barbies

Mae died. I'm not sure when. It doesn't really matter. It hardly mattered that she lived at all. I was only one of many who cared for her, who lifted her from bed to chair and back again with the help of many other paid people. But I cared about her. She was odd. It was her psychiatric diagnosis: Funny Looking Kid Syndrome. Look it up. It sounds awful, but it seems that the endless barbs of the young and insensitive take their toll. Her appearance, however, did not keep her father from fucking her, or shipping her off to the nuthouse when she delivered an 8 pound tumor at the age of 11. Oh, I know I'm not supposed to tell these stories. But they are an enduring part of the medical record and I just don't want them to die with her. Who else will tell them? She was sterilized. Probably for the best.

To look at her was to view the work of an unskilled sculptor-- a haphazard face, eyes too wide set and off by several degrees, big and round and accusing. Her hair, thin feathers around her face, had no color really at all. Her body didn't work very well. I don't know that it ever did. Like so many, she found comfort in food, in the food from her own metal tray and the trays of nearby, less observant, inmates. Rolls of Mae spread around her like shade, and as she grew ill toward the end and the fat began to go away, and she began the long process of disappearing, her skin simply stayed, stretched like pizza dough over bones as pourous as sandstone, subject to gravity like the rest of us.

The thing is.... she had this Barbie collection. Looking back, it seems unusually unkind to have purchased Barbies for Mae. Shit--it seems mean to buy them for me. It seems mean to make them at all, but that's not the point. I wonder what happened to them -- those skinny dolls, the gold standard of body types. They must have been worth a mint. She had boxes of perfect, unwrapped barbies, guilt presents no doubt from dear old dad. But I don't want to focus on the legends, the hospital stories, handed down like nasty treasure from one shift to the next, morsels of sexual myth that keep the interest of underpaid caregivers, and which may or may not be true. They seem true. They could be true. She did give birth at 11. They did call it a tumor. She came to the nuthouse and stayed... long before the trend in therapy was in full swing. She grew up there. Then, we brought her to live with us.

Living with Mae, which is what you do if you run a residential unit, was sketchy. Its funny. In her chart -- the location of pure truth-- it said things like: suspicious... does not trust caregivers. Hoarding behavior. Well, no shit. What they don't say is that the people who come out of those places, those warehouses for the undead, are crazy if they aren't suspicious, if they don't want to keep all of their worldly goods in plain sight. She wasn't nice -- that much is true. But she was consistent. She didn't like anybody. We coined the word "snarky" to describe her, then, when State surveyors said it wasn't a word, we found it in a british dictionary. She was snarky. She embodied snarkiness.

Oh hell. Mae is dead. It's not that I wish she wasn't. I wouldn't have wished her life on anyone. I guess I just want to say out loud, in the only way I know to say things out loud, that she lived, and in the living, enriched my life.

I just wonder what happened to the barbies.