Ship of Dolls
Authors: Shirley Parenteau
Portland, Oregon
Late November, 1926
“I
dare you. I double-dare you.” Beneath the tweed cap that matched his belted coat, Jack Harmon’s brown eyes glowed. Grandma said he had the makings of a good-looking man. Eleven-year-old Lexie Lewis couldn’t see it. Jack was a neighbor and a classmate, but she didn’t trust him.
“Go in and hold that doll — the one that’s going to the girls’ festival in Japan.” Jack motioned toward the school’s front door and the hall that led to the sixth-grade room. “Then come back and, to prove you did it, tell me if the doll’s dress has buttons in the back.”
Lexie hesitated, watching others from school splashing through the rain on their way home. A motorcar rumbled past, making them jump back from flying water. Grandpa said this winter wasn’t as wet as winters were when he was a boy, but it was wet enough for Lexie. It rained even more here in Portland than it did in Seattle. Maybe it seemed that way because she didn’t belong here. She belonged in Seattle with Mama.
“Miss Tompkins won’t let anyone touch her,” she said finally. As if Jack didn’t already know that.
“So what’s she gonna do if she catches you? Cut off your hand?” He leaned against the school’s front-porch rail. “You helped bake cakes and stuff to buy the doll. Why shouldn’t you pick her up?”
The class was still collecting pennies to send the doll to Japan for a girls’ festival called Hinamatsuri. Classes and clubs all over America were preparing dolls, thousands of them. Lexie’s class had voted to name their doll Emily Grace, but none of the students were allowed to touch her.
Lexie shook her head. “Miss Tompkins doesn’t want dirty fingers smudging the doll and her fancy dress.”
“Are your hands dirty?”
“No!”
“So you’re just scared.”
“I am not!”
“Then here’s your chance. Miss Tompkins left. Go in and pick up the doll. I dare you!”
Mama would have never refused a dare. But Lexie wasn’t living with Mama now. She lived with her grandparents, and this was the kind of impulse Grandma was determined to root out of her.
Reason enough to do it, Lexie decided. She pulled open the door and walked quickly down the hall, but she wasn’t just taking Jack’s dare. Miss Tompkins wasn’t being fair. And neither was Grandma.
The last students hurried past on their way out of the building. She hoped Jack was right, that Miss Tompkins had gone, too, back to the room she rented in the boardinghouse Jack’s mother ran. Carefully, Lexie cracked open the door to the sixth-grade classroom, with its green paper wreath decorated with red glass balls.
The motion of the door made the balls clink together. She drew a sharp breath. What if someone heard? For a long moment, she stood still, every muscle tight, while she listened. The only sound was rain dripping from the eaves outside.
She peeked into the room, smelling chalk dust. Someone had slapped blackboard erasers together to clean them. And not long ago.
Again, she worried.
If Miss Tompkins is still here, what can I say to explain coming back?
She couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t be a lie. And she couldn’t say Jack had dared her to touch the doll. That would get them both in trouble.
She pushed the door open wider, an inch at a time, until she could see the entire room. Her breath whooshed out in a sigh of relief. No one was there. She hurried past the still-warm woodstove to the teacher’s desk at the front.
The wooden box holding Emily Grace with her wicker suitcase was no longer on top of Miss Tompkins’s desk. Lexie went around the desk to look at the closed drawers, picturing the box in her mind. Would it fit in a drawer? Or was it too big?
After an uneasy glance toward the hall, she tried the large bottom drawer. It slid out but held only notebooks. She closed it quickly, then remembered the storage closet at the back of the room.
She darted over. The round glass knob turned in her hand. The door squeaked open. After another glance toward the hall, she slipped inside and reached up to pull the chain to the lightbulb.
No one was going to cut off her hand, but if she was caught, she could expect a good scolding. Miss Tompkins never used the paddle the way some teachers did, but Grandma might hear about it. Grandma had strong ideas about proper behavior.
Where was Emily Grace? Boxes and stacks of books and papers crowded the shelves, along with a few old slates for writing. The box with the doll was not among them.
“She took Emily Grace home so nobody would touch her!” The words burst from Lexie. She could almost see Miss Tompkins leaving the school with the box under one arm. “And Jack must have known that. The skunk!”
