Drowsy

drowsy, the pink and white polka-dot terror
I found the doll frightening. It was supposed to be a little baby. Drowsy had short, platinum blonde hair and was dressed in a pink sleeper suit with white polka dots on it. On her back there was a string that you could pull, and she (although when I think back, “she” was pretty androgynous) had several quaint yet bossy sayings such as, “Feed me, I’m hungry,” and, “I’m tired now, I need a nap.” This cheeky doll not only thought she could boss me around, but had the audacity to be a blonde (which I was not), and I’d just about had enough of her when Megan came along. So I passed her off.
One day while Megan was napping, I threw Drowsy into her crib. My sister Megan is three years younger than me, and through my mix of excitement about her birth and disappointment at having someone else around to deflect attention from me, I thought it perfect that I discard my doll into her crib because I did not want it anymore. Megan fell in love with Drowsy, and to my horror she brought the doll everywhere with her. One Friday night my parents went out to dinner, and a girl from down the street came to babysit us. I think her last name was Voorhees. My parents rarely went out, so Megan and I weren’t used to having anyone but my mom and dad in the house, and we were pretty intimidated by this teenager talking on the phone in our kitchen, so we kept our mouths shut. That night a wild wind was blowing, with intermittent rain, and later on things quieted down and the sky turned that sickly green the way it does when a tornado is coming. Sure enough, the warning sirens went off, and suddenly our cool babysitter was calling her mother and crying about what she should do with us.
	Moments later, her father picked us up in his antiquated green station wagon. In our pajamas, he carted us off to their house just down the street. We huddled in the basement with our babysitter, her parents, and her older brothers, who I remembered distinctly as torturing my friends and I when we visited their favorite bike jumping ramps. Megan and I were terrified.
It wasn’t until my parents got home and were tucking us into bed that Megan realized that Drowsy’s head had fallen off. You see, the beloved doll was so worn and her head had fallen off so many times that my dad just decided to go ahead and duct tape the thing on. She had a ring about 2 inches thick around her neck keeping her in line. Megan could not be plied by a new Drowsy, because she knew it was not the same, and now the terrible thing we all feared had happened. We’d lost Drowsy’s head. Megan was up all night crying, and in the morning, my dad went over to the neighbor’s house to retrieve the lost head. Back