particles of pure hatred bounced off our munching cheeks and entwined legs. The movie was boring. I made a bad move into the first ten minutes, when my daughter was good and happy in my arms; I offered crisps – something that had to come much much later when all patience was lost on boring grown-up talk and the rare but treasured shots of penguins and dolphins. So out came far too loud requests for crisps, and biscuits, and water, the eager cries ‘Where is the boy?’ and ‘What happened to the dolphins?’ I was uncomfortable, people were turning round to stare at me hard, and there were some sighs and reproaching tut-tuts. Finally somebody yelled: ‘Well, that’s quite enough, I can’t hear anything’. I sprang to my feet and dragged my daughter out of the theatre while she cried her heart out.

On our way back home I thought that the women sneered more than men, the men didn’t have the guts. How many of these women would have babies on their own? How many of them would have babies not by insemination, but with somebody who seems human, which is worse, since in the case of insemination at least one knows there isn’t the somebody to lean on? The truth is that half of the women in that theatre would be fat and stretch marked one day, unloved and unwanted, sitting on the bench in front of a sandpit where the cats piss, looking at their fatherless offspring eating sand, without a single idea in their head that it was actually possible to shake life off their shoulders, get on both two, go out and live like humans before children do. Yes, I was smug again.

I thought about many things on our way back (it’s 11 metro stops, with one change, then 6 stops by bus), holding to the icy cold handle. And then I realized something was missing. I searched frantically in the bag, but sure enough, there wasn’t anything in it except for the books I got just in case, the empty bag of crisps and the drained water bottle. No, a good doll like that wouldn’t fit in.

I told my daughter she would never get a doll like this, British and overpriced, with accessories that cost as much as the dresses she got at summer sales.

In the metro when I realized we left the doll, I was overcome with that feeling, that dreadful angst, that horror, that the character in the movie felt right before inseminating herself with someone’s alien seed, the feeling that overwhelmed me when the father of my daughter was out of our lives in cold blood, leaving me to revert to my primal instincts and survive on adrenaline and fear. Funny thing: turns out human beings thrive on those two.

I don’t know what it was, the irony that I couldn’t watch a movie about single motherhood because I was a single mother; or the fact that I had read all of the reviews of the latest premiers and had chosen the only one that was remotely interesting to my daughter, and it turned out to be exactly the opposite; or the fact that I boasted so profusely about our movie-going habits to the women in the playground, the desperate housewives, the Stepford wives, who didn’t brush their teeth and hair for two weeks, and talked about sauces, dance classes and washing powder; or the reason why I read all the reviews – a place in a UK MA in Film program, starting a month from that fateful night – to which I would not be going because I was selling my good coats to get groceries; but I wanted to cry so bad, I let my daughter cry for me. She bawled. I didn’t console her.

I am a single mother. I am here to stay. I am many, and I am reproducing all the time. I am growing armies of me around my shoulders. Society, I refuse to adjust to you. You will have to adjust to me.