American Girls and Hyrule Boys
This weekend my best friend growing up, Sarah, visited New York, with her husband and his best friend. As is usually the case, their visit served as a reminder of all the things I have yet to do in the city— go to a Yankee’s game, ride to the top of the Empire State Building, and MOTHERFUCKIN GO TO THE MOTHERFUCKIN AMERICAN GIRL STORE.
Now I am someone who likes to believe in that whole, Let It Unfold, what’s meant to be will be, if it sounds good why not believe it line of bullshit. I’ve found it really works for me, suits my lifestyle, caters to my happiness, and I’m sorry but, what else is there? Oh, helping other people? Shut up, that is part of it, too. Anyway, for instance, when I tell you I haven’t ever read 100 Years of Solitude or seen Star Wars, you are gonna be like DUDE WTF and I’ll be like, Dude. And that is because part of me completely believes that one day the perfect opportunity will arise— someone will give me that book with a beautiful inscription in it and I’ll cherish it forever, or I will fucking be George Lucas’s nanny and he will sit and watch the whole goddamn series with me and feed me popcorn and tell me what a great moviewatching companion I am. In fact, I believe in this so much I am actually sort of reluctant to reveal it to you, this, my most intimate life approach that has really seemed to work out so far and come to think of it I am sort of convinced now that I will be George Lucas’s nanny even though I just Wikipedia’d him and I don’t think he even has kids.
Anyway it is with this Life Approach that I found myself in the American Girl Place, having passed it so many times and never had any desire to go in until yesterday, when it hit me, that all this time a veritable nostalgia factory lay waiting for me on 5th avenue, to run through shrieking and yelling, promising to have children just so I could bring them there, to get their stupid doll’s hair done or their ears pierced (true story: “We just take them in the back and drill a hole in their head, then tell the kid that she was very brave and didn’t cry a bit.”)
Sarah and I ran up the escalator filled with the same excitement we have found around each other since we were 9 and pretending to be retarded on the short bus they made us take to go to Gifted; the same glee we felt when we would dance on the tables with our teacher’s life-sized, inflatable emporer penguin; the same joy we took from flinging our classmate’s purse filled with pantyliners across the classroom, all because she mispronounced “fury” in our halloween puppet show.
In short, we were assholes.
“WHERE’S MY BITCH?!” I screamed at the top of the escalator that led to the historical dolls section. I had seemed to forgotten we were at a store marketed to spoiled 8 year old girls and their anxiety-ridden mothers. I covered my mouth and we ran, truly, ran, to Kirsten.
I clutched my chest.
Imagine seeing something that actually makes you aware of how deeply you felt things when you were a child. I mean it when I say I had no idea I cared about anything that much until I started squealing and pacing and running back and forth from outfit to outfit. I remember the longing I felt, dragging those catalogs everywhere I went, pen in hand, circling desperately all of my big dreams, knowing I could never have it all, feeling tortured by the limitations. But most of all how much I gave a shit about a doll, how meticulously I would tie her shoes and brush her hair, pack all of her clothes away in the sunflower trunk my mom got me, how agonizing a decision it was to pick which one i wanted, how much of an expression of my identity it felt — I remember conceptualizing each girl, the mythology of all of them- Felicity seemed to be for all the hippy dippy girls, maybe because of her red hair, Samantha was the one we loved to hate, Molly- seriously, fuck Molly, she had glasses before it was cool and she was wayyy too modern. My gal was from 1854 and she was blonde and she had pigtail braids at a time in my life where braids really MEANT something (something awesome and unattainable- a level of together-ness reserved for only the coolest girls at St. Margaret Mary… at least in my mind, as my mom always told us she didn’t know how to do it [as I type this I realize how insane that is- MOM, HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO BRAID? HAVE YOU LEARNED YET? THAT IS CRAZY, I CAN TEACH YOU, WE LEARNED ON YARN AT GIRL SCOUTS MANY YEARS AGO]).
The point is, I wanted to jump through the glass and possess each and every thing on display. I wondered where her cat was. I had that cat! WHERE IS IT NOW? Where is her mini chalkboard?! I made her do her homework on that chalkboard! SHE WAS VERY GOOD AT CURSIVE.
I think American Girl dolls first taught me that lifelong lesson of wanting what you can’t have. And how want begets want. And how you can never keep up. But also, how you can grab your sister’s hand on Christmas morning and drag her into your grandparents’ living room while it’s still dark out, how without turning any lights on for fear of getting caught, you feel your way over to the couch, blindly wave your hands around until your 8 year old eyes adjust, and then hug the doll to your chest in the dark, not knowing which one it is yet, but screaming silently with your sister, who is 6 and would do whatever you asked her to, who is jumping along with you quietly, and you cover your guilty mouths, filled with fear and excitement and disbelief but also knowing that this is definitely, definitely the best thing that could have happened.
Long post, but given my horrific ADD of late, the fact that I read it with wide eyes and unabating attention says something. Namely, that it hit home.
Not that I played with American Girl dolls (the girls I knew got dolls that looked just like them, but in Pioneer-era clothing, which frightened me), but the dolls, in this case, are merely a vessel for the message. Or so I’ll assume, in this case, for literary sake.
I wouldn’t call myself a success, by any means, but in my early 20’s, I’m surviving here in New York City, a feat that requires no small grasp of reality. Yet despite my grasp, I’ve always had an intense desire to escape that reality, which remains unabated. In fact, in the face of new tedium, it’s gotten stronger and stronger.
Childhood games were life and death, the decisions rendered serious and consequential to the fate of the world.
My world, however, was inhabbited by 150 different species of Pokemon and threatened by radiation-altered, city-wrecking dragons. A world called Hyrule, that could only be saved by a blond elfin, controlled by a third generation New York kid and a Nintendo controller.
It’s why I write now, why I write screenplays and plan animated series. Why I start websites, to have my own corner of the universe.
The nine year old me would have little to do with an American Girl store, but take me somewhere that I could save pretend to save the world with my sword and my trusty Pikachu, and my reaction would be the same as Meaghano’s — a transportation back to the excitement and grave seriousness of the childhood things that mattered so much then and that, if permited to see daylight from underneath the layers of heartbreak and work and responsibility and baggage built up like plaque over the years, would matter again.
Oh yeah. I played Pokemon on the subway ride home.
