Tiny House on the Road

by Celia Bonaduce

“It still is,” Vivien said, turning to Priscilla, who had made herself comfortable on an old flat-topped trunk. “It’s the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen.”

  “Do you want it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you want the dress?” Priscilla asked again.

  “You can’t part with this. It’s incredible!”

  Vivien worried she was losing credibility with each word she uttered. She was supposed to be helping Priscilla divest of things. But the very first item she’d uncovered, she was refusing to let Priscilla give away.

  “And anyway, it would never fit me,” Vivien said, hoping this made her sound more reasonable. She looked at Priscilla, perched like a little bird on the trunk. “But it looks like it would fit you.”

  “I very much doubt I’m going to be needing a wedding dress,” Priscilla said.

  Vivien hurriedly returned the dress to the garment bag. She opened another bag and saw a dull brown man’s suit. Now here was something she could get rid of! She shook it out and showed Priscilla.

  “I think we can get rid of this,” Vivien said with great authority.

  “Good! We’re making progress already.”

  Vivien looked around the room, finally deciding to hang up the suit on a door propped nearby until she and Priscilla decided what they were going to do with cast-off clothes. She returned her attention to the clothes rack. If she opened a bag and saw a gossamer sleeve or a lace petticoat, she zipped the sack closed. She was determined to only look at men’s clothes as long as Priscilla was in the room.

  “It’s amazing how a house can just keep absorbing things, isn’t it?” Priscilla said. “But I guess that will never happen to you in that tiny place of yours.”

  “I don’t even have room for the things I need, let alone anything extra.”

  “I find it interesting that the whole tiny house concept caught fire like it did.”

  “Oh? Why do you say that?” Vivien stiffened. Was Priscilla going to be as critical as her parents had been?

  “It just makes sense. My grandparents started with nothing, but by the time I came along, we had all this…” Priscilla said, looking around the room again. “In three generations, we had more than we could even keep track of. The pendulum swings. Your generation wants to divest, streamline, simplify. These were not buzzwords in my day.”

  Vivien felt her shoulders loosen. Priscilla didn’t seem to be judging her at all.

  “Not just my generation,” Vivien said. “I mean, look at you, you’re looking to simplify.”

  “I’ve always been a maverick.”

  Vivien looked at Priscilla in surprise. She was starting to suspect that Priscilla was not your typical little old lady.

  “Just listen to me going on and on,” Priscilla said suddenly. “I’m sure you’ll get a lot more done if I just left you to it.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Yes!

  Vivien watched Priscilla walk carefully out of the attic. She was such a graceful little lady. Vivien turned to stare at the room, which seemed less friendly without Priscilla in it. There was so much history in this place—Vivien wondered if the attic might be haunted. She jumped as a sheet draped over a large object in the corner of the attic caught her by surprise. She steeled herself and walked over to it. It was too solid to be a ghost.

  The sheet threw a cloud of dust into the air as Vivien pulled it from the object hidden beneath. When she stopped coughing, she found herself staring in awe at a perfect miniature replica of Casa de Promesas.

  It was the most perfect dollhouse Vivien had ever seen.

  She sat cross-legged on the floor and studied the dollhouse. It appeared to be wired for electricity. Vivien gingerly unraveled the cord and checked for damage. There didn’t appear to be any fraying, cuts, or burned spots. Vivien decided she could safely plug the cord into the wall socket.

  Vivien gasped as the dollhouse lit up in a blaze of twinkling lights. Vivien giggled to herself. She thought about the stares she’d gotten as she traveled the country in her tiny house. Everywhere she went, people remarked that they’d never seen such a perfect miniature house.

  But Shrimpfork had just been one-upped.

  Chapter 13

  Priscilla gave Vivien keys to the kitchen door’s three locks and pretty much left her to her own devices. For four days, Vivien unwrapped Priscilla’s possessions in the “attic.” She continued to sort through clothes, from corsets to mini-skirts, hats, scarves, shoes, and ponchos; quilts of varying degrees of artistry; lamps, tables, and dressers decorated in tile; china, glassware, and cutlery; ancient yard tools; sports equipment ranging from antique snowshoes to fiberglass skis, and discarded toys.

