main job was designing and building prisons. It paid him well. Laura and her seven brothers lived in a large house with many rooms, so many that no one had to share with anyone else, and their mother watched them during the morning and at night and after school with a careful, quiet eye. In the basement, underneath the stairs, there was enough space for Laura to create a makeshift playroom. She stored costumes down there, in boxes on top of boxes, and piles of books that expanded and shrunk as she grew older and time floated by; bobbing on waves, sprinting down sidewalks.
Her father, despite working very much and being at home very little, had a workshop in the basement. He wrote down a list of rules for Laura and her brothers, but the most important one was this: they were never, ever, to go into his workshop. The workshop belonged to his dolls.
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It was what he did in his spare time. Make dolls. When Laura was nine, her father built a large dollhouse to store them all in, and set it up near the windows in their living room. All work and no play, her mother teased him, but he didn’t find that joke amusing. He didn’t find much of anything amusing, her father. One of his rules was to always keep a straight face. Like in poker. Neither to bend nor to break he was fond of saying.
He took the dolls very seriously. Laura and her brothers were not allowed to touch them. That was another rule, a big one, one of the five “unbreakables.” They were intricate creatures. Her mother made the dolls small outfits in her spare time: dresses with petticoats, tuxedo pants, little shoes that lined the windowsill in pairs. She combed their hair out, braided it if it was long enough, knitted them headbands and elaborate bows out of thin ribbons and wire.
But the most noticeable thing about the dolls was their beauty. It arrested the eyes. Guests visiting their house would end up mesmerized by the dollhouse and its inhabitants for hours, stuck in an endless loop of gazing, sighing, stationary admiring.
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