What am I going to do for the next two and a half months?
I finished applying to colleges. I sent my applications to ten schools. What a waste of time, I mean, what a personally enlightening experience. Except that I still have to figure out how to pay Brandeis and Oberlin, and I still have to interview for Oberlin, which is weird. But other than that I'm done.
I came home that afternoon with a general plan. I expected the typical progression of events: running, dinner, procrastination by means of Internet, Earl Grey tea, maybe a swab of cello practice, and schoolwork into morning’s early hours. Then my mother asked me to move the dollhouse.
The Victorian-era Playmobile mansion had been passing its days on a table in the living room ever since I evicted it from my bedroom. I took it out of there because I wanted to remove my rug and paint the walls in a massive redecoration project that stretched over a year and a half. Now that the walls of my room were at last an acceptable green, my mother decided the time had come to move the dollhouse back. Unconcerned with its fate and exhaustedly ready to begin my Drama reading, I still understood her need to increase the semblance of order in the living room, so I helped remove the dusty, plastic dwelling to the top of a dresser at the foot of my bed.
The last person to play with the dollhouse had been my four-year-old nephew. Flowerbeds separated from their windowsills, a pull chain toilet disconnected from its pipe, and masses of curtain holders piled in the building’s former kitchen all provided evidence for this fact. Four Ziploc tubs contained the rest of the accessories, and I brought these into my room as well. Clearly, the most appropriate place for dollhouse accessories was in the dresser underneath the dollhouse. On the other hand, I wanted to conserve space for real-people clothes and computer paper. The tubs were sorted by accessory type, but was that level of organization necessary? I hadn’t played with it in six years. I made an executive decision to transfer the Playmobile flowerbeds, bathroom fixtures, and curtain holders alike out of their containers into one single drawer, and let my future children figure out the mess when we came to visit grandma and grandpa’s.
First I dumped the tub of permanently smiling, racially homogenous doll people. I overturned their furniture on top of them. Next I poured in rows of stuck-together books, a chamber pot for every bedside table, and the tiny silverware that always slipped from my fingers when I tried to make my families eat. Finally I added the vehicles and started to shut the drawer. When I looked down and saw everything mixed in with everything else, I stopped.
The kayak did not belong in the same place as the little blue children’s beds with matching pink covers that were shaped to look like people were lying under them. The overweight man in the purple suit should not have been trapped under the car. It looked like a landfill, or some kind of mass grave. No one would ever want to play with the house again.
“Mama,” I shouted to the other room, “I wish I hadn’t done that.”
“You could spend the next two hours reorganizing it,” she replied.
That wasn’t going to happen. I had work to do. However, even if I closed the drawer and forgot its tragic interior, I still disliked the thought of an empty dollhouse radiating sterility in my room. I decided to pick furniture from the drawer and relocate it piece by piece, but only for a short amount of time. If I made myself arrange furniture for ten minutes every day, or one piece for every time I walked into the room, then eventually the dollhouse would feel lived-in and complete.
I righted the stove and stood it against the wall in the room that had always been the kitchen. I found the toilet’s tile backdrop and reunited it with the toilet. Thus I began with the most impersonal rooms in Playmobile world: every house has a bathroom and kitchen, but the number of beds depends on the number of people, and at first I wasn’t ready to think about the family. Slowly and fussily yet gaining confidence, I eventually moved on to the nursery, dining room, living room, and bedrooms, vaguely inventing characters on the way.
I decided to set my watch alarm to 3 o’clock. Then I would stop playing and get to work. I brought my watch over, yet somehow never set the alarm.
I surprised myself by how much I remembered. I remembered that I could have a resident maid who slept in the nursery. The orange glasses belonged in the kitchen, the white ones in the dining room, and the clear ones out on the patio. I also made radical changes. I discovered that if I took out the staircase, a greater variety of food items could fit inside the kitchen, thus improving the family’s overall health. When I went to put the soda cooler in its traditional spot on the patio, I realized it clashed with the Victorian furniture there, so I moved it to the roof, where the parents could go up and secretly have a smoke. Now and then I checked my watch and noticed how the day was passing; but somewhere in that afternoon, maybe for an hour, a half hour, or even just ten minutes, I didn’t think at all about school or grades or getting into college. By dinnertime in real-people world, every room in my house was furnished and even slightly messy, ready for the soap-opera drama I intended to make happen there.
After dinner, I added a few more details. For example, I gave the visiting, vagrant son a fur-lined hood to show he lived in Alaska. Eventually, however, I started my homework. I practiced cello and checked my email; I drank tea to keep myself awake; I climbed into bed as late as usual. Before I turned out the light, I looked over at my lived-in, aesthetically pleasing dollhouse, and liked the frilly shadows it cast on the wall. Maybe tomorrow would bring more time to play.
