White Elephants by Katie Haegele

Author:Katie Haegele
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
Published: 2012-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

SO YEAH, I HAVE A DOLLHOUSE. LAST YEAR I decided to get it out of mom’s storage closet and bring it to my apartment. It weighs a ton so I had to ask my sister to drive it over, but once it was at my place I could look at it a while and think about fixing it up again.

My dad built the house for me when I was five and my parents gave it to me that Christmas; they did the same for Liz the year she turned five. You can buy a dollhouse kit that comes with all the parts, but he used a book with patterns and cut the wood himself. Mom told me how they worked on the house that winter, how at night after my sister and I went to bed they’d sneak down into the basement to wallpaper and paint one little room at a time. We loved playing with the houses when we were kids, especially Liz’s. Mom and dad had become more expert the second time around, so her house had extra details, like a staircase and a kitchen sink with exposed pipes.

I had a revival of interest in my dollhouse when I was around 11, at that age where you’re just about to become too old for things like that so you really go for it for a little while longer. I remember the day I got my first period, I’d spent hours trying to construct a garden in the carpet next to where the house sat on my bedroom floor. My stomach had felt funny all afternoon and when I finally understood what was going on, that I’d gotten my period, I felt stupid for having played with a toy that day. For a long time after that, looking at the house made me feel vaguely embarrassed. But no more! I’ve been bleeding monthly for almost twenty years now and I figure I’m allowed to play with anything I want.

I set up a work area in my living room and cleaned the dust off the roof and the shiny wooden floors. The original wallpaper was the only thing that was really ruined by time and needed replacing. Without thinking about it I figured I could use leftover scraps of real wallpaper, but picture it: If you tried that it would look terrifying, with huge flowers blooming nauseous on the walls, or big parrots like predators. Everything in a dollhouse has to be done to the same scale or it will look crazy, like an Alice in Wonderland hallucination. So I found and ordered wallpaper made especially for dollhouses—in the bathroom teensy seashells line up neat along the top near the ceiling—and put it up with paste and smoothed out the bumps, just like in a real house.

Then I went shopping for what the miniatures dealers call accessories. In the catalogs I browsed online I found tiny sewing machines, spinning wheels, and quilting racks you could get if you decide your dolls are into needlework.

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