COMPARTIMALTIZED Love
She learned that once unboxed, love had to be compartmentalized.
It was the only way to keep it from becoming dangerous.
The first brown-and-brick-red dollhouse had six rooms and stairs.
Very safe in its simplicity.
The stairs were her favorite.
There was a yellow kitchen with a yellow table, a blue living room with two stiff-backed blue chairs, a taupe bedroom with one wide bed, a pink nursery, a mint-green bathroom, and a room whose purpose she never quite understood.
Perhaps it was meant to be a dining room.
Perhaps a den.
She made it different things depending on what the family needed that day.
The family came in a plastic bag.
Mother.
Father.
Baby.
Girl.
Boy.
Dog.
No cats.
It was the 1980s.
Labs only.
Or poodles.
There was also a wedding dress.
The mother could wear it if you bent her arms backward and forced them through the sleeves.
Love was simple then.
You married.
You puckered your lips.
You wore a sparkling ring.
You kissed.
You lived in a house.
A car appeared outside.
Maybe.
A baby appeared upstairs.
Usually twins.
There was a dog.
Sometimes.
No cats.
It was the eighties.
Nobody explained where any of them came from.
Nobody explained what happened if the mother wanted to leave.
Mothers didn't want to leave.
That was absurd.
Who said that?
Mommy loved all her babies.
Even the sixth one she hadn't thought was possible.
At forty-five years old.
Another one.
Great.
This is great.
Right.
What a blessing.
Another girl.
After five others.
Great.
This was exactly what the mother had dreamed of.
More girls.
Later, love became more complicated.
There were sisters.
She loved one sister.
This was apparently evidence against another sister.
She loved the other sister.
This was apparently evidence against the first.
There were stories, accusations, histories, injuries.
Things whispered in kitchens and shouted across rooms.
Sometimes pushing on the stairs.
Shouting.
Everyone wanted to know whose version she believed.
She did not understand the question.
They were her sisters.
She loved them.
All of them.
There was no acceptable answer.
Loving one person required betraying another.
I bought you a dress!
I bought you a jacket!
I bought you an ice cream!
You spoiled little bitch.
She was constantly betraying.
It was who she was.
She loved Dad.
Betrayed Mom.
She loved Mom.
Betrayed Sister.
She loved one sister.
Betrayed the other.
She was a disloyal, traitorous, backstabbing, spoiled bitch.
And she was only nine.
Believing one story meant being against another person's story.
Neutrality was betrayal.
CHOOSE A SIDE!
Listening was endorsement.
CHOOSE A SIDE!
SILENCE WAS ENDORSEMENT, DIANE.
Forgiveness was disloyalty.
DIANE!
Distance was cruelty.
DENISE!
DANA!
DEBRA!
D.
D.
D.
D.
Damn it.
ALL OF YOU!
At least there was the dollhouse.
She began putting people into rooms.
Not literally, of course.
Not yet.
She had tea sets.
A grandfather clock.
A standing floor lamp.
She understood instinctively that there had to be walls.
This sister could live here.
That sister could live there.
Their stories would not touch.
If they did, the pieces that touched bubbled and frothed and burned.
She would not carry accusations through the hallway.
That was anthrax.
That was rat poison.
She would not make one woman disappear so another could feel loved.
But then she had to.
It seemed reasonable.
Then.
The first boy who liked her skated to her house.
Tony.
She thought this was... what happened.
Her mom said nothing.
No one said anything.
Did it even happen?
She remembered it forty years later.
It wasn't important.
He broke up with her two weeks later.
Also not important.
She put him in a back room.
The next year, the next summer, the next boy taught her to kiss during a summer in New Hampshire.
He was much older.
Her sister had introduced them.
Had handed her off to him.
Years later, she would realize she could not remember the kiss or his name, but she understood that allowing a baby sister to be alone with a much older boy had not been okay.
She remembered her best friend Heather's irritation when she mentioned him later.
And how Heather found other girls to be best friends with.
Fuck.
