The Doll We Buried

The Doll that We Buried

by Jade Alexandria

illustration by Sadie Hutchings

The poles were out of the water and had been for quite some time, but James and I still sat by the shore, watching the darting shadows of the minnows.

Two hours ago, we’d come home, loaded with groceries and a stack of papers from the mailbox. We cleared everything away until all that was left was the mail—bills, a US military appeal, internet provider ads, and a letter from Dartmouth. We both stared at the stack, and I thought about saying something, but then I was suddenly aware of the glass eyes of Ma’s dolls watching us from atop the wraparound shelves like a grim council. James picked up the US military appeal, shoved it in the trash, and asked me if I wanted to head down to the pond.

I kept thinking about it, less about James’s military appeal or my letter from Dartmouth and more about those dolls, about the empty spot right above the trashcan where a porcelain family heirloom used to sit before I broke it in the fifth grade.

James had brought a couple of Miller Lites too, even though Ma always got cross when we drank. The last one was still warm was still sitting between us and I took a sip. I was warm. It tasted like piss.

James picked up a pine cone and tossed it at a dark splotch on the fabric of the water. The fish jolted but didn’t swim more than a few feet away. “Cocky bastard,” I said. James snorted and looked at me funny. “It’s just a fish.” I shrugged and a strange, gaping silence formed between us. “Shooting fish in a barrel,” I murmured, meaning absolutely nothing by it but needing something to fill the quiet. I tried to think of something else to say, but all I could think of was that other idiom shooting the shit.

It used to be that James and I would say the same thing at the same time. People always said that’s how they could tell we were twins, but then in the same beat they’d point out how different we were, what with James being all muscles and sports and me being all brains and books. It was irritating, listening to people draw out the Venn diagram of the two of us, even if it was mostly true. And, lately, it felt like the two circles of us were drifting farther and farther away, like one cell splitting into two. It shouldn’t be so hard to talk to my goddamn twin, I thought, and I didn’t know when it started being that way.

But then James took a sip of the beer, grimaced, and said, “This tastes like piss.”

“Yeah, I thought so too.”

“So, you going to Dartmouth?” he asked as if we’d been talking about this all along.

I said naw, I was thinking about the community college, that they had a decent enough medical program. His

face didn’t change. “I figured you were—I am too, but hell if I know what I’ll do, maybe sports medicine. But how you gonna tell Ma?”

“I don’t know, man.”

I could hear him suck his teeth. The cicadas started to cry; I hadn’t realized how dark it was getting. “You could go,” he said, “if you wanted to. Ma would make it happen.”

“If.” Ma was worse than anyone about making us out to be so different. For me, it was endless tests and insisting I take honors even though it put James and me in different classes. For James, she’d eye his gut when he grabbed seconds at dinner and enrolled him in baseball and football, which made it rare to see him before dinnertime. “They just work different muscles,” she’d always say, especially to teachers and football coaches, who were most liable to scratch their heads and ask how we shared twin blood.

“Good idea, throwing away the military acceptance. I should’ve done that with the Dartmouth letter.”

“Naw, Ma would’ve killed you. She’s gonna kill me when I tell her I’m not joining the forces.”

I glanced back at the house, and I saw the fractured rectangle of gold light emanating from the kitchen window. Ma had come home about half an hour ago, probably read the letter, probably was waiting now for us to come back inside, probably had started supper in the meantime. Maybe she’d already found the military letter in the trash. “Let’s be real,” I said, “she’s gonna kill us both.”

What could we tell her? Neither of us really had a better plan, and it was already the last semester of senior year. She always called it “promoting our natural talents,”

and maybe that was true, but I couldn’t help but wonder if you only are who you are because somebody turned you that way. She wouldn’t understand that. I thought of the doll again, the tinkling crack it made as it hit the floor after I’d slammed the front door in a tantrum. It had been more than just another doll in her collection; it had been her favorite, some bonnet- wearing prairie girl passed down from her grandma. When Ma saw it, I was ready for her to be angry or even sad, but I wasn’t ready for her to say nothing, turn on her heel, and leave it in pieces in the kitchen, immediately irrelevant.

“Remember that time,” James said suddenly, “when you got mad at Ma when she didn’t let you join the baseball team with me because you had tutoring?”

“Yeah, I was just thinking about that, about—"

“—that doll.” James slung the poles over his shoulder. “After it broke, we went and buried it, remember? You think it’s still there?”

We’d buried it at the base of a pine tree at the edge of the pond. For some reason, we’d done it at night while wearing all black. We both brought shovels and didn’t say a word, just dug until it was deep enough to hold the little white shards, threw them in, stared, then shuffled back inside, never mentioning it again.

But now we had no shovels, so we just used our hands, wiping away the pine needles and worming our fingers into the dirt. It was almost too dark to see anymore. After a few minutes, we found a fragment white as bone. It was the face, the paint long rubbed off the creamy porcelain but the empty creases of the eye still intact, the head halffilled with rich, black loam.

I ran my thumb across its smoothness. “When I told you I was gonna go bury it,” I said, “You came along. I

didn’t ask you to.” I wondered why I’d never thought of that question before—maybe back then I knew the answer.

James sat back on his haunches, looking at the house, at the shadow moving behind the window. “I figured it could’ve just as easily been me that done it.”

He stood and brushed off his knees, and looking up felt small again, like that fifth grader burying a doll like it could be a person. I opened my mouth to say what I’d been thinking all day, that I wouldn’t have turned down Dartmouth if I didn’t already know he was gonna join me at the community college, that we were in this one together, but there was no point saying it because I was sure he already knew.

So I also stood, kicking the dirt and pine needles back over the doll, and told James I was about ready for supper. He was too.