TAKING THINGS by Sophia Veltfort
The doll wanted her. Clare felt its green vinyl eyes peering from the shelf. It had been this way all afternoon, from the moment she’d started conducting her troop of forest creatures in the dumb game she and her cousin Liddy were playing in Liddy’s room.
It wasn’t unusual for Clare to have this effect on a doll, especially one that happened to belong, for the moment, to someone else. She didn’t project onto her characters shallow whims for lunches or shopping, as Liddy did. She recognized them as fellow beings, and they felt this. They saw in her the possibility of new life.
“Actually,” Liddy had her cheetah say to Clare’s anteater, “actually, I just heard from Michael, and he and the other big cats are having a pool party. They said you could come, too, if you wanted.”
Michael, a lion, was Liddy’s cheetah’s boyfriend. It had been made clear to Clare that anteaters did not attract beaus.
Do you see what I have to put up with? the doll asked Clare.
Clare saw.
“Cats don’t like water,” she told Liddy. Clare’s family had a cat.
If you did see, the doll continued, sullen, then you’d take me with you.
“Yes they do,” Liddy said. “Besides, they’re not going in.”
It’s not so simple, Clare tried to explain. You belong to Liddy. I can’t just—
Belong? the doll mocked. Doesn’t ownership have to be earned? The doll cast its eyes over its unclad plastic body, its squashed position between a box of lanyards and a stuffed elephant down whose side Liddy had once spilled pink lemonade. Its eyes rose languidly to Clare’s.
Clare didn’t know what to tell the doll about the phenomenology of belonging. She just knew that there were rules about abducting toys from other children, especially from one’s cousin. If she broke them and someone caught her, she would not just be in trouble; she would be forever different in the eyes of the world.
I get that, the doll informed Clare. (But did the doll really? Clare wanted to know. Clare caught whiffs of recklessness, of a feral disregard fundamentally foreign to her own sensibility.) I’d just thought you were more expansive in your understanding, the doll said, than other little girls. But maybe you’re like all the rest. The doll shrugged.
Don’t be manipulative, Clare snapped. She was expansive. It was just a lot to carry, that kind of guilt. She would see what she could do.
* * *
The girls’ raised voices yanked Rita from the realm of Rousseau’s life-writing, back to her closet-cum-office, where empty, fruit-streaked yogurt pots lined the shelves, and Post-its punctuated the sides of notepads and library books. The article she was writing currently contained zero words, just a bobbing black cursor like a drowning man.
“But you’re not the cheetah,” Liddy was shrilling, “so no one asked you what you think, so why don’t you just shut up?”
Rita would have to go in and do something. Liddy could not be talking that way. But it was always embarrassing to catch her child out in a nastiness, to let Liddy know she’d been heard and found wanting, again.
It was always like this between her daughter and her niece. Clare was a year younger than Liddy and several wavelengths distant. Rita had never understood why her husband and his sister insisted on bringing their six- and seven-year-olds together. No one ever had fun. Each attempt left all involved feeling less sure, on some fundamental level, of the world’s warmth.
“You’re always the cheetah.” Clare’s words came wearily.
“Because the cheetah’s mine.”
“They’re all yours.”
“Right. My stuff, my rules. And I’m older.”
“By eleven months!”
The girls sat crouched on the carpet, surrounded by toys. Or, rather, Liddy was surrounded. Around Clare lay scattered the dregs of Liddy’s collections—the plastic insects Rita’s mother had hoped might tempt Liddy into science; the chair and lamp that had come with Dentist Barbie; an armless monkey; an anteater; a plastic shrub.
“Trouble in paradise?” Rita leaned against the doorframe and crossed her arms, feeling the dry skin of her elbows. You could read the incompatibility in the two upturned faces. Liddy’s, for all her distemper, gleamed pearlescent and calm as the polished inside of a conch. Clare’s shivered and rustled, each microexpression frangible as a leaf. The world would break Clare in ways Liddy would never experience. Liddy was a lot like her father, that way.
“We were just playing,” Liddy said a little too pointedly. “Like you said to.”
Rita glanced at Clare, who moved her slender shoulders into what should have been a shrug but somehow came out wrong, like a mispronounced word.
Speaking to Liddy now could embarrass Clare, which Rita did not want. “You girls hungry?”
Liddy nodded.
“Let’s get this room cleaned, then. How does grilled cheese sound?”
“Delectable,” Clare said. Rita could imagine her having stashed the word in her possession for weeks, ready to deploy it on the right occasion.
Liddy rolled her eyes. She carried a plastic lion and cheetah to the wicker bin from which the toys had emerged earlier in the afternoon.
“They go in like this,” Liddy explained to Clare. She placed the toys delicately inside the bin. Superficially model behavior came naturally to Liddy, when she wanted it to; it was a language she could slip into and out of depending on who was around.
Rita looked to see how Clare would integrate with Liddy’s cleanup routine. Clare was stuffing her fleece jacket awkwardly into her backpack, as rapt as Liddy in her efforts. Rita supposed she was drawing out the process to avoid Liddy.
