2025
It hung on our basement door like a sentinel—a ragdoll caught in the merciless grip of an old-fashioned clothes wringer, accompanied by that unforgettable caption: “The truth will set you free but at first it will make you miserable.”
For years, I sat with my back against the cracked vinyl bench in our Milford, Ohio kitchen, watching that door’s decor change with the seasons: a rattling skeleton at Halloween, a jolly Santa during December. But the ragdoll always returned, resuming its position like a stubborn gargoyle, watching over our little trio as we grew: me advancing toward nine, my sister toward seven, the baby of us reaching five.
The kitchen was pure 1970s: mustard-yellow countertops that seemed to absorb every shadow, even in full daylight. I’d slouch at the table, pushing my mother’s Midwestern white lady interpretation of chicken chow mein around my plate, creating smaller and smaller piles until I could discreetly ball it into a napkin. Some nights, it was meatloaf; others, it was her chili spaghetti—a rotating cast of dishes I couldn’t stomach. “May I be excused?” I’d implore beseechingly, already half-risen from the bench. The ragdoll watched my every deception with its blank button eyes.
I never questioned its presence then. It was simply part of our small family home’s landscape, like the perpetual haze of Folgers coffee and Benson & Hedges cigarettes that hung in the air. But its message about truth and misery never quite stuck—I was already a practiced fibber by then, masking my own disgust at my mother’s cooking (sorry, mom) while instinctively developing the tools we’d need later for grander prevarications. By nine, these small acts of self-preservation at the dinner table were quietly preparing us for the years ahead, when truth-telling would become a more complicated matter of survival, when her struggles with alcohol addiction and mental illness became more apparent.
Looking back, I wonder if the poster knew what it was watching over: three little girls at a kitchen table, with me already adept at the art of selective truth-telling, my sisters no doubt soon to follow, if they hadn’t already surpassed me. The basement door might as well have been a stage curtain, with that tortured ragdoll as our silent audience, witnessing each small deception that was really just practice for the bigger ones to come. I wonder if it was appalled at its uselessness or if it found the little trio of budding dissemblers bleakly amusing. I also often wonder if our shared dark sense of humor began with the pained but resigned expression on this rag doll’s face. Most of all, I wonder… whatever happened to that poster?!
Yesterday, my middle sister texted me with barely contained-glee. This is the same sister who solved the JAW CRAZER mystery, by the way. She might be an even more persistent sleuth than me! She’d found it—the exact same freaky rag doll poster —listed for around $50 on a resale site. The photo brought an immediate rush of memories: the sticky give of vinyl against my back, the scrape of fork tines against plates, the strategic redistribution of unwanted dinners. She placed an offer immediately.
The offer was accepted, and that ragdoll will return to us after forty years—no longer a looming presence above our childhood meals but a cherished relic of the kitchen table where three little girls poked at questionable Chinese food and stodgy meatloaf, perfecting their poker faces, pretending to eat dinner.
P.S. I should note that I’m only speaking from my own experience with truth-telling and survival strategies—I shouldn’t presume to know my sisters’ relationships with honesty, then or now. (Though I suspect we all are all lying liars in our own ways, for our own reasons.)
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