Parenting:
BARBIE'S SHOE
by Joyce Maynard
It was Audrey's seventh birthday and of course I wanted it to be perfect. Weeks before, I had reserved the swimming pool at the Y for an hour, and rented a VCR and two movies for afterward. I hunted in half a dozen stores for a certain kind of bracelet Audrey loved, that I figured the other girls would appreciate too, for favors. We studied a dozen styles of invitations before arriving at the design we liked best (a jazzy-looking sneaker, sealed with a bow-shaped sticker, that opened to reveal party details). We bought an ice cream cake, with Audrey's name in purple, edged in roses. We hung streamers and I stayed up late, writing the clues to a treasure hunt and then planting the treasures: miniature Cabbage Patch Kid figurines, all different. I had driven fifty miles to find a store that carried them.
The morning of the party, one mother (of twin guests) called to say her girls were sick and couldn't make it. I managed to say something about hoping they'd feel better soon, but I got off the phone with my stomach in knots. I presented the facts to Audrey with attempted casualness. "Megan and Erica can't make it, Aud," I said. "We'll have them over another time soon."
She looked sad, a little troubled maybe, but not devastated certainly, or even (as I was) worried. The girls' absence would bring the guest list down to four.
I mentioned to Audrey the names of a couple of friends from last year's school, whose mothers I could call to see if they were free, but Audrey shook her head. "No thanks," said my daughter (who proved herself, not for the first time, to be a good deal more rational than I). Then she went back to playing with her birthday present from us -- an elaborately outfitted model of the Love Boat, with dolls, swimming pool, and shuffleboard.
The guests arrived, with much giggling and many purple accessories. They all brought purses, and carried them throughout the treasure hunt. Then they made their way into our living room to watch Audrey open her gifts.
The one she saved until the last was from Charlie. She could tell it was a Barbie doll, she said, from the shape of the box. Not just any Barbie, as it turned out. This was a Crystal Barbie, in an iridescent gown, with diamond earrings and a ruffled stole. But the thing she loved best were the shoes: see-through, and slightly iridescent, dainty as Cinderella's glass slippers.
"Why don't you wait till later to study them?" I suggested, as she slipped them off the doll's feet. "Yup," her friend Kate concurred sadly. "I have a Crystal Barbie too, only I lost the shoes and now she doesn't seem special."
After we'd all had cake, we headed out to the Y and then home again for pizza and a double feature of Splash and Charlotte's Web. Got everybody into sleeping bags around ten-thirty, listened to the giggles die down. Woke a little after midnight, to find Audrey's friend Tammy -- a girl who had seemed fearless only hours before, on the diving board -- trembling beside our bed, wanting to know if she could get into bed beside me.
The next morning I made blueberry pancakes. The girls played for a couple of hours before I drove them home, with ballons and streamers blowing out the car windows and everyone calling out "Hip, hip hooray for Audrey!" Sitting in the back seat, and with a bow off a package stuck on top of her head, she was a little quiet. She had been waiting for this birthday, as she put it, a whole year. Now it was over. But I knew she'd had a happy time.
And then, home once more, with the house finally tidy again and quiet, I noticed my new seven-year-old on her stomach, peering under chairs in the living room and reaching under sofa cushions with attempted casualness.
"You lost something, didn't you?" I said.
She nodded miserably. "One of Crystal Barbie's shoes."
I didn't have to say I told her so. I pushed back all the furniture and took every pillow off the couch. I lifted the rug, and I emptied the wastebasket full of wrapping paper. Something had taken possession of me -- I was irritated, upset, even a little frantic at the mess I was making in the room I'd just finished cleaning a half hour before, but I couldn't stop looking for that shoe. I was sweating now. I was flinging pillows, thrashing through the toybox, flinging Legos.
"It's OK, Mom," Audrey said finally -- more upset by this time, I think, by the vision of me going crazy than she had been by the lost shoe. I would be embarrassed to say how many wastebaskets I went through before I finally gave up.
It was a few hours later that the memory came to me of something eerily similar that my own mother had done, one spring twenty years before. I had just got a new Skipper doll -- to cheer me up, because my father had been in the hospital. I'd taken the doll outside and lost her shoe. My mother had spent an hour on her hands and knees, helping me search for that shoe in the thick grass. My mother -- who, I always believed, could do anything -- found it.
I always tell that story with affection. But I have always made fun of my mother a little for that too. What a lot of fuss to make over something so small, I have thought to myself.
Only the fuss was about something besides a doll's shoe, of course. It was about loss and pain. Small pain, minor loss, in the scale of things. The kind of pain a mother can still control, can still prevent, maybe. Knowing all the while how many other sorrows there will be that she can't do anything about: Little girls who don't come to her party. Children on the playground who make fun of her overalls. Boys who ask someone else to the dance. Colleges she won't get into. A lover who leaves.
The next day we went for a walk. It was a sunny, spring-like day. Maple sap was dripping into our buckets. Up ahead, Charlie splashed happily in a muddy puddle. Willy, in the backpack, grabbed for branches overhead.
"You know what I wished for when I blew out the candles?" Audrey asked me. (She could tell me, because she hadn't got them out in one breath anyway and knew that meant her wish wouldn't come true.) "I wished I'd never have to die, and you wouldn't either, and neither would Dad and the boys."
As I said, I wanted that birthday to be perfect, and I wanted to shield my child from loss and pain. And I actually thought if I could only find that Barbie shoe, I could do it.
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