My Wilhelmina, My Self
I think in about third or fourth grade, we started to make a Wilhelmina every fall.
Wilhelmina was what we called a scarecrow. She was the same, every time. Beige pantyhose stuffed full of leaves a long sleeved floral dress stuffed with the same, and a pumpkin head that we drew two full red lips on and eyes with huge black commas for lashes. A straw beach hat with a wide sweeping brim to sit on top of her head and cover up the fact that she did not have any hair. My favorite task was to draw on her ears.
Then we would slump her in a lawn chair and put her in the front of wherever we happened to be living—the front porch of the dream house in Lexington; the front porch of my grandparents’ house; the front porch of the first apartment my mom could afford as a single mother and then the front porch of the housing project when we lost it.
I think my sister came up with the name Wilhelmina. She was a champion namer of everything—a baby doll named Enricka that she convinced me was suffering from a rare disease, that’s why she would never grow old like a real baby would. A made up French governess called Madamoiselle that she would channel in order to get me and my younger cousin to behave. So Wilhelmina was in her wheelhouse.
I loved each and every one of those Wilhelminas. They were almost real women to me. I loved that their soft bodies smelled like sweetly rotten leaves. I loved their red lips. I loved the way they humped into a chair. I loved looking at their faces that I’d often drawn myself, imagining them grown women.
This year, after a long hiatus, I wanted to make a Wilhelmina. My mother said she would help me, but she came home with two stakes to drape the Wilhelmina across and started talking about getting a paper mask for its face and I turned into a seven year old child. “No,” I said. “We’ll make it like we always did.” My mother has only so many battles to fight, so she said sure and then stopped trying to help.
On Sunday afternoon, I got a good-sized pumpkin and asked around the house for sharpies to draw on Wilhelmina’s gloriously femme face. I gave my mother fifty dollars to get two bales of hay for stuffing because I wasn’t sure we’d have enough fallen leaves to fill out her body—a ludicrous fear, we live in the land of fallen fall foliage.
My plans were big but by three pm on Sunday, I was exhausted from what is a normal weekend with a one year old. Still, I took out the storage bags from underneath my bed and began to go through my old clothes for a suitable Wilhelmina outfit.
The problem was, I dress like a hellion and whoever’s clothes we used to use for Wilhelmina were decidedly more conservative. All my old dresses were sleeveless, Bodycon affairs—Forever 21 tank dresses from 2014. I thought about dressing Wilhelmina in a sweatshirt and old skirt, but as I warmed to the idea, I realized, with horror, that Wilhelmina would be wearing the same outfit I currently was.
Is that why my mother was so reluctant to recreate her? Was every Wilhelmina, dressed in the women of my family’s castoff clothes, merely an eerie doppleganger of my female relatives? Is that why I’d loved her and been so comfortable around her? Was adulthood recognizing the horror in seeing yourself reproduced in a slouchy children’s scarecrow, and not the comfort?
Contemplating these questions sapped what little energy I had left and I put my garish old clothes away and started to strategize how I could recycle the pumpkin I’d bought for my Wilhelmina’s head.