The Barbie Incident

I am told I was a pain in the neck as a baby. I, for some reason, thought 9 P.M. was a perfectly acceptable time to wake up and play. For hours. And, if mom and dad weren’t willing to go along with my night-owl tactics, I would scream from my crib. When the choice between A.M. and P.M. Kindergarten presented itself, it was pretty obvious which group I belonged in.
My brother, Brian, is twenty-two months younger than me, but he was widely regarded as the angel baby of the family. He ate and he slept (when he was supposed to). He didn’t cry or fuss.

Luckily, I came first, and my parents didn’t know any better.


When I was eleven years old, my mother led me downstairs to our dimly lit basement, which had recently become a large storage unit (housing all the Christmas decorations that wouldn’t quite fit in the crawlspace, and all the childhood toys my brother and I insisted we were too old to play with) telling me she had to show me something. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, even though I begged repeatedly, almost annoyingly. I thought she had gotten me a present, and she didn’t want my brother to see her give it to me. We had barely walked in the front door after coming home from school. I sashayed through the basement in my plaid, catholic schoolgirl jumper and saddle shoes as she brought me across the mold brown carpet and through the maze of boxes sharpied in my dad’s unmistakable scrawl: “ORNAMENTS,” “ANNALEES,” “BOARD GAMES,” and (more) “ORNAMENTS.” I never understood why he always wrote in all capital letters. I also never understood why, even though we had more than enough ornaments to cover the Christmas tree, he continued to buy new ones every year. Eventually, we reached the opposite end of the basement, near the escape hatch window, and stopped in front of a dresser that had become the new home for my barbies, since I had recently become both too old and too cool to play with them.

But there they were. Dozens of small, tanned bodies, dismembered. The appendages lay jammed into two dresser drawers. Their blond, decapitated heads and beady blue eyes, still wide open, looked up at me in their typical naivety, unconcerned (or, obviously, unaware) about the absence of their arms and legs, lacking curiosity about the disappearance of their breasts, unembarrassed by their uncharacteristic nakedness. I pulled one, then two, then three heads out of the drawers by strands of braided, pony-tailed, or knotted hair and examined their broken necks. The heads had not been simply popped off, clean, quick and easy, but severed, perhaps cracked, unevenly, with no chance of reattachment. The midsections sounded like baby rattles, small pieces of their leftover necks dropped into their stomachs, knocking up against always empty body cavities. Perfectly sculpted legs, never plagued by cellulite, were rendered un-walkable, bent backward in 45-degree angles at the knees. Arms that once waved happily from stylish sports cars, adorned with clinking, decorative, silver bangle bracelets and hands that once proudly locked with those of her boyfriend (or was he her husband?), or kid sister, would never experience these social delicacies again.

Moments later, I found shreds of clothing, bits of lace and cotton poly-blend, in various shades of pink, covering the bottom of each drawer like bedding in a hamster cage. Miniature patent leather handbags were missing their handles, and stilettos were, all of a sudden, arched flats.

Bright pink collector’s edition boxes that had, previously, remained unopened were torn open at the tops like cereal boxes, the clear plastic on the display windows slashed open with a child-proof scissors.

The cars and homes, however, remained untouched.

The look on my mother’s face asked if I had been the one responsible for the massacre. After all, it wouldn’t have been the first (and certainly wouldn’t be the last) time I had attempted to hide some kind of character damaging evidence from my parents. When I was eight years old, I hid a multiplication math test in my underwear drawer beneath neatly folded piles of bikini-cut jockeys. I had miserably failed the test, and I was required to get one of my parents to sign it. Rather than bring my failure to my parents’ attention, I hid it, in hopes that it would disappear on its own. But my avoidant, scheming eight-year-old mind forgot that Mom not only did all my laundry, but also put it away in my dressers for me. I’m sure my cover-up only lasted for a couple days, until Mom sat me down with the test and I made, at last, a tear-filled confession: guilty.

But this time, she didn’t say anything. She just stood by, watching me pilfer through the wreckage searching for survivors. Eventually, my face flushed and I slammed the dresser drawers and ran through the maze of Christmas boxes and dashed up the stairs and went screaming through the house looking for Brian.


