Poet Dana Goodyear peeps into a Bissinger’s sugar egg “like a pair of binoculars” to reflect on her childhood home in the Central West End—and her fascination with everything tiny
I have an impulse toward miniatures of which I am a little bit ashamed. I feel certain that I should be interested only in grand themes and large canvasses, and yet I find myself drawn to scenes that could fit on the head of a match. At an eclectic museum in Los Angeles, where I live, I recently saw a baffling, exciting exhibit of sculptures carved from grains of rice (each viewing case was equipped with a magnifying glass). Having learned that the bonsai, with which my grandfather had a fascination, is not a perverse manipulation of nature for its own sake, but rather is meant to represent a forest viewed distantly, I love it. Through simple optical illusion, it makes an expanse of any room. For many years, I have carried around a 1½- by 2-inch picture frame, decorated with a border of tiny carved flowers. Inside is a picture of my father at a party in the ’70s. He is seated and turned toward the camera so that his jacket gapes to reveal a wide burnt-orange necktie. People are having conversations all around him. I think he is smiling, but his face has faded out and I see only the glossy black shine of his hair, illuminated by a ballroom chandelier. It is a complete world.
This attraction to objects that remake the world small began, naturally, in childhood, with a dollhouse. Mine was white clapboard, like the house I lived in then, and it had working electricity, though the lanterns on either side of the front door required frequent reapplications of a gummy substance from the hardware store to stay put. My mother encouraged my interest, giving me, at Christmas and on my birthday, tiny packages inside which were shrunken pewter candlesticks, tea cozies and realistic fruits made from a salty, hardened flour dough. (I know, because one time the simulacrum had proved too convincing for my willpower and I tried to eat them.) When we moved to London, the dollhouse came along, though the real house, of course, was left behind. We rented a skinny, three-story mews house. I got a second dollhouse, tall and narrow, which I decided was a dry-goods store, where my doll family kept shop. My mother took me to dollhouse conventions, and I spent my allowance on cutlery the length of eyelashes.
I think about poems in this way, too, as miniatures—discrete physical spaces that defy the ordinary rules of time and space. A few months ago, I printed out a list of such spaces to think about in conjunction with my poems. It reads: “Miniatures, Bonsai, Zen Rock Garden, Dollhouse, Diorama, Kunstkammer, Bower, Grotto.” In pencil next to it I wrote “In a Nutshell,” which reminds me that, of course, fairy and morality tales do this miniaturizing work, too, and Thumbelina is the ultimate spokesperson for the genre.
This brings me to Bissinger’s panoramic sugar eggs. After London, and a year in Maryland, I moved, at the age of 11, to the Central West End and was given an egg from Bissinger’s at Easter. This gaudy object held me in thrall: two white sugar half-eggs, sealed with a seam of pink frosting, whose single small opening revealed a meadow wonderland of bunnies and, if I recall, daffodils. When I think of it, I see a pointillist field of baby blue, yellow, chalk pink, bright green. It was inedible, my mother said, so I didn’t have to face the same disillusionment I had undergone with the dollhouse fruit bowl. The egg sat on my bookshelf for years, and I would peer into it like it was a pair of binoculars, which allowed me to spy on a private, Edenic, super-colored universe, designed for one viewer at a time.
Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Honey and Junk (Norton, 2005), which Publishers Weekly praised thus: “All the poems are short and well-calibrated and her poems perfectly reproduce the claustrophobic atmosphere of love among the ruins of plenty.” See her read at the Observable Reading Series on January 10 at 8 p.m. at the Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest; for more information, go to observable.org.
