Smile by Sarah Ruhl

Author:Sarah Ruhl [Ruhl, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

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That fall, we moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn so we’d have more room for our growing household. Anna was five, starting kindergarten. I was worried that she would miss our old apartment and her friends in Stuyvesant Town. Before bedtime she said, “Don’t worry, Mama, when we move to Brooklyn all the movers will just put all our stuff on a platform and drive it all to Brooklyn. Only I wish we could put our house inside that house. Or take a piece of our house with us. Maybe cut out one of the walls in the shape of a heart.”

In the new Brooklyn apartment, I sat with a screwdriver, trying to put together a dollhouse for Anna; I thought it might take the sting out of moving. I was not good with the screwdriver, and the prefabricated dollhouse lay in pieces around me.

When I was a baby and my sister was four, my father stayed up all Christmas Eve putting finishing touches on the dollhouse he’d made for her. It was white with a green roof. He glued in wallpaper that matched some of the wallpaper we had in our own house. I inherited the dollhouse when my sister was done with it. Kate was not all that interested in playing with dollhouses anyway. She was more apt to be found in the alley, playing with other kids, playing with a ball, big or small, pitching, kicking, or throwing. When I took over the dollhouse, I saved my allowance and collected furniture for it. A teakettle. A dark green faux-velvet couch. A tiny cabinet with latches to hold the dishes inside.

I arranged the tiny people, moved them around, invented stories, made the dolls talk to each other. A dollhouse is wonderful training for a playwright. After our kids were born, I asked my sister if I could have the dollhouse for Anna, who was the right age for it. Kate’s stepdaughter was too old for dollhouses at that point, and her young boys weren’t interested. Kate thought about it and said, no, it was her house, our father made it for her. But she told me I could have the furniture.

And so the dollhouse with the green roof gathered dust in a basement. Of course my sister and I both wanted the house my father had built. I was a grown woman laying claim to tiny furniture. Dividing realms. She would have the empty house, I would have the tiny furniture with no place to put it. Both useless without the other. The perils and costs of symmetry.

Years later, she cleaned out her basement; found the dollhouse; and, full of self-recrimination, asked if I still wanted it. I no longer did. Perhaps we had both finally grown up.

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