Doll Palace

PRAISE

FOR

DOLL PALACE

Lippmann's debut is a terrific collection of short stories that mostly take place in or around New York...These stories clearly reveal Lippmann's talent, and indicate a bright future ahead.

—Publishers Weekly

…smart, technically accomplished fiction… —Kirkus Reviews

Lippmann’s stories are well-crafted and tight...[Her] voice is distinctive for her sparse and straightforward style, which ties together a collection with a roving cast of characters...All of the stories are propelled by a forward momentum, and the stories are more likely to end on an action, rather than an image, or a moment of contemplation. —Bustle

Sara Lippmann is the sort of writer who can drop you with a line. ‘Of a guy wearing a baby in a harness,’ she writes, ‘He yanks on the baby's stubby toes like he is milking it.’ I'd read a hell of lot of pages to find a sentence that practically nails an entire generation. Good news is this book has such lines on every page. Lippmann is a fearless writer, and these are concise and deadly stories. —Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown and Others

Sara Lippmann’s stories are visceral and gripping, venturing into dark places with sharp wit and a gimlet eye. A lot of them gave me bad dreams, and I mean that in a good way. This is a memorable debut collection.

—Alix Ohlin, author of Dual Citizens

"Sara Lippmann’s Doll Palace is a sexy, sad and fearless collection full of humor, pathos and a compassion. Her scalpel-sharp stories are raw emotional gems, blinding in their precision. She understands the pumping highways and byways of the human heart like a seasoned traveler."

—Jonathan Papernick, author of The Ascent of Eli Israel

Sara Lippmann’s prose is unflinching. Her female characters see motherhood, womanhood and self-hood through a raw and funny lens: I am about to cry, when I laugh. Terribly wonderful and exciting work!

—Rachel Sherman, author of Living Room

Doll palace

_

stories by

Sara Lippmann

7.13 Books

Brooklyn

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Second Edition, 7.13 Books, 2021

Doll Palace was originally published in 2014 by Dock Street Press under ISBN: 978-0-9910657-1-4

Girl Land Music by Mary Rodgers, Lyrics by Bruce Hart. Copyright © 1972 Ms. Foundation For Women, on behalf of Free To Be Foundation, Inc. Used by permission.

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Selections of up to one page may be reproduced without permission. To reproduce more than one page of any one portion of this book, write to 7.13 Books at leland@713books.com.

Cover art by Gigi Little

Edited by Leland Cheuk

Copyright ©2014 by Sara Lippmann

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-7361767-6-4

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-7361767-7-1

LCCN: 2020953036

So, come on in

And look about.

You go in a girl

And you never get out.

—Girl Land

For all the girls.

Whipping Post | 1

Jew | 7

Target Girl | 17

The Last Resort | 23

Everyone Has Your Best Interests at Heart | 35

Houseboy | 51

Starter Home | 65

Babydollz | 67

Girl | 73

queen of hearts | 77

Tomorrowland | 85

This Old Man | 91

All This Happiness | 99

Body Scan | 119

Reunion | 129

Come See for Yourself | 135

Foreign Bodies | 143

Talisman | 149

The Second Act | 157

Human Interest | 171

Wolf Cry | 175

Doll Palace | 179

The Best of Us | 191

whipping post

I’m in the car with my sister Jane when that song comes on. She adjusts the A/C, does nothing to the volume. Then comes the look.

Lizzie, she says. Remember State Fair?

I was fourteen but looked twelve. Rode in on the bus that morning, Peter Pan, white ribbed tank and batik skirt, bells woven into macramé looped around my bony ankle. I needed a break from home so Jane picked me up at the station in Ithaca and I dropped my Guatemalan knapsack at her off-campus apartment and we spent the morning getting high on the Arts Quad, wandering through fraternities and big rumbling houses. Everywhere I went people got a kick out of me. She hated it. I was so young I jingled.

We both wore our hair like the girl in the Muppets band, blonde and stringy and straight down the middle, so we passed back her ID and snuck me into a bar for lunch. We drank pitchers. At one point I wasn’t looking great and Jane saw it and started hopping about how I was going to embarrass her right fucking there until some guy pressed next to me in the booth and brushed the sweaty wisps from my forehead and offered this gorgeous basket of bread.

I sat there and ate the whole loaf.

Later, we piled into a station wagon that smelled like cleats and camping gear, Ivy League stickers, dancing bears stamped in rainbow along the bumper, Ithaca is gorges. I’d just completed ninth grade. On the drive to Syracuse I kept my head out the window, strands whipping my cheeks, gulping air. I’d done this once with my favorite stuffed animal, only somewhere along the New Jersey Turnpike I’d forgotten I was holding on until my lovey was spinning out smack into the divider.

