While walking my dog this morning I came across a severed head just lying there in the street.  A sight of this nature would usually be considered gruesome, even horrifying.  And in some way it was.  But since this was merely a Barbie head which had been given a haphazard hair cut followed by decapitation from its voluptuous body, my thoughts went immediately to the two young boys who lived in the house just up the hill.  I looked up and imagined the boys ripping the head off their sister’s Barbie doll, chopping its hair and tossing it down the hill to roll into the street.

The sister wouldn't have done it.  We girls would rather leave the body in tact so we can dress it and redress it.  We know that Barbie needs her body attached to her head so she can press it against Ken when she kisses him.  We keep her hair long so we can comb it and style it because Barbie heads are covered in hair follicles, very stylable, not like the cheap imitation dolls that come with a pony tail.  Then when you remove the rubber band and the hair relaxes, you find that the follicles are positioned in a ring at the hairline and the entire middle of the head is bald, sometimes spray painted the same color as the hair to fool the buyer into believing that the doll has a whole head of hair.  Definitely unstylable, unless you want your Barbie’s head to look like a mango wearing a hula shirt.

For a moment I wanted to pick up the head and tell it I was sorry it had to go through that kind of abuse.  I wanted to take it home and wrap it in some sparkly paper and give it a burial ceremony.  I wanted to tell it to not give up on mankind because we weren't all doll abusers.

But on second thought there was that time when I was around four years old that I did unspeakable things to my doll Barbara, who coincidentally had the full name for which Barbie was a nick name.  But back then Mattel Toys hadn't invented the Barbie Doll yet and even if they had, my Barbara wasn't a long-legged, full-breasted adult doll with permanent make-up.  She was a baby doll about the size of a real baby and I didn't name her some cute name you’d give to an air-headed glamour girl because Barbara wasn't glamorous and I hated it when my mother called her Zsa Zsa.

Back then Zsa Zsa Gabore was a glamorous movie star and when I walked into the room holding Barbara in my arms to watch my mother ironing clothes, she would ask me how Zsa Zsa was doing and I’d become indignant and say, “Her name is Barbara,” at which point my mother would smile and continue ironing.  I didn't want Barbara to be a glamorous woman like Zsa Zsa because Barbara was my baby, or so I thought when I cut off all her hair.  My intentions in cutting her hair weren't maniacal because at that age I believed her hair would grow back.  I must have just wanted to give her a summer bob, you know, because of the heat in Bakersfield and all.  But of course her hair didn't grow back.  So I stopped believing that my dolls were real long before I stopped believing in Santa Clause.

Shortly after cutting Barbara’s hair down to sand paper nubs (and the nubs covered her entire head because she wasn't a cheap doll with a hair ring) I was fascinated by a ball point pen and wildly scribbled on the bottom of her feet.  Don’t ask me why I did it because I don’t know.  But I remember that over time the ink traveled up her legs like blood poisoning and left her with a look of varicose veins.  And by the time I outgrew her she looked like an old woman with a man’s haircut (as so many old women do), and legs that begged for amputation.

We must have given her away because throwing her into a trash would have been devastating for me.  Some poor child probably got her and had to pretend she was taking care of a perpetual hospital patient.  She may have wrapped a scarf around Barbara’s head and said that she had just come from her umpteenth chemotherapy treatment, or put casts on her legs to pretend she was recovering from a car accident.

Or maybe someone in my immediate family did toss her away and an out-of-work screenwriter picked through a garbage can and found her and gleaned inspiration for his next horror movie because he saw the hair nubs and the veined legs and those old fashioned doll eyes that opened when you sat her up and closed when you laid her down.  And her eyes were so clear and bright blue that for a moment the writer would feel his breath catch in his throat at the thought of how alive she looked.  And he would take her home and prop her on a shelf across from his typewriter, because of course he didn't have a computer back then, and he would type away.  Her aura would be so strong he would be compelled to name her Barbara.  And he would consider shortening it to Barbie, which he would immediately reject since that name is too cute for an evil doll.  Then he’d think again and realize how horrifying it would be to create a doll with such a cute name who murdered people.  And he would write the script that would give him that Ferrari he always wanted.

But I can’t think of Barbara that way, not as one of those horror movie dolls.  She was my experimental baby for a short time and I learned that mommies are not supposed to buzz their baby daughter’s hair or draw on the bottom of their feet with blue ink.  So in some ways, having Barbara taught me to be a good mother.