My sis and I played incessantly with Barbies. This was the era of fuzzy-haired Cabbage Patch Kids and Strawberry Shortcake dolls with their faint scent of sweetness and Monchhichi, Monchhichi, oh so soft and cuddly (looking back, these stuffed monkeys with plastic hands were just plain weird). But Barbies ruled the hours of our playtime. I remember the green plastic and cardboard Barbie house styled with blow-up furniture. The house folded up flat into a neat square. There was the hard, boxy Barbie carrying case with the slick black handle, smooth metal clasp and the two perfect Barbies emblazoned on the front with their pink background and flowing hair and tiniest waists and breasts so perfectly simple and huge they snapped my little girl green eyes backwards. We would get so excited to unlatch that case and let those mini heels and small tall boots and 16 Barbies with their scratchy sweetheart dresses tumble to the floor so we could craft them into their life scenes in the cardboard house. Barbie in the kitchen making dinner with Skipper doing something ridiculous like riding her blonde plastic horse in the yard or Barbie going to the Fisher-Price McDonald’s and making all of the squatty plastic Fisher-Price people with muffin tops and bowl cuts feel small and odd. There was only one Ken. He played a minimal role in our world which is strange because he was the only male except for the Fisher-Price mailman and policeman (if we crossed communities). There is a vague recollection of a half-hearted attempt at making Ken and Barbie appear to be having straight-legged Barbie sex on a blow-up bed with no sheets. And then Ken always went to work. I am not sure there is anything that needs to be discussed here other than it was just easier to have that guy out of our way.
We had Wonder Woman with her sexy red boots and perma-fierce face, though not too fierce, we wouldn’t want to scare the little girls. And Brooke Shields Barbie. I remember thinking it was so refreshing to at least see some dark hair in that mess of blonde. And then there was Jonah.
I did it. I grabbed Mom’s orange-handled sewing scissors from the pull-down kitchen cupboard and went to town-chop, chop, chop-until all that was left of her luscious waxen locks were sharp stubs of hair and some smooth bald spots with those over-enlarged Barbie pores. I can hear my brother laughing beside me, and then see my sister’s enraged, teary eyes when I went running to the living room to show her my Frankenstein-like creation.
What had I done? I just shrugged my shoulders.
“I dunno. She looks funny, and I was bored with these dumb Barbies.”
Realizing there was nothing to be done to “fix” her and still badly wanting to play with all of those “dumb Barbies”, we gave her a name and a new era began.
We named her Jonah.
Something always intrigued me about the way we played with Jonah. At first, she was a freak. I mean, who would cut their own waxy blonde mane right off their beautiful Barbie head??? I remember several episodes of Jonah “screaming” and smacking normal Barbie around a bit because she was so angry. She was hilarious. We gave her a “job” or at least she always carried the weird brown briefcase instead of the sparkly clutch. She was hauled away at one point for unruly conduct (probably by the squatty Fisher-Price police dude), and Skipper just smiled at her as she trotted by on her plastic pony. Jonah was always the one trying to act decent at family gatherings, but yet she still managed to get sent to her room by Brooke Shields Barbie.
Then the “Jonah-game” started to shift. When our cousins came to visit, tension would rise and our little girl fists would start to clench as we debated over “who got Jonah” for this particular round of Barbie madness. Even my sister, who is still traumatized to this day over the shearing of Jonah’s tiny head, was protective of that little criminal. I always wanted her. I hated doing hair and hers was simple and she could wear anything even if it didn’t match (phew, I loved clothes that didn’t match). Plus I liked it when she got angry. I got angry, too, sometimes because being 8 is hard and Barbie waists were so small and big sisters were so beautiful and sometimes mean and dresses were hard to snap in the back and those damn tiny heels were always falling victim to Mom’s Hoover vacuum and she was brave usually when I wasn’t and she got to leave the cardboard house (even if it was to go to jail). Jonah was………cool? Independent? I don’t know, her hair looked like shit, but nobody cared anymore. Jonah just did her own thing.
My Mom kept all of our toys. ALL of the toys. I asked my Mom to take a picture of the Barbie case YESTERDAY. It still sits in the coat closet by the front door. All of the Barbie clothes are there, including the fur-trimmed red pleather jacket I always put on Jonah. The flat cardboard house is gone, but Loving You Barbie is still rattling around in there with tangled hair and tired eyes. Some Barbies are missing limbs and their rouge cheeks are faded, but when our children go to Grandma’s house, I can literally hear those plastic babes sighing and saying in smoky, brusque voices, “All right, ladies, look alive, the kids are here. Skipper! Saddle up the damn horse!”
But not Jonah. She simply up and vanished.
Nobody remembers her leaving or being thrown away. She was too scrappy to get herself sold at a garage sale. I texted my big sis last night asking about Jonah. Her response when I asked what she thinks might have happened to Jonah was: “No idea. She’s not there- it’s creepy.”
She’s somewhere. I feel her. She might be protesting. She certainly wouldn’t stand for women being pushed around anymore. I like to think she lives hard and wild and free and probably wears a pink hat with kitty ears over her patchy hair and hikes mountains and loves all but really only a few and drinks whiskey with poets and goes to bed alone when she wants to and reads Hemingway with a poster of Gloria Steinem above her scratched and worn writer’s desk. Oh, yes, she’s a writer. Sometimes. When she is not a photographer or a public defender or a performance artist or a mysterious herbal medicine woman. No more blow-up furniture for Jonah. She buys whatever damn sheets she wants. I am sure she has a following of faithful friends, but she keeps her distance, too. She spent enough time being told she was crazy and watching Skipper on her horse while chubby policeman led her to jail to know the only one you can ever really trust is yourself.
Keep going, Jonah of Arc. xoxoxoxoxoxox
“One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”
Joan of Arc
