Raising Demons (15 page)

My mother supplied the original materials, although Dorothy and I had to buy subsequent supplies from our allowances after my mother had washed her hands of the whole thing. The next summer we were interested in playing piano duets, Dorothy playing the bass, and my mother very soon came to wash her hands of piano duets. The following summer was the one when I began to write a book of poetry which I planned to illustrate myself and Dorothy took up the cello; that would have been the summer we were almost sixteen and I still have the first pages of the book of poetry. I have not felt equal to taking it out and reading it over recently, nor have I shown it to my husband, but I recall that the first poem was entitled “On Clouds,” and the second was entitled “To a Rose,” and that is as far as I care to go in recollections of my book of poetry. Dorothy and I had by then grown a little apart, what with her cello lessons three days a week and me spending a good deal of time sitting among the nasturtiums at the foot of the garden thinking of rhymes; many years ago, when Jannie was a baby, my mother wrote me that she had run into Dorothy's mother on the street and Dorothy was married and had a little boy. I always meant to write her.

That summer when we were fourteen had been an unusually hot summer, even for the warm summers we had then. I remember because our hands were always slightly damp and the paper would stick to our fingers. At first we kept our clothespin-doll supplies in a wicker basket Dorothy's mother gave us, but after a while we needed three huge cartons which were full of crepe paper in various colors. We used to paw through the assorted papers on the rack at the back of the stationery store, looking for the odd pinks and blues of faded crepe paper, and one roll of black paper which had been water-soaked gave us a lovely moiré effect. We had gold and silver paper, and of course the clothespins, which were the old-fashioned, round-headed kind, not the utterly efficient snap clothespins which may have come into general use because Dorothy and I had dressed up most of the round-headed clothespins there were.

Day after day during that hot summer we carried our three great cartons lovingly, and staggering, back and forth from my house to Dorothy's house, to the kitchen at Dorothy's or the dining room at my house. We needed the largest possible table in either house because of the magnitude of our operations, and we always left tiny scraps of paper on the floor. If we wanted to set out our clothespin dolls and compare them or label them or count them, we had to use the long hall at Dorothy's house. The only place we ever found in which to store our clothespin dolls without tangling them or crushing them was in the collection of corset boxes my grandmother had been accumulating for a number of years; these corset boxes were just wide enough to hold a clothespin doll crosswise, and long enough to hold exactly twenty-five clothespin dolls each. My grandmother had saved her corset boxes to hold torn silk stockings, which she dyed and crocheted into rugs, but my mother persuaded her to give up the corset boxes and keep her stockings in the wicker basket instead. When we stopped making clothespin dolls one afternoon, we had seventeen corset boxes full, and one almost full. We stacked the eighteen corset boxes in the corner of the dining room at my house, where we happened to be that afternoon, and they stayed there for quite a while, along with our three cartons of material, because my mother did not dare hope for a long time that we had really stopped making clothespin dolls.

The making of clothespin dolls is based upon the debatable assumption that a round-headed clothespin looks enough like a human figure to wear clothes. Allowing—as I believe my mother was the first to point out—that the top looks like a little head, and the bottom looks like little feet, clothing the middle part requires only an infinity of patience and a good deal of paste. We began, Dorothy and I, with ladies dressed in wide skirts, and we used cotton for hair, making a figure roughly like those on sentimental valentines. To make the skirts it is necessary to gather a length of crepe paper and paste it onto a strip of heavier paper—we used brown wrapping paper—as a sort of belt which will fit neatly around the middle of the clothespin. Crepe paper will stretch efficiently in one direction, so that if the skirt is cut on the correct bias it is possible to flare it out and even put a neat ruffle around the bottom. A particularly advanced type of female clothespin doll had several skirts of different colors, making for a rather bulky waist but a rich display of petticoats; this doll would of course stand up much more gracefully than one wearing, say, a sheathlike evening gown. The bodice was made of a contrasting color, and a short cape was frequently worn. We made bonnets to go over the cotton hair, with a foundation of more brown wrapping paper, a ruffle of crepe paper, and an occasional decorative rose. The result was as authentic as a clothespin doll can presumably be. My mother was vastly pleased with the first half-dozen clothespin dolls, and set one on her dresser.

