House of Dolls

Part One

The Dolls

Part Two

Madison Blackberry

Part Three

Rose

Part Four

Love

About the Author and the Illustrator

Other Books by Francesca Lia Block

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

 

 

 

In the garden was a real bonsai tree and a reflecting pool made from a pocket mirror tucked into a lawn of real moss. The floors were tiled with black-and-white parquet or softly carpeted, and the walls were covered with floral paper, foil mirrors, and paintings in gold doily frames. Above the dining room table was a silver chandelier fixed with birthday candles. Silk and lace curtains hung at every window.

The house belonged to Madison Blackberry, a tall-for-her-age, sour-faced girl who secretly wished, more than almost anything, that she could live in the dollhouse with the dolls. They seemed so warm and cozy, and
they nestled so closely together among the black-and-rose needlepoint pillows on the green velvet chaise longue in the parlor, as if they never wished to be apart.

This was very different from life in the cool, all-white-and-gray penthouse apartment where Madison Blackberry lived with her mother, father, and little brother, Dallas George.

Because the dolls made Madison Blackberry feel lonelier than she already was, she ignored them most of the time. The dolls didn't mind. They spent their days enjoying the company of one another as well as Wildflower's boyfriend, Guy, and Rockstar's
boyfriend, B. Friend, and trying on the clothes that Madison Blackberry's grandmother sewed for them.

The dollhouse had belonged to Madison's grandmother when she was a girl. Her father had made it. She and her mother had played with it together. Wildflower had belonged to Madison's grandmother, too.

Wildflower was a celluloid doll with long black braids of real hair, pale skin, and big brown eyes with painted-on eyelashes. Guy was a dark-skinned plastic doll in army fatigues. It did not matter that they looked nothing alike. The first time Madison Blackberry lay them down next to each other in the
white lace canopy bed and their arms brushed, Wildflower and Guy knew they never wanted to be separated. Because Wildflower had lived so long and seen so much of the world, she would have been content just to sit beside Guy for the rest of her existence.

Rockstar had been given to Madison Blackberry one Hanukkah and she had been a huge disappointment. Madison Blackberry had wanted a more glamorous doll with a lipstick-red mouth, sunglasses, and high heels, but instead she was given the meek, mousy-haired girl with the plastic head, hands, and feet, and the bendable wire body swaddled in linen like a small mummy.

Madison Blackberry named her Rockstar, as a way to remind herself of her mother's injustice, and perhaps as a way to punish the doll for being so plain and much too intelligent for someone with a plastic head. Rockstar would have preferred the name Lillian or Rebecca or Emily Sarah, but as it was, she tried to enjoy the irony of Rockstar and sometimes had fun dressing the part anyway. She longed to pick up the books in the library and read them but was afraid to get caught by Madison Blackberry, who was already frustrated enough with her.

But Rockstar had no idea why Madison Blackberry felt that way.

B. Friend was a devastatingly handsome stuffed bear with button eyes, an embroidered nose, and jointed arms and legs. He was a studious fellow with round wire-rimmed glasses with lenses made of a clear dried nail polish. B. Friend wore a red crochet beret and a red flannel vest and britches. Madison Blackberry had originally named him Boyfriend, but because he was not really a boy, the dolls called him B. (as in bear) Friend for short.

Miss Selene was a delicately crafted fairy with golden curls, pointed ears, lavender eyes, greenish skin, and silver wings. She did not have a boyfriend, but she loved to dream up ideas
for new dresses. One reason Miss Selene thought about dresses so much was that it helped her forget that most things were out of her control.

Madison Blackberry's grandmother had crocheted the runner that went all the way up the polished wood staircase that led to the nursery with the empty cradle, and she had sewed all the silk and lace curtains at the windows. The dresses she made for the dolls were ornate concoctions,
interpretations of styles from every era. There were dresses that made the dolls feel like ice-cream sundaes, flowers, seashells, cocoons, butterflies, angels, goddesses, rock stars, heavenly stars, and moons. In their spellbinding dresses the dolls spent their evenings talking, singing, dancing, and baking tiny play-dough cakes with Guy and B. Friend.

The dolls also delighted in small things like putting the china teacups with blue roses away in the wooden sideboard, pouring water out of the real glass pitcher with gold filigree into the matching glasses, arranging papers and pencils in the rolltop desk,
sniffing the lingering fragrance in the real perfume bottles with dove-shaped stoppers on the glass-topped dressing table, folding their sweaters into the pink-rose paper-lined drawers, and hanging up their dresses on the miniature wooden hangers in the wooden wardrobe.

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes Madison Blackberry's grandmother gave them real lemonade in the glass pitcher, and, instead of a play-dough cake, she gave them one of the real chocolates from her birthday or Valentine's Day box. The coating crumbled a little when they put the birthday candle in, and they could see the mystery of the secret filling—
cream or caramel or more chocolate inside. And for many weeks after, they could smell the chocolate on the brown crinkly wrapper.

Life was small but good.

 

But then, one day, as things always do—even for dolls—everything changed.