The porcelain doll sat, prizelike, in the middle of the faux, white leather couch. The face was exquisitely beautiful with red, rosebud painted lips. The blue glass eyes were framed with lifelike black eyelashes. It had curled blonde hair, pulled to one side, the ponytail cascading down its front. The lace dress sat fluffed around it and the tiny porcelain feet were encased in baby socks and actual human baby booties.
The house was low-set, fibro with four bedrooms all leading off a very long hallway. The hallway had a plastic, spiked cover, maybe 15 metres long, protecting the carpet. The house was meticulously cleaned and decorated. The Laminex kitchen table gleamed, and the china cabinet sparkled. A family of glass elephants held together with chains were dusted carefully each week and put back in the same place every time.
Outdoors was a large garden, front and back. The back garden had vegetables growing. Across the street was a local primary school, kids shrieking and playing in the big oval during the week. On the weekends it was dead and lifeless. Around the corner from the house and a few blocks down was the catholic church. Inside a woman sat. She looked gaunt but wore an oversize coat. Her thin, stooped shoulders did not fill out the coat’s width. Brown plastic rimmed sunglasses covered half her face. A scarf tied to cover long plaited, dark hair. Her shoes were sturdy, brown and flat with ankle straps. They were shoes that an old woman would wear, but she was not old. She had no wedding ring but carried rosary beads in her coat pocket. She seemed very mournful.
Back in the house with the very long hallway, a four-year-old girl ran up and down the corridor. She was a small four-year-old with thick wavy brown hair on her shoulders. She had suntanned olive skin and large oval brown eyes with dark lashes. She had chubby, little legs and a pink sleeveless cotton dress. The dress has large, green, spotty pockets. She put things in them. A button, a coin, a hairclip and flower petals from the garden. Her name was Anna, and she would visit her grandmother’s house, mostly on Sundays.
After lunch the child walked with her grandmother down the hallway to the living room. At lunchtimes her grandmother would always watch her favourite daytime television. “Come, Anna, I want to watch my story on TV.” “Ok, Nanna.” On the couch (the one nobody ever sat on) the porcelain doll sat primly in the centre. On a bed of lace. Anna knew better than to touch it. She always wanted to play with it and make it dance. She wanted to make the full skirt twirl, just like it was supposed to. Grandmother knew what she was thinking. “No, Anna” that doll is special. “Don’t touch it. It was your mother’s.”
Anna always thought to herself that it was a shame that such a nice doll never got played with properly. Anna would have the doll going to balls and dating princes and riding magic carpets, if she could! Grandmother always said to leave it alone and nobody should touch it. Anna was always perplexed by this. Some afternoons when her grandmother had a nap, she would touch it. Carefully. One of the doll’s wrists had a crack in it. She wondered if her mother had done it. Had she played too rough with the doll? broke the hand and then it was glued together again?
After the morning mass, her spinster aunt would come back to her grandmothers from the church and then take up her usual position in her special lounge chair. There she would sit, sometimes doing cross stitch, sometimes staring at the TV, but always so mournful and sad. She was just the saddest person Anna had ever known. Anna would feel dismay and despair about her aunt’s life and wished with all her might that she would never live a life so wasteful and lonely. At lunchtime her grandmother would always cook something delicious. Her aunt always needed something special and smaller. Anna would watch her aunt as she could barely lift her spoon to her mouth to feed herself. She took forever to eat and even then, would not finish what was on her plate. With Grandmother’s encouragement, Anna ate all of her own food and often a second plateful, with the promise of chocolate for dessert. Then she would go outside and feed the chickens and make daisy chain necklaces or run across the road to the canefields and suck on the sugar cane sticks from the fields where it lay cut on the farms.
Years went by, Anna grew, swimming in competitions, playing netball, winning local story writing competitions. Her visits to her grandmothers were less than they used to be. One day her grandmother asked her to come sit with her spinster Aunt because she was sadder than she normally was. Anna was only 12 at the time. She sat next to her on Grandmother’s front porch. It faced the garden that she always loved and had played in so many times. Her mournful aunt looked at her and said, “How do you do it?”. Anna was confused. “How do I do what?”. “How do you be happy; how do you do all the things that you do?” “How do you keep on going?”. These questions were not meant for a 12-year-old. Anna was not experienced enough in life to help someone who was so desperate and depressed and screaming out for help. “I don’t know?” said Anna. “I just do it.” Anna was a little overwhelmed and troubled about being put in this position to help a person more than 3 times her ago. Anna ran off around the house to seek a happier disposition. It was not that she did not want to help her spinster Aunt. She just did not know how.
Many, many years passed, and everyone grew old. The grandmother and the spinster Aunt ended up in the local nursing home. Anna led a busy life. Sometimes she wondered what had made her aunt so sad. Anna was angry that the aunt had wasted her life and also a bit guilty that she had not done more to help her when she was 12 years old.
Since the house with the long hallway was now empty, Anna and her mother were there going through the furniture and personal effects. “Mum, do you want to take the porcelain doll home?”, It was yours Grandmother said. “Mine?” Mum said. “That was never my doll. I hate it, sitting there, look at it.” It was lifeless, cracked and some of the eyelashes had fallen out. It puzzled Anna that Grandmother had lied about who owned the doll, so she went to lift it off the couch. It was stuck to the plastic covering on the couch and as she grabbed it the head toppled to the left and dropped on the floor. It rolled away, under the couch and settled in some cobwebs. There was paper inside the body of the doll. Old yellowed paper with inky running writing, folded into neat rectangles and hidden inside the doll’s body, long, long ago.
The yellow papers were handwritten letters. Love letters. Letters to her aunt. They were dated 1964. They were signed by a man named Mark. He had professed his love for her. The first letters were so meticulously written and all with an outpouring of love and affection. The last letter was covered in water stains. “I am so sorry for the trouble and pain I have caused you; I may burn in hell for what I have done to you and my heart aches with an intensity so deep that I feel I will never recover, ever. Forever yours, Mark.”
“Anna!” her Mum called. Anna dropped the letters in shock. Her Mum saw what she was holding, and her face became alarmed, her jaw clenched.
The car ride home was quiet. Mum told Anna the secret letters in the doll were from a man that her aunt had been in love with when she was in her late teens. The problem was that the man was a catholic priest. When the church and her parents had found out all hell broke loose. The man was banned from the church and removed as a priest and from the community. Her Aunt had a broken heart and wanted to become a Nun. She told her parents she would never be able to love another man again and would serve Jesus instead. They forbade her from becoming a Nun and so she spent the rest of her ruined life sitting in that chair, staying sad. That’s what she did her whole life. Just stayed sad.
Now, Anna knew why her aunt was so strange. Her heart broken was broken and she had been betrayed. She let it take over her life, the pain so enormous that her aunt could never recover from it. The pain was so intense that just living was too much to bear.
Still, Anna was young and had that vibrant energy of youth and naivete to think that something as such as a broken heart was unfixable. In the years to come Anna too faced pain. She would think of the porcelain doll, that conversation on the porch. Those memories sometimes give her the inspiration to rise above it all.
By Rosie M