When Susan was eight or nine years old, all she wanted was a doll house.
She’d only seen doll houses in Collinsons Department Store, and certainly never played with one but all the girls in her class had a doll house and talked constantly about them. Their doll houses sounded so much grander than the actual houses they lived in.
From the outside, their real houses didn’t look at all posh. Robyn lived in a four-room falling down house with her nine brothers and sisters. Jennifer’s house was attached to the local plumber’s shop, across the road from the school. Ann’s house was hidden behind a hedge so tall and overgrown you couldn’t see the house.
“My doll house is fancier than the biggest house in Palmerston North”, her friend Ann would brag. Palmerston was the closest city to the tiny village where Susan lived and went to school.
Susan’s family belonged to a fundamentalist, Christian, cult-like group that believed in complete separation from the rest of the world – no radios, no televisions, no books, no dancing, no movies, no eating with the ‘unclean’. So, of course, Susan wasn’t allowed to visit with friends from outside the church and had never seen any of her classmates’ doll houses, or for that matter, the inside of any of the houses where they lived.
She was obsessed with how other people might live and wondered constantly about how the inside of her school friends’ houses might look. Did they have a radio or a gramophone? Where did their mothers keep their lipstick? She couldn’t imagine what could be so wicked. When she stayed with her grandmother in Palmerston where the houses were closer to the street – not spread out over paddocks like they were in Ashhurst – Susan would walk two or three houses further down Ruahine Street staring in windows trying to see what was inside. She especially liked doing this when the lights were on before the drapes were drawn.
She could only imagine what it must be like to live in a normal house, with a normal family and a doll house. And imagine she did.
Every day after school — as soon as her chores were done – Susan would escape to her bedroom to plan her doll house. From the number of bedrooms to the colour of the couch, or the size of the kitchen counter, she would write it down and then next day, dream up a different plan. The plans always included a radio and books, lots of books.
One morning, Susan woke thinking about her doll house, as usual. Then suddenly she sat up. She did have a doll house. She remembered, just before she went to sleep, she’d caught a glimpse of her father creeping past her bedroom door carrying a doll house and he’d said it would be in the back porch when she woke up. Susan couldn’t remember much about the doll house except that it was so big her father had a difficult time carrying it. The outside looked like a real house. It had a red roof. It was spectacular.
As she remembered the night before, Susan started planning the day ahead for her dolls. She talked out loud to herself.
“First of all, I won’t yell at them to make their beds or clean their teeth or wash their hands. I’ll let them come to breakfast however they want. They can have porridge with cream and brown sugar or maybe toast with eggs and sausage, or nothing at all, if that’s what they feel like. And they don’t have to pray or read bible verses.
“After breakfast, they can get dressed for school. I won’t tell them what to wear. I’ll let them choose their own clothes and brush their own hair.
“Ha, brushing their hair will be easy because it’s short and curly, not ugly’ long-down-to-the-waist-hair like us Brethren girls. When they’ve brushed their hair they can go to the bathroom to wash their faces and clean their teeth. And they won’t get into trouble if they leave splash marks on the taps.”
Susan’s dreaming was interrupted as she heard her mother calling out, “Rise and shine, it’s time to get up.” . .
She dressed quickly in the blue dress and maroon hand-knitted cardigan; the one with the big silver buttons that she hated. Susan sighed deeply, but she knew she would have to wear that outfit because her mother had laid it out on the chair for her the night before.
She made her bed, pulling the sheets tight and making sure the bedspread was totally smooth, tucked in under the front of the pillow and then folded back over it and pushed neatly between the pillow and the headboard. She washed her face and hands, cleaned her teeth and then wiped the taps so there were no spots. She splashed water on her long plaits doing her best to push the straggly front bits of hair under a ribbon headband. She knew after breakfast her mother would do her hair all over again.
She took a deep breath and looked around her bedroom to make sure everything was ship-shape, as her father liked to say.
She heard him calling out, “Susan, hurry up and set the table. You are really dawdling this morning.”
Although she was anxious to see her doll house she knew she’d have to wait until after they’d said morning prayers, eaten breakfast, and the table cleared and the dishes washed, dried, and put away neatly in the cupboards.
Her heart was pumping so fast she could hardly breathe, as she was laying the cloth on the table, she managed to stand on her tippy toes and stare over the top of the old wood stove into the sun porch. She was hoping for a quick peek before breakfast.
The doll house was not there!
“You’ve moved it,” she said accusingly to her father. “Where did you put it?”
“Put what?” asked her father.
“My doll house.”
“What doll house? You and your storytelling. Now finish laying the table. Breakfast is ready.”
Susan said not a word. As soon as breakfast was finished and the dishes done, she escaped to her bedroom, lay face down on her bed and sobbed quietly into her pillow.
This story is based on a personal memory, names have been changed
