The Great Move In

So, it was in May, on the very day of my birth, that we finally took all our separate cars and began the process of moving into the house. The set up was simple: Jacinta and I were to have the very large, two room master suite on the main floor, and I would have the basement as my workshop, and a study near the attic as mine. Miss Gilda was officially engaged, mainly to temper my wife’s jealousy-- which had begun to flare up when I was not with her-- as the cook of the house. She did not truly provide this service, except for once or twice, and mainly stuck to tasks more suited to the title of maid. Her room was on the opposite side of the house, a small room that I suppose was originally meant as a nursery. It was next to Robert’s room, by arrangement, and a small door allowed passage between the two. All this was on the second floor.

On the third floor, and near my study, was the room reserved for Roman. He had originally wanted the room next to mine, but that was converted, after long debate, into a day room and lounge for my wife (and nominally, though not in practice, for Miss Gilda as well). We had a whole range of bathrooms running throughout the house, and indeed I got the generator I desired. We were hooked up with the latest of technologies, and our phone lines were among the best in the nation. The lighting, too, was overhauled, giving the place a much brighter feeling than it had when we first investigated the place. If a light was on, I could assure myself, there would be no shadow men. I still dared not speak this terror to the others, though it was never far from my mind. I’d also had new wood laid in most every room, for I feared mistaking the natural creakings of a house for something terrifying in the night.

I did not recognize then, I suppose, the privilege that I was afforded. I did not understand, I suppose the luxury that I was at that time accustomed to. The world in which I was stepping out of was one in which I had made a fortune with small pieces of plastic. I was intent on finding a new toy, and I was intent that it would revolutionize the world. This was my project: in the promised solitude of the house I would rediscover that magic that made childhood such a time of growth and learning that when we are grown we look back and mourn that it should never return. I must concede now that I did not recover that sense of wonder. But it was not for a lack of trying.

Being a toy maker it was customary for my friends and acquaintances on my birthday to shower me with the cleverest and strangest toys imaginable to the world. I had a fairly large collection myself, ranging back to some of the very first wooden pull toys and plastic popping mowers. In the center living room of this large house I placed an old Fisher Price elephant slide. This was the original Little Tykes model, which I had recovered from my own childhood. It was something that I believed I needed to do, as I thought I had grown up too quickly-- I tried to collect all the toys that I had once discarded. I tried to understand, when I had them again, what made them such essential memories. It was this pursuit that once led me, after hours, to make a trade with a clearly unfit parent to recover a nearly pristine collection of variously coloured cardboard brick building blocks. To my shame, though I knew that the toys belonged to a child and not the parent, I forked over the money and took them away.

I supposed that the parent would have found the cash anyways, and rationalized my action by suggesting to myself that having these objects would allow me to recapture that magic which I sought to bring to life with my own designs. But this did not stop me from waking, many night, in a cold sweat, worried about the feelings of the poor child that lost such wonderful toys. Some nights, when remembering this, I even cried, weeping so openly that when Jacinta later left me she would suggest a softness as one of the reasons for the divorce. But I was-- I still am-- more afraid of hurting the feelings of a child than I could ever be of some imagined shadow man.

On this birthday, as we were moving into the mansion on that very day, it seemed appropriate for my friends to shell out some little more money than they were used to and create for me something of a one of a kind toy that referenced the very venture in which we had just embarked upon. They refused to inform me what they had purchased with their pooled capital, but I spent much of the ride guessing. I still was so fond of every little version of an animal slide, so many of my guesses were of that nature. But what they found-- or made, for I never found the source of the object-- was far greater indeed. After we had unpacked and all seemed settled in enough at least for a first night in our new home, they presented me with a large package set upon the long, low, black maple coffee table of the foyer. I unwrapped the brown paper, carefully undoing each string and balling it up in my hand. I had the habit, at that time, of wrapping string around my palms and sometimes around my wrist until the blood flow began to become cut off. I stuffed the string into my pocket, enjoying the feeling of the frayed string rubbing against my skin.

When all the string was wound into my pocket and the wrapping had all fallen away I beheld in miniature-- a microcosm-- my new abode. Here it all was as a small world: and, when I opened the latch to inspect every room, just as it was laid out in the very house, I found dolls representing ourselves. The figures were handpainted, special ordered I supposed, by some master miniaturist: my own image had everything, even down to my slightly overgrown chaplinesque mustache. I thought of it mainly as a not quite fully grown in vasquez, but my friends and companions delighted in comparing me to the comedian. They’d even gone as far, as the year previous, as enlisting me to re-enact some of the better escapades of the Little Tramp during the company Christmas party. It was all, I supposed, in the name of the fun and frivolity that a toy company should embody. I relished the part as much as I relished the opportunity every year, at the flagship store, to play Santa Claus and give out small plastic dinosaurs in small santa hats to each child that came to see the magic man who delivered them gifts every year.

Unwrapping the model of my home had me in the same kind of golden-glinting glee that I had seen spring forth from the eyes of the children when they wished their hearts out to me, in the guise of some jolly old elf. I caressed the model that was mine for a while, inspecting it closely, revelling in the craftwork and attention to detail. But, it was in the shapes of the others that I was truly surprised. None of the figures were vain representations, and each almost perfectly detailed the beauties and horrors of the outward parts of each of the members of the household.

The red hair of my mistress, just a little frizzy, was bound down, as per her usual manner, nearly below her bottom. She wore, in this representation, not the sexually revealing dress you might expect, but her more normal outfit. She wore black pants, usually, an old t-shirt that hid a loose brassiere, and always some old hoodie either around her waist or covering up her upper half. Inspecting the figure I noticed that I could remove the clothing, and did so with the hoodie. I struck me as almost strange that she was wearing the same outfit as she sat next to me, but at that moment it did not come to my attention that my own outfit-- far from my normal getup of black slacks and dress shirt-- was perfectly detailed on my own figure. As it was moving day I was wearing an old, white t-shirt sprawled with some motto from some forgotten debauchery of my collegiate day. So, I suppose, was my own little figure.

My other friends were well represented as well: Florez was presented as an almost too real pin-up girl. She, in contrast with Miss GIlda, was indeed wearing a revealing dress. It was a sweeping thing, that reminded me of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. It was more of the order of Judith Anderson than Joan Fontaine, though a strategic slit down the right side allowed the imagination little room to play. As with my outfit, and that of the other’s, it was exactly what she had chosen as her ensemble for the evening.

Both Robert and Roman, too, were faithfully depicted in the microworld of the dollhouse. Roman with his chestnut brown hair and stocky figure and Robert with a button-tight suit ensemble were as vivid in the dollhouse as they were before me. It seemed only appropriate, somehow, as if some spirit moved me, that I place all the figures in the room that we inhabited. A strange thing happened, however. When I arranged the figures on the couch, putting myself bent over a table in that small dollhouse looking down at even smaller a dollhouse set atop even smaller a table, I did not set them exactly as they were arranged in real life. Where Roman and Robert occupied both ends of the seating, I set them instead each next to one of the women:next to Miss Gilda and Florez respectively. As I did so, they each got up from the couch.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked.

They both stopped in their tracks, for a moment, as if they had momentarily forgotten all that was required of a human being except for continued breathing. Blank looks wiped from their faces, and they each shrugged.

“I had thought there was something I needed in the kitchen,” said Robert, and then unceremoniously sat down on the couch-- in the exact place where his doll was positioned within the model.