  It was a never-ending task and Vivien had barely scratched the surface.

  Vivien made her own schedule. She’d cross the back lawn in the morning, work until noon, head back to Shrimpfork until two in the afternoon, then work in the attic again until five. If she ran into Priscilla, the older woman would smile and speak pleasantly, but after the first day in the attic, Priscilla never suggested the two of them discuss Vivien’s progress nor offered to discuss with Vivien any of her finds. Vivien periodically spotted Priscilla during the day. Priscilla never seemed to leave the property, but appeared endlessly busy, puttering in the yard, cooking or cleaning the house. When it came to the possibility that germs were lurking, Priscilla Workman seemed to have the energy of someone half her age.

  Vivien could see the road from the second story and found herself periodically looking for Marco’s truck. She thought she spotted him driving by once or twice, but he never pulled into the driveway. Did he have other old ladies he was charming on his deliveries, or was it just Priscilla?

  Priscilla offered Vivien the run of the house, including the kitchen, but Vivien was determined to make Shrimpfork her home.

  Which was not as easy as it sounded.

  Shrimpfork bedeviled Vivien. It might have been the contrast between Priscilla’s sprawling hacienda and Vivien’s tiny house, but living in sixty-four square feet continued to be a challenge. Just making a sandwich was exhausting. There was no room on the kitchen counter for a loaf of bread, lettuce, tomatoes, mayonnaise, and sliced turkey—at least not all at the same time. It took her awhile to learn that everything had to be done in stages. She would take two slices of bread from the loaf and return the loaf to one of the miniscule shelves. She would get the lettuce out of the postage-sized fridge and pull off a few leaves. She would then exchange the lettuce for the tomato and cut a slice of that as well. The first time she went through the ordeal of making lunch, Vivien searched and searched for the mayonnaise. Where could mayonnaise hide in sixty-four square feet? It took a few minutes to remember she’d given it to a trucker at the rest stop where she bought it, after determining she couldn’t close the fridge door on the bulbous jar. But that still left the sliced turkey, which she managed to drop on the floor because she hit her elbow on the ladder, which she forgot to elevate to the ceiling in the morning.

  She decided she’d try to eat more simply. Simplicity was the name of the game after all. She tried cereal, but the boxes were too big for the shelves and the fridge held such a small quantity of milk she needed to replace it every day. Baby carrots, hummus, and blessedly flat tortillas had become her mainstay.

  She figured she must be losing weight—the silver lining to a kitchen determined to starve her—but her bathroom was too small to hold a scale. Vivien had made enough progress in the attic that she hoped to pin Priscilla down to discuss the next step. Did Priscilla want to organize by date? By category? There were several directions—and so much stuff! Was Vivien supposed to figure out what to toss? And if so…how?

  She realized she really did need to do some sleuthing into the age of some of these things. Putting down a Tiffany-style lampshade, she got to her feet. She dusted off her yoga pants and headed
out to find Priscilla. She needed to get more of a handle on the history of the place. That might inspire a direction.

  At the landing, she heard a terrible screech—followed by a long yowl from Clay. Vivien stood frozen in her tracks. The sounds repeated themselves. They were coming from the living room. After running back to the attic, she grabbed the first frightening-looking object she could lay her hands on—a heavy fireplace bellows. She inched down the stairs, her back against the wall as she made her way to the first floor. She sneaked up to the living room as the wailing continued. Forcing herself forward, Vivien peeked into the room.

  Priscilla was rocking out—and wailing—to some threatening-sounding music coming from an old turntable. Clay was joining her on the chorus.

