Because I Said So (6 page)

Part of the problem is this loaded and mostly outmoded word
stepparent
. It’s a holdover from the days when divorce was uncommon and stepparents were mainly people married to wid-22

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ows and widowers. Unless an actual parent has died and the stepparent functions as an ersatz actual parent, the word just makes everyone uncomfortable. It sets up confusing expectations.

(Under the heading “relationship” on my older stepdaughter’s high school emergency contact form, it says, for me, “Dad’s wife.”) If people are referring to you as a stepparent, you imagine you will be occupying some sort of vaguely parent-like post, and that even if you don’t behave like a parent and mete out discipline or pick them up at school, there will be some sort of familial bond. But why should there be? A child who has two loving parents does not need or want a third. Especially a bogus one who didn’t give birth to you and who can’t be relied on to send letters while you’re at summer camp and who doesn’t know the songs you all sang in the car together when you were growing up. Who is this woman? What is she doing at parents’ night? How did she get into a book about mothers?

While I’m not wild about my status as stitched-on appendage, I view it as just. No one owes me otherwise. And there have been times—there
are
times—when I feel genuinely loved and appreci-ated by one or another of my stepkids. To feel the affection or love of someone who has cause and cultural rubber-stamp to resent you is a uniquely precious thing. Unlike the love between parent and child, this love you don’t take for granted. It’s an Indian summer kind of love—maybe it’ll show up this week, maybe it won’t. But when it does, it’s a gift, and you run out and bask in it.

We’re an odd, ungainly thing, this three-headed family of ours, but we seem to have adapted to our condition. All families have some sort of metaphorical deformity. There are ripped-out hearts and overactive spleens, forked tongues and wandering loins. Relatively speaking, we’re as normal and healthy as the next dog.

Material Girls

M a r g a r e t Ta l b o t

I don’t have anything against dolls,
but part of me has always found them a little creepy—their inert perfection, their blinky eyes, the way you find them in odd corners of the house, limbs akimbo, as if dropped from a great height. As a child, I had a Barbie with a frothy black cocktail dress and a Heidi doll I was fond of, though I could never get her hair rigged back up into those cinnamon buns on either side of her head after I’d unbraided it. I was impatient and a klutz, so buttons and bows, especially tiny ones, were a trial. In any case, I was more of a stuffed-animal girl myself, and my daughter, who is five, seems to be one too. She’s had a few baby dolls, which she has graced with peculiar names—Ha-Ha, Pogick—but her interest in them, though warm, is intermittent. They spend most of their time upside down in the toy basket, missing crucial garments, which is why, I suppose, I don’t care much for that genre of children’s story in which toys come to life and bemoan their little masters’

neglect of them.

So it was something of a surprise to me when, about a year ago, I developed a mild obsession with American Girl dolls. I read the catalogs; I read the books. I made a special trip to American Girl Place, the vast doll emporium in New York, where, without my children, I felt like a doll stalker or one of those self-styled hobbyists with a little too much time on her hands. (I kept think-24

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ing of a little amusement park we sometimes go to that has an ominous placard forbidding adults to enter unaccompanied by children.) I drifted by the clusters of mothers and grandmothers and little girls in satin-lined winter coats, their noses pressed against glass cases of doll accessories, their expressions sweetly avid. Sales people kept asking pointedly if they could help me.

Could they? I didn’t know. The American Girl story fascinated me partly because of its sheer, almost shocking success.

Mostly it fascinated me because of what it seemed to say about American girlhood. Parents I knew with girls on the brink of adolescence seemed anxious to prolong their daughters’ childhoods, and some had specific advice on how to do so. Encourage an interest in horses—that was my sister’s idea. She was certainly relieved that her thirteen-year-old spent most of her afternoons mucking out stables and soaring over jumps rather than, say, IMing trash talk to her friends. Sports, in general, other people recommended—unless they were the kinds of sports that led to extreme dieting. But for more and more families, it seemed, American Girl dolls were the chosen talisman against unwanted precocity.

