Saturday's Child by Robin Morgan Page B

into the hundreds: wee dolls and dolls the size of a three-year-old child, baby dolls and grown-up dolls, cloth dolls, antiques with porcelain heads, and a subcategory of “exotics” from other countries, the kind you see displayed in tourist shops sporting national dress. The elite line of Madame Alexander dolls found its way into the collection one by one, usually as gifts from agents and producers: the Queen Elizabeth II in her coronation robes, the Prima Ballerina, the Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty, the Little Women set—Meg/Jo/Amy/Beth (Beth arrived cross-eyed, but I wouldn’t send her back) and Marmee—and naturally there was the Bride Doll. A doll was dutifully carried for photo shoots and public appearances, making me the object of bilious envy for most other little girls—who didn’t know that these dolls were considered too expensive to play with. Nor did they know that the one thing I really wanted, a dollhouse, was “out of the question”: it would take up too muchspace, and it wasn’t portable, meaning it had no function for publicity purposes.
    When I grew a little older and an omnipresent doll was less required for my adorability factor, it became more permissible for me to have some fun with the dolls. I dressed them in creations of my own making from scraps of cloth, washcloths, an old chiffon scarf of my mother’s. I wrote plays for my miniature repertory company, with multiple heroines (there were no boy dolls back then, no Kens or GI Joes). I rearranged everybody, putting Queen Elizabeth’s crown on Beth, switching the Ballerina’s toe shoes with Cinderella’s glass slippers. I threw them a pajama party—an act of invention on my part, since I’d never been to such a party and none of them had doll pajamas anyway.
    Still, only one doll ever claimed my heart. She was a plain Raggedy Ann with shoe-button eyes, a stitched-on grin, and a printed heart that declared I love you . She sat on my bed all day and slept in it all night, got packed in suitcases when we traveled for location taping or promotional shots, got frayed, torn, restitched, and lumpy. But, like Faulkner’s Delsey, she endured. Of all the characters in the doll collection—donated with fanfare publicity to a children’s hospital when I was fifteen—she’s the only one I still have. Any average little girl, any real little girl, could have had a Raggedy Ann, you see.
    I know nothing about the type of rewards working kid actors today ostensibly enjoy. Swimming pools, it seems. Porsches, coke snorts, and sex by age fourteen, perhaps. Vacations at Cannes or Palm Springs. I suspect it’s far less glam than it sounds. For my part, I worked more in radio and television than in theater or films; this meant a New York, not California, base—something beneficent in the universe about that . But it meant that the money, though steadier, was less lavish. I was also the daughter and niece of women who apparently had stored in their emotional genes a vigilance that at any given moment Doom might arrive or the Cossacks thunder in ( Who knows? )—and so were highly suspicious of swimming pools ( Careful! You could drown or catch polio! ), cars ( Why would you want to learn to drive, anyway? Someday you’ll have a chauffeur! Besides, buses don’t exist? ), any kind of drugs, even medicinal ( You don’t want an aspirin; it’ll make you groggy for days ), sex ( What? ), and certainly “vacations.”
    I can remember only two vacations from my childhood. The first, whenI was very little, maybe three years old, is part memory and part inherited story from my mother and aunts. It was while we still lived in Lake Worth, Florida, where I was born, before the move back north to Mount Vernon. My mother and Aunt Sally had taken me to the Everglades, for, they told me, a family vacation. It just happened that the papers had been filled for weeks with the