Chapter Text
“Make my messes matter, Make this chaos count” - Sleeping at Last, Jupiter
“That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he would go back directly after lunch and find Clarissa; that he would tell her, in so many words, that he loved her. Yes, he would say that.” - Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
- - -
Jessie didn’t know what to make of Buzz’s dancing at first. She’s wasn’t sure how she felt about him looking directly at her when on any other day in their years together he’d blush and stumble away when she'd flirted with him. And she did flirt! She would show off with her shoestring lasso when she knew he was looking and sidle up to him, when it was funny of course, when it was safe to do so, when it wasn’t going to scare him off (because she didn’t want to scare him off, she liked how his paint glowed when they were left in the box for weeks, months on end). She would lean into him when they were all pressed together as a heap in the toy box. She would squeeze his offered hands when the darkness got too much, though that wasn’t flirting, that was just survival, but she liked that he had offered his hands.
- - -
She had been found at the donation center by two men who remembered, "What was it? Jane the Hootin' Hollerer?" "What?! It's Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl, you turkey!" from their childhood and the sight of her made them light up and laugh. They purchased her and then placed her on a shelf in the living room next to the books where she could see them kiss each other before heading out to work each day and then after a month or two they "got a great new place in the city" and she was placed in the storage locker until the new apartment could be set up.
During Jessie's first time in storage she had just been by herself. It had just been her, the darkness, and the heavy marble in her chest.
- - -
Yes, the dancing vexed her, because Buzz had been so bashful up to that point, and it wasn’t that she didn’t mind the dancing, it was that it wasn’t like him to be so forward. She was the forward one, because any day in the open air was a day to take life in both hands. Buzz was the one who muttered about needing to fix something and lope away, his head turning back to look at her, then forward again pretending he hadn’t, and then casting one more backwards glance in her direction.
She had never minded that he never walked back to her, despite all her attempts, because she had no idea what would happen afterwards if he did. She would be like a farm dog who didn't know what to do with the baby rabbit he'd brought into the house. What would she do, when she got what she actually wanted, when he was actually within arm’s length? She would have to kiss him (just to give it a try), press all of his buttons at once like an impulsive child in an elevator, and then run away because she just wouldn’t know.
- - -
First there had been the muffled sound of men shouting, unusual in the cement block maze of storage lockers that she was always too afraid to explore. Then there was the rickety waterfall sound of the metal door rolling up and the cardboard walls around her flashed a faint and fuzzy warm brown. Somewhere out there was a moving light.
The muffled shouting continued until it stopped and the sound of people chattering just outside faded out. There was the sound of heavy feet moving through the maze of boxes. “That’s it, that’s the one.”
Jessie lay still as the box moved up and out until the sliver between the box’s cardboard flaps were so bright. What child wanted her? When her eyes adjusted to the blinding nature of the fluorescent lights and she could see the owner of the hand that had pulled her out of the dark she had been disappointed. Not a child, a man. A boyish man, but not a young man like Bobby Krusinksi, a grown man, with greasy fingerprints on his glasses and hair around his mouth. But he still shrieked like a child under the Christmas tree.
“Yes! Yes! This is it! This is what I’ve been looking for! I mean-“ clearing his throat, “Who should I make the check out to?”
- - -
In the big sunlit room that smelled like a mixture of caked up salt dough, sunflower seed butter, and the faint undercut of urine, there had been countless picture frames on the wall. For a moment these frames of a thousand small faces were the answer to her anxieties, solace from the fear that she should suffer the pain of one drawn out wound after another. Each child’s life would be something professional and impersonal- however much that they would spit or sneeze or cough on her with curled pink tongues. They would never grow old and she would never know pain; life and youth eternal.
It wasn’t long until she learned that this was easier said than done. Fifteen lives in the span of a day was harder on the body than two kids over the coures of a half a century. She loved rough and tumble play but she was built for it. She wasn’t sure how long her friends would last here. Things weren’t as they had seemed. This was a different sort of death than the storage locker. It was a crueler sort of purgatory, where their bodies would be reduced to scratched plastic and marked up plush, before something cracked irreparably sharp and the final inevitable fall into a covered trash bin among spit out apple skins and wet pull-ups.
