Don’t You Do What Your Big Sister Done
Don’t You Do What Your Big Sister Done
Weddings and babies. Ruth is consumed with both. At the age of forty-seven, she’s now a grandmother. Barbara has a little girl, Cheryl, and while Ruth adores her granddaughter, she doesn’t envy the road ahead for Barbara. After having her children, Ruth was miserable being stuck at home and couldn’t wait to get back to work. Just as Sarah had done with her, Ruth shlepped Barbara to the office and along on sales calls. When Ken was born, she could thankfully afford a sitter while she went back to work.
Barbara is up four and five times a night for feedings, and there’s the diaper changing, the bottles, the endless loads of laundry. And Allen is of no help. He can’t reconcile what’s happened to the Barbara he married versus Barbara the mother. They argue over the baby stroller left in the doorway, and why dinner isn’t ready when he gets home from his job at the insurance company—the one he only took because he now has a wife and child to support. He hates the dirty diapers left in the tub, the baby bottles and pacifiers scattered everywhere, along with blankets that smell of sour spit-up.
Ruth can see it in Barbara’s eyes—after four years, the reality of marriage, not to mention motherhood, is nothing like what she expected. Barbara will never come out and say it, but Ruth knows she’s feeling chained to the house; all that freedom she took for granted is now gone. She’s drowning and depressed. Ruth has offered to pay for a housekeeper or even a sitter, but Barbara doesn’t want her daughter raised the way she was. She feels it’s her duty to do this all herself. Ruth offers to help but is never available when Barbara decides she needs her mother: Oh, honey, I have a meeting that day. Oh, I’d love to but I’m going to be out of town. I’ll try but you should get a backup in case my appointment runs late. Let me see if I can juggle my schedule , which, of course, she never can.
On top of this, Ken is now married, too. Two years ago, right after his high school graduation, just like his sister, Ken proposed to Suzie. He was tired of all the doll jokes and sick innuendo about him sleeping with his sister and not having a penis. He figured the quickest way to shut everyone up was to get married.
But he’s only nineteen. He’s a talented musician and every bit as creative as his father. He has his whole life ahead of him, and Ruth’s bewildered by his choice. She doesn’t know how her children—of all children—could have chosen to follow such traditional paths.
Marriage and babies. It’s all she hears about. Even at work. A steady flood of fan mail arrives every day from little girls asking when Barbie and Ken are getting married. On top of that, they want Barbie to have a baby. More than a few letters have even suggested that Barbie is selfish for not marrying Ken, for not giving him a family.
Tucking another letter back into its envelope, Ruth stabs out a cigarette and wonders why marriage and babies are the end goal for these young girls. Her own daughter is proof that a husband and child don’t guarantee happiness. Ruth wants Barbie to set a new example. Show them a different road they can walk down, one where marriage and children could be a stop along the way rather than a foregone conclusion, and definitely not the end of their journey.
Ruth’s already formed a new department just to manage the Barbie fan mail and instructs the secretaries to respond to each of those letters by saying: Having a boyfriend is swell, but Barbie is not ready to settle down and get married. She’s not ready to have a baby yet when there’s so much more for her to do.
And while her staff is writing letters, Ruth gives Barbie more careers. So now in addition to Barbie the fashion designer, Barbie the nightclub singer, Barbie the airline stewardess, there’ll be Barbie the ballerina, Barbie the nurse—anything but Barbie the wife and mother.
“But c’mon, Ruth,” says Loomis, always looking to challenge her, “you can’t have Barbie stay single forever.”
“And why not?”
“It’s only natural that Barbie would marry Ken and have a kid,” he says, unwrapping a stick of Juicy Fruit and folding it in half before popping it in his mouth. “There’s a lot to be said for traditional play models. You see what’s happening with Kenner’s Easy-Bake Oven.”
“Big whoop,” says Jack. “It’s a hundred-watt light bulb. That’s what cooks the little cakes. That’s their big fucking idea.”
“Yeah, but it’s selling like hotcakes—no pun intended,” says Loomis, rolling the foiled gum wrapper into a BB of a ball. “I think we need to follow a more traditional course for Barbie.”
“Jesus! Do any of you remember why I created her in the first place?” says Ruth. “Look how she’s changed the marketplace. We practically built Mattel on Barbie’s back. You all have jobs because of Barbie. If you turn her into a housewife and mother—where do we go from there?”
“We can grow the line over time by introducing a second baby, and then a third—at some point, hell, we could even give her twins,” says Loomis. “What’s wrong with that?”
