By Alexa Hirst
/ Fiction /
It’s the people inside that make this a home, the cross-stitch on Ava’s wall says. The pink thread words loop over the winter scene of a snug cottage tucked behind snow-covered pines. It looks nothing like Ava’s house here on the windswept northern prairie, where tall grasses bend their heads like soldiers nodding off to sleep. Each year, weeds creep farther into the fields surrounding her drafty clapboard farmhouse. They’ve already overtaken the rotting gray barn. Once-neat rows languish under stretches of patchy clover, pigweed, and nettle. Her ancestors broke the matted sod with a steel plough so her family could live. They’d be ashamed of how she’s let it go.
She looks through magnifying lenses at her half-finished creation. Whipped cream peaks envelop three layers of cake with one slice cut out; better to show its moist, yellow interior. Ava has plated the slice for serving and imagines how she’ll paint briar roses dancing around the dish. Tiny polymer clay strawberries dot the cake’s edges. Using dental tools, she sculpts a final strawberry. She takes her time, adding divots to mimic seeds even on the side of the fruit that she’ll bury in simulated frosting. She could skip that, but she would know the blankness was there. With a pair of tweezers, she picks up tiny stems and attaches them to the berries. She pauses, her hand hovering, holding the tool.
That would be annoying, she thinks, if someone served you a slice of cake with berries on top, but they hadn’t bothered to cut the green stuff off. How would you politely get rid of the stem after you ate the fruit? She frowns. But it will look nicer this way. More color.
Finishing up, she adds the cake to a sheet pan that holds the rest of the miniature banquet she’s been working on since morning. Roast chicken and ham studded with cloves form the centerpiece. A boat of gravy made with drippings from the chicken sits over to the side. Mashed potatoes topped with a divot of melting butter mound in a serving bowl that she’ll decorate with the Blue Willow pattern. Bits of bacon and crispy fried onion dust a platter of green beans that will glisten with oil from the bacon. Crispy wedges of potato, sprinkled with parsley. Biscuits that will be golden-brown on top and half-hidden in a wicker basket beneath blue-checkered cloth. Her stomach growls. It’s late and these need to go in the oven.
Ava takes careful steps down the stairs to the kitchen, carrying the clay feast in front of her. After setting it on the cooktop, she turns on the oven. In the cupboards, she finds Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter, solids separated from an oily layer. She’ll snack on those while she heats supper in the microwave. From the pantry deep freezer, she pulls out a Hungry Man dinner. While the sky darkens from streaks of lavender to deep-blue and black, she’ll eat in the den and watch an old movie. Maybe North by Northwest. That was one of Mama’s favorites.
* * *
She hadn’t wanted to move here, to the dying plains town where Mama grew up. Ava was happy in Chicago. Spring there was best, when the sloppy gray slush piled at the curb melted down into the sewers, when the mirrored glass of tall buildings reflected a cerulean sky, when light jackets shoved parkas to the back of the closet. Everything felt brighter then.
The spring after Ava turned ten was the coldest on record. She remembers one evening, she was looking out of the apartment window at the slate-gray overcast that had settled above the city, frozen solid into the sky. Sleet hit the glass, leaving fat icy-wet splotches. She didn’t like it when Mama said, “Ava, I need to talk to you.” That meant she was about to be lectured for some lie or a transgression like failing to brush her teeth or loading the dishwasher in a slapdash way. She pretended not to hear and blew a humid breath of air onto the window, her nose an inch from the glass. Dragging her index finger through the foggy circle, she made crisscrossed lines and added feathery details, revealing the crude image of a snowflake.
“Ava,” Mama repeated, her voice quiet but firm. “I have to talk to you about something.” The fogged area shrank inward, creeping toward the snowflake. Ava turned toward Mama, sitting on the sofa, a blue chenille throw pillow clutched to her stomach, her eyes like holes in paper.
“I got a call earlier today. Granny Dierdre’s sick,” Mama started.
Ava scrunched up her face and waited.
“I need to go be with her,” Mama told Ava.
“What am I supposed to do while you’re there?” Ava asked. Her heart beat faster, though not because she was especially moved by the news. While she felt bad because Mama seemed upset, she barely knew Granny. She was thinking that maybe Mama would arrange for her stay with her friend Neely’s family. She loved sleepovers in their big house and the pantry filled with snacks that she and Neely could raid any time they wanted. Neely’s mom made Belgian waffles every Sunday morning and set out an intoxicating array of toppings – Reddi-Wip, chocolate sauce, maraschino cherries, multi-colored sprinkles.
