How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (28 page)

“That's an American Girl doll,” the woman says. “They're a hundred dollars new, y'know.”

No lady, I didn't know that. I live underground, I have never seen a TV, nor have I heard of computers, condoms, or penicillin. Of course I know the price of an American Girl doll. I'm a mother to a four-year-old female and have been trying to shield her from this specter of marketing genius since the moment the doctor said, “There's one lip, and there's the other lip. It's a girl!”

When I was a kid we had Barbie. With her Dolly Parton figure and Farrah Fawcett smile, she was like nicotine to our little lady brains.

My Barbie collection was small, but impressive enough to have been stolen sometime around my tenth birthday (a fact that enrages me to this day). And though I did not possess the holy grail of Barbie products—Barbie's glorious Camper Van—the crowning glory of my collection was a “Growing Up Skipper” doll. With a 360-degree spin of her arm, she would grow an inch taller from the torso, and two conical protrusions would fill out her pliable rubber chest, turning this adorable little girl into a fully pubescent young lady. (A curious feature of Growing Up Skipper was that, after a few months, the rubber on her chest hardened to a state of permanent breast-iosity, leaving young Skipper looking like a disturbingly well-stacked eight-year-old.)

But as much as I loved my Barbies, they are mere candy cigarettes compared to the crack cocaine of American Girl dolls today.

My daughter fell for her first American Girl when she was two and a half years old, and may God have mercy on me, it was my own damn fault.

We were living in Chicago at the time and taking a walk downtown on what turned out to be a balmy, thirty-below-zero winter day. So as not to perish, we sought refuge in the nearest heated building, which was the American Girl flagship store.

We'd been there countless times before—it was a frequent shortcut due to its convenient location and hassle-free bathrooms, and I have to admit, as I pushed my disinterested toddler's stroller through the aisles, I got a chuckle at the sight of tween girls crying and being scolded by their mothers “BECAUSE YOU'VE ALREADY GOT SIX DOLLS,
THAT'S
WHY!”

I laughed because I thought we were safe. I thought we were immune.

I thought oh-so-cockily wrong.

By the time I'd pulled the ice-encrusted scarf away from my daughter's face, I could tell that something in her had been stirred, as though a second set of eyelids had been peeled back from her eyes and she was finally, for the first time in her short life, truly awake.

She sat straight up, cocked her head, and then stretched her sticky, chubby hands toward an immaculate display
filled with dolls of every eye, hair, and skin color—each one wearing a vacant expression that seemed to be chanting, “One of us! One of us!”

My kid opened her mouth and began to scream/chant/gurgle, “MAAAHHH! MAAAHHH!” Whether she was trying to say, “Mine!” or “MOM!” or whether it was just a primal sound emanating from deep within her soul, I can't say, because I ran that stroller out of there at a speed far faster than would have been safe, like all those other moms I'd laughed at not so very long ago.

My days became a series of evasion tactics: avoiding the store (two blocks from our home), intercepting the mail carrier before he could deliver the American Girl catalog, and crossing the street to avoid the neighborhood twin girls who carried twin American Girl versions of themselves everywhere they went (a disturbing and creepy sight).

Then came the repeated requests from the child, with an alarming frequency:

“I HAVE AN AMERICAN DOLL?” “Someday, sure.”

“I HAVE AN AMERICAN DOLL?” “Someday, yes.”

“I HAVE AN AMERICAN DOLL?” “Someday, okay.”

And yes, deep down I meant it, though I may have left out the “maybe after a nuclear holocaust” part. Because you know what? I never got a Barbie Camper Van, and I turned out okay. Sort of.

The American Girl store is a marvel of retail success. It has three beautifully appointed stories of merchandise. There's a café where little girls can enjoy high-priced tea with their
dolls and captive grandparents. There's a dolly hair salon, and an actual dolly hospital where the healthcare services rival anything available through my own HMO. As a proud member of our capitalist culture, I am both inspired and impressed by the success of this business.

But as a parent and lifelong bargain hunter, I am offended to my very core by everything it stands for. Most offensive is that, as of this writing, a new doll costs over one hundred bones, more than I have ever paid for a regular article of clothing and only slightly less than I paid for my wedding dress. One hundred dollars for a child's toy that doesn't even plug in? Not my bag, baby. And definitely not the knock-off bag that has been passed down to me by my mother.

