Recalling Girlhood Days With Dolls Such as Betsy Wetsy, Tiny Tears, Vogue, Ginny, Muffie and More

I left my dolls behind on the ledge in my bedroom when I packed for college in 1965. With heads forward and eyes open, they looked hopeful and steadfast, if a little timid, which was how I felt about what might come next.

I was leaving home, and the real women in my family, too: my mother and my sister, Judy. Mom worked for a grocery wholesaler, stamping the state seal on cigarette packages. Her job belied her intelligence; every shift took a toll requiring a nap afterward. But she came to life on Saturday afternoons when the clerks at Lou Johnson's, the local high-end ladies' store, greeted her warmly. At Mass on Sunday, in a pencil-slim skirt with a jacket tailored to her slender figure, she outclassed all competition at the Communion rail.

Judy, five years older than I, had begun carrying our neighbors' babies on her hip at 12. She was popular with the mothers, made good money and found her vocation. She married at 18 and, by the fall I left for college, had three babies of her own and could vacuum with one arm while holding an infant like a football under the other.

I had failed the tests of womanhood posed by these two. My hopes for myself rode on more schooling, the one "something" I knew I was good at and enjoyed, and no one in our family had ever tried before.

Four decades later when I wandered into an antique doll show, I had a career and a family of my own rooted in Virginia, a continent away from my first home. As I approached an exhibit of pristine dolls in porcelain and linen, I thought about my sister. She had stayed put, the keeper of tradition and things related to family; I had traveled, buying new and discarding keepsakes.

Then, on a narrow ascending staircase, I confronted the familiar dolls from our 1950s childhood: Betsy Wetsy, Tiny Tears, Vogue, Ginny and Muffie dolls. The word over the display, "vintage," made me laugh. Could it really have been vintage-long since I carted dolls out to a corner of our living room?

I remembered how I lay on the floor to play, dolls and cases lined up. I combed hair, dressed and redressed my dolls for pretend baths, meals and sleepovers, re-creating scenes from my then-teenage sister's life. I decided what dolls would wear the nicest dresses and which could date.

Then, among all the other '50s dolls at the show, I spotted my namesake, the Toni doll, just like my own rosy-faced beauty with a taffeta dress and nylon comb-able hair.

I dug my cellphone from my purse, found a quiet corner and called Judy. "What's left of our dolls?" I asked casually, understating my excitement.

Mine had fallen apart because everyone played with them, Judy said. She sounded curt and practical, the older sister, mother and now grandmother.

I remembered a time, after college, when I had seen the dolls strewn around the floor of her house. Mom, perhaps despairing of my ever having children, had passed them along to my sister's fourth child, a daughter. I had felt a twinge of loss but it hadn't seemed right to miss what I had left behind only when it was given away. I contemplated the girl I had been, the one so resolute on a future away from home that she had quickly relinquished a claim on what was her own.

I wandered the show, eventually noticing a seamstress selling doll clothes: wool coats and jumpers, pajamas with satin ribbon ties, dresses in pale cotton print trimmed with lace, weightless in my fingers. I wanted these, but for what?