The Saga of Fix Millicent by Marlene Hickey

“Mommy, Daddy . . . I want you to meet Fix Millicent.”

“Well, hi there, Fix. How are you tonight?” my husband, Don, said as he peered at the empty recliner chair in front of him. “Where exactly is she sitting, Sue?”

With that, our youngest child, Suzanne, not yet three years of age, introduced to her father the fascinating friend who shared her days of frolic and fun. I, by contrast, had been aware of Fix for quite a long while. In fact, I considered her practically a fifth, if invisible, member of our brood. This, however, was our first formal introduction. Because of his busy work and travel schedule, there had been no occasion to tell my husband anything about the appearance and importance of Fix Millicent (pronounced by Suzanne as Milly-cent.) For a change, we were all together at the dinner table that night. As they basked in the warmth of extra attention, the three older children recounted the small triumphs and tragedies of their school day.

When they had finished, Suzanne took the floor and proceeded, from her high chair, to regale us with her adventures. Secure in her position as Last-Child-Left-At-Home, she was smugly confident that she could outscore these world-traveling siblings with one anecdote tied behind her. Her father expressed interest in her story and asked if we could meet this elusive pal. Suzanne agreed to take us into the living room after dinner to introduce us.
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The year was 1959. Wichita, Kansas, had been our home for just a short time when I began to hear my little girl’s lively conversations with . . . no one. “How sweet,” I thought. “She has an invisible friend.”

I knew that children often turn to imaginary playmates when they lose their real-life brothers and sisters to school. Left alone to entertain themselves, they create their own solitary games. Sometimes she sat on the living room rug with a deck of cards playing one of these imaginary games with two additional invisible characters, Ricky and Pirate. Now and then she would throw down her cards and say, “I quit! Pirate cheats!” Then she would stalk off in disgust.

When Fix Millicent first made her appearance, I was amazed most of all at the unlikely name. As a fulltime stay-at-home mom who monitored all aspects of her children’s lives, I knew that every story familiar to Suzanne had been read or told to her by me. The few television programs the kids were allowed to see, such as Lassie and the Mickey Mouse Club, were watched in my presence. We used no baby-sitters and, as newcomers to the area, no visitors had brightened our door up to that time. So far as I knew, she had never come in contact with names that sounded anything like Fix or Millicent.

One day, as Suzanne and I walked hand in hand to the neighborhood grocery store on sidewalks wet with puddles from a recent rain, she began suddenly to mutter under her breath in an exasperated voice: “Stop! Don’t! You’re splashing me. I’m getting all wet. Stop it, I said!”

Surprised at the vehemence of her accusation, I defended myself, saying, “Suzanne, what are you talking about? I’m not splashing you.”

“Not you, Mommy,” she answered. “Fix Millicent is doing it.”

Another time, as I cleaned near the bathroom, I heard my child moan and say to herself in a frantic tone of voice, “Oh, ooh, I have to go. I can’t wait. Ow, oh, ooh.”

I glanced into the room to see why she was unable to answer nature’s call, and was perplexed to see her squirm and writhe in what seemed to be genuine need.

“So then go to the bathroom, for heaven’s sake! What’s stopping you?”

In a voice both urgent and reasonable, Suzanne explained. “I can’t, Mommy. Fix is sitting on the toilet.”

Other unusual things occurred during our stay in the Wichita house. Often when I was writing a letter at the table, Suzanne, who sat nearby playing with her toys, would suddenly start talking about the subject I was writing about at that exact minute. I thought the first time that it was a funny coincidence, but I didn’t find it quite so amusing when it happened several times after that.

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On the night Suzanne introduced Fix Millicent to the family, she filled us in on the girl’s history,
at least as much as she had supposedly been told: Fix lived with her grandfather in Wichita on Newscome Street. Both parents were dead. She was about six years old with long, blond hair, and she always wore a blue nightgown.

To Don’s credit, he displayed as much interest in his little girl’s fantastic tale as a father can muster after a twelve hour workday. Finally, however, he was ready to settle down with his newspaper and a television show or two, but just as he sank wearily into his easy chair, he was startled by a loud shriek from his youngest child.

“Stop, Daddy! Fix Millicent is in that chair. You almost sat on her.” It was another reminder that life was different now that he shared his existence with a denizen of the unseen world.

In spite of my well-meaning plans to research early Wichita history to see if there had ever been such a street, or to follow up on some of the other details Suzanne had told us, I somehow never got around to it. Raising four small children, sometimes by myself for a week or two at a time while my husband traveled on business, filled my days and consumed all my energy. In addition, our stay in that city lasted only a short time before Don was transferred again.

Fix apparently didn’t accompany us when we moved from Kansas to California a few months later. She preferred to stay where she had always lived, according to Suzanne. In later years when she was teaching foreign languages to high school students, and I had written an account of her Wichita adventures, she translated that tale into French and shared with her classes the story of Fix Millicent. Recently, the two of us reminisced about the days when she played card games with the characters named Ricky and Pirate. They were just make-believe, Suzanne assured me, but Fix Millicent was real.