The Victorian Gothic Italianate house is five minutes away from the little green Cape house that I squeeze in with Mom and my sisters.  Here, in subsidized housing, I share a bedroom with Donna, who, in my unspoken opinion, is a bit too sloppy.  Most mornings, I straighten out the turquoise bedspread on her bed.  Mom orders us to do chores before we head to high school every morning and swears cruel words if we don’t comply.  I’m a shy teenager stuck in a small, wealthy town, and, even worse, for the 1970s, a child of divorced parents.  I think everybody in town knows it and there’s no way to sugarcoat how I feel.

            Even though the town is not the same as when Mom grew up here in the 1930s, lots of her extended family lives here.  My sisters and I trek all over, to every aunt’s house, investigate every playground, park, woods, and God-only-knows what else along the way.  Sometimes Mom’s brother, Uncle Pippi, invites me to enter his garden.  He swings open the garden gate to his sanctuary, and I step inside, my blue-sneakered feet feeling quite sneaky.  He shows me the status of string beans dripping in bunches, puts a few plucked tomatoes in my hands, then holds open the garden gate, notice for me to go.

            Sometimes, Mom gives us rides in her old station wagon and along the way, we pass the Victorian.  She tells me that the owners of the Florentine Iron Works in Brooklyn owned the house in 1939, when she was twelve years old.

            “That’s a real old house, built in the 1800s,” said Mom.  I glimpse the black iron swirls of entrance gates through the trees in front of what I call the wedding cake house.

            The Victorian is as sweet as a big, white-frosted wedding cake, the kind of cake I just want to scoop up, sugary and delicious, to lick every last bit of buttercream icing.  It’s decorated with curlicues, pointed arches, scalloped edges, iced rosettes, and leafy latticework, layer-upon-layer, with peaks, in the same way a wedding cake is ornamented.  Wings, towers, corniced eaves, angled windows, and fine ironwork grace balconies in layers that draw me in.  Orbed spires, like a bride and groom, top the cake.  The house is a baker’s wish come true.   

            When I am fifteen years old, and gotta’ make some money, Uncle Pippi gets me a housecleaning job.  He picks me up in his car, drives five minutes, and pulls into the side driveway of the Victorian.  My heart skips as the path to the house is like the path to heaven.  I’m going inside the wedding cake house!

            Uncle Pippi tells me the tasks, and, as he has errands to run, leaves me all by myself.  I walk through this sanctuary as though in a dream.

            In a sunlit hallway, the vacuum cleaner glides as I cover pink flowers and swirling diamonds and squares on an antique carpet.  I am awed by the tightly woven yarn.  It is quite different from the yellow knots I embroidered into a sunburst on the seat of my blue jeans.

            I stare at a grandfather clock.  The minute hand slowly tick-tocks and a painted sun smiles at me from above the gilt plate of the clock face.  

            Because of my dilly-dallying, I don’t have time to gaze out windows at the flowering gardens and hurry upstairs with the vacuum cleaner.

            In a bedroom, furniture explodes in Victorian glory with mahogany carved roses and almond-shaped finials.  The wood glows as carved birds at the top of an armoire nearly turn their heads and sing to me.

            I lay the vacuum handle down on the floor, its flexible hose carelessly curves under the bed.  A glass cabinet filled with antique French Bebe dolls with soulful, blue eyes, stare back at my soulful, brown eyes.  Golden ringlets frame faces with pink cheeks.  Bonnets with ribbons and ruffled petticoats peek out from pink silk smocks.  Tiny hands hold white gloves.

            In this quiet house, using my housework hands, I feel content.  I forget about the turmoil that rolls around Mom, sisters, and me – the explosive fights, the things I don’t have and can’t get.  I dream to meld my painfully shy girl self with budding traces of assertive control.

             “What a beautiful house!”  I can’t contain my joy even though I’m beat from housework, as I settle into Uncle Pippi’s car.

            “Jeanne, do you know what this house is nicknamed?” asks Uncle Pippi. 

             “No, I don’t know.  What’s it called?”  I yearn to know more about the wedding cake house.

             “It’s called The Garden Gate,” said Uncle Pippi.