The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (10 page)

“Wow!” we’d exclaim. “This baby has really taken to you! You would make an excellent mommy for this little one.” The girls would gently stroke the babies, while the mothers would look at us in a state of panic. You could practically read their minds:
Why are you doing this to me? What did I ever do to you?

The other game we invented stemmed from Chad’s memo. Instead of saying, “There’s a wider selection available online,” we had to try and say, “There is a whiter selection available online,” without getting caught or breaking character.

In spite of these games, the situation still depressed me. I remember one mother in particular. She was in her midthirties, with blond hair and a pinched face. When I offered her a Hispanic baby, she looked at me and said, “Oh, come on, we don’t want a dark child—what would people think if Jessica was carrying a dark baby?” She touched my hand and looked into my eyes. “You know what I mean.”

I knew what she was trying to imply: She was saying that since we were both white, I understood her. But what she didn’t know is that while I’m fair-skinned, I’m actually half Mexican and that that doll looked exactly like my sister Tina and my brother Britain. And besides, did she honestly think that if someone saw her daughter carrying a Hispanic baby doll they would think that Juan the gardener had knocked her up?

There were so many things I wanted to say to these mothers. But I needed to keep my job, which meant I had to follow FAO Schwarz’s policy: The customer is always right. So instead of speaking up, I took my hand out from under the pinched-faced woman’s and said, “You are more than welcome to order online, where there is a whiter selection available.”

But this was only half the story.

Technically we hadn’t sold out of all the white babies; technically we still had one left. Nubbins. As a result, when mothers rushed to the adoption center and realized there were only minority babies, they’d immediately notice Nubbins. They’d spot him in our arms, round and pudgy with a head of red hair. He was the answer to their prayers. In their minds they had gotten there just in time—in their minds they were just that lucky.

“Can I see that baby?” they would insist.

All we ever had to do was turn Nubbins around. His head would flop back, his flippers would flip up, and the mothers would quickly say, “Never mind.”

This happened so often that eventually we nurses decided to make a bet: “Who do you think will go first? Baby Nubbins or all of the minority babies?”

To be honest, when I’ve told this story in the past, and I’ve told it a number of times, I’ve said that I bet on the minority babies, because I thought Nubbins would be the last to go—if he’d go at all.

And then what I’d say happened was that Nubbins sold first, leaving behind an entire toy nursery of minority babies. And isn’t that crazy!

But that wasn’t exactly true. What actually happened was much harder to admit. It was this: The minority babies did start to sell. Slowly. First we sold out of all the Asian babies. Then we sold out of all the Hispanic babies. And finally, all we had left was Nubbins . . . and incubators of black baby dolls.

This just made us all feel worse. Inadvertently the bet had become: Who do you think will go first? Nubbins . . . or every black baby in the nursery?

I stood by my initial bet: “We’ll never sell Nubbins,” I insisted.

And then, a week later, a mother marched up to the adoption center. “Nurse,” she yelled, “is this some sort of a joke?”

Her face was frozen in disgust. In one hand she was holding a Bergdorf shopping bag; with the other she was dragging a very solemn child.

“Where are the white babies?” she demanded.

I wasn’t used to mothers being quite so direct. “We’re all out,” I said.

“You have got to be kidding. . . .” she began, then her eyes focused on Nubbins, who was nestled in my arms. “What about that one?” she asked.

I turned Nubbins around slowly for full impact, his head flopped back, his flippers flipped up. I waited for her horrified response.

“We’ll take it,” she said.

“What?” I thought,
Nubbins? You want to adopt Nubbins?
Was Nubbins even up for adoption?

I opened the white picket fence and escorted the mother and her daughter over to the rocking chairs. I set Baby Nubbins in the solemn little girl’s lap. “Do you promise to love and care for this baby?”

The little girl looked up at me. “No.”

I didn’t know what to do. I had been doing adoptions for two months now, and I had interviewed hundreds of little girls. No one had ever answered no before. Technically she had just failed the adoption interview.

“Okay. . . .” I said, moving to the next question.

“Will you read to the baby?”

She looked at me, her eyes like ice. “No.”

“Will you change the baby’s diaper?”

“No.”

