The Troll Doll Had A Jewel In Its Belly And We Rubbed It For Luck

The troll was three inches tall and sat on top of the computer monitor.

It had wild hair, dyed hot pink from the factory, that had been standing straight up for two years and was now matted into a cone that could not be combed back down. It had pointed ears. It had a face that was deliberately slightly ugly - a potbelly, a gap-toothed grin, two shiny black eyes that were a little too close together. It was wearing nothing. Trolls, as a category, did not wear anything. The only non-skin thing on the troll was a jewel.

The jewel was glued into the troll's belly. It was faceted, plastic, roughly the size of a pencil eraser, and it was the point of the whole thing. You were supposed to rub it. The box called it a wishing stone. The cardboard insert in the back of the box had a line drawing of a kid rubbing the jewel with a thumb and a thought bubble above the kid's head containing an ice cream cone. The implication was clear. You rubbed. You wished. The ice cream cone arrived.

The ice cream cone never arrived.

The Lineup

The Troll Doll was not one toy. The Troll Doll was a category of toys made by at least four different companies throughout the nineties, all competing for the same impulse-buy slot at the end of the aisle.

The Dam Troll was the original. A Danish fisherman named Thomas Dam carved one for his daughter in 1959, out of wood, and it was so ugly it became famous, and by 1964 there was a bootlegging crisis and a Supreme Court case about who got to make them. By the time I was six, I did not know any of this. The troll on my dresser said Russ on the bottom of one foot and Ace Novelty on the bottom of the other foot, which was impossible, because they were different companies, but was true, because the trolls had become so fungible that the knockoffs had their own knockoffs and the feet had both names stamped into them from a mold somebody had bought at an auction.

The Treasure Troll, specifically, was the Ace Novelty line. The jewel was the differentiator. The Dam trolls did not have the jewel. The Russ trolls did not have the jewel, mostly. The Treasure Trolls had the jewel, and the jewel was the reason you bought a Treasure Troll instead of just a Troll, and the jewel was six cents of acrylic glued to a plastic chest and marked up two dollars at retail, and we all paid for it.

The jewel was six cents of acrylic glued to a plastic chest and marked up two dollars at retail, and we all paid for it.

The Hair

The hair was the first thing that broke.

It came out of the factory standing straight up, in a cone, dyed in a color that did not exist in nature - electric cyan, neon lime, hot magenta, grape. The color was embedded in the fiber at some stage of the manufacturing process that nobody at the factory could explain and nobody at my house cared about. The hair was anchored into a hole in the top of the troll's skull with a plug of hot glue. If you pulled on it, the whole clump came out, and you were left with a troll with a cone-shaped hole in its head and a wad of pink nylon in your hand.

The hair did not accept combing. You could comb it, with the tiny plastic comb that came in the blister pack, for exactly as long as it took to realize that the comb's teeth were softer than the hair, and that the hair was going to win. After about a week, the hair had tangled itself into a solid mass that was no longer directional. The flame was gone. What remained was a felted dreadlock that pointed vaguely upward because gravity had not yet convinced it to lie down. By 1995 every troll on every dresser in America had the same hair, which was not the hair the troll had left the factory with, and nobody minded, because the matted version was somehow more honest.

By 1995 every troll on every dresser in America had the same hair, which was not the hair the troll had left the factory with, and nobody minded, because the matted version was somehow more honest.

My sister tried to dye hers blonde, once, with lemon juice, because an issue of YM had said this would work on human hair. The hair stayed pink. The hair became wet, pink, and sticky. My mother threw the troll away. We did not speak of it.

The Jewel

Rub it.

The Wishing

The pitch was that the jewel was magic.

It was not magic. The jewel was a flat-backed rhinestone, probably Czech, probably purchased in gross quantities from a bead supplier in Rhode Island, probably glued into the troll's chest at a factory in Guangdong, probably costing less to produce than the sticker on the box that said WISHING STONE. The jewel did not know you were there. The jewel was not connected to a database of wishes. The jewel was glue and plastic.

But also - and this is the thing - the jewel worked.

The jewel worked in the sense that you rubbed it when you were anxious. You rubbed it before a spelling test. You rubbed it when you heard your parents arguing through the floor. You rubbed it when the dog had been outside too long and the sky was getting dark. The rubbing did not cause the outcome. The rubbing did something else. The rubbing gave you something to do with your thumb while your brain, which was six, was trying to figure out what to do with a situation it did not control. The jewel was a fidget. The jewel was a grounding technique. The jewel was, in retrospect, the first piece of mindfulness equipment I ever owned, and it came in a cardboard box at Toys R Us for $4.99 and it was marketed by a man in a suit in a boardroom in Woodinville, Washington, who did not know what mindfulness was.

The wishes themselves were mostly for things that would not happen. A snow day. A specific person at school noticing you. A dog. A specific brand of sneaker. You rubbed the jewel. The thing did not happen. You rubbed it again. The thing still did not happen. By the time the thing failed to happen for the eighth time, you had internalized a thing about the universe that was useful, which was that the jewel is a jewel and the universe is a universe and the two are not communicating, and you were going to have to figure out how to produce an outcome yourself. Which is a thing you can learn, in a way, by rubbing a plastic rhinestone and waiting for a snow day that doesn't come.

