The Dollhouse

by: Joan Hitz

The grandparents’ house in Freeport was a forest of moss-green carpet. The dining room held high-backed chairs whereupon the shortest diners sat on telephone books to better access their roast beef. In the dusky basement, the grandfather’s painting dropcloths were flung like ghosts concealing secrets. 

This magical house also bore a room of jewels: the art room. Whenever the granddaughter arrived, she raced there to visually feast upon the crimped oil-paint tubes with their liquid eruption of colors: ultramarine, fuchsia, burnt sienna, heliotrope, carmine. 

“Don’t touch the paints!” her parents said. 

“Let her,” said the grandmother.

(The grandmother’s grandchildren could do no wrong and that was all right.)

Inside the art room and basement-of-dropcloths, during three top-secret months when the girl was seven, an enormous home-built dollhouse was constructed. It was the only dollhouse like it in the world, and it appeared in the little girl’s living room Christmas morning, 1969.

Constructed of thick plywood, with a blue-shingled roof and red-brick sides, the dollhouse was divided into two floors, six rooms. Open-faced, a child (or a family cat) could access everything on sight. 

Leftover wallpaper and carpeting swatches from the beloved Freeport homestead covered every surface, and tiny handmade furniture filled the rooms. This included a sizable TV set, which broadcast an unending episode involving a palm tree on a tropical beach.            

But the Crowning-Glory Enduring Kid-Charming Majesty of the Whole Domestic Extravaganza was a final touch that had been installed by the girl’s father: Christmas lights.  

Along the back wall, with the click of a single switch, six fat bulbs made each room gasp with party light. Huge globs of orange, blue, red, green and yellow glow saturated the rooms in permanent Christmas-tree ecstasy.

Manhandled down to a corner of the basement, the dollhouse became the little girl’s new address. Over the years, she filled its rooms with hours and hours of her childhood. Then, one unmarked day, she grew beyond it. 

In her teens, when her father moved into his second house, the dollhouse went with him. The girl went on to college.

One recent autumn, with her grandparents long gone and her father moving from his second house to his third, he asked if she wanted it back.

For decades, it’d resided in his garage rafters, its plywood expanding and contracting through pitch black Januarys, moist Aprils, scalding Julys. 

Now, beyond its days of use, it sat, out of place, in the driveway, halfway between a moving truck and a curbside pile of debris. Like the hollow events inside history books, the dollhouse was spent, coming asunder, with no real bearing upon today or the child it’d been built for.

The “child,” however, remembered. Still saw her “people” - the plastic baby dolls, the green-hatted dad doll, the strawberry-pigtailed mom. Pool parties with plastic bowls of water, rooftop dives that no actual mother or father would permit. Her cat, curled up inside the dollhouse’s main floor.

And, the private quiet of that basement, where she’d spun her once-in-a-lifetime magic with the limited number of childhood hours allotted her. 

And all too soon, done.

Do you want to take the dollhouse?

“No,” she said, softly enough to let her father know that she’d treasured - still did - the dollhouse. And, her grandparents, now departed, now ghosts themselves.

But, real ghosts, their memory in shimmering colors, echoed voices, visions of summers and dinners and a house of moss-green carpet and a hidden dollhouse under construction. 

These were real. These were gone. And, these were still here. Simply a different kind of real.

Someday she would be real like this, too. Alive to her followers, her nieces, to whoever else stayed when it was her turn to move on. 

The dollhouse was carried to the curb and set sideways. The girl stood near it one more time, scanning the cracked wallpapers, touching each faded lightbulb, opening a little drawer.

And suddenly, something fell. With a plastic clatter from 1970, it hit the pavement. It was a round toy button with a ridged surface. When it was tilted back and forth, it gave the appearance of movement. The button featured Snoopy, followed by a line of Woodstocks, marching along. March, march, marching. Forever.

The truck was finished loading. It was time to follow behind in the car, and head over to house number three. A breath of October sent a rattle of leaves past the dollhouse and down the street.

“It’s okay,” she told the dollhouse. “You were real and you still are. Just not in a physical way anymore.” 

She picked up the button, pinned it to her car’s sun visor, and followed the moving van.  

Moving away. Always moving on.

(first published on November 30, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor News)