And now here I am, standing at the edge of a lesson in bargain hunting. Seems I will be going into battle after all.

“Yes,” I say to my neon-clad rival, “there's quite a market for these dolls . . . when they're in good condition. This one looks like it was well loved. By an aggressive, longhaired cat.”

One cool hand, casually played.

The Velour Demoness smiles at me. “It belonged to my daughter, Debi. She's on her way to Princeton this year on a tennis scholarship.”

Ooh, she is good, implying that the doll's got Ivy League juju all over it. But I don't care if this doll comes with a transferable master's degree. I will not pay more than ten dollars for it.

Me: “I'll give you five dollars.”

One low-ball gauntlet, forcefully thrown down.

Old Juicy Dusty-Buns makes a sound like a cat coughing up a hair ball and says with disgust, “I can't take less than twenty-five.”

And here's where I pull my signature move: the laugh/walk-away combo that I'm guessing should result in a decent counteroffer, maybe fifteen dollars.

But the Orange-Haloed Battle-Ax does not quake under my laissez-faire attitude. Instead, she shakes her head and hisses as she sets the doll back into the suitcase.

She is tough as nails—she's not budging. Well, neither am I. I grab my kid's hand and start to walk away. I give her a sly wink, my attempt to show her that this is all part of the dance, but at four years old she doesn't understand subtlety or the machinations of yard-sale subterfuge, the art that I learned at my mother's knee and have perfected over twenty years of professional cheapskate-ism.

Her chin begins to quiver. “WHY I CAN'T HAVE THE AMERICAN DOLL?”

We are knee-deep in a teachable moment—but what will it teach her? Will it be a lesson in standing up for your principles, regardless of the outcome—or will it be a lesson in “you can't always get what you want”? Or maybe it will be a lesson in how easily Mommy loses sight of her priorities. Or how wide Mommy's nostrils flare when she's agitated and backed into a corner.

I don't like corners like this, particularly corners that break another cardinal rule of yard-sale-ing—never haggle over something that you are not prepared to lose.

I should walk, but I don't.

“I'll give you seven dollars.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Eight.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Nine dollars and 75 cents.” (I immediately regret the seventy-five-cents maneuver—it reeks of desperation.)

“Twenty-five.”

Another laugh (hers), another turn/walk (mine). This one not so much a tactic as a time stall.

I mumble to my opponent that I'm going to take a look around and see what else she's got.

My mind races as I scan the yard: a threadbare cowboy hat . . . a salad spinner . . . faded Mickey Mouse ears . . . lederhosen (lederhosen?!) . . . and a cracked replica of a samurai sword, which is beginning to look more and more useful as the minutes pass.

I look at my daughter, now cradling the frizzy-haired doll with an ink-stained foot and one lazy eye, stroking its face and whispering into its ear, and God help me I watch as my hand, now seemingly possessed, reaches into my purse and pulls out a twenty-dollar bill and five bucks in change, then hands it to the Goldenrod-Haired Gargoyle, who smiles in victory.

Because this is what happens when theory meets reality. When principles meet real life. When your deeply held beliefs meet the gaze of your four-year-old's pleading eyes.

“ENJOY!” shrieks the Hideous Victor Who Has Stolen My Mantle of Yard Sale Supremacy and then turns
her attention to an elderly man testing out a rusty wheelchair that's missing two front wheels. “You take off the other two wheels and you've got an office chair that's better for your back than anything you could buy at Staples. I'll let you have it for ninety dollars.”

My daughter scrutinizes the doll as though she cannot fathom what she is seeing with her own eyes. She looks back at me in the same way.

On the walk home, as if to twist the knife, the kid talks about all of the things we're going to have to buy for her new (pre-owned!) American Girl doll—the clothes, accessories, visits to the café, and the friggin salon—because this used doll, for which I paid way too much, BTW, is just the gateway drug. I see now that I have failed my cheapskate self in more ways than one.

I tune out the child to say a small, silent prayer that, like every other toy in the history of her, she'll lose interest in it after ten minutes.