Such Small Hands Read online

  That’s the way it would be.

  At first our eyes would slip in the night, until they adapted to the darkness. We almost couldn’t see the sides of the dressers where our names were written. Slowly, we’d forget the cares of the day. We’d forget our times tables and spelling rules, forget the smell and taste of that night’s dinner. Everything would be slow and amber-colored, like stuffy air in a closed-up room. But even if we really wanted to, we’d never rush. Feeling the contact of our nightgowns and the touch of our sheets, we’d pretend to be asleep, as if we’d been flooded by fatigue all of a sudden. Closing our eyes, we’d compel our bodies to produce the sleep-smell that convinced the adult it was okay for her to go. And we’d lie there like that, motionless, for several minutes. Then, in the dark of night, a strange sound would send the first sign. We’d billow, like skirts in the wind. We’d start to live inside the game, the anxiety of the game. Soon the second sign would come; there would be no doubt now. It could be anything: a whistle, the sound of creaking wood, even silence. And then slowly, we’d get out of bed, without even brushing up against each other, and our bodies would feel lighter. Not even then would we feel the cold of the floor tiles, be afraid of the dark. We were the cold, the dark. And so we’d go to Marina’s bed, sleepwalkers, obsessed with one idea: starting the game.

  Once we’d gathered around her bed, Marina would finally rise up and someone would turn on a light and put it under the sheets. We’d see her face, and for a moment she’d seem to hesitate. And then she’d say:

  “You.”

  No more waiting. She’d just say:

  “You.”

  Our last tie to the day, to the orphanage, would break then. To us, that was when the doll’s girl-life ended; an expression of fear, of pain, would cross her face. And when Marina signaled, we’d start to undress the chosen girl, thinking trivial thoughts: that we’d never noticed that mole on her shoulder before, that her face leaned comically to one side, that her nightgown had Donald Duck on it and was frayed at the hem. But as we undressed her, the chosen girl would become smaller, and more compact. She’d lose her smell. That precious, fragile thing, her smell, yes, even that would disappear. Her skin would become coarser, and so would our touch; everything would get a little rougher, a little tougher. To hide our uneasiness we’d make faces, tell jokes. Someone would even sing:

  Minne Minnehaha went to see her Papa,

  Papa died, Minne cried,

  Minne had a newborn baby,

  Stuck it in the bathtub to see if it could swim.

  Almost in a whisper, so you could hardly hear it, so you didn’t think about the doll’s tiny body.

  “You have to take off all of her clothes.”

  “Even her underwear?”

  “Even her underwear. And then you have to put this dress on her, because this is the doll’s dress.”

  The dress would be blue, and coarse, and no one would ever know where Marina had gotten it from. It would have a red cat playing with a green ball of yarn embroidered on the front. We would each touch the dress before putting it on the doll, as if we needed to prove that it was real, at least as real as the body of the doll who, now naked, would be waiting. There would be, truth be told, tremendous mistrust. The doll would wait, motionless. Once she was naked Marina would say:

  “Now you have to dress her.”

  She’d make a very unhappy face. Her expression would go to pieces in one second. And we’d have to be very aware in that second because that was when we’d discover who the doll really was.

  That was something we learned immediately: no two dolls were ever the same.

  That was the way it had to be.

  Some would be heavy and formless, as if constantly searching for a shape that never came, painful, chubby dolls with no message, and no one knew what to do with their spent flesh; others would be as taut as bows, marionettes with wide-open eyes, guilty as criminals; others would be fragile and delicate and we couldn’t do anything to rid them of their delicacy; others would be born dead, impossibly cheap, one arm or leg longer than the other, or hair too coarse, or feet too dirty. Marina would always wait to see them before she put on their makeup.

  Still naked, motionless, even before we put her dress on, the doll would await her face. That was when the game’s second door would open, the scary one because who knew what was behind that closed door. It was always frightening there. You feared a terrible adventure. And what’s to come is unnerving.

  You close your eyes.

  Then it’s like you’re dreaming.