She shouldn't have mentioned the older boy.
The hands.
The lips.
Summer?
It had only been a couple of weeks in July.
Maybe 1986.
He went into the back room with the others.
The boy who held her hand and told her she had the softest hands he had ever touched went into a back room too.
That was something for a little while.
Until Shelley started making fun of them.
Shelley already made fun of her.
Four eyes.
What else?
She was never okay for Shelley.
Shelly Jelly Belly.
A taunt made up by other people and attributed to her.
Four eyes.
"I can't be friends with you. You have glasses."
Shelly Jelly Belly.
So now Boner is not boyfriend.
Fuck you.
You made my life hell since kindergarten.
Fuck you.
I can't be friends with you.
You don't go to church.
Fuck you.
She never said any of it.
She felt it.
It hurt.
Blows to her body.
Invisible.
Being laughed at twice seemed unbearable with so many other things already going wrong.
Dad had left to live
somewhere else.
So she tried to step away from the boy.
Then Charles began making fun of her too.
She moved him into another back room.
But in reality, he wouldn't leave her alone.
Horse tail.
Farm girl.
Dirty socks.
One day she dropped her books on the ground.
"Go on. Let's go."
He backed off.
A teacher blew a whistle.
She was in trouble.
The house was getting crowded.
She threw the dollhouse away.
But it was too late.
The dollhouse was being constructed around her.
Her mother taught her something new when she was seventeen.
Sometimes you were not allowed to stop loving someone simply because you wanted to.
And loving was not feeling.
There was a boy she no longer wanted to date.
Her mother told her she was being stupid.
Cruel.
Unfaithful.
She tried again.
He wasn't talking to her on the phone.
He disappeared for weeks into his own world while she altered her life and her plans to spend time with him.
It was exhausting her.
Her friends told her she should give him another chance.
She tried to date somebody else.
That boy came to the door.
He was nineteen.
She was not eighteen.
Her mother met him before she could.
He was told to leave.
He left.
Years later, she would remember the front door more clearly than she remembered his face.
MP on his arm.
He had shown an interest in her writing.
Her mom wouldn't even let her near the door.
The front door became one of the most important parts of the fencing around the dollhouse.
Who was allowed through it?
Who was turned away?
Who had the authority to open it?
Who had the authority to close it?
And did the woman inside have any authority at all?
There were weddings everywhere.
Her sisters married.
Some divorced.
Some married again.
Last names changed.
Children were born.
Children grew.
Years passed.
Eventually she did not know exactly where every niece and nephew lived.
Sometimes she could not remember which surname belonged to which period of somebody's life.
But she remembered the weddings.
The cake.
The flowers.
The envelopes.
The gifts carried in wrapped boxes.
The ministers speaking confidently about love.
Love was patient.
Love was kind.
Love endured.
Love forgave.
Love never failed.
Then somebody's husband left for another woman.
Somebody's husband started another family before properly ending the first one.
Somebody hid money.
Somebody did not pay child support.
Somebody threatened somebody with a gun.
One man shoved her sister's head into a trash can.
Another threatened to blow her away.
The weddings remained in their albums.
Smiling couples beneath flowered arches.
White dresses.
Cake knives.
Hands joined beneath the minister's.
Love never fails.
She gave the ministers their own room.
Her father went into the smallest room.
There was very little to put in it.
No hugs.
No great warmth.
No sense of being cherished.
No pile of memories proving she had been somebody's precious girl.
Mostly there was leaving.
Absence took up remarkably little physical space.
That was one of its advantages.
You could fit years of it into a very small room.
Then there was her own wedding.
By the time she wanted to stop it, it was already moving.
Other people had made arrangements.
A mother-in-law had invited people.
So many people.
A hundred, perhaps.
She hadn't even known invitations had gone out.
There were plans.
Deposits.
Expectations.
Relatives.
Embarrassment waiting on the other side of cancellation.
She tried to imagine saying no.
Everyone else's inconvenience stood around her like furniture.
