Keeping Secrets by Sarah Shankman Page A

back into the wagon with Virgie and William to shop in Natchitoches for those store-bought items that couldn’t be purchased in Sweetwell.
    There, in the cool dark Kendall’s Mercantile Store, while Virgie chose from the spools of thread and considered new needles for her treadle sewing machine, Rosalie saw the doll.
    It was perched on the counter, out of her reach, but she wouldn’t have touched it anyway. She wouldn’t have dared.
    The doll was like something out of a fairy tale, like Cinderella dressed for the ball. Its hair, real human hair, was like spun gold, parted down the middle and then twisted into a high knot atop her delicate head. A silver veil of the finest netting crowned the yellow curls. Her face was of porcelain, tinted blush pink at the cheeks and a rosier hue on her sweetly bowed lips. But the rest of the face was left its natural china white, and light seemed to shine through it, opalescent in the dim store. Her eyes were bright blue, with long fringed lashes that looked as if they had been dusted with gold. Beneath her slender neck began her dress of pale-blue taffeta, marked with what looked like rivulets of water. Virgie had once told her that the fabric was moiré, a kind of silk from France. Close upon her neck was a ruff of creamy lace. Below it marched a row of pearl buttons, tiny as seeds, down her slightly swelling bosom, ending at her wasplike waist. The sleeves of the dress belled out from the shoulder and then grew tight from the elbow down to her tiny wrists, where lacy trim matched that of the ruff. The skirt was full to the ankles, and just below the hem of it her delicate porcelain feet were enclosed in tiny black kid slippers. She was the most beautiful thing Rosalie had ever seen, beyond imagining.
    Virgie had heard her daughter’s sharp intake of breath and turned to see her staring, as round-eyed as the doll. Virgie’s lips had tightened. Anger rose in her breast. She knew she ought to feel pity or sadness, but it was always anger that surged like bile when the children wanted something that they couldn’t have. Their wanting and the naked hunger in their eyes made her ashamed to be a country hick standing in a city store with her passel of children strung out behind her like biddy chickens.
    She reached down and jerked Rosalie closer to her.
    “Don’t you dare touch,” she said.
    “Ma, I was just looking at her.” Rosalie’s cheeks burned hot. She knew that everyone in the store must be staring.
    “There’s no point in wishing, girl. Your daddy works too hard for you to be having fancy ideas about things like that.”
    Rosalie ducked her head. She’d get a whipping, she knew, if her mother saw her quick tears; she’d get something to cry about, all right. She turned and walked slowly, but not smartlike to make her mother angrier, out of the cool darkness of the store and across the wooden sidewalk back to the wagon, which was tied up outside on the town square. She climbed back in and sat beside Esther.
    “What’s the matter, Ro? You look mad enough to spit.”
    “Nothing.” Rosalie shook her head. Esther shrugged.
    But something was wrong, Rosalie thought. Something was wrong when you couldn’t even look at a doll and dream.
    A few weeks later as Virgie and William whispered late into the night in their bed, making Christmas plans, Virgie brought the doll up to her husband.
    “We skipped her, you know,” she said to the long lanky man who had lain beside her more than half of her thirty-eight years. “If we don’t get it for her this year, it’ll probably be too late. She’ll come into her womanhood soon and be too old for dolls.”
    “Virg!” William shushed her. Though he had fathered all of their twelve children right on this very mattress and had never seemed shy about that, he was uncomfortable at any mention of what he called “women’s business.”
    “Well, I wish you’d think about it.” Virgie snuggled closer to him, but not too close. She