“Okay . . . ,” I teased, “but you’re going to have a stinky baby.” I mimed plugging my nose—when the little girl stared blankly, I felt like an idiot. I moved on to the last question:

“What would you like to name the baby?” I asked.

“Stupid,” she said.

Again, not what I’d expected, and while I wasn’t exactly Nubbins’s best friend, I wasn’t about to name him Stupid. “Why don’t we try calling him . . .”

Her mother interrupted me. “Just name the baby Veronica.”

“Veronica?” I asked. I couldn’t tell if she was being serious, because while I knew the dolls weren’t anatomically correct, Nubbins was clearly a boy. I scribbled “Veronica” in the “Name” sections of the baby bracelet and birth certificate, and then handed the paperwork to the mother.

I took Nubbins from the little girl, opened the picket fence, and pointed to the far-off register. “Now all you have to do is pay the adoption fee (
wink, wink
).”

As they walked away, I laid out a pink blanket and set Nubbins in the center. For the last time, his head flopped back, and his little flippers flipped up. That’s when it hit me.
Nubbins has been adopted. . . . There will be no more Nubbins.
A little montage in honor of the doll began to play in my head. There Jenny was tossing him across the adoption center; there was the time Karla had “accidentally” rocked over him with the rocking chair. There was the sweet taste of his plastic kiss, and a crowd gasping as he tumbled onto a marble floor.

It had never occurred to me, but I loved Nubbins.

And if I sold Baby Nubbins, what it meant was just too depressing. After all the weird comments from customers about our less-than-desirable baby inventory—the rolled eyes and the frustrated glares—I still didn’t want to face what it meant if a factory reject monster baby was adopted before a whole nursery of perfectly cute black babies.

I decided I couldn’t let this happen. I thought about lying and telling them Nubbins had already been purchased. I thought about buying Nubbins myself. I imagined what I’d say to my dad when I called him to borrow the $120 it would take. “Um, Dad,” I’d say, “there was this baby at the adoption center and he was about to go to a bad family and I think I could be a good family for him.”

And then I looked up. The woman and her daughter had returned with their receipt. Reluctantly I placed Nubbins in the little girl’s arms.

“I’m sure baby Veronica is going to have a wonderful home,” I lied.

The little girl stared at me with her strange cold eyes and took the doll. As she and her mother walked out of the store I watched Nubbins’s head bobbing on her shoulder until I couldn’t see him anymore.

I’m sure baby Veronica is going to have a wonderful home
. Long after they were gone, this line stayed with me. I was just acting. But this lifelong ambition of mine suddenly seemed misguided. In the end, I didn’t like acting. I liked speaking my mind. Only I’d stopped doing it for the job.

Without really thinking it through, I unfastened the white picket fence, marched to Chad’s office, and knocked on the door. He opened it wearing a Nerf hat with a target on it.

“I can’t work here anymore,” I explained. “I just sold Nubbins.”

Chad had no idea who Nubbins was. In fact, if Chad knew half the things I had done to Baby Nubbins, he probably would have fired me. But he didn’t, so instead he tried to get me to stay.

“I didn’t want to tell anyone this,” he whispered, “but I pulled some strings and it looks like we’ll be getting a shipment of white babies in sometime early next week. If that happens, we’re gonna need all the nurses we can get.”

Any guilt that I had over quitting—dissipated.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but when the white babies arrive, I won’t be here.”

The Wookey Mirror

Every New Year’s Eve I make extraordinarily unattainable goals and immediately forget them. And 2004 was no exception. I was twenty-one, recently unemployed, and sleeping on the couch of my parents’ home in London. With nothing better to do, I took out my journal and wrote
What do I want?
on the top of the page. I proceeded to make a list of everything missing from my life. You know, to cheer myself up. There were easily forty or fifty things written down, but it all boiled down to two:
I wanted a job and I wanted a boyfriend.

I was about to turn twenty-two and I still didn’t know how to kiss. The “ job” goal wasn’t looking any better . . . I’d just quit FAO Schwarz, my lifelong ambition to be an actress was in question, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my life.

2004: Get a job. Get a boyfriend
. I rewrote my two major goals and turned out the lights.

