Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang Read online

  At that moment my sister Sloane walked in and announced she wanted a Cabbage Patch, too. I told her to go take a hike in a fucking lake. There was no way she was going to get in on this action. We'd be lucky if my dad came back from the store with the limb of a Cabbage Patch doll, never mind two complete ones.

  "Step off!" I told her. "Go to your room."

  "Shut up, you can't tell me to go to my room. Why don't you go to your room and dry-hump your pillow?"

  "Mom!" I wailed.

  "Girls," my mother interrupted. "Pipe down."

  "You do not need a Cabbage Patch doll," I told Sloane. "You are thirteen. You need to get a grip."

  "If Chelsea's going to get one, then I want one."

  "Sloane, you are a little old for a Cabbage Patch doll," my mother told her.

  "Can we please focus on my doll? Did you get the brown hair with green eyes?"

  "Chelsea, please write it down for me. It sounds very specific. How many different types are there?"

  "Thousands!" I wailed. "I don't want a blonde or anyone with brown eyes. Green eyes. They have ones with two dimples, but I just want one dimple. The ones with two dimples look too fake, and the ones without dimples look like Chucky. This is a very precise assignment. No matter what, Mom, please, please do not screw this up. Under no circumstances are you to come home with a redhead."

  I knew early on about redheads and how they were prone to melanoma. I wasn't about to invest in a child, only to lose her years later to cancer. Plus, I had a young childhood friend named Farrah Linklater, and her whole family had red hair. Thick, unruly red hair that would inevitably end up in one of the dishes they served at dinner. They were like a tribe, an Indian tribe who took up weapons against other single-hair-colored families. Red hair was always suspicious to me, like something made out of synthetic fibers. I imagined that when redheads slept, their hair wove together like the mangrove trees you find in the Florida Keys that grow underwater. They knew they were a minority, and the more consolidated they became, the greater the danger. The only thing I could imagine more suspicious than a regular redhead was a black redhead, but I knew that whatever company was in charge of Cabbage Patch dolls was not nearly progressive enough to throw that at the marketplace.

  Just then my father walked through our front door in his ridiculous rain boots that he wore all year long regardless of the weather. He had three newspapers trapped in his armpit, which I knew meant trouble.

  My father believed that he was a Thornton Wilder type of character and never tired of impressing upon us how important it was to read. He would bring three newspapers home every week for me to peruse--the New York Times, the Boston Globe, because he thought that was a very well-written newspaper, and our local paper, the Star-Ledger. Once a week he would expect me to write a report on my favorite current-events story in each paper. As if in the third grade I gave a shitstain about how Reagan was reaching across party lines or, even worse, whatever 7-Eleven they were remodeling in a neighboring town. These weren't exactly hot topics for third-graders. At that point in my life, I was looking to reach across my own party lines, and the clearest way to do that was with one of these goddamned Cabbage Patch dolls, not an op-ed piece in the New York Times. It never occurred to my father to maybe put down the paper once in a while and actually get busy looking for a legitimate job that might take him out of the house for more than two hours at a time.

  I leaped up from the sofa and announced I felt a bout of diarrhea coming on, which was really the only ailment my father ever took seriously.

  "What did she eat?" he asked my mother.

  "Cat shit," I said, running out of the room. "The kids at school made me eat cat shit today, because I'm wearing jeans from Sears."

  My father believed at the time that reading was the only way for me to succeed in life. "You must not let your mind get weak." He never mentioned anything about not letting your bladder get weak, which turned out to be fortuitous for him and the hundreds of pairs of pants he's ruined since.

  My mother came into my room later to ask how much the dolls were, and when I told her, she told me that my father would not be happy. By this time in my life, I'd had enough of their shenanigans and bargain hunting, and I definitely felt like I had plenty of stored resentment to make a case for myself. I walked into the living room, where my father had parked himself with a corned beef on rye, and stated my case.

  "Here's the deal, guys. I can't go on like this. We can't go on like this. You two are a joke. I am nine years old, trying to make the best out of a situation that is unlike any of my peers'. I have five older brothers and sisters who seem to have fared better than me, mostly because you birthed them when the two of you had a clue as to how to raise a child. I am competing with people in this neighborhood who have access to swing sets, and in-ground pools I can only dream of, and cars that work the first time you try to start them. This isn't a good foundation for the rest of my life, because I will only end up never feeling like I'm enough or of any worth. I will depend on my looks, which will turn me into a shallow, eating-disorder whore who will end up selling her body just so she can buy herself an eternity ring. Reading the Boston Globe is not helping my cause. I can read the Boston Globe when I'm twenty. Right now I need to read Sweet Valley High and watch Family Ties and have sleepovers where we get 'the feeling.' I don't even know what you guys do for a living, which brings me to my next topic: Does either one of you have a job?"

  "What's 'the feeling'?" my father asked.

  "Don't worry about it," my mother interjected to save me. "It's a game they play with peanut butter."

  "That's not the point, Dad. I need a Cabbage Patch doll. They're $49.99, and I need one. Do you copy?"

  "Yes," he said. "I'll go first thing in the morning. You've made your case. Now, take all the papers into your room, and in exchange for one of these lettuce dolls I'd like you to review what you think of Reagan's trickle-down theory."

  "I can tell you my answer to that before reading anything. If it means that people like us are eventually going to get free Cabbage Patch Kids from wealthier Jews in the neighborhood, I'm telling you right now I'm not willing to wait for that leak. I think we already have enough leaks in this house."

  "Would you stop it with the complaining all the time? I told you if you see anything leaking, grab some duct tape and pitch in. Weren't you just talking about an arts-and-crafts class?" he reminded me.

  "Fine, Melvin," I told him, grabbing the paper out of his hand. "But it has to be the one with brown hair, green eyes, no freckles, and one dimple. One dimple! I'm going to write it down for you. No redheads!"

  "What if that's the only kind left, Chelsea? These dolls sound as if they're selling like hotcakes. We can always get a redhead and Mom can color her hair."

  "Their hair is made of yarn, Dad. Okay, this isn't one of your Buick LeSabres that you can just spray-paint another color in the hopes of raising the price an extra hundred and fifty dollars and turning it into a 'classic.' Please get real."

  "All right, enough already, we got it. No redheads."

  Before I retreated to one of the kitchen drawers to retrieve a stained piece of paper that contained some forgotten grocery list that I had probably authored and wrote down the exact description of the doll being demanded, I told them, "And thank you for acknowledging your misstep in having me."

  "Jesus Christ, Sylvia, you'd think she was raising us."

  "Yeah, no fucking kidding," I mumbled on my way to the kitchen.

  The next day at school was torture mixed with excitement. There was a part of me that was hopeful that my father would in fact hold true to his promise. Like a girl in an abusive relationship who hopes that her boyfriend will suddenly see reason and cease and desist with his attacks, I was cautiously optimistic. It was brutal watching everyone at school carrying their Cabbage Patches around, comparing eye color and dimples, who had bangs, who didn't, the birth certificates with their birth weight and full first, middle, and last names.