Dream House

by Catherine Armsden

  “He’s here somewhere,” Ms. Symington said. “Please don’t worry.”

  “I am worried!” Gina snapped. “He’s gone!”

  Esther’s mouth dropped open in a mortified O.

  “Please, Mrs. Goodson, we have very good security, and there’s really no place he could . . .”

  “We’d better call the police!” Gina concentrated on her breathing because, should her attention slip for a second, she felt it might just stop. She was coming apart—a concrete structure in compression, no rebar. She stumbled to the wall to lean into it so she could rummage through her purse for her phone.

  “Are you okay? Please don’t . . .” Ms. Symington began. “Mrs. Goodson,” she said too firmly, her good-with-six-year-olds face too close to Gina’s. “Please calm down—we . . .”

  Ms. Symington, all confident five feet eight of her, blurred; from the human smudge emerged a hand, snaking toward Gina.

  “It’s Gilbert, not Goodson!” Gina drew what felt like her last breath and thrust out her own hand, searching for an anchor. She felt the heat of Ms. Symington’s thin wrist, the hard, cold metal of her bracelet. Recognized Esther’s gasp. She turned to see her daughter’s face, pinched with horror, and withdrew her offending hand. Ms. Symington’s ballet flats clicked away down the hall. Beyond her, Gina made out first the tiny frame, the posture, the orange sweatshirt, and then the face, smiling now: Ben.

  “I told you!” Esther yelled at her mother, and at last, the few gaping children in the hallway scurried away.

  Gina wanted to make a fast retreat home, but now the milkshake outing seemed even more important; adhering to tradition might be her only shot at redemption as far as Esther was concerned. At the drive-in, she and Esther were silent while Ben prattled on about the distance of certain planets from the sun. Gina oohed and wowed while monitoring the sinking foamy chocolate in Esther and Ben’s glasses. When the last strawful had been slurped, she stood and said, “Ready to go?”

  Once home, she went straight upstairs to curl up in a ball on the bed. She heard Esther tell Paul loudly on the phone, “Mom grabbed Ms. Symington and had a heart attack or something!” Minutes later, Paul came into the house and up the stairs. He poked his head into the bedroom; when she didn’t stir, he quietly said her name. She breathed heavily to let him know she was sleeping, alive.

  As he was about to shut the bedroom door, his cell phone rang. “Yes, Felicia,” he said. Gina’s eyes popped open. Felicia was head of Ben and Esther’s lower school. She strained to listen, but Paul’s voice trailed off as he went downstairs.

  She lay stunned and staring at the dusty ceiling medallion, wanting only to run away from herself, from her vibrating body. She’d done what she’d promised herself she’d never do: lose it in front of her child. Was she becoming her mother?

  Her eyes fixed on the photograph she’d brought home from Maine, which she’d finally hung between the two windows. From the bed, it provided a third “window”—the view of the summer cove, its sinuous shoreline rimmed with pines and opening to the boat-studded harbor. She visualized Whit’s Point in a kaleidoscope of other seasons, too: in fall, a sky dashed with geese; elms heavy with snow in winter; in spring, lush with lilacs and blossoming apple trees. She would not let herself dwell on any one of these landscapes, instead conjuring a slender ribbon of images to tow her away from her troubled thoughts. She felt herself slipping, gently sliding into the images, into the house in Maine, into sleep. Then, she was awake again, her heartbeat insistent.

  The last good slumber she’d had, she realized, was on the chaise in the yard in Maine.

  She needed to feel that peaceful prelude to sleep again. What had brought it on? Not just the soothing, familiar landscape. Something inside her had opened during those last hours alone. It was as if for the first time, without her mother’s dominion over the house, without the noise of Cassie’s extravagant emotions and snappish commentary, she could hear the house speak—just to her. After years of keeping her hatches battened while there, she’d let the house in.

  Her mother had slipped inside her, too. Even the falling shutter had seemed to convey what she always thought her mother felt, but wouldn’t say: “What will become of us now that you are leaving?”

