When I was a little girl, I spent all of my time in my walk-in closet. It was a small room, really. All of my clothes and my record player, and even my bookcase fit in there, and I spent untold hours tucked inside my hideaway, playing Barbies.

My Barbie dolls didn’t have the fancy accoutrements. They had no Dream House, no Corvette, not even the little swimming pool. Mama figured my imagination was all I and my torpedo-busted crew needed to get us by. It was a big deal for me to get a new outfit for one of my dolls, and I learned to make clothes for them with scraps from Mama’s sewing box.

One time I got a brand new Barbie and decided that she should be a tramp. I took Daddy’s shoe polish and gave her blond locks some obvious black roots, just like the lady who lived down the street from my grandmother. Mama said only a tramp would have “black roots two inches wide on top of a head full of bleached-`til-it’d-turned-to-straw hair”.

I loved my Barbies, and I knew a secret about them- they were real. I was sure that the second I closed the door they came to life and started talking and walking around. I worried that they were in the closet fussing about their lifestyle and the fact that they had no car and had to swim in a Tupperware bowl, so about once a week, I’d line them up on the floor of the closet and give them a talk.

“It’s OK,” I’d start out, “You can trust me. I know you’re real, so you can go ahead and talk. I won’t tell anybody, I promise! Come on, who’s gonna start? Dawn, you know I could get you anything you want, if you’d just tell me what it is. P.J., if you tell me what kind of clothes you like, you wouldn’t have to go naked all the time, and maybe we could see about touching up those roots, you tramp! Ken, just say the word, and you and Barbie can have your own private shoe box. Think about it, at least. Come on, y’all, don’t you want some real food?”

My heartfelt entreaties would be met with seven blank stares. Their painted-on smiles never faltered. I would sigh and back out of the closet, close the door and then really quickly open it again and yell, “Aha!”. But they were too fast, and stopped whatever fun they were having without me before I could catch them.

Over the years, I moved on to more grown-up pursuits, and my Barbies languished on the shelf, tucked behind my band helmet and some children’s books that I no longer read. I gave up on getting them to trust me, and eventually the magic of girlhood left me, and I realized that they weren’t anything more than eleven and a half inch fashion dolls, creations of plastic and paint. It was inevitable.

Then I saw something on TV that made me remember the closet crowd. It was a warm, family-oriented Thanksgiving commercial. There was a groaning board, and grandparents, and a large dog begging for scraps. And there was a pair of salt-and-pepper shakers made to look like a pleasantly rotund pilgrim couple.

The little ceramic pilgrims got passed around, dumped into the mashed potatoes and slobbered on by the dog, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrim were real! They cut their little painted-on eyes at one another, and seemed worried about what was coming next. They squinched their faces when grabby feasters scooped them up and carelessly tossed them around. The climax of the commercial came when they were reunited, smiling at last, side-by-side on the table.

The day after Thanksgiving that year, I got a set of those salt-and-pepper shakers. They sit companionably, side-by-side in the cabinet over the stove, except for a little while at Thanksgiving. I know they’re in there wishing for more fashionable shelf paper. Every once in a while I sneak up and open the cabinet door really fast, exclaiming “Aha!” , but they’re too fast. So far.