It all began with a doll, and it all ended with a doll.

Deborah had wanted nothing more than a Betsy Wetsy doll as soon as she had discovered one in her friend’s home. It had seemed like an innocent request to make to her parents, but her father had snapped at her, as he often did. Dolls were too expensive, the family was barely getting by as it was, and there was no point in getting something she would soon outgrow. When Deborah had observed that she outgrew her clothes, she’d earned a cuff for backsass.

A handful of times over the next few years, the sting had faded and Deborah had asked for another doll. The response was always the same: they were too expensive and she would outgrow them. Sometimes the message would be delivered with another cuff for emphasis, but Deborah learned her lesson soon enough and stopped asking. But it wasn’t enough to make her stop thinking about the dolls: she daydreamed about her favorites often, desperately made friends with wealthier girls so she could play with their toys, and even scoured the ground near local shops in case somebody dropped one.

Ultimately, she left her family and set out on her own. The first full paycheck she received working in the steno pool went to a deluxe Malibu Barbie doll, an almost unheard-of luxury and one which left her going hungry some nights. But it was worth it for Deborah to see the doll there on her shelf every night. She never even played with it, content to leave it in its box and admire it from afar, much as she had done for all her childhood.

Times were good and bad over the next decades. Though Deborah saw her financial position improve as she was promoted at work and eventually married Harold, who brought an income of his own. But she also faced the specter of long hours of secretarial work, miserable treatment by some of her higher-ups, and Harold’s descent into impotence, unemployment, and alcoholism. But through it all, there were the dolls. Deborah purchased a new one, of the latest sort, whenever she had the money and needed a pick-me-up, and they never failed to lift her mood.

An entire room of the house was given over to them, with Deborah keeping it immaculate. Harold may have let the rest of the house slide into squalor, and pawned plenty of things to get booze money after Deborah cut him off, be he knew never to interfere with her dolls. When cirrhosis took him in 1999, Deborah moved into a smaller room in the house and gave over all three bedrooms and her living room to dolls. By then, there were so many that she had to resort to cutting the tops off some of their blister cards to get them to fit–but it didn’t matter.

They made her happy.

When Deborah fell ill, her cousin suggested selling some of the oldest dolls to help fund her treatment. Deborah vehemently refused; she had the dolls to make her feel better, and getting rid of any would have been a devastating emotional blow just when she needed to feel her best. Once the cancer took its course, though, the cousin thought better of the sale–it would have taken months to sort out all of the dolls, see which ones were valuable, and then pack them for shipment. Deborah’s house was a much better, much quicker, money source, and it needed to be empty.

The local thrift stores were all too happy to take the dolls on, still in their original packaging. And for the next few months, as they gradually trickled onto shelves and were purchased, the collection was broken up. Deborah’s ultimate bequest, it seemed, was that no family in the county, no matter how bad their finances, would be in a position where they couldn’t buy a brand-new doll.

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