Read Online Interior Design by Philip Graham - Free Book Online Page B

demonstration home they believed they were in much fuller spaces. I thought this was a terrible way to make a living, to ensure that a home grew smaller once a family moved in with their full-sized furniture. Think of it, an entire house a subtle, secret lie! Their walls static but always closing in, the family would become increasingly irritable and argue over nothing. Throughout my childhood I wanted my father to be a fireman, someone who saved homes.
    We moved from place to place before Father’s dissatisfied customers could accumulate, and over the years he filled our successive homes with three-quarter-sized cast-offs from his old displays. Each chair and table was a hard example of his special talent for belittling those around him. My mother was already shrunken under his steady contempt and Phyllis and Patricia, with their carefully imposed silences, were ripe for squeezing themselves into reduced limits. My sisters fit so well that Father soon took them along to work on weekends, where they became part of his devious display and helped his sales. I was never invited to the showroom because, happily, I was too tall for my age.
    I grew up frightened by and yet longing for furniture. A simple chair with its inviting cushions was a forbidding object, and when I thought of my mother and sisters forever crimped, I was prepared for the discomfort of fitting nowhere in our home. I remember at dinnertime looking at all the plates and glasses, obscenely huge on the runty table, and I insisted on sitting on a telephone book. “It’s for my posture,” I explained, though my secret reason was I didn’t want to touch that chair, and because I never leaned back—to avoid resting against the tiny wicker backing—I endured those childhood dinners with aching shoulders.
    My willful isolation from the contamination of touch also extended to my mother and sisters: I couldn’t bear the thought of a stunted embrace. So it was a thrilling release to hear, however cautious and clinical the telling in my school’s sex education class, about the grapplings of love. I was proud to discover how girls were much more complicated than boys, that women were born with their ovaries full, an egg waiting decades to be fertilized by a single shrimp of a sperm. My opinion of Father lowered still further for his inability to appreciate us, and then I learned it was the male who determines the sex of the child.
    I took no small pleasure in telling my father that he was the failure of the family. “I don’t need to hear such language from you , young lady,” he said.
    Mother sat across the room from us, her eyes made dull by patience. Yet there was a minute smile on her face—a smile that I would see at the oddest moments for the rest of my life—and I wondered, was it faint support, or relief that she was momentarily forgotten?
    â€œThat’s right,” I laughed, “I am a young lady, not a stupid son.”
    â€œDon’t you talk to me that way,” Father shouted, “you sit down here and…”
    â€œIn this creepy furniture? Forget it.” While Father sputtered, my sisters huddled beside their dollhouse: prisoners playing a game of Warden, poking their dolls into furniture even smaller than ours. And then I remembered something else from biology class, about age and the atrophy of bones. I shouted at Father that like everyone else he was going to shrink with old age and die three-quarter sized on a full-sized bed. He stood there silent and trembling, with a face so fallen I ran from the room, furious that my father wasn’t as untouchable as I had imagined. That night, and for long after, I dreamt I was three-quarter sized: my legs, arms, head and heart, and I was crammed inside that damned dollhouse. My body was bent and buckled, an arm out a window, a leg down a stairwell, and then I reversed and grew so small I could fit in one of those rooms, sitting comfortably