All Tale material on this page copyright 2001, Nadia Gramercy. All rights reserved. Memories of Barbie
Wasn’t Barbie beautiful? Her hair was golden and thick. Her eyes were big and bluer than a summer sky. Her face had perfect bone structure, and her lips had just the right amount of pout. Her hands were tiny, and her fingers were alender with nicely trimmed, but not too short, fingernails. Her waist was almost as small as her neck, and she could do the splits. She had a corvette and a townhouse. She was perfect and the antithesis to the 8-year-old girl clutching her in one chubby, grubby little hand. I had red hair and brown eyes. My fingernails were jagged and almost always sheltering some type of dirt. You couldn’t tell my waist from the rest of me. I looked into Barbie’s perfect face and her face said, "You are not perfect like me."
That is why Barbie had to pay.
One warm Saturday, I defiled her flaxen mane with my mother’s sewing shears until she looked like a boot camp recruit. I gouged her eyes with a seam ripper so there were only holes where the placid blue eyes had been. I trimmed her nails with a fingernail clipper, back to the first knuckle. I removed her delicate arms and tied them to my bike frame, so the hands would click against the spokes as the wheels spun. I looked into her face again and she said, "So what, I still have a perfect body."
I got two feet of string and knotted one end around her head a couple of times and then once around her slender neck. I tied the other to the bar under my banana bicycle seat.
I rode my bike two blocks down the sidewalk with Barbie dragging, sometimes skipping like a flat stone on water. Tick tick tick went her hands. "Take," I said as I pushed with my left foot. "That," I said as I push with my right. Right. Left. Right Left. Faster. I stopped and surveyed the damage. She had suffered only minor abrasions to her outer thighs and boobs. Her toes were only slightly ragged and most of them still had that damn pink nail polish. Her perfect pout mocked me. "I am so beautiful. You will never be close to beautiful."
I grasped the handlebars with determination and tossed her over my shoulder. She hit the street with a smack. I rode my bike on the blacktop, over manhole covers, broken glass, and oil spots. Tick tick tick went her hands. I stopped to analyze the progress. Now we were getting somewhere. She had landed face down in the oil and it was seeping from her eyeholes. The manhole cover must have had a sharp edge because she had a satisfying gash on the front of one of her legs. The outer thigh of her other leg was starting to shred. She was dirty—no more miss pristine and perfect—and her scrapes and scars were laced with small pebbles.
I rode on, and the neighbor’s dog made chase. At first I tried to outrun him, but then I slowed and let him catch up. He grabbed Barbie in his teeth and bore down as he engaged me in a tug of war. I braked and planted my feet, and the small dog gnawed on Barbie’s legs, popping her right knee so it bent side to side in addition to front to back. "Oh Barbie, I am ever so sorry," I said in my best Shirley Temple voice. He chewed her right foot clean off before I tore away on my bike.
I rode on the sidewalk, in the gutter, in the street, down a dirt path through a small field, and then around a parking lot. Tick tick tick. Turning for home, I went down a rocky path that threatened to catapult me from my bicycle seat more than once. But I persevered and rode as fast as I could manage without falling. Barbie bounced around in the path, first on one side of the path, then the other. A couple of times, to my delight, she flew up against the tire, only to be hurled to the ground again. I pedaled and pedaled, relishing the sounds of her carcass skipping about on the dry earth.
Then the sweet sound stopped. I stopped and turned. I could not see her. I popped the kickstand and dismounted. The string had tangled in the spokes of the rear tire. Her head dangled from a spoke like an ornament. Her lips no longer held that familiar pout, but were flat and rough and covered in dirt and oil. Her nose was completely gone.
I backtracked and found her headless body wedged between two good-sized rocks. The hard plastic of her shoulder had chipped, revealing the entire arm socket. Her back and butt were lacerated. The wires in both legs were exposed at the hips. One leg was missing a huge chunk of Barbie flesh. The toes of the remaining foot had been scraped off. The bottom half of the right leg hung only by a sinewy strand of pink rubber.
Satisfied, I picked up the body and tucked it in the back pocket of my green jeans. I removed the string from my spokes and fashioned a Barbie head necklace. Later, my mom would wonder what caused the oily polka dots on my shirt, but she would never know because I buried Barbie in the garden with her arms sticking out of her neck and her head impaled on her one remaining foot.
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