“For starters,” says Ruth, “it puts us in the baby doll category, where we never wanted Barbie to be in the first place. On top of that, those baby dolls would be the size of a thimble. You wanna play with a thimble? You say you’ll grow the line by adding more babies, but what do you do with the babies she’s already got? They never grow up. They don’t age. You can’t just keep adding more infants—she’ll end up with a litter. And then there’s Barbie’s wardrobe. Right now seventy-six percent of Barbie’s revenue comes from her wardrobe. She’s a fashion doll, not a mother. We can’t dress her in aprons and housecoats. It’s a step backward and it’ll cut off future revenue streams. Independent Barbie, single Barbie, can do anything. She can take on new careers, new fashions. She can keep up with the times. Reflect the way women are changing. The way society’s changing, too. I don’t want little girls to think conventionally and see themselves as just wives and mothers. That’s what baby dolls are for. Not Barbie.” She sits back, exhausted, exhilarated and oddly surprised by her own words and what Barbie really means to her. Yes, Barbie is lucrative, but—and Ruth loathes being overly sentimental—she recognizes that her doll has also come to symbolize something far greater than their paychecks.
The men shift in their chairs, and after an uncomfortable silence, Jack speaks up. “She’s right, guys.”
“Of course I’m right. I’ve been right about Barbie all along. You’d think by now you’d trust my instincts.”
“But we still have to address the whole nurturing issue,” says Lewis. “We can’t ignore that people think Barbie’s selfish.”
“Well,” says Ruth, tossing her pen onto the table, “we’re not going to fix that by giving her a husband and baby. We have to find another way.”
—
Stevie is in a design rut and stays late one night to read through the latest flood of fan mail, hoping for inspiration. She’s looking for clues about how little girls want to play with their Barbies, especially when it includes Ken.
Ruth is about to leave for the day when she notices Stevie in the conference room, sitting before a pile of letters. “Anything intriguing in there?” she asks.
“Just more girls wanting Barbie to marry Ken and have a baby.” Stevie shakes her head. “I just don’t get it.”
“You shouldn’t be surprised,” says Ruth, taking a seat and shrugging off her jacket.
She pulls out a cigarette and Stevie realizes she intends on staying for a bit. This isn’t one of her pass-throughs. Stevie feels a little honored. It’s not every day that a designer gets time like this with Ruth, outside of a meeting, just one-on-one.
Ruth picks up a letter, reads a few lines and sets it back down, nudging it away as if to distance herself from it. All this nonsense about Barbie being selfish. She has no idea how to change that perception. “I blame society. Just look at the magazines and what’s on television. You’ve got programs like The Donna Reed Show and I Love Lucy . The women on those shows are always stuck in the home.”
“I would go stir-crazy. I don’t get how my mother does it,” says Stevie. “She has zero interests of her own—I mean, not even a hobby. She doesn’t do anything all day long other than wait on my father. And when he’s at work, she’s waiting for him to come home so she can wait on him some more. If that’s what marriage is supposed to be like, I would rather stay single the rest of my life.”
Ruth laughs, reaching for an ashtray. “I assure you, not all marriages are like that.”
“Well, obviously yours isn’t.”
“Thankfully, I have a very modern husband. Keep looking. There’s some good ones out there.”
“I’m not in any hurry.” She picks up another letter.
“Good for you.”
“Listen to this,” Stevie says, reading from the letter. “ My Barbie can’t wait to marry Ken and learn to keep house . It’s like they’re trying to imitate their mothers or something.”
“Well of course they are,” says Ruth. “That’s what little girls do. They imitate the women in their lives. They’re influenced by what they see around them.”
“Well, your mother must not have been very conventional.”
Ruth nearly coughs. “You can say that again. But I take after my sister, not my mother. My big sister was the one who raised me. And there wasn’t anything conventional about her.”
Stevie wonders what happened to Ruth’s mother, but she doesn’t dare ask.
“Sarah was a woman ahead of her time,” Ruth continues. “She owned a drugstore, and I watched her deal with bill collectors, bankers, hustlers. I saw her chase thugs out of her store who were trying to shoplift.” Ruth smiles, takes a long, luxurious drag off her cigarette, lost in her own reverie. “Sarah was very wise. She was married, but Louie”—Ruth shakes her head—“he wasn’t much help. She never expected him to take care of her. She taught me not to depend on a man or on anyone but myself.”
Stevie has never seen this side of Ruth before, and she is a sponge, taking in every word. Little does she know that as Ruth speaks, a new idea is beginning to crackle alive inside her. For days now, she’s been stewing about those claims that Barbie is selfish and wondering how she’s going to remedy it. And now she realizes she has the perfect solution: Barbie can be like Sarah.
And so it’s because of Ruth’s big sister that Skipper is born.