You see why I feel older than my classmates? I was listening to that kind of stuff in the fifth grade, and they’re still dishing it out. Unfortunately, I’m still reacting to it the way I did in the fifth grade: with a great deal of tension. My cheeks blazed red. I felt like a toaster with little hot wires on my face.
“Look at those cheeks!” yelled Zaweicki. “Now she’s Holly Blush Berry!”
I would have liked to flatten Zaweicki’s face with my Spanish book, but having tried the violence technique in the past, I know that a) I will owe a fine for damaging the book, and b) I will get teased for being the minister’s daughter—“What would your father say to such an act of total aggression?” Zaweicki would demand.
I let the teasing drift over me. It was like letting a blizzard drift over me. Not too successful.
“She’s trying to ignore us,” said Ron White, “but it’ll never work.”
Hope sat calmly doing her nails. Nobody ever teases Hope. I don’t know why.
Stein said, “You are boring, Zaweicki. Shut up, White.”
They shut up instantly and even looked embarrassed. Stein is such a leader type that any side he’s on is the winning side. “Thanks, Pete,” I said.
He nodded, looking put upon, as though girls were always placing demands upon him and it was really irritating, sapping the energy he needed for winning hockey games and scholarships.
Finally the homeroom bell rang, and we chugged up the stairs out of the bowels of the basement and on to our first period classes.
Hope glided up the stairs just in front of me, and I read her jeans labels for two flights. If I did have labels on my clothes, I thought, mine would probably read “Irregulars and Seconds.”
Between fourth and fifth period, Kate stopped me in the hall. “Lydia and I are going to go hunt for some good buys in secondhand ski boots,” she said. “The fraternities over at the college are having a sale. You want to come? Anyhow,” she added, grinning eagerly, “we might meet somebody interesting.”
The odds were slim that tiny-footed Kate was going to find a good fit in a ski boot that a twenty-year-old male athlete could no longer wear. It was just an excuse to go over to the fraternity and check out the boys there. Now, I am always ready to meet interesting boys. The trouble is that a boy selling used ski boots is a boy looking for a new pair of ski boots, and therefore not a boy I would find interesting. I would be interested in the boys who were not thinking about skiing, and they wouldn’t be at the sale, so what was the point in going, right?
Kate said, “It’s only eleven degrees out, Holl. Wear your gloves.”
Eleven degrees. In November. It was going to be one frigid winter.
Jamie Winter walked by, grinning at me. “Some expression on your face,” he said. “All I have to do is look at you, Holly, and I can tell it’s Monday, and snowing, and winter, and school.”
I laughed, but nobody else seemed to get the joke.
Hope, standing behind me, said, “Honestly, Holly, with your looks you could be dating college boys, too. But no, you exchange jokes with Jamie. He’s not even a senior, Holly. He isn’t even seventeen yet!”
Hope was like wall-to-wall carpeting. Impossible to get away from. I wished she would roll up and go away.
“He’s so young,” said Hope. “Why even bother with him?”
“I’m not bothering with him,” I snapped at her. “We just talked for twenty seconds, is that a crime?” Jamie was already turning the corner in the hallway. I hoped he had not heard Hope’s remarks. He would think I was interested in him, that Hope and I had had some prior conversation about him. I wasn’t interested in anybody, and certainly not sixteen-year-olds. Every male in the whole high school seemed too young to me. That was half my problem. I just couldn’t seem to work up any enthusiasm for anybody this year.
I left Hope still expounding on the virtues of dating older men like her wonderful, suave Grey and went on to English. We were reading Dickens. Mrs. Audette was having us look at a particularly horrid chapter where the poor little urchin was shuddering with cold and neglect, and you could almost feel those chilblains on your icy little hands.
“What’s a chilblain?” said Kate.
“A sore on your hands from too much exposure to cold,” said Mrs. Audette.
O Hawaii. O Mexico, I thought. Save a corner for me! Before I get chilblains!
Two
WHEN YOU LIVE IN a town like this, either you ski and skate and snowmobile, or you live like a hermit.