The Shelf

Every kid I knew had a shelf of trolls.

The shelf was usually in the bedroom, on a dresser, on a windowsill, or on top of the computer monitor if the house had a computer. The trolls stood in a row, by size, with the giant one on the end if you were lucky enough to have one, and the pencil-topper trolls lined up in a cluster at the front because they would not stand up on their own. The row got longer over time. Birthday gift. Vacation gift. Grandma trip. Dentist prize bin, once. The shelf accumulated.

The shelf was a collection, in the ninety-dollar-Beanie-Baby sense, except nobody was telling you the trolls were going to be worth money. Trolls were not an investment. Trolls were not a bet on the future. Trolls were just a collection, which is a thing kids are allowed to have for its own sake, and that was most of what made it good. You lined them up. You picked them up. You moved them around. You rubbed the jewels, in order, left to right, as a sort of ritual before bed, because by the end you had sixteen jewels and you had sixteen wishes and the odds were better than one, in theory, if you believed the trolls were a committee.

They were not a committee. The trolls, by any serious measure, did not know each other. The trolls were manufactured in different factories in different years and had been shipped to my house by different relatives who did not consult. The trolls were strangers in a lineup. But six-year-olds believe in committees. Six-year-olds believe in all kinds of things. The committee was the point.

The Argument With Myself

Here is the part I don't quite know what to do with.

The troll doll was objectively a bad object. It was ugly on purpose. The hair tangled. The jewel came unglued. The paint on the eyes rubbed off after six months. The materials were plastic, nylon, and acrylic, all of which outlast any human emotion by about three centuries, and all of which are now, in some number, in a landfill in New Jersey, with their original jewels still glued in place. The troll was a disposable object sold at a hard markup to kids with no economic self-defense, and the whole business was predicated on the idea that if you called a rhinestone a wishing stone, you could charge extra for the rhinestone, and the markup was invisible because nobody could see the margin on glued acrylic.

I knew none of this at the time. At the time, I had a troll with a pink cone of hair and a magenta jewel in its belly, and the jewel caught the light when I turned the troll in my hand, and when I rubbed it with my thumb the surface was slightly warm from the room and slightly cool from the plastic, and the warm-and-cool thing was the whole experience of being seven, and I could not have told you then and cannot tell you now what the wish was. But I rubbed it anyway. Every night. For something I didn't name.

I rubbed it anyway. Every night. For something I didn't name.

I think about this a lot now. We have fidget cubes and spinner rings and worry stones with little grooves cut into them, and the stores sell them by the thousand at airports, and they are all honest about what they are. They are described as fidget objects. They do not claim to grant wishes. They are, I think, worse at the job. The honesty removes the wishing part, and the wishing part is what gave the rubbing a direction. Without the wishing part, you are rubbing a rock. With the wishing part, you are rubbing a rock at something. The at matters. The at is maybe the whole thing.

The troll was lying, in the small useful way a six-year-old needs an object to lie to them. The lie was: this will do something. The truth was: the doing is you. The troll stood between the lie and the truth and let you not notice the distinction, which is a thing a plastic figurine with a glued-in acrylic can be surprisingly good at.

The Factory

The factory, by the way, is still running.

Not the original factory. Not the one in Guangdong, or the one in Rhode Island where the rhinestones came from, or Thomas Dam's workshop in Gjøl. All of those have shut down or moved or been replaced. The troll is still running. The IP got bought and sold a few times, and in 2016 DreamWorks made a movie called Trolls that had Justin Timberlake in it and a soundtrack and a sequel and a second sequel, and the trolls in the movie had the same hair and the same potbelly and the same pointed ears as my dresser trolls had thirty years earlier, and the movie trolls did not have a jewel in the belly, because the jewel was never actually the point of the troll, and the movie knew that, and the movie did it anyway.

They sell troll merchandise now in a plastic clamshell at Target, two aisles over from where the Treasure Trolls used to be, and the hair is still the same color, and the smile is still the same gap-toothed grin, and the kid picking one up still has no idea it was once a Danish fisherman's attempt to make a daughter laugh, and I think that is maybe fine. The toy did its job. The toy's job was to be in the kid's hand. The toy is still, in some form, in the kid's hand. The jewel is gone, but the kid is still rubbing something. We have changed the surface. We have not changed the thumb.

The dresser is still there. The trolls are in a shoebox in a basement in Illinois, under a stack of Christmas lights that have not worked since 2004. The hair is matted. The jewels are mostly glued in. One of them is loose, and if you turn the box, you can hear it, a tiny tap, which is the sound of a rhinestone looking for a wish, which is a thing a rhinestone cannot find, which is maybe fine. My mom hasn't thrown them out. She says she keeps meaning to. She hasn't yet. She hasn't yet is maybe the closest thing to a wish that got granted.