  Actually, you feel like you’re on the verge of entering a dream but then don’t, and then after a while all that’s left is that feeling. Then even that fades, and a milky light seeps in through the crack, an anxiety that knows no words, no objects. But when you open your eyes, you see Marina’s face putting on the makeup, bringing your hidden face to the surface. A frightened face. Very slowly, she twists the lipstick up and applies it to the doll’s face. Your lips surrender to the color. Lips that had been so pale, almost transparent in the muted light, grow full, as if filling with blood.

  Slowly your limbs sink into a warm sludge. You see the other girls’ faces as if they’d just suddenly appeared out of nowhere. And then your eyes begin to feel tired.

  “Close your eyes.”

  You close your eyes. You fall. It’s as if you were wearing a mask. You feel the black pencil lining your eyes, emphasizing them. No one speaks, but you know exactly where each girl is and what she feels, and that wind is still blowing in from the window and that it’s cold; you feel the scratchiness of the dress on your skin like a sack, and you love that contact, the presence, the feel of black eyeliner gliding across your eyelids. Marina pulls back a little, admiring her work. Then, calmly, she says:

  “Now you’re a doll.”

  And now you’re a doll.

  Suddenly, just like that, you’re a doll.

  You are passed from one set of hands to the next, from one bed to the next. You’re never alone again. Safe inside the doll you love harder, feel deeper, exist boundlessly, no moderation. And yet you disregard the sound of girls kissing your cheek. Nothing matters now.

  You have to let your arms flop at your sides so the girl will hold them up. You’re frozen there, motionless, skin moist from a warm kiss that means nothing. Then you feel the yanking on your dress, greedy hands. The easiest thing is just to think you’re going to die. But that thought, to a doll, has no meaning either. You feel it, but in no way does it stir you. Your eyes slowly drain of color until they’re completely vacant. Your temperature drops, your heartbeat slows. You’re not outside of anything, you’re inside it; that’s why they can leave their secrets with you. They inch their lips closer to your ear and whisper.

  “Dolly, I . . .”

  And the doll stiffens, excited, because even if you’re not allowed to tell, you know the secret now.

  Sad-armed doll, blue-dress doll, poor fallen thing that knows secrets.

  FEAR WAS CONTAINED by the night. Fear was nocturnal, and it lied. It lied, again and again. And the dolls lived off of the fear they inhaled at night; they gorged on fear until at last something finally drove them back to bed and there they lay, spent. So slow, so patient.

  Then in the morning they put on clean clothes and they were made new. Marina watched them sitting in class. It didn’t seem possible that these girls were the same as those, and yet their faces were the same. There was one thing, though, that changed in the daytime: the rancor, the violence. A pent-up violence, flushed and physical. It came from the gut, from the gut of the clown with a chalkboard in his stomach, the clown that stood beside the teacher’s desk. It was as if someone had written: “Now hate Marina” and they’d all obeyed.

  But at night the game continued. And it revolved around Marina. When the lights went out she heard the dolls stir, come to life, come to her. Then, for a fleeting moment, that flash of power, of joy:

  “You.”

  Why was
it so different during the daytime? It was as though waking up flooded them with shame, and shame provoked rancor. They’d walk down to the bathroom, barefoot, and while they undressed before their showers, sometimes one of them would hit Marina. If she turned around, she’d see a cold face, sharp in the bright morning light, an accusatory face that suddenly made her want to ask forgiveness, a face that swelled and then shrank back to normal, to its composed daytime expression. And she couldn’t say:

  “It was her.”

