The Marionette Theatre
Brianna Di Monda
When I first revisited my childhood home, it was after an absence of twenty-two years. My sister opened the front door, and I stepped through its threshold, intoxicated by the proximity of the past. Our home held souvenirs that had long been forgotten, that had been buried in the recesses of memory. A fine layer of dust covered the tabletops in the living room, where the nurse had set up my father’s hospice bed. As though preserved in a time capsule, we found Franklin Roosevelt’s framed letter to my father; the wine stopper our aunt had bought in Murano; a stack of papers that contained letters of thanks, of congratulations, of old essays my sister and I had written at Choate, with the teachers’ comments in faded red pen.
In the library, we waded through shelves of the family’s collection: the complete works of Emerson, Churchill, Carlysle, and Hawthorne; Hale’s A New England Boyhood; the 1904-1910 yearbooks for The Bibliophile Society, our cousin’s book on the crisis of sixteenth-century Italy, the private correspondence of Charles Dickens and Maria Beadnell, Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and a bound collection of my father’s research at Harvard.
My bedroom was the most difficult corner to sort through. While cleaning out boxes, I found my old dolls. I grabbed one and smoothed its hair down. I stared at its manicured nails, its long legs, its narrow torso, all features so unlike my wider and more wild body. When my mother first gave it to me, she’d told me it was okay if I liked girls. That I could tell her if I was. I was only eleven. I had looked up at her, unsure what it had to do with the new toy. The little woman.
Those dolls proved impossible to play with. They had too many outfits, too many shoes, too many ways to style their hair. They required constant maintenance and grooming, indoctrinating my pre-pubescent body into the rituals of self-care. Some of them were missing limbs from the times I had thrown them across the room in frustration, making my sister jump as she finished homework at her desk.
My mom pulled dresses over my nose and by the time my head popped out the top, my hair stood up like a bird’s nest. She brushed my hair, put bows in it, and sent me off to school. One of the older boys grabbed me by the braids on my way home. He put his fat, wet lips on my mouth and asked if I was ready for the “wild thing.” I’ll never forget my mom’s face when she found out. Her face was dead white and her jaw hung open like a catfish. All I knew to say as she sat sobbing on the couch was, “I thought you wanted me to like boys.” That really did it.
When my parents shipped me off to the youth residential treatment center (telling all their friends I was transferring to boarding school), I stuffed the dolls into the dresser’s bottom drawer and left them to rot. Uncovering the past was not much in my nature. It was something I had avoided all these years: once I left the house, I continued forward blindly. Yet rooms full of objects lay in wait for this inevitable homecoming. The house stood as a reminder that the past will not always be the past. That I was wrong to insist I had nothing but my own, unreliable memory with which to remember my childhood.
Brianna Di Monda is a Contributing Editor at The Cleveland Review. Her fiction and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Worms Magazine, Flaunt Magazine, and COUNTERCLOCK, among others. She was nominated for the 2021 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.