Just Two Girls
By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison
If you had asked me, at age seventeen and twenty-four and thirty-one, to describe what being a strong woman looked like, I’d have started by telling you about her clothes.
“She has this fitted-leather jacket,” says Seventeen. “And she wears it over flowy skirts and vintage t-shirts when she flies internationally to report on internal displacement in Sudan. Oh, and she definitely has a nose piercing.”
“No, she’s more polished than that,” says Twenty-Four. “Soft tweed skirt-suit with champagne pumps. Low-heels, of course, because she’s standing all day in a classroom ...”
“Wow,” says Thirty-one. “I’d be content with a clean pair of leggings, actually. Something that doesn’t have spit up on it?”
For as long as I can remember, I was ready to take a running leap into adulthood. I wanted to make an impact, be taken seriously, and leave the trivialities of childhood behind me. By the time I reached my thirties, I had started to understand what being a grown woman was really about. Not because I’d mastered the art of dressing well, but because I’d internalized that being a strong woman wasn’t some fictitious ideal. The strong woman was undeniably me. Up-in-the-night, diffuser of tantrums, picture book in one hand and nursing baby in the other Me. As much as I’d thrived in the classroom, as much as I was thrilled by performance reviews and three-day conferences, it all felt like dressing up and playing a part until I came home with my first baby, a feather-haired little girl named Penny.
We surrounded her with toy dinosaurs and dollhouses, dressed her in various shades of pink, but also blue and orange and green. We read her board books on insects, Mars, famous inventors, and sure, okay, a princess or two. I had very specific ideas for my firstborn. She would not be moulded with quite as much blunt societal force as the generations of girls before her. I didn’t want her measuring herself against a plastic dolly. She had options. She was free.
Any mother of two or more will tell you that once your second baby comes home from the hospital, your oldest, no matter how young, suddenly looks so very big. This change in perspective precedes a necessary shift—you need them to be a bit more capable, a bit more independent, and a bit more patient than they were last week. By the time her second little brother arrived, Penny had perfected the art of keeping herself entertained for long stretches, creating elaborate scenes with tissue boxes, baby blankets, and countless stuffed animals. While I was nursing the baby hours on end, she coaxed her younger brother into long reenactments of sea voyages and pirate treasure hunts. But just as I was escaping the baby haze and could offer her more attention, my darling girl took a running leap into big kid territory, galavanting around the neighborhood with friends and heading to sleep-away camp for a week. I caught the first glimpses of her as a moody and sharp-tongued tween and could suddenly and vividly imagine her late night, deep thoughts as an angsty teen.
I wasn’t ready.
So when her ninth birthday approached and I asked her to make me a wish list, I was pleasantly surprised to see American Girl dolls at the top. She’d received Molly from her grandma for Christmas the year before, and had brought her along to a few playdates with other AG-loving friends. My delight was laced with a sense of urgency. She’d never taken much interest in dolls until now. How much longer would she want to? I went a little crazy, yes, but at least I was thrifty about it.
“I can get you another outfit or two for Molly from the website, or I can find another doll and some outfits that another girl has played with before,” I said. “What do you think?”
“It’s more fun with more dolls,” she said, detailing her latest afternoon with her friend, Addie, whose collection included a cast of characters once loved by older cousins, their outfits swapped and hair re-styled. I thought of the reverence I’d had for my own doll, Kirsten, given to me once I reached the responsible age of nine. Sixty-five dollars was a lot of money for one toy back then. While my parents weren’t so precious about her as to expect me to keep her in collectible condition, I understood she couldn’t end up like the Barbies that got relocated to the bin of bath toys, their hair an unredeemable rope of tangles.
A month before her birthday, I posted on Facebook to see if any friends had some gently-loved American Girl dolls or accessories I could purchase, and within a day or two, I had offers from several connections to “come take a look at what they had.” One friend texted me photos of three separate dolls that belonged to her college-aged daughter, their matching shoes and hats still nestled into the folds of birthday dresses and doll-sized winter coats. Suddenly, all the hours I’d spent pouring over slick catalogue pages on my bedroom floor coalesced with the image of Penny’s girlhood flickering bright, then dim in these middle years.
“If it works for you, I’ll come and pick it up this weekend,” I texted her.
“Which one?” she asked.
Reader, let me tell you, without much more than a guilty twinge about needing to talk to my husband first, I typed back—
“All of it.”
In the following weeks, countless people messaged me to relive their American Girl nostalgia. “I saw you post that Penny is in an American Girl phase,” they often began. “Weren’t those just the best when we were kids?” or “I couldn’t wait till those catalogues arrived.” I’d nod and tilt my head, wondering which doll they’d called their own, back when there were only five dolls to choose from.
“Let me guess… Felicity?”
“Nope! Samantha.”
“Lucky.” And all of us were. Lucky to have those moments, however unrealistic they were, to change names and histories and dreams as easily as swapping one dress for another. It was never meant to be aspirational or true-to-life, it was meant to be play.
After bringing home the bin of pre-loved dolls, I lifted each girl out, marveling at her costumes and trying to guess where she fit on the timeline of history. Caroline’s cornsilk hair had ringlet curls and showed the most signs of having been loved before, but Marie-Grace and McKenna were nearly pristine. My mom and I stayed up the night before Penny’s birthday brushing and braiding their hair, tucking tiny textbooks into McKenna’s locker and delighting in Marie-Grace’s hand painted Mardi-Gras mask. I gravitated toward Caroline, skimming through her paperback story of sailing Lake Ontario, while my mom restored McKenna’s hairstyle to its original half-up-do. We nestled the three dolls into their boxes and wrapped them with all our hopes for the nearly-nine-year-old sleeping upstairs.
“It’s the last year of single-digit birthdays,” I told my mom.
“I know, honey,” she said. “You’re doing a great job.”
We said goodnight, falling asleep with the specific kind of contentment only a good round of playing dress-up can bring.
Penny spent her birthday with three of her closest friends, taking turns swapping outfits and making up stories about the four time-crossed American Girls in their hands. As much as she loved each of her new dolls, she still showed a preference for Molly, whose glasses always seemed to be missing.
Just yesterday, I found her sitting cross-legged on the floor speaking sternly through a stuffed unicorn as her dolls gazed wide-eyed back at her from their seats beneath the window. It was “the third day of Magic School,” she said, and Marie-Grace was leading a rebellion against the substitute teacher.
“Can I play, too?” I asked.
Penny lit up. “Of course!” she said, handing me my own Kirsten doll, lifted out of a storage trunk to join the AG menagerie in her room.
“Teacher? Teacher? Can I tell you something?” I said, speaking for Kirsten.
The sky-blue unicorn looked forbiddingly down its nose and said, “If you must.”
“One time, I burned down our entire cabin,” Kirsten said. “I think it had something to do with a baby racoon.”
Penny rolled her eyes. “Yes, Kirsten. But today we are learning to lift objects using only the power of our minds. Pay attention.”
“Wow,” I said, nodding at her. “This substitute teacher is really a grouch. Can we just change their outfits a bunch of times instead?”
She laughed at me and shook her head, like she was indulging me (which she was) and for the next hour we swapped fuzzy white mufflers and pink organza dresses. Just two girls, strong and creative, able to be anything they wanted, and content to be completely themselves.
Adrienne Garrison lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her husband and their two little ones. Her essays have appeared in Coffee + Crumbs and New Millennium Writings, and her short story “No Longer Mine” was recently featured in LETTERS Journal. Adrienne believes magic takes the form of heart-to-heart conversations, petit-fours, and walks in the woods. You can find more of her writing on her website and Substack.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.