The mothers have been in uniform for eleven days. Desire and mischief are being crushed out of them. Frida’s classmates have stopped ogling guards. There’s been bickering in the shower line, elbowing and shoulder-checking in the halls, tripping and name-calling, endless dirty looks.
A number of foster parents and grandparents and guardians missed their assigned call times. Some lacked computers or smartphones. Some lacked Wi-Fi. There were bad connections and misunderstandings, children who wouldn’t talk.
Emmanuelle’s new habit is running while crying. She’s faster than Harriet was in September, though maybe not faster than Harriet is now. Frida feels like she’s cheating Harriet with every embrace. More for Emmanuelle, less for Harriet, and how much of her is there to go around? She’d been so angry at Gust for his talk of divided loyalties—his family versus his new, glorious love. His divided heart. The difficulty of triangulation. She broke two wineglasses the night he used that term.
The sky this morning is overcast, with the kind of soft light that makes the dolls’ skin look more real. The dolls run to the doors and windows. They bang on locked cabinets. They pull open drawers. Mothers pursue. Dolls collide. The crying gets louder.
Ms. Russo adjusts Frida’s stance. Frida needs to kneel. She shouldn’t bend over Emmanuelle or bend down to her. Children must be treated with respect.
“You have to meet them where they are,” Ms. Russo says. She asks Frida to try her apology again. This time, with more feeling.
They’re practicing the hug of contrition. This week, the instructors finally gave them toys—stacking rings and blocks and shape sorters and stuffed animals—but after an hour of playing, the dolls laughing, bonding seemingly within reach, the toys are snatched away, leaving the mothers to earn the dolls’ forgiveness. The instructors have been doing this every morning, setting off tantrums that last the entire day.
Frida would not say that she is used to the place or the uniforms or the lessons or the mothers or the dolls, but she is growing used to the headaches. The throbbing behind her eyes is part of her life here, as is her dry skin and bleeding gums and aching knees and sore back, the sensation of never being clean, the tightness in her wrists and shoulders and jaw. She has a new roommate, Roxanne, a Black mother in her early twenties whose seven-month-old baby boy, Isaac, is in foster care. Roxanne let her twelve-year-old niece babysit Isaac when she got called into work on a Sunday. A passerby saw the girl wheeling Isaac in his stroller in front of Roxanne’s apartment building and called the police. He was only five months old when they took him.
Roxanne is from North Philly, had been a student at Temple, was just beginning her senior year. Poli-sci major, with a minor in media studies. She doesn’t talk about Isaac much, but she’s asked Frida about the stages of development she’s missing. Before all this happened, Isaac was just learning to sit up. He’ll be crawling soon. Roxanne said Frida is lucky. She had a year and a half with Harriet. Harriet will know Frida’s face. Her voice. What will Isaac remember about his mother? Nothing.
Roxanne has skeptical, inky almond-shaped eyes and a button nose and waist-length dreads that she plays with incessantly. She is compact and bosomy, with hips so narrow it’s unclear how she birthed a baby. She changes her clothes quietly, makes her bed quietly, never wants to gossip, never lets Frida see her naked, but, unfortunately for Frida, she talks and laughs in her sleep. Her dream laughter is charmed and abundant. Her dreams, if Frida is interpreting them correctly, involve fragrant meadows and mountain streams, a gentleman caller.
Frida wishes she could laugh about it with Will. She wants to tell him about Roxanne rustling the sheets and smiling in the dark. She wants to tell him that these buildings are composed of pheromones and regret. Hostility. Longing. That it’s possible to stop noticing sadness. That the sound of women crying now resembles white noise.
* * *
Some say the dolls needed time to get used to them. Some say all progress is due to the mothers. Some say the dolls’ cooperation has been programmed to increase competition. Regardless of the reason, the impossible has happened. There have been breakthroughs. Trust has been established. Mothers are meeting their dolls’ needs.
In Frida’s cohort, the leader is Linda, who, on Friday morning, quiets her doll with an eight-second hug and a two-second bounce-bounce.
The instructors ask the class to observe. They silence the other dolls, then taunt Linda’s doll with a teddy bear, which is then snatched away. Linda, who has birthed and allegedly neglected many, moves in swift and graceful. She presses her doll firmly to her shoulder, delivering affirmations in Spanish and English. She bounces the doll with jittery motions, as if she’s preparing a cocktail. She pats and dips. Soon, the doll is calm.