The Porcelain Doll

We found her in a cramped doll shop on a downtown street in the small town of St. Cloud, in Central Florida where we lived. It was the mid ‘90’s and most of the store front windows were papered over. It was never difficult to find street parking. Her name tag reads Molly, the brand Geppeddo. Geppeddo sounds quaintly olde world, as if every doll is hand crafted in a tyrolean chalet, except Geppeddo is owned by a conglomerate in Ohio. Our daughter Ann swooned over her.

Ann set her sights on “collectibles”, specifically dolls, as a preteen. God knows why. We browsed in that cluttered, perfumy, lacy, Bordello-chintzy boutique more often than I cared to. Ann would gaze reverently at the merchandise like a dazzled tourist at the Louvre. The clothes, the hair, the accessories! She crushed on Molly the most of all. The porcelain doll is about a foot tall. She is posed on an old-timey steel tricycle with cherry wood rims and spokes. There’s a flower basket secured to the handlebars. She is hugging a good sized teddy bear on her lap. It is nearly half Molly’s size and would not just be difficult for a child to hold onto—especially when engaged in steering a tricycle—but to my eye its bulk overwhelms the tableau. The bear is wearing a blue denim jumper. There are red high tops on Molly’s tiny feet and she is sporting denim Capris and a dressy, cropped white sweater. Her curly copper penny red hair is bound in two pony tails secured with pink gingham ribbon. The pink gingham motif is repeated in Molly’s neck scarf, pant cuffs, and the teddy bear’s ear ribbons. Molly’s accessories and garments are a muddle of contemporary and vintage styling. She is not defined by any era. More power to her!

Ann’s bargaining skills improved with every visit to the doll shop. When we purchased Molly, her nearly-forty-dollar price tag was pricey for us. We were a family of five living paycheck to paycheck. Additionally, the sale included the display case; a wood framed glass box, 24” tall and a foot wide. The proprietor was loath to give the case up, and I am not sure why or how we convinced the woman to sell it to us at all. I cannot remember what the package deal cost us, but I remember it seemed like a needless expense at the time. And I was right. 

I am certain that once Molly moved into our home and Ann’s bedroom there was a time in which our mollified daughter gazed proudly and admiringly at the porcelain doll’s perfection, her pale pink satin bow mouth and rouged cheeks. Molly was not a play thing. She was always perceived as some kind of investment. Her garments were never removed, her well-coiffed locks never mussed. She was no Barbie doll, let me tell you. The Barbie dolls’ perfections seemed to just invite maltreatment in our house. Once freed from their boxes where they were posed like window display mannequins, their built-in limitations swiftly became a liability. Bound up in restrictive garments, the stiff legged, short waisted, top heavy beauties were soon deconstructed. Corset tops, pencil skirts, tight slacks, and elegant gowns were brutally stripped from their plastic bodies, the luxurious hair turned to a tumbleweed snarl. Voguish ensembles, shoes, and handbags were scattered and trod on, as if ransackings were all part of the violence,(I blame the GI Joes, Ken would never do such a thing!). Sure, my daughters created sprawling Barbie-lands on our bedroom floor and would fawn over the long limbed dolls as long as the play held their interest. How much time did I spend crawling on all fours to pluck all the fashion accessories—the teeny tippy-toe shoes!—from the roots of the ugly green shag carpeting? I ripped the useless, lilliputian plastic brushes through coarse, tangled hair, covered the dolls’ nude forms with the jettisoned garments, righted the furnishings and organized the belongings. Molly never suffered such indignities. She remained suspended in her glass pillar, impassively watching it all play out. 

Our daughter Ann is 41 years old now. She left Molly with us when she set out on her own, along with all the other must-haves of her youth. I asked Ann more than once what she wanted me to do with her. She seemed less than disinterested and more than offended, as if I was weaponizing the doll in my ongoing misery-campaign against my daughter.

