The Spanish Doll, Karen Newman

The Spanish Doll

Karen Newman

When I was a child, I acquired a Spanish doll, a flamenco dancer with delicate, plastic arms and a long, lacy red and white dress with a tight bodice and crinoline train that flowed behind her in a sweeping arc. Her hair was dark, a bit like mine, and tied up in an artful bun with a faux turtle-shell comb holding it in place, and her flashy eye makeup and bright lipstick smile contrasted strongly with her creamy skin tone. She wore black plastic high-heeled shoes, one of which managed to get lost, despite the care I lavished upon her and all my other dolls. Her arms and castanet-bearing fingers were frozen in front of her in a dancer’s pose, but much to my consternation, the cat ate off her splayed pinky and index fingers soon after I positioned her on my bedroom dresser. She had an odd allure for me—part ingenue and part vamp, artifact of a culture and language that I didn’t know—representing an idealized standard of beauty and a dance that I’d never actually seen performed. This type of doll was a common Spanish souvenir of the day and came in different sizes. I can’t recall now if I selected her myself from a store or if she was given to me by someone who’d just returned from a trip to Spain. Many of my female classmates also displayed identical Spanish dolls in their bedrooms, only theirs had pink or yellow lacy dresses. Her dress couldn’t be removed, as she was really meant to be admired in a china cabinet and not actually played with—which was, admittedly, a bit frustrating for the 7-year-old me who delighted in dressing my dolls for various imagined occasions. She is now lost to the ebb and flow of time that filters through my mind’s eye and to the three household moves we made during my childhood. I loved that doll for the mysterious femininity she represented, while simultaneously resenting her impractical extravagance and frippery. Perhaps she was in one of the boxes that went mysteriously missing when we moved to California, along with my girl scout uniform and

sash festooned with badges, or perhaps she is at the bottom of a still-unopened box in my parents’ garage, decades after the move, her dress inhabited by the silverfish that I will someday encounter when I clean out their house.