Eventually after Molly Clairemont hyperventilated before her valedictorian speech at Eastpoint High School she would tell me that the panic attacks which had started striking her all those years ago had never actually faded away. But then the only medication she’d ever received for them was Radiohead albums and Xanax supplements—she had ultimately matured into the kind of girl her parents were very proud of, and part of it involved the exact Gen X capacity for theatrics that she had inherited from her father. I was not at all surprised that these attacks had become a permanent facet of her being. In fact I’d witnessed their onset myself at the closing end of that one year I’d spent babysitting Molly back in the early ‘10s. It was a time that could be called a simpler time, insofar as simpler meant spartan and not uncomplicated—I was in senior year at Eastpoint myself and can very much recall a series of cascading emotions tripping over one another, but the external activities my day was structured around remained few in number. A big one of which was of course babysitting. Not only was Molly not able to present any kind of valedictorian speech that day at all, she would also end up delaying her admission to the University of Michigan by a semester for what was officially ‘mental health reasons’ but was more in the vein of repeated bouts of sleep paralysis which make little interpretive sense if described directly but fit together quite bleakly as an offshoot to a complex series of upendings that were taking place on the corner of the living-room floor that overlooked the television, a spot hidden behind the arm of a misplaced sofa that served as the primary location of then-six-year-old Molly’s escapades with a number of toys that I came to refer to as ‘Molly’s Toys,’ or merely ‘the Toys’ to my more witting informants.
All this took place, as I said, back in my senior year starting late 2014. At that time babysitting was one of the the most lucrative after-hours career choices for a seventeen-year-old girl in suburban Detroit. Everyone was doing it—Helena Kimball even quit her job at Tim Hortons because Abigail Winters’s mom matched the per-hour rate while also promising her a summer internship at the real estate firm. This was a time of great economic precarity for Detroit, but the state-backed economy was going back up. The recession was over. The city was no longer bankrupt. Rick Snyder had signed the Grand Bargain. The automotive industry had died out and was being replaced by big tech, and pretty much every humdrum suburban blue-collar worker was being shafted out to the very edges of the Detroit area or into rural Michigan proper while the influx of coastals in the North with their newly minted Camrys and ProQuest jobs were propping up both the city itself and the suburban lifestyle that went along with it. There were a lot more glasses and nervous twitching. Lions caps became increasingly ill-fitting. Suddenly you could walk into a Starbucks and see someone crouched over a MacBook. Mac Miller was on the radio.
These changes coalesced into a bubble where new parents were both too busy to exercise individual control over their children and unsure enough of their finances to submit their kids to the pricey daycare systems uptown, and suburban Detroit developed the best babysitting scene in the country. My own parents were optometrists. This was also a point in my life where I didn’t really want to ‘be’ anything, and the idea of actually rolling up my sleeves and going at something which could amount to an actual activity gave me the cooties. But then I could never bring it in myself to adopt nihilism wholesale because I had ultimately been imprinted with too much of that midwestern ‘go-getter’ attitude, and together these two forms of self-expression conjoined into my babysitting gig. I was allergic to clothing that wasn’t three sizes two big or didn’t somehow incorporate both a plain white T and cargo pants. In short, I dressed and behaved like my best approximation of a skater girl, complete with pink highlights and Vans, but I also lacked the conviction to actually go out and get a tattoo. You know the type. Instead I would wear large rubber wristbands with things like ‘the Strokes’ or ‘David Guetta’ written on them while actually spending my time poring over AP US History textbooks at Molly’s house on Crockett Street. Molly was not the sole Schooze under my care (that’s what I called them—my name is Suzy Niles, but God only knows how the word ‘Schooze’ was coined; I suspect it has to do with by boyfriend of three weeks around that period called Randy Cunningham, who behaved like some kind of know-all guru while actually spending all his time smoking bongs and sewing patches expressing sentiments like ‘fuck music, embrace noise’ onto this corduroy overshirt and who also tried to throw me into a river at one point, but I’m digressing). There was also Monday evening Schooze Kimberly Ann Mansell who was prone to throwing tantrums if not allowed to sit in front of the television beyond her allotted 5-6PM timespan. This timespan was notable for airing simultaneous reruns of both childhood favorites Sesame Street and The Backyardigans which the children could tune into as per their choice on that date—Kimberly was a Backyardigans girl, while Molly was generally uninterested in television during the first month of my knowing her. Kimberly’s mother was a nervous makeup saleswoman called Jennifer and would only pay me $7 an hour but saturated nature of the babysitting economy in the Greater Detroit region ensured that my bargaining abilities remained limited. Molly’s mother Evelyn Clairemont, on the other hand, worked as part of the school district and would therefore return via school bus three days of the week, which meant that babysitting Molly was a low-stakes three-hour Tuesday and Thursday gig. The $12 per hour weeknight wage was practically a steal for sitting a girl as well-behaved as Molly. The two Schoozes were, on the whole, about as different as two girls of similar social strata and economic precarity could be, with the sole exception being that they both styled their hair in pigtails.
