Domestic Affairs

by Joyce Maynard

  With our sons, the problem seldom arises. Very often my boys’ faces are dirty or their hair’s a mess, or Charlie wants to wear his red Superman cape with his maroon Oshkosh overalls, or Willy’s hand-me-down socks have ruffles on them or his pant cuffs go just below his knees. None of which causes me a moment of pain.

  But Audrey’s another story. For years I could dress her like a doll, exactly as I pleased: in smocked dresses and A-line jumpers, overalls with turtlenecks, 1950s-style thrift-shop treasures. I styled her hair in pigtails and French braids. She owned tights in every color of the rainbow.

  Then she started school, and what she wanted were shirts with pictures of Strawberry Shortcake and Cabbage Patch Kids on the front; jeans, tailored shirts, her hair held behind her ears with a plastic headband. She wanted what the other girls were wearing: conservative knee-length corduroy skirts and matching blouses. Or, the other extreme, crazy, ill-matched combinations, or some beloved but too small dress.

  Some mothers with whom I conferred on this told me they simply set out their child’s clothes every night; but with memories of my frustration at being told what to wear as a child, I’ve resisted that. As a result, the kilts and smocked dresses I’ve bought for Audrey—and even a lot of outfits she chose herself—hang at the back of the closet. On good mornings, when she comes down in one of the same three outfits (none of them, in my opinion, the most flattering of her clothes), I bite my tongue. But there are bad mornings, too (often the ones when I have just studied my own reflection in the mirror and been unhappy with it), when I snap at Audrey, “Can’t you ever wear something different?” or simply send her upstairs to change. At my worst, I have pointed out to her how much money I spent on those unworn clothes hanging in her closet, while I say (indicating my sweat pants and T-shirt), “Look at me. I dress in rags!”

  Our arguments make her so late that I have to drive her to the school bus—both of us close to tears. I watch her trudge across the street and mount the steps of the bus, the pompom on her hat bobbing, and I want to call out, “Come back.” This morning, after the worst showdown yet, I ended up driving the five miles into town to meet her getting off the bus and to tell her I was sorry. Next time, I vow throughout the whole drive home, next time she comes down the stairs (as she did this morning) wearing crew socks and black patent-leather shoes, a too big skirt and a too small sweater, I will say to her only that I love her smiling face.

  If I were talking to a therapist about my daughter’s dollhouse (and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea) the first thing I’d say is that I never had a dollhouse of my own. Variation on a theme of parents everywhere—who move through their children’s youth attempting an odd mix of re-creating their own, compensating for everything their own failed to provide, and attempting to construct, for their beloved offspring, that most elusive of experiences known as a happy childhood.

  In fact, it’s not entirely accurate to say I never had a dollhouse: The year I turned six, my parents gave me a split-level ranch house with fireplace, doors, windows and paintings printed directly on the walls, and a set of furniture meant to symbolize beds, chairs, bureaus. But none of the drawers opened. There was no way to tuck a doll into beds whose spreads and pillows were molded in plastic, with not a wrinkle present. The view out the windows was always the same: sun shining, red geraniums in bloom.

  What I actually played with—nearly every day of my life, from age five to nearly thirteen (when self-consciousness, not lack of interest, finally led me to pack it all away)—was actually a set of bookshelves: wallpapered, carpeted, and filled with mostly homemade cardboard and balsa-wood furniture, with matchbox drawers that always had something hidden inside. I was the only one who knew that if you cut open the Play-Doh food in the dollhouse refrigerator, inside the eggs you’d find a yolk, and in the watermelon, seeds. In 1967, when I finally packed it all away, I set the contents of those shelves in boxes according to rooms, with written instructions describing how things should be arranged, for the daughter I always knew I’d have. I’ve gone through the years, since, still saving the paper parasols from tropical drinks at restaurants, the miniature pencils that sometimes come inside magazine subscription offers. Because as surely as I knew I’d have a daughter, I knew the two of us would someday have, not wallpapered bookshelves, but a real dollhouse.

