“It was hard to conceive how all this beauty had been obtained.” From “Landor’s Cottage,” The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, p. 619.
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It was hard to conceive how all this beauty had been obtained. Sarah drew herself nose to nose with a tiny glass unicorn, one of dozens of figures standing on motionless display in a lit curio cabinet.
She turned and ran her index finger lightly along the frilly edge of a bedspread in the enormous doll house. In each room a doll–perfectly to scale–went about some business or another. The mother doll, with her graceful chignon and real lace collar, sat alone sipping coffee at a table set for twelve, her tiny chin raised slightly, her eyes far away, almost pensive. In the next room the father doll sat at a miniature rollback desk with a tiny green velvet blotter, head in hands, bent over a stack of papers with real writing on them. Sara imagined that, with a magnifying glass, she might be able to read the words on those pages–no bigger than postage stamps, thinner than tissue paper–and decipher a root cause for the gloom that pervaded the rooms of that make-believe house.
Beyond the dollhouse was a massive white wrought-iron bed covered in crisp white linens. The spread at first appeared polka-dotted, but on closer inspection was hand-embroidered with little baskets of purple flowers, each one slightly different from its neighbors. Hung from a hook on the ceiling was a sheer white canopy with purple scalloped edges. Sarah drew it lightly aside to see, raised up against the pillows, an army of porcelain dolls, their eyes fixed forward beneath curving lashes. Some were old, dressed in pinafores and heeled boots, others looked almost modern, in saddle shoes and mini skirts.
Sarah sat carefully on the bed, wincing as it squeaked in objection to her weight.
She had not been in that many other girls’ rooms. There was Shelly Parker, who stood with Sarah at the bus stop each morning, half under and half outside of the rectangle of shade thrown by the awning of the life insurance company. The broker never had any clients that early but was against kids loitering on his doorstep just the same. Shelly’s family was born-again Christian, some sort of fundamentalist Baptist sect. They went to church three times a week, and Shelly’s room was decorated with Precious Moments figurines and framed prints of Thomas Kincaid paintings–warmly lit cottages hugged tight by gardens brimming with blue and pink hydrangeas and bud roses–an old person’s idea of what a young girl might like.
Tabitha Lamott’s room, she could see, was also heavy with adult notions of childhood. But it was also fascinating. With rekindled resolve, Sarah waited, hands in her lap, to meet her new friend.