Channeling Barbie
By Linda Oatman High

Mother is channeling Barbie.

The insanity started at seventy, when she began stealing (she called it collecting) false teeth and lining them on blue-lit shelves in the basement. The smiles made her happy, she said. It was creepy: all those luminous teeth leering in the cobwebbed dark. Creepier yet was the sight of Mother's pajama-party bingo buddies: pucker-mouthed and toothless and totally unsuspecting of their friend.

At eighty, she became obsessed with death and insisted that we visit the L.A. Coroner's Office gift shop at least once a week. She has quite a collection from Skeleton's Closet: the sweatshirt and the fanny pack and the toe tag key chain and the coffee cup with the coroner's seal and the Black Mariah bank, a replica of a 1938 Chevy panel van used to pick up the dearly departed. This stuff is displayed upon lace doilies on her bureau (except for the sweatshirt, which she wears constantly), in her lavender bedroom at my house, where she's been living since the Denture Arrest.

And now, at eighty-four, she's got a stockpile of Barbie dolls. She talks to them, sometimes in whispers. She listens for their answers, head cocked and eyes squinted. She puts a brown-spotted hand to her ear, leaning forward. She claims that she's channeling Barbie, like some screwball psychic. The doctor calls it Alzheimer's. I call it crazy.

"Mother," I say one day, "why are you doing this? Why? Can't you see that it's insane?"

She doesn't answer. She simply holds a doll to her ear, eyelids heavy. She hums, a scrawny Zen master in a purple polyester nightgown, bent like a wishbone.

I sigh. I don't need this; I can't take this. I had a breast removed six months ago. I don't know what they did with it. Do they bury boobs? Burn them? Pile them up in a mad scientist's lab? I like to picture my breast planted in a Mastectomy Garden, growing full and lush and lovely with a bouquet of other blooming boobs. I dream of it sometimes. When I wake up, there's nothing but a flat seam - a scar - where the breast used to be. It's freaky. I once nursed a baby from that spot. The baby grew. She was chubby and content, glowing with mother's milk. She was pink-cheeked and dimpled. She was pretty. She was sweet, until she hit thirteen. Before I knew it, she was eighteen and gone. And so was the breast. So was her father. They all disappeared like sighs, fading slowly as icicles or candles.

Ever since the mastectomy, Mother gets under my skin. So does Barbie. There's nothing like a plastic blonde with an hourglass figure to depress a forty-eight-year-old one-breasted woman. I'm thinking of putting Mother and her dolls in a nursing home, where nurses can wipe her bottom and comb her straggles of hair and hold a hankie to her lips to catch her blood-speckled spit. Nurses can listen to her giggling with Barbie and complaining loudly about her hemorrhoids, which are all named Henry. Nurses can sprinkle baby powder on her Brillo pad pubic hair and rub lotion on her blue-veined legs. Nurses can pat her back when she gags, and spoon Geritol liquid down her throat. They can force-feed her when she refuses to eat. I'm not a nurse. I never wanted to be a nurse.

"Annie!" Mother calls, a thousand times a day. It's gotten to the point where I hate my own name.

"Barbie says that you need to go out dancing every once in a while," Mother relates, straight-faced. "She says that getting gussied up in a ballroom gown would do you good."

"Right, Mother," I mutter. I wonder if Barbies make good bonfires.

"Barbie says that a tad bit of makeup would lift your spirits," Mother says. Or, "Barbie says that a new hairstyle is just the ticket." Or, "Barbie says that all you need is a man like Ken."

"Barbie can go to hell," I say. Mother gasps. What I've said is a sacrilege in the Church Of The Barbie Doll.

"I'm sorry," I say. Mother adjusts her coroner's office sweatshirt, offended.

"Barbie says that a real lady is always polite," Mother states. She sniffs. "She says manners are very important."

Manners will get you everywhere, according to Mother. Manners and ballroom gowns and perfect plastic boobs.

I'm working on a book called Henny Penny Goes Through Henopause. It's about a hen no longer laying eggs, and she's depressed. She's also irritable. Her feathers are turning gray. The rooster is having a mid-life crisis and Henny Penny is dealing with an empty nest. Eventually she ends up on someone's dinner plate: just a stuffed chicken breast. I think it's going to be a bestseller, like Dr. Seuss' Oh, The Places You'll Go. If only I could finish the book. I'd write more if Mother wasn't here, that's for sure. I'd even be on the Oprah show, I bet.

