Let’s Call Her Barbie

Tweaks and Transformations

Tweaks and Transformations

Ginger is out of the office for two weeks due to an “unspecified medical procedure,” which Jack has sponsored. The poor girl had been suffering from a sinus infection, which led to the detection of a deviated septum, which led to a discussion about having the bump in her nose removed along with the internal blockage. Such a sweet girl, and so loyal and invaluable to him, and she’d been unhappy and self-conscious about her nose all her life. He couldn’t bear for her to be so miserable, not if he could help it. So before he knew it, Jack was calling around to plastic surgeons. She couldn’t afford to have it fixed, so he told her he’d pay for it. No big deal.

But in Ginger’s absence, despite the attractive Kelly Girl temporarily filling in for her, Jack is lost. And it’s only been one day. How is he going to manage without Ginger for two whole weeks? He’s unable to make sense of his mail, all the office memos or updates on the Ken crisis. They used a new special flocking material for his hair and customers are complaining that it’s rubbing off. Technically Twist is overseeing this, but Jack oversees Twist. He has to be on top of things. And even though the Kelly Girl has signed all of Mattel’s required confidentiality agreements, neither Jack nor Ruth is comfortable sharing information with an outsider. For all they know, she’s a plant, someone Louis Marx put in place to spy on them.

As Jack stretches out on his bearskin rug, staring at the ceiling, he realizes how much he’s come to depend on Ginger for everything from his morning coffee to doing all his reading to stroking his bruised ego after a rough meeting or project setback.

There’s a tentative knock on his door and Stevie steps inside. “You weren’t in the status meeting this morning. You okay?”

“I’m better now.” He sits up, cross-legged, on the rug.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

Jack would like to confide in her, ask for her help in Ginger’s absence, but his shame is too great. “Do me a favor,” he says, knowing his request is going to sound odd. “Would you just read this one thing for me?” He gets up and hands her the package with the Ken updates. “Just tell me if there’s anything I need to do. My mind’s on a million other things. I can’t focus on that piddly shit right now.”

Stevie opens the packet. “Let’s see here.” She shuffles through the pages. “Looks like all three Ken dolls—the blond, the brown and the darker-haired Kens”—she turns the page—“yep, looks like they’re all having hair issues.” She sorts through more pages. “I never understood why you used flocking for Ken’s hair in the first place. Why didn’t you just root his hair like you did for Barbie?”

“It would have taken too long, and it was too expensive.”

She is still going through the packet when Jack’s phone buzzes. The Kelly Girl’s voice crackles over the intercom. “I have a Dr.Geoffries’s office on line two for you?”

Jack jogs over to his desk and picks up to get her off the loudspeaker. “She’s out of surgery,” says Dr.Geoffries’s nurse. “Everything went very well. No complications.”

—

Two weeks later, when Ginger returns to work, she looks like hell. Her nose is bandaged in a splint and there’s a wad of gauze secured beneath her nostrils. Her eyes are swollen with purple and yellowish bruises. Rumors immediately begin to circulate—she was in a car accident, she was mugged, she walked into a door, she had a nose job.

“I had a deviated septum,” Ginger corrects anyone who asks. “I needed surgery to have it fixed so I could breathe.”

She heals rather quickly, and by the end of the month the bruising is almost completely gone. And so is the bump in her nose.

“Deviated septum my ass,” says Frankie. “She had a nose job.”

“Looks a helluva lot better than she did before,” says Twist.

And Ginger’s transformation doesn’t stop there.

A few days later, she joins Stevie and the others in the cafeteria, and Stevie notices the only thing on Ginger’s tray is a bowl of chicken tortilla soup.

“That’s all you’re having for lunch?” she asks.

“Oh, I’m reducing,” Ginger says, her soup spoon paused above her bowl. “I’ve already lost twenty-three pounds. Those pills Jack gave me are really working. He told me today that I’m ‘looking good.’?”

Poor Ginger. The smile on her face is enough to break Stevie’s heart. For years now Ginger’s been trying to catch Jack’s eye. Poor, poor Ginger. She’s one of those girls cursed with a beautiful sister, one of those girls who never had a date to the prom, was never asked to play Spin the Bottle. She thinks that winning Jack’s love will erase a lifetime of romantic disappointments. He is her first thought when she wakes each morning, her last thought as she drifts off to sleep each night. She will do anything to catch his attention and affection.

It’s not until she gets bangs, lightens her hair yet again and starts wearing it pulled back in a high ponytail that it dawns on everyone, including Jack, that Ginger is trying to look like Barbie.