Toys

I’m a grown lady, but I’m still crazy about stuffed animals. I love their soft, ineffectual bodies and their sweet, humble expressions. I love how patient they seem, how forbearing. Part of me knows they’re just pieces of cloth, bits of stuffing, but another part of me is a magical thinker. Part of me, probably 99.99 percent of me, believes they’re alive and “real.”

When I was little, I had trouble accepting that people are a mixture of good and bad, that nobody is purely nice or sweet. I was mortified that I wasn’t all good, and I was always deeply hurt if somebody I thought was nice revealed himself or herself to be a little bit unfair or mean—I’d be crushed. (I was an intense—and annoying!—child.)

To me, toys were better than people because they were always lovable, always innocent. I could imbue them with all that was good in my own heart, with all that was good in the world, by using the power of my imagination.

But it didn’t seem like I was imagining. It seemed like I was just telling the truth about my dear stuffed-animal friends, bearing witness to their innate gentleness of spirit.

My sister Kris and I had lots of special animals when we were kids, but we had one who was the most special: Fenna. Fenna is a teddy bear who came to us by way of our neighbors the Folkses. Ann and Marie Folks were about 10 years older than Kris and me, and one day, when I was maybe six, Mrs. Folks brought over a bunch of Ann and Marie’s old toys and gave them to us!

They were fabulous, expensive toys, from the 1950s and early ‘60s, in perfect condition. There was an elaborate dollhouse, and a Patti Playpal doll in her original dress and black patent Mary Janes—and there was Fenna, a plucky-looking teddy bear with a certain twinkle in her eye.

Isn’t her name great? Fenna. Kris made it up. It’s short for Bearifeen. Her full name was/is Bearifeen Marie Mayfield. In our games, she was such a hilarious, slightly ridiculous, yet vulnerable character—thoroughly lovable. She was like Miss Piggy in that she hid her pain, and like Charlie Brown in that she never gave up. Fenna wanted to pretend to be rich and classy, but she was constantly being undermined by her own toys, a pig doll named McSnout, who was country, and a china doll named Chablis, who was just kind of a butthead.

Kris and I played with Fenna every day for years and years, and she had all kinds of adventures. Once, she was involved in a fire in our backyard fort (our “cottage” as we called it) when she was cooking some raisins over a candle and the roof, which was made of dried juniper branches, suddenly went up in flames. (The details of the fire are fuzzy, but I know that rubbing alcohol was involved somehow; we were the stupidest kids.)

Poor Fenna. She deserved better parents than us.

Kris and I played with Fenna until we were old enough that we had to hide to do it, for fear the other kids in the neighborhood would make fun of us. In the lush, secret shadows of the backyard, we’d sew her clothes and bead bracelets and necklaces for her. We even made her a little pair of wire spectacles. Her shoes, which we also made, had cardboard soles and wine corks for heels.

Sometimes at night now, just before I fall asleep, I like to wonder what heaven might be like, and I often speculate that it might be different for each person, tailor-made to each individual’s taste. For my dad, for instance, I think it would be full of daffodils, his favorite flower. And for my mom, every shop would be an ice cream shop. My own heaven would look a lot like my childhood backyard, with azaleas and a trampoline—and Fenna would be there.