"How do you feel about a retirement home?" I ask. "One of those nice community-living homes where they have bingo and crafts and a beauty parlor and all kinds of fun stuff."

Mother wrinkles her nose.

"Those places smell like poop in baggies," she says. "Stale pee. Dirty hinies. Old people."

"L.A. is full of retirement homes," I say. "We'd find one that doesn't stink."

"Yes, but there would still be the old people," Mother replies.

Mother doesn't know that she's old. She thinks that she's Barbie, in the flesh. Barbie's spirit is moving through her blood. My mother is a wacko. I wonder if I'd miss her as much as I miss my daughter and my breast. I don't miss my husband. I know that I wouldn't miss the dolls. I close my eyes for a moment, picturing Barbies lined up on the shelves in a room at Good Maturity Homes. The coroner's office collection would go on the bureau. There would be a T.V. and a telephone and a buzzer to call the nurses. There'd be lots of people with false teeth. I'd visit. I'd go home. I'd write.

I'm driving Mother to her doctor's appointment. She's holding Barbie to the open car window, making her wave at handsome men. I'm pretending I don't know her, my knuckles white and cheeks red. She's a hitchhiker. An escapee from Good Maturity. I'm returning her. This is my fantasy.

"Annie," says Mother, "look at that fellow. Now that's what I call a good-looking man." We're stopped at a red light and a glossy black convertible Corvette idles beside us. The man's hair is black as his car. I hate when men color their hair. I can see the white roots. It's like catching a glimpse of something private. Real men never dye.

Mother holds Barbie to her ear.

"Okay," she says. "If you insist."

Mother lifts Barbie's dress, flashing the doll's bare bottom to the man in the Corvette. He gives her the finger and roars away as the light turns green.

"Oh," Mother says. "He's nice-looking, all right, but he has no manners. Manners are very important. He's no Ken, that's for darned sure."

Mother adjusts herself on the hemorrhoid pillow. She mutters to Henry. Barbie smiles in her lap.

"Where are we going again?" Mother asks. "Annie?"

"To . . . the . . . doctor's." I hold my breath and count to ten.

"And what is the doctor's name?"

I rake a hand through my hair. "Dr. Gordon."

Mother worms her bra through the sleeve of her dress. She can no longer tolerate a bra for more than an hour at a time, she says. Barbie doesn't wear a bra and she doesn't sag, she says. At least Barbie (and Mother) have a boob for each cup. I'm thinking of getting one of those prosthesis things.

"Yes, a prosthesis would be nice," Mother says. But I haven't spoken a word. "Barbie says that it's better to have fake titties than no titties at all. Even if they are made in Japan."

I'm on the internet, surfing the world-wide web for the best breast. One site says that they accommodate everyone: "From Surgery Patients To Crossdressers." They have a special silicone section just for men.

Another site is for a store somewhere in Georgia. They'll come to your house and The Fitter will make sure that the tit fits just right. There was a picture of The Fitter on the site, and it looked just like a guy in women's clothes. His wig didn't even fit. I click on another place called "Mastectomy Boutique." That sounds classy. Only problem was that it got me to a site that sells Used Foreign Car Parts. I'm afraid that a radiator cap just isn't going to do it for me.

Finally, I find a web site decorated with beating hearts and falling flowers and pulsing pink backgrounds. There are too many choices: Just For You and Just For Me and Just Like You and Just Like Me. Not to mention that you've got to decide on shape - teardrop or heart or triangular - and then either weighted or nonweighted. This is a foreign language: Boobese.

Mother is standing behind me. I hear her breathing. I feel her heat.

"Barbie says to go with the heart-shaped form," she says. "Men will love it. Maybe you'll get a date."

This is the last straw. "Screw Barbie," I say.

Mother sniffs.

"A real lady," she says, "is always polite. Cursing is a sign of a weak mind."

"Weak mind," I mutter. "What about stealing teeth? Collecting stuff from the coroner's office? Talking to stupid Barbie dolls."

"Barbie has had it with you, young lady," Mother says. She shoves Barbie up her sweatshirt. "She doesn't want to ever see you again."

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