How odd, when you think of it, that such an idea should exist. Who would have predicted that here in America, at the start of the twenty-first century, girls in high-necked Edwardian dresses, girls in bonnets, girls with labor-intensive
chores,
would seem so sturdy, competent, and admirable—so much like the girls we hoped our little girls would want to be? But there it is: perhaps the most popular strategy for protecting your young daughter from Britneyhood and Paris Hiltonville, for holding her from the brink of mall-haunting, ’ho’-dressing tweendom, is to get her interested in American Girl dolls. It is a strategy that involves buying something in order to try and be something: the mother of a girlish girl, an innocent girl, a girl who, at nine or ten, still likes playing with old-fashioned dolls. But then again, there aren’t that many options for parents who don’t wish to succumb to what the toy industry calls “age compression,” or “kids getting older younger”—KGOY, for short. “The girls these days grow up so
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fast,” a seven-year-old girl’s grandmother explained to
Newsday
in 2003. The woman and her husband were waiting patiently in line at the opening of American Girl Place in Manhattan. They had already paid about four hundred dollars for Kaya, the Nez Perce American Girl doll and various accessories, but they did not regret it. “These toys,” the woman said, “help them be girls for a little longer.” These toys, she implied, were
needed
.

American Girl dolls
are a very big deal, though if you have sons and no daughters, you may have to take my word for it. But this, in brief, is the story: In 1986, a forty-five-year-old woman with the fateful name Pleasant T. Rowland started a new career as a doll entrepreneur. Rowland had been an elementary school teacher, a TV news reporter, and a textbook author, but in 1984, when she accompanied her husband on a business trip to Colonial Williamsburg, she had something of an epiphany about what she wanted to do next. She loved the material culture of history, the stuff you could touch—the wood, the pewter, the parchment.

Rowland wondered whether there was a new way to market this tangible history to children, and she was still wondering when she headed into a toy store that Christmas to buy dolls for her eight-and ten-year-old nieces. She didn’t want Barbie and she wasn’t crazy about the other choices either. “Here I was, in a generation of women at the forefront of redefining women’s roles,” she recalled years later, “and yet our daughters were playing with dolls that celebrated being a teen queen or a mommy.”

Soon Rowland hit on the idea of combining her love of history with her drive to create an uplifting girl culture. She would accomplish her aim by marketing dolls that represented little girls from different periods in American history. Eventually there would be eight of them: Kaya, an “adventurous” Nez Perce girl; Felicity, a

“spunky” colonial girl; Josefina, a “hopeful” girl living on a New Mexican rancho in 1824; Kirsten, “a pioneer girl of strength and spirit”; Addy, a “courageous” girl who escapes slavery; Samantha,

“a bright, compassionate girl living with her wealthy grandmother
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in 1904”; Nellie, who is Irish and also “practical and hardwork-ing,” which is just as well, since she was “hired to be a servant in the house next door to Samantha”; Kit, a “clever resourceful girl growing up during America’s Depression”; and Molly, “a lively, loveable schemer and dreamer growing up in 1944.” The dolls would be exceptionally well made—Rowland went all the way to Germany for doll eyes that met her exacting standards for realism—and outfitted in costumes that could pass some sort of muster for historical accuracy without sacrificing any girl appeal. (Nellie, the servant girl, for instance, would not be clad in anything too practical or gray, nor would Addie, the slave, look too disheveled. Their boots, however, would have a lot of buttons.)

Each girl had a book and eventually a series of books that told her story, and each book was sprinkled with historical details: steamboats, breadlines, Victory Gardens. In a sense, all the girls are pretty much the same girl— the historical backdrops change, but the same basic personality type cycles cheerfully through all of them. All American Girls are “plucky,” “spunky,”

and mildly adventurous but not overtly rebellious, and they are never misfits. They often have a pesky boy in their lives: a brother or neighbor who annoys them to no end. They are inclined to help the less fortunate, useful to the household economy, talkative without being mouthy, and bright without being egg-headed.