  This time, imagining her mother’s question had touched Gina with a pang, not of guilt pushing her away, but of protectiveness, pulling her back. Her parents had died long before she’d finished with them; as long as their presence still flickered in the house, she couldn’t let them go, couldn’t let the house go.

  “For as long as I’ve known you,” Paul had said today, “you’ve been trying to leave that house.” Gina knew he was right. She was still trying to leave, to put the house and all that happened there behind her. But the only way to leave was to go back.

  She slid off the bed and gathered the courage to face Paul, Esther, and Ben. Deciding a prop would be helpful, she retrieved the basket of clean laundry and carried it to the family room. Paul put down the paper and peered at her. From the couch, Esther and Ben looked up, wide-eyed.

  Gina set down the basket, sat on the floor, and began folding. “I think I’ll go . . . I’m going to Whit’s Point for a few days,” she said without looking up.

  “Are you going to stay at Gran and Granddad’s house?” Ben asked.

  “No!” Esther barked. “Gran and Granddad are dead.”

  Ben ran out of the room and up the stairs. Esther put her hand over her mouth as if to say, “I don’t know why, it just popped out.” Sobs sputtered from her. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  “Shhh, it’s okay.” Paul stroked her back.

  “No, it’s not!” Esther cried, raising her blotchy face. “Nothing’s okay!” She glared at Gina with searing accusation, stood abruptly, and ran upstairs.

  “Gina,” Paul said, “what happened?”

  Gina heard emotion in Paul’s voice, but she continued to fold with retail-like precision. The neat piles of clothes mocked her; within a few days, the same items would sit at the bottom of the laundry chute, and the cycle would start again. Finally she said, “I need to go to the house. I don’t know if I can talk to Sid, with everything that’s gone on between our families. But I’m not ready to just . . . I need to be there again.”

  “Is this the right thing for you now? When would you go?”

  “In two weeks, during the time we set aside to go camping. I know it screws up our vacation, but since I’d already planned to be away from the office then . . .. It would only be for a few days.”

  Paul sighed. He was petting Stella, gathering handfuls of her hair, and in his slack posture, Gina read his disappointment and concern. She felt awful changing their family trip.

  “Why don’t we come with you?” he said.

  “No,” Gina said firmly. “I need to be there alone.”

  “Are you sure? I’m worried about you, Gina. What happened at school? Esther’s really upset.”

  Gina stopped folding and looked at Paul through flooded eyes. “The teacher was . . . I thought I was going to . . . I lost my balance.”

  Paul’s expression implored her to elaborate, but she looked away. He stood and walked to the window, then back again. “I would just feel so much better about your leaving if I knew what happened today. You’ve been really out of sorts and going to Maine has always been tough for you.”

  Gina calmly tried in vain to smooth the wrinkles in the shirt she was folding. “Paul, I’m asking you to trust that I know what I need.”

  Standing over her, Paul sighed. “Okay,” he said. “You should go. But don’t tell me not to worry, because I’m going to.”

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek. Gina smiled, picked up the laundry basket, and left the room, relieved that at least the awful day was over.

  That is why people look to the past. Their nostalgia is not the result of an interest in archaeology . . . nor of a sympathy for a particular period . . . Nor is it a rejection of technology. People appreciate the benefit
s of central heating and electric lighting, but the rooms of a Colonial country home or of a Georgian mansion—which had neither—continue to attract them, for they provide a measure of something that is absent from the modern interior. People turn to the past because they are looking for something that they do not find in the present—comfort and well-being.

  Witold Rybczynski, Home

  Chapter 6

  After two weeks of uncomfortable business-as-usual—the kids at day camp, conversations with Paul focused on logistics—Gina was at the airport saying goodbye to her family. Esther and Ben were somber, unaccustomed to Gina’s being away. She kissed them both, and Esther blinked back tears. Gina knew the scene she’d made at school would hang over Paul and Esther until she could offer an explanation, but she had none.

  Paul hugged Gina. “I’m still sad you’ll be having your birthday out there,” he said.