Both Molly and Kimberly were six at the time but were in separate school years—Kimberly entering first grade as per usual, but Molly already making her way into the second grade after a lengthy intervention by the school district which culminated in placing her into one of the various ‘gifted’ programs then pioneered by school administrations across the country. In practice this meant that she would instead be driven to Henry P. Baldwin instead of the usual Taft Elementary, Henry P. Baldwin of course being the middle school which also served as the local site of the gifted program—unlike the other kids which were asked to rote-memorize multiplication tables Molly would instead spend time dissecting all manner of underwater fauna and cultivating the so-called ‘twenty-first century critical skills’ which had already become outdated by the end of that very decade. This was a time of general optimism in technological progress and kids like Molly were expected to be at the forefront of it. I remember seeing various programs on the History Channel where grubby-looking scientists made claims like the first person to be immortal had already been born, and Molly to me certainly seemed like a good candidate. I remember also telling this to her and her finding it a proposition she had already considered a while ago—she had internalized death very early as a concept and also discarded it with the same fastidiousness, reasoning that if medical science could cure smallpox then it could certainly cure aging as well. She was actually going through a marine era when I first met her, and was prone to outbursts like ‘did you know that the whale shark is actually a fish’ or ‘the Japanese spider crab is as big as a man.’ Her parents had put much effort into getting her an entire bookshelf which was adorned with a complete set of recent National Geographic Kids’ magazines and also classical literature á la The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which occupied a prominent place in her Mount Rushmore along The Cat in the Hat, the Narnia series and the first Hunger Games book which her parents had evidently not proofread before obtaining. I also recall her being quite mathematically intuitive and helping her parents out with calculations that involved percentages, not in the stereotypical sense of performing fast mental calculus but rather explaining to them how ratios worked so they could work it out in a calculator themselves: there was this time her mother was convinced that the customary 20% discount obtained via owning a JCPenney Platinum card was to be applied on top of the 20% they had already gained as part of the fall season sale amounting to a total discount of 40%, and I recall this image of her trying to convince her mother that 20% of 80% was actually going to be less than 20%—even though she didn’t know the actual number, which was later calculated to be 16%—and therefore the total discount was to be less than 40% and that JCPenney weren’t really scamming her all along, she had just misjudged what the discount meant. In fact I saw a lot of myself in her, seeing as to how we were both intelligent girls with a slightly rebellious demeanor and need to stand out along with this general inability to sit still for any amount of time. So of course Molly and I ended up becoming friends. I remember throwing around the term ‘little sister’ a lot.
While I would like to say that our friendship had a profound effect on every walk of our lives, the truth is that the majority of interactions between Molly and I were mediated via the aforementioned toys.
