Free Small World by Tabitha King Page A

make love to Lucy. Except that he didn’t want to make love to her. He wanted her to lie still and unresponsive, like a mannequin, or a rag doll; he wanted to punish her with his sex.
    He drove fast, sweating out the fear of his own anger. He might be able to talk to his father about this new experience of rage in love; the old gambler must understand what it was. But his father was far away on his island, sleeping the sleep of the old and justified. Leyna’s address was not far out of his way. She would at least return him to himself.
    She had removed her silly high heels and they stood eye to eye. A long time later, he was able to sleep.
    Lucy was glad when the Sunday segment finished interviewing Nick and let him narrate clips from the dollhouse exhibition. She could watch the dollhouses and their contents, and divorce the even, still faintly British-public-school-accented voice from him.
    Little girls, and sometimes not-so-little girls, have played with dollhouses for as long as human memory can recall. Generation after generation of children have played at house, with their own child-size or smaller version of their parents’ tools and utensils, furniture, and the rooms to put them in, turning learning into play as children do, practicing at living.
    The camera illustrated: tiny blue enamel spatterware pots and pans, a brass sewing machine, a cradle, fairy-size toys for the dolls’ babies.
    Adults too made miniature forms of their possessions and buildings for purposes other than childrens’ play. From the time of the pharaohs, in whose tombs tiny jewellike models of every kind of thing that the people used have been found, people have made what we call now miniatures, not only for religious purposes, but for merchandising. There were miniature objects that were samples of goods too heavy or bulky to be casually transported, or which were models of future full-scale things (many dollhouses, even today, are in fact architectural models of real buildings) . . .
    An enameled and gilded altar, one-seventh of the size of the original, was displayed against dark velvet. A toy train, with a tiny, shabby engineer in it; a gleaming, polished piano; an iron oven, showed to less splendor before an elegant Edwardian dollhouse; the architect’s model of a long-vanished Manhattan townhouse.
    ... or that were samples in the sense of today’s commercial samples, enticements to buy. Dollhouses and miniatures have been used as teaching aids, so that little girls of bygone eras might learn the complicated arts of housewifery . . .
    A clumsy-looking iron; folded and yellowed linen; rusty knives and spoons of wildly varying sizes; a set of crystal glasses and a decanter; a drying rack; a moth-eaten bellows; all shown in a disproportionately huge kitchen, so crowded with utensils and tools that no self-respecting doll could hope to get a minute’s work done in the clutter.
    . . . Other dollhouses preserve past ways of life, domestic arts of other times, or sometimes famous rooms or famous houses. It is the grown-up collector or miniatures-maker who is interested in historical illustration, of course. And sometimes, we find a dollhouse that someone’s passion and skill has made a work of art, in response to that instinct of human beings to transmute the most mundane objects into something more.
    The final vision of the camera was at the Stettheimer dollhouse, the 1920s creation of a trio of sisters that is at once a work of art, a historic illustration of a period life-style, and a never-neverland toy, a dollhouse for not-so-little girls.
    What draws us to dollhouses and their tiny furnishings? Perhaps it is a simple, obvious, and appropriately childish reason— littleness: the reproduction of our world on a reduced scale, in which we are in charge, just as we were when we played at being Mom and Dad, parents to our dollies, which become ourselves.
    Lucy’s father snorted as the segment ended. ‘Piled that a little high, didn’t