- - -
So this was the end of life, life after Emily, this was afterlife. To be transferred to a series of boxes and bags until she was lying in a customized tomb. Sour smelling Styrofoam carved with a laser to fit her dimensions exactly and cradle her in the darkness.
But in the afterlife there was a horse and a kindly old man who was not afraid of small spaces because his whole life had been confined to a box. She felt lucky to have ever been played with by a child whenever she saw him in the light, when the boyish man would take them out to photograph them in various poses on a table full of merchandise emblazoned with their faces. She learned from her new friends that this series of boxes and bright flashing lights, ecstatic phone calls in stuttered foreign languages, this was how adults played, not in a world of pretend and imagination, but with the preservation of their static lives and the potential of incoming money.
“Will we ever get out of here?” she asked the darkness and the darkness replied, “Yes my dear, you must believe me. When Sheriff Woody gets here, we will fly far far away.”
- - -
Yet however much Buzz’s out of character dancing and partially interpreted confessions of love gave her pause, Jessie didn’t mind because as soon as he scooped her up in the back of a garbage truck to stop the trash from falling on her she knew it was still him. He was always doing things like that, pulling her up out of the darkness and offering her his shoulder. When his usual bashful self came back to her, she just had to kiss him and when he offered his hand, once last offer of comfort this time not against the threat of darkness, but against the bright light of fire and the end of life itself, she held it tight.
- - -
Sheriff Woody arrived and to her dismay he was not a frontier hero, but a toy like any she had ever met. He yearned for his former life, his child, the warmth of the old bedroom. The marble had not buried into his chest yet, or so she had thought at the time. She hated him for it, called him selfish for wanting to reach back to life when she had had to endure in the darkness for so long. The eternal lights of a museum display, the faces of thousands of children, that the Prospector had promised was nearly in her grasp and it would all be squandered for the love of some boy who would grow up and in time forget his cowboy.
In the end it had been a relief when Woody finally took her home. It was what she really wanted. A second chance at real life: the world of child's play and not the idolization of immortal creatures behind a glass case, however uncertain the future and the heartbreaks that lay ahead.
- - -
That life should go on should have scared her, should have made her breath quicken at the thought of another heartache on the horizon but for just a little bit more time, always bargaining with life for just a little more time, she could ignore the ruptured seam in her chest. She could fill it with long playtimes in the hands of a creative little girl, with comfortable sleeps in the glow of a night light, with stolen kisses with her dear space ranger behind a shuttered closet. She could feel the pride rising in her as she rose back up the sacred bedroom ranks to “favorite” toy, forgave Woody for his selfishness so long ago for wanting to return to Andy’s room when the promise of museum lights were in her reach. The soft light of a little girl’s bedroom as she was ridden around on Bullseye, on Buttercup, in a Red Flyer wagon, was so much better. She knew she shouldn’t put all her monkeys in one barrel, shouldn’t pin all her hopes on an impossible eternal childhood, but as she settled in bed between Buzz’s glowing paint and the warm back of a little girl smelling of baby shampoo and freshly laundered pajamas, she could let herself forget for just a little bit more.
- - -
“Why are we here?” she had once demanded the darkness and the darkness answered with contempt in his old man’s voice: “It's because of those damn Russki astronauts.”
- - -
Jessie could forgive Woody for leaving with Bo, for being selfish in Al’s apartment, for being cruel to Buzz when he first met him (or from what she understood of that time from Andy’s other toys). She understood all his actions now. She could forgive him for ignoring the shooter sized marble somewhere in his stuffing, just as she wished she could ignore hers as she worked through another panic attack on the moonlit floorboards with her boots dangerously close to the underside of Bonnie’s bed. She had had time! She thought she had had time- six, seven, eight more years- before the worry could rear its ugly head.
She remembered what Bo had said that night in Molly’s room, “You get used to it, but it doesn’t make the pain hurt any less.” Jessie was built for rough and tumble play, but the anticipation of grief was harder on her than anything else she had encountered.