  They were all close enough to have done it; all of their eyes glinted. And so daytime life began troublingly, so different from nighttime life. The orphanage came to life like an anthill in the sun. All of the game’s gentleness was gone; there was only incomprehensible hostility. Inexplicably, the girls became veiled, difficult creatures once more. They ate breakfast, and their cheeks puffed with milk and cereal and they looked like they were gobbling up wounded flowers. They went to class and their rancor was there, too, in their silence. If Marina asked one of them to borrow a pencil or an eraser, they ignored her completely, and it seemed that their daytime hatred was the inverse of their nocturnal love; it felt like she’d regressed, felt worse, like she’d done something wrong and unforgiveable and irreversible. Suddenly she’d be overcome with leadenness, as if she’d reached out to them too urgently. But having put eyeliner and lipstick on almost each of their faces gave Marina a sense of serenity, a new level of intimacy. Each of those faces that had once been scattered and careless, each eye that was unmoving and sad, had stopped being a mistake. Now she perceived those faces as if, solely because of the game, they had suddenly become girl faces. Lazy, tired, hesitant, violent, Marina knew that the girls felt a love for her that was reserved for the night, for the game, and that was how she protected herself from their daytime rancor.

  Sometimes it wasn’t easy. One morning she saw that someone had written “BITCH” on her desk.

  She had to rub it and rub it with spit until the letters began to disappear, forming little black pearls. She looked up, anguished, her face frozen like a scared rabbit, lips cold and hard, and no one responded. Then, slowly, her body seemed to swell with the word, and the word permeated everything: her dress, the classroom, the adult’s eyes. The word soared up and then slammed into the class windows, unable to escape.

  When night fell, she had already decided that she’d never play the game again. Hiding beneath the sheets, she lay there sticking out her tongue, licking her shoulder. Her feet cold, hard as a kernel of corn, she said to herself, “I’m never playing again.”

  And yet that very night, she played. The signals were sent and one by one the dolls got up. It was as though each one carried a fragile gift, a delicate gift inside her. She tried to breathe quietly so the dolls would think she was asleep, but they wouldn’t go away. The weight of their bodies on her bed became awkward; each time a new body arrived, the springs creaked and “shhh” went from one to the next.

  “I don’t want to play,” she said.

  The dolls lifted the sheet.

  “Aren’t we going to play, Marina?”

  “No.”

  Their faces were more fragile than ever. Soft love permeated everything, painstaking love, self-contained in its secrecy. What good would it have done to say, “I don’t want to play because you wrote ‘BITCH’ on my desk”? The word no longer expressed any truth. The coming of the dolls’ nighttime demeanor turned the word convex, perforated it; it no longer filled space but emptied it, like a sink when you pull the plug.

  “Can’t we play?”

  “Okay.”

  Sometimes violence burst into the game, as if through a crack, and Marina was afraid to begin. But she’d arm herself with courage and say, randomly:

  “You.”

  The sky capsized, falling down to the floor; everything was suspended except the doll. Touch began with nakedness. In a flash they brought her dress and she pulled it over the doll’s soft body.

  Only the game remained. Only the game was slow and puzzling. It was important to remain solemn, to let all ideas filter through the game. So one day she stole a knife from the dining room, and when nighttime came, she said, “Now we have to use the sacred knife to see the doll’s blood.”

  As soon as she said it she knew that the words were bigger than the desire, knew that the two didn’t match at all.

  “The doll has to bleed,” she said gravely.

  She was pretty, too. She wore glasses. Her face was clean and unreadable, tiny, like a newborn animal. Though the doll lay motionless, Marina felt her body tense. The doll’s rough skin registered cold: goosebumpy doll.

  “It’s very important.”

  She rested the knife on her leg. The doll quivered and then flinched. She cried one round, heavy tear. She whimpered.

  “Ay!”

  “You not allowed to talk; you’re a doll.”

  Her blood flowed immediately and Marina put her finger on it. The doll paled.

  “Now give the doll a glass of water; she’s thirsty. One of you go get her a glass of water.”

  No one moved.

  “I command you.”

  But they were rooted to the spot, paralyzed. The doll bled; the doll was absurd. They felt like crying; they felt ashamed to be alive.

  “Fine then, I’ll go.”

  And trembling with pride, she walked to the bathroom, filled a glass with water and returned, stepping carefully so as not to spill a drop. On the way back she stopped to spit in the glass. Not for vengeance, not from rage. She spit in the glass to preserve her own power, and she stood there for a moment, staring at her saliva in the water that the doll was about to drink.