I started referring to the abandoned doll as “Jane Eyre” but did nothing to alleviate her grievous status. What was I to do? I clung to the misguided notion that someday Ann would recognize the sentimental value of this childhood treasure. Molly has always been in our possession, but years would go by when I forgot she existed. Then I’d happen to catch a glimpse of the glass case in which she is eternally frozen. Imprisoned. Sometimes I imagine that her expression, which is neither happy nor sad—honestly, she looks to be daydreaming, perhaps of a future outside of that box—was once smiley and bright, but over the years the smile relaxed, the mouth settling to an almost-pout, as if she was grimly reconciling her sorry fate. Molly is not one to wallow or whine. Her posture is still erect, her hold on that cumbersome, fat teddy bear unwavering. She is as reliable as she is unflappable.

Before our recent move, as I was assessing and reassessing our countless possessions, I decided to try to sell Molly. Geppeddo dolls are touted as valuable, yet they certainly don’t command impressive figures on eBay according to the brief research I conducted. We have had Molly for at least thirty years and her original price tag, still dangling from her wrist, reads $39.95. I tried to sell her on Facebook Marketplace for 25 bucks, including the glass display case she lives in—I imagine the case is more valuable than the doll itself—and did not receive a single response. I even went so far as to attract attention to the item by writing some parent-humor into the description: “purchased back in the 90’s for ungrateful child who never wanted it after all.” Maybe that was the problem with my ad, now that I am reconsidering the tone. Who wants to buy an unwanted doll, cursed as she is with such a dark and tragic history?

I offered Molly to my granddaughter Esme who is almost four years old. Esme has a small family of baby dolls somewhere in her room, but her attention is keenly drawn to her animals. An abundance of ‘stuffies’ crowd her shelves, as well as small plastic animal figurines representing every continent and habitat on earth. Esme casts the creatures in very human roles. They are usually anthropomorphized as school children with the giraffe representing the teacher, who loads the kids up in a box that is designated as a bus or plane or rocketship for transport on the coolest field trip expeditions ever. They are real globe trotters, these kids, their destinations and activities mostly eco-tourism related. Interplanetary travel is pretty routine. Esme took a good long look at Molly. I suddenly realized the error of my thinking. The large porcelain doll in the glass box was not at all designed for small children. Esme twisted her mouth and said, rather apologetically, “hmm. I don’t think so.”

I am starting to believe that Molly represents my daughter, and by extension our relationship, more than I have dared to consider. Why have I even held onto her for so long? Why am I still grasping onto the faint hope that Ann will take possession of her, and will even express her gratitude that I never gave up on Molly? I absolutely can’t give up on Ann. Certainly she and I will chat and laugh on the phone like we used to, and she will take over our kitchen to cook us extravagant vegan suppers like before, just two very long years ago, and we will discuss our identical political and social viewpoints with empathy and mutual concern. But that’s all changed now.

Ann, like Molly, is isolated. Last we knew, she lived alone in a small house in Indiana, with no one but her orange cat for company. She was two hours away by car, just far enough to ensure a visit is never casual or unplanned, and close enough for assistance if her residence is once again surveilled, or her neighbors start poisoning her food again. The world became too dangerous for our daughter, the same woman who moved to China after high school and toured Asia and Europe solo. Suddenly both the visible and invisible/cyber worlds were populated with monsters, and she retreated. Our Buddhist, liberal, vegan, feminist, bisexual daughter is now a right wing Christian Nationalist omnivore. All these new ways to describe Ann could be so many people, but never her.

She moved recently and opted not to reveal her new address. Ann also blocked us from her phone and email account. We are lurking on the outside, trying to see in, hoping she will wade back into the material dimensions where we reside and find a job, a few friends, a life.Those of us who desperately want her in our lives are shut out. We are not to be trusted. We are not who she wants.

Maybe Molly is destined to stay with us, always. She doesn’t have the power to lure Ann back into our lives but she is present, and I can see her. I can lift the lid off that old display case, reach in, and touch her. I won’t ever abandon her, and she won’t ever change.

Bethia Sheean-Wallace has been working in the stacks in libraries from Florida to California for twenty-five years. She writes like a fiend about everything from poetry to politics and always has. She was born and raised in Los Angeles in a time when Orange County was considered the home of Disneyland, orange groves, and John Birch Republicans. She has been married for four decades to a fellow hippie and has three adult children, one daughter-in-law, and one wee grandbaby.