You’d have to come with me,” Mama replied, and Ava’s hopes came crashing back to Earth. “I’m not sure how long I’m going to be there.”
“No!” Ava shouted. “I can’t go! My friends are here! I’m not even done with fifth grade yet! I’ve got three whole months of school left!”
“We’ll enroll you in school there, Ava. It’ll be fun – like a little adventure for us!” Mama said, in that fake-cheery voice she used to cajole Ava into doing things her way. “I promise we’ll come back as soon as we can. But I’ve got to do this. She’s got no one.”
* * *
Mama hadn’t spoken to her parents after leaving home to go to college, for which they had refused to pay. She had hugged independence tight to her core until it hardened into a knot of coal, and finally an impenetrable diamond. Ava had met Granny Dierdre only once when she was six and Granny made a surprise visit over Memorial Day weekend. Rather than booking a hotel, there had been an unspoken agreement that Granny would stay with them in their cramped two-bedroom apartment. Ava resented being asked to give up her bed to Granny. In protest, she left her quilt balled in an untidy pile on the couch every morning. Granny preferred to stay rooted to the couch and spent most of the weekend reading from one of the romance paperbacks that she stashed in her worn leather purse. They had titles like Arizona Star and Sweet Georgia.
“They’re all history!” Granny declared, “All history! The characters have such a sense of place. Just like back home. Most people here wouldn’t know a sense of place if it smacked them in the mouth. Young people just don’t care about their roots,” she asserted as she cast at dark look at Mama. “Everyone in this city comes from somewhere else. No one’s from here.”
“How would you know?” Mama asked, her voice quivering like a phonograph needle struggling not to slip back into well-worn grooves. “You’ve barely been out of the apartment since we got here from the bus station. We should go out and see the city, Mom. You’d like it. There are great museums here. Good restaurants too.”
Granny snorted. “Restaurants? Don’t you know how dirty those are? You wouldn’t believe the kind of people who work at restaurants! I came to see you both. Not ugly things made by strangers or a bunch of concrete and metal!” She paused and then added, “It’s such a shame you’ve never brought her back home to the farm. Now that she’s old enough, she needs to know where she’s from.”
Ava was sitting at the kitchen table, listening as she used crayons to draw an empty-eyed cat couple dressed in formal attire and standing on their hind legs. When Granny said that, she yelped, “That’s not where I’m from! I’m from Chicago!”
“Oh, that’s what she’s been telling you.” Granny said, stretching her red-violet lips in a thin line, a simulacrum of a smile. Her lipstick kisses tattooed the rims of coffee mugs and glasses and only vanished after Mama had scrubbed them by hand. Granny jerked her head, shaking her short white curls. “Your mother should bring you down to the farm,” she sighed pointedly, “You wouldn’t want to come back to this place.”
“I like it here. I was born here,” Ava replied.
Granny’s little eyes pierced Ava as she said, “Home has nothing to do with where you were born. Home is where the people you care for have set roots in the ground.”
“Stop it!” Mama snarled, making Ava jump.
* * *
It took six months after they’d gone back to the farm for Granny Dierdre to pass. Mama inherited what little she’d had – mostly a crumbling house sitting on two hundred acres of land. By then, there was no longer a job for Mama to go back to in the city. Mama said she felt stuck between the frying pan and the fire when she talked about what to do next, though life around the farm was as cold and hard as mountain stone. That winter even the wind was hostile, whipping snow against the house in blinding horizontal sheets, and driving cold air through gaps around the doors and windows. Mama grew untethered, her plans and intentions scattered by the prairie wind. They didn’t leave even after they’d settled Granny next to Grandpa Murphy in the old family cemetery, where the black iron fence stood out in stark relief against the pale horizon. Mama said she needed time to figure out what to do next.
After a couple of weeks, Mama stopped asking about school and Ava didn’t tell her she’d made only one friend that first year: Jean Carter. The other girls teased Jean for her dirty clothes and her uncombed hair.
“Let’s play horses,” Jean would say. She’d pinch Ava’s thigh or kick her in the shin. “It’s a horse bite.” If Ava asked her to stop, she’d shrug, “Fine. No friend.” Ava pretended to like wearing pants that year so no one would see the bruises up and down her legs.
It happened something like that. Ava can’t remember well; it was all so long ago.
