Often, I played hospitals with my dolls. I played that the dolls were sick, and 1 was a nurse. When the dolls had bad stomachs, I gave them medicine to take.
Sometimes I pulled their arms and legs off and put tomatoes on them, to look like blood.
And sometimes I gave them drugs. That was the best of all. My mother gave me an old syringe, and I put water in it and pushed it into the dolls. Soon the dolls were full of holes.
'That's a good game for a little girl,' my mother said. But she didn't understand. Because in my game, all the dolls were boys, like Al. And they never got better. They were sick for a very long time, and then they died. I put them in a hole in the ground, in the garden.
When I was ten, my mother died. My father was unhappy, and began to drink a lot. Sometimes he came home with strange women, but he didn't marry any of them. 1 think the women didn't like him, because he drank so much. When he wasn't drunk, he played with Al. So I had more time alone.