The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold

Chapter Four

11 chapter four By the age of four, Lucy had denounced birthday parties , peacefully intuiting them to be selfish events— she asked instead to celebrate her parents and sisters and brother on June 1 every year. At the age of five she wrote a letter to Mr and Mrs Gold.It read,“Thank you for your cooperation. No Gifts or Contributions.” The phrases had been painstakingly copied (it took several hours) from a letter she found on Mrs Gold’s desk from the Temple, inviting her to either a meeting, a funeral, or a bat mitzvah. (Mr Gold was an atheist, while Mrs Gold had tentative leanings; in later years, this reversed for reasons that still are not known.) In addition to finding the garish festivities of birthday parties a sort of moral embarrassment, Lucy believed she had already gathered enough gifts of consequence in her life—she felt no need for further attachments to toys; those she had were so beloved and spectacular, so shamefully in excess already. In a metal trunk at the foot of her bed—the very same trunk Mrs Gold had taken to camp when she was young, which either was or was not a camp where you might have been killed—Lucy kept her 12 favorite belongings.This trunk that resembled the treasure chest of a pirate, and also evoked danger: Lucy did not want to add to its collection. Among the items in there: a sewing kit, a plastic doll, a knitted skirt. The sewing kit and plastic doll had been Merry’s first and then Ketzia’s, and were rather broken. The sewing kit held needles and thread all tangled in a glinting mess. This treacherous bundle was itself rolled up inside the knitted skirt, which Grandma had made. (Yellow ,pom-poms,and fringe.) The doll,naked and dirty,had eyelids but under, no eyes; by the time she’d been passed down to Lucy, they’d either fallen out or been removed, possibly during a game her sisters played called The Punish , a game about which they both spoke with great fervor and pride. The missing eyes of the doll did bother Lucy, so for her ninth birthday she reluctantly and with feelings of guilt did ask for a present: that the doll-eyes be fixed.Mrs Gold took the pretty, unnamed, and blind creature to the Doll Hospital in the town center. With Lucy at her elbow, she had, by telephone, arranged for an operation. The delivery and operation took place while Lucy was at school, but the Doll Hospital was very real; this was not just a story. Everyone in town knew about the Doll Hospital. It had brought the town very great fame at one time. But the Doll Hospital botched the procedure (so rare of those well-trained and fine dolly doctors! so unexpected!): the doll stared malevolently, not sweetly, somehow, when it returned home, by mail in a carton. Oh, our dear and resourceful Lucy! Ever the optimist here. 13 Using her magic,Lucy pronounced the doll dead. Then the sewing kit simply came in handy to sew the lids down. The poncho came in handy to wrap the doll corpse; and the pirate’s chest came in handy as the doll’s coffin. Came in handy, thought Lucy with a shudder—what a terrible phrase. (Perhaps just the word handy was wrong.) Thus, on the eve of June 1, after no birthday cake—for none was requested—and no birthday song—Lucy lay in bed in a pink flannel nightgown, rubbing the cold soles of her feet together beneath the pink coverlet. A slight breeze blew the orange gauze curtains ajar, letting some moonlight into the room. In the pink-orange haze of her mind, Lucy thought of the doll. And Lucy Lucy Lucy she heard—the sound of a breeze sliding in through the window, scented with lilac. Her little body gave a small, floral shudder. From then on she was enchanted, you see. ...