* * *
Their first Christmas on the farm, Mama gave Ava a dollhouse, though she was too old for it. In a photo album, Mama glued a browning Polaroid she’d taken of Ava that morning, sitting on the floor next to the present. She’s smiling wide at Mama, though she’d been hoping for makeup or a hair dryer rather than the relic Mama pulled out of the dusty attic. The dollhouse looked like one of the big Victorians in Oak Park, outside cornflower-blue, windows trimmed in white. Each room had been furnished with replica antiques. A clawfoot tub and toilet with a pull-chain flush; cast-iron stove and wooden icebox; Queen Anne sofa and side chairs next to the living room fireplace; three bedrooms fitted with four-poster beds.
“Where are the dolls?” Ava asked.
* * *
Mama showed Ava how to make her first doll.
“Ava,” Mama lifted a delicate gold chain up and over her head, “It’s time we made a doll together.” Her fingers fumbled at the tiny clasp of the locket that she’d been wearing since Granny passed. She pulled a wisp of colorless hair out and pinched it delicately between her thumb and forefinger and murmured, “The hair is the most important part. It won’t do to use yarn or string.”
“Is that Granny’s hair?!” Ava shrieked. “We can’t make a doll with that! That’s creepy!”
Mama sighed and gave Ava an indulgent smile. “A long time ago, all dolls were made with human hair.”
Ava’s stared with steely eyes at the hair. “I bet it wasn’t from dead people! And even if it was, no one does that anymore because it’s weird! Besides, why do we have to make a doll? Why can’t we just buy one?”
Mama set her hands in her lap, enclosing the hair in her fist. “Because I promised Granny I would do it.”
“What? No!”
“Can you just do one thing for me Ava, without complaining and arguing about it?”
“I’m not complaining! I’m telling you what I want! You never listen. We always do what you want! I don’t want to make a doll!”
“This is how it has to be done!” Mama shouted. Her eyes blazed before filling with angry tears. She lowered her head. “Never mind. Just go to your room.”
Ava sat silent for a minute, trying to stoke the fire she’d built in her heart. She glared at Mama, small and breakable, and at the tears that plopped onto her fist, where she held that last remnant of Granny. “Alright, Mama,” she whispered, and felt hot tears welling in her own eyes. “Please don’t be mad, please. Please? We can do it.”
Mama looked up, a smile already beginning to form at the corners of her mouth now that she’d gotten her way. She rubbed a fist under her eyes and reached out to Ava saying, “Oh Ava! Don’t cry! We’ll get through this together.”
* * *
Mama cut off the foot of a nylon stocking and stuffed it with cotton balls to form the torso. Ava made a stocky, unjointed pair of legs with air-dry clay from Ben Franklin. Mama made the head and arms out of clay, sculpting rough features with the point of an orange stick. They used it to poke holes through the shoulder and hip joints of the clay limbs so they could attach them to the torso. Finally, Mama glued the skein of hair to the head. After leaving the doll to dry on the kitchen table, Mama snipped one of Granny’s blue calico dresses into strips. She wrapped these around the doll, tying a piece of kitchen twine at the waist. It looked ugly and shapeless.
“There,” Mama said when she propped the Granny doll, legs splayed stiffly, onto the red velvet cushions of the dollhouse loveseat. “She’s home now.” The doll sagged to the side, but Mama began to look as if a great weight had lifted from her shoulders.
“I’m sorry about Granny, Mama. I’m sorry I was mean to you earlier,” Ava told her, want to encourage the new lightness that she saw so rarely any more in Mama.
Mama stood up from where she had crouched, peering into the dollhouse and smiled at Ava. “I need to tell you something.”
Ava held her breath, riding the words back to the icy morning in Chicago when Mama told her they were leaving. Perhaps this was the beginning of some new branch on their path. Ava feared where it might lead.
“It’s okay,” Mama said, sitting on Ava’s bed. She held out her hand, smiling, beckoning. “I should’ve explained to you why we did this.”
“I know why we did it.” Ava started cautiously holding her hands in her lap, staying where she was. “Because I needed a doll. And you didn’t want to buy one.”
“It’s more than that. I want to tell you something. I’m still working through it all, but I’ve started to figure some things out.”
Ava waited, unsure what Mama might say next. She moved closer to Mama.
“Do you know what happens when we die?”
Ava hadn’t been ready for that and looked down at her hands. She and Mama had never talked about things like that. “Um, at the service they said Granny was in heaven...”
