Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
There were six rooms. Two bedrooms with wrought iron bed frames whose covers hung over the edge with rippled edges like a head of romaine lettuce. The bathroom, a half sliced triangle with a little plastic faucet, the kitchen and dining room and the nave. Up a set of stairs near the old organ, was a little bed, yellow with blue butterflies on the coverlet. The house had been converted from an old church, with white shingles and dark green trim. The windows had green shutters, which one could hinge open with a delicate hand. One could put their eye up to the circle of lilac-colored stained-glass above the main doors and see the pews in the entrance— movable, as they had been pushed aside to make space for a party. The dolls had been dressed in their fancy clothes, frilly yellow and pink taffeta, skirts, which the little girl named Eloise pulled over their porcelain bodies. She couldn’t find their shirts, and so their chests remained bare, with little nippleless bumps.
Eloise sat upstairs beneath the red mahogany and poplar organ, which was no longer capable of sound, and moved her pieces around in the large wood dollhouse. Big and little church-house is what she called them. She lived with her parents in big church-house. Her dolls lived in little church-house, an exact replica that her father had carved for her last Christmas. He had spent a year in the workshop working on the little church, gluing, shaving, and sanding such that curls of wood attached themselves to each of his sweater’s cuffs. Everywhere he went that year he thought about the curve of the staircase or the shell-shaped knobs of the door.
He had found an unimaginably perfect circle piece of pale lilac sea glass from the bottom of a bottle, and placed it as a window above the two main doors. The little church-house, could split right down the middle and open like a suitcase by two hinges. Revealing the rooms in which Eloise played with the Bisque porcelain dolls which had been her mother’s as a child. They were fragile, with look-alike faces and different colored swaths of ringlet hair. The dollhouse was the families the greatest success, it hemmed the three of them together. Often after dinner the three of them would crouch together, looking at the elaborate birthday parties, teas, infirmaries, or feasts, scenes which Eloise constructed.
On Tuesday afternoon, her parents left Eloise alone for the first time. Your mother has a check-up—her father had said. It was an hour each way, her mother called it a headache drive. At first, Eloise sat in front of her dollhouse, moving pieces quietly, realizing how she liked not being interrupted. Then she ran through the house without reprimand and promptly lay on the walkway between pews looking up at the old light blue ceiling. The paint, with age and humidity, had begun to have different shades, Eloise thought if she looked at it long enough it began to move like a patch of the river.
She thought about how her father wanted to paint over it. He was a large man with delicate fingers and disposition. He had cried once when, in the backyard, they had watched a fox kill a bird. Then he said isn’t it beautiful, the natural course of things. He was a house painter who listened loudly to the radio and would walk with his ladder on one shoulder before placing it on the back of the red truck.
The big church house was an echoing house, not one for secret keepers. At night, from upstairs, Eloise could hear her mother’s voice low and quaking move upwards like the high shrill whistle of a cedar waxwing.
“I’m forty-one damn it, there are all sorts of complications. I don’t know if I can do it again.”
Eloise moved the boy doll and the girl doll into a room and placed them on a bed in their clothes, with their legs lacking joints, intertwined.
“It would be nice for Eloise to have a sister. She plays alone all the time with that house.”
It was dark out now. Eloise put the third doll in another room and ran outside to get a small cone from the sugar pine, which she placed in the doll’s arm like a child.
“The doctors said it will be fine.”
Outside her window, the girl could hear raccoons fighting. In the morning the trash bins would be knocked over, and she would be told to collect the bean cans scattered across the yard and the plastic bags which had been torn.
“I don’t want it. It's my life. It's my life.”
It was humid and that night no one slept, but they heard owls and the train go by.
When they started going for checkups every Tuesday, her mother began to spend more time in the garden. Her face was like a bronzed deer who wanted to become leather in the sun. Her pockets were full of packets of seeds and when she moved she rattled like a wind chime. She walked slowly, she said, because she was in the process of growing. The perennial flower beds stopped at the edge of their property at the woods. Yet, when walking on the road, or by the river her mother would stop and point to the Daylilies and Penstemon and Lupines and say—my flowers. Eloise came to believe that her mother’s garden was ever-extending.
When her mother weeded, Eloise would get toast from the pantry and eat in the garden. She would sit in the innermost section between the sunflowers and the spikes of the raspberry bushes, which tilted towards one another to create a small patch of shade. Her mother would open Eloise’s hands placing in them ripe cherry tomatoes—nature’s candy, her mother called them, and she would smile at that popping them into her mouth one at a time.
Suddenly it was winter in the big church-house and light barely trespassed through the stain glass window. They lived inland from the brackish water which pushed in from the coast, creating fissures of water like cracked pieces in a puzzle. It was nearing Christmastime, a tree had been cut down from the woods, and wrapped in white lights it remained on throughout the night. Late one night, her mother and father left the house in a hurry. The red truck refused to start, it didn’t like the cold, so they took instead the small green Saab without winter tires. In the morning, around seven Eloise was asleep upstairs, when the neighbor, a woman in her sixties, knocked on the door, holding her orange cat.
“Your parents called, I’m going to drive you to see the baby.”
They took the red truck and Eloise got to sit in the front seat. She ran back inside to bring her doll. It began to snow. To get to the town where the hospital was they drove over the bridge of a big slow river the color of blue steel, Eloise had a hard time pronouncing the rivers name—Androscoggin. Once the whole river had caught on fire from pollution, the neighbor told her. Eloise imagined the water turned red like her mother’s going out lipstick. In the hospital room, her mother was asleep. Eloise sat perched on the edge of the bed as they placed her sister in her arms, and told her to be careful. Her father took out his video camera and asked her who it was. She said—a real life baby doll.
When they arrived home, her father went inside, holding her newborn sister. Eloise followed, she wanted to see how small her sister was. Her mother stayed in the car. Eloise asked her father why she wouldn’t come in, Eloise imagined her mother must be sad without her bump to hold. Her father never answered, he touched the baby’s face as if it were china and leaned towards the child as a tree bends towards water. He seemed to have forgotten Eloise’s mother sitting in the passenger seat of the car, and the sky which had gone dark.
It was late when Eloise heard her mother rattling things below, she could hear her mother’s boots. The screen door squeaking close before slamming shut, Eloise sat up in bed looking through the window to where she saw her mother walking outside. She watched her sit in the middle of the cold garden. Eloise put on her shoes and called out softly from the door, she asked what her mother was doing. Eloise’s voice went unheard over the frozen ground. Eloise went upstairs to retrieve her dollhouse. She couldn’t see over the roof as she carried it down the flight of stairs and out the back door. Her mother seemed to need it more than she did.
Eloise walked to where her mother sat cross legged, the baby between her mother’s legs lay untouched by her mother’s hands. It was cold, the baby had begun to cry. As if her mother was blind, Eloise reached for her fingers placing them lightly on the dollhouse. Together they reached forward, it was the same movement they made each spring, when it was time to bury the seeds. They planted the little church house between the stalks of the sunflowers. Secretly, Eloise hoped the house would grow, so she and her sister could play together. Eloise and her mother stood up when it smelled like snow.