The Children and Their Dolls 

by Emily Sakaguchi

 

     Mrs. Erlam’s four daughters and three sons watched their mother answer the door, their eyes following the wooden spoon still in her hand. Just then it was coated in their Christmas dinner soup, but other times that spoon came down hard when anyone got smart at the dinner table. With her spoonless hand, Mrs. Erlam tucked a few stray hairs behind her right ear then opened the door. 

     There was Mrs. Hardy on the doorstep, perfect with her tidy spit curls around her temples, perfect with her hat tilted and dashing. She might as well have been an illustration in the Sears Wishbook. Mrs. Lewis, with her nose and cheeks a festive red from the wind, was standing at attention on Mrs. Hardy’s left. Mrs. Dawson flanked the right, patting a cloth sack. 

     “Mrs. Hardy,” Mrs. Erlam nodded. “Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Dawson, to what do I owe the pleasure?” 

     “Oh nonsense, dearest. The pleasure is ours,” Mrs. Hardy leaned into the doorway, but Mrs. Erlam stiffened her grip on the doorknob, keeping the door only half open. 

     “A pleasure twice today already.” 

     Mrs. Lewis chuckled, “But we hardly had a chance to speak, what with the length of that sermon.” 

     “Yes,” Mrs. Erlam widened the door a little as her youngest son tumbled to her side and nestled against her flour-sack apron. “I didn’t mean to be so funny, Mrs. Lewis. Do you find God a laughing matter?” 

     “Mrs. Erlam, you can be certain she does not,” Mrs. Hardy swallowed her smile, “For His will is the very reason we are here.” 

     “Is it indeed?” 

     “Certainly. And—I don’t mean to impose, but isn’t it rather cold?” 

     “Of course,” she softened her grip on the door handle and stepped aside. “Come in.” 

 

     Soon enough, there was Mrs. Hardy surveying the Erlam house from a moth-eaten armchair. She shook her head, frowning at the corner where she would have liked a tree, glaring at the windows where she would have liked a bit of good lace, but, most of all, biting her lip at the sight of the children. 

     They were very good children, she thought. There was Ruth, surrounded by her younger sisters yet no longer a child, crumpled with laughter and, Mrs. Hardy decided, a little too thin to be pretty. The others were playing on the balding rug. The youngest daughter was cradling a doll, stroking its wooden smile with her thumb. The newly painted eyes were already peeling away beneath her caresses. The brothers circled around a set of toy soldiers, the tiny tin men so few in number that they painted a picture of crushing defeat. 

     Dreadful presents, Mrs. Hardy thought. And then there was the matter of Mrs. Erlam, a woman whose very lungs were clenched. She had the dowdy appearance of someone who would keep on having children until it killed her. Never cracked a smile. Shame. 

 

     Mrs. Erlam watched her children play. There were the boys setting up imaginary lines of defence for their dime-store war, and there was little Rosy smiling at the doll. She sighed. These were nothing like her own childhood Christmas presents. What a doll she once had embraced, had primped, had protected! To have had that doll—to have stroked its glossy ringlets and straightened its little white gown—and to see her children with these coarse toys—now that was a very hard thing, she thought. 

     But Mrs. Erlam knew that these were thoughts Mrs. Hardy would expect from her. Mrs. Hardy would want her to blush for saving month after month to set aside these few grim toys. Hadn’t she looked so smug when she found out that, to afford them, she had gone to the jam factory with all the low women who never knew how to brush a doll’s hair? And wouldn’t Mrs. Hardy have snickered—yes, she would have—to see Mr. Erlam fly at her, grabbing her by the hair, squawking that no wife of his would be a working woman.

      Mrs. Erlam looked at Ruth, wearing her one good dress, a secondhand frock given to her by Mrs. Dawson, because Mrs. Dawson claimed to have put on more weight than its buttons could support. A fever stirred in Mrs. Erlam’s cheeks to know that nobody had ever seen Mrs. Dawson wear it before she conjured it for Ruth. And there was Mrs. Hardy, sizing up Ruth, frowning at all her precious little children, and sneering at everything else in the house. 

 

     “You have such a lovely home,” Mrs. Hardy told the rotting floor boards. “But you have no tree. As I was saying before, we are here in our duty as Christians.” 

     “You came because we have no tree?” said Mrs. Erlam as she perched atop a stool by a laceless window. 

     “Frankly,” Mrs. Hardy began, “We have spoken with all the ladies at church and decided that, of all the families in the parish, yours is most deserving of what little miracle we can offer. We wanted to bring your children these toys.” 

     Mrs. Erlam jumped from her seat. Her eyes darted towards Mrs. Dawson’s cloth sack. She turned her face away from her guests as she stumbled to the door. 

     “Thank you for the thought, but we have our share of Christmas trinkets. There must be some family that needs your charity.” 

 

     Mrs. Hardy was slow to stand. She glided towards the open door with the other two women trailing behind her. 

    “Mrs. Erlam, these are gifts. I don’t understand.” Mrs. Dawson’s porcelain face cracked from side to side. 

     “I take care of my family, and I do well enough without the good charity of Mrs. Hardy’s inner circle.” 

     Rosy had followed Mrs. Dawson to the door, eyeing the lumps in the cloth sack, wondering if the squarish shape might be a box of chocolates. Her doll was still nestled in her arms. Mrs. Erlam fixed her eyes on the doll, then glanced at the toy soldiers. 

     With one bound towards her sons, she was gathering the fragile little soldiers, turning them over in her chapped palm, hovering motionless for a moment. Her sons gazed up, their mouths rusted open. Then she closed her hand around the toys. She stared at Rosy’s doll for a moment, and leaped, without warning, back to the doorway where Rosy and the church women were shivering. 

She ripped the doll from a tangle of Rosy’s fingers. Rosy sobbed. 

     “We don’t need your charity,” Mrs. Erlam said. “In fact, I have some charity for you.” 

     She snatched the sack and shoved her children’s toys inside before returning it to Mrs. Dawson. She nudged all three out of the entrance and the door grunted shut. 

 

     “I know you don’t understand now,” Mrs. Erlam told her children, half of them crying, the other half still wide-eyed in confusion. “But you will someday.”

     “How am I supposed to look Grace Hardy in the eye on Sunday after you’ve turned Mrs. Hardy out of the house like that? And Peter Dawson is going to hate me,” Ruth swiped young tears from the corners of her eyes. “I’ll die of shame.” 

     “You have a lot to learn about shame then,” Mrs. Erlam patted her shoulder. “Shame won’t kill you, Ruth. And if you ever feel like killing yourself, just wait until the morning. Hasn’t failed me yet.”