  “Give her the water,” she ordered.

  The doll drank slowly and then fainted, ashen. She fell onto her side and hit her head on one of the beds. Together, they carried her back to her own bed and pulled the covers up over her.

  Marina felt exhausted and emotional that night, as if she’d been punished.

  THEY SHAMED US. They said, “Look.”

  They put a name on everything.

  They said, “Look what you did.”

  The names scared us. How is it that a thing gets caught inside a name and then never comes out again? Everything becomes bigger when it’s named, but we didn’t know that then; that was why we played. And we said, “Isn’t this a good game.”

  We were all lovers and the game was our love.

  We saw the letters of our names on the drawers; we imagined a doll like a color, living and glowing like a color. Then they said, “Look.” The doll had turned evil; we didn’t know what to do with her anymore. But the doll was pretty, too. She said, “Drink me, eat me.” For a second, the doll was pretty; she tried her best to love. But instead of giving in to her all the time, we had to make her wait, until urgency became part of what she wanted to express. She would plead again, “Drink me, eat me.” Where did the doll learn those words? And, when we didn’t answer her, she’d grow calm again.

  And so the days.

  And afternoons.

  She’d lie in the grass and pass the time braiding it. While we jumped rope, she’d play that weird, stupid game all by herself. It was so stupid, braiding blades of grass. But there she was, absorbed, prickly, as if she only had fifteen minutes to braid the whole entire lawn. Then we’d find her braids and yank them up. We’d say, “Look, Marina, your braid.” This was her look: serious, focused, as if it were the only response possible. She’d just sit there, quiet. And then, in an almost friendly tone, she’d whisper, “Yes.”

  Sometimes she’d blank out, as if she suddenly forgot we were all there standing around her, as if she had no idea we were still there. She seemed to unfold, like crepe paper, like very thin cloth.

  But when she came out of it the urgency would be back. “Drink me, eat me,” and there was no name for what we wanted. And one day, she said:

  “Tonight I’m going to be the doll.”

  “You can’t, Marina.”

&nbs
p; “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “But I want to.”

  “But you can’t, you’re not allowed.”

  Then her lips became supplicant, contracting in a dark twitch. We were still one step away from that expression then; we were afraid to touch it.

  “But I’m the one who made it up.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  But by then she’d already started to look like a doll. She got closer each day.

  “But I want to.”

  “But you can’t, you’re not allowed.”

  It was in her nature to be excluded. When the game was over she’d sit in the sun and close her eyes. Becoming unrecognizable to herself, inhaling happiness. She took breaks from us, too; sometimes she managed to forget about us, and then woke and returned to where we played, pretending not to have been watching her. We felt a dark pleasure in our bodies, a mixture of strength and fatigue. We longed for the moment she’d return.

  “But I want to be the doll, too.”

  She knew that if she kept insisting she’d eventually get what she wanted, that the time would come when we could no longer stop her. She’d appear, transformed, new: her hands, her feet, her head, her body tense and slightly hunched over. And there would be no more humility, no entreaty in her voice, like when someone discovers something terrible within them and feels no fear, no shame, only arrogance.

  She was swinging from the iron arch by the black statue and suddenly her whole body went taut. There she was now, aggressive. She leapt from the arch into our midst. She shouted.

  “Look!”

  We didn’t dare to look up yet.

  “Look at me, you big dummies!”

  Then there was a long silence and we knew that it would be that very night. We clenched our teeth; our fear could keep us going for days and days. But nothing had happened yet, even after all that; there was just the chaos of laughter, greetings, shouting, words being formed. Her scheming eyes were hooded, her brows low, her face suddenly miniscule, ears huge, like a humble dog.

  Yes, that was what we were waiting for, the doll’s crude, tiny body. Night fell seamlessly. It was night over all of us. The adult would come and turn out the lights any minute. Secret things seemed to unite the two of them, Marina and the night.