The Crissy Doll

The Crissy Doll for me was a yearning to love. I know that now.

In our adult lives, we hold onto stories we love to share. For new acquaintances, they are snippets of who we might be. To our old friends, they are the reasons of who we are. The Crissy Doll was my story. One I carried around and told with relish; brandishing this small fragment of my childhood with flair and drama. On the surface, it carried a deep, sweet nostalgia that transported me and my listeners back to a time of innocence and simplicity. In reality, it housed a surreptitious dark yearning for what I sensed were the years that had been taken away from me: not my youth; nor my innocence; though these are long gone, but my relationship with my mother.

I first saw the Crissy Doll in the toy store window on Crinan Street, a quaint shopping strip in the inner Sydney suburb of Hurlstone Park. It was late Spring, and the shops were already starting to trim their facades with an eclectic array of coloured tinsel and baubles proclaiming to its shoppers that the 1971 Christmas season had arrived.

The toy shop, with its bright jumble of shapes and colour always grabbed my attention. I would scamper ahead of my mother and stand with my palms pressing against the glass, warmed by the morning sun which sliced across its window. Sometimes, the fingers of simmering rays would take hold of the delicate gold bracelet laying in the folds of my chubby wrist. The glint of gold would catch my eye for just the briefest moment before I returned my gaze back to the display of toys, cascading into a tumble of board games, toy trucks, hoola-hoops and wooden skateboards. It was a hoard of magic and delight that tickled and caressed my heart before my mother would pull me away to attend to the daily chore of shopping.

‘Ho cose da fare. I have things to do,’ she would sigh as she took my hand, pulling me away from the Crissy Doll.

My mind often drifts back to the little girl who seized every opportunity to visit the Crissy Doll as she stood untouched and shielded in her enclosed wonderland. As an innocent and sheltered four-year-old, I saw a pretty doll who was always extraordinarily happy.

My mother held her happiness in a way that felt borrowed, shallow and fragile.

At sixteen, my mother had been forced to migrate from Sicily with her family. At only 4 foot 11 inches, she was feisty and intelligent. Her skin was unusually pale for a Sicilian and felt like a soft warm flannel when she brushed her cheek against mine as she kissed me goodnight. The memory of my mother’s translucent skin always floats into my thoughts. A classic beauty with dark shiny hair and sharp green eyes that danced when she laughed and burned into you when she scolded. As a cheeky child, I stirred up an assortment of her emotions in one day. Sometimes earning a biting smack across my backside.

Our daily trips to the shops released her from an imprisoned melancholy that followed her around. She left her sadness like breadcrumbs as we strolled to the shop, only to pick them up on our returned journey home. Her impatience growing as I stopped to smell a flower, touch a rendered front fence or pat a cat as it sun-baked.

I began to desperately long for our visits to Crinan Street, so I could see my Crissy Doll. After crossing the street, I would break away from my mother and race to greet her.

‘Non corer. Don’t run,’ my mother would call out as I ran ahead.

‘Buongiorno bella bambina,’ I cooed at her imitating my mother who would also greet me with love in her voice followed by a cuddle in her arms when she came to dress me. Each morning gifted me my mother’s smile. The day tore it to shreds.

I lost my mother to her work. I used to wake in my pink bedroom to the sounds of the sewing machine whirring and screeching as she sewed a variety of garments, attaching their collars, making buttonholes and inserting zippers. The sound of the machine ignited a deep heartache. As I woke, I would hear the machine echo through the house, the shrill sound shoving my heart into a pool of sadness. I understand now that I had equated my mother’s hard life of sewing for long hours, to her missed opportunities and self-flagellating sacrifices.

My mother would wake at dawn to get her required quota of sewing completed before I would wake, returning to her sewing after my bedtime. The sounds of the machine lulled me into a melancholic slumber. She relinquished her youth and time, as she fed fabric into an angry machine; a sacrificial offering for the hours she spent being my mother.

I love her. ‘La amo,’ I whispered to my mother as her warm hand squeezed around mine with a firm gentleness, before tugging me away. Not once did she acknowledge Crissy Doll; a blunt reminder that such frivolous objects would never be considered.

From the moment Crissy Doll appeared in the shop window, I wanted to touch her long auburn hair. She was the most beautiful doll I had ever seen. Dressed in an aqua satin mini and matching Mary Jane shoes she was pure enchantment. Thick, curled lashes framed her bright brown eyes that held my own gaze upon her.

Each day my mother fussed over me with a new dress. I loved the care she took as she dressed me. When tying a ribbon, or buttoning a jacket, I watched as her red, ruby lips puckered with concentration. To hold my balance, I would gently place my hand onto her cheek, causing her to release a quick smile that fluttered in and out like the cabbage moths in our herb garden. In those tender quiet moments, a fragile connection was shared between us. Her green eyes always shimmered as she brushed my dark wavy hair, sometimes tucking her pinkie finger into one of my curls before capturing them into a tight little bow.

