Chapter Text
“We should make it official,” says Richie one day, having pulled Gloria into her home office for this conversation.
Gloria laughs, confused. “We tried that. It didn’t work.”
“The separation, Gloria. Divorce.”
She feels simultaneously numb and like the ground has dropped out from beneath her. “Why?” she asks. “I thought we agreed this was best for Sasha? Normalcy. Living under one roof. Co-parenting.”
“I think we both know we can still do all of those things without staying married. I’ll probably start looking for my own place, though. As comfortable as the couch is, I’m too old for this.”
Gloria leans heavily on her desk. “Why now? What changed?”
Richie’s gaze flicks to the design sketches cluttering her workspace. It’s not unfair; Barbie moving in has been a pretty big change. Still, Gloria feels immediately defensive. He anticipates this and holds up his hands.
“I’m not blaming Barbie, I’m just acknowledging that it’s time for me to get out of the way.”
“Get out of the way?”
“She’s perfect for you in ways I never could’ve even imagined being.”
“Barbie? Are you telling me to—Richie, I’m straight. We have a kid together.”
“Bisexuality exists, Gloria.”
“Bi—I—Richie, what, in the fifteen years you’ve known me, has led you to believe I might be—”
There’s a knock on the door, and Barbie pokes her head in. “Hi!” she says brightly, the landline clutched to her chest. “Sorry to interrupt. Gloria, your mom is on the phone.”
“Tell her I’ll call her back in, like, ten minutes,” says Gloria, nerves jangly with the fear that either Barbie or her mother might’ve overheard the conversation she and Richie were having.
“Okay!” says Barbie. “We’ll just catch up until you’re ready.” She brings the phone to her ear and starts chatting with Gloria’s mother in unaccented Spanish as she pulls the door shut.
Barbie likes talking to Gloria’s family. Her Spanish is even better than Sasha’s. It makes Gloria feel warm inside. Richie’s phone chooses that exact moment to chime with a Duolingo notification. He looks at Gloria meaningfully.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Gloria says peevishly. “She’s my barbie, not my rebound.”
He’s right about divorce, though. It’s time.
When they tell Sasha, her first question is, “Why?”
Richie says, “Your mother and I both need to open ourselves up to new beginnings. We can’t do that until we’ve closed this chapter.”
“Both?” Sasha echoes skeptically. “Real brave, Dad. We all know only one of you is ready to start dating again.”
Having seen other parents destroy each other through the divorce process, Gloria is endlessly thankful he’s still committed to putting up a united front, even if it means taking undeserved flak. As Sasha stomps away, she looks at him sympathetically and says, “I’ll talk to her.”
But he waves her off and goes after Sasha himself, and whatever he says has everything back to normal by dinner.
Motivated by Barbie, Gloria makes her first gyno appointment in longer than she’d like to admit. It’s just as awkward as she remembers it being, and more so when she informs him that she’s no longer married. He asks the requisite “are you sexually active?” and she laughs nervously and blurts, “Well, my husband—ex-husband—thinks I’m a lesbian, apparently.”
The doctor looks up and asks flatly, “Are you?”
She tries to explain that it was a joke, and he is both unamused and unconvinced.
Gloria is dying of embarrassment and they haven’t even started the exam yet.
It does not get less awkward when they do.
“How’d it go?” Sasha asks when Gloria finally escapes and scoops her up from the waiting room.
“Oh, great,” says Gloria sarcastically. “Now my doctor thinks I’m a lesbian.”
“What?!”
Herding her flabbergasted daughter towards the car, Gloria tries a couple lamaze breaths to clear her jitteriness. “You know how you always tell your doctor way more than you intended?”
“No.”
Sasha is still at the age where she looks expectantly at her mom for help whenever her doctor asks her a question, fiercely independent until the pediatrician wants to know when her tummy started hurting. Of course she doesn’t know.
“I made a joke and there was a misunderstanding,” Gloria says.