Then, as she turned to leave, it happened: Clare’s arm darted off course, away from her fleece, towards the bookshelf, where she seized an ugly plastic doll and stuffed it into her bag. It was like a tentacle of a forgotten sea monster rising from the depths to clutch a ship.
Clare glanced at Liddy, still engaged with her bins, and then up at Rita. Clare’s wide grey eyes started. A tuft of synthetic orange hair peeked from the top of her bag.
* * *
Don’t even think about it, the doll called from Clare’s backpack. We’ve come this far. Don’t be a pussy.
Excuse me? Clare asked. Where did you learn that word?
Liddy’s older sister.
It’s rude, Clare said, once again wary of the unknown character she’d taken on board. You shouldn’t say it. But that’s beside the point. Don’t you get it? Aunt Rita saw.
You sure about that?
Not a thousand percent, but sure enough—
Then put a lid on it. You don’t know.
Liddy had finished with the toys and was waiting. Clare cast about for an excuse to stay behind and not join Liddy in the kitchen, but nothing would do. Liddy disliked having people in her room without her supervision. Clare had to go.
The smell of grilled cheese grew stronger the farther Clare got from the doll, who she was sure was smirking in the depths of the backpack. It was stupid, stupid, to have taken her. Clare would have to put the doll back. Aunt Rita would still know, but would maybe not say anything. She might even doubt what she’d seen, if the doll were to reappear on the shelf.
* * *
Rita pressed the knife diagonally down each sandwich and carried the plates to the table, where the girls waited, fiddling with their placemats. She brought two glasses of milk and two sets of carrot sticks, plus a cookie each as a reward if the carrots disappeared. The three of them had performed this routine, with slight variations, a couple times a month for years.
Rita did not want to speak to either of Clare’s parents about the doll. Both would hear the story as a further instance of Liddy being held above. If anyone, she should tell her husband; Clare was his sister’s kid. But why get her niece in trouble?
Clare ate her sandwich quietly. If she seemed more subdued than usual, it was because her eyes, always bright and attentive, barely rose from her plate. Rita could speak to her directly, when Liddy wasn’t around. Or she could say nothing. Liddy wouldn’t miss the doll. Clare must know that Rita had witnessed the abduction. Perhaps that would be enough to set Clare straight. She might even return the ugly thing.
And if she didn’t, so what? Rita too had taken things. Nothing so tangible as a doll, perhaps, but that didn’t matter; her piracies were worse. Moments away from her children and husband—nothing drastic, just the relief of closing herself into a room without them and letting her face, for a moment, break. The contours of other scholars’ ideas, accidentally, as she formulated her own. Confidences she didn’t deserve, allowances she didn’t merit. Too much space on the subway so that she could breathe, even if it meant other commuters had to wait for the next train. She took the smiles her male colleagues threw her, and she took the liberty of returning them with her own. And, of course, that kiss from her colleague at that conference in March, both received and returned, and that had since held hostage her imagination. Some Friday evenings, on the way home from work, she walked past the hotels with their basement bars spilling music onto the streets, the bass notes shouldering awake the phantom selves she’s weeded out so that this better, more wholesome being might have a fighting chance.
You cut corner after corner, and they added up into—what? Another life? Another version of yourself too monstrous to recognize? It was impossible to tell whether you were building something or just trimming yourself away bit by bit, and whether the difference mattered at all.
* * *
The doll hung stiff and silent in Clare’s fist as she peeked into her aunt’s office, while Liddy was in the bathroom. From amidst stacks of papers and books, Rita looked up.
“Hello, sweetheart. Everything all right?”
Clare nodded and stepped inside. She’d rarely been in her aunt’s office before; she wasn’t sure where to stand. Her aunt waited.
“This wound up in my stuff, somehow.” Clare pulled the doll from behind her back. “It’s Liddy’s, I think. But I wasn’t sure where it goes.”
She placed the doll on the desk, beside a stack of papers, and stepped back. Her aunt looked at the doll a moment before returning her eyes to Clare.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
Clare nodded, clasped her empty hands together, cracked a knuckle. When that seemed to be all, or at least enough, she left.
* * *
The doll was even uglier up close, Rita decided, its tangled orange hair trollish, its face petty and squat. She couldn’t imagine where Liddy had gotten it. It wouldn’t be long before the doll was given away.
So Clare had returned it, along with a lie they could both live with. It would’ve been easier for Clare just to put the doll back on the shelf. She supposed this was her niece’s way of asking to be forgiven.
Rita picked up the doll. The girls were playing in the living room, now; something about flying carpets and the Eiffel Tower. She could easily replace the doll on Liddy’s shelf before they went back to Liddy’s room. Why this doll, though? What possibilities had Clare envisioned in this unpromising vehicle? Rita combed her fingers through the knotted orange hair, braided it. A clump of Silly Putty had hardened on the doll’s thigh. Liddy was slovenly, profligate. She took no care of things she didn’t love. Rita picked the putty off, licked her finger, and rubbed off the sticky residue. She pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk. In there lay the familiar covers of old journals, stacked among the choice relics of other lives. Rita slipped the doll inside.
Sophia Veltfort has published an essay in Harvard Review. “Taking Things” is her first published short story.