A. Homes: Safety of Objects: Stories

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Wednesday Ken and Barbie had their heads switched. I went to get Barbie, and there on top of the dresser were Barbie and Ken, sort of. Barbie’s head was on Ken’s body, and Ken’s head was on Barbie. At first I thought it was just me.

“Hi,” Barbie’s head said.

I couldn’t respond. She was on Ken’s body and I was looking at Ken in a whole new way.

I picked up the Barbie head/Ken and immediately Barbie’s head rolled off. It rolled across the dresser, across the white doily past Jennifer’s collection of miniature ceramic cats, and boom it fell to the floor. I saw Barbie’s head rolling and about to fall, and then falling, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was frozen, paralyzed with Ken’s headless body in my left hand.

Barbie’s head was on the floor, her hair spread out underneath it like angel wings in the snow, and I expected to see blood, a wide rich pool of blood, or at least a little bit coming out of her ear, her nose, or her mouth. I looked at her head on the floor and saw nothing but Barbie with eyes like the cosmos looking up at me. I thought she was dead.

“Christ, that hurt,” she said. “And I already had a headache from these earrings.”

There were little red dot/ball earrings jutting out of Barbie’s ears.

“They go right through my head, you know. I guess it takes getting used to,” Barbie said.

I noticed my mother’s pincushion on the dresser next to the other Barbie/Ken, the Barbie body, Ken head. The pincushion was filled with hundreds of pins, pins with flat silver ends and pins with red, yellow, and blue dot/ball ends.

“You have pins in your head,” I said to the Barbie head on the floor.

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

I was starting to hate her. I was being perfectly clear and she didn’t understand me.

I looked at Ken. He was in my left hand, my fist wrapped around his waist. I looked at him and realized my thumb was on his bump. My thumb was pressed against Ken’s crotch and as soon as I noticed I got an automatic hard-on, the kind you don’t know you’re getting, it’s just there. I started rubbing Ken’s bump and watching my thumb like it was a large-screen projection of a porno movie.

“What are you doing?” Barbie’s head said. “Get me up. Help me.” I was rubbing Ken’s bump/hump with my finger inside his bathing suit. I was standing in the middle of my sister’s room, with my pants pulled down.

“Aren’t you going to help me?” Barbie kept asking. “Aren’t you going to help me?”

In the second before I came, I held Ken’s head hole in front of me. I held Ken upside down above my dick and came inside of Ken like I never could in Barbie.

I came into Ken’s body and as soon as I was done I wanted to do it again. I wanted to fill Ken and put his head back on, like a perfume bottle. I wanted Ken to be the vessel for my secret supply. I came in Ken and then I remembered he wasn’t mine. He didn’t belong to me. I took him into the bathroom and soaked him in warm water and Ivory liquid. I brushed his insides with Jennifer’s toothbrush and left him alone in a cold-water rinse.

“Aren’t you going to help me, aren’t you?” Barbie kept asking.

I started thinking she’d been brain damaged by the accident. I picked her head up from the floor.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“I had to take care of Ken.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’ll be fine. He’s soaking in the bathroom.” I held Barbie’s head in my hand.

“What are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

Did my little incident, my moment with Ken, mean that right then and there some decision about my future life as queerbait had to be made?

“This afternoon. Where are we going? What are we doing? I miss you when I don’t see you,” Barbie said.

“You see me every day,” I said.

“I don’t really see you. I sit on top of the dresser and if you pass by, I see you. Take me to your room.”

“I have to bring Ken’s body back.”

I went into the bathroom, rinsed out Ken, blew him dry with my mother’s blow-dryer, then played with him again. It was a boy thing, we were boys together. I thought sometime I might play ball with him, I might take him out instead of Barbie.

“Everything takes you so long,” Barbie said when I got back into the room.

I put Ken back up on the dresser, picked up Barbie’s body, knocked Ken’s head off, and smashed Barbie’s head back down on her own damn neck.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” Barbie said as I carried her into my room. “We don’t have enough time together to fight. Fuck me,” she said.

I didn’t feel like it. I was thinking about fucking Ken and Ken being a boy. I was thinking about Barbie and Barbie being a girl. I was thinking about Jennifer, switching Barbie’s and Ken’s heads, chewing Barbie’s feet off, hanging Barbie from the ceiling fan, and who knows what else.

“Fuck me,” Barbie said again.

I ripped Barbie’s clothing off. Between Barbie’s legs Jennifer had drawn pubic hair in reverse. She’d drawn it upside down so it looked like a fountain spewing up and out in great wide arcs. I spit directly onto Barbie and with my thumb and first finger rubbed the ink lines, erasing them. Barbie moaned.

“Why do you let her do this to you?”

“Jennifer owns me,” Barbie moaned.

Jennifer owns me, she said, so easily and with pleasure. I was totally jealous. Jennifer owned Barbie and it made me crazy. Obviously it was one of those relationships that could exist only between women. Jennifer could own her because it didn’t matter that Jennifer owned her. Jennifer didn’t want Barbie, she had her.

“You’re perfect,” I said.

“I’m getting fat,” Barbie said.

Barbie was crawling all over me, and I wondered if Jennifer knew she was a nymphomaniac. I wondered if Jennifer knew what a nymphomaniac was.

“You don’t belong with little girls,” I said.

Barbie ignored me.

There were scratches on Barbie’s chest and stomach. She didn’t say anything about them and so at first I pretended not to notice. As I was touching her, I could feel they were deep, like slices. The edges were rough; my finger caught on them and I couldn’t help but wonder.

“Jennifer?” I said, massaging the cuts with my tongue, as though my tongue, like sandpaper, would erase them. Barbie nodded.

In fact, I thought of using sandpaper but didn’t know how I would explain it to Barbie: you have to lie still and let me rub it really hard with this stuff that’s like terry cloth dipped in cement. I thought she might even like it if I made it into an S&M kind of thing and handcuffed her first.

I ran my tongue back and forth over the slivers, back and forth over the words “copyright 1966 Mattel Inc., Malaysia” tattooed on her back. Tonguing the tattoo drove Barbie crazy. She said it had something to do with scar tissue being extremely sensitive.

Barbie pushed herself hard against me, I could feel her slices rubbing my skin. I was thinking that Jennifer might kill Barbie. Without meaning to she might just go over the line, and I wondered if Barbie would know what was happening or if she’d try to stop her.

We fucked, that’s what I called it, fucking. In the beginning Barbie said she hated the word, which made me like it even more. She hated it because it was so strong and hard, and she said we weren’t fucking, we were making love. I told her she had to be kidding.

“Fuck me,” she said that afternoon, and I knew the end was coming soon. “Fuck me,” she said. I didn’t like the sound of the word.

* * *

Friday when I went into Jennifer’s room, there was something in the air. The place smelled like a science lab, a fire, a failed experiment.