Early Childhood Education by Tamara Kaye Sellman

[1978]

The girl finds herself on a dirt path surrounded by lush vegetation and notes the sweet, rancid smell in the air. Palms, vines, bougainvillea clump around her, flora she doesn’t know in the real world where everything is green and needled and living in shadow. The overbright sky hangs woolen and low, tinged a pale, unpleasant orange.

She walks among rows of sleeping people: families in coils, lovers spooning, grandparents clutching babies. The path leads to a crude boardwalk and, beyond it, an empty stage upon which sits an oversized wooden chair like a simple throne. In its solid planked back, she spies the hole about the size of a dime, splintered from behind in violent shards.

The cloying weight of silence is replaced by rhythmic mechanical pounding that bounces off the clouds.

The girl awakens, disoriented, heart racing. She finds relief in the smell of waffles, coffee, and the stale underbite of cigarette smoke.

She dons her robe and goes into the kitchen like every other Sunday. From the breakfast table, a mess of newsprint and dishes, her brother and father stare at quivering broadsheets, eyes tracking. She grabs the full-color front page of the Oregonian.

Above the fold, she sees them: People, side by side in rows, in the daylight. Asleep.

Dateline: Jonestown, Guyana.

She reads as if in a fever.

People’s Temple… Nine hundred souls… One third children… Dixie Cups… Kool-Aid… Cyanide… Five minutes.

The girl gasps.

“I’d like to choose my own kind of death, for a change.”—Jim Jones.

She feels lightheaded.

Manhunt… Helicopters… Large wooden chair… Pavilion… Self-inflicted gunshot wound…

Her mother sets a freshly plated waffle in front of her. The girl only knows it’s her mother because she can see her quilted housecoat in her peripheral vision. The housecoat pauses. “What’s wrong?”

“I dreamed this.” She says it first, then she looks up, watches her mother’s frown lines across her forehead deepen. Watches her mother trace the words of the headline as she reads it. Watches her shake her head. “No, you couldn’t have.”

“But I did.”

Her mother snatches the newsprint. Tilts her face in the direction of her brother across the table. “Give your sister the comics.”

The girl frowns but feels a sour sense of relief. Her brother refolds sheets of colored panels, then hands them to her, scowling, his lips tinged red in the corners from morning grape juice.

The waffle smells like dead flowers. She throws up.

Her brother’s eyes light up, and he laughs.

Her father leaps away from the table, still clutching the Sports section, swearing.

Her mother grabs her by the hair and marches her into the bathroom.

All she can hear on the way there is the constant and deafening thud in her ears. Her watery eyes look out the square window above the toilet for signs of a helicopter.

“Nobody believes me,” she will tell her friend later.

[Twenty years later]

Her four-year-old daughter moans so loudly in her sleep in the other room that it awakens her. She climbs into the girl’s twin bed, embraces her tiny question-mark figure, notes her damp scalp, flushed face, oversized eyes closed, the spent tears there reshaping her lashes into star-like points.

Moaning turns into words: “The doll is in the oven.” Repeated, the tone of her child’s voice grows more urgent with each articulation. Finally: “Mama!”

Brown eyes open, gushing fresh tears.

“It’s just a bad dream, sweetie,” she tells her daughter, but the girl only shakes her mussed curls and says it again: “The doll is in the oven!”

Her girl cannot go back to sleep until they check. She insists.

There is no doll in the EZ-bake oven. No doll in the microwave oven. None in the double-stacked oven in the kitchen. Not even in the oven, in the camping trail parked out back, where they have to find keys, coats, rainboots, and a flashlight to investigate.

The girl seems dissatisfied but, overwhelmed and exhausted, crawls back into bed.

At breakfast the following morning, she notes her daughter’s eyes hollowed by poor sleep, gives her an extra bit of sugar on her cinnamon toast. It’s Grocery Day, and they set out once the dishes are done.

The mother drives down the road, her girl buckled into the center back seat, listless eyes glancing out one side window of the SUV, then the other.

Around the bend, brake lights suddenly blaze in a vivid red stream. She slows up, sees a battalion of cherry lights flickering in a wooded neighborhood just off the road—squad cars in and around the front yard of an old red house.

Traffic crawls as looky-loos try to make sense of the emergency she realizes is still in progress.

“Mama?” The girl’s legs kick aimlessly in her car seat, her spiral shoelaces rattling. “What’s wrong?”

“Looks like something is happening at that house.”

“There?” The mother hears her girl gasp. “The doll!” she sings out in a bright, concerned voice.

“The doll?” She looks into her rearview mirror, startled by the panic in her daughter’s eyes, notes the tiny finger pointed at the red house.

“It’s in the oven!” the girl exclaims, her face pale, its expression a mirror from just hours before.

“What doll?”

Her daughter blinks away new tears. “The one in my dream, Mama! The doll… it’s in the oven!”

Overwhelmed by a wave of nausea, she swings the SUV into the next open driveway. “I believe you, sweet pea, I believe you.”

Idling, she withdraws her tiny red brick phone from her purse, dials 9-1-1, ears filled with a familiar rhythmic roaring.

[The next day]

Page 2, The Oregonian

Local man arrested, charged with poisoning three children

…The police apprehended the homeowner Monday evening, charging him with three counts of homicide after officers discovered a bottle of cyanide stashed in a nesting doll hidden inside the microwave oven. The discovery was based on a tip from an anonymous caller.