Freya suggests that they assemble her doll tree house. They haven’t done that for a long time. They used to do it a lot. Devi quickly agrees, and Badim goes to get it out of the hall closet.
They sit on the floor and put together all the parts of the house. It was a present from Devi’s parents to Devi, long before, and through every move in her life, Devi has saved it. A big dollhouse that is also a miniature tree house, in that all its rooms fit onto the branches of a very nice-looking plastic bonsai tree. When all the rooms are assembled and fitted onto the branches they are supposed to fit, you can open the roofs and look into each room, and each is furnished and appointed however you like.
“It’s so pretty,” Freya says. “I’d love to live in a house like this.”
“You already do,” Devi says.
Badim looks away, and Devi sees that. Her face spasms. Freya feels a lurch of fear as she watches her mother’s face shift from anger to sadness, then to frustration, then resolve, then fury, then, finally, to some kind of desolation; and after all that, pulling herself together, to some kind of blankness, which is the best she can do at that moment. Which Freya pretends is okay, to help her out.
“I would choose this room,” Badim says, tapping a small bedroom with open windows on all four sides, out on one of the outermost branches of the tree.
“You always choose that one,” Freya points out. “I choose the one by the water wheel.”
“It would be noisy,” Devi says, as she always does. She always chooses the living room itself, so big and airy, where she will sleep on the couch, next to the harmonium. Now she makes that choice again. And so they go on, trying to knit things back together.
How to decide how to sequence information in a narrative account? Many elements in a complex situation are simultaneously relevant.