In the beginning we did not concern ourselves unnecessarily with style or personality, aiming sensibly at getting as many as possible done and onto my mother's dresser, but with practice small refinements crept in and we began to think more of the product; as a matter of fact, we got so we could set up a cotton-haired lady clothespin doll in about three minutes, and we had to think of something to make it harder. Shoes, we discovered, are impossible on the prongs of a clothespin. The feet could be covered with silver or gold paper, but nothing could make a clothespin's feet look as though they had shoes on, not even buckles. Small pieces of colored string made acceptable belts, the lace edging that used to come on candy boxes was splendid for ruffles and lace collars. We tried arms made of tissue paper, but they usually fell right off.

We used homemade flour paste, because we used a good deal of paste and we had to pay for our own supplies. Almost anything could be molded, I recall, from a combination of crepe paper and homemade flour paste. To make a hat for a clothespin doll we started with a piece of brown wrapping paper cut to the correct size, coated it with paste, added a layer of crepe paper, more paste, more paper, and so on until it was thick and workable and could be shaped to the right style. When we had our hats shaped we used to set them on the windowsill where they dried solid in about fifteen minutes, and one of the things that persuaded my mother to wash her hands of clothespin dolls was a row of brown fedoras on the dining room windowsill; once dried, the paste and crepe paper combination was as heavy and hard as rock; if the hat fit the clothespin doll in the first place no power on earth could shift it once it was on.

Dorothy used this method very successfully to make a pail to go with a milkmaid doll, although it took her all one afternoon to shape the pail so it was symmetrical and no clothespin doll ever born could have carried it with a tissue-paper arm. On the milkmaid doll, and several after that, we used brown yarn for hair, either in long braids ending in a bow, or wound around the top of the head on a coronet. Braiding three strands of brown yarn is remarkably easy compared to anchoring an upswept hair-do on the head of a round-headed clothespin.

We started out making men in about the state of mind which I suppose created them in the first place—we had run out of kinds of women, and had to think of something else. The first man, as I remember, was a soldier, bright in regimental pink and blue, with a silver paper sword and a tall hat never seen outside the pages of Grimm. Dorothy and I had created him together, and we both found him so lovely that we set out to make an army, all in different colors, but gave up after only a dozen or so. Boots were much more practical than shoes; it was possible to make a high, swaggering sort of boot out of silver or gold paper, and this led us of course into the free-lance, or D'Artagnan, type of soldier, with a short cape and a rakish hat trimmed with crepe-paper feathers, and even, in one lamentable case, Cavalier curls.

By this time all odds and ends of material had begun to find their way to us, and when my mother decided to take the sequins off her black evening dress, or when my uncle found himself with a half-used roll of tire tape, or when Dorothy's mother gave up the idea of choosing new wallpaper that year, the sequins and the tire tape and the wallpaper sample book came to us. We tried making black boots with the tire tape, but they were sticky.

Use of crayon or paint was regarded as unworthy, and I remember a patient, infuriating afternoon when Dorothy laboriously made a plaid shirt, weaving the plaid herself out of tiny strips of colored paper. I was usually able to make two or three dolls during the time it took Dorothy to make one, but hers always had something like plaid shirts or ruffled skirts where each ruffle was lace-edged, or a tiny bouquet made flower by flower.

The final stage was, I suppose, inevitable; after we had gone through every conceivable fancy-dress creature imaginable, we fell to copying people we knew; it represented the last point of imaginative decay before the deadly advent of the piano duet. We made a small image of my mother in a purple housedress and one of Dorothy's mother in a pink dressing gown, and made my father and hers, but there was nothing to put on the fathers except gray business suits, which were extremely difficult to make, and we had to distinguish between the two fathers by their ties. Dorothy's father had the inevitable plaid tie and I made my father a kind of full cravat with polka dots which he assured me earnestly did not resemble anything he had ever worn or would ever wear or could even, he told me, dream of wearing in his worst nightmares.