Because all the leading characters in the books have a second and more compelling life as dolls (though pleasant enough, the books are not great children’s literature), they must be pretty. Some of the most memorable children’s book heroines are not pretty—

though it is understood that they may grow up to be handsome or striking or even, to the discerning eye, beautiful—which is one reason so many generations of awkward, intellectual girls have loved them. Jo in
Little Women
is famously plain and tomboyish; Meg in
A Wrinkle in Time
describes herself as “snaggle-toothed,” “myopic,” and “clumsy,” a bespectacled frump in the shadow of her gorgeous mother; even dear Laura in the
Little
House
books compares herself unfavorably to her golden-haired, lady-like sister Mary, who always remembers to save her comM a t e r i a l G i r l s

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plexion by wearing her hat. In a freestanding book, a homely or an unkempt heroine is fine. In a book that supplies back story for a doll, it won’t do.

The girls of color—Josefina, Addy, and Kaya—came later, but neither late arrival nor cultural distinctness did anything to alter their essential personality or, in some respects, their appearance.

All American Girl dolls are plump-cheeked and sturdy-legged (the dolls look younger—and hence cuddlier—than the girls illustrated in the books), with round eyes and small smiles that reveal precisely two teeth. The catalogs often show girls matched to dolls by race: Addy is snuggled by an African American girl, Josefina by a Hispanic one. But in real life, girls quickly exhibited a happy disregard for such conventions. Kaya, the native American doll, for instance, has entranced girls of various ethnic backgrounds.

(She is, after all, a nine-year-old with ready access to fast horses, beaded dresses, and the wide-open plains.)

The concept was, almost from the beginning, a remarkable success. Pleasant Company did not advertise and made its wares available by catalog only, but between September and December of its first year, 1986, it sold $1.7 million worth of products. By 2003 it had sold seven million dolls and eighty-two million books, still without advertising. In 1998 it opened its first store—

American Girl Place—in Chicago, which became, in its first year, the top-selling store on Chicago’s prime shopping street. In 2003

it opened a second American Girl Place, on Fifth Avenue in New York. “Place” was a significant word, for both the Chicago and New York stores were meant to be more than stores: they were destinations for families, safe harbors for innocent girlishness and mother-daughter bonding. Each store featured a doll hospital; a hair salon, where, for fifteen dollars, doll tresses could be styled by an adult; a theater with a live, Broadway-meets-Branson–style stage show, in which young actresses playing the American Girls belted out original tunes; and a classy black-and-white-and-fuchsia tearoom, where mothers could eat smoked salmon–and-cucumber sandwiches with orange fennel butter and daughters could eat grape jelly flag sandwiches, and dolls got “treat seats” of their
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own. In 1998, Rowland sold the brand that was essentially the anti-Barbie to Mattel, the Barbie maker, for $700 million. And since then, American Girl has done the amazing: it has nearly displaced the venerable, vacant Barbie as the best-selling doll in America.

Ours, it’s clear, is a moment in consumer history when middle-class American parents will spend, pretty much happily, a great deal of money on what they perceive as quality goods for their children, particularly if those goods can be seen as in any way educational. A Samantha starter kit, which includes the doll, a slim paperback book, and a few teensy accessories, sells for $98.

Samantha’s cunning little wooden school desk, with its historically accurate wrought-iron legs, costs $68. Her trunk, with its oval mirror and three wee hangers, costs $175. Josefina’s carved wooden chest, in tasteful Santa Fe style, goes for $155. And so on. For many American girls, these are, of course, unimaginable luxuries. At an economically and racially diverse private school where a friend’s daughter goes, American Girl dolls are a dividing line—and an early introduction to class in America—for a group of third-graders. Two of the girls are from families who cannot afford the dolls, let alone the fripperies that go with them. And, lately, these two girls have been getting left out of play dates and playground games, which often center on American Girl fantasies. Ironic, in a way, since these particular girls are from newly arrived immigrant families of modest means, whose life stories are, therefore, classic American Girl. The “Barbie as Halle Berry in
Catwoman
” doll may come swathed in stereotypes, but at least it has the virtue of being available at your local Target for $14.99.