His dare was one more way to get rid of her. Jack would do almost anything to avoid walking from school with her and getting teased by his friends. In the three months since she’d moved here from Seattle to live with her grandparents, Jack’s mother and Grandma Lewis had insisted they walk together. They seemed to think one of those fast-moving motorcars would run right over her without Jack along.
As if she’d run in front of an automobile after what had happened to Papa.
Lexie took a deep breath, turned out the light in the storeroom, and walked toward the front porch. As she neared the open door, a girl’s voice said clearly, “Don’t tell Lexie Lewis.”
Lexie moved nearer. Louise Wilkins stood on the porch with her friend Alma Miller, whose father worked in Mr. Wilkins’s department store.
“You know how she is,” Louise added, “always trying to be the best. Anyway, it’s a secret. Nobody’s supposed to know yet.”
“You’ll win that trip to San Francisco, Louise,” Alma said, as if her father’s job depended on her agreeing with his boss’s daughter. “I just know you’ll write the best letter, the one chosen to go to Japan with Emily Grace.”
“But don’t tell Lexie,” Louise warned again.
Letters? All the girls in the class were writing letters, hoping theirs would be chosen to go with the doll. None of the boys were interested in a festival just for girls, even one far away in Japan. When Miss Tompkins had asked if any of the boys would like to write a letter, Ollie Johnson had made a joke of the kind they might write: “‘She’ll be a good citizen. She won’t spit or make rude noises at the table.’” All the boys laughed and began making noises. Miss Tompkins rang her handbell loudly for silence and didn’t invite them again.
Nothing had been said about a trip to San Francisco, though. Lexie knew she wasn’t likely to learn anything from Louise and Alma. Those two had made moving to Portland, Oregon — away from Mama — even harder than it had to be. Still, she had to ask. Lexie stalked onto the porch. “Don’t tell me what?”
Both girls looked up. Louise tossed back her perfectly bobbed hair. “You don’t need to know, Dog Breath.”
Dog Breath.
She was never going to live down eating a cookie after Jack had let a dog lick it. When she’d learned the truth and rinsed her mouth again and again in the fountain, Jack had walked home without her. Jack Harmon had a lot to answer for.
“Why would you care what we’re talking about?” Alma asked. “You’re not going to San Francisco. Your own mother doesn’t want you — ouch!”
Louise must have pinched her for mentioning San Francisco. Lexie wanted to pinch her again for her nasty comment about Mama, but decided Alma wasn’t worth the trouble. Could it be true? Could the girl who wrote the best letter be going with the doll to the send-off party in San Francisco? Well, so what if it was true? She didn’t want to go south to San Francisco. That was the wrong direction. She wanted to go north, back to Seattle and Mama.
“You’re right,” Lexie told Alma. “I don’t care.” She walked past, swishing her skirt the way Mama did when ladies raised their noses while she passed, making sure they saw her not caring.
“It’s just a rumor, anyway,” Louise called. “Nobody knows if it’s true.”
“Like everything else you say,” Lexie shot back as she headed toward her grandparents’ house.
She didn’t care that someone might go to San Francisco when thousands of dolls left for Japan to make friends with children there, but she did care about everything else.
She shouldn’t be here living with strict grandparents. She cared about that a lot. She should be with Mama, happy and laughing and being
“the two of us together, kiddo.”
Mama liked to say she was a true modern flapper, that she and her friends had fun without worrying much about rules. That was almost funny, since Mama had sent Lexie to grandparents who believed that following rules was the only way to live.
But Mama said two years was long enough to be a widow. Lexie could almost see her snapping her fingers, her eyes sparkling while her love for life shimmered like sunbeams around her. The next thing Lexie knew, Mama married Toby, who played saxophone in the jazz club where she sang. And Toby said a little girl shouldn’t live with parents who worked all night and slept all day.
“So here I am,” Lexie said aloud. She slapped one hand against the flat-topped gatepost at the end of her grandparents’ walk, then paused to add with a rush of defiance, “But I won’t stay.”
She took care to scrape her shoes on the mat before opening the back door. Grandma didn’t like dirt tracked over her clean linoleum floor. When Lexie stepped inside, Grandma looked up from the kitchen stove and wiped her hands on the big apron she wore over her dress.