PAPERDOLLS

The plethora of sexy young women posing as heroes, warriors, irresistible sex objects who yet retain their innocence and their fine makeup, are everywhere on TV, social media, magazines, and so on.  Books are pitched at the reality of the consumers who are likely to be average, unremarkable, and not inclined to achieve anything more than a bubble bath with candles.  But they have vivid imaginations.

This is a phase.  When I went through it, I did it with the paperdolls I drew, which were fashionistas who were basically naked and evidently had been thrown off a roof or run over with a steam roller.  They were flat, with outthrown arms and straight but splayed legs, because that was the best way to use them under elaborate gowns and specialized outfits for polo or something.  They had round breasts and no pubis, because they were intensely sexual in the terms of a prepuertal mind.

My family used to travel across the continent every August in the pretense that my father was attending a national Cooperative convocation and had cashed in his airplane ticket to pay for the trip.  Travel is one of those middle-class pursuits that are meant to improve one and teach history.  At least that was the pretense though we never really know why those places we paused to photograph were significant.  We’d rather read our comic books.

Jammed into the back seat together, we three sibs grew apart.  As the oldest, I felt it was my duty to stay awake as long as the car was moving because I never trusted my father to do the right thing and had the ridiculous idea that I could stop disaster.  We plunged through the dark until my father found a proper place to park and put up our camp trailer, a tent on a two-wheel trailer.  Where we thought we were when we stopped often turned out to be quite different in the morning.  Sometimes the cops checked us out in the night.

There were no disasters but a few close calls I’ll describe later.  What matters in this little sketch is that my brothers always slept in the moving dark and I did not.  Thus I overheard my mother talk about me as “pubertal.”  She had recently gone back to college to get her teaching degree and was taking “Human Growth and Development.”

My father purported to be wise and informed and had a hoard of academic books about sex (like Kinsey, then Masters and Johnson) in his sock drawer.  On hearing that word he blew up.  He accused my mother of using a dirty word, being indecent.  She was taken aback, even stunned.  I was, too.  Of course I was pubertal  — that was the age I was.  I couldn’t help sex kicking in.

My mother and I were amazed at having triggered “our father” into a reaction as violent as if we had accused him of molesting his daughter.  He had done no such thing.  Or had he, but been repressed somehow?  Forgotten?  What was he privately imagining about me?  The family style was to deny anything unsavory or outside convention.  

But I remembered that one of my brothers had called something a “dingus” and our father had the same reaction to that word.  It turned out it was the name he had learned for male athletic supporters.  One of my brothers was a wrestler and undoubtedly used one, but I never saw it any more than I saw the used menstrual pads I’d been taught to wind up tight in toilet paper and hide deep in the trash.

Paperdolls were my safe expression of a wildly dynamic force that I tried to hide.  What could be more innocent than paperdolls?

There was a history.  Originally I had lots of paperdolls that came in bright pamphlets bigger than typing paper.  On the pasteboard front would be a few female figures doing things, holding things, dressed for something.  Then inside would be the “outfits” which were indicated by new arms inside the new dresses covering the old arms.  One played with them by cutting them out.  I always did this sitting on the floor, not at a table.  My fingers were barely nimble enough to fold over the tabs that held the clothes onto the girls.  The dolls were assigned cute alliterative names.  I remember Jill/Jo/Judy.

I didn’t walk them around or have them “say” things, but just handling them brought them to life and created a cloud around them about their ways and places.  I kept the accumulation of them in a suit box which I slid under my brothers’ double bed.  The three of us shared a room, me and my two brothers.

Then my brother caught scarlet fever.  It was thought he was in mortal danger.  Everything around him had to be made germ-free.  My village of paperdolls was immolated.  I was quite young.  When much later I watched footage of Vietnam villages being fired to ash, on some level it was about my village of paperdolls.  My mother was not consoling.  What did I expect?  Anyway, they were PAPER.

I understood that destruction and death could come out of nowhere, calling for unconvincing answers that could be found by analysis and reflection — of course they were only paper, easily replaced, but my brother’s life — actual survival — was more important than small flat fungible play objects.  At least to my mother.

So now these new paperdolls I drew myself in sets of two: Snow White and Rose Red.  Good and bad.  So sexy with their round breasts, but never having intercourse.  One was blonde and the other was brunette.  The redheads came a little later and were a little more sophisticated.  Brenda Starr, ace newspaperwoman with a mysterious one-eyed boyfriend who brought her black orchids.  Or maybe Maureen O’Hara in “The Quiet Man” or Miss Kitty from “Gunsmoke”.  They had a gap in their lower lip meant to indicate their mouth was shiny.  That’s the way the women in cartoons wore their “Roses in the Snow” Revlon lipstick.  They wept but their mascara never smeared.