 

The next morning, January 1, 2004, I woke up to the sound of my father blasting Bob Marley and dancing. He was restless. He has a tendency to do this when he’s on vacation and we’re sitting at home. One Christmas he told us to get in the car and drove us to the airport. When we got there he handed us our passports. “Whoever finds the cheapest flight wins, and we’ll go there,” he said. Julia found a roundtrip ticket to Rome for under $150. All seven of us, with just the clothes on our backs, went to Rome for three days. It was fun until we realized we didn’t have clean underwear and all the shops were closed for the holidays. But that’s the price you pay for adventure.

This year wasn’t as extravagant. Instead, my dad took out the
Reader’s Digest
guide to Britain. “Line up shortest to tallest,” he yelled.

Even though Tina’s no longer the tallest, we still keep our original age-based order. With our Christmas stockings still hanging on the wall behind our heads, we scrambled into a line: Tina (the pretty sister), Elna (the funny one), Julia (the sarcastic sister), Britain (the boy), and Jill (the baby).

My father opened the book and started listing off cities. “Pick a place,” he said, “and we’ll go there.” We’ve played this game many times before. And we have a tendency to pick only cities with weird names. While most people visiting the United Kingdom travel to Bath or Stratford-upon-Avon, my family has been to Flash, Worm’s Head, Knockin, Little Horwood, Snig’s End, Dorking, Boysack, and Willey. This year was no exception. “Appleby, Birmingham, Harro gate, Liverpool, Stowmarket, Tiverton, Wookey,” my father read. We stopped him.
Wookey.
We had to go to Wookey.

Reader’s Digest
described Wookey’s picturesque scenery and quaint shops. But because of the holiday, only one attraction was open, an amusement park from the 1920s. We piled out of the van, split up, and started to explore.

I can now officially say that I have empathy for the people who lived in the 1920s. They must’ve had it pretty bad, because the things they found “amusing” are pretty dull by today’s standards. The highlight of the entire park was an old machine that, when switched on, spun out a row of lions and a lion tamer on a track system. Thirty seconds later, the lions and lion tamer retreated into their cage. Thrilling. There was also a large wooden panel with a pirate ship and pirates’ bodies painted on it. If you went behind it you could stick your head out and pretend you were a pirate,
Arrrrr!

I was passing the “World’s Largest Bucket” when I came upon a dimly lit corridor with a sign above it that read: HALLWAY OF MIRRORS, ILLUSTRIOUS ILLUSIONS. I’ve always liked funny mirrors. You don’t feel bad about yourself when you’ve seen how much worse it could be. I lifted the thick red curtain and watched my reflection as I passed each mirror, my body shrinking and expanding.

I was in the process of making a goofy face in a stretched mirror when I noticed someone standing in the corner looking at me. It was a girl, a very pretty girl. She looked familiar—she was thin, she was tall, she had long golden hair, and these amazing big brown eyes. I smiled at her politely; she smiled back. It took a second to register. It was me! Me, in a mirror that made me skinny!

No way.
I cautiously approached the mirror, worried she’d disappear if I wasn’t careful. I’d seen distorting mirrors but never anything like this. I was perfectly proportional, but I looked nothing like myself—I was thin. My jaw dropped open. I’d spent so much time convincing myself that how I looked was just the way I looked that it never occurred to me I was capable of this kind of beauty—the outer kind. It was mesmerizing.

For the next ten minutes, I stood there playing with the mirror. I turned to see my profile. I put my hand on my hip, made flirty eyes, and blew myself a kiss. After that I tried walking in place; I waved; I curtsied—no matter what position I chose, it was a novelty. I thought of the movies
Big
and
Trading Places
, movies where people made wishes or swapped bodies. I imagined stepping through that mirror and coming out the other side as a thin person. In that universe I was a size 6; in that universe I lived happily ever after.

I stopped myself midthought. The notion that she was happier than me contradicted years of hard-earned self-acceptance. I had a mantra,
I am what I am.
I’d prayed and asked God to help me love myself—I didn’t need to be thin. But in that moment, looking in that mirror, it wasn’t just about size. For the first time, I had a sweet spirit and a sweet ass. And so, even though it was totally cheesy, I faced the mirror head on and I made a wish.