SMALL MIRACLES

Until I was thirty five, the only house my family or I had ever owned was thirty inches high and thirty six wide. A white wooden doll house with a black roof, it had two large rooms on the ground floor and three smaller ones above. The front door opened; window boxes adorned the facade. I loved that house with a passion that I can still feel more than remember, and the hours spent playing with it offered an endlessly fascinating reversal of scale: for once, I was big and everything else was small.

The decor was both flamboyant and eclectic. Red felt carpeted the stairs; plum velvet and silver lame´adorned the windows. The furnishing took time, as I would save my allowance for particularly coveted items: a tufted pink satin chaise longue or gingham covered rocker. When my family traveled, I hunted for miniature shops, and invariably, my father bought me something. My friends were also eager accomplices. We learned to improvise by refashioning the artifacts of the real world to fit within the parameters of the miniaturized one, of which we were the sovereign rulers. Tiny spectacles were made out of one part of a hook and eye set found in my mother's sewing box; the print from the pages of the New York Times stock index was the right scale for doll house newspapers and snipped down birthday cake candles became elegant tapers.

I played with this house steadily until I was twelve. After, it remained in my room, a shrine that I liked to contemplate if no longer actively manipulate. It was disassembled only when I left home for college. The house I gave away but all the small objects within were wrapped in tissue and stored in plastic boxes. These boxes were left with my mother and later followed me to various apartments of my own. I never opened them; I sensed perhaps that within them lay the talismanic and seductive power of my own childhood, and that the metaphorical perfume that emanated from them was one best not often inhaled.

It was only when my husband and I had bought a home of our own--a nineteenth century brick row house in Brooklyn--that I felt compelled to open them. Childhood came rushing back with the force of whirlwind: removing a carved cherry dresser from its Kleenex shroud, I remembered exactly where in Vermont my father and I had bought it; what the shop smelled like; what we had said to each other as we considered the purchase. After an hour or so of glutting myself on the past, I didn't want to return these things to their boxes, but to display them. And where better than a doll house? At first, the idea embarrassed me. I was a grown-up, right? A wife and mother. Did I need a hobby that involved searching for the right shade of damask for pillows in 1/12 ratio?

Then, quite by chance, my dream doll house appeared, a gift from a friend who was an antique dealer and had purchased a rather grand (the name on its instruction sheet read The Worthington), unfinished doll house as part of an estate sale. The three story house was made of plywood, and consisted of three separate sections: a central area with stairways linking the floors, flanked by two smaller wings on each side. The house became a fixture in our basement, where it sat idle for many months while I contemplated what, exactly, to do with it.

After watching the dust settle and thicken on the (unfinished) roof and sagging floorboards, I asked my husband--who is very handy--for help. Initially, he was just going to shore up the structure so that I might begin work on it. I had by this time purchased some clapboard siding for the exterior and cedar shingles for the roof. I just needed a jump start.

Little did either of us know that the doll house would become a project that would completely overtake and consume him. He began by building a solid wooden base to support all three wings and then gluing them on it. Clapboard was painstakingly measured, cut, sanded, primed, sanded again, and given three coats of paint. He dyed over 1000 cedar shingles, dried them on huge sheets of wax paper and glued them individually to the roof. The existing windows and stairways were deemed crude and ripped out, replaced by others he found at miniature shops or phone book sized miniature catalogues over which he now pored. The inside was reconfigured as walls were moved, eaves added, new spaces created. I was a part of all this planning and even if the actual work was done by him, it was very much our project. After our children were asleep, we cuddled on the couch discussing the relative merits of a particular type of porch railing or interior molding. For all the intensity we poured into this small house, we might as well have been remodeling our own human-sized home, which, in fact, we were.

But the larger house had to bow to the demands of our limited budget, and the wear and tear imposed by our two adorable but boisterous children and their equally adorable but boisterous friends. Walls that were carefully scraped, plastered, primed and painted succumbed to small grimy hand prints and crayon marks all too quickly. New fabrics on a couch or chair soon looked worn and lived in; under a cushion, you were apt to find kernels of popcorn, monster fangs and several of Barbie's lost shoes. Perfection, or even a pale facsimile of it, was impossible to achieve. But in the little house, things were different. The individual floorboards my husband cut, laid, glued, sanded and shellacked, remained pristine and intact. No greasy bike tires, cookie crumbs, spilled juice or chocolate milk marred their surface. I shopped for wallpaper that once installed, remained clean and seamless; tiny furniture was a bargain compared to the real thing. Where else could you find a moire satin covered wing chair and matching footstool with mahogany legs for $32? A four poster canopy bed for $24?

As the rooms took shape, I began to place furniture, rugs and lamps within them. Often, I worked on (or played with) the doll house late at night, when everyone else was sleeping. As I arranged tiny china on the dining room table or fussed with the position of the gilt edged mirror over the mantle, I experienced none of the worries or anxieties that similar activities would have engendered had they been on a large scale. Instead, there was a precious kind of contentment brought about my desire for order and perfection that was--for once!--attainable..

I found I could not stay away from the house even during the daytime, and gravitated towards it when my children were around. Sometimes my seven year old son would, despite his disdain for girlish things, help me. He happily organized the contents of a miniature refrigerator or asked me where I thought a certain table might look best. My three year old daughter was enchanted from the start, and would patiently arrange furniture and other objects in a mesmerizing order all her own. They too were transfixed by the alchemy imposed by scale, magically revealed when the humble, ordinary artifacts of the world--toasters, tea pots, brooms, petit fours on a silver platter--were reduced in size. The little house where no one ostensibly lived became one where we all did. The thrill of the small resides in a place in which we can reorder, reorganize and refashion all the big and messy stuff of the world into reassuring shapes that fit--gracefully, naturally-- into the palms of our hands.

This essay originally appeared in METROPOLITAN HOME, November/December, 1999


FROM: TIDINGS OF COMFORT AND JOY
There was even an impressive, glittering tree in the lobby of the apartment building where we lived. I could not believe my older brother when he told me that the gaily wrapped, ribbon festooned boxes which lay scattered about its skirted base were, in fact, empty.
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FROM: FATHER'S DAY
My father's abandonment was something I learned to accept, the way I imagine one might grow to accept the amputation of a limb: first an overwhelming sense of loss that gradually diminishes, though never entirely disappearing.
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FROM: GOT MILK?
Holding him in my arms and watching the intense, rapt nature of his feeding--he got the hang of it very quickly-- filled me with what must have been a hormone induced euphoria that was slow to fade.
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