Dolls Behaving Badly

by Cinthia Ritchie

Genres: Family Life; Humor & Satire; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A hilarious and heartwarming debut novel about a single mom living in Alaska trying to make a life for herself and her young son. Carla Richards is a lot of things. She's a waitress at Anchorage's premier dining establishment, Mexico in an Igloo; an artist who secretly makes erotic dolls for extra income; a divorcee who can't quite detach from her ex-husband; and a single mom trying to support her gifted eight-year-old son, her pregnant sister, and her babysitter-turned-resident-teenager. She's one overdue bill away from completely losing control-when inspiration strikes in the form of a TV personality. Now she's scribbling away in a diary, flirting with an anthropologist, and making appointments with a credit counselor. Still, getting her life and dreams back on track is difficult. Is perfection really within reach? Or will she wind up with something even better?

Release date: February 5, 2013

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 353

Sample

Chapter 1

Thursday, Sept. 15, 2005

THIS IS MY DIARY, my pathetic little conversation with myself. No doubt I will burn it halfway through. I’ve never been one to finish anything.
Mother used to say this was because I was born during a full moon, but like everything she says, it doesn’t make a lick of
sense.


It isn’t even the beginning of the year. Or even the month. It’s not even my birthday. I’m starting, typical of me, impulsively,
in the middle of September. I’m starting with the facts.


I’m thirty-eight years old. I’ve slept with nineteen and a half men.

I live in Alaska, not the wild parts but smack in the middle of Anchorage, with the Walmart and Home Depot squatting over
streets littered with moose poop.


I’m divorced. Last month my ex-husband paid child support in ptarmigan carcasses, those tiny bones snapping like fingers when
I tried to eat them.


I have one son, age eight and already in fourth grade. He is gifted, his teachers gush, remarking how unusual it is for such
a child to come out of such unique (meaning underprivileged, meaning single parent, meaning they don’t think I’m very smart)
circumstances.


I work as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant. This is a step up: two years ago I was at Denny’s.

Yesterday, I was so worried about money I stayed home from work and tried to drown myself in the bathtub. I sank my head under
the water and held my breath, but my face popped up in less than a minute. I tried a second time, but by then my heart wasn’t
really in it, so I got out, brushed the dog hair off the sofa, and plopped down to watch Oprah.


What happened next was a miracle, like Gramma used to say. No angels sang, of course, and there was none of that ornery church
music. Instead, a very tall woman (who might have been an angel if heaven had high ceilings) waved her arms. There were sweat
stains under her sweater, and this impressed me so much that I leaned forward; I knew something important was about to happen.


Most of what she said was New Age mumbo jumbo, but when she mentioned the diary, I pulled myself up and rewrapped the towel
around my waist. I knew she was speaking to me, almost as if this was her purpose in life, to make sure these words got directed
my way.


She said you didn’t need a fancy one; it didn’t even need a lock, like those little-girl ones I kept as a teenager. A notebook,
she said, would work just fine. Or even a bunch of papers stapled together. The important thing was doing it. Committing yourself
to paper every day, regardless of whether anything exciting or thought provoking actually happens.


“Your thoughts are gold,” the giant woman said. “Hold them up to the light and they shine.”

I was crying by then, sobbing into the dog’s neck. It was like a salvation, like those traveling preachers who used to come
to town. Mother would never let us go but I snuck out with Julie, who was a Baptist. Those preachers believed, and while we
were there in that tent, we did too.


This is what I’m hoping for, that my words will deliver me something. Not the truth, exactly. But solace.

Sunday, Sept. 18

Already I’m slacking. Writing is like working out. If you miss one day, it’s easy to convince yourself to miss another.

I’m an artist. I write this rather shamefully, as if admitting to an embarrassing medical problem that I have no right to
be embarrassed about since I clearly brought it on myself.


“She’s obviously talented,” the art teacher informed Mother during my fourth-grade teacher conference, and Mother hung her
head, her white-gloved hand tightening around the Ivory soap sculpture I had fashioned into a Campbell’s soup can. By the
time we walked out to the car, my sculpture had melted under the wrath of Mother’s grasp.