We didn’t have family dinnertime very often at my house. I don’t say this to evoke any kind of sympathy, or to insinuate that my parents didn’t think that family time was important. Brian and I were just very involved in our activities. He spent five out of seven nights a week playing hockey, and I spent the same amount of time at my dance studio. Dad acted as Brian’s chauffer, and Mom was mine. Suffice it to say we collected a lot of McDonald’s happy meal toys along the way. I think my parents still have them, boxed up in the basement or attic somewhere.

But before my parents packed them away, Brian and I bartered with them. We created a game called “Pass it Under.” The rules of the game were simple. We closed the door to my bedroom. I sat behind the door inside my room, and Brian sat in the hallway. We’d empty out our bottomless junk drawers filled with happy meal toys, prizes for a job well done from our grade school principal, junk we had won at the indoor carnival at Church, and each create a pile of stuff to “trade.” Certainly, it would have been too simple for us to sit side-by-side elsewhere in the house and trade, the way little boys trade baseball cards, or the way children swap snacks in the lunchroom. There was something more fun, more surprising about sliding treasures through the crack between the bottom of the door and the top of the brown, fuzzy carpet.

Brian would start by stuffing a small trinket or toy under my bedroom door, and I would pick it up, examine it closely, and select a trinket from my give-away pile to respond with. If this process took too long (in Brian’s estimation) he would clear his throat and announce, as if addressing an audience, “Pass it Under!” We would continue on in this fashion, until Brian would start trying to give me the same junk I had rejected for trade the last time we played. Sometimes he would respond by opening my door and tossing the toys inside, other times we would jam our fingers from pushing at the same object in opposite directions at the same time. It never occurred to us to throw the cheap, plastic toys that we didn’t want in the garbage, instead of trying to pawn them off on each other.

And wouldn't you know, I have grown to be a woman who avoids conflict at all costs. I don’t like confrontation. At parties, I shrink out of the room when people get into an argument. I don’t even particularly like serious face-to-face conversations. When asked a question I feel uncomfortable answering, I become increasingly interested in the patterns of the tiles on the floor, the cracks in the ceiling, or the clothing of pedestrians on the sidewalk. I make a funny comment. I notice that it’s starting to rain, or snow, or that the sun is coming out. I do everything but answer directly. I swear by my caller-ID, and most of my incoming calls go straight to voice mail. My preferred mode of communication is e-mail. I enjoy the immediacy of text messaging and instant messaging. I do everything possible to avoiding seeing or hearing an in-the-moment kind of reaction. I’ve been told, on more than one occasion, that I’m emotionally closed off, and I’m only verbally straightforward after a glass of wine, or two, or whatever it takes to break down the walls. I'm (still) hiding.


When I finally found Brian, he was sitting quietly on his beanbag chair in his bedroom playing Gameboy in the dark. My face was hot, red, and stinging from the tears rolling down my cheeks. I flicked on the light.

A few minutes later, our mother was standing behind me in Brian’s doorframe. Very few words managed to escape from my mouth. I was too upset and angry to form complete sentences. It was a preview into the future, and proof of how difficult it would be for me to communicate directly later in life, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. But I do remember throwing a mangled Barbie leg at him in my fury.

“How could you do this?!”

“I don’t know,” he said. But he didn’t attempt to deny it, and there was really nothing else for him to say.

“Some of those were collector dolls!” I stomped forward, but mom grabbed me by the hand before I got much further. I was shrieking, sobbing, and thrashing my arms back and forth. “I could have passed them along to my own daughter someday! And you, you just destroyed them!”

It couldn’t have been the fact that I might someday have a daughter and might someday pass along my doll collection to her that made me so upset. Perhaps it was, I imagine, my brother’s single-handed destruction of an aspect of my childhood through an attack on my dolls.


Years later, after Brian and I had gone away to college and moved to different states, we only saw each other for select holidays, obligatory trips home for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter. From time to time, on car trips, traveling to visit family, I bring up the “Barbie Incident.”

I still ask him what provoked him to destroy my Barbies the way he did, hoping 14 years has been enough time for him to finally let it out. He still won’t answer. He says he doesn’t remember. He says I must have done something to one of his things, maybe even accidentally. He says he was nine, and it was a long time ago. He jams his iPod ear buds back in his ears and looks out the window, responding to numerous text messages as they come in.
Brian lets all of my calls go to voice mail, and (sometimes) calls me back after he listens to the message. But we do e-mail. And these days, both of us stay up all night.