For her sixth birthday, Annamae was given a dollhouse. It was blue, with a yellow roof, and it had a handle so you could carry it around. The house opened on its hinges so you could see inside the rooms. There was a little doorbell you could really ring, and a garage door that really slid up and down. Some of the furniture was painted on the walls and some of it was real. When you closed the house and picked it up by the handle, you could hear the pieces of plastic furniture clunk around inside.
The dollhouse was the one Annamae’s mother had played with when she was little. Not the same kind; the same exact one. She had gone over it with a warm soapy sponge before presenting it to Annamae, but you could still see traces of its earlier life as another child’s toy. The child that Annamae’s mother had once been had scribbled a picture in permanent marker on the wall of one of the bedrooms. Or she’d tried to and given up, or possibly she’d been found and stopped in the act—only two sides of the picture frame and a crossed-out something inside it had been completed. The child that Annamae’s mother had once been had affixed some amazingly adhesive stickers—a kitten and a bicycle—to the outside of the house, over the rose trellis. They were still there all these years later, even though it looked like someone had tried to scrub them off.
“It’s a real heirloom,” said Nana when Annamae took the dollhouse to Nana’s house across the river. “But what happened to all the people?”
“What people?”
“The family.”
It had come with little plastic people, a mother and father and girl and boy, and a little plastic dog. Annamae’s mother had bathed these, too, in warm soapy water, and she’d rolled each one up in a separate piece of tissue paper, twisting the ends like candy wrappers. On the morning of her birthday, Annamae had unwrapped them one by one.
Now she did not answer. She lay on her stomach on the plush carpet in Nana’s living room and moved the furniture around, whispering all the while.
So Annamae’s mother answered for her. “She’s not into dolls.”
“Whyever not?” said Nana.
The silence glowed. Annamae knew her mother was shrugging or making a face or maybe mouthing something to Nana on the couch.
“Then who’s she talking to?” asked Nana, but she, too, had dropped her voice to a whisper.
Annamae grew fat with the warmth of being discussed.
It was true. She did not like dolls. They had no life. You were supposed to pretend they had. It was somehow a sign of being good—to care for dolls. Baby dolls especially. You were supposed to cradle and kiss them, scold and soothe them, hold a toy bottle against their rigid sculpted lips, wrap them in blankets and sing them lullabies. But when you laid them down to sleep, their arms remained sticking out, their little fingers remained stiffly crooked, and they did not cry or fuss.
Dolls had no choice but to obey. There was no possibility in dolls; they were lonely company.
What Annamae liked was the dollhouse itself. It held something beyond her control. A kind of puzzle. She sensed it in the half picture scribbled on the nursery wall, in the faded stickers that still clung to the rose trellis. They were like messages left by the slightly wayward child who would one day become her mother. It was to her, this distant child, that Annamae whispered as she rearranged pieces of furniture, pressed the working doorbell, and walked her fingers over the floors that some version of her mother, that faraway little girl, had also once touched.