Photo/Text 1: Legs

When I find them, their legs dangling through the slats of her bunk bed, lined up to dip their toes into the bedroom air, it’s as though I had a plan for all of it: a quarter of a century ago traipsing all over Southern California malls with my grandmother, seeking the dolls whose scarcity was nearly inciting riots, looking for particular hair and eye and nose combinations, sewing the dolls elaborate costumes, displaying them like fine china on shelves, and later, after my fetish had faded, packing them carefully away in boxes, and moving them a dozen times in four different states, so that I could discover them again in a basement in Connecticut and give them to my daughter, who would haul them into her bed, undress them, arrange them. And now, when I encounter them here, I can see clearly why I have kept them, why I acquired them in the first place: simply to delight in finding them in a girl’s bright yellow-walled room. “Mom, their diapers are a bit saggy,” my daughter says, apologetically, as though this fact is a reflection on her mothering abilities. “That,” I tell her, “is bound to happen after twenty-seven years.”