I go in stages.
Some weeks, I want company so much I go right out and face the ice and snow, pretending that I actually like that kind of thing. I’ve always wanted to lose my toes to frostbite. I prefer tears of wind-driven agony to tears over soap operas. I like using one Chap Stick per week keeping my lips from cracking open.
Other weeks I feel that everybody out there but me is insane. Who needs that kind of company? So unless I can manage the indoors angle of the outdoor sport (like sipping hot chocolate in the little muffin shop beside the skating pond, or eating popcorn in front of the fireplace at the ski lift shelter) I just stay home.
Now, at home I have three activities other than homework and chores, which I regard as burdens, not activities.
The first is reruns. I love television reruns. It’s so comforting to see the same show you’ve already watched four times. I even watch “I Love Lucy” shows that were reruns when my mother was watching television. I like the ones where the heroines are always getting into embarrassing and stupid positions but somehow survive, like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” or “Rhoda” or “LaVerne and Shirley.” I can really identify with doing something stupid and having to pay for it.
If my parents are in a strict mood, which is often, and they are afraid all this television will destroy my moral fiber, I move into my second hobby, which is daydreaming.
I have never heard anybody mention this as a hobby, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps I’m the only one who does so much of it. Or maybe other people won’t admit they like to sit around daydreaming. I daydream best when I’m doing something where nobody will interrupt me. Ironing, say. There is no way my mother is going to interfere when I voluntarily approach the ironing basket and get to work. It is possible to stare down into the pattern of a wrinkled shirt for fifteen minutes and still look occupied.
In my daydreams I am always slender and beautiful, cavity-free and complexion-perfect. I am someplace hot and exotic, preferably sandy, and I am resting up after doing something impressive and strenuous.
Now if my mother were having the daydream, it would be about the strenuous and impressive deed instead of the vacation afterward. No wonder my parents think I am basically lazy.
There is only one thing I do in life that requires effort. That’s my dollhouse. I work on it in secret because I feel sort of funny about it. Kate knows, and Lydia, but I don’t think anybody else does, and I’m not sure Kate and Lydia have the slightest idea how much time I spend on it.
My father built it for me years ago; I think I was five. It’s an enormous Victorian dollhouse with nine rooms, and it has a wraparound porch with gingerbread trim, an attic, and a marvelous stairway that sweeps up through two curved landings.
When I first saw the dollhouse, I was totally uninterested. My father’s heart was broken. Here he’d spent a thousand hours creating this work of art and all his little girl said was, “Didn’t you get me anything else?”
Once in a while I’d arrange the dolls in different beds, or put the kitchen furniture up in the attic, or see if my plastic horses could gallop in the door, but that was the extent of it. It was last winter when I got interested again. I happened to notice that three of the rooms in the dollhouse were not furnished. You would think a girl as swift as I would have spotted this sometime during the previous decade, but as I said, the dollhouse was not my first concern during those years. Anyhow, I decided that given a choice between sledding with Kate or furnishing the library (I knew it wa
s a library because my father had put a tiny brass plaque over the door that read SSSHHH!!! LIBRARY!!!), I would furnish the library.
I made shelving out of popsicle sticks that I stained brown with Magic Markers. I turned a macaroni box into an old scarred desk, covering it with brown paper and covering the brown paper with tiny graffiti. With a little bit of glue and gray satin, a plastic spool of thread became a shiny office chair. Books appeared from tiny squares of cardboard and wrapping paper.
Frankly, it was tacky looking. But it was such fun. I loved doing it. I loved those tiny little pieces and the steady wrist I needed and the teeny speck of glue it took, and the patience.
My parents had very mixed feelings. My mother worried that I was regressing. That I felt doomed to a lack of popularity and so retreated to my girlhood bedroom and occupied myself with babyish things. “Don’t you want to be out with your friends?” Mother would say. And then, very understanding, “Or did they go off without you? That’s rough, isn’t it, Holly? But I know how you feel, dear.”