The Clairemont family TV stand was in fact a large, repurposed antique sideboard that was infixed with several doors and drawers. It was where they shelved basic tools like batteries or screwdrivers, for instance, but the leftmost cupboard was entirely dedicated to a large number of Molly’s playthings. That’s not to say that Molly didn’t have herself a room to play in, but her parents didn’t think it a very good idea to give a six-year-old girl a full room for herself and was instead housed in a shared arrangement with her nine-year-old brother Kevin. I remember this being a source of great frustration for Kevin who would often point out that there was a full bedroom in the house that was just lying around unused, but the parents remained adamant. This was a time in Kevin’s development during which he was internalizing the first principles of individualism. His primary source of annoyance was that the walls in their shared room were a pleasantly neutral orange color while he wanted them redone in a deep blue so as to better align with his boyish instincts. This led to a number of arguments, but Evelyn was not the bargaining type—her hand over her children was strong enough that the arrangement would stand for another five years until Kevin was allowed to move to the extra bedroom at thirteen. In any case, to Molly the shared room represented little more than a resting locale, and her main playpen was in the corner of the living room that served as a functional ‘blind spot’ for onlookers unless one was more-or-less seated right next to where she had set up. Which was exactly where I used to sit, watching over her with a book in hand and a pen tucked above my ear waiting for the seconds to tick away until Evelyn and Kevin would return—one from work, the other from baseball practice.
The toys themselves were numerous in scope. Several of them had been borrowed from Kevin’s collection, who was also going through a phase in which he considered himself far too old to be playing with toys and would instead ration those tendencies into basketball games on his newly-acquired PlayStation 4. The Kevin of a few years ago on the other hand had put together quite a comprehensive collection of cars and action figures himself, some of which would later be appraised at several hundred dollars’ worth of value. The most prominent toys in Molly’s collection, however, were Mattel’s newly introduced Swanson Family™ dolls that were being demoed in the lower Michigan region as a progressive and gender-neutral alternative to the very same Barbies and Kens which had been quoted in the New York Times as being ‘more harmful to Iranian children than an American missile’ and which had recently come under severe fire as part of school administrations’ attempts to curb implicit discriminatory practices among our children. Foremost among this was retiring the Barbie doll from schools under the pretext of it being harmful to young girls by presenting a racially charged ideal body image. Mattel’s response to this was the series of Swanson Family™ dolls (which I will henceforth refer to as the Swansons) that were representative of a nuclear family but were actually quite customizable—there were two moms available to buy, for instance, Elodie and Martha, technically allowing progressive families to put together an alternative lesbian household for their children to play with, but the catch was that all the dolls would be sold separately except for a large four-doll starter kit that consisted of one father, one mother, one son and one daughter christened Rick, Elodie, Callum and Zoë Swanson respectively. These dolls were accompanied by a large-scale advertising campaign that emphasized the switch-and-swap nature of clothing for these dolls, which came in a one-size-fits-all and therefore allowed Callum to wear a dress, for instance, while usually reinforcing conventional norms by having the advertisements feature Callum riding around in a leather jacket which he then ‘presents’ to his younger sister as a means to keep her warm from an incoming snowstorm, that sort of thing. The customizable nature of the clothing also made it so that Mattel could sell clothing sets separately The point is that the dolls had pre-made names and personalities, and both Molly and Kimberly owned a complete set along with the included meter-tall dollhouse that was nothing less than a miniature of the average upper-income townhouse in the West Hollywood region. It was all wonderfully Sofia Coppola.
My initial draw to the Swansons was not as a result of Molly’s games but rather Kimberly’s. Being a single daughter her understanding of brother-sister relationships was limited. While her version of Callum and Zoe’s story was quite romantic—Callum had one day brought home a rose for Zoe while she was asleep and they had kissed, Snow White-style—it was also unfortunately incestuous, and I had to stage a short conversation to impress upon her how sibling relationships actually worked. This was quickly mitigated, however: Kimberly had a far greater number of dolls than Molly and was also far less fixated on the Swansons in particular, and Callum was replaced with a Ken doll. All this led to my redoubled interest in Molly’s games the next day—a woeful interest, because by the end of my three hours on Tuesday I was quite in awe at the number of idiosyncrasies that were going on in the corner of that room.