  There are children who don’t make possible their parents’ fantasy-childhood reenactments: daughters who want haircuts when the mother’s idea is French braids, sons who greet their father’s presentation of Celtics tickets with the news that they have other plans for the evening. But I have a daughter whose natural leanings, combined with a heavy dose of indoctrination, have usually tended to follow the lines of my passions. Even before she was tall enough to see into display cases without being lifted up, Audrey—breathing heavily—was fogging up the glass separating her from the museum dollhouses I took her to see, crying out in a way some might mistake for distress when she’d spot a chandelier or a mouse hole or some other particularly heartbreaking detail. And she has always set up little houses of her own— outdoors with sticks and leaves, and in her room out of cigar and shoe boxes. To Audrey every commonplace object suggests a miniature variation. Thimbles are flower pots, a burnt-out flashcube is an aquarium.

  I was on the lookout for a real dollhouse for a very long time, and I considered numerous contenders. There was an exquisite, copper-roofed Victorian reproduction at a museum gift shop that was not only too expensive but too grand all around. You couldn’t put a toothpaste-cap lampshade in that mansion. There was a house in a secondhand store I frequent around here, made by a middle-aged man whose dream it was to recreate his childhood home, exactly as it was in 1930, complete with Caruso recordings playing all the time, a Mary Pickford calendar on the wall, and in the basement, a furnace that really worked. No mistaking that dollhouse as anything but the product of a full-fledged obsession—but somebody else’s, not mine. Though I could have bought it for $350, the house would never have belonged to anyone but him.

  I saw the house I wanted to buy four years ago at a local craft show. Roy, the man who made it, used to build real houses until a bad heart forced him to retire. So now he builds little houses, but with real shingles and three coats of paint on the clapboards, polished hardwood floors and hand-turned banisters and nine-over-six paned windows that actually open. Not fancy in their designs, but solid, homey, lived-in—the kind of house you wished your grandparents lived in, with swings on their front porches and sleds leaning against the door.

  For the next few Octobers after that, Steve and I had our annual dollhouse discussion: I wanting to put in an order with Roy; Steve arguing that Audrey was too young by about twenty-five years, the house was too extravagant, and that the person who really wanted a dollhouse wasn’t Audrey anyway, it was her mother. Sometimes during these sessions I would cry (my girlhood and my parents came up with surprising frequency) and Steve would make the comment that it’s not until a person loses her childhood home that she seeks out a dollhouse with the kind of compulsion I displayed. Usually he’d end up saying “Go ahead, buy it,” but of course I knew the objections he raised were real and accurate. I did want a dollhouse for the child I used to be. And in a way that’s good for neither Audrey nor me, Audrey sometimes represents, for me, that childhood self.

  So I held out against temptation the Christmas she was almost four, and again (more reluctantly) when she was almost five. But this fall—one of our most broke ever, at a time in our lives when I was putting off dental appointments and all but the most essential car repairs—I gave Roy my order for a $475 Christmas dollhouse, to be paid for (significantly enough) with a portion of the inheritance I had just received following the death of my father.

  It’s more than mildly embarrassing to admit how large the dollhouse loomed in my imagination, all this past December, as we awaited delivery: the hours I spent stitching a patchwork quilt for the brass bed, constructing a miniature Christmas tree for the living room,
sewing stockings for the real stone fireplace and making doll-sized presents to stack inside it. For Charlie I ordered a yellow Tonka bulldozer from the Sears catalogue. For Audrey (not better loved, just differently so) I made a heart-shaped, doily-covered, doll-sized chocolate box filled with individually formed chocolates, the size of seed pearls. Near midnight on Christmas Eve, setting up the dollhouse in a corner of our living room, arranging the furnishings I’d been accumulating for years, plugging in the chandelier, putting the note from Santa into the mailbox beside the front door, I felt as excited as I had, twenty-five years earlier, when I lay in my bed, listening for reindeer.

  When Audrey came into the living room next morning she didn’t let out any screams, didn’t even seem to register the dollhouse for several minutes as she painstakingly unwrapped the colored pencils and stickers and barrettes inside her stocking. Then, very slowly, she approached the house, ran her fingers over the smooth floors, opened the drawers in the bureau, picked up the baby in the cradle, looked inside the mailbox. She didn’t make a sound for a long time. Finally she said, “I can’t believe it’s really mine.”

