Her Nylon Doll

“My sister’s disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favored and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. 

Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; not, with very few exceptions, ever experienced.

And yet she know them: knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them, she rarely exchanged a word.”

― Charlotte Brontë in her 1850 preface to “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë

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Dear Alex,

Antique shops fascinate me. They hold fragile trinkets of tales about the original owners whose lives would be obscured if it were not for these leftovers turning to caregivers of their secrets.

I remember growing up in Vancouver as a child and walking quite often along a lively strip of Main Street most notable for its culinary cuisines and curious collections of decade-fold books and furniture, pre-loved and post-war hats tea sets and tinkering chatter in queer quarters of an afternoon loosely mine to lose.

One mid-day after school in my teen years I took the bus to Main Street and crossed the thresholds of time to find a small birthday gift for my sister in one of these consignment shops. There it lay, a tiny baby doll puffed with love squeezing through its nylon stitches at the unbearable bundle of $ 19.99 to love for life. I scoured the expanse of my side pocket that had just worn the thrill of my minimum wage of $ 4.25 on the spanking hour earned at McD nestled half a block down.

For years the nylon doll stayed with my sister until just before last Christmas, while house cleaning, I found her in her original plastic case snuck between my stacks of old books and photo albums in the garage. How she returned to me I did not recall - for I had moved to and from at least 3 colleges in 3 cities of 3 states since high school - but the doll soon slipped out of her dreamy coma, nylon to flesh on the reclaimed palms of my sister.

How many times have we gifted someone something only to be recycled to us in sweet surprise?

A year after the death of Emily Brontë at the age of 30 in 1848, her only novel, “Wuthering Heights” was first published under her pen name “Ellis Bell” by her sister, Charlotte Brontë. In its second edition, Charlotte wrote a biographical preface of Emily, revealing for the first time the real name of its storyteller, a figure rarely seen or known in public and now whose identity rings like a household name in the annals of literature and cinematic corollary to fashioning love on mission impossible.

Catherine and Heathcliff of “Wuthering Heights” died to be revived in elliptical rippling through generations and genres of readers and evening dreamers, their thrashing temperaments and pendulous passions so closely anticipated in books and movie adaptions we feel virtually as family and foe under one roof with these make-believe lovers. Ironically, through her characters, Emily regifted us less of a narrative in romantic love never gifted for her but more of the absence of love. She knew us better than our dolls and sisters, emptying us of the love we have saved stingily within us, driving us out into the moor and solitude to seek for it.

A stroke from the famed novel, we know so scantily of Emily in her living years but perhaps more abundantly of her death from tuberculous dated and verified by throngs visiting her museum home in West Yorkshire, England. The Brontë parsonage is now closed of course as most doors have been shuttered in the pandemic wind expected to pass when a vaccine is suggested to arrive soon, maybe by Christmas as a rescue gift like my grace-saving find of treasured spoils in secondhand stores, nylon doll as memoir of sisterhood, Robin Hood, heroic fables piling up behind closed curtains for a prolonged pause in social fluttering to suppress mortality in this wintry twindemic.

So you’ve asked in your last post: How are we going to do Christmas when there is not much we can do about it?

I don’t have a clue, just an inkling of expectation - not for waiting to the whereabouts of a vaccine or cure. Our maladies are more sophisticated than our science. You don’t do Christmas like a chore or pursuit. Christmas comes to you all done, up and coming, ancient and current in the most fantastical unwinding and unwrapping of what you least expect most expectantly through empty roads and corridors you did not think of loafing around until they come rushing to you like a cure, a gift to regift.

Yours, Kate