Bury Me With Barbie (10 page)

“Craig Krieger,” he said.

P.J. swallowed hard. “Devvon West.”

The San Luis Obispo Starbucks was in the Downtown Centre on the corner of Marsh and Morro.

Caresse’s date, Jerry, was her age nearly to the day. They’d both had birthdays in January, hers on New Year’s and his on the ninth. He resembled her cousin, which raised in her the impulse to give him a noogie, messing up the gel job he’d done on his auburn hair.

The barista behind the counter, a blonde in her twenties, worked quietly and efficiently, mastering chocolate, caramel, and peppermint combinations as she went. Her workmate, a definite rock star barista, greeted old friends and newbies like old pals.

“Caresse!” he screamed after scribbling her name on a Venti cup. “Venti. Venti … what’d you say you wanted? Where you been?”

“Here,” she replied.

Jerry had already placed his order for a toffee nut latte.

“Venti house,” she mumbled.

“Black is all I drink now,” she told Jerry. “It’s kind of a long story.”

No matter how things went, this date could never be as bad as date number two. On that disastrous outing, she had forgotten it was Farmers’ Market night and had a hell of a time finding a place to park. She ran to Brubeck’s, thanking the stars she wasn’t one of those chicks who needed to wear high, strappy sandals to impress on a blind date. Sneakers, jeans, and a gorgeous heliotrope top worked just fine. The sexy shoes would wait until she found out whether she was even attracted to the guy.

Smoke from the outdoor grills and the smell of ribs slathered in barbecue sauce wafted toward her as she raced to the restaurant. She was nearly there when Downtown Brown the bear almost collided with her. For a few seconds, she was up close and personal with the city mascot’s flat blue and white eyes. Downtown stepped left as she stepped left and then stepped right as she stepped right. Onlookers paused to watch the ridiculous dance between the adult in the furry costume and the harried-looking brunette in her mid-thirties, trying to get past him to get to Brubeck’s. Finally, Downtown stood still and she offered him profuse thanks as she ran off.

Date number two, Bill, looked to be in his forties, with dark-hair, Tommy Lee Jones eyes, and a gaunt frame.

“Hi,” she said, offering her hand, sliding into the chair across from him.

Bill stood up halfway and sat when she sat, pulling in his chair.

“Caresse,” he said.

“Caresse you?” she quipped. “I barely know you.” This was an old joke of hers that she pulled out when meeting others for the first time to see if they laughed. He didn’t. She covered. “Sorry about being late. Farmers’ Market.”

“And you’ve lived here how long?” he asked. The implication was that if she had lived there even a few weeks, she would have to have the brain of a tree frog not to know downtown San Luis Obispo was virtually inaccessible on a Thursday night.

“Since my son was eight months old.”

“You have a son?” He made it sound like she had a communicable disease.

She smiled to cover a grimace. It could only get worse from there—and it did.

Bill stared at the TV that hung over the bar where two commentators were discussing a game in progress. The TV had closed captioning on, with the sound muted to allow for the live jazz band to command center stage. The quartet was playing
A Love Supreme
, and while they weren’t Coltrane, Tyner, Garrison, and Jones, they were damn good.

She ordered grilled fish with a side of pasta and a glass of white wine, and Bill said, “Make that two.”

He spent the meal talking about what turned out to be his main interests: death and dying, and lingerie. To top off the evening, he pulled a copy of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’
On Death and Dying
and handed it to her after inscribing the front page.

She accepted the paperback and stuck it in her small black purse.

“Don’t you want to read what I wrote?” He sounded surprised.

“No,” she replied. She had gone through the five stages of grief, which perfectly applied to this evening: denial that this was actually her date, anger that he was so rude, bargaining (with herself) that at least she’d gotten a meal out of it, depression that the wine wasn’t better, and acceptance that she would never have to see Bill again.

Jerry wasn’t rude like Bill, but he had little to say, and the chemistry was lacking. Unable to keep up her one-sided small talk, she gave up and stared at him until the protracted silence made them both uncomfortable. After saying good-bye, she went into the nearby bookstore and headed upstairs to the magazine section. They would have the February
Barbie International
in stock before she would get her copy in the mail at home, and she wanted to see her latest article.

