Monday, July 16, 2012

The Dollhouse

The first summer that Uncle Bob and Aunt Phyllis rented a house down the road from ours, I felt betrayed. They always stayed at our house. Just like Steven was always my cousin and Todd was always Elizabeth’s. These were the rules that were never broken. However, it soon became clear to me that having two houses in the family had its advantages.

Elizabeth, aka “Lizardbreath”, was always in Maine when her birthday rolled around in July. She never celebrated her birthday in New Jersey with her friends. Steven and I would throw a surprise birthday party for her each July and we would try to give her a great present. In the cellar of the rental house, in the creepy corner of junk, there was a pile of old wood that had been used in a previous renovation. In this cellar our greatest gift idea ever was formed: the dollhouse.

We raided the cellar of my house for a hammer, rusty hand saw, and an old mayonnaise jar filled with an eclectic assortment of nails. All of this we spirited back to the rental house via my old wooden row boat. It would have been faster to walk, but we ran the chance of discovery by my sister who had yet to master the oars of the rowboat. We decided that the water route, though ten minutes longer, was the more furtive route.

Back in the relative safety of the rental cellar, Steven carefully taped black construction paper to the windows and bolted the door. Protected from prying eyes, we began our construction project. The main structure of the dollhouse was easy to build. It had two stories with six rooms and a roof on top. It wasn’t fancy and we decorated it with sand glued to the roof and made use of small shells, pilfered plastic wrap and bits of tin foil. Once the top heavy house was completed, we began to work on the furniture. Further raids of my house produced useable scraps of wood and soon our furniture project was completed: a table, a couch and several beds. Leftover metal soda caps became bowls for the kitchen while toothpaste caps stolen from the bathrooms of both houses became cups. Our most ambitious project was the waterbed. Steven retrieved a Ziploc baggie and filled it with water. I made a lining for it using leftover material from my mother’s perpetual sewing projects. We left it overnight on the cellar floor to test its durability. The next morning, to our disappointment, the water had almost completely leaked out. So much for the company’s advertising campaign. The waterbed idea was scrapped.

The next phase of Operation Dollhouse was to find dolls to live in it. Steven and I, always ahead of our time in living green, collected cans and bottles from the side of the road and took them to the Camp Waban Country Store. Each soda can yielded five cents and each two liter bottle netted ten cents. That summer, the store had a display of mice dolls. Each doll was a small mouse dressed in fancy clothing. After careful scrutiny, we selected Miss Mouse America and Southern Belle Mouse. We raced the mile and a half back to the cellar and placed the mice inside the dollhouse. Our present was completed and just in time: the birthday party was the next day.

I met Steven early the next morning and we loaded the dollhouse into the rowboat. We covered it with towels and transported it back to my cellar, rowing carefully through the silent water.

I still don’t understand how the party could have been a surprise. It was on Elizabeth’s actual birthday and we held it every year without an exception. She was in the house the entire time and could clearly detect the scent of her favorite blueberry birthday cake floating from the oven. She was delighted, surprise or not and Steven and I eagerly waited for the moment when we could unveil our present for her. The expression on my sister’s face was worth all of our efforts. Operation Dollhouse was a success.

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