This Fish Needs A Bicycle

tired of barbie

We ride home from work, Michelle weaving in and out in some seemingly haphazard pattern, one which only she understands. She reminds me of that Discovery Channel special on bees, with the way she drives -- dodging and dancing through traffic. A bee after pollen.

Chatting and laughing, we mock those mellow, falsely fresh NPR disc-jockeys while her three-year-old wreaks havoc on my hair from her harness in the back seat. First she tugs sharply, and I wince, but I say nothing. Not even a quiet, 'ouch.' The attention is nice; I don't want to discourage her.

I feel her miniature hands grasp at the strands of my unbrushed ponytail, the way she might hold tight to the string of a balloon, afraid it will lift away should she let go. For blocks she is silent, her fingers frozen, curled around my hair that is spilling through the gap between my headrest and the seat. Thread through a needle. And she can't get enough of it. White girl's hair.

"Like Rapunzel," I say.
"No," Thea says. "Like Barbie." Only it comes out, 'bah-bie," her accent every day growing more and more to sound like that of her Indian babysitter, Mantaz.

Her mother laughs. "Poor Thea," she says.

Her Carribean genetics, passed on from mother to daugher, will make Thea full-lipped and caramel-skinned, and her dark hair tightly curled. She will never have Mantaz's cascading black mass of hair, or my thinner, paler version. She will not have petroleum-produced strands like Barbie--nor any other of Barbie's plastic, pale features. She will instead be pouty, hot-tempered, mysterious and exotic. Poor Thea, indeed.

I feel her small digits tangle in the mess at the bottom of my ponytail as they work, with the still under-developed grace of her age, meticulously removing the knots and snarls. Petting and admiring. I will let her envy me for now--while my cookie-cutter sameness is fascinating and appealing, and before she develops a sense of self and moves on from that generic, stiff-armed doll. I will let her envy me for now.

She isn't tired of Barbie yet.