Growing up in Dowser, a little southwestern Michigan town whose only distinction was an award-winning badminton team, I took
every art class the high school offered. I even managed to win a few “prestigious” awards: the Dorothy Maloney Fellowship
for Duck Drawings; the Hardings Grocery Store Cuts of Meat Award; and the Southwestern Michigan Lookalike Contest, where I
painted the assemblymen in drag and almost got Mother kicked out of the Women’s League.


All this might sound heady and exciting, except that in our stuffy little farming community, the liberal arts were looked
upon as a minor sin. Mother squirmed each time I brought home another award, while my older sister, Laurel, sighed and squared
her shoulders, knowing it was up to her to do something with her life, since I was so obviously throwing mine away.


I slid through my senior year with Cs and Ds, skipped graduation, and hitchhiked down to the Greyhound station, where I made
a one-way reservation to Farmington, New Mexico, the farthest my money would take me. I wore my lucky peasant blouse and carried
my new Kmart suitcase, stuffed with art supplies, stray earrings, photocopies of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, and a brand-new
diaphragm.


Things didn’t quite work out as planned. Trying to make it in the art world is like trying to have an orgasm when you’re not
in the mood: You strain and struggle and twist yourself into impossible positions until you almost, almost (oh god, oh yes,
oh plllleeeassee) get there. But you never quite manage, and instead of being blissed-out on pleasure, you find yourself attending
other people’s shows and pretending to be happy for them when all you want to do is give them a swift kick in the ass.


That’s what happened to me. I lost my orgasm. My resolve followed shortly afterward, along with my standards. I started settling
for a little less here, a lot less there, and before I knew it, I found myself living in Alaska, a state so far removed it’s
not even included on national weather maps.


Then I met Barry and really lost my steam. Years passed in a blur and the minute Jay-Jay popped his head from between my legs, it was sore nipples, sleepless
nights, and Barry and me arguing about whose turn it was to buy diapers. Our arguments quickly escalated until he moved into
a shabby apartment in Spenard, a down-on-your-luck neighborhood famous for its cheap hookers and even cheaper drugs, and I
bought a shabby trailer less than a mile away. This is typical of Barry and me. We’ve been divorced almost three years yet
neither one of us has the gumption to move on. We claim that this is so Jay-Jay can move back and forth between us but really
it’s because we don’t know how to let go. Sometimes, I’m ashamed to admit, we still…


Whew, there’s the groan of the school bus grinding its way up the hill by Westchester Lagoon. In a minute Jay-Jay will charge
through the door. “Mom,” he’ll scream, demanding food and attention, love and understanding. And I’ll give it to him, messily,
badly, my hair falling down, my armpits reeking because I forgot to put on deodorant this morning. Jay-Jay is tall and blond,
his legs starting to thin, poor kid. He’s caught in that awkward stumble of pulling away from the cute-little-boy stage. He’s
choosy about food and movies, and so good-natured it’s easy to forget how smart he really is. He’s just Jay-Jay, a skinny
kid with freckles who picks his nose when he thinks no one’s looking. He smells of milk and grass. What I like is the smell
of his feet. Embarrassing, but while he sleeps I sometimes sneak into his room, lift his foot to my face, close my eyes, and
inhale: subtle and slightly sweet, not yet sour, a bit musky.


Soon he’ll wear huge sneakers and clomp around the house. He’ll smell of sweat and get pimples and hard-ons. He’ll jack off
in the bathroom and borrow the car without asking, while I sit home reading trashy magazines, hoping and praying that he doesn’t
turn out to be as big an asshole as his father.


Alaska Airlines Visa bill: OVERDUE!

JCPenney credit card bill: PAST DUE!

Anchorage Pet Emergency bill: DELINQUENT!

Ken doll, with the head cut off

Sex and the City DVD covered in ketchup


Wednesday, Sept. 21

It’s 9:30 a.m. on a sunny autumn day, and I’m sitting at a cleared space on the kitchen table, munching on Chex Mix and watching
the dog dig holes in Mr. and Mrs. Nice’s yard. It’s almost time to pull on my wrinkled blouse and stained apron and head out
the door.