Upstairs, to the left, there was a coffee bar and several tables where people were reading. Straight ahead was the children’s section, decorated with colorful cartoon animal cutouts. To the right, there was mainstream fiction and Caresse’s favorite section: the collectibles and the craft and hobby books.

She seldom had the honor of cover artwork connected with one of her features, but the front of the February issue of
Barbie International
was an exception. It displayed work from one of 130 artists and designers from the German-speaking world, including Austria and Switzerland, who accepted the invitation to present Barbie as an aesthetic cult object for an exhibition held in Berlin. A box of slides had been shipped to her upon request from Mattel Germany, based near Frankfurt, and in turn, she selected a dozen favorites and sent them to Sierra Walsh with her story. World-famous artists whose mediums ranged from interior design, sculpture, painting, graphic design, photography, video, industrial design, furniture design, jewelry, fashion, and hair design, worked alongside unrecognized artists to create everything from a lamp that included Barbie as part of its base and a chandelier that blended Barbie into its crystal and candle framework to a human-sized King Kong sculpture holding a Barbie doll in the palm of its hand and paper-money-clad ballerinas posed atop bars of gold.

Barbie doll in Cosmos
by Ricardo Wende featured dozens of modern, blond Barbies attached to a flat surface. Vidal Sassoon created a trio of blonds with wild, carefree hairstyles. Escada created a sequined gown for a blond with a towering up-do. Jorg Bollin painted Barbie gold and stood her upright in a velvet-lined box. Anything deemed provocative or obscene was excluded. Since children were bound to attend the showing, the artist Stilleto’s streetwalker Barbie was nixed. It seemed humorous to exclude a scantily-clad doll from Mattel’s imaginary red light district, but they had no problem approving Frank Lindow’s four-shelf display containing numerous jars of pickled beets, pickled sausage and—you guessed it—pickled Barbies, chopped to fit an assortment of jars.

A woman with chestnut hair was watching her from the end of the magazine aisle. Caresse looked up and smiled.

The woman took her smile as an invitation to approach. “Is that a good magazine?”

It was a silly question. If she even glanced through a copy, she’d know how good it was. “It’s gotta be. I’m a staff writer.”

Caresse was about to experience one of her first-ever fan moments as the woman grabbed her. “You are? I still have all my dolls,” she gushed.

She tactfully approached the question of the woman’s age. “What era?”

“Oh, the ’60s.”

“Yeah, the ’60s rocked.”

“Are there certain things people should look for when starting to collect?”

She thought for a moment. “Yeah. The first thing you don’t want to do—unless of course you have the resources and the room to do it—is go out and clean out a toy store, you know, because that’s a little crazy. You may make mistakes at first, buying things that don’t really appeal to you. The first thing is, ask yourself, do I like this doll, and what do I like about her more than the ten different dolls beside her? I mean, if you like her, there’s a good chance that other people like her and that she’s a winner. Try and stay away from the real cheap, standard bathing suit models. If you’re looking to explore this to make money, look at the price tag. There truly is a correlation between dolls that are more expensive at the outset and increasing value over the long run. Play dolls generally don’t appreciate that much, so if you’re looking at collecting as an investment, don’t get into them. Once you’re dealing with the pricier dolls, buy what you like, and you can’t go too far wrong.”

The woman looked overwhelmed. “What do you like?” she finally asked.

“Oh, I’m a sucker for the repros that have been coming out, particularly those that are more recent, in the retro packaging. I don’t have them all. I don’t seem to need them. I get one or two a year and put them in back-to-back shadow boxes, with their retro dioramas as backdrops. Then I hang them on the wall, up close to the ceiling, where they’re out of the way. My apartment’s kind of short on space.”

“Do you still have your childhood dolls?”

She thought about the collection she’d inherited from her sister Cami when she passed down her dolls from 1966 through 1969. The ’70s, when Caresse first bought her own Barbies, were a letdown by comparison.