Mama’s voice became sorrowful. “I wish that were true. But there’s no such thing, Ava. Heaven is just a story people tell to make themselves feel better.”
“Then … what happens when you die?”
“The body your spirit is born into is its natural home. When you die and that body is gone, your spirit has to find a new place. It leaves and goes out into the world, searching, looking for that place it once belonged. If someone doesn’t call it back and catch it the way we did with Granny, it gets lost and wanders forever.”
Ava felt claustrophobic, imagining spirits of dead things around them, in the countertop, the coffeemaker, the faded chintz curtains on the window, the air they were breathing in and out. She wasn’t sure if she believed Mama.
“How do you know?”
“Granny told me.”
Ava skin prickled and she asked in a small voice, “When?”
“She started to talk to me at night, the week after she passed. She told me how to bring her back in, how to take care of her.”
“But Mama …”
“I know. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” Mama admitted and smiled wider, talking louder. “At first, I didn’t believe it either. I didn’t want to say anything to you until I was sure.”
Ava felt small and lonely listening to Mama say these things that she still didn’t believe. She furrowed her brow. “Well, how do you know Granny wants to be stuck in that doll?”
Mama shrugged, dismissing this. “Why wouldn’t she want to be here? Granny’s happy to be with us. She told me something very important though, Ava. You need to keep her fed or she won’t stay.”
“Fed? How would I feed a doll?”
“She’s made of clay now so she doesn’t eat food like we eat anymore. We’ll have to make her things and leave them beside her. Not as often as we eat either, but we do need to leave her new things every week or so.”
So Ava had obliged, making Granny little clay meals. Easy stuff at first – apples, hot dogs, rolls. She left them in the dollhouse kitchen on tiny China plates when she remembered. She’d never liked dolls much, but making the food was fun.
* * *
Ava didn’t tell Mama what she saw the night after they made Granny’s doll as she lay in bed trying to fall asleep, quilt pulled high to cover her ear. Finally starting to doze off, she heard a scuff on the floor. She held her breath and opened her eyes a slit. Granny was in front of her, grown into a gigantic version of the lumpy doll. Ava’s hair stood up on the back of her neck. She didn’t move as Granny brushed back her hair and leaned to plant a kiss on her forehead. Granny’s lips felt damp and cold, like fresh clay.
* * *
Summer that year was oppressively hot. They kept the windows open all night for the breeze and soaked in cold baths during the day. Late in August, a thunderstorm rumbled through overnight, riding a cold front whose wind rattled the shutters. In the morning, Ava shivered as she went to close the window next to the dollhouse. As she approached, she saw the destruction. Wind had scattered tiny furniture across the floor. Bending to pick up a wing chair, she saw the Granny-doll’s head on the floor, split in two, all the hair blown away. Pinprick eyes made from black beads bored into Ava’s. She called for Mama, who came running.
“Don’t worry, Mama!” Ava said, snatching up the head. “I’ll glue her back together!”
“It’s no good,” Mama wailed. “She’s gone! We’ve got no way of getting her back!”
Ava held Mama and stroked her hair, Mama curling back in on herself like a comma, numbing Ava’s leg with the weight of her body. They buried the broken Granny doll next to Granny’s grave inside the iron ring of the family cemetery.
* * *
Many years later, Ava had tried to leave, had gotten all the way to the University of Kansas to study English, but then Mama had gotten sick during Ava’s sophomore year. There was no one else to take care of Mama, so she had come home. There were lots of tests, but the doctors couldn’t come up with a confident diagnosis – something with her circulation or her heart. Ambiguity suited Mama. She lay in bed most days, watching TV in a flowered house dress. When she wanted something, she rang a silver bell she kept on the nightstand. Then it was “Fetch me some water,” or “The remote’s not working.”
* * *
Just a month ago, Ava listened from downstairs, waiting until the third time Mama rang the bell. When she opened the door, Mama’s eyes stared back at her from a face that looked like a rind of cheese. Her head was propped on the pillow, a halo of gray hair fanned around. Ava wrinkled her nose at the stale-urine smell hanging in the air.
“Ava,” Mama said, her voice like the leathery wings of a bat. “Can you go to the third drawer in my dresser? All the way in the back, there’s a box. Get it for me.”
How long will I be doing just as Mama wants? Ava wondered. Never a ‘please’, never a ‘thank you’. She squatted in front of the dresser and dug past polyester slacks in every color, some with the tags still on. Behind that, she found a cedar chest, smaller than a shoebox and polished mirror-smooth.