“Mother, Lydia and Kate and for that matter everybody else would be perfectly happy to have me meet them at the pond and skate.”
“I’ll buy you new skates. Your old ones probably squash your toes.”
“No, thanks, Mom. Having old, crummy skates is a terrific excuse. I don’t want to skate.”
Then my father’s even more mixed feelings would surface. On the one hand, he was darn glad that his gift of love and craft had been noticed after all these years. On the other hand, he worried that it wasn’t normal to play with a dollhouse at my age. “It isn’t good to isolate yourself from your fellow man,” he would say nervously. “You need to join things, Holly. Be with your friends.”
“Dad, I’ve been in school with them for seven hours today already. Isolated I’m not.”
They were relieved to find magazines for adults printed to reach the miniatures enthusiast. When there was a dollhouse exhibit to raise money for playground equipment, they were even more relieved to find civilized, church-going adults participating in this sort of thing. And when the senior deacon of the church and his wife showed off their miniatures collections, my parents surrendered completely.
One day my father was watching me hack at bits of old balsa-wood flying airplanes, using a kitchen knife in an attempt to cut cradle pieces, and he said, “You’re not using proper tools, Holly. Come on down to my workshop, and I’ll teach you how to work with wood. Those flimsy little things you’re making won’t last long.”
It was a whole new world. A world of tiny screwdrivers and miniature files, of tweezers and vises for making tiny furniture. It wasn’t the world I’d been daydreaming about—that hot, sunny, sandy world—but it certainly kept me occupied through a long and frigid spring.
Even my mother got into the act. She loves needlework. To my complete surprise, she made a pair of tiny quilts for the twin beds in the dollhouse guest room, the smallest imaginable squares making the patterns.
When summer came—in northern New Hampshire it doesn’t come for long—we went on long drives down unknown roads that wound through the patchwork quilt of forest and stone walls of rural New England. And what should we find in one village but a little shop that sold nothing but dollhouses and miniatures and dollhouse furniture kits. When we got over our total and absolute shock at the prices of those lovely Queen Anne hunt boards designed for a three-inch doll to serve from, we drove shakily on home.
Every Christmas my grandmother sends me a check. This year I was trying to decide whether to save it for my hot climate escape hatch fund, or buy a six-inch-tall clock that actually chimes and tells the time and wall sconces that actually have electrical connections.
Sometimes when I’m pouring over a catalog for dollhouse things I want the pieces so much I actually ache for them. Especially on Sundays it’s hard to look at that dollhouse without a twinge of guilt. My father likes to tell me that there are places in, say, Brazil where half the children die before age one because they have no milk and perhaps no safe water. Instead of sending my grandmother’s Christmas check to them, or at the very least planning on how I’m going to save the world, I sit and daydream about buying a miniature fireplace screen, or plan decorating the dollhouse parlor for Christmas.
Sometimes I wonder if my father goes through life feeling guilty, or if being a minister sort of takes the edge off.
I could ask him, of course, and he’d love it, but the trouble is that Dad answers things too thoroughly. When I’d like a two sentence answer, I get a two-hour sermon.
My current project for the dollhouse is a Christmas tree. I cut it from balsa, slotting three tree shapes together to make a six-winged tree, and now the green paint I’d sprayed on was dry so I could paint the bells and candles and tinsel and popcorn. Now, painting those tiny, tiny decorations takes a steady hand, believe me.
The phone rang, taking my mind off my guilt. It was Kate. Kate is sunshine. If she’s ever had a doubt or a fear, she’s never mentioned it in my presence. “Holly!” she said, bubbling even more than usual. “You’ll never guess what!”
“What?”
Kate paused for a moment so I could sense that it really was something special. Finally she said, “Gary Beaulieu asked me out on Friday!”
