The "Mine" Field
Written By Catherine Newman
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In which Birdy spends the afternoon holding a doll hostage from a playmate who couldn't care less.
Technically, what's in Birdy's hands is a toy, but she's being about as playful as one of those Greek mythology girls who get changed forever into a marble stairway or a rocky outcropping. Birdy is squatting, grim-faced and immobile, with the toy car seat wedged into her lap. Seated inside is an enormous baby doll that's seen better days — one eye sticks shut and there's a dreadlocky tangle of stiff yellow hair. Birdy is not playing with this doll she found when we got here; my wary 2-year-old is too busy up in her imaginary crow's nest, keeping watch over it. Her stony silence is punctured only when she catches sight of her playdate toddling nearby. If he so much as exhales in her direction, Birdy screams "No!" and tightens her grip.The afternoon passes. Birdy squats with the car seat while the playdate bangs exuberantly on a xylophone. She squats with the car seat while he sends farm animals down the conveyor belt of a pretend grocery-store checkout. When we turn on some Dan Zanes, she wags her hips gravely, but this solemn bouncing could hardly be called dancing. Now and then, the playdate scuttles past her like a worried crab, this or that toy concealed in his arms. Birdy is "playing" with him in the same way you might call what a guard does with the prisoners "hanging out."
At one point, I'm eating a piece of applesauce cake at the table and Birdy is tempted — "Cake!" she calls across the room to me — but not tempted enough to leave her car-seat vigil. She's still squatting with the doll, her face a pink, cherubic mask of gloom. I go over and bend down beside her. "Birdy, honey," I say, "I don't think you're really having fun with that doll." "Dolly!" she says back, although it sounds like DAW-yee. "I khev daw-yee." She could be a Russian immigrant hawking wares at a flea market. "Do you want to play?" I ask her, and she shakes her head, then adds, unconvincingly, "I am." "I don't think he's actually interested in that dolly," I offer, and gesture toward the busy playdate. But she shakes her head again and adds, even though this is his house: "Mine."
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