Like Hansel and Gretel, we follow a path.
If we were really Hansel and Gretel, we鈥檇 walk through wolf-filled woods, the sky dark, a bright moon overhead. Here, we wander amid a bright thicket of beds and dressers, desks and chairs.
There are arrows painted on the floor, but these feel unnecessary. Most everyone in the Ikea showroom stays on the path, an amiable herd only aware we are walking together when someone comes at us the wrong way.
We walk past room after room. There are pretend television sets, of course. But unlike in other furniture stores, the unseen inhabitants of these imaginary rooms read books鈥攖hey are stacked on coffee tables, jammed into bookshelves, left open on the arms of chairs. There is art in the Ikea living room, too, evidence of life lived. Bedrooms, kitchens, and bathrooms are dusted with reality. Look, the children have left their toys in the corner! A beautifully cut suit (not for sale) hangs in the smart, career-woman closet, her empty shoes lined up just so.
The rooms are real and yet not, like life-sized dollhouses. They are just slightly uncanny. Empty yet filled with clues about lives interrupted, they are like the Three Bears鈥 cottage when Goldilocks enters, and I walk through them like Goldilocks, covetous but a little guilty about it. Although I tell my young son to look with his eyes, not with his hands, I confess I do both. I touch it all.
As a child, I loved fairy tales. The book I adored most was big and blue, old even before my father grew up on it and quite battered by the time it came to my brothers and me. As ancient as it seemed to me then, it was a baby compared to the stories inside鈥攕cholars now say that many of the tales predate, in their oral form, the development of the languages in which they were first written down.
Fairy tales are at once eternal and endlessly renewable. Everything that happens in them鈥攖rickery and deception, transgression and harsh justice, magic and danger and love鈥攅vokes something of what childhood is like, or really, what life is like. We may never face a witch or bear, but every one of us learned as kids how it feels to lie, pretend to be someone else, or outsmart somebody bigger and stronger.
My mother tossed it out, that beloved blue book, after a flooded basement waterlogged it. Those years that I imagined myself lost in the woods or hiding from a witch, our mother was drowning in depression, occasionally erupting into mania. I wanted to be as self-sufficient as Hansel and Gretel, whose abandonment by their parents terrified but did not shock me. I yearned to believe that at the end of scary journeys, there would be safe homecomings, that fairy godmothers could divine our good intentions, that children do triumph, even when their families go wrong.
When I was the age my son is now, I built little houses wherever I could: out of shoeboxes in my closet, out of twigs and stones in the yard. My mother once told me that as a toddler, I liked to group everything in threes: mama, daddy, child. I鈥檓 still comforted by certainty and order. I can鈥檛 know if it鈥檚 because my mother was erratic and our house often chaotic, but I鈥檝e grown into the kind of person who likes things simple: no secrets, no hidden dangers, a clearly marked path to follow. I鈥檓 impatient, but I can wait forever for the other shoe to drop.
At Ikea, though, I always feel as if nothing bad can happen. All those tidy little rooms, like a happy house whose family has just stepped out. As if a kind of enchantment is at work.
I know not everyone feels the same way. You can spot the resisters: they grumble about the pathway鈥攖hey want to choose their own path! Marital arguments sometimes erupt during Ikea shopping, or during the assembly of furniture back at home. Once, in an Ikea outside Boston, I found myself walking behind a couple through the forest of beds. They began squabbling, and as their voices rose and arms began wheeling, I realized they were two distinguished professors of literature, an unmarried couple well known in the department where I worked as a secretary.
The scene reminded me of another fairy tale in the big blue book鈥斺淭oads and Diamonds鈥濃攊n which a spoiled young woman meets a fairy godmother disguised as an old beggar. The fairy godmother asks for help drawing water from the well; when the girl refuses, she becomes cursed: every time she opens her mouth to speak, frogs and lizards slither out. The story fascinated and chastened me. I knew my mother felt I talked too much, was difficult, was not kind. Secretly, I thought of myself as the sort of person who would be sweet to an old beggar, but I knew my mother wished I were sweeter to her.
The literature professors spat amphibians at one another all through the bedrooms, then vanished as they stepped off the path. I stayed on, my mouth shut tight.
Later, at an Ikea in Atlanta, I watched a group of expensively dressed, well-coiffed women marvel at each of the tiny apartment layouts we came upon. 鈥淚 live in 590 square feet鈥 was painted on the wall of one. 鈥淚 live in 380 square feet鈥, 鈥淚 live in 240 square feet.鈥 My New York and Boston friends lament their cramped apartments, yearning for room to spread out. I saw a different kind of longing in the eyes of these women as they took in the tidiness and tininess of these spaces, like playhouses loved in girlhood. As I imagined it, instead of daydreaming a future life, they were wondering what it would be like to have a different one, solitary and self-contained, no vast, suburban, carpeted expanses to vacuum.
I know it鈥檚 just a store鈥擨 leave my money behind and take things home鈥攂ut sometimes I鈥檓 so powerfully enthralled, I don鈥檛 remember what I鈥檝e bought until I pull things out of bags. Ikea鈥檚 enchantment lies in the multiple realities it suggests, the idea that any kind of home, or life, could be within reach.
What if the path went that way instead of this? What if instead of insulting that beggar woman, you filled her bucket? In the fairy tale, the vain young woman鈥檚 kinder sister helped the disguised fairy godmother, and instead of frogs and lizards, diamonds and pearls fell from that girl鈥檚 mouth.
In the Hansel and Gretel story鈥檚 earliest form, the children鈥檚 mother and father abandon them in the forest because there isn鈥檛 enough food to feed them (in later versions, the mother is replaced by a stepmother). The children yearn to get home, but the reader knows home is not any safer than the forest. Still, Hansel and Gretel are desperate to return. They refuse to stay in the forest and starve; they refuse to be killed and eaten by the witch. That they deserve to live is never in doubt鈥攋ust as the fact that their parents want to kill them is never examined鈥攁nd when they finally do make it home, their father has come to his senses and their stepmother, or mother, is gone.
As a child, I could never figure out what I was supposed to learn from 鈥淗ansel and Gretel.鈥 I understood that 鈥淭oads and Diamonds鈥 had a lesson for me, just as 鈥淏eauty and the Beast鈥 did (although I remained confused about why anyone would prefer the boring prince to the wonderful beast). But beyond their cleverness and will to survive, what could Hansel and Gretel teach me? Wasn鈥檛 the moral of that story better aimed at parents? Don鈥檛 abandon your children鈥攜ou will regret it or be punished for it. Or maybe the story of Hansel and Gretel is itself a little bread-crumbed path, a line of clues laid out in childhood that you don鈥檛 notice until you鈥檙e grown:
Once upon a time, you were a child. But you survived. Someday, you will grow up and make your own home. It will be what you always wanted it to be鈥攖he children鈥檚 toys in the corner, the book open upon a chair.
Photographic response by聽Sanja Vrzi膰
Kate Tuttle is a writer based in New Jersey. She is a book columnist for the Boston Globe; her reviews, profiles, and essays have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, New York Times, Salon, and The Rumpus. 痴颈蝉颈迟听聽to read her work on books and authors, race and politics, family and childhood.聽She is currently serving as president of the National Book Critics Circle.
Sanja Vrzi膰 is an architect, photographer, and graphic designer. She was born in Sarajevo, where she completed a degree in architecture in 2010. Since then, she has worked as a freelancer in Sarajevo, Paris, and Nice. Her expertise is in landscape, documentary, and cultural photography.
Published on November 2, 2017.
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