“Oh, Kate!” I said, delighted for her. Gary was a really nice guy. As far as I knew, he’d never asked a girl out except to the occasional class dances, and he’d never asked the same girl twice. He was much too athletic and winter sports oriented for me—a sidekick of Pete Stein—and yet curiously enough I felt a little pang of unhappiness at the thought of Kate going out with him. Once again, it was somebody else dating, and not me. “That’s super, Kate!” I said. “He’s a doll.”
My dolls were three inches high. Hers were living, breathing six-foot males.
Kate talked happily about the date they would have Friday. I’m not jealous, I told myself.
“There’s one problem, Hollyberry,” said Kate anxiously.
“What’s wrong?”
“I have to babysit Friday,” she said. “I agreed ages ago. Do you think you could sit for me?”
“Oh, Kate, you know I would, but I’m already sitting. Mr. and Mrs. Dallimonti.”
“Oh, no!” said Kate, almost in tears. “I was sure you’d be able to help me. Can you think of anybody else I could call? I already accepted the date because I was so sure I could find someone.”
“Lynn Vining?” I said. “Or Sally? Or maybe Gretchen?”
My father yelled from downstairs. “Holly! Don’t stay on the phone so long! I want the line open!”
He always wants the line open. He’s convinced that some suicidal parishioner will try to call just when I’m using the phone to talk about hair styles or something. There’s never been a suicidal parishioner in his church that I know of, but he really has a thing about keeping the phone line free. I can never talk more than fifteen minutes.
“I know, I know,” said Kate glumly.
We were silent for a moment, thinking. Of course, Kate could always back out of her babysitting job, but then she’d feel so guilty all Friday night she couldn’t enjoy herself with Gary. “Listen, Kate,” I said. “The Dallimontis have only the one little girl, and Nancy is seven, after all, and absolutely no problem. Who are you sitting for? Could I combine kids in one house?”
I could almost feel Kate hugging me. “Oh, Hollyberry, I love you. It’s the Smith baby. I bet you could. Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Dallimonti wouldn’t mind.”
I said I’d call them both and be sure.
Kate said I was the most terrific person she knew.
It wasn’t in quite the same league with feeding the starving in Bangladesh, but it certainly did make me feel better. I made a miniature Christmas present for my dollhouse tree and tied the silver embroidery thread bow with pleasure.
Three
IT WAS A FEW weeks after the double babysitting job that Christopher asked if he could practice on me.
He
came into my bedroom at about ten at night and just sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at me nervously. “Did you break something?” I said. “You look as if you hope Mom and Dad won’t get home for two years.”
Christopher tried to laugh. Instead, he just looked pinched around the mouth. Whatever he’d done, it must be pretty awful.
It’s strange to watch a kid brother grow up. For years and years, Christopher was nothing but a shrimp, a loud-mouthed pest. I steered around him, speaking only if absolutely necessary. Christopher always had sand in his shoes and peanut butter in his hair and D’s on his report card.
Then all of a sudden—wham!
There was this six-foot-tall, handsome man living in my house—and it was my little brother.
I don’t even feel acquainted with the present Christopher. He’s so different from the shrimpy pest of the past that I sometimes think a substitution was worked when I wasn’t looking. “What’s your problem, Christopher?” I said.
It’s never wise to ask Christopher that. While I loathe telling anybody my problems, Christopher loves to. He’ll tell Dad for an hour and Dad will give him support and feedback, being a minister experienced in comfort sessions. Then Christopher’ll tell Mother for an hour, and she’ll give him insight and understanding, being a college prof accustomed to young people with difficulties. Yuck.
But Christopher, to my surprise, did not settle down on my bed, close up my chemistry book for me, and start in on a long monologue about how life is hard and nobody cares enough. He said, “Holly, if I put some music on, would you dance with me?”
My lower half slid off the bed, partly due to Christopher’s weighing it down and creating a path and partly due to sheer astonishment. “Dance with you?” I said.
He looked down at the rug, over at the wall, and finally into the dollhouse, where he seemed deeply interested in the miniature bookshelf. “Yeah,” he said.
Christopher was not a dancer. Christopher could hardly count to four in rhythm, let alone dance. “Why?” I said suspiciously.