The Doll Maker Read Free

table.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Mr Marseille said. ‘I just don’t know.’
    I glanced at the selections, and saw his impasse. There had to be a half-dozen choices, all of which, from just a few feet away, could be described as yellow. Pale yellow, at that. Not the yellow of sunflowers or school buses or taxicabs, or even the yellow of summer corn. These were pastel shades, almost whitish, and they had the most scandalous of names:
    Butter Frosting. Lemon Whip. Sweet Marzipan.
    Mr Marseille hummed a song, our song, almost certainly turning over the words in his mind, perhaps hoping for a flicker of inspiration.
    I soon became distracted by a woman with a small child, passing by at the end of our aisle. The woman wore a short puffy jacket and shockingly tight denim jeans. Her makeup seemed to have been applied in haste – perhaps reflected in a less than well-silvered mirror – and gave her an almost clownish look in the unforgiving light of the store. The child, a toddler at oldest, bounced along behind the woman, deliriously consumed by an oversized cookie with brightly colored candies baked in. A few moments after they passed from view I heard the woman exhort the child to hurry up. I don’t imagine the little boy did.
    At the thought of the mother and child I felt a familiar yearning blossom within me. I scolded it away, and turned once more to Mr Marseille and his assessments. Before I could choke the words, I pointed at one of the paint swatches in his hands, and asked:
    ‘What’s wrong with this one? Candlelight is a delightful name. Quite apropos, n’est-ce pas?’
    Mr Marseille looked up – first at the long, empty aisle, then at the myriad cans of paint, then at me. He replied softly, but forcefully:
    ‘It is my decision, and I will not be hurried.’
    I simply hated it when Mr Marseille was cross with me. It did not happen often – we were kindred and compatible spirits in almost all ways, especially in the habits of color and texture and fabric and song – but when I saw the flare in his eyes I knew that this would be a day of numbering, our first since that terrible moment last week, a day during which a young girl’s blood would surely be the rouge that colored my cheeks.

    We rode in our car, a white sedan that, according to Mr Marseille, had once been advertised during a football game. I don’t know much about cars – or football, for that matter – and this was not our car, not by any watermark of legal ownership. Mr Marseille simply drove to the curb about an hour earlier, and I got in. In this manner it became our car, if only for the briefest of times. Mr Marseille, like all of our kind, was an expert borrower.
    The first thing I noticed was that the front seat smelled of licorice. The sweet kind. I don’t care for the other kind. It is bitter to my tongue. There are some who crave it, but if I’ve learned anything in this life it is that one can never reason, or truly understand, the tastes of another.
    We drove on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the magnificent divided thoroughfare that I’ve heard is patterned, after a fashion, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. I’ve never been to Paris but I’ve seen many photographs, and this seems to be true.
    I speak a cluttered French, as does Mr Marseille – sometimes, for sport, we go for days speaking nothing else – and we often talk of one day travelling from the City of Brotherly Love to the City of Light.
    The trees along the parkway were deep in their autumn slumber, but I’ve been on this street in summer, when the green seems to go on forever, bookended by the stately Museum of Art at one end, and the splendid Swann Fountain on the other. On this November morning the street was beautiful, but if you come here in July it will be breathtaking.

    We followed the group of girls at a discreet distance. They had attended a Saturday showing of a film at the Franklin Institute, and were now boarding a bus to take them back to their school.
    Mr