I cherished this time together. I felt the same about Crissy Doll, who, like my mother, I couldn’t truly possess either.

When we ventured out, I was always impeccably styled. My godmother Maria delighted in sharing with me that I was my mother’s living doll. Our tattered family albums hold faded photos of me in new outfits, with matching jackets and skirts, dresses adorned in lace and fancy pockets all designed and made by my mother. My clothes were fashioned from the scraps of her sewing work.

My mother was a wonderful dressmaker. Her extraordinary talent and finesse were wasted on mundane piece sewing that transformed fragments of fabric into carbon copy garments for department stores. Her young immigrant life was dictated by synthetic patterned pieces that sat in heavy hessian bags and reeked of acrid petroleum. The smell seeped into the faded buttercup walls of the sewing room and hung onto the burnt orange and olive striped poplin curtains which were always drawn tight to keep out the harsh afternoon sun. 

I don’t remember ever asking to have Crissy Doll. My parents weren’t poor, but they weren’t rich either. This would come in the next decade and beyond until their divorce in 2003 where the wealth they had amassed would be divided between them.

To make ends meet and support my father’s meagre wage as a stonemason, my mother sewed long hours from home. She had made the bold decision to buy an industrial sewing machine on hire purchase, setting up a mini sewing factory in a room the size of a walk-in pantry. My mother had joined other migrant wives who worked in the early1970s. Women who took in-home sewing or worked in factories that once thrived in inner Sydney. She still owns that same machine 52 years later.

Crissy Doll existed in a fairy tale realm that I sensed was unattainable. I lived in a world where my mother kept everything. Italians are natural recyclers. Empty tins to store nails and screws in my father’s shed, glass jars to store buttons, ribbons, and food items. Food scraps for the chickens and the compost heap. Paper was salvaged from old bills and empty cereal boxes, resurrecting their blank sides for shopping lists. Money was precious and only spent on what was needed.

A week before Christmas, on a steamy and sultry morning, my mother had borrowed the family car and driven to Crinan Street.

‘Poso vedere Crissy Doll?’ I had asked wanting to see her again.

My mother returned a clipped ‘No,’ and hustled me into the butcher’s shop.

I stood next to her, holding back the tears as my heart twisted painfully in my chest. I watched her smile as she spoke with the butcher, a large Scottish man with a long bushy red beard and booming laugh. My Godmother Maria loved to bate my mother about him, giggling and teasing her as she smoked her menthol Kool cigarettes while they gossiped and laughed over an espresso.

I stood with stubborn defiance listening to my mother’s unadulterated banter with the butcher. Their words echoing against the sterile white tiles, poking fun at my bitterness.

As they chatted, I snuck away. The little bell above the butcher shop sat silent on my quiet departure. My yearning to see Crissy Doll eliminated any fear of wandering the length of the main shopping strip alone, filled with local businesses run by Italians and Greeks. Past the grocery store run by an elderly Italian couple from Naples who sold shiny red candied apples on a stick. I toddled beyond the delicatessen owned by a Calabrese widow. Signora Rosa would squeeze my cheek hard as I sat on the polished counter eating pieces of prosciutto, sliced too thin to be sold, and fat green olives dripping golden oil down my chin.

Flustered and consumed with worry, my mother found me as I stood outside the toy shop window. My silent tears catching my breath as I searched in desperation amongst the clutter of toys for Crissy Doll. My greatest fear had descended upon me. Crissy Doll with her happy, kind eyes and her permanent smile was no longer there. She was gone and I was heartbroken.

My mother was kind but firm.

‘Le cose vanno e vengono. Questa é la vita,’ she said as she dabbed the tears off my cheek. ‘Things come and go. That is life,’ a saying she is still fond of relaying to me when I call home with some disappointing news.

Crissy Doll had come and was gone, and I needed to learn that this was life. My migrant mother knew this all too well. I have learnt this in my own life.

As I journeyed away from the serenity and innocence of my childhood, I searched in desperation for my mother’s happiness, who like Crissy Doll, was housed behind a glass barrier. I could see it but could never really touch it.

Across the decades where my turbulent relationship with my mother has sometimes left me battered and bruised, I have discovered that, although happiness is fleeting, love can survive anything.

On Christmas morning in 1971, I woke and discovered a long rectangular box wrapped in brown paper with foil stars pasted across the top and a pale pink satin ribbon tied in a loose bow. Inside? The Crissy Doll.

My mother had taken an advance on her wage and had gone back to the toy shop.

For me.