Mini

Anne Panning

I

My mother’s life is hard; she labors cleaning rich women’s houses while her own house—a rangy old Victorian—sinks deeper into decrepitude every year. She owns doll houses and miniature tea sets kept behind glass. She knits teeny-weeny sweaters and bends paper clips into hangers for them to hang on. When I was five years old, I received a handmade dollhouse for Christmas, which I still have to this day. Over the years, my mother has made food for my dollhouse kitchen out of actual dough, tiny loaves of bread which she’s pressed into blue-spackled pans and painted with a light brown wash. She’s also rolled the dough into a dozen miniscule eggs, painted them all white and then crafted a small carton out of paper in which they cozied safely inside.

I remember lying on the floor looking through the windows at the rooms, imagining myself living in such a quaint and lovely house. There were hand-sewn curtains trimmed with lace hung up with dental floss and thumbtacks­­. There were gingham couch cushions the size of saltines. There were even books smaller than postage stamps and, although they didn’t open with actual pages, they boasted titles such as Winter in the Woods and Mopsy’s Big Adventure. Much of my childhood in Minnesota was spent living in a trailer court before moving to the big old Victorian. Years later, when I finally bought my own house in New York state and moved the dollhouse with me in the U-Haul, I remember thinking—this means something, but I wasn’t sure what.

II

My husband and I both avoid laundry in the dryer until it is cold and wrinkled and needs another round of fluff. At midnight, we drink beer, sit on the floor and fold our baby daughter, Lily’s, miniature clothes: little white sweat socks so small I can hold ten in my hand at a time. A pink cable knit cardigan that’s as wide as it is long. A pair of white tights so thin and tangled I initially mistake them for a discarded Kleenex. Upstairs, I line her shoes up beneath her window because where else do you put such little shoes, after all?

One day, at eight months old, Lily begins to stand. She fits underneath the kitchen table, and when I call to tell my mother this, she reports that I was so tiny when I learned to walk I used to go right beneath tables—in one end and out the other. Lily topples over and smacks her forehead into the chair and I tell my mother I have to go. I watch Lily stand and look out the window at all the snow. She clutches the windowsill in her baby hands, wobbles, bounces her knees up and down. The windows in our big old Victorian are long, dramatic, probably four times the size of her. The glass is hazy and wavy. It distorts. The world outside is large and white and bright. I hover behind her, restless. She pounds the glass, falls, lands on her diapered bottom with a thud. I pick her up, set her in front of the window. She falls. We do it again. And again.

At night, I hold her against me in the rocking chair until she falls asleep. She sighs, goes limp. The back of her head fits perfectly inside the curve of my cheekbone, and I hold her against me until the lullaby CD grinds to a stop. Even then, I hang on, body to body, her small heart beating against mine.

Anne Panning is the 2006 Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction. Her Super America: Stories and a Novella will be published by The University of Georgia Press in October 2007. She is the Co-Director of the SUNY Brockport Writers Forum.