Playing with Barbies

Originally published in Blue Earth Review, issue 35

Colten Dom

You’re a fetus, bunkered in the womb like a tick, and they’re hosing you down with hormones like the rainbow soap at a carwash. Perhaps it’s decided here, long before you’re born, that as a young red-headed boy, you will like playing with Barbies. This gives your parents endless concern since, from day zero, they had always hoped you would play sports. Even now, thirty years old and with widening streaks of grey, you’ll be sitting across a beer and your dad will turn and ask, do you remember when you used to play with Barbies? Smiling as you harken back to the awkwardness, the tension, the rows and the tantrums; when you don’t answer, they’ll say something like: woof—dodged a bullet there. Thrilled, of course, that you like playing sports. And so disappointed, you’re sure, if they found out that you still like playing with Barbies.

You’re blank receipt paper spilled out atop the Toys “R” Us counter before it’s fed into the machine, a waxy scroll that bruises easily. Your parents don’t seem to realize this. It’s not like you had a thousand Barbies—they weren’t cheap, you can hear your dad growling—just a handful: Barbies out on the town for cocktails, Barbies driving convertibles, and your star, a mermaid Barbie whose hair turned a vibrant pink in a warm bath and an enigmatic blue when dunked in cold water. There’s a picture of you in dinosaur pajamas hoisting her cardboard coffin, Christmas wrapping shredded and humped across your feet like papery waves. For a long time, your parents joked that they would share the photo at your wedding. For a long time, this made you anxious.

Because, for a long time, you knew that boys playing with Barbies was wrong, something your family tolerated only because they loved you. No boys played with Barbies back in their day, and honestly, beyond the visual appeal, you can’t remember why you liked playing with Barbies. You simply assume that, as a little boy, you sought the same outlet as little girls—dressing, turning, twisting human figures to replicate and color the human dramas you had either seen or imagined.

You’re a couch potato, a flabby preteen, somewhat a loser and not super into sports. Your friends are outgrowing you, hitting the pubescent escalator first and turning around to show you porn on their family computers. You’re probably twelve when, playing your favorite online game, you dashed around a virtual corner and, virtual gun in hand, saw an image of two men playing with Barbies. It wasn’t something you’d never heard of, the kids at school accusing this or that unlucky fellow of playing with Barbies, often paired with another temporary target. If a peer was too goofy, too emotional, everyone would say he played with Barbies. And, if someone didn’t talk about their crushes, your friends would wonder aloud if maybe he was afraid to share, because, of course, he must be playing Barbies instead.

Confronted with the image, you did not feel the disgust, the revulsion you imagined, remembering how the other kids on the playground had spat out the word Barbie. Years passed, puberty striking like a tiny plastic car crash, and you stumbled into similar photos in other webspaces. Then you started looking for them. For a while, you wondered if you didn’t like sports at all, just wanting to play Barbies instead—but, thankfully for your parents, there was summer camp. Each year you attended, ferried through a muggy July to a sweaty YMCA bunkhouse, some combination of pimply pique and adolescent sarcasm won you admirers, teen girls who wanted to play sports with you. They wore braces, their black hoodies rippling cheap perfume, and they would sit on your bunk and stare, waiting for you to do something. Nervously, you started playing with them and, confusingly, found that you liked those games too.

Of course, you grew up in a sports household. Every night was Sunday Night Football, and playing with Barbies—playing seriously and forever, playing as a lifestyle, or even as an idle hobby—wasn’t tabled for the post-game. If it somehow came up, it was always negative. And playing both sports and Barbies? Laughable—any boy who played both, you can still hear the guffaw, really just wanted to play with Barbies. So when you tripped into high school and, through the typical hyper-dramas, realized you wanted to play Barbies with the friend you swapped punches with during your weekly boxing lessons, you were doubly bewildered.

Bewildered, but not confused: despite all the giddy fun of playing sports, chasing flashing jean shorts through the purple dark, it was repeated exposure, or maybe just beating the shit out of each other atop the bright blue mats, that finally unboxed the famine. Suddenly you were haunted, thinking nothing else, wanting nothing else—terrified, staring across the backseat of his mother’s Subaru as it wiggled through the gloomy winter streets. Outside idle dreams and half-understood fantasies, you had never felt such hunger. You sobbed often, paralyzed, alone in your room through the singular midnights as a hundred thousand futures passed between your ears, rolled beneath your coltish feet—betrayals, alienation, banishment, love. Half-insane with terror, when you finally mustered the courage to confess that you liked playing with Barbies—and, in your awkward way, that you wanted to play Barbies with him—he turned you down.

You’re a bleeding oyster: you crack the scabs in the mirror each evening and throw table salt around all night before burying yourself in the mud before sunrise. Only in the final years of high school do you discover it’s humanly possible to like playing sports and playing with Barbies. No one told you, learning for yourself, alone, that these games are not exclusive. You had a steady girlfriend—football, rugby, basketball, soccer—and, when you couldn’t see her, you went home and played Barbies in the shower, hunting yourself through the fog, searching for the weakness hiding within your body. But one spring day when, for the thousandth time, you sought your infirmity in the mirror, you saw, hiding underneath both the hickeys and your curving figure, a strength. Sports, Barbies, or some secret third thing, it didn’t matter: you simply had an enormous, hideous appetite.

