The Pink Dress

The only time I ever stole, it was for Barbie. My family went, one Sunday afternoon, to visit our friends, the Beebees. They had moved from within Detroit’s city limits to a new, safer, antiseptic neighborhood in one of the suburbs, where all the houses looked alike and were set back the same exact distance from the clean cement streets where there were curbs but no sidewalks. The Beebees had one daughter, Debbie, a few years older than me. Debbie had long, dark brown hair, a blue bike that would one day be handed down to me (my first two-wheeler), and an extensive wardrobe for her Barbies. On the day of the theft, Debbie was really past the age when she found dolls amusing, but my family was there all afternoon and she wasn’t allowed to go anywhere else. Playing Barbies with me at least passed the time.

My eye went immediately to a doll clothed in a long, sleeveless dress a slightly darker pink than the inside of the big shell that my sister had told me you could hear the ocean in. The dress was plain, with no decoration beyond a small brown bow at the waist and a slightly flaring skirt that hit Barbie just above her trim ankles. My disappointment was deep, as deep as if I had witnessed the death of everything holy, when Debbie chose that doll to play with, plucking her casually from the pile of doll paraphernalia on her bedroom floor. Then, without even looking at the doll, Debbie unsnapped the halter strap and, in one careless motion, swept the dress from the doll’s body.

I scooped it up, almost before it could touch the ground. My trembling hands pressed the gorgeous confection to my heart. The pink material was soft beneath my fingers, soft and less slick than mass-manufactured Barbie clothes. It was also more elegant than many Barbie creations, although elegant was not a word I would have known to use then. With no sequins, spangles, or feathers, this was a dress I could imagine a real person wearing.

This was a dress I could imagine wearing.

My Own Two Feet

I always wanted to have Barbie’s feet.

Well, okay, maybe not the wires that run from her heels to her thighs and allow her knees to bend with that clickclickclick clickclickclick so dear to a child’s ear. When it comes to the inner workings of our legs and feet, I clearly got the better deal.

Ah, but the shape of them: slender, high-arched, delicate – while I tromp around on Fred Flintstone feet: flat, fat and with no discernible taper between calf and ankle. My feet always worked, and for that I am grateful, but transportation aside, they did little for me and certainly seemed to go out of their way to scuttle my desire to attain the twin pinnacles of adolescence – beauty and popularity.

When I was a kid, my shoe choices were limited not just by income (low to middle) and size (short and wide) but by my mother’s insistence that I was allergic to rubber. I’m not sure exactly what was this based on, except that the elastic in her bras made her itch and left deep red grooves in her white flesh each night. She said, "You’re allergic to rubber, just like me." So the allergic to rubber thing was always there – sort of like my little brother. If there was a time in my life when either of them didn’t exist, I don’t remember it.

Anything She Wanted

I was born on October 1, 1960. Barbara Millicent Roberts – better known to billions as, merely, "Barbie" – was born on March 9, 1959. Although little more than eighteen months separate us, she emerged – like Athena from the forehead of Zeus – fully grown, and I have spent my entire life trying to catch up. When I was learning to walk, she was tripping the light fantastic in color-coordinated pumps and strappy sandals. When I was dealing with pimples and adolescent angst, she smiled, clear-skinned and unconcerned. You might say that when I married, at thirty-eight, I finally lapped her, since she, despite a long and sometimes turbulent relationship with Ken, has not. But she has far outstripped me on the career track.

I have never been a vet, an actress, a teacher, a model or a flight attendant. I have never been a member of any of the armed services, let alone all four of them. (I’m not entirely sure she hasn’t served in other countries, as well.) I have not been a lawyer, though I considered it for a while in college. ("You’re too sensitive to be a lawyer/social worker/actress," my father said.) I was not athletic enough to be a circus star, a ballerina, an Olympic skater. I will never go to space. I have never run for president.

Don't Call Me Barbie

Don’t call me Barbie.

Of all the permutations of Barbara, it’s the one name I will not answer to. Call me Barb if you must, though if we don’t know each other well, I would prefer that you didn’t. I might respond to Babs—if it's offered with affection and humor—but I won’t come if you call me Barbie.

A boy whose name I’ve long forgotten called me Barbie on the playground one morning.

"Barbie, Barbie, Barbie, Barbara is a Barbie doll."

"Shut up! Don’t call me that, shut up."

He danced around me, just out of reach, singing, "Barbie, Barbie, Barbie." I stomped my foot. Shut up, shut up, shut up. He laughed and ran away when, fueled by a humiliated rage that scorched my memory, I charged at him, too young to realize that my violent response was fuel for his teasing—and that I was drawing more attention to myself by attempting to silence him.

I didn’t have the words in second grade to explain this terrible transgression to the teacher who asked what the boy had done. Gulping through shameful tears, I told her that he had called me Barbie.