Alice Weatherby

Lot 43
Alice Weatherby Estate
Assorted Dolls (nine pieces)

Her mother always said that Alice had her brain wrapped in cotton wool.  Not to say she was particularly unintelligent -- she always was a bright young lady, in her way -- but she always seemed to be insulated against the sharp corners of the world; she created for herself a safe, nonthreatening place in her head and stayed there.  They never sought treatment for her because, well, she seemed happy enough.  Everybody said what a happy, cheerful young girl she was.  Grandma would call the girl her little ray of sunshine, and give her treats.  Everyone at church would praise her, and even the preacher once referred to her as “a pure child of the Lord”.  When people said these things, she would smile sweetly, and nestle in a little deeper.

Of course, there were times it wasn't quite so charming.  When her little terrier Precious died, she seemed unable to grasp the idea properly.  She kept the body with her for weeks, carrying it about, talking to it, treating it like a doll.  Her mother eventually had to take the thing away while she was at school and give it a proper burial.  When she got home, Alice was told that Precious had gone to a special place, but would come back for her one day. She seemed satisfied with this, but it was a pain to watch her write letters to it and ask mother to post them.  Her mother always meant to throw them out, of course, but somehow she never could.  And there were times, when Alice asked when Daddy was coming back, that she couldn't even look her in the eye.

Still, she did eventually grow up – well, older, anyway – and got a job as a saleslady at one of the knickknack shops in town, where she got to surround herself with sentimental cards, decorative figurines, pictures of babies dressed up like plants, and so on.  She never actually moved out of the house, staying on “to take care of Mother,” though among those who knew them there was some speculation as to who was really taking care of whom.  Eventually, the mother died -- “Received her mansion in Glory” was how Alice put it (she was the kind of person who could say something like that and mean it) – and Alice began to make the place her own, filling it with tchotchkes from the store, meticulously completed craft projects, and a few of the cleaner varieties of dog.  She attended church regularly, and believed every word the preacher said.  She rarely had men over, and almost never more than once, but seemed to get along quite well without them.  After all, her pets were her babies already, weren't they?  And anyway, sex was filthy.

And so it went.  She painted her world in pastels and wrapped herself in sentiment.  She discovered romance novels, and devoured them; she even tried her hand at writing her own, but somehow they weren't right.  She knew that ideally stories should contain some sort of conflict, but when she took pen to paper she just couldn't bring herself to do it.  Having two people meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after was all good and well as far as it went, but it hardly made for riveting reading.  So, she contented herself with her romance novels, her objects d'art, all her pretty things, and burrowed deeper and deeper into herself.

When the news of her death got out, it shocked the neighborhood; this wasn't the kind of place where that sort of thing happened.  Neighbors had heard the gunshot late in the afternoon, and had gone around to investigate.  The gun was identified as having belonged to her father; apparently he'd left that behind, if little else.  There was talk of a possible homicide, but really the scene in the kitchen told it all.  She was sitting at the table, the gun still in her hand and a brief note detailing the feeding requirements of the dogs on the table.  A thorough investigation of the house turned up no evidence as to a motive.  The only things that aroused any suspicion were the remains of what looked to have been an envelope and a sheet of writing-paper in the fireplace, but these were both burned beyond any hope of discovering anything from them.  That, and a worn old rag doll clenched tightly in her free hand, smiling its frozen smile.

The funeral was well attended, and when she was lowered into the ground in the grave next to her mother, her friends and remaining family blew their noses and wondered why it had come to this.  After all, they said to one another, she was always such a happy person.