One Bachelor of Arts later, you told your new girlfriend—the red-headed woman who, after nearly another decade, would become your wife—that you liked playing with Barbies. Her eyelashes barely fluttered, pale blues winking as she swallowed your whole self in stride. You were her first, a pro player from the league, a super-jock in comparison—you showed her how to kick the ball, dressed her in the uniform and whisked her off to the locker room; over the years, you share about a hundred million secrets with her. But you’re still screwed up, concussed, thoughts torn across the street like an exploded mailbox. Craving distance from yourself, you go to teach English for a year in Japan—a monkish seclusion to maybe, just maybe, get the plastic ironed out, no wrinkles, completely straight.

So you banish yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually to the Island of Misfit Toys. An ocean separates you from your love—apart from Christmas, when your parents flew you home, and the one time you saved up enough yen for her to visit, you can’t play sports together. You got what you wanted, wrestling feverishly with yourself, wanting to play with her and only her but, thrust out starving over the sudden void, slavering, hungering more than ever to play with Barbies. It didn’t help that the island resembled the worst of your childhood: limits, binaries, a nightmare of social concrete. You never once broke your promise, but you kept playing Barbies alone in your pink-tiled bathroom. That Halloween, you probably played Barbies with a half-dozen boys under the bright blue lights of a third-floor Osaka nightclub, pressing your doll to their doll’s sweating cheek. You would wake in the middle of the night, twisted through the sheets, heart pounding, dreams of Barbies falling from you like fistfuls of sand.

You wonder exactly how many dorm rooms you’ve sat in, just you and another guy drinking and yapping, the question hiding behind your tongue, aching—Do you want to play Barbies with me? But you rarely produced this speech, practically impossible unless you saw a doll sticking out from beneath their nightstand. Back then, the risk felt incalculable—now that you’re older, it’s laughable. Turns out the boy you traded punches with back in high school did like to play with Barbies: he’s getting married, building a dollhouse he can play in forever. At least, you console yourself, I wasn’t wrong. You’re not angry, not even disappointed; it’s been well over a decade. But you can’t help feeling sorry for that younger self drowning in the surf, choking on the pining, a couple years too early.

You’re a smoking crater papered over with a decent job, a beautiful spouse, and a good relationship with your family who still don’t know you like to play with Barbies. This essay will end, you’ve realized, when you die. You love your wife completely, always leaping into the field, playing sports with her like a titlist; however, she’s well aware of your bisected interests. You both know that there will always be some genuine and sad plastic part of you sneaking away from time to time. And you’ve come to realize your parents will never understand that you can play sports with the best of them—enough to exhaust your wife on the pitch, at least—but also brush the hair of plastic dolls.

Don’t be confused: they’ve heard enough hints, smelled enough of your past that you’re certain they know, even if they’ve never dared speak it aloud, that you played with Barbies after high school. But you’re sure they imagined it to be a passing phase, a fleeting fancy, time and marriage leading your father to make such comments as: Do you remember when you used to play with Barbies?

How can you say that the pink fear of disappointment and the horror of recognition have been dunked, replaced by a cold and bottomless blue anger? That years ago, at some hidden and uncertain crossroads, you decided to never give anyone, ever, the satisfaction—never give, even those you love most, the opportunity to ridicule your playing. The pressure has made you a perfect doll: better to live privately, denying admission to this self so publicly demeaned, so commonly taunted if not abhorred, than to answer even a single question, to debase yourself in explanations.

What’s horrifying is, it wasn’t your choice to leave the wrapping on. Now there simply isn’t any time. Your parents are aging, you’re getting older, and you’ll probably have a kid of your own soon. You’ve missed out on knowing each other as you truly are—because of the past, and their grass-stained fear, and your prune-fingered rage, and you don’t know if it’s your fault or theirs. All this time, you could have been brave, shouting from every stadium and dollhouse that you love playing sports and playing with Barbies. But, of course, you were too afraid they would only hear the part about the Barbies.

In the meantime, you continue writing little books and living your tiny life with your woman. All that remains are words, secrets placed in Christmas stockings, wrapped in paper and made harmless. You’ve come to realize that, in the great pink history of human playing—millions upon millions of games made of skin and hair, covered in outsides, filled with insides—it doesn’t fucking matter.

Because, through plastic eyes, with cleats on your feet, you’ve somehow witnessed an actual truth—that it’s an imaginary, floating world of closets and locker rooms and toy bins. And if the species were to die out with a final, loving generation playing in the exact and perfect combinations required to fulfill themselves—sports, Barbies, or some secret third thing—then we can truly declare ourselves to be champions, finally becoming a greater thing in each other’s arms, fearless of the plastic they’re attached to.

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