“This, Mama?” she held it up.
“That’s it. Bring it over to me.”
Mama set it on her belly. She took out and laid beside her a notebook folded into a tube, its soft black cover tied with a leather thong. Then a narrow velvet pouch, six inches long, trimmed in silk piping and crisscrossed with embroidery, so dark purple it was almost black. Mama opened the snap and pulled out tarnished silver scissors, the body and legs of a bird forming their handle, the beak their blades. They looked ancient and sharp. After turning them over in her hands, she slid them back in the pouch. Without warning, she reached out and grabbed Ava’s wrist, stronger than she looked.
“Take these,” Mama said, pressing the pouch into Ava’s hand. “I don’t have long. I’ll need you to take care of me after I go, so I’m not lost.”
“Mama, you’re ok. You’ll be fine. You’re just not feeling well today.” Fear clenched at her heart, though she wasn’t sure that it was for Mama.
“No Ava, this is different,” Mama said. She sounded wheezy and hoarse.
Ava went down to the pantry. She brought up a package of polymer clay to Mama’s room along with a card table, so she could work by Mama’s bed.
“I’ll be careful this time,” Ava told Mama.
And she was. She shaped the doll’s neat limbs, then molded tiny fingers and toes. Mama looked on as Ava sculpted the head and face, glancing at Mama every now and then to check the likeness. After the doll’s head, torso, and limbs came out of the oven, Ava painted on red lips, black eyes, and slim brows. She sewed a blue cotton dress, adding a bit of white ribbon to tie at the waist.
It was well after dark by the time she finished. “There,” she held the bald doll up for Mama to see when she was done.
“It’ll do,” Mama said.
* * *
Ava stayed with Mama that night, sitting up in the chair and dreamed of unsettling things. She awakened once in the middle of the night, imagining phosphorescent animal eyes peering at her from the darkness around the farmhouse. Mama was asleep, gently snoring. The doll made sat on the nightstand; eyes staring blankly at the wall, lips fixed in a cherry-red smile.
In the morning, Mama didn’t wake up, though her chest continued to rise and fall, even as Ava leaned across the bed to clip a lock of hair. She glued it to the doll’s head as she thought about the obligation stretching ahead, measured in an unending line of tiny clay meals. Thought of herself, rooted to the house, drifting up and down the stairs like a shade.
Before she called for paramedics, she rolled the doll in a handkerchief and placed it at the bottom of the cedar box. Ava didn’t visit the husk that had been Mama during the two days she remained in the hospital.
* * *
After the funeral, it took Ava three days to clear out Mama’s bedroom. She moved blocky wooden furniture and ancient knick-knacks down the stairs and out to the rubbish heap by the barn. After each trip, she washed the scrum of dust from her hands. She had to use an axe to break down the antique bed into pieces light enough for her to carry. While orange light flickered across her face, she threw Mama’s bedding and clothes into the fireplace, waiting for each piece to catch and crinkle to a blackened fragment before tossing the next in.
She kept the polished cedar box. Inside it scissors nestled in their velvet pouch under the leatherbound book that documented Mama’s conversations with the dead, and beneath all that rested a hard, shrouded bundle.
* * *
Inside the dollhouse, which now sits on a folding table in the otherwise empty bedroom, Ava arranges the clay banquet she spent the morning preparing. Then she opens the cedar box and unwraps Mama’s doll. She puts her on the dollhouse loveseat and places a tray of cookies in her lap to accompany the tea service set on the end table beside her.
Ava takes the cedar box downstairs, where she’s built a fire in the living room fireplace. For a moment, she thinks about tossing it in the fireplace and watching the flames eat away the box and its contents. Instead, she sets it down and adds another log to the fire. As the wood thumps onto the hearth, it disturbs bits of ash that circle upward, matching the speed of the snow that’s started to fall outside. In the foyer, she takes her coat from the hook by the door and goes outside, where she can see the top of the cemetery fence, just over the next rise. As she watches, snowflakes stick to her face and melt there, dotting her cheeks like tears.
* * *
“Fairy Bites.” That’s what Ava calls her Etsy shop. She works in polymer clay—the kind you cure in the oven and paint afterward. She runs the fan and opens the kitchen door while she bakes so she can air out the plasticky smell. The cured clay is sturdy; doesn’t crack in summer heat or weaken in rainy day damp. Her customers rave about her attention to detail and delight in her elaborate miniature cakes, pies, and pastries, which look almost good enough to eat.
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