  What I felt, watching her, was not only simple parental pleasure at having found a really nice present for my child, but also relief: The whole dollhouse question had been resolved, the only way it could’ve been—by getting one. I also knew that, much as Audrey liked the dollhouse, she would have liked a plastic Barbie Townhouse just as much and maybe (for the moment) more. Now sometimes I walk through her room and see dollhouse furniture and the patchwork quilt strewn on the floor. Days go by that the house stands idle. Now and then I’ll suggest it might be fun to sew curtains for the nine-over-six windows, and Audrey, kindly but firmly, will explain she’s busy. (She’s making a doll out of a sprouted onion, with a toilet-paper dress. She’s set up a Barbie tanning salon, using our broken toaster oven.) I think back to my six-year-old self (who would have run upstairs first thing after school every day to play with a house like Audrey’s), and realize (with interest, not pain) that my child and I are not as totally alike as I have sometimes thought.

  Time was, I told my children about the world. I held their hands when I took them places, and told them the names of butterflies or rocks. Sometimes I’d go away—for an afternoon, or longer—and come home with stories for them about my adventures. It didn’t have to be much to thrill them: Maybe I saw a porcupine cross the road, or a fireman bringing a cat down off a roof. I’d bring home a bagel from the city, or a helium balloon from my dentist, or a bar of soap from an airplane ladies’ room, and they were happy. What they learned about life beyond the edges of our driveway they mostly got from Steve and me.

  But I’ve begun to see the tables turn. I can still make the room come alive for Willy just by walking into it. But more and more, lately, I am the one who stays home (sitting at this desk of mine, looking out the window a lot, and eyeing the clock, waiting for them to come home, waiting for the stories they’ll have for me). I see how it is for my friend Jessica, with her children grown and gone now, free to do the work she had to put off nearly twenty years, while she raised them. How she looks forward to the occasional weekend when her children are all, once again, briefly sleeping under her roof. I begin to see, though my children are much younger, how she must feel. Now they walk in, and I light up.

  I felt it pretty keenly on Audrey’s first day of school—the way the mothers (and I was one) lingered on the playground after their children filed into the school building. Scuffing our feet in the dirt, studying the class lists for any clue they might yield about what our child’s year would be like. Huddling together, surrounded by empty swings and teeter-totters, comparing notes on teachers—who looked nice, who looked tough. I’m not proud of the fact that one or two of us (and again, I was one) could not resist walking past our child’s classroom just to catch a glimpse inside before finally taking off.

  It’s not that we’re idle, that our lives are empty. Most of these mothers (and the few fathers who were there in the schoolyard that first day) have jobs, and a life separate from their children. We design buildings, draw up legal documents, build houses, counsel patients, write books. Our lives are full. But an hour after school starts, my phone rings, and it’s my friend Erica (who also has a job she likes, a husband she loves, interests and concerns beyond motherhood), and she’s saying “Well, what do you think?” And I know she’s not talking about economic sanctions in South Africa or trade talks with Japan. She’s talking about our daughters’ new second-grade class.

  Charlie is just four, and already it’s happening with him too. I drop him off at his nursery school and kneel for a kiss, and he gives me one. But it’s fleeting, and a little distracted, and I can tell, as I hug him afterward, that he’s looking over my shoulder and eyeing the boys in the block area. “I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours,” I tell him (not that he’s asking). “Yup,” he says gruffly, over his shoulder. “Bye.”

  Of course there were children, that first day, who wept and clung to their mothers’ legs. Even Charlie has his moments, still, when he climbs into my lap, afraid of a daddy longlegs in his room, or needing to hear, one more time, that dinosaurs are extinct. He still needs me to drive him places, to pour his milk, to do up the fasteners on his overalls. And he still depends on me to walk him across the street.

  But there are also some things my children know that I don’t. It starts with silly, odd bits of information: the various types of Care Bears available, which He-Man figures are good and which are evil. Then, gradually, it gets a little closer to home, and before a person knows it, her children are explaining photosynthesis and teaching her how to make an origami box. Which is just what we all want to happen, of course. Still, when it does, it’s a shock.