This was September. It was fall out, and the temperature had already begun dropping to the mid-50s, which meant that Swanson winter coats were now available, and Molly had convinced her parents to spend the \$15.99 required to buy a complete family set along with the complimentary coatrack; all this was delivered to the Clairemonts’ on that Tuesday and opened up right in front of me, after which Molly spend a very long time trying to figure out where this coat rack had to be placed. The first suggestion I ever gave her was that it be placed next to the door, of course, seeing as to how when one entered they would like an immediate spot to place their coat, but she disagreed.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But what if they don’t enter through the door?’
‘Well, how else can they enter?’ I asked.
She shook her head, pointing to an arbitrary room on the ground floor. ‘From here.’
I didn’t get what she was saying at first, but it quickly became clear that Molly did not seem to understand that a dollhouse was a sectional representation of an actual house—instead she took it as a space literally opening onto the street, and the characters would enter and exit as they pleased. This created a complex situation, because the level at which Molly’s Swansons were operating was also significantly higher than Kimberly’s. Kimberly’s Swansons were involved in preschool-age conflicts: they wanted to play games or be involved in budding romances, but Molly’s Swansons instead had uncharacteristically developed personalities. Rick, for instance, the Swanson father, had a consistent job as an auto mechanic and would often return from home covered in soot, which would lead to Elodie telling him off for being a dirty man. While this was generally consistent with the domestic lifestyle of the traditional auto mechanic I had little idea where Molly had picked up this dynamic, especially because she didn’t seem to watch much television, and her own father was a junior manager at the downtown JP Morgan. There were quite a number of these oddities: both the daughter Zoe and the son Callum had appropriate personalities as well, though they were more easily drawn from her own household experience; Zoe was the studious type who spent most of her time either playing dress-up or fawning after Peter (a schoolmate represented by a Peter Parker figurine), while Callum was more rebellious and had a full-fledged garage band. The latter could be easily explained by Molly’s own father, Michael, who held in a display stand an enormous CD collection consisting of everything from U2 to Oasis to Modest Mouse and who it was pretty easy to infer had been part of his own mildly successful grunge band in 1990s Seattle—this is what these kids had grown up listening to. As my relationship with Molly matured her father gave me permission to play some of those CDs myself when I was at the Clairemonts’, and while Molly’s requests often bordered on inappropriate (her favorite record was, of all things, In Utero) I reasoned it was just music and would often oblige—but that’s for later. The most idiosyncratic thing about Molly’s dollhouse was not actually the characters’ personalities but rather the spatial nature of how they would interact with each other. For instance, seeing as to how Molly assumed that the dollhouse was just open to the world she had set up an elaborate ladder system that allowed them to climb directly from each room to the one above instead of passing through rooms and taking the stairs as one would have ordinarily done. More difficult to understand however was how this spatial reasoning complicated the sound dynamics of the characters. Another odd thing about the dollhouse was that every character seemed to be keeping all manner of secrets from one another and that several conversations were meant to be private. Molly understood, however, that if the floors were open in this manner, then sound could emanate not merely to nearby rooms but also to the ones above and below since there was essentially only air in the middle—this meant that private conversations occurred in a separate shed that she had fashioned out of an old LEGO box. The problem was that this shed was also where Callum and his band regularly practiced music, therefore leading to the characters timing secret interactions so as to not coincide with his practice sessions. All in all, the whole thing was a complexly micromanaged enterprise and it was in general very difficult to even follow what was happening. This was exacerbated by the fact that her dollhouse would seemingly be working in the background, as well, and Molly was often simply an observer: if the Swansons had decided to do some gardening then the flowers would grow while she was at school, and they would be done by the time that she was back—a continually operating existence.