There were advantages to having an older sister. She went through things and I don’t merely mean I got hand-me-downs. I’d eaten mushrooms. Chewed through a tough, gritty palm’s worth on cold pizza in a friend’s basement, puked in her yard, cart-wheeled through the brush in a pack of girls as our designated ‘shroom mommy tried cracking sense at the moon. This was different. I could nibble a few stale stems in the car if I wanted, Jane said, but she was not going to babysit on her trip.

It was the summer of 1990.

Metal bleachers rattled as we filed on laughing. Allman Brothers! State Fair! Jane’s friends passed around glass bowls and one-hitters and joints rolled in clove paper so we smoked and looped arms and watched the jellyfish blobs morph their groovy shit on the Jumbotron.

Southbound. Sweet Melissa.

In health class Ms. Betts distributed neon condoms to usher in our unit on sex-ed. We plumped them up at the water fountain and launched them from an open window in geometry, landed a month of detention.

At some point I had to pee. There was a line for the Port-a-Johns next to the pimpled vendors for fried dough. I slipped off my sandals as I waited, wiggling my toes through sand and broken glass.

Lookee, it’s Little Sister.

Some guy from campus I recognized, he held a funnel over my mouth at a party or maybe he was the one who watched me stuff myself full with bread. I wasn’t sure. He wore cargos.

I’d had my braces off a year so I stood there, smiling wide, squinty. Talk about dry mouth. Greg Allman was singing, People can you feel it, tambourines slamming against thighs. He had tan muscled calves, this college boy, and his hair was at that in-between length, so he kept slipping the stragglers from his ponytail behind his ears. His fingers fluttered. I lit a cigarette.

Somewhere, it must be written: Tell a little sister she’s hotter than cooler than more badass than her older sister and she will do anything to make it feel true.

He stole a drag and said what’s going on. I was so grateful he didn’t call me kiddo that when he handed me his foamy cup I drained it.

Easy tiger, he said.

I wiped my face. Sure, I was built like a boy in army surplus, tiny holes working through my tank’s ribbing, but who knows what drove him. There were no washboard comments or termite tits. My lips kept curling against my gums so I licked them.

You don’t want to deal with this stink, he said, standing close enough I could smell fair food on him. He knew a better place, so I twisted through the crowds after him, past beer stops and pickle barrels and tie-dye stands and machines whirring icy blue threads of cotton candy. We crossed a parking lot. The Ferris wheel rose in the distance.

There was a field. He stood in front of me to block the road while I yanked down my underwear and squatted. My aim was poor, my heels wet, so I left my Hanes right there in the grass, my skirt long enough; I felt a breeze.

Nice, he said.

We sat on the hill and watched the sunset.

Come here, he said. I burrowed into his arm and he fingered the crystals strung on iridescent beads low on my neck, where a cleavage would go if I had one. He started in on my hair. I had been in a bus, a car, I’d tumbled down Libe Slope in a druggy haze; I was a tangled grassy mess but whatever. It’s the gestures that make a girl feel special.

Kissing was one thing only it wasn’t. Boys said, finish what you started.

My friend Emily had a pool with a cabana for dolphin floats and foam noodles. Everyone went to her house that summer. We would peel off wet suits and give lazy hand jobs to the upperclassmen, who pressed against my clammy ribs, kneading and tugging and always looking for more than I had.

I would give this guy everything if it meant beating Jane. Pull off his shirt and ease onto his lap, all ninety pounds of me rocking slow against him as if he were a balance beam I’d mounted before rising at a meet. He held my hips and grew. Hair circled his nipples, and I knew it was a matter of time before patches would sprout along his back and shoulders too, like my father. I spread my hands into his chest, half-hoping to be lifted in a game of airplane. Instead he groped my head. When I wormed down to him he smelled like a locker room but Jane had prepared me; asparagus, she said, so this wasn’t bad, really, this was fine and manly and good—this made the world go round—busying down him with my mouth open and eyes closed, breathing, until I could no longer hear the band.

We were wasted yet he checked me like a holiday turkey. It was thoughtful. Lord knows I was small. Fingers I was used to but his forefinger and thumb hosted these tiny hard bumps he swore came from lighter burns but felt like plantar warts. Finally, he rolled me over and hiked up my skirt and parted my knees, sucking as if he were pulling a bong hit through a three-foot tube. That should do it, he said, and sure enough he was in and I was watching the clouds pull apart and the sky give way to darkness.

I was back on the stands by Whipping Post. Jane was peaking then, so she twirled me and we danced and my thighs stuck together. I smiled at the thought of him pocketing my underwear he used to clean himself. It felt so Sixteen Candles.

A week later a urinary tract infection would shoot through my kidneys. What did I know? Jane never taught me about peeing. Ms. Betts would drive me to the ER in her mustard Pinto during lunch, where after school my father would find me, snapping back the pastel curtain as antibiotics seeped through a vein, and call me a whore.

