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I can't tell you when I first became aware of my namesake. My general knowledge of her seems to have been in the air from the time I was born. On television she and her friends would ride in her convertible, would comb their hair and inspect their outfits in the mirror of her wardrobe (a closet of a size I have come across in only one apartment I have ever rented), would dawn their bikinis and dip into her Jacuzzi, would dance around her mansion (I have been to three mansions in my life that I remember, all of them on tours--one in Newport, Rhode Island, used for 1920s millionaires; one in Beverly Hills, California, used for movies; and one outside Gainesville, Georgia, used as a bed and breakfast, at which I did not stay). Ten-year-old girls' tiny fingers held the Barbies in place in these ads, and the narration alternated between them and some overly modulated adult voice. In my memory of these commercials, Barbie herself never spoke. It was up to us--the daughters of the purchasers--to give her voice, in addition to adding to the story that had been started in the thirty-second spot.
In the department stores Barbie stared out of virtually every toy section, and in the toy stores she had her own aisle. I stalked these aisles like so many young girls, only for me the experience, I would argue, seemed somehow more connected personally. Barbie was not my twin sister or some hypothetical grownup self. She was me--same name, same hair, same tan and skinny body. Because Barbie had a wardrobe of twenty-eight outfits, it seemed that I should as well. Because Barbie dawned a feather boa, it seemed that I should too. Because Barbie had an oven devoted to cooking hand-sized personal pizzas, I felt a need to have one myself. She was me. If I did not have twenty-eight outfits yet, did not have a feather boa, did not have the ability to make pizza, the lack was temporal. These things were coming my way.
This does not mean that Barbie was familiar to me. She was a mystery. That she was the type of person to have her own Jacuzzi or drive a red sports car, to have a boyfriend named Ken and yet no baby, these were things beyond my inclinations as a five- and six- and seven-year-old. But I would grow into them, I figured. And in time, even though I tried my hardest not to, I did, except that I never had a mansion, and those twenty-eight outfits no longer seemed enough (indeed, both the Barbie that was me and the Barbie that was the doll went far beyond that), and Ken wasn't nearly as wonderful as he seemed.
My first Barbie came to me at age eight, in a box wrapped in yellow and orange, at a party for some other kid. All of the guests--nine of us--received Barbies. Some of us already had them, and so Barbie now had a twin. But this was my first, my only.
The long familiarity with her store and television presence made her addition to my doll collection seem natural. She integrated easily into gatherings with the Sunshine family and somewhat less easily into picnics with the more rotund Holly Hobbie and company. As with the other dolls, I combed her hair, dressed her as seemed appropriate to the occasion each day until a newer doll came to steal my attention.
Never once did I consider what Barbie herself would have felt had she been real: the glamorous single girl hanging out with the Sunshines--she, lonely, wanting, too often the object of Mr. Sunshine's unwanted stares and Mrs. Sunshine's jealousy; the unwanted beauty among the less-attractive Strawberry Shortcake set--no matter, since no men were around anyway. Never once did I consider how those other dolls would have felt had they been real, cast aside by me for the girl with the plastic good looks. Nor did I consider the same of Barbie when my Cabbage Patch baby came along. How used she would have felt, how stupid, how purposeless.
Despite being a brunette for the last seventeen years, I recognize that my early childhood Barbie fixation has not left me. I tried to distance herself from me with a simple change to my hair's color, and yet that change itself made me only more self-conscious in all the other ways that she was me and I was her. How many choices have I made to become her? How many choices have I made trying not to?
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