  One morning I notice Charlie putting on his socks and fastening the Velcro on his sneakers unassisted (and I wonder whether, in part, he has been humoring me, every morning, when—without thinking about it—I’ve dressed him). I speak, in some story I’m making up, about “a deadly tarantula,” and both Audrey and Charlie correct me: A tarantula bite, to a human, it turns out, is hardly worse than a bee sting.

  Charlie can transform a GoBot; I can’t. At our local ski slope Audrey rides the chair lift to the top of the mountain while I stand at the bottom watching, amazed, with Willy in my arms or toddling close beside me. But even with him, I know, the days are numbered before he moves on and I’m left standing in his dust.

  These are the very early stages, still, of a process all our parents and grandparents have witnessed clear through its completion: from the point at which the child is entirely dependent on the parent, to the place where it’s the parent who looks to and counts on the child. We are, most of us, overtaken by our children in our lifetimes. (If we’re lucky.) They will be not only taller, and longer-lived, but smarter, stronger, more handsome and more beautiful, happier (that’s the hope) and wiser, their lives even more full than our own.

  So already I see it beginning. Today, with Audrey at school and Charlie off playing at a friend’s house, and only Willy left with me, I stand in my doorway, at one minute after three, waiting for the first glimpse of Audrey as she trudges around the last bend in our driveway and up the last little hill to our house. Swinging her Snorks lunchbox and her backpack, singing a song I didn’t teach her. She breezes in the door as I turn to fix her a cup of hot chocolate. “Tell me about your day,” I say, trying to sound casual. “Later, Mom,” she says, blowing me a kiss. “I’ve got a really great game of Barbies going upstairs. I’ll tell you about things later, I promise.”

  “Well,” I say, turning to Willy. “Shall we put on Cyndi Lauper and dance?” I am still, briefly, his favorite partner.

  A half mile down the road from our house there’s a wide, rushing brook. In summer we swim there, in a place where the brook widens, and in the fall we sometimes have picnics along the banks. In winter the brook mostly freezes over, but because of the rocks and the speed of the water as it crashes over them
, the ice forms thick blocks that fracture into jagged chunks and pile up, one against the other. Every winter—standing on the stone bridge over our frozen swimming hole and staring down at the way even the trees on either side have frosted over with the moisture from the brook—I think: “This has to be the most beautiful time of all.” Then comes spring: The snow melts, the ice blocks break apart and dissolve, the fiddlehead ferns stick up through the ground, watercress begins to grow in the icy water, and the brook runs so fast I can hear its roar from my back porch. And I remember that there is nothing I like better than this brook, just as it is right now.

  Always, though, my love of this spot is mixed with something else, and that’s fear: Fear that when my son tosses his pebbles in to make a wish, he will lean too far over the railing and fall into those swirling waters. Fear that someday, like their father, they’ll want to jump off the high boulder at one side of the swimming hole (where, if you don’t position yourself just right, you could land on stone and break your back). On a walk one day with Audrey, when she was very small, we saw a gust of wind swoop down and lift her red cowboy hat right off her head and carry it down into the water, never to be seen again. And last fall, when a neighbor’s puppy disappeared, we all eventually concluded that the dog had probably gone for a dip in the brook and that he’d been pulled under by the swift current.

  Every spring, I try to make boats with my children and sail them in this brook, the same as I used to with my father, in a different brook, when I was young. With three children now, it’s not always easy to hit just the right combination of good weather, good moods, good sailing conditions, and free time. Last Saturday everything fell into place.

  It was, for starters, a beautiful day. We had a couple of friends’ children over—Ben and Aaron, around the ages of Audrey and Charlie. Everyone was getting along. Nobody was wearing the kind of shoes that couldn’t get wet. I brought out my giant box of boat-building supplies (Popsicle sticks, fabric scraps, Styrofoam blocks saved from various small-appliance purchases, odd bottle caps and old curlers) and let everyone loose with the glue. Forty-five minutes later, we had five small craft—each design as distinct as its creator—and we headed for the brook.