My food service career began over fifteen years ago at a truck stop in Camp Verde, Arizona. Easy money, I thought, and a perfect way to supplement my art, which I was sure was about to take off.


When it didn’t, I hit the road and spent the next three years following the festival circuit in the summer and waitressing
during the winters. I spent my days out in the desert sketching naked men I picked up in bars, transforming their tired bodies
into paintings of cowboy butts floating in the air like helium balloons and penises shaped like the arms of saguaro cacti.
I hadn’t snared a gallery show, but I was getting by. I had my own business cards (my name misspelled, but you can’t have
everything) and a faithful following of women in Birkenstock sandals.


One night, camped out on the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, red sandstone smeared across my face and arms, I dreamed
that Gramma was standing in front of me, a white egg in each palm. I woke up sweating and irritable. Gramma, my father’s mother,
was Polish and fat and smelled of onions and garlic. We had always been close. We were the messy ones, the stumbling ones,
the ones who goofed up and knocked things over. Mostly, though, our relationship went like this: She cooked and I ate. She
talked and I listened. She made messes and I played happily in their wake. Just thinking of Gramma made me so lonely that
I broke down and called her from Holbrook the next morning.


“Yah,” she answered in her heavy Polish accent. “That you, Pushski?”

I asked her what it meant to dream of an egg. “Raw,” I told her. “In a shell. In someone’s hand. And white, almost luminous.”

“It mean,” she said slowly, “that you is brzemienny.”


“That’s ridiculous,” I shouted.

“You sure?” she asked. “You got the blood?”

“Yes,” I lied. After I hung up, I sat on the wilted ground outside the phone booth. I knew Gramma was right. I was pregnant
and I had no idea who the father might be: That cowboy from Winslow who never wore underwear? That cowboy I picked up outside
of Flagstaff who had a belt buckle larger than my head? That older cowboy who walked with a limp and lost three fingers off
his left hand to a horse bite?


To make a long story short (and the less I talk about this phase of my life, the better), I had an abortion at the clinic
down in Tucson. As soon as I was declared “normal” at my six-week checkup, I walked to the highway, stuck out my thumb, and
waited for a ride. I left everything behind, even my car. It was the price I had to pay, was still paying, since as soon as
it was gone that child connected to me tighter and firmer than if I had birthed it myself. I learned too late that some things
can’t be left behind, that they seek you out, show up at your doorstep late at night.


“Sins make you fat,” Gramma used to say. I thought she meant it literally, that sins would cause weight to form on your body.
But after the abortion I understood what she was really saying: sins bring you down, make you heavy. That they make you fat
with your own misgivings.


I eventually reached Alaska, met and married Barry, and worked and quit and worked and was fired from a variety of waitressing
jobs. We had Jay-Jay and our own house and a golden retriever named Almond Joy. I stayed home most of the first year, stumbling
around in a sleep-deprived haze while Barry stormed off to work every day. As soon as I put Jay-Jay down for his midmorning
nap I’d hurriedly pull my art supplies from the closet (I was down to two colors by then, phthalo green and cadmium orange,
which sucked since everything came out a grainy, brownish mess). I was halfway finished with an Alaska nude Last Supper, but I was having trouble with the toes, which resembled slugs. Jesus’ thighs looked especially nice, though, very strong
and competent and tinted an almond shade I was particularly proud of (I had mixed in a small bit of Jay-Jay’s infant formula
to lighten the paint colors). Right when I hit on the brilliant idea of covering the apostles’ feet with bunny boots, Barry
up and quit his job. I tried to keep painting but it was impossible. I threw my supplies back in the closet (just the phthalo
green—the cadmium orange had given out the week before) and joined my husband on the couch for morning marathons of PBS shows:
Mister Rogers, Barney, Reading Rainbow. I ate too many bowls of cereal, lulled into a sugary stupor so that I would often look at us all curled up in our pajamas
at one o’clock in the afternoon and think, Isn’t this cozy?

The day I pinned a dish towel around Jay-Jay’s squirming butt because we had run out of diapers was the day I shook off my
inertia, pulled on the only skirt that still fit, and marched around the restaurant circuit. I hit all the places that frequently
hired but rarely advertised: Sea Galley, Sourdough Mining Company, Peanut Farm.


