.

force her again. Suddenly I remembered the doll family.

      I had ordered the dolls from the school supply catalogue the year before and stored them in my closet, waiting for the right time to bring them out. Surely, if there was a right time, this was it.

      The next morning, after Circle, I announced that we were going to add something new to Best and Worst. I placed the box in the middle of the table. In the closet I said to Hannah, ‘Hey, come see. I’ve got a box for you to open.’

      She peeked out of the closet to see what I was talking about. The box sat invitingly on the table. Hannah couldn’t resist it. She skirted the table twice on her own and then suddenly sat down and peeled off the tape and pulled the box open. She lifted out the brown crumpled packing paper and sat staring at the contents. Then, one by one, she lifted out the members of the miniature family, unwrapping each one carefully and laying it on the table. Man, woman, girl, boy, baby.

      The dolls were made of a hard, wax-like substance, a kind of moulded rubber, pliable, durable, sturdy enough to take bending and pounding.

      We all sat looking at the dolls. No one seemed sure what to do next. On impulse, I picked up the woman and girl dolls and put their arms around each other. ‘My best thing is that Elizabeth, my daughter, came home from college for a visit last night.’

      I talked for about two minutes, telling how my daughter and I had gone to a movie and bought some ice cream. As I talked I was bending the dolls to sit, pushing them along the table, pretending they were moving in the car.

      The children watched, their eyes never moving from the little figures. When I finished I laid the two dolls back on the table.

      Rufus was sitting next to me, and he picked up the man doll and in a loud, authoritarian voice said, ‘If I’m doing the cooking, I’ll do it the way I want to. So shut up!’

      We all stared at him. None of us had ever heard Rufus speak like that before. Obviously he was being someone else.

      Now he picked up the woman doll and in a high, wistful voice said, ‘You never listen to me, no matter what it is. Cooking or anything else.’

      Maybe not, but we listened to Rufus. Forgetting time limits, we sat spellbound as he acted out a household drama, using first one doll and then another. When he finished he pushed the dolls to the middle of the table and leaned back with a tired, satisfied sigh.

      Jamie picked up each doll and inspected it carefully. He petted the baby and kissed the mother and then put them back without saying a word.

      Brian had his turn and acted out a TV commercial.

      And now, look at Hannah. She picked up the boy doll and put him under the box. She pushed hard on the box, which wobbled in an unsatisfactory way. She got up from the table, went to the block wagon, and pulled it back to the table. What was she doing? She laid out one, two, three, four blocks in a square and put the boy doll in the middle. Was he supposed to be her brother, Carl? Bang, she put a block on the top, then another and another.

      Hannah looked up at us and smiled. For the first time in our room she smiled with pure joy, as she added block after block on top of the boy doll.