In the car I tell my sister I hardly remember.

Suddenly, I want a smoke. I try rolling down the window but the button has a childproof lock even though her car seats are empty. Our father just had triple bypass. We are his two girls and a visit is expected. I fidget with the unlit cigarette in my lap until it crumbles.

Really, have you no self-control? Jane says.

We are almost there.

The radio plays.

Jew

She never would have entered if it weren’t for her husband. This was not her kind of place, and as her husband creaked open the door, paint flaking eagerly from the panels, desperate to be free, she wondered how anyone could lay claim to it, a weather-beaten mess, windows streaked in sludge, bricks scraped bare from salt deposits. Had she been alone, she would have tilted her body toward the curb as she passed the awning without a tarp, a ghastly skeleton of cast iron poles, a subconscious habit she performed in the presence of homeless people and large dogs. Maybe she would have crossed to the other side of the street. Had she been alone, that is, entirely alone, most likely she would have been so bent on saving her heels from the cracked sidewalk lest she fall on this sort of a block she never would have lifted her chin to take notice.

He held the door. It was a typical gesture. The truth was, had she been alone she never would have found herself here. But she was with her husband and it was a Sunday and they were having a walk without the stroller, her arm looped through his, her gait steady as he steered them both, talking it out once more, as if they ever did anything else, making the whole afternoon seem romantic despite matters, especially when the day carried them to this dismal industrial strip on the fringe of their neighborhood, overrun with flag-strewn delis, Laundromats, and signs hawking new and used parts. They’d been walking for some time, the backdrop permeating her mood in a way she deemed fitting, but whenever a new bar or café leaped out from the mass of shuttered storefronts, she foolishly hoped for a bright little coffee and a rest. There was time. Jack, nestled between the foam cushions of his crib support, would still be asleep.

Instead he brought her here. The dank entry was too narrow to accommodate them both, so he released his grip, brushing past the religious signpost on the door, and she followed. Inside the small shop she had the distinct feeling of being in a different country, not one she would have chosen to visit, but that somehow still seemed familiar in its foreignness, a collage of exotic images juxtaposed from magazines and movie sets. It was as if an entire marketplace had been squeezed into the cramped quarters. The pressed tin ceiling, puckered from water damage, dipped so low her husband could not straighten his shoulders. The dark shelves sagged in the middle, weighed down by piles of dusty miscellany. Her husband removed his glasses and loosened the sash of his trench coat and dug in. She did not know where to look. Books were stacked high in an array of languages, spines leather bound and faded. Throw pillows embroidered with dime-sized mirrors and hand-painted dishware, there were trinkets galore, from water pipes to candelabras, wooden masks, skull caps, caravans of whittled camels, herbal teas and aromatherapy sticks, bootlegged CDs, comic books, barrels of dried fruit, bags of nuts, a lone caftan collecting the seasons. Leather sandals hung from cords like cured meat. It was unimaginable how much fit in here.

The place smelled of cardamom and for the first time all day it was quiet.

In the back stood a deli case, an outdated cash register slumped on the counter beside it. The shopkeeper sat behind it all with a terrible posture, as if the tip of his nose were a stirrer for his coffee. She approached, her hands balled in pockets, wool collar grazing her neck; she appraised the sticky trays of baklava and pastries curled like birds’ nests, the hunks of cheese awash in a cloudy pool; she stared at a single, raw, whole, flaccid, gray fish.

Can I help you? the shopkeeper asked.

She shook her head. Help. In the last few months, help, it was all she heard, only it was too late; there was nothing, nobody, so beyond the realm of help were they that the question now, in this crazy space, felt comic.

She almost smiled.

Please, he said, indicating a cocktail table wedged into the corner.

She protested, but when her husband cut in, You must be tired, she did not argue.

Nervously she slid into her chair and upset the flimsy table, quickly covering her lack of grace by thumbing through a folded newspaper abandoned there; the headlines, plainly in English, might as well have been in another language. Since Jack’s birth she had lost all track of the outside world. Her husband joked, after the third time she’d forgotten his shirts at the dry cleaners, that he would leave reminders for household chores in Jack’s diaper. And that was before Jack got sick, that was when Jack was just fine, beaming and gurgling and drooling down his chin like every other baby, the short-lived bliss before the tests and doctors’ visits. She watched her husband fill up the room and put his hands on everything, as was his way, cracking a fistful of pistachios, hovering over backgammon sets, breathing his breakfast sausage on Roman glass and pendants of the evil eye. It was his confidence, an unwavering faith that the universe would always rule in his favor, which first attracted her. His presence had been a poultice to her system of nerves. Now he joined her, firmly planting his elbows on the table and reaching across it for her wrists. He demanded her gaze so she gave it.

Trust me, he said and he squeezed.

The shopkeeper settled his coffee on a dish. His stool scraped the