The four hundred and thirty-first clothespin doll was, I remember, a lady doll in a wide skirt with cotton hair, and I remember as well Dorothy's putting her scissors down on the dining room table and saying clearly, “I don't want to make clothespin dolls any more.”

I think we must have gone directly on from there into piano duets, because I know that although our eighteen corset boxes full of clothespin dolls stayed in the corner of the dining room and then in the hall closet for a long time, the cartons of material got emptied out after a while so we could use the cartons to keep our piano duets in. I also remember that company who used to have to look at four-hundred-odd clothespin dolls now had to listen to Dorothy and me playing “The Charge of the Uhlans,” and “Selections from the Bohemian Girl,” but I cannot remember how long it might have been before my mother decided that eighteen corset boxes full of clothespin dolls were in the way in the hall closet and she told Dorothy and me to please stop playing duets for five minutes and go get rid of those clothespin dolls. She suggested that if we take out the ones we liked best she would be glad to see that the rest were disposed of. Dorothy and I each took one box full of our personal favorites—Dorothy had, by rights, the plaid shirt doll and the milkmaid, and I took several of the soldiers, which I had always fancied, and my best cotton-headed ladies. I put my box of clothespin dolls in my bottom desk drawer, where I afterward kept my book of poetry, and one day my mother drove Dorothy and me and sixteen boxes of clothespin dolls to the Children's Hospital in San Francisco, and waited outside while Dorothy and I took the clothespin dolls and went in. We were both wearing black patent-leather shoes and white socks, and we had to walk across a polished marble floor and I was desperately afraid of slipping and spilling clothespin dolls all over the lobby.

“I hope they don't think we're bringing them your grandmother's corsets,” Dorothy whispered to me. We left the boxes at the desk with an unpleasant woman who was too busy to say thank you, and who made no move to open the boxes to see what they were. About a week later we got a printed form from the hospital, addressed to Dorothy and me together, since both our names had been on the boxes; the printed form said thanks for our gift, the children in the wards would appreciate it. On the bottom of the form someone had written, “For Indian beadwork.”

I don't suppose, strictly speaking, that after that day clothespin dolls came into my head from one year to the next. When I had to have a place to hide my book of poetry I must have taken the box of clothespin dolls and put them away with the feather fan and the autograph albums and the china dogs. The whole batch of them got sensibly put up into the attic, where they would have stayed in perfect safety, untroubled by any longing of mine for them, if my mother had not gotten to thinking about the old china, which wasn't there anyway, as I could have told her, my brother and I having used it long before that for tea parties in our tree hut.

I was sitting on the living room floor, holding the feather fan and reading through the autograph albums, when I heard the voices of my children outside, on their way home for lunch. I made a frantic effort to scramble all the things back into the carton, but I was too late. “What's
that
?” Laurie said, coming into the living room, and “Let
me
see,” Jannie said behind him. Sally came over and sat down on the floor next to me, and possessed herself of the feather fan, which for some reason struck her as irresistibly funny.

“Never
mind
,” I said, snatching childishly. “It's
mine
.” I was unreasonably angry at Sally for laughing at my feather fan, and then Jannie got hold of the box of clothespin dolls. My mother (at least, I prefer to
think
that it was my mother) had tied a blue ribbon around the box, and before I could stop her Jannie had untied the ribbon and opened the box. “Ooh,” she said, and Laurie, peering, said, “Jeeps.”

I had forgotten D'Artagnan, I am afraid, and the soldiers in pink and blue, and the cotton hair. I had forgotten the name labels in Dorothy's neatest handwriting; I had forgotten the line of four hundred and thirty-one clothespin dolls going down the long hall at Dorothy's house. I had forgotten the hats and the feathers and the yarn hair and the silver boots. “Looka
this
one,” Laurie said. “I found one named Linda,” Jannie said. “I want that one with the blue hat,” Sally said.