Bear's Story

Elizabeth Anne and Jenny Marie have found the hidden manuscript of their beloved Mistress Sarah. While she is away on vacation they decide to turn the manuscript into a real book but they will have to enlist Bear's help. With more work than anticipated, will the long neglected dolls finish in time to surprise their mistress and win back her attention?

Chapter One – Story Time

Bear loved books.

She loved them even before she could read and in the beginning, admiring them from afar, she spent many hours looking up at all the orderly rows on the shelves.  Then one day Bear’s little Mistress Sarah was deemed old enough to listen to the wonderful stories hidden behind all the mysterious columns of letters decorating the spines of their covers.

Immediately Bear was captured and unlike her young Mistress Sarah who always fell asleep before her mother finished reading, Bear listened with a rapt and hungry attention, carefully memorizing every story.

There were five of them each evening when the reading began.  Mistress Sarah’s mother would sit in the upholstered chair in the corner of the room while Mistress Sarah snuggled in her bed with the twin rag dolls Elizabeth Anne and Jenny Marie on either side, all except for their arms and heads tucked in underneath the bright handmade quilt.

Bear’s place was on the arm of the overstuffed chair.

“Bear wants to learn to read,” the little Mistress Sarah told her mother.  It may have been a childlike fabrication to justify her exclusion of Bear from the bed, but Bear wasn’t really Mistress Sarah’s nor had she really belonged to Mistress Sarah’s mother.  No one was quite sure how old the tiny teddy really was or from which name in the bushy family tree she had originated.  Nonetheless, from her vantage point on the arm of the chair, it was only natural for the little bear to follow the markings on the slowly turning pages as their sounds flowed into her ever alert ears.

Without realizing what was happening, Bear soon learned to read.  Enthralled, a whole new world opened up and it did not take Bear long to take advantage of the fact that bears are very good climbers.  When no one was looking, she began reading anything she could find, plowing through every book in the house, often sharing what she found with Mistress Sarah even before Mistress Sarah started school.

Four weeks after she was enrolled in kindergarten, Mistress Sarah was promoted to the first grade.  Shortly after that, her astonished teachers moved her ahead once more to the second grade.

“They tell me you are very, very advanced in your skills as well as being naturally clever,” said Mistress Sarah’s mother to her daughter.

“Mommy,” Mistress Sarah said quite truthfully, “it isn’t me.  It’s Bear.  She helps me with everything.” 
And so it continued and for a while, all was well.

Then one momentous day in the middle of putting on her first makeup, the maturing Sarah abruptly decided she had grown out of her need for dolls.  Her impulsive decision excluded Bear however, because she knew her own supposedly impressive cleverness was really Bear.  None of the adults in the family knew, but Mistress Sarah would never forget that the capacity of the little bear’s astonishing brain was in no way related to her diminutive size.  Thus, Bear was eventually allowed to accompany her mistress when she moved to the great university several states away.  Bear loved it when some of Mistress Sarah’s sorority sisters also learned to take advantage of her encyclopedic store of useful information.  They always knew where to find her.  If they couldn’t find her near a computer, they would find her in Sarah’s backpack.

With both Bear and Sarah gone, the dolls’ loneliness turned into paralysis, their only animation occurring during the regular breaks that punctuate every school year.  On the longer vacations, Bear frequently offered to teach the disconsolate dolls to read.  Neither had any heart for it but Bear did manage to teach them a basic familiarity with arithmetic, the better to count the days between Bear and their mistress’s visits. 

 As for reading, “Why should we?” a dispirited Jenny Marie once asked.  “You read enough for all of us and when you read to us, except that your little growl doesn’t sound like either Mistress Sarah or her mother, everything is all right again.”

Mistress Sarah graduated.

Mistress Sarah went to work for a prestigious international corporation.

Mistress Sarah flew away on assignment to cities the dolls and Bear had seen only in pictures.

Mistress Sarah inherited the house and after first remodeling her mother’s spacious southwest bedroom, made the second substantial move of her life.  The move from one side of the upstairs balcony’s double French doors to the other was not far, but it finalized her crossing from childhood to maturity.  Now fully grown, and busily if not blissfully unaware of the dolls’ misery, she stored the desolate toys on a high dark shelf in one of the big upstairs closets while she refurbished her old room into a bright new guest room.

When the remodeling was finished, the dolls were released to decorate the furniture of the brightly repapered room.  Back in the light again, the dolls were as lonely as ever, but at least they could watch the cleaning lady as she went about keeping their mistress’s house spic and span.  But the very efficient and orderly housekeeper had no interest in conversing with dolls.

And so it went.

Then one day their preoccupied mistress chose to make a call on the upstairs telephone instead of going down to the study.  The dolls were immediately captivated. Although their mistress’s frustrated irritation was a little frightening, the content of her exasperated exchange was rich with sudden opportunity.  That evening when their mistress was in bed, the two dolls slipped from their respective placement and stole downstairs in search of Bear.

In the study Elizabeth Anne wasted no time in preliminary conversation.  “Bear,” she asked, “is Mistress Sarah writing a book?”

Elizabeth Anne’s question hung unanswered in the air as Bear looked at them. “You’re not supposed to know,” she said.  “How did you find out?”

“We overheard her on the upstairs telephone,” Jenny Marie said.  “She wants to make it into a real book but no one seems to be able to help her.  You should have heard her arguing with whoever it was she called.  I think she was even a little angry.”

“And Mistress Sarah can be scary when she’s angry,” Elizabeth Anne added then, “but it didn’t seem to do any good.”

“We knew something was going on,” Jenny Marie said at Bear’s worried look.  Then not wanting Bear to be upset, quickly added, “Mistress Sarah has spent an awful lot of time at the computer lately.  Sometimes at night when it is quiet we can hear the keys clicking.”

 “Is Mistress Sarah’s book about us?”  Elizabeth Anne asked.