  She flapped her hands against his back. Esther was watching them, her mouth pinched in concentration. “Me, too. But it’s okay. I’ll call you from Annie and Lester’s tonight,” Gina said. She pulled away from Paul, her shirt damp with perspiration though the airport was cold.

  As she walked away, she turned and called, “Love you, guys!”

  Love you, guys: her cheerfulness sounded so phony! Feeling as she did, she wondered how in the world she would survive being without her family for four days.

  At Logan Airport, she caught the bus that would take her an hour and a half north to Riversport, New Hampshire, one town south of Whit’s Point, Maine. She’d been outside for only a few minutes, but already she was sticky from heat and relished the bus’s chill as she slid onto the plush seat.

  From the window she took in the disparate sights of Route 1 north: a Greek Revival house with a “DiAngelo’s Funeral Parlor” sign plastered against its fluted columns; beside it, a picket fence encircling a display of turquoise pools; a Mr. Tux shop whose plywood bride and groom were dressed in soot. Across an enormous empty parking lot stood a colonial barn, its ancient weathervane peeking out over a giant green-and-red dragon promising authentic Chinese Cuisine. All were rooted in a sea of black on this June day, hot-enough-to-fry-an-egg black, appearing liquid in places, as though asphalt had flowed from some nearby volcano.

  This stretch of Route 1 was an authentic sample of America, though not an uplifting one. Soon, Gina began to notice that not everything had succumbed to the highway. A white clapboard house clung to a patch of green just big enough for a laundry line and a chained-up German shepherd. An occasional majestic, century-old tree sprang from the center of a parking lot, its canopy providing an oasis of shade for the cars huddled below it. And Queen Anne’s lace sprouted from cracks in the asphalt, reaching up to hug the highway guardrail. Despite the continuous assault of noise and poisons, of greed, ugliness, and extreme weather, in the New England tradition, these survivors held their ground.

  She turned from the window and let her head fall back on the headrest. Thirty-one years in New England hadn’t made her resilient. She hadn’t had another episode like the one at school that day, but still she felt fear waiting in her recesses, as if all this time she’d been flourishing from the ground up, while under her, fragile roots struggled to keep hold. When she was younger, she wanted to explore, to be productive, to be excited by life. Now, more than anything she wanted to be strong.

  She thought of Esther and Ben and felt her hand slip into her carry-on for her phone. But she stopped herself. She was determined this time to focus on being only here, undivided and self-reliant.

  Her shoulder pressed the window as the bus swerved off the highway into the parking lot of King’s Clam House, its last stop in Massachusetts before reaching New Hampshire. A group of shirtless boys waited in line at the takeout window, brushing sweat from their foreheads with their T-shirts. Gina could almost smell the fishy grease mingling with the flat odor of scorching asphalt. It made her queasy, but it was summer, real summer, not like bundling up to hover over the barbeque in San Francisco.

  Along the highway, the asphalt let up, giving way to lush grass and woods of maple, ash, and birch trees, already at their deepest summer green. In California, Gina missed this abundant green and the undisciplined, untended growth that graced the New England landscape. In California it was housing that grew this way: forests of pitched-roof variations on an affordable dream house sprouting from hillsides, flanked by identical trees, each with its own IV of water to fool it into believing it was not growing in a desert. Unfair, perhaps, but making these comparisons was irresistible; every year, no matter how hard she tried to play the detached tourist, she found herself drinking in the lushness of eastern summer.

  The bus exited the wide, pristine highway at the “Entering Riversport” sign and, as it squeezed through the twisty city streets, seemed to pass from one century into a previous one. Colonial houses stood shoulder-to-shoulder along both sides of the street, some brick, most wood, and nearly all with window shutters, a later Victorian embellishment. Riversport bore the signs of prosperity brought by Yuppie refugees from Boston: concrete sidewalks widened and replaced with brick, uniform rows of trees, Starbucks.