Sasha merely scoffs at the absurdity.
And then she tells Barbie the second they get home.
“Oh,” says Barbie bemusedly. She’s in cutoffs and her skin is shiny with sweat from helping Richie move. Gloria would look ridiculous, but she looks incredible. “Would that be a bad thing?”
“Being gay?”
Barbie nods uncertainly, and Gloria’s heart drops.
She hurries over and takes Barbie’s hands. “Honey, no, of course not,” she says firmly. “There is nothing wrong with being gay.”
“It’s cooler, actually,” says Sasha nonchalantly, spiriting Barbie away and leaving Gloria behind, both grateful and disappointed.
“Why is this so hard?” she whines.
Her therapist sets down her pen and looks Gloria dead in the eye. “Gloria, you are among the most emotionally intelligent people I interact with, in and out of this office.”
“Then I pity other people.” She and Sasha fought that morning, and she’s not even sure why. “Things are getting better, but I feel like I’m always doing something wrong in her eyes, and, when I try to fix it, she just gets more annoyed.”
“Kids are especially prone to overreaction at that age, so it might not be anything you did, but have you been validating her feelings when you “try to fix it?””
Gloria wrings her hands in her lap. “What do you mean?”
“Feelings are very subjective, but they’re also very real. Emotional validation is acknowledging and accepting the feelings someone is having, regardless of whether or not you agree with them or intended to cause those feelings. You told me last week that Sasha snapped at Barbie for trying to help her with her homework, but then she apologized and explained that she was frustrated and wanted to figure the problem out herself.
“The first thing Sasha did was validate Barbie’s hurt feelings. She didn’t get defensive. She didn’t tell Barbie to stop being upset because she didn’t mean it that way. Right?”
Gloria sighs. She thinks about how Sasha usually does let Barbie help her with homework. About how seeing the two of them hunched over textbooks and worksheets doesn’t spark the same maternal guilt in her as it did when it was Richie leaning over Sasha’s shoulder. “I guess we’re both more patient when it comes to Barbie.”
“And how are things going there, with Barbie?”
“Not you, too,” she groans.
Her therapist frowns. “Not me what?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you think of a lesbian Barbie?” Gloria asks Aaron from work in hushed tones over lunch one day.
They’ve gotten close since the whole tear in the doll/human continuum fiasco, or whatever Mattel is calling it. Not as close as her and Barbie, obviously, but closer than Gloria’s ever been with anyone at the office before. It’s nice to have a work friend. She doesn’t feel like she can talk to anyone else about this.
“I mean, market research isn’t my department, but I’m not sure they’ll go for it,” Aaron tells her, swirling a fry in ketchup.
“Not as a product line. As a, uh, reality.”
Aaron stills with the fry halfway to his mouth. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not sure, but I think…yeah.”
“I mean, it’s pretty killer for you, huh? Imagine dating a literal barbie.”
Gloria stares. Puts her hand down in the ketchup. Curses.
“You are going to go for it, right?” Aaron asks as he hands her a napkin.
“Why would I do that?”
“Not to state the obvious, but she’s kind of made for you.”
“Except that I’m not gay. Why does everyone seem to forget that?” To be fair to Aaron, she kind of walked right into this conversation. Gloria’s too exasperated to be fair.
“Uh, you do set off the—” Aaron bites his own tongue. “Who’s everyone?”
“Richie, for one.”
He winces sympathetically. “Awkward. Who else?”
“I…I guess that’s kind of it.” Which is weird, because it feels like it’s been everywhere lately, pressing in on her.
“O-kay,” Aaron says and changes the topic.
Gloria immediately feels validated in the pickup line at school a week later.
There’s a new kid in Sasha’s class, and his poor mother has been bamboozled into hosting one of those pointless PTA meetings Gloria’s been successfully ducking since the kids were in third grade. The woman leans against her Subaru and strikes up a conversation, and it’s easy for Gloria to sympathize with a fellow working mom. Expectations are so unfairly high. She feels the Barbieland rants simmering in her chest.