“I’ll call you,” everyone said. But no one did. It wasn’t my spit-stained shirts or lackluster hair that turned them off as
much as my desperation, which emitted from my skin like a nasty odor.


One night in the Safeway, as I hurriedly wrote out a check I couldn’t cover for milk and crackers, the scrappy manager from
the Denny’s accidently rammed my shopping cart. He remembered me right away—I had worked for him a few years before, quitting
to hike the Resurrection Pass Trail, only to be hired back again, only to quit to kayak Prince William Sound. He eyed my meager
purchases and slyly mentioned a day shift opening. Would I be interested? I swallowed my pride, added three Mounds bars to
my order, and said I would. Then I drove home to share the good news with my soon-to-be ex-husband.


“I got a job,” I yelled. Barry grunted from the couch.

“Cool,” he said with disinterest. “Where?”

“Denny’s.” A long pause, and was it my imagination or did he actually sneer?

“Well, it ain’t the Hilton, but you’ll do just fine,” he said. Then he turned to Jay-Jay and patted his dish-toweled butt.
“Sport, get your daddy another one of them beers.”


This is the truth: I used to lie awake and imagine my husband’s death. I imagined this right down to the clothes I would wear
to his funeral—a simple black dress and a pair of designer shoes. In these fantasies, my expensive feet floated a few inches
above the ground like in those pictures of the saints on holy cards. Like I was suddenly blessed.


  

For the past two and a half years I’ve worked at a restaurant called Mexico in an Igloo. It’s as tacky as the name implies,
a monstrous igloo-shaped building that squats over half a city block, with cacti and tequila bottles jutting around the door
and window frames. Tourists love it and locals tolerate it because the food is homemade, the drinks stiff, the salsa hot enough
to knock sweat inside your winter drawers.


I start off each shift strong but fizzle halfway through. I don’t have the pizzazz it takes to be cheerful seven hours a day.
By the time I pick up Jay-Jay from his after-school Camp Fire program, I’m itchy and irritable. He usually has the good sense
to keep his mouth shut on the ride home. Once we walk in the house, however, he lets loose, his words shooting from his mouth
so fast I often jump back as if under attack. Poor kid, it’s not his fault his mother hates her job. I try to listen, I really
do. But some evenings I stare into his eager face as he goes on and on about some complicated story and want to yell, “Stop!
Stop being so happy!”


Instead I smile my fake waitressing smile and make little cooing sounds of approval.

Then I warm up some bread. It’s my favorite thing after work, thick, sturdy wedges of brown bread so dense I have to rip pieces
with my teeth. Jay-Jay munches the crust while I work my way through the middle sections. It’s satisfying to eat this way,
no plates or silverware, only our mouths chewing. On Fridays, I spread open the paper to the entertainment section and daydream
of myself as Talented Artist, my hips swaying under a long silk skirt as I give an interview to the snotty arts reviewer from
the local paper.


“I know what it’s like at the bottom,” I say as he eyes my breasts (in this fantasy, I have hefty and enviable cleavage).
“I lived in a trailer park for years, and the shading from this period was influenced by Kmart blue-light specials.”


These little fantasies calm me down enough so that by suppertime, Jay-Jay and I are able to enjoy a nice meal out in the living
room, eating on TV trays while we watch Vanna applaud as contestants spin the big wheel.


“She’s pretty old, huh, Mom?” Jay-Jay says. “She’s been on forever.”


“Yes, honey, she has,” I reply. And I stare at the screen, the wedges on the wheel going round and round, my stomach full
and gurgling, the dog lying on my feet, and the TV gives off a tint that makes everything around us, from the mangy carpet
to the cracks in the wall, look homey and warm and inviting.


It isn’t, of course. But it’s a nice illusion.

Ms. Carla Richards

202 W. Hillcrest Drive #22

Anchorage, AK 99503

Dear Ms. Carla Richards:

We regret to inform you that your application for a Platinum Alaska Bank Visa Card has been declined.

