Lineal Gaps

Every Christmas while she was still alive, my mother’s mother would leave a single unwrapped toy among the other presents under the tree for each of her children. My mother and her sister would always get a baby doll, their faces uncovered and waiting for the girls to scoop them into their arms. Denny was my mother’s favorite of these special Christmas treats. She carried him with her wherever she went, slept with him, whispered secrets into the plastic folds of his ears. When my grandmother died of multiple sclerosis—a disease that took her slowly, painfully; a disease that, because she was a woman in 1957, she was not even told she had—I believe Denny became a way for my mother to access her mother again. And during my grandmother’s funeral, which my mother and her siblings were not permitted to attend, I can imagine the two of them—Linda and Denny—holding each other. While my mother was away at graduate school, her stepmother donated Denny after wrongly assuming that my mother didn’t want to keep him.

“Oh…my baby…my baby.”

As a child I was convinced that I would be the one that would find Denny. I searched for him in every antique store and pawn shop in downtown Reno. As my mother danced her fingers over old trinkets and pins and jewelry, I would privately investigate the dolls sitting on dusty shelves or forever sleeping in bassinets. The dolls were pretty but old fashioned, with hard heads and stiff arms and the stuffing in their bellies gone clumpy. And anyway, the dolls weren’t for me. I was looking for Denny, and, when I found him, I imagined my mother would say, Oh, my daughter, you found him. Oh, my daughter, thank you. I knew that it was unlikely that Denny would have made it all the way from Portage la Prairie, Manitoba to Reno, Nevada. Then again, my mother had; it wasn’t impossible.

In the back of those antique stores, I would think about what I knew about Denny—he had a big head, his hair was part of his skull, he had tiny, pink painted lips—and when I found a doll that fit his description, I would present it to my mother, and wait for her to recognize him. She would put her hand to its face, cradle its full cheeks, and ask if I wanted it—she is so beautiful, Esther—and I would put it back because, this time, it wasn’t Denny.

I have been looking for