Frida carries her to the instructors.
“We’re going to teach Mommy Frida how to clean you,” Ms. Russo says. The doll looks terrified, her cry anticipating physical injury, emotional upset, and psychological harm all at once.
Frida stays behind during lunch. The other dolls watch in fright as Ms. Russo wheels an examination table from the equipment room and covers it with a tarp. Ms. Russo unbuttons Emmanuelle’s uniform, places her facedown on the table, and holds her there. Frida kisses her head, remembering how scared Harriet would be before shots.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says. Ms. Russo directs Frida to unscrew the knob at the small of Emmanuelle’s back.
Frida looks over at the four frozen dolls. She asks if they can do this somewhere else.
“It’s nothing they haven’t seen before.” Ms. Khoury hands her a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves. Frida must be careful. If the blue liquid comes in contact with her skin, it will cause a rash.
If there’s a hug of contrition, can there also be a touch? Frida is glad they don’t have to reach inside a doll vagina or anus, but as she unscrews the cap, as Ms. Russo pins Emmanuelle down and tells her not to move, she feels like a rapist.
The blue liquid smells rotten and milky, but with a chemical brightness, as if curdled milk was layered with aerosol air freshener. Frida’s stomach turns. Ms. Khoury gives her a speculum, tells her to widen the hole. The doll kicks her legs. She shrieks into the table.
“Can you turn her off?”
“We appreciate your concern, Frida, but we need the liquid to be the right temperature.”
Ms. Khoury hands her a flashlight. Frida expects to see gears, wires, buttons, filaments, but whatever makes Emmanuelle run won’t be revealed. The blue liquid is shiny and thick. Floating on top are several nuggets the size of golf balls.
Ms. Russo brings over four empty unmarked cans. She pops the lids open and finds a long metal spoon with a serrated edge. The liquid will be sent back to the doll factory and recycled for future use. Ms. Khoury finds a metal drum in which Frida can deposit the spoiled liquid.
Frida apologizes to Emmanuelle as she fishes out nuggets and deposits these in the waste drum, then ladles the blue liquid out one spoonful at a time, trying not to gag. Emmanuelle has settled into a trance. It’s possible that Frida is inflicting upon her the worst pain she’s ever known, forcing her to dissociate from her body.
As a child, Frida loved to stretch across her mother’s lap and have her mother scratch her back while they watched television. Sometimes her mother would clean her ears with a bobby pin. She remembers the delight in her mother’s voice—Ah!—when she scooped out an especially big piece of wax. The shadowy tumbling sound if she knocked a piece farther into Frida’s ear canal. The feeling of the bobby pin scraping against her eardrum. She was willing to go deaf if it meant they could spend more time together.
Emmanuelle will have no such tender memories. Frida inspects the cleaned cavity, which is metal but flexible, moving with the doll’s breath. The new liquid hisses on contact. Emmanuelle seizes. She opens her mouth in a silent scream. Frida unlatches the speculum. The cavity returns to its normal size.
“I think we’re done now. Are you okay, sweetie?”
Emmanuelle won’t look at her. She hangs limp as Frida fixes her uniform. Her face and hands are smooth again. The instructors catch Frida pressing her ear to the doll’s chest, grabbing her wrist and feeling for a pulse. They smile and make a note on their devices.
* * *
Emmanuelle remains listless and withdrawn the next day. She refuses to speak. Stares off into space. No longer cries. Seems like a different child entirely. Ms. Russo says this is natural. After a cleaning, the dolls can become shy.
The puckering is happening to the other dolls too. At meals, Frida’s classmates speak in euphemisms, as if they’re discussing sex. They refer to the serrated spoon as “the thing,” call the blue liquid “the stuff,” refer to the dolls’ dimpled bodies as “the problem.”
Everyone thinks it’s evil to make the other dolls watch. Beth heard gasps.
“They should have told us about the side effects,” Lucretia says. The zombie disposition.
This week’s counseling sessions have been canceled. The mothers have no one in power with whom to discuss the strangeness of the procedure or their guilt. They have no one to ask, if by changing the doll’s constitution, they’re hurting their chances.
Linda has been making fun of them, saying this can’t be any worse than cleaning up shit or vomit. When her doll finally dimples, the others rejoice.