She married him.
Life unfolded.
She tried.
She stayed.
She could not get pregnant.
People had opinions about that too.
Jokes.
Questions.
Suggestions.
Bodies, she learned, were public property in ways nobody admitted.
Marriage had a room.
Sex had a room.
Infertility had a room.
Humiliation got several.
The dollhouse expanded.
Eventually she left.
Or tried to.
Her brother-in-law stepped forward to intimidate her.
There was always somebody willing to guard the doorway of a life she no longer wanted.
She tried living alone.
She tried friendship.
She drove hours to see people.
They did not drive hours to see her.
She sent messages.
They went unanswered.
She began to understand that friendship could be another room where one person did most of the furnishing.
She closed that door too.
Then came a man with a house.
A plan.
A child.
A family-shaped space waiting for someone to enter it.
By then she understood loneliness better than she understood romance.
She understood the hunger for somewhere to belong.
A house could look very much like safety from the outside.
So could a man who knew what tomorrow was supposed to look like.
She stepped inside.
Another room.
Another set of promises.
Another arrangement people called love.
She kept trying to make the rooms connect.
They never did.
The problem with compartments was that other people did not respect them.
They wanted doors opened.
They wanted alliances carried from one room to another.
They wanted her to hate whom they hated.
Forgive whom they forgave.
Condemn whom they condemned.
Believe what they believed.
Family wanted loyalty.
Partners wanted allegiance.
Friends wanted confirmation.
Everybody seemed to believe love should make her easier to control.
She disagreed.
Quietly at first.
Then less quietly.
She did not want to inherit other people's enemies.
She did not want to surrender her judgment to prove devotion.
She did not want to accept harm because somebody had once kissed her tenderly.
She did not want a minister, mother, sister, husband, friend, or frightened child inside herself deciding whom she was allowed to love.
So she kept building walls.
Not because she was cold.
Because she was trying to preserve something.
Each person got a room.
Each story stayed in its room.
She could visit.
She could listen.
She could care.
She could love.
But she would not let one room burn down the whole house.
People called this distance.
They called it disloyalty.
They said she did not love enough.
And sometimes they left.
Then her daughter was born.
There was no dollhouse prepared for what happened.
No compartment.
No rule.
No minister.
No mother.
No wedding.
No promise.
No audience.
She looked at the tiny person placed against her and felt something so immediate that, for the first time in her life, she did not have to ask what it was.
There was no confusion.
No negotiation.
No calculation about what would be returned.
No requirement that the baby agree with her.
No demand that she choose sides.
No need for the baby to make her look good.
No debt.
No contract.
She did not want the child to belong to her.
She wanted the child to belong to herself.
She wanted her safe.
Fed.
Warm.
Curious.
Loud when she needed to be loud.
Quiet when she wanted quiet.
Able to leave rooms that frightened her.
Able to love people who disagreed with one another.
Able to change her mind.
Able to open the door.
Able to close it.
Able to come home.
Able to go.
She stared at her daughter and understood suddenly why so many of the other rooms had never felt right.
She had spent her entire life examining things people called love.
Marriage.
Desire.
Obligation.
Staying.
Jealousy.
Sacrifice.
Possession.
Forgiveness.
Family.
Fear.
She had believed the problem was that she could not understand love.
She had been wrong.
She understood it perfectly.
She simply had not encountered enough of it coming toward her.
She looked again at her daughter.
People would say the child was loved.
People liked saying things like that.
She had learned not to trust declarations.
She could not control who would love this girl.
She could not promise that nobody would fail her.
She could not build a house strong enough to keep every cruelty outside.
But there was one thing she knew.
For once, she did not need another person to confirm it.
She did not need a ceremony.
She did not need a ring.
She did not need witnesses.
She did not even need the word.
She would love.
And somewhere inside the old dollhouse, a door finally opened.
Compartments.
Compartmentalize.
Love.
It was a secret door.
A trapdoor.
It opened.
She fell through.
It was over.
Love.
