“I am Gerda Vander Meer, and I made every one of those dolls,” I said, and I stood up from the porch chair. The woman in the red coat held out her free hand. “Mrs. Vander Meer, my name is Annelise Cho. We signed the contract in the spring, for twenty six designs, and we paid you two million nine hundred thousand dollars. I have been looking for you at the Tulip Time festival for weeks.” She glanced at the card table, at the hundred dolls and the cardboard sign. “Mrs. Vander Meer, I do not understand. These are the first dolls of a collection that will be sold in every toy store in the country.”
Kristi stepped between us with a bright false smile. “Oh, it is only a family sale. We were clearing out the basement.” “You were clearing out my life, Kristi,” I said. “The dolls for a dollar. And that box in the kitchen with the tag of the antique dealer on it. The Delft tea set of my mother, fourteen pieces, offered three thousand six hundred dollars by a man in Des Moines. She carried it across the ocean wrapped in her own nightgowns.” I lifted my hands. “I put those dolls together for fifty years, and my son laughed when you set them out beside the lemonade.” Pieter said nothing, and his hands hung at his sides.
Annelise looked at Pieter, at the cash box, at the lawn chair, and at the neighbor who had been standing quietly with a doll in her hand. “Sir,” she said gently, “you are aware that under the contract every doll bearing the design is the property of the company after signature?” Pieter swallowed. “Mom told me it was just a hobby.” “You never asked what it was,” I said. “You had a hundred ways to ask, and you chose the one that cost me the most.” The carillon in the town square began to play. A brown dog crossed the lawn, sniffed a doll and moved on.
A corn husk doll with a red thread at the waist gave one son the weekend to bring his mother back to the festival in Pella.
I spoke slowly, the way my mother taught me to speak to a wayward cow. “Here are my terms. Every doll returns to the basement before sundown, and Pieter refunds the dollars to every buyer from his own wallet. The tea set stays in the china cabinet, and I will carry the key. The dealer in Des Moines gets a call tonight, and Kristi will make it. And I will be moving out of this house this week, because I have bought one of my own, a little yellow cottage on the edge of town with a garden full of tulips.” Pieter lowered his head. Kristi, for once, had no words.
That Sunday I went to the Tulip Time festival, and I found a surprise waiting. The mayor of Pella, a stout and cheerful man in wooden shoes, was standing at the entrance with a delegation from the Dutch Heritage Society. Annelise had told them everything. A little girl in a white cap and a long blue skirt walked forward with a bouquet of tulips as tall as she was. “Mevrouw Vander Meer,” she said in careful Dutch, “thank you for the dolls.” I took the flowers and held them to my face, and my eyes filled, and the whole street began to clap.
The money consequences were quick. Pieter had borrowed against his truck to pay for a trip to Branson that Kristi had planned, and the lender called the note when the truth came out. The antique dealer in Des Moines, a fair man, said he would not take the matter further, but he would not do business with Kristi again, and that was the end of her little side business buying and selling collectibles. The employer of Pieter, a big grain cooperative, quietly noted the incident in his file. For months afterward, the couple argued in low voices behind the closed door of the guest room.
I did not want to let my heart harden. With part of the licensing money, I started a program that I called the Husk Fund. It pays for craft classes, supplies and a little red thread for any child in Marion County who wants to learn the old Dutch ways. We held the first class in the library on a rainy Saturday in June. Twenty three children sat at long tables and bent the dry husks, and a girl named Annika tied the waist of her first doll with a red thread and held it up to the light. She looked at me, glowing, and I knew the craft would live.
Kristi came to see me at the yellow cottage, carrying the tea set in its newspaper in both arms like an infant. She set it down on my kitchen table and wept. I put the kettle on and let her cry. When she finished, I took out the cups of my mother, and we drank tea together from the Delft blue, with windmills on the saucers. She told me she had been jealous of the dolls for years, because Pieter spoke of them with a tenderness he never showed her. I said it was never about dolls. It was about being seen. She nodded, and we sat quietly together.
Pieter showed up at the festival booth on the first morning of Tulip Time, as I had asked, at six oclock sharp. I handed him a bundle of husks and a ball of twine, and I showed him how to fold the head of a doll. His big fingers were clumsy, and the first one fell apart. The second looked like a frightened turnip. Around noon, he held up a small doll with a bonnet and a skirt, tied at the waist with a bit of red thread. He stared at it as though it were a miracle. “Mom,” he said, “this is so much harder than it looks.”
In the autumn, I put the finished dolls on the shelf in the cottage window, a Dutch girl in wooden shoes, a farm wife with a tiny broom and a bride with a husk veil. Pieter and Kristi came for supper, and the smell of stamppot filled the kitchen. After dinner, Pieter took a little doll from the shelf. It was the one he had made himself, a little crooked, with a red thread at the waist. “Mom,” he said, “may I keep it?” I smiled, and I touched the red thread. “Of course,” I said. “That is how a good thing is passed on.”
