Emma is four, just old enough to stand on her tippy toes, brace herself against the door and turn the little nipple of the lock to the right, thankful that it doesn’t make a sound. Slowly she slides her back down the door’s surface, the high pile carpet tickling her bare legs and feet. From her post she surveys the playroom, bright blue and expansive: everything under the popcorn sky is hers and hers alone, and about this she becomes sentimental, wishing that she could greet every object wistfully with the decorum it deserves, hello dollhouse, hello bookshelf, hello bins. But there is no time for that.
In her hand is the purple plastic knife from the pretend kitchen set on the screened porch, whose previous use was to separate two halves of Velcroed food, something which was pleasurable enough in the way all textures, all resistance, all parting is pleasurable, yes, the crunch of the material, the bringing of the plate and the fruit and the purple knife to the smiling face that looks at her and pretends to eat it — but this food, this parting, is no longer enough. It became not enough because it did not get to the heart of the thing, which was true cleavage, which was cleavage that could not be stuck back together.
Recently, around the non-velcro plastic food, flexible and pliant between palm and fingers, Emma had developed new and unexplainable urges. She was well old enough to be able to distinguish plastic from reality; even pretending to eat the food had begun to feel a little hollow. Rather than eating, she wanted to open it up, to see the empty interior, to feel the fraying and splitting of the plastic, to put her fingers in the smooth, once hidden cavity where fingers are not supposed to go.
One afternoon, for an hour, she gnawed at the top of a plastic pear that was just squishy enough to be feasibly rent. By the time the hole emerged, Emma’s teeth hurt and her gums were bleeding, but the core of the pear was smooth and dark and tearing it open to completion filled her with a sense of accomplishment no amount of you’re not a baby anymore – or – to take it all, all away, I’m going to – could snuff out.
Emma thinks about this, about the pear, about the hole and a shiver of frisson rolls through her. In the playroom, now, as then, she does not care about the potential consequences of her actions, only about the pressing need to perform them as quickly and effectively as possible, to completion, because she is running out of time – little time, nipple lock time, and big time, grasped as an undefined and therefore frightful arc, one beginning with Mommy at the doctor, the pictures on the screen. A little bean in a quivering triangular field, lollipop from the jar jammed in her cheek as she listened: look, there he is. Tight round belly skin, like a ball, like the marbled plastic ball in the yard, but when you press on it, it causes pain, shooed off the lap, sent away, and soon he will be out.
Since, she hasn’t been well. To the doctor three times. Wetting the bed, doing it on purpose yet unable to stop herself, pressing her hands there, nothing. An encroaching fear of a silence that will never end, of a cry that is never heeded, and sometimes this fear bears down on her so strongly that only howling for help can abate it, and, later, embarrassed, she has to lie and say that she fell or that she had a bad dream in part because she has no other words for what is wrong. The dark becomes unfriendly again.
Often, she does have bad dreams. She has a dream that the house is on fire and that she is the only survivor, survivor and perpetrator somehow, as though she started the fire by being afraid of fire. Several times she’s begged her mother to put on the fire safety tape with the cartoon dalmatian, with only some success because even her burgeoning aesthetic sensibilities can pick up on the fact that it’s not a good movie, that it’s repetitive, that the songs are bad, which makes her angry because she needs it. Stop, drop, and roll! Ya gotta –
The purple plastic knife from the Velcro fruit, just thick and just short enough to use as leverage…she makes her calculations again, rooted in the length of her arms and the strength of her grip. Then, with that same wistfulness, she attempts one more to survey, to recover the room, but these feelings of ownership, of belonging, begin to feel forced, crumble by the moment, become somehow irretrievable.
The agony she feels, the agony she muffles in the crook of her arm, it is so terrible because, being that she is small, there are people who should be able to take her pain away, but now she’s not so sure, now she’s not so sure that someone is going to pick her up or take her out of her sorrow, out of the burning house or that the house will stop burning, and even so, even so, she doesn’t even know what’s wrong – maybe it will be legible to them, but how can it be if they never come?
What is most unbearable is that the culprit of this agony is her mother, her own mother who is doing this to her, causing her an anguish that can only be abated if Mommy does the right thing, if she does the right thing and then everything will go back to the way it was, one bed in the room, no blue everything in the house, no cakes and cards, no Emma and. The words I’m sorry, spoken in her mother’s voice, gather inside her mind’s ears like morning dew, trickle down her throat with her tears. I will take care of it. I will replace it. I will – it can’t be.
Emma goes to the box of barbies and takes the knife in her hand, searching for the ones whose heads are not in sockets so that she can pry them off with the knife, hold them up to the light of the ceiling fan and peer inside. But there is nothing there, not even anything she can stick her finger into, pull apart. She shakes them and beats them against the floor, but nothing comes out, just like how nothing comes out when she braces her weight against the doll’s torso and pops off her leg, her fingers feeling the smooth crevice of the empty joint, which, too, reveals nothing, no way into the belly where the baby could be.
Where is it? Emma begins to panic, covers her mouth with her hands, overwhelmed from without by the pressure to cry. Footfall, footfall. She seizes on the stuffed animals in the corner, a dragon and a bear. The bear is weaker, the bear she throws herself at and starts gnawing at the thin fabric around the belly, picking away at the seam with her teeth and the knife, only to reveal what she already expected: nothing but stuffing, and now, now she is in despair, rifling through bins, knocking things over, knowing that the footsteps will come, are coming, but it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, nothing in the room, not her, not them, not punishment, not the fear of punishment and, tears rolling down her pink cheeks, the banging on the door, her name muffled by it, she rolls up her dress, presses her hands, the flat of the knife against her belly and screams into the empty room: Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?
Kate Wagner is the architecture critic at The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. She is also the creator of the satirical blog McMansion Hell. She lives in Chicago.
minor literature[s] 