After reviewing your rather entertaining credit history, we feel it is in our best interest to keep you securely focused on
your current plan.


As always, thank you for choosing Alaska Bank Visa Card.

Sincerely,

Douglas R. Winnington

Junior Account Supervisor

P.S. Did your August payment get lost in the mail again?

Chapter 2

Friday, Sept. 23

SHHH! I’M CROUCHED IN THE CLOSET, hiding from my sister, Laurel, who this very minute is pouring herself a glass of my generic orange juice. I can see her
through the cracks along the door hinges.


“Yoo-hoo, Carla,” she yells. “I’ve got wonderful news.”

I hold my breath and pray for her to go away. No such luck. She sits down at the kitchen table and shuffles through a magazine.

“Carla, listen,” she shouts toward the closed bathroom door; she must think I’m in there. “I sold the McPherson place, can
you believe it? On the market for almost a year and I sell it in two weeks. Isn’t that amazing?”


She walks down the hall, her heels click-clack-clicking on the linoleum, and knocks on the bathroom door. “I’ve got to go, Carla. I’m meeting someone for breakfast.” A nervous
cough, followed by a giggle. “No one special, you know. Just a…this client.”


She lets herself out and I wait a moment to make sure the coast is clear, then slip out of the closet and hunker down at the
table to finish this entry.


I know it sounds a bit mad, hiding from my very own sister. But if you saw Laurel, you’d know what I mean. Two years older,
Laurel is perfect, or at least she likes to think she is. Smart, talented, beautiful—that’s how Mother used to explain it
to me. Laurel was the favorite. The shining star in an otherwise mediocre family. My brother and I (poor Gene, working as
a manager for a Chickin’ Lickin’ back home in Dowser) were pushed to the background, half-hidden, like those relatives they
used to keep in attics.


Now Laurel lives up on the Hillside in a perfect house with an immaculate lawn, expensive art dangling from the walls. Her
husband, Junior, is a flat, white wall: no surprises, no deep shades or textures. He is a corporate lawyer for British Petroleum,
and Laurel is one of the top-selling agents at Southwest Alaska Real Estate. She and Junior are among the Alaska jet set.
They play racquetball on the weekends, tennis in the summers, take exotic vacations twice a year, and keep their cars so clean
you could put on your makeup in the reflection of the chrome.


Laurel and Junior weren’t always Alaskans. They used to live in Chicago, a glorious six-hour plane flight away. Then one afternoon
about five years ago, someone knocked at the door as I was untangling Barry’s fishing line. Jay-Jay, who was almost three
at the time, raced to answer.


“Mom! Auntie Laurel’s at the door.”

“Laurel?”

“She has funny shoes.” Jay-Jay stared at his socks. “Like animal claws.”

I hurried out to the kitchen and found my sister leaning against the dishwasher, the toe of her expensive boot jutting across
my path.


“Carla,” she cried.

“I didn’t know you were on vacation,” I said.

“Vacation?” She giggled. “We’re moving here.” Her voice was high and screechy. “We’re looking at houses up on the Hillside.
It’s supposed to be the best neighborhood for people like us.” She nodded at my shabby kitchen as if to say, as opposed to people like you.


A few months later, they were tucked tidily away in an expensive house by the Chugach foothills, Laurel maneuvering her BMW
along potholed roads and bitching about the general lack of basic traffic law obedience. I initially envisioned the two of
us drinking tea and sharing pieces of our lives, like sisters in Hallmark Cards commercials, but that never happened. Laurel
remained as unapproachable as ever, though she did soften toward Jay-Jay. Oh, the way my sister changes when Jay-Jay is around!
Her face lightens, and the lines around her mouth even out. Laurel and Junior don’t have children. Laurel says she can’t,
but I think she has willed her body not to reproduce, frightened as she is of the idea of pregnancy. And labor! Blood and
sweat, screams and flailing legs: Laurel would die before she would allow herself to be seen like that.


I could go on, but writing about someone who is so goddamned perfect is like drinking too much. At first you feel brave and
superior, but as soon as the alcohol hits your blood, you flatten out and realize that underneath it all, you just want to
sit on a barstool and sob.


