Toy Story

From the “archives”

I’m in edits for my book, so I decided to, um, repurpose some material. I recently found this piece I wrote 27 years ago when I was a feature writer at The Sun. Technically, it’s copyrighted to The Baltimore Sun¹, but I’m fond of it and decided to share it here, adding footnotes where relevant, but making no other changes. (I was dying to make other changes.) Meanwhile, don’t forget to enter the lottery to win the monthly Mystery Box, a dozen books culled from my personal shelves. Just email “Lauralippmanauthor@gmail.com” and put “Mystery Box” in the subject line.

The voice on the voice mail was a familiar one, my husband’s², and the message was the one he always leaves: Call me when you get a chance. Not: “Have you heard the news, call me!” — the life-shortening message he left the day the Yankees traded David Wells for Roger Clemens.³ Just: “Call me when you get a chance.”

I got a chance.

“I broke your labyrinth,” he said without preamble. “I was dusting, and I knocked it over. I don’t think it can be fixed.”

“Oh,” I said. And then I didn’t say anything for a long time.

We are large-boned, heedless people, my husband and I; we break things a lot. We are not like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy — we don’t retreat into our money⁴ and we don’t expect others to clean up after us. We live with our clumsiness. We buy our wine glasses from Ikea, $5.95 for a six-pack.⁵ We know our way around a tube of Super Glue.

“She’s hard on her things,” my mother always said of me. My sister’s Barbies⁶ and Madame Alexander dolls are in pristine condition to this day. If I still had mine, they would look like guests on Jerry Springer. Shoeless hillbillies with bad hair and fur-trimmed coats, but no underwear.

A beloved bear known as Doodlebug. He’s almost 60 years old.

So it was something of a triumph that this toy, my Brio Labyrinthspel, had survived. Purchased from FAO Schwarz, circa 1969, it was a wooden box with a maze of holes, through which one guided a small metal ball. I even had the original ball — me, who could never hold onto a Barbie’s shoe.

I was a whiz at the labyrinth, as we called the game. It was the only thing I was a whiz at. At age 10, I was hopeless in all things athletic. Still am.⁷ As for Parcheesi, Monopoly and dominoes — well, let’s just say I never had the mental game.

So everyone was shocked when it turned out I had the manual dexterity to guide the little metal ball from zero to 60, and back again. It was the only thing at which I could best my sister, or my father.

I knew the surface of the board so well. I understood the game, how it was all balance, that your two hands must work together. I knew a single eyelash on the track could send the ball down one of the many holes. I knew that the parts that looked hard — the narrow path between the twin holes at No. 23, for example — were often easy. Getting past No. 3 took weeks of practice; 41-42-43 was the hardest stretch of all.

I moved onto similar toys — something called Moonshoot, in which one slowly opened two metal poles, drawing a large metal ball up their path. I mastered the forerunners of the Rubik’s cub, little squares with colors or numbers. I also doted on a game in which one moved a tower of discs from one pole to another in the fewest possible moves.

But labyrinth was the game I kept. It sat on our coffee table, although I seldom touched it anymore. When I did, I found that I did not have to practice to stay good, that I could quickly start again on my zero-to-60-to-zero path. It became the only game at which I could consistently beat my husband. (Not that I’m impugning his motives, or doubting his “dusting” story.)

I am 40 years old, childless, and comfortable with those facts.⁸ Lately, I have begun to give some of my toys away, the durable ones that survived my ownership — my Legos, a wonderful dollhouse that came from the oh-so-‘70s Creative Playthings, complete with its full set of Scandinavian furniture.⁹

But I have kept far more: the “City” and “Country” mice houses, my collection of Steiff animals, a pair of wind-up Sumo wrestlers, a plastic double-decker bus that my father brought me from England. Why can’t I give that bus away? Sometimes, I think it’s because it has the virtue of being unbreakable.

Part of being a grown-up is learning to say, “It’s just a thing.” My mother taught me that when the cat broke her Shirley Temple bowl. “It’s just a thing,” I muttered when I broke a Fiestaware egg cup. Yet my mother still mentions, every now and then, how much a Shirley Temple bowl fetches on the open market.

There are modern versions of the Labyrinthspel. But they’re poor imitations of my toy. The feel is different, the ball is lighter, the path is not exactly the same. They will never do. Nor can I imagine scouring shops and online auctions for another 30-year-old version. I don’t want one just like mine. I want mine.

CAN YOU BLAME ME FOR NOT LETTING THESE GO?

I inspect the broken pieces of my broken game. The six pieces of wood are whole, it’s just the internal mechanism that seems compromised. We could easily glue it back together, I point out.

“It won’t work, though,” my husband says.

“That’s OK.”

“What’s the point of putting it back together if it can’t work?”¹⁰

I haven’t the vaguest idea. But I’m already rummaging in a drawer for the Super Glue.¹¹

Published March 28, 1999.

Unpublished selfie; I was documenting the “cut” in my right leg to show my trainer.

Read/reading: Pool House, Mary H.K. Choi; Look What You Made Me Do, John Lanchester; Serling: A Journey into the Twilight Zone with TV’s First Visionary, Alan Sepinwall; A Gorgeous Excitement, Cynthia Weiner; The Perfect Moment: God, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture War, Isaac Butler (audio); Social Animals, Camille Perri (audio); Everyone is Lying to You, Jo Piazza. (audio).

Rereading: Sorority Girl, Anne Emery; A Mother and Two Daughters, Gail Godwin. The Moon by Night, Madeleine L’Engle.

Me, me, me: The trade paperback edition of Murder Takes a Vacation, published May 26, enjoyed a nice voyage¹² on bestseller lists in June — three weeks on the Publishers Weekly list, where it topped out at #8, and four weeks on the USA Today list, where it peaked at #22. I published my 11th piece at Oldster on June 22.

1. Please take a moment and consider the fact that something I wrote does not belong to me and yet things I wrote that do belong to me were fed into the maw of various LLMs without my permission.

2. This was my first husband. I am 0-for-2 in the marital sweepstakes.

3. He was a Yankees fan. It was challenging.

4. Also, we didn’t have that much money; by 1999, we were living on my newspaper salary and my book advances, which were still relatively modest, although I was able to leave my newspaper job by fall 2001.

5. I still buy cheap glasses because I still break stuff all the time.

6. At some point, my sister unboxed her still-pristine Barbies and one of the heads had kind of melted. I was secretly delighted.

7. I’m not sure I’d say that about myself now, although I’m also not sure that being adept at strength-training = athleticism.

8. I’m 67 now, raising a teenager as a divorced mom, and comfortable with those facts.

9. My friends returned that dollhouse to me, but, alas, my daughter was not charmed by it.

10. A metaphor more apt to my second marriage, but noting the date on this piece, I realize that I wrote this just as things were beginning to fall apart in the first one. I left him less than a year later.

11. It never worked again. Still kind of bummed about it.

12. Sorry!