“Nope. I played with them virtually every day, and they were banged up. Not what you might consider lightly battered, but nearly destroyed from constant play. I was relentless and would play for hours at a time, and they didn’t look good enough to display. They originally belonged to my oldest sister. I asked her if she wanted them back. She thought about it and finally said yes, rather than see me pass them on to a dealer who might try to revive them. She said something to the effect of keeping them in their original albeit rough condition would preserve their childhood mojo. She predicted I’d want them back someday and said she’d hang onto them. I just couldn’t imagine having them around. Picture the heartbreak of looking at a Skipper you wanted to glam up, so you drew big black circles with a magic marker around her eyes, and you’ve got the full horror of what we might call my idea of ‘maximum play value.’”

The woman was wide-eyed. She snatched the copy of
Barbie International
out of Caresse’s hands, winking before she started to walk away.

“I’m gonna get this,” she said, when she was too far away for Caresse to grab it back.

“Great.”

She watched as the woman started making her way down the main staircase. Only her head and shoulders were visible when she glanced back and flashed a quick smile. The woman hadn’t introduced herself, but it didn’t matter. Caresse was willing to chat about Barbie with anyone, anytime, for any reason. She reached into the rack and pulled out another copy of the February issue, riffling through it to make sure there wasn’t anything wrong with it, like a center-spine glue blob.

A quick glance at her watch told her it was time to get back to work, where Marilyn would be waiting for her latest date report.

After Valley Xpress Rent-A-Car of Las Vegas delivered a four-door sedan to P.J. at The Luxor, she returned to her room and called her half-brother to tell him she was never going to travel by Greyhound again.

The bus had been uncomfortable, the ride had taken all day, and because she did not have the luxury of sitting by herself, far from those who liked to strike up conversations, she had placed herself in jeopardy of being identified. She recounted her meeting with Craig Krieger and allowed Darby to berate her for wearing her Barbie bracelet.

“So he has a sister,” he said. “Did he tell you what her name is?”

“No, but Krieger rings a bell for some reason,” P.J. said, falling onto the queen-sized bed and staring at the slanted wall which, to outsiders, created the illusion of a giant Egyptian pyramid.

The beauty of the hotel distracted her, and she found herself mesmerized, staring down at the atrium fifteen floors below before she had even gone into her room.

“You’ve got to see this place, Darby,” P.J. said, getting back up and stripping off her jeans, sweatshirt, and shirt single-handedly while talking. “If you were in a plane over L.A., you’d be able to see the building’s light at flight level.”

“Great,” he said. “Let me hop on a plane, and you go up to the rooftop and see if you can send me signals from three hundred miles away.”

P.J. pouted. “It’s less than three hundred miles from
home
. It just seems farther when you take the fucking bus.”

“So, do you want me to check your database?”

Over the past decade, P.J. had methodically amassed a list of a quarter-million Barbie collectors and the cities they lived in.

“Sure,” she said, “and call me back.”

“Are you gonna do it tonight?”

P.J. sighed, falling back onto the bed in just her underwear and socks. “To be honest, this is the first time I’ve checked into a hotel that made me just want to relax. There’s a whole vibe here, and I’m not just talking about the Egyptian ambiance. It is so cool. You’ve got to come stay here sometime so you know what I mean.”

“What? And forgo my VIP suite at Circus Circus?”

“Ha ha,” P.J. said sarcastically, but she was smiling. “Tomorrow night. Tomorrow night, I’ll do it.”

“Are you gonna call your husband?”

“Sure. I talk to him every night,” she lied.

Darby laughed at how sad his half-sister’s marriage was. The union worked, but mostly, he thought, because she and Heath rarely saw each other.

“That reminds me,” he said.

P.J. had the TV remote in her non-phone hand and was surfing for a good movie.

“What?”

“I think I met someone.”

P.J. paused on the channel that aired information about The Luxor. A room service menu appeared onscreen and tantalized her with Italian food, steak, and fine wine. Of course, if she were feeling brave and didn’t feel like dining in, she could always head down to the foyer level and play nickel slots until one of the waitresses making the rounds had her failing a breathalyzer.

“You think you met someone,” she parroted, just to let him know she’d heard him.