Monday, Sept. 26

Every Sunday the Oprah Giant posts a blog to give us poor diary-​writing slobs hope. This week’s was about loss. “You can’t see the center of the pond when the water is muddied with regret,” she
wrote. “Make a list of all the things you lost—socks and pets and that teacup from Aunt Mabel. Draw little hearts beside them.
Treasure them! Love them! They’re not lost, they’re still hiding inside your heart.”


I snorted as I read this. List the things I’ve lost—please! What exactly was her point?

But then I remembered the winter after the divorce, when the snow and darkness settled in and I felt so alone that I called
Laurel in the middle of the night. It was all too much, I sobbed. I couldn’t take it.


“I’ll come over Saturday and take Jay-Jay,” she offered.

“Thanks,” I sniffed. But it wasn’t a babysitter I needed as much as hope. I wanted someone to offer me a slice of hope, the
way Gramma used to offer me a slice of lemon meringue pie, the middle shiny with promise.


“I’ll never love anyone again,” I cried dramatically.

There was a long pause. “Love isn’t what you expect,” Laurel finally said. “It doesn’t necessarily make you happy.”

I ignored the implication that my sister’s marriage wasn’t working. I was too selfish, too mired in my own pain to acknowledge
anyone else’s.


“I’ll never meet anyone like Barry,” I continued. Now that he was gone, I forgave him his faults and remembered only the good.
What had I done? Why had I left such a prince of a man?


“He chewed with his mouth open,” Laurel reminded me. “He hung dead animal heads on the walls. And remember your wedding? He
wore hiking boots with his tux.”


“Those are no reasons to leave a good man,” I cried.

Laurel snorted in disgust. “What exactly about him do you miss?”

“He loved to eat,” I said. “He was a great hiking partner. He had a nice furry chest.”

“So get a dog,” Laurel snapped.

Enter Killer Bee. Like everything else around here, she isn’t much to look at. Part beagle and part Labrador retriever, her
eyes are slightly crossed, her tail bent, her coat speckled with outlandish white spots, the largest one in the perfect shape
of Florida, right down to the panhandle. Killer is afraid of loud noises, cats, small dogs, kites, the garbage truck, and
plastic bags blowing in the wind. She also has a nervous stomach and throws up if anyone yells too long, too loud, or too
often.


But Killer is loyal to a fault, patrolling the hallway at night, her toenails clicking on the floor like a demented sentry.

We rescued Killer Bee from the back of a pickup truck at the supermarket. Jay-Jay took one look at the squirming puppies and
refused to budge.


“Can we get one, huh, Mom, huh?” He asked for so little, how could I possibly refuse? I gave the man a twenty and we drove
home with that puppy licking Jay-Jay’s face. He named her the next day, after watching an advertisement for a movie about
killer bees swarming a Texas town.


I have to admit that through all the housebreaking, the chewed-up shoes and coats, and the torn upholstery, it helped having
another body in the house. Nights after Jay-Jay is asleep and I pace the dark living room, it’s reassuring to know that anytime
I want, I can reach my hand out and she’ll trot over and greet me. She’ll always be happy to see me.


  

Jay-Jay wasn’t happy to see me when I picked him up from his after-school program this afternoon.

“You smell,” he hissed, glaring at my grease-splattered uniform. “The other mothers don’t wear stupid aprons.”


Well, what could I say? The other mothers had neat hair and I’m-a-respected-member-of-the-community clothes and wedding rings
that flashed when they waved their hands. Jay-Jay attends the gifted program in a school located in an upper-middle-class
neighborhood, and while he’s too young to understand the significance of class structure, he’s smart enough to decipher the
nuances. He knows it’s not good to have a mother who works as a waitress and has rightly decided that this must be my fault.
Once we got in the car, though, he was more civil, and by the time we hit the first traffic light, he was explaining a science
class fiasco.


“Julia was supposed to only count the green colors,” he said. “But she didn’t, Mom. She counted everything but green.” Jay-Jay shook his head. “We came in last. It took us forever. We had to recount every single green.”


I had no idea what he was talking about but I nodded my head. I was looking forward to a