From one box to another

If I sit quietly enough, and the air is still, I can remember the faint scent of stale cardboard, combined with a less pleasant, tangy odour reminiscent of burnt rubber.  As long as I wasn’t jostled around too much, I didn’t mind my box. It was dark and cozy inside. Occasionally, little bits of light would creep into my sanctuary; like shadows, they would flicker across the cardboard walls, dance into my line of vision and then escape as quickly as they’d come. 

Life in a box might seem lonely, but if you don’t know any different, the solitude is comforting, in its own way. I learned how to be content with my own company long before I learned how to find solace with others. Inside the box, everything is shadowed in newness. New shoes, new dress, new hair, new mechanical devices – that last one is a big deal to those in the outside world. It was 1972 and I was the latest and greatest in new-fangled toys for girls.

Muffled cries breach the quiet of my box, but I can’t distinguish between happy and distraught. The high pitched noise offends the blanketing silence of my closed-off world and I wish it would fade away, along with the piercing light and periodic vibrations. For a brief moment, my world is still once again. Quiet. Waiting, without even realizing I’m waiting, I sink into the comforting lull of nothingness.

The screeching of metal hinges jars my senses. I awaken from my reverie to see the girl’s smiling face bending over her old toy trunk. Her hands reach in, soft and sticky. Bits of cloth and plastic are shuffled around the trunk, spilling over me, catching in my hair. She grabs hold of my leg, gives a sharp tug and I find myself dangling upside down in front of light blue eyes. The expression on her face looks like a smile from this angle, but I know from experience, it’s a grimace. Disappointed, she drops me back into the trunk and slams the lid. Obviously, I wasn’t what she was looking for.

From the day I entered her world, she hated me.

“Oooooh,” the high-pitched, excited squeal of a child filled the air, while my forehead repeatedly whacked against the wall of my manufacturer’s box. “It’s the one I wanted! The one that makes all those funny faces! Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you!”

I heard the sound of paper tearing as the top of my box was ripped open. Light poured in, sweeping the darkness away. Eager hands reached inside, pulled me out by my hair, and forced me into a much bigger world than I had known.  Blue eyes stared into mine while the sticky fingers twisted my head back and forth, allowing the rest of my body to swing freely. It’s a strange sensation.

The nose wrinkled, making the freckles on her cheeks dance and I think I might like this little person, who was handling me so roughly.

“It’s kind of ugly.” She presented me to a larger version of herself. “Her dress is ok, but her hair is weird.”

The larger version took hold of me; her hands were gentler as she grasped my arms instead of my hair. “Let’s see what she can do.”

Do? I can do things?  Yes, let’s see.

The woman spins me around to face the child and starts cranking my left arm up and down, up and down, like a lever. I feel my face twitching, as gears slide into motion and my features contort into a smile, then a frown, then my eyes shift back and forth before falling closed.

I hear the child laughing. “Lemme try!”

Her rough little hands take hold of me once more. Furiously, she pumps my arm up and down, forcing my features to quickly reshape themselves. The girl’s lips pull down, in an echo of my grimace and she tosses me aside. I land face-down on the orange shag carpet.

“She’s really ugly. I don’t like her.”

A boy’s feet come into view. He nudges me with his toe, flipping me me onto my back. “It looks like something out of a horror movie.”

As my left arm slides down towards the ground, my gears pop, and my face settles into a calm expression. The woman picks me up, straightens out my dress and hands me back to the girl. “She’s not so bad. Grandma was so excited to send her to you. Please don’t tell her you hate the doll. Keep it for a bit, and in the summer we can put her in the yard sale.”

The girl sticks her little pink tongue out and roles her pretty blue eyes.

“Take her up to your room and put her away.”

Still holding me by the hair, as though she can’t stand to touch the rest of me, the girl drags me behind her. She is so small, the backs of my legs bump against each carpeted step, leaving a dusky brown mark, like a bruise, on my pink plastic calves. Once in her room, she lifts the lid to a pink wooden box, tosses me inside and slams down the lid. I hear the pitter-patter of her feet skipping from the room and then everything is once again blanketed in dark silence.

This box is much larger than my original, filled with strange shapes and textures. Something slips beneath me and my weight settles deeper into the trunk.