The first thing Grandma says when she enters Jen’s room
is not a thank you for giving up her bed,
or a compliment about how neat everything looks,
but instead a shrill, “They’re demonic!”
Jen follows her trembling, pointing finger
to the two Cabbage Patch dolls slumped in the corner.
Jen hasn’t played with them in years; in fact,
they were buried under a mound of clothes
until just this morning, when Mom reminded her to clean.
Jen hustles the dolls into the closet now, but Grandma
keeps muttering, side-eyeing Jen like she’s evil incarnate.
They haven’t seen each other in years, and Jen
is mortified that Grandma has gotten the wrong impression.
Grandma brings up the dolls again at supper that night,
waving aside Mom’s insistence that they’re only toys,
repeating, “That’s how the devil gets into a child,”
as Mom chuckles nervously and attempts to change
the subject. Mom spends a lot of the next few weeks
rolling her eyes behind Grandma’s back,
taking Jen aside and reminding her that she shouldn’t
listen to anything Grandma says, that sometimes
people go funny as they get older and you just
have to put up with them. Jen is horrified by this explanation,
pictures all the good draining out of herself one day,
leaving her a cruel husk who finds fault with everything.
For the entire visit Jen does her best
to please her grandmother while simultaneously trying
to ignore the woman’s endless litany of complaints.
She is not successful in either task, and her failure
at the first serves to fuel the woman’s grievances.
Grandma’s words seep beneath Jen’s skin,
turning every thought into a doubt. Maybe
her shirt is too revealing, maybe
her music is too loud, maybe
her tummy is too big, maybe
she is lazy, gluttonous, slovenly, sinful,
not a good girl.
When Grandma finally leaves, Jen spends the afternoon
trying to revert her room, changing the sheets, blasting
her music, scattering clothes around the floor. She considers
leaving the Cabbage Patch dolls in the closet, or even packing
them away in the attic—she’s too old for them, and they were
never her favorite, even when she was small—but instead she
takes them out, sits them on the floor, digs out her old toy food,
and has a party. Plastic cupcakes, plastic ice cream,
plastic smiles from (she really has to think to remember
their names) Melora and Tiffany. She squeezes a fake cupcake
and has a sudden memory of sitting here with Grandma—
same food, same dolls, but also real juice and cookies and laughter—
and she can’t bring herself to go ask Mom if it was real
or just a devil-sent dream of some should-have-been moment
that never actually was.
INSTANT NOODLES 