For ages, Foxy wasn’t Japhy’s toy. He was just a toy that stood on a shelf in Japhy’s room as decor. From the age the AAP permitted Japhy to have a toy in his crib, he would fall asleep clutching different household objects for a few nights—a yellow spatula, a potato masher, a cookbook, a hard plastic banana—passing through a phase with one onto the next. A small part of me wondered if there was something wrong, and he would be the kind of guy who grows up and insists he is going to marry his cat.
Eventually, though, he attached to Foxy, a small, soft stuffed fox. And as the sun went down one night, we found that—like all gods do—Foxy had gone missing.
In Kafka and the Doll (illustrated by Rebecca Green), Larissa Theule turns an old, supposedly true story about Franz Kafka into a children’s book. A girl is crying in the park because she has lost her doll. Kafka, a complete stranger, pipes up to tell the girl that her doll is off on an adventure. He is a “volunteer mailman,” he explains, this guy in a suit in the park, and goes on to give her letters from the doll detailing her travels.
Like many celebrity bios, the book is a bit self-serious, particularly in how it describes Kafka, who is “struggling” to finish his story on the first page, as though a 6-year-old will care who he is or understand what it is to not finish a story—excuse, are we getting meta on page one of a children’s book? Also, it doesn’t let the reader get too sad. Even when Kafka is dying, the girl understands that there won’t be more letters, since the doll is off “breaking ice” for a ship in Antarctica. It’s a very gentle landing. I asked Scout what she thought of the doll in the book, and she told me the doll seemed “a lot like Bunny,” her Jellycat lovey. The other piece didn’t register.
There is another children’s(ish) book, The Beach at Night, about a lost toy. This one is written by Elena Ferrante as a variation of sorts on her novel The Lost Daughter, and illustrated by Mara Cerri and translated by Ann Goldstein. The story is told by the doll itself, Celina, who explains that she belongs to Mati, a 5-year-old girl who “talks a lot, especially to me.”
Distracted by her new cat as she plays on the beach, Mati forgets her doll. For Celina, half-buried in the sand, the horrors come thick and fast and are told with the clarity of a child who knows shit isn’t right: “I call out: ‘Mati!’ But Mati doesn’t hear me.”
The sun has set, which means kids should be at home. Next the Mean Beach Attendant is headed Celina’s way:
“His eyes, I don’t like his eyes. He folds up the big beach umbrellas, the chaises. I see the two halves of his mustache moving over his lips like lizard tails.”
It’s dark, and Celina wonders or hopes that maybe this is all a game Mati made up to scare her. The doll worries she’s damp:
“Mati always tells me: ‘If you catch cold, you’ll get a fever.’ She says it exactly the way her mother says it to her. Because Mati and I are also mother and daughter.”
The Mean Beach Attendant rakes her up then dumps her by a bonfire of all the rubbish he has swept.
It gets hot, and she sees the fire eating the Pen and the Pony. The beach attendant doesn’t burn the doll when he realizes she has a sound box in her—"I quickly collect all Mati’s words and hide them in my chest. Only the Name she gave me stays behind”—and a gold necklace around her neck that he thinks he can sell. She loses her name, but is pulled away from the man and into the ocean by a wave. She fills with seawater, sinking to the bottom. Celina is pondering the rubbish, the fish, when a hook descends to yank her to the surface. Before the beach attendant can seize her again, a Dark Animal chomps her in its jaws and runs off. It’s Mati’s cat.
At home, Celina tells Mati, “Do you know I was almost killed by the Big Rake and the Mean Beach Attendant of Sunset?”
“‘I know,’ says Mati, who always knows everything, like a perfect mamma.”
This story is much, much darker than Kafka and the Doll, much more honest about the horror a kid feels when they imagine their toy out in the dark, alone, for the night. The only possible death is Celina’s, not some tubercular writer. Notice how powerful the doll feels the child is, too! And how seriously the child takes her role as parent. I bet Ferrante hardly ever lied to her kids.
The day I interviewed Marie Kondo, Scout had lost Bunny 1 somewhere between our apartment and her gymnastics class. Kondo was promoting a children’s book about two animals—one tidy, one chaotic and unable to ever find the toy she wants. So I asked her if she had any advice for poor Scoutie (then 5 years old) on losing her most trusted friend, despite being the best owner a toy could hope for. You need to understand how tiny and gentle Kondo is in real life, how her soft Japanese comes out sounding like the clicks of knitting needles. Her eyes immediately filled up.
“I think what's important is to first acknowledge how sad and accept how sad it is and how disappointing that is.” Kondo told me through her translator. “But afterwards, I think simply reflecting on the good times that you did share with your lovey and to verbalize how grateful you are and to say goodbye in our hearts.”
Did this help? We ended up ordering an identical Jellycat bunny off Prime—this became Bunny 2, whose name eventually was shortened to Bunny as the edges wore off the tragedy. From memory, we introduced Bunny 2 as “Bunny’s cousin.”
My friend Meg once bought a dupe lovey and ran it over with her car before giving it to her child, who didn’t know the difference. The way she wrote it, the details of the mother trying to turn back the clock and reconstitute a worn lovey are a perfect story on their own:
She soaked it in coffee, then mud. She beat it against the bricks of the house and then ran it over with her car a few times. She burned a hole in it with a hairdryer to recreate the damage that resulted from the Great Stomach Bug of 2013, when Taggie was hand-washed and ineffectively dried with a hairdryer, leaving circle scorch marks in his green velour. Grandma then took the new-old Taggie, slept with it for a week to give it that body stink, and mailed it back with fake hotel letterhead.
Foxy was harder to replace, simply because he wasn’t a known brand, and there are dozens of similar but not-quite-right-looking foxes for sale. It had actually been a while that Foxy was missing, but Japhs had only recently begun to cry about him. Did he have beads in his feet? How long was he, end to end? It was hard to say. Grandma sent one that looked close, and I decided to sit it on Japhy’s pillow with the tag still hanging off his tail. Japhs is 7, and I didn’t want to set up a bigger deception—Pet Sematary might have turned out fine if the dad stopped at resurrecting the dog.
When Japhy entered his bedroom that night, he took a few steps then paused, seeing Foxy on his pillow. He ran headlong at the bed, tackling Foxy and landing in a ball. When he sat up, he considered the toy.
“Foxy’s bigger, and fluffier,” he said. “He’s older now, like me.”
It had to be his lie.
“Sure,” I said.
How did we use our time at the hippy-dippy “Creative Expression” camp, with its velvet curtains and feelings and circle time and incredible stash of craft supplies? Glad you asked
might go back for one of the feminine sensuality seminars there
Goodies
I subscribe to Today in Trail—an AT blog, and an exceptional one! This one, Meetings and Partings, killed me.
Really liked this end-summer dispatch from Evie Ebert—we did it to ourselves
A house concert in the rainforest—good Galah dispatch from
, featuring an illo by Daniel New! And old friend.Dad influencers have a mostly very female (mom) audience, and it makes their work a kind of double performance as they try to reach men through their partners. I wrote about it for The Cut.
Happy paperback day to
’s blockbuster Touched Out <3
I love this story ! Pets stuffed or real are so important! Grandkids are amazing. ❤️
Janet! THANK YOU.