I came home that afternoon with a general plan. I expected the typical progression of events: running, dinner, procrastination by means of Internet, Earl Grey tea, maybe a swab of cello practice, and schoolwork into morning’s early hours. Then my mother asked me to move the dollhouse.
The Victorian-era Playmobile mansion had been passing its days on a table in the living room ever since I evicted it from my bedroom. I took it out of there because I wanted to remove my rug and paint the walls in a massive redecoration project that stretched over a year and a half. Now that the walls of my room were at last an acceptable green, my mother decided the time had come to move the dollhouse back. Unconcerned with its fate and exhaustedly ready to begin my Drama reading, I still understood her need to increase the semblance of order in the living room, so I helped remove the dusty, plastic dwelling to the top of a dresser at the foot of my bed.
The last person to play with the dollhouse had been my four-year-old nephew. Flowerbeds separated from their windowsills, a pull chain toilet disconnected from its pipe, and masses of curtain holders piled in the building’s former kitchen all provided evidence for this fact. Four Ziploc tubs contained the rest of the accessories, and I brought these into my room as well. Clearly, the most appropriate place for dollhouse accessories was in the dresser underneath the dollhouse. On the other hand, I wanted to conserve space for real-people clothes and computer paper. The tubs were sorted by accessory type, but was that level of organization necessary? I hadn’t played with it in six years. I made an executive decision to transfer the Playmobile flowerbeds, bathroom fixtures, and curtain holders alike out of their containers into one single drawer, and let my future children figure out the mess when we came to visit grandma and grandpa’s.
First I dumped the tub of permanently smiling, racially homogenous doll people. I overturned their furniture on top of them. Next I poured in rows of stuck-together books, a chamber pot for every bedside table, and the tiny silverware that always slipped from my fingers when I tried to make my families eat. Finally I added the vehicles and started to shut the drawer. When I looked down and saw everything mixed in with everything else, I stopped.
The kayak did not belong in the same place as the little blue children’s beds with matching pink covers that were shaped to look like people were lying under them. The overweight man in the purple suit should not have been trapped under the car. It looked like a landfill, or some kind of mass grave. No one would ever want to play with the house again.
“Mama,” I shouted to the other room, “I wish I hadn’t done that.”
“You could spend the next two hours reorganizing it,” she replied.
That wasn’t going to happen. I had work to do. However, even if I closed the drawer and forgot its tragic interior, I still disliked the thought of an empty dollhouse radiating sterility in my room. I decided to pick furniture from the drawer and relocate it piece by piece, but only for a short amount of time. If I made myself arrange furniture for ten minutes every day, or one piece for every time I walked into the room, then eventually the dollhouse would feel lived-in and complete.
I righted the stove and stood it against the wall in the room that had always been the kitchen. I found the toilet’s tile backdrop and reunited it with the toilet. Thus I began with the most impersonal rooms in Playmobile world: every house has a bathroom and kitchen, but the number of beds depends on the number of people, and at first I wasn’t ready to think about the family. Slowly and fussily yet gaining confidence, I eventually moved on to the nursery, dining room, living room, and bedrooms, vaguely inventing characters on the way.
I decided to set my watch alarm to 3 o’clock. Then I would stop playing and get to work. I brought my watch over, yet somehow never set the alarm.
I surprised myself by how much I remembered. I remembered that I could have a resident maid who slept in the nursery. The orange glasses belonged in the kitchen, the white ones in the dining room, and the clear ones out on the patio. I also made radical changes. I discovered that if I took out the staircase, a greater variety of food items could fit inside the kitchen, thus improving the family’s overall health. When I went to put the soda cooler in its traditional spot on the patio, I realized it clashed with the Victorian furniture there, so I moved it to the roof, where the parents could go up and secretly have a smoke. Now and then I checked my watch and noticed how the day was passing; but somewhere in that afternoon, maybe for an hour, a half hour, or even just ten minutes, I didn’t think at all about school or grades or getting into college. By dinnertime in real-people world, every room in my house was furnished and even slightly messy, ready for the soap-opera drama I intended to make happen there.
After dinner, I added a few more details. For example, I gave the visiting, vagrant son a fur-lined hood to show he lived in Alaska. Eventually, however, I started my homework. I practiced cello and checked my email; I drank tea to keep myself awake; I climbed into bed as late as usual. Before I turned out the light, I looked over at my lived-in, aesthetically pleasing dollhouse, and liked the frilly shadows it cast on the wall. Maybe tomorrow would bring more time to play.