Shadow Box

When I was young, and my mother began filling my hope chest with bed sheets and serving spoons and cuttings of colorful fabrics, and saving pictures from the JC Penney catalog of china hutches and dinnerware and lush comforters for someday, I created shadow boxes for places I dreamed of visiting.

I’d spend birthday money on bags of seashells and craft sand from the hobby shop for a Hawaiian beach scene, create a Swiss ski village with cotton balls and thrift store sweaters cut into tiny versions for Popsicle stick skiers, prop toothpick tents on top of papier-mâché Kilimanjaros and Everests. These adorned my room, anointing my dresser and the fake wood paneling of our trailer walls with my fantasies.

My mother once came in while I was dusting them and said, “It’s all well and good to dream. Dreaming keeps a body moving.”

She placed a hand on her hip. “But why don’t you make one of home? Why not include that?”

For her I did, with a pocket mirror for a TV and a piece of old plaid pajama pants stitched into a couch.

“That’s what home is to you?” she asked, so I added foliage cut from a bouquet of silk flowers to represent her spindly houseplants. She shook her head, so I stayed up late creating a kitchen that looked nothing like ours. It was filled with teensy fresh-baked cookies, pots of soup boiling on the stove, and a smiling mom in an apron, made out of an old He-Man doll.

My mother displayed it in our own dim kitchen for a week.

I asked if I could go to summer camp in Florida and she offered me a secondhand boom box and a hot pink comforter with palm trees on it. I said I’d like to build houses around the country with Habitat for Humanity and she surprised me with a birdhouse-making kit. I mentioned my crush on a foreign exchange student named Antoine and she set me up on a date with a neighbor boy who it was rumored could get a girl pregnant just by looking at her.

By then, I knew exactly how to dance around the living room looking pleased while shaking out the ache.

In my senior year of high school, long after the neighbor boy showed no interest in me, I confessed my wish to go to college like some of my friends, preferably some place I could study abroad. My mother signed me up for the dental hygienist program at the community college and paid my tuition in full. When she surprised me with the news over dinner at Red Lobster, I mustered movie-level excitement and leapt into the air before giving her a hug. Then I ran to the bathroom and cried.

When the dentist at my first job wanted to marry me, he asked her permission first. She booked the rec center and spent what was left of her savings on my dress before I could answer. Her face glowed when she squeezed my hands and told me I was set. Later, I eyed the top button of his crisp plaid shirt and asked if he at least liked to travel.

As he slipped a ring on my finger, he promised we’d go to every one of my dream spots before we’d been married a year. I took a few steps back, staring at my damp, hanging hand, but he didn’t seem to notice as he pulled me close, turning my finger this way and that in the light.

“See how it sparkles?” he said. “That’s what the ocean looks like.”

My dentist already had a nice house—a real one with textured white walls—so I moved straight from my mother’s house into his. This was after our three-day honeymoon in Vegas, where we visited The Eiffel Tower and The Venetian and New York-New York and he joked that we could check those cities off the list.

“See how it sparkles?” he said. “That’s what the ocean looks like.”

I set up my shadow boxes in the treehouse in the backyard—I knew grownups didn’t decorate their homes with things like that, and the dentist already had a very specific décor of slick leather and minimalism.

We had kids right away to meet his goal of a family of four before age thirty. Sometimes, I would take them out to the treehouse with a box of craft supplies so they could dream about their futures. But they were like their father and just wanted to look at their phones and play soccer.

Instead of taking them on vacation, we spent summers with my mother or the dentist’s parents, sitting in the living room watching Judge Judy or playing Skip-Bo. The kids grew tall and blank-faced, satisfactory to their grandmothers. Occasionally, I would have coffee with an old friend back in town for a visit and hear about her new job, her new city, her new internet lover.

When she asked about my life, I would show her pictures of the kids and talk about the trade show in Anaheim the dentist promised we would someday attend. After those visits, I would sneak out to the treehouse with a travel magazine from the grocery store and try to make it all the way through before anyone called for me.

On her sickbed, my mother said, “I’m dying, don’t leave me,” so I set up a cot next to her, dabbed her head with a cool cloth, and read aloud from hopeful pamphlets about death. I didn’t get up for lunch or dinner, for the bathroom or the phone.

When her fever finally broke, I asked for permission to step out and get her some Saltines and soup. She threw a Kleenex box at me and said, “You take everything I say so goddamn literally.”

I stood there, confused, until she requested a glass of water and her medication.

“You always were clingy,” she sighed after swallowing her pills and handing me the empty glass. “Not a girl to follow her own star, not my daughter.”

She fluffed her sheets and snored through my fumbled rebuttal.

When she died three years later, with the family gathered around her hospital bed exactly as requested, I thought I would grab my husband by the collar and give him some tongue before head-butting him into Tuesday. I thought I would buy a pair of skis and a one-way ticket to the actual Swiss Alps, and that would be just for starters.

But my mother’s doctor patted my shoulder and said, “You’re an angel,” and my husband wrapped an arm around me and said, “My girl has a calling,” and I found myself smiling just right and then going home to polish the kitchen floor to a bright shine, fertilize the ficus and philodendron, and make fifty perfect canapés for the memorial.

When the dentist came in for a late-night snack, I glanced around at my textured white walls, tightened the bow on my ruffled apron, and held out the pretty butterfly-patterned Lenox tray of smoked salmon crostini—after all, I could always make another batch.

• 0