The Sins We Keep

She perches demurely on my desk. Her impossibly long legs are bent at the hip socket and slightly at the knee—shapely, Caucasian-flesh-toned rubber sticks protruding from too a narrow pelvis and a wasp waist any Victorian woman might have died for. Literally.

She still confuses me, my 50-year-old Kelly doll in a prim green and white polka dot dress. Maybe that’s why I rescued her from my parents’ house clean-out, why she sits gazing vacuously toward some point behind me while I work. I can’t help but wonder: why did my feminist mother give me this just-as-curvy cousin of Barbie’s when Barbie was verboten? Sure, her hair is a copper-penny auburn instead of beach-bleached blonde, her eyes a warm chestnut instead of summer sky blue, but why was that more palatable to Mom, a woman who would go on to earn two master’s degrees and a PhD? Since Mom can’t remember, I guess I’ll never know.

For such a smallish hunk of plastic and vinyl with no heart, Kelly is a keeper of many things. A keeper of memories, of disappointments. 

Of sins.

That Christmas in Hong Kong, ripping the paper to reveal the edge of the Mattel box, only to get her? I mean, who’d ever heard of a Kelly doll? All the girls in the six-year-old set at school had Malibu Barbie, and that’s who I wanted. Not this facsimile, this imposter. 

I would never show her face to the world. At least, not to the girls in my class.

Deep in our basement playroom, Kelly and GI Joe soon began to form a dark bond. She’d go grocery shopping, only to run right into Joe, their lips meeting accidently each time. Sometimes they’d fall down together, Joe landing with an “oof, sorry!” on top of her. Such hot stuff that, if my little sister and I heard Mom or our Ama anywhere near the top of the basement steps, we flung the adult-bodied dolls and their grown-up desires to the side and began cooing over our baby dolls. We weren’t exactly sure what we were playing at, but we knew it might not be entirely okay.

Despite her not being who I wanted her to be, Kelly and I became inseparable. One afternoon, fired up with righteous fury, I decided it was time to leave home. My parents were horrible, didn’t understand me and never would if they wouldn’t let me watch H.R. Pufnstuff. It was the last straw. I stuffed Kelly into a tiny backpack along with other essentials a six-year-old might need on the road: a stained Bambi handkerchief, a broken toy iron, and a bird’s feather I treasured. This bonding moment, of running out the back door to hide in full view of our Ama doing dishes at the kitchen window, sealed Kelly’s and my friendship for a long time thereafter.

Kelly moved with me to Tokyo from Hong Kong, making the cut unlike the denizens of toys purged every time we left one country for another. In that largest and busiest of Japanese cities, we lived in an oasis—the U.S. Embassy residential compound was several acres of green and trails in the middle of the Ropongi shopping district. By then I’d gotten over the sting of Kelly not being Barbie, and before I had any friends in Tokyo, she was my partner in crime. I’d head out of our apartment for the day, Kelly strapped to the front of my bike, and off we’d go on adventures that existed purely in my mind. 

When I alienated everyone in my second-grade class for mouthing off to the school bully, I dragged myself home. Mom was unavailable, in bed again with one of her many headaches, so I took solace in Kelly’s placid, mass-produced plastic face instead. She seemed to be telling me that everything was all right.

And it was in Tokyo, with Kelly doll, I remember now, that I once peeked into the third bedroom that was Dad’s office while he was on the phone. I’m not sure why I did that, whether I knew he was in there, but likely I’d heard his unusual tone from outside the door and was dangerously curious. I was expressly not allowed in his office. Ever. 

I crept in, clutching Kelly. Dad’s long-limbed body, his posture, his entire being was enraptured, curled in around the phone. His voice was sonorous and more loving than he was with any of us except with my mother after a weeks-long assignment in the Philippines, Thailand or Vietnam, a softness that lasted only a few days before frustration and anger would creep back in, and we’d all be trying and failing to avoid landmines.

I didn’t understand the shape and sound of my father in that moment. My mother was home, in her darkened bedroom, and Dad hadn’t traveled for ages—there was no precedent for his behavior. No, I didn’t understand it, but it embarrassed me anyway. My face burned with an unknowable shame that I had done something that felt far more inappropriate than anything my sister and I had cooked up between Kelly and GI Joe in that basement playroom. 

When I am old enough, I told myself, gripping Kelly hard while I crept out, I will understand. 

Eventually I outgrew her. For a long time, for decades after Kelly had been relegated to a box with my sister’s Bionic Woman, and my parents had moved a few more times—once after a short separation I prayed would end in their divorce—I forgot about that little adventure of ours. But the shame I didn’t understand lay buried like a stone inside my fierce child’s heart. 

Looking into Kelly’s warm brown gaze now, though, I see and feel that moment in Japan again and know her pretty, painted eyes not empty. They are world-weary. And I am old enough to understand what I was seeing that afternoon in my father’s office. It does not ease my mind. Remembering makes my chest so tight it hurts. 

For now, I’ll keep Kelly on my desk. Maybe the daily reminder will numb the protective anger I feel for that little girl taking on her father’s wrongdoing as her own, wanting him to be what she believed him to be more than anything else. After a while, I’ll put her back in a box again. If she’s lucky, she’ll live on, long after my parents are gone, and I am too, to go on adventures great and small with my great-grandchildren. 

Wherever Kelly ends up, she’ll hold a silent well of memories and secrets and disillusions deep in her heartless plastic heart, her placid face a message to any lonely child who needs it that everything is all right, even if it really isn’t.