The Doll Dress

2021

 The Doll Dress

     by Douglas Reimer the Orderly

This is how our breakfast ran mornings till I left home at 18 years of age. Mother or father called down the stairs for us boys to get up. Initially, my brother Jim and I, and then later my brother Rudi and I, slept in a room, built into a corner of the basement, that we called ours. The boys’ room. There was only a bunkbed as the sleeping arrangement, as sleeping equipment. A set of shells, a table, a chair or two, a window to the outside, and a bare gray cement floor constituted the visible qualities of that space. So many of my childhood moments of discovery owe their existence to, or their memory to, this room.

     So, we would file upstairs after taking off our longjohns (pyjamas) and putting on our jeans or slacks, or whatever they may have been that we wore then, and a shirt likely already worn the day before, and rushed up to eat our oatmeal with brown sugar and milk. Hungry always. Always! Like boys always are. Never more food than they can eat. Such a thing as orange juice didn’t exist at our house. I doubt whether I had ever tasted orange juice as a young person. Bacon and eggs were food for lunch or dinner. Toast happened along with porridge at our breakfast. And coffee. Coffee not for the kids, but for mom and dad.

     Speaking of coffee, this one time, this one morning, dad complained after devotions and prayer that his coffee tasted off. When the pot got emptier and dad wanted more, still complaining, mom got up to take a look at the inside of the pot.  

     “Oh! My goodness,” she yelled, “there’s a doll dress in here.” Both Lois and Gwen,  my sisters, had dolls with dresses that had been used for 10 years without being washed. They would have looked filthy and they would have been filthy. With spit, with germs from the toilet, with handling by many children, all with questionable hygiene, and with the remnants of the juicy evacuations of all of the Mexican Chihuahuas we had ever owned (some 15 of them).

     “No! Oh! No! Not a doll dress! No! No!” my father yelled. “Neij, obba neij! Nich noch dot uck noch! (Not yet that also yet!) Nich noch en puppae Kleit! (Not yet a doll dress!) He poured the rest of the coffee left in his cup into the sink and in exasperation left the kitchen. None of us had exactly smirked or laughed until then, but once he was out of sight we all, including mother, roared with the humour of it all. Doll dress coffee is what we called it then and still do in recollection. Never to be forgotten by anyone in the family who witnessed it. I smirk just now in memory