A Portion of Your Loveliness

My daughter’s favorite game is Holocaust. She’s been playing it for two years, since fourth grade, and she is unbelievably inventive. She found her old American Girl doll, Samantha from Park Avenue, cut her hair off with nail clippers for that ragged, doomed look, took the poor doll out of her plaid taffeta dress, wrapped her pink cotton bottom in a dirty dish towel, and laid her in a pile of leaves in the backyard. She tore strips from the doll’s pretty pink-and-white duvet cover and wrapped them around her own bare feet, tearing up her soles on acorns and twigs. She crumbled dead leaves into a cup and brewed them with boiling water. She came into the house, puking and happy.

“It must have been like this, for them,” Abby said.

“Where’d they get the hot water,” I said. That’s what I was reduced to, raising a few speed bumps in her path.