“It’s just so hard to say no,” the other mom is complaining. “How do you do it?”
“Oh, they haven’t asked me, thankfully.”
“Really? For the inclusion and diversity committee?”
Gloria is thoroughly speechless.
The other mother blushes beet red and stammers, “Oh! Oh, no, sorry, not because—I meant—the tiny one—Janet?—went rabid when she saw my HRC equality bumper sticker. I figured they’d be hounding you and your wife, too…”
“My wife?” Gloria repeats, choking on the concept at the same time her mind goes to exactly one person.
“Yeah, the one who looks like a model? Tall? Blonde? Wears a lot of pink?”
Yep, exactly that one person.
There’s a noise of impatience, and both mothers look to see Sasha standing by the passenger door of Gloria’s car. “Mom and Barbie aren’t together,” she says flatly.
“Her name is Barbie? Isn’t that kind of on the nose?” And then, “Wait, you’re not together?”
“No,” says Gloria awkwardly. “But good luck with the committee stuff.”
She slides into her car and leverages her gateway driving skills.
Gloria’s mother comes to visit, and the couch might’ve been good enough for Richie, but there’s not a chance in hell she’s asking that of her 65 year old mother. Consequently, Barbie has to give up her room for the week. Before Gloria can offer to take the couch herself—or think about why she’d do that for Barbie but not Richie—Barbie grins at her and asks, “Sleepover?”
“Sure,” she says. “That…works.”
Sasha is trying not to laugh.
And it would be funny, probably, if Gloria wasn’t so damn sick of being inexplicably panicky all the time.
When they get home from the airport the next night, Gloria goes straight to the kitchen to start dinner while Barbie helps her mother with her luggage. The woman does not know the meaning of packing light, and Barbie’s biceps bulge impressively under the harsh overhead lighting on the stairs. Her mother compliments her cheekily, and Gloria catches herself staring. It doesn’t mean anything except that she needs to get back on a gym routine.
They join Gloria in the kitchen not long after, having left Sasha to her homework. Her mother posts up at the counter to observe, whereas Barbie immediately commandeers the cutting board. She’s gotten pretty adept in her six months as a human, but she’s clearly putting a little extra effort in to impress their guest. In that moment, Gloria realizes that, while Barbie has a family in her and Sasha and Richie, she doesn’t have a mother.
Unless Ruth Handler counts, and Gloria doesn’t think she does. Not in moments like this.
Barbie bumps shoulders playfully. “How was work?” she asks, as always.
“Meh. I’m trying to set something up, but none of these DMs bother to read my emails when they’re not sent “on behalf of the CEO.” So.”
“That’s extremely unprofessional of them.”
“Sure is.”
“Have you tried putting “action required” in the subject line? Or copying their bosses?”
“Oh. That’s a good idea. Thanks, Barbie.”
“No problem! I do have those occasionally.”
Gloria smirks. “Ideas?” she teases.
“Good ones,” Barbie replies, filching some sliced pepper. “Ideas I have all the time.”
“Mija,” her mother interrupts somewhat urgently, and both Gloria and Barbie turn. “You left the seeds in. That’s going to be picante.”
“It’s just a jalapeño,” Barbie says, and pops it in her mouth. She really is showing off. “Did you know the capsaicin is actually in the ribs? The seeds are only spicy on the outside because they’re touching the rib.”
Gloria’s mother stares for a moment, then she laughs loudly. “Vale. I got too used to the gringo.”
“¡Mamá!” Gloria yelps.
“He was perfectly nice, mija,” she says, waving her hand dismissively, “but I like this one.”
Barbie grins so wide and for so long that Sasha looks mildly concerned when she comes down to set the table.
Dinner is comfortable. It’s not that her mother and Richie don’t get along, but Gloria thinks maybe everyone was always trying too hard when they were married. It felt stressful. This is easy. Barbie simply fits.
