With just that first glance of the too familiar, hot pink walls and baby blue roof tiles, Riley Anderson was taken from the slightly chilly, well-lit aisles of Jack & Jill’s Pail of Playthings and transported somewhere she wished she never had to see again.
-*-*-*-
There had been a time when Riley had thought that Barbie’s Victorian Dream House was the epitome of femininity. Owning one of these two story beauties was all she could ever dream of. When she had opened one on her seventh birthday, she didn’t think that she could be any happier. Of course, she was wrong. Not that she knew that then, as she stared at its bright pink wall or it’s delicate baby blue roof. It would be several more days before she started to realize. It would start to sink in when she numbly noted how the soft glow of the night light spilled from behind it, illuminating its elegant balcony. The feeling of happiness that she had when she looked at it would start to fade as she saw what it looked like from across the room, snuggled deep into her bed with her little fingers gripping her blankets tight. With unfocused eyes wide open, the sounds of their fight somehow burned that moment, that image of her once beloved doll house into her mind.
There was something different about that night, though it almost sounded the same as all the other nights before. She was almost able to convince herself to close her eyes and snuggle deeper into her tear dampened pillow.
She should go to sleep, she knew. Mommy didn’t like it when she listened to them be loud. Everything would be better in the morning, anyway. Everything was always better in the morning–
CRASH!
Riley didn’t jump, scream, or sob. She had already learned how to cry without making a sound. Some nights it was almost a game for her to see how quiet she could be while they pushed the limits of how loud they were. Nights like tonight, though, she wanted to scream in a way that she could never actually do. She knew by now that if she reminded them that she was here, let them hear any trace of her, that it would only cause them to fight more. She couldn’t even breathe as she waited through the thick silence that followed.
She should go to sleep, she knew, but this wasn’t right. This was different and different was bad. Her parents were always loud. Night after night they were loud. For the first time her eyes moved away from Barbie’s cheerful home and landed on her bedroom door.
She shouldn’t get out of bed, she knew this. She would get punished if she was bad, but it was quiet.
It was quiet for a moment, for two, the silence stretched longer than her little lungs could hold that breath. There was an eternity of quiet moments, and she should go to sleep.
She wasn’t sleeping, though. She was opening the door quietly before even realizing that she was out of bed. Every step seemed loud as she padded barefoot down the hall.
Five, six, seven steps to pass the bathroom and bring her just outside their open door.
Unable to bring herself to step inside, she listened. It wasn’t so quiet anymore.
Her dad’s low, soothing voice rolled out of the room. She almost left then, turned, and went back to her bed. When she listened to his words, though, they didn’t match his tone.
“I’ll take ya out back in the woods. Dig ya a shallow grave fit for a whore. I’ll tell them that ya up and ran off again. No one will look for ya.”
They wouldn’t, Riley knew. Her mom disappeared sometimes. Days would go by while she waited at the window. No one ever looked for her then.
One, two, three quiet steps into the room and her eyes locked on her mother’s hazel ones, but nothing made sense. She should help her; she knew that because her mother was laying on the ground. She should help her, she knew that as she saw his hands around her mother’s neck, as he continued to whisper how he would raise Riley to know her place. She couldn’t move. She could only stare at her mother, as her mother stared back at her. This moment felt big in a way she didn’t understand.
Her mother moved then, slowly, as if it was the hardest thing she had ever had to do. Her arm raised from her side until she was pointing past Riley, a silent command to go back to bed.
She should be asleep right now, she knew that, but she couldn’t leave. Then suddenly it was silent again. How could she have forgotten the threat in the room? With a quick, startled flick her eyes locked with a different pair. Somehow, they were cold, angry, and terrifyingly empty all at once.
He stood then. He was tall and she was very small.
Her mother coughed and wheezed, rolling onto her side. Riley waited for her to stand, to fight, and protect her. If this was a normal night, her mother would have, but tonight was different and different was bad. She watched as her mother laid there, breathing but broken, right before she felt the pain from his big hand wrapping cruelly around her little arm.
-*-*-*-
“Mommy?” Riley heard not just the scared, twenty-year-old memory say, but a newer, voice echo as well.
As she blinked, she realized that though they were the same hazel shade, the eyes she was looking into weren’t her mother’s. They were instead set in a feminine and youth rounded mold of her husband’s face.
She followed along the motion of the small body to the shelf her daughter was pointing to. Where an exact replica of Barbie’s Victorian Dream House sat, no doubt a marketing attempt from the manufacturer to lure in nostalgic parents.
“Mommy? Can I have it, Mommy?” her little daughter’s brow furrowed, and she stomped her foot as annoyance leaked into her tone. Obviously, this wasn’t the first time she had voiced the question.
That’s when Riley felt a warmth, she hadn’t noticed, leaving the small of her back. She turned to catch the soft, understanding gaze of her husband as he stepped from her side. Then she watched, almost entranced as he plastered a large and familiar smile on his face before swooping in to pick their daughter up and throw her in the air.
She watched them play for several minutes, eventually chasing and tickling each other through the aisles of the discount toy store.
With her own childhood so fresh in her mind, she couldn’t help but notice how her daughter was never daunted by her husband’s height, she never flinched at his touch or drew into herself to avoid catching his attention. Instead, she smiled at him. She watched as her daughter, with confidence, teased him. Her daughter loved him with a kind of love that doesn’t know fear.
With the help of her therapist, and later her husband, Riley had spent years crawling out of the effects of her childhood trauma in the hopes that one day she would be strong enough to create a world where any of her future daughters would be fierce, not because they survived in a man’s world, but because they thrived in it.
Today, in these dirty aisles, surrounded by cheap toys, she realized that she succeeded.
Femininity isn’t found in a pink, two story dollhouse, but it’s created in finding, and helping others find, the confidence and strength to thrive in a world that would rather see you lying broken on the floor.
Naomi Sheely is a student at Hagerstown Community College who is working towards earning a dual major. She is also a wife, mother of three, and continuously exhausted. She is motivated by her childhood dream of becoming an author and terrified of the thought of anyone, ever, reading something she has written.