  When she saw Vivien, Priscilla stopped suddenly. She looked at Vivien, but did not appear embarrassed in the slightest.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” Priscilla said, reverting to sweet-little-old-lady mode as she lifted the needle off the record player. “Did we disturb you? I thought we’d turned the music low enough, but sometimes you just can’t help yourself. Besides, Janis’s ‘Ball and Chain’ is Clay’s favorite.”

  “Janis?” Vivien asked.

  “Janis Joplin,” Priscilla said.

  “Who is Janis Joplin?” Vivien asked.

  “Who is Janis Joplin?” Priscilla asked, still breathless from her rock concert. “She was the greatest female psychedelic blues singer of my generation. I was at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 when she was discovered.”

  “Was that like Woodstock?” Vivien asked. “I’ve heard of Woodstock. In New York? That was the big hippie concert, right? I’ve seen pictures. There was a lot of mud.”

  “Woodstock was a little later,” Priscilla said. “But the music was what it was all about at both concerts. I guess I was just more of a West Coast hippie.”

  “You were a hippie?”

  Vivien was having a hard time adding this new dimension to what she thought she knew of the prim Priscilla Workman.

  “Oh, yes.” Priscilla almost giggled. “I was quite the wild child. Ran away to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and everything.”

  “You ran away?” Vivien asked. “How old were you?”

  Vivien realized she was asking way too many questions. She was afraid she sounded judgmental, which was not her place as an oracle. She vowed to stop.

  “Let’s see… I hitchhiked to California in—”

  “You hitchhiked?” Vivien gasped.

  So much for her vow.

  “It was the way we got around in those days,” Priscilla said with a broad smile.

  Reliving her youth, Priscilla suddenly looked years younger. Vivien was intrigued by this new information. Priscilla seemed to be reading her mind, because she suddenly stopped smiling.

  “Of course, that was completely irresponsible and you should never, never hitchhike.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Vivien said automatically. “But you were saying….”

  “Oh! Yes.” Priscilla seemed happy to be back on track. “Well, I suppose I was nineteen when I left Casa de Promesas. My poor parents were frantic. But I was very strong-willed in those days.”

  “At least you were a legal adult,” Vivien offered.

  “Actually, I wasn’t,” Priscilla said. “This was 1967. In those days, you had to be twenty-one to be considered a legal adult.”

  “No way,” Vivien said.

  It seemed to Vivien as if she were hearing about ancient history, instead of the life of someone standing in front of her.

  “It’s true,” Priscilla said. “And of course, it was a whole other world. We had pay phones, but communicating with people back home wasn’t as easy as it is today. Not to mention my parents were very old-fashioned. They weren’t crazy about the idea of their teenage daughter out on her own.”

  “I understand that,” Vivien said, thinking back to her own parents’ reaction when she told them she was going to travel the states in a tiny house. “Parents are just like that.”

  Vivien was startled to find herself bonding over impossible parents with a seventy-year-old.

  “My father was especially hardheaded,” Priscilla said. “Of course, when you’re young, everything they do just seems mean. But when you get older, you see that, even if they made mistakes, they meant well.”

  Vivien nodded.

  “When I went off to California, I thought nothing of the danger I might have been putting myself in, or took into account how frantic my parents must have been. It was all me-me-me.”

  Priscilla’s words hit home. Vivien was so focused on her own adventures, that she barely took her parent’s concerns into account.

  “But you came back and everything was fine, right?” Vivien asked, hoping to ease her own conscience.

  “‘Fine’ might be too strong a word,” Priscilla said. “Don’t get me wrong, my parents loved me. Those were very different times. You were supposed to reign supreme over your children. Both my parents paid a high price in Sandstone for having such a willful child. They were judged harshly for my mistakes.”

  “Do you think of that time as a mistake?”

  “Oh! Look what you found!” Priscilla exclaimed, seeing the fireplace bellows in Vivien’s hands.

  Vivien didn’t know if Priscilla was changing the subject, or was just distracted.