Shit.
Richie might be kind of right. Aaron, too. Barbie is perfect for her.
By the time the last plate is washed and put away, Gloria’s half expecting her mother to tell her to leave her bedroom door open, the way she had to as a teenager when boys came over.
She doesn’t, obviously.
Barbie, clad in a stripped purple pajama set, eases the door closed and smiles warmly at her. Gloria is so preoccupied with acting totally and completely normal that she doesn’t realize until they’re both in bed, staring at the ceiling, that Barbie has definitely noticed her agitation and is choosing not to mention it. As grateful (and terrified) as she is that Barbie is so in tune with her emotional boundaries, Gloria feels a pang of loss for the way freshly-human Barbie would ask literally any question that came into her head.
“You get along better with my mother than I do,” she whispers into the dark.
“Completely untrue,” Barbie whispers back.
Gloria laughs. “Barely. It’s nice, is what I’m trying to say. You’re under no obligation to spend so much time with my mom.”
“I like spending time with your mom. She has all sorts of interesting stories. She’s an impressive woman.”
“Yeah, I guess she is, huh?”
“And she makes me feel like a whole person.”
Something ice cold constricts around Gloria’s gut. “Do I not make you feel like a whole person?” she asks with trepidation.
“No!” Barbie says quickly and a little too loudly, turning over onto her side to look at Gloria directly. She lowers her voice. “That is not what I’m saying. It’s not that you make me feel bad! I love the support you and Sasha give me. Really. It’s just, sometimes, I feel like you’re easily impressed with me because you see me as a kid. Your mom doesn’t know I used to be a doll. When she compliments me, she thinks I’ve been human-ing for…um, however old I’m supposed to be.”
“Oh, honey,” Gloria says, scooting closer, “I—wait, do we not know how old you are?”
“Nope. Is there a way to figure that out?”
There must be, but Gloria’s not a scientist or a doctor or close enough to her phone to google it, so she shrugs and laughs. “We’ll look into it. The only thing I can think of is a meme I saw once about vaginas having rings like trees.”
“They do not!” says Barbie, a little uncertain.
“They don’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure, yeah.”
“Should we check?”
In the dark, Gloria can’t quite make out Barbie’s expression, but she can hear enough playfulness in her tone to know she’s being teased. She chooses to ignore it and reaches out to cup Barbie’s cheek. “Honey,” she says, very seriously, “I do not see you as a kid. Honestly, you’re so independent that sometimes I’m afraid you’re going to leave.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Barbie—”
“I don’t want to leave,” Barbie says firmly, and then she kisses Gloria full on the mouth.
There are sparks. Fireworks. A whole cacophony of pyrotechnics.
Suddenly, Barbie pulls away. “Sorry!” she whispers frantically. “Sorry, was that okay? I should’ve asked if that was okay. How Ken of me. It’s so important to always ask for consent. I don’t know what I was thinking. I swear, I’m not—”
“Barbie,” interrupts Gloria, smiling shyly, “it was more than okay. You could even do it again, if you want to.”
“Are you sure? You look…not sure.”
“No, I’m sure,” she says, leaning forward to brush their lips together herself. “I’m just processing. An hour ago, I thought I was straight. It’s new and exciting and my mom is right down the hall. Oh, god, my mom is right down the hall. I feel like a teenager.”
Barbie is smiling, but concern still lines her brow. “You thought you were straight? Do you need me to go? Sexuality is complicated and confusing, and I don’t want you to feel pressured to go outside your comfort zone to make me happy.”
“Don’t you dare go anywhere,” Gloria says, wrapping her fingers around Barbie’s upper arm and squeezing, more reassuringly than possessively. “I knew. I think I’ve known for a long time. I just wasn’t ready to admit it.”
“Okay, if you’re really super sure,” replied Barbie, sliding a hand over Gloria’s hip.
Folding herself into the embrace, Gloria hums contentedly. “Oh, yeah, definitely sold on this.”