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Memory's Plaything
by Amy Nemecek Mimi adored her girls. Since Jack died, she sometimes forgot to change her clothes or comb her hair. But she always made sure her girls looked their best. She brushed their hair every morning. Her knarry fingers fumbled to fasten their miniature bodice buttons and tiny shoe buckles. Mimi talked to them constantly. Sometimes they talked to her. Mimi gave her girls pretty names like Shirley and Charlotte, Maureen and Helen. Some days Mimi had the feeling she once had a pretty name too. Always it played on the overcast edges of her mind. But the grandkids called her Mimi, and Sunday school students called her Mimi, and everyone else followed suit. She wished she could remember her name before children, before this small town, before Jack even. Jack. He’d been gone twenty-some years. Or was it thirty? A heart attack. Or maybe cancer. Still, she had her girls. They stayed by her side since the hip replacement last March…or was it the year before that? She’d have to ask her daughter during their weekly phone chat. Mimi winced as she slid toward the front of Jack’s tattered easy chair, convinced she could still smell his aftershave all these years later. Using the armrests, she heaved herself up on the third try, shuffled into the kitchen, began fumbling for her car keys. Her children insisted she shouldn’t drive, and one son even took away her keys. But Mimi hid spare sets all over the house. If she could just remember where. Today she found a set under a flower pot in the kitchen cupboard. She needed to pick up her mail, and the post office was only a stone’s throw from her door. Besides, it would do the girls good to get out for a bit, though carrying them to the car was becoming harder. She half sat, half fell into the driver’s seat, then arranged her girls on the bench seat beside her. Mimi backed out of the garage and barely scraped the passenger-side fender against the weathered trim. No matter. It wouldn’t show much. She turned the wheel and let the car idle along her street. When she came to the two-way blinker, she braked to an almost stop and glanced as far as she could both ways before pulling onto Main Street. A horn blared from somewhere to the right. “My stars, Helen! Folks are so impatient these days,” Mimi fretted as she pressed the gas pedal. A splash of blue diverted her attention to the sidewalk where a little girl skipped parallel to the road. She looked like a doll Mimi owned as a child. Blonde curls bounced with every hop. Navy smocking puckered around the middle of her sky-blue Polly Flinders dress. “Little girls don’t wear nice things like that anymore, Shirley.” Mimi tsked. “Such a shame. Where’s her mother? She shouldn’t be out by herself!” The child didn’t even glance at Mimi’s compact green station wagon, just kept on skipping. Mimi took her foot off the gas and angled the car toward a blue handicapped space out front of the post office. The little girl stopped skipping and bent to adjust a cotton anklet, retied a shoelace with concentration. Mimi’s foot found the pedal and gently applied the brakes. The car kept moving. “That’s odd. Remind me to call the mechanic this week, Charlotte, and get those checked.” In the meantime, she pressed harder, worried her tires would hit the curb. The little girl straightened between Mimi and the post office door. Porcelain eyes grew round. The engine revved higher and tires slapped concrete. Blonde curls and blue smocking disappeared as the grill of Mimi’s car ripped through the red brick façade. Window glass shattered and the front end crumpled. Rear wheels spun freely, but the wall of sturdy PO boxes stopped forward progress. Mimi’s girls sprawled on the tan vinyl seat. A single rag doll figure lay behind and to the right of the car, legs akimbo and blue dress torn. Mimi could hear panicked wails, but she couldn’t open the door to reach her, to comfort her. A second of clarity. She knew dolls don’t cry, felt the keening in her own throat, understood some things could not be mended. Mimi gathered her girls to her chest and rocked them until a white sheet obscured memory’s face. |
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