  Warm air, thick with ocean saltiness, embraced her as she stepped off the bus. She found herself surrounded by the moist flesh of evening strollers so took off her thin sweater and tied it around her waist. She loved the intimacy of exposed limbs on a warm summer day. People greeted each other, hands touching skin, bare heels pulled up out of sandals by a hug.

  She searched the street for a taxi to take her the remaining five miles to Whit’s Point. She’d be staying with Annie and Lester, and they’d offered to pick her up at the bus station, but she’d told them “No, thank you;” her need to be alone was so pressing that she hadn’t even told Cassie she was coming east.

  In the taxi, she opened both backseat windows to let in the sea breeze. In a few minutes they were crossing the Piscataqua River, which separated New Hampshire from Maine. Lobster buoys were pulled flat against the water’s surface by the river’s powerful current. A frantic crowd of seagulls dove at the wake of a fishing boat roaring downriver with its catch.

  Entering Whit’s Point, she felt the drop in temperature that never failed to surprise her. The road wound through an unkempt townscape that had barely changed since she was a child. Unpruned trees threatened phone lines, a jungle gym she could remember climbing on now rusted in a yard, mailboxes bore the same names they had for decades. Farther along were the formidable entrances to the Naval shipyard and the brick schoolhouse where Gina had attended junior high. Then there were only the tired but stalwart houses lining the road with their unapologetic boxiness, white, gray, or yellow clapboards, and tall chimneys. She liked to look at them every year, to see how they might’ve changed. “You still designing houses?” an architecture school classmate had asked her last year, as if she were stuck in some evolutionary stage. But she’d always been a respectful admirer of houses. Not houses presented in magazines as lifestyle showcases, but houses as objects in the landscape, like trees, and as containers of life. Tall bare-boned houses that sprouted from the middle of vast, flat farmlands, the tiny stone cottages of Ireland, Native American dwellings in the recesses of cliffs. Even the monotonous rows of tiny, expressionless facades in San Francisco’s Sunset District were intriguing—to think of the multiplicity of stories behind those ubiquitous picture windows!

  But these were the kinds of houses her clients often yearned for, she thought; not just their old windows or gable roofs or the patina of something old, but something sensory about them, like the way sunlight slanted through a window. Not the staccato of balusters below a porch railing, but the memory of friends gathered on the porch to eat popcorn and play Monopoly in a thunderstorm.

  As the taxi swerved around two bike riders, Gina sucked in her breath. The driver caught her eye in the mirror. “The bridge into Whit’s Point was up for an hour today,” he said. “Some clown in a yacht got his signals crossed, and there musta been fo
ur boats under the span trying to sort it all out. What a mess.”

  Gina laughed, but her heart galloped. In a moment after they’d passed the high school, she could see the bridge. It was up. Not even all the way yet, and there was a line of cars waiting. She hadn’t counted on this little delay; she’d made every arrangement she could think of to avoid surprises on the trip.

  Leaning out the window, she spotted the culprit, a tall-masted sloop motoring up-river. To distract herself from her thudding heart and the tingling in her shoulders, she imagined herself in the boat, lightly sunburned and relaxed after a long afternoon sail. But she was immediately back, trapped in the taxi. The bridge was up, no way out. She closed her eyes and wiped her moist palms on her thighs.

  Once, waiting in this spot with her parents, she’d been the villain. She was twenty-two, had been up for the weekend, and they were taking her to the bus station to go home to Boston.

  Just before they reached the bridge, her mother had said, “Why don’t you give us a key to your apartment? It would be so convenient for Daddy and me to stop in there when we’re in Boston shopping.”

  In the backseat, Gina had seethed. She had had a powerful sense her mother was wrong, on principle, to ask for the key, but it was confused, as always, with her own guilt about being secretive and unwelcoming. Giving them a key would have meant her apartment could be subject to her parents’ scrutiny without notice. She had pictured the incriminating evidence they might encounter—like her boyfriend’s T-shirt hanging on the bathroom hook—and had imagined Eleanor descending into a self-pitying harangue about how her daughter had failed her. But not giving them a key would have been felt as a brutal rejection, like all of Cassie’s and Gina’s assertions of independence.