  “I remember my father making fires on cold nights using this. He always thought it was ‘the man’s job.’ After he died, my mother refused to learn how to make a fire. I suppose she thought Papa was watching her from the great beyond and wouldn’t think it was very ladylike. She put gas lines in, so now the fires make themselves.”

  “There’s something to be said for that,” Vivien said.

  “There is,” Priscilla said as she took the bellows from Vivien. “But there’s something so romantic about a real fire, don’t you think?”

  Vivien did not want to get into Priscilla’s ideas of romance. Getting used to Priscilla as a hippie was hard enough.

  “It used to live right here,” Priscilla said, as she hung the bellows on a peg by the fireplace. “I’d forgotten how lovely this is. Look at the detail in the handles.”

  “It is beautiful,” Vivien said, deciding not to tell Priscilla she’d planned on using it as a weapon.

  “I don’t know when it ended up in the attic,” Priscilla said wistfully.

  Vivien suspected that many things in the attic were going to trigger memories. She hoped they would all be good ones.

  “How are things going upstairs?” Priscilla asked, as she motioned for Vivien to take a seat. “Have you found anything interesting—besides the bellows?”

  “Lots,” Vivien said.

  “Tell me,” Priscilla said with an intensity Vivien hadn’t seen before.

  “I found a really old carved sign,” Vivien said after going through a mental list of her work. “It was in a foreign language. It said something like ‘Troubadour?’”

  “Trabajador?” Priscilla said instantly.

  “That’s it,” Vivien said.

  “It’s pretty much the opposite of Troubadour,” Priscilla said. “It means ‘the worker’ in Spanish. That was my grandfather’s last name when he came to America. Emilio Trabajador. But they changed it on Ellis Island to ‘Workman.’”

  This was the part of the job she loved. When a jumble of forgotten items help bring a history to life. Vivien suspected this was going to be an amazing journey.

  “When did he come to America?”

  “He docked in New York in 1920. He was just a teenager. One day, he decided he was going to make a new life for himself in America and he left Spain—just like that.”

  “Sounds like he might be where you got your—”

  “Strongheadedness?”

  “I was going to say ‘sense of adventure,’ b
ut okay.”

  “He was sponsored by a cousin in New York,” Priscilla said. “But times were hard. My grandfather couldn’t get a job. The cousin had his own family. He couldn’t afford to keep my grandfather around. He offered to buy my grandfather a train ticket to anywhere he wanted to go.

  “My grandfather had already figured out that the streets of America weren’t paved with gold, but he still had very unrealistic ideas about what this country was all about. He wanted to be a cowboy. So he asked his cousin to buy him a ticket to Wyoming.”

  “Cowboys. Wyoming. Makes sense,” Vivien said.

  “The cousin wrote Wyoming on a piece of paper and sent my grandfather to the train station with enough money for a ticket. My grandfather, who rarely admitted to any emotion, did say that navigating Penn Station for a young man from a small village in Spain with no knowledge of the English language scared him to death.”

  “I’ll bet,” Vivien said, trying to visualize the young Spaniard in a bustling train station.

  “He gave the clerk the piece of paper.…” Priscilla savored her words.

  “And?” Vivien asked, caught up in a story from America’s past.

  “And the clerk gave him a ticket to Wyoming, Pennsylvania!”

  “No way!” Vivien said.

  “Can you believe it?” Priscilla giggled.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Oh, this is ancient history,” Priscilla said. “You can’t be interested in all this.”

  “Are you kidding?” Vivien said. “Tell me!”

  “Well, he spent a couple of years in different parts of Pennsylvania. With the language barrier and no real skills, he was lucky to find work. But he did. He became a brick maker.”

  “A brick layer?” Vivien asked, thinking she misheard.

  “No, a brick maker,” Priscilla said. Her tone sobered. “In those days, it was backbreaking work. But he was grateful to have it. He still dreamed of being a cowboy, though. So he saved his money and moved to Texas.”

  “I found an old Texas flag,” Vivien said, excitedly.

  “What about dolls?” Priscilla asked, looking up suddenly.