- - -
The Prospector had always been wrong. It was not the space toys, not the astronauts, and certainly not the Russians that had taken their glory away from them. And she had been wrong, it was not screens, or devices, or technology that took children from their toys- she was technology! It was time, always time, and the competition for attention in a world that moved too fast for anyone to withstand. Seventy years and up to four to five hundred more to go and it would always move too fast. She had more in common with the Tire Swing Tree, this sturdy unmoving oak that she now sits under, than she did with the children she had hung all her hopes on. She could cling to Woody’s words, that there was nothing better in the whole world than to make a child happy, she could tell herself day after day that there was nothing better; but what about the self? What if the soul that inhabited the body built for eternal play was not ready for eternal grief, the cyclical reopening of old scar tissue. Is this what it was to be alive? To feel like something was breaking in her every time a child outgrew her? Hundreds of portraits hung up in her heart like on the wall of a daycare classroom and each pair of little eyes destined to walk away and forget about her.
- - -
And still: This carving in the side of an oak tree, this photograph of a mother and her daughter, this mark of her existence on the universe. A girl had been brave enough to go out into the world because of her, brave enough to grow up enough to pass along that bravery to another child who was brave enough to move on and bury her childhood momentos beneath this tree.
And still: Her friends who would cross the whole wide world to find her.
And still: The little space toy who rides up the hill on a purple plastic alicorn with blue tinsel in its glimmering hair and offers his whole heart to her, who will stutter through his confession of undying love before the oncoming headlights of a Mack truck, who had once offered his hand to her in the face of an approaching inferno, who in time will vow to share all her days, “Even the really hard ones!”
She understands it now. What Bo meant about needing to find something besides these kids. But it isn’t just trusting that being alive is enough, it's trusting that there is something constant enough to be worth living for. She would always have herself. She had had herself in the dark all those years. She needed someone to share the daylight and the darkness with.
- - -
The honeymoon is at the Palm Springs Hotel Drive-In, which is the Anderson’s living room. Bonnie is finally having her sleepover with Blaze and she will grow up and grow away and that will be fine and Jessie will grieve and Buzz will offer his shoulder for her to cry on and it will be just fine because they will have themselves and they will have each other. It hasn't happened yet but they have to trust that that is how it will happen.
There is commotion as the girls put the bowl of microwave popcorn on the table and build a fort out of couch cushions. Jessie uses the commotion to let herself fall a little closer to Buzz’s chest.
“What should we watch?” asks Bonnie excitedly as she brandishes the television remote. “We have StreamBeam Kids and Paralax Plus aaand the free premium cable channels that come with the T.V.”
The girls spend the next forty minutes browsing the truly infinite selection of films on the Anderson’s flat screen television. The rental shop could not possibly have housed this many movies. The girls hit buttons on the remote and make each digital image of a movie poster becomes haloed in a whitish sort of glow. They talk about the movies they’ve seen and the movies they haven’t seen and the ones they want to see and the ones their parents would never let them see and the ones they think are too scary but one day they’ll be brave enough to watch.
“Haven’t you girls picked out a movie yet?” Bonnie’s father asks.
“But there’s so many to choose from!” says Blaze. She's a little overstimulated from the sight of the Menu screen alone.
“Why don’t you make a list of all the ones you like and then you can watch another one at the next sleepover,” suggests Bonnie’s father.
“Oh that’s a great idea Dad!”
The girls finally settle on an age appropriate film about a girl just a little older than Bonnie and Blaze with a powerful connection to a seemingly untamable horse. The connection of the horse and the girl is so strong that it even defeats a corporate real estate agent who is looking to buy the stables and raises enough money so the kindly owner doesn’t have to sell the property in the first place. Jessie isn’t particularly paying attention to the details, it is no cowboy film, but it will be good enough to give the girls ideas for a horse based game with the toys in the morning. (They will discuss it into the night, they will forget their toys to discuss their plans in the pile of blankets on the living room floor.) Jessie breathes in Buzz’s plastic, the two pieces of burnt microwave popcorn placed in front of her and Buzz in sacred offering of play, the faint fruit and chemical smell of nail polish bottles opening in the light of the LED screen.
It is more than enough.
- - -
“ 'But how lovely', she said, taking his flowers. She understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa.”- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway