Dream House

by Catherine Armsden

  “Life’s just secrets and lies, cousin Ginny,” he said, standing over her. “My own mother’s been lying to me all my life. Turns out my father wasn’t some asshole who ran off to South America after all. Nope. But the Holloways thought they were too good for us. So they all lied.”

  “Your mother . . .” Sid went on. Ginny braced herself. “She always told me she loved me, you know. I was her ‘little boy.’ But neither of them knows how to love someone; they just know how to lie.” He kicked a giraffe across the room. “Secrets and lies! Well, I have a secret of my own, but it’s not going to be a secret for long.”

  Heart pounding, Ginny rocketed to her feet and turned to Sid. Fumes from his drink enveloped her. “You’re the liar!” she yelled. “You’re a messed-up drunk!” Her knees nearly folded under her. Sid’s lips quivered, and his eyes were glassy. Ginny backed away from him, nearly falling over the toys.

  Her mother stormed into the piano room, expression resolute, body stiff. “Put the toys away, Ginny. We’re going.”

  Jangling with fear that her mother had heard the nasty words she’d shouted at Sid, Ginny stuffed the toys into the cabinet. She followed her mother out to the entry hall where Fran stood looking lifeless as a statue, holding a Christmas present.

  “We’re family, you know!” her mother snapped.

  Stone faced, Fran held the present out to Ginny, and Ginny reached for it.

  “Certainly not!” Eleanor snarled, snatched the gift and dropped it on the hall table.

  When Eleanor had turned her back, though, Fran took the present and quickly stuffed it into Ginny’s game bag. Ginny looked back at Sid.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You’re all experts at being cruel. I can’t wait to get the hell out of here. This is one sick family. You all deserve each other.” He looked at his mother, then at Eleanor, then straight at Ginny.

  Shaking, Ginny slinked out the door behind her mother, one hand pressing the present deeper into her bag.

  In the car, Eleanor announced, “I guess I won’t be asking them to dinner after all. She’s just lost her mind.”

  Ginny started to cry.

  Her mother said, “Oh, it’s not worth getting upset about.”

  But it was; Ginny could see the tears in her mother’s eyes, and she herself had never in her life felt so sick when she wasn’t actually sick.

  “If she thinks she can stay in Lily House till her dying day, she’s got another think coming,” her mother snapped. “She just grabbed that house, like she grabs everything.”

  “My stomach hurts,” Ginny said.

  They passed Tobey’s Market. “We’ll get you some ginger ale when we get home.”

  Back at the house, Ginny ran upstairs to her room and pulled the present from her bag. Fran had given her little things every Christmas and in the car Ginny had schemed that she’d open the gift immediately, throw away the wrapping, and never mention it to her mother. But the tag on the package said “For Eleanor.” She panicked. She couldn’t throw away someone else’s gift, but her mother would be furious if she knew Ginny had accepted it. She’d have to hide it until Christmas day when, surely, her mother would no longer be angry.

  The Christmas tree stood waiting in the living room. Her father had brought it inside the night before, and its fragrance had begun to overpower the aroma of Mr. Ruby’s sweets. The box of ornaments sat on the floor near the front door, next to a mound of green light strands. Every time Ginny walked by them, she thought of Cassie and wondered if she would be home in time to decorate the tree with them. She hadn’t heard Cassie’s name since the phone call with her mother.

  On Sunday, Mr. Ruby started packing things up. Ginny felt a little sad that he wouldn’t be coming anymore, but at least maybe her mother would cheer up. She sat on the steps and watched Mr. Ruby and her father carefully packing up the baked goods and folding the white tablecloths. As they unclamped the floodlights from their stands and coiled extension cords, they shared stories about their customers. Her father had to work all weekend, but it seemed to Ginny that he and Mr. Ruby had been enjoying themselves. And, she hadn’t had to practice for days.

  It was nearly nine o’clock when Mr. Ruby finally loaded the last box into his van. He came back to the house carrying a large, flat, red box and called out for Ginny and her mother. When the family had congregated at the front door, he handed the box to Eleanor.

  Smiling and tipping his hat, he said, “Thank you, Eleanor, for your patience and most generous hospitality. Merry Christmas!” Then he was gone.

  The night was still and cold enough that icicles had formed at the corner of the porch roof. When Mr. Ruby’s taillights had disappeared from the driveway, Ron lifted the top of the box. The three of them peered into it at a dazzling heap of Christmas cookies—stars frosted in green and red and white, blinking like little neon signs. Ginny’s mouth watered at the thought of their creamy sweetness.

  “Well,” Ginny’s father chuckled, “I’m almost sorry to see him go. He’s kind of a fun fellow.” Smiling, he turned to her mother. “Why don’t we decorate the tree now? Where’s Cassie? Wasn’t she supposed to come home tonight?”

  Her mother looked up at him with eyes flat and gray like beach stones. Stepping out onto the porch, she raised the box of cookies over her head, leaned forward and heaved them into the night. Then she snatched the ornament box from the floor and flung its contents out with the cookies. Green and red balls, miniature sleighs, and Santa mice rained down, hit the crusty surface of the snow and slid a little before coming to rest. Glowing white under the porch light, the yard became celestial, constellations of cookie stars scattered below a black starless sky. Ginny’s world turned upside down.

  Her father stood at the bottom of the stairs staring at his feet. A minute later, he trudged upstairs where her mother had fled.

  “Don’t ‘honey’ me!” Ginny heard her mother yell. “If you and Cassie don’t care about Christmas, maybe we just won’t have Christmas this year!” The bedroom door slammed.

  Ginny sat in the living room with the blank Christmas tree. She and the tree seemed to belong together at that moment, robbed of all Christmas spirit, sentenced to wait and wonder: was it possible to just not have Christmas?

  A storm raged in her head. She couldn’t fix the fact that Mr. Ruby had stayed too long in the piano room or what had happened at Lily House, but it dawned on her that she and Cassie could salvage Christmas.

  She raced from the room, tripping over the dog sprawled across the kitchen threshold. In the darkroom, she flipped on the light and went to her father’s worktable. Where was the phone? She pushed aside wrapped presents, the pile of Christmas cards waiting to be mailed, lightbulbs, boxes of film, and two large bags of glazed donuts. When she’d unearthed the phone, she hunted some more and found the message pad where her mother had jotted down Cassie’s friend’s number.

  Her body throbbed. Never before had she stepped onto the tightrope that stretched between her mother and Cassie, or so boldly asked Cassie to suspend her sense of fairness in order to give something up for her, Ginny. She picked up the phone and dialed.

  “It’s just one more day,” Cassie said when Ginny asked her to come home.

  “One more day’s too late!” Ginny whispered. “You have to come tomorrow. Mom’s really, really sad. And this thing happened today. A big fight at Lily House. Sid was there and . . . something about Bill Holloway. It sounded like he was Sid’s father. I think Mom lied to us about Sid’s father being some guy who ran away.” Ginny didn’t really care whose son Sid was; she wanted to tell Cassie what had scared her most, which was the sound of her own voice yelling mean things at Sid. But she didn’t dare.

  Cassie was silent. Then she said, “Ginny . . . every goddamn Christmas, Mom and Fran find something to fight about. They fight about everything. They always ruin Christmas! Mom’s just making a scene, like she always does at Christmas. Try not to let it get to you.”

  Ginny’s anger soared. She
pictured Cassie in a room with a crackling fire, her cheeks sunburned from a day of skiing, in her parka with the rabbit fur-trimmed hood. Clearly, she had no intention of coming home. Ginny would need to try another tactic. “No, Cassie. It’s your fault. It’s you this time. She’s talking about not even having Christmas because of you! You have to come home! It’s not fair! Come home!”

  The sound of her voice commanding Cassie was so alien to Ginny that she began to cry. When Cassie didn’t respond right away, she panicked and hung up.

  Ginny’s stomach still hurt when she went to bed. She couldn’t find the sweet spot on her pillow and tossed for a long time.

  In the morning, she awoke damp with sweat. The house banged with commotion and a plaintive wail, “Noooo . . .” pierced the air. She looked at the time—ten o’clock! She climbed out of bed and opened her door slowly, just in time to hear her mother sob from downstairs, “All her life, she’s only thought of herself. Never Sid. She just wanted to hurt him. Sid . . . oh, no one knows how much I loved him, and now he’s lost to me . . .” Her father’s low, consolatory tones wove through her mother’s mournful cries.

  Ginny struggled to make sense of her mother’s words. Could Sid be dead? she wondered. Did Fran kill him last night after Ginny and her mother left Lily House? The fighting had certainly felt deadly.

  Clutching her nightgown, she stepped to the hall window to look out at the yard. She didn’t see a single ornament or cookie. What had happened to them? Had her father picked them up after she’d gone to bed? Had the geese eaten the cookies? She shuddered, thinking about all the things that could have happened while she was asleep. When she heard the teakettle whistle from the kitchen, she braced herself and went downstairs.

  At least the piano room had been transformed into the dining room: signs of Christmas! In the middle of the expanse of Oriental rug, her father was on his knees, vacuuming up every last muffin crumb, sucking up the evidence of business that had worn out its welcome. Everything that was her father’s: light stands, typewriter table, camera equipment, now hugged the edges of the room. Files, the desk blotter, scissors, and the ugly green metal tape dispenser were gone; in their places, a red linen runner and a gleaming silver bowl of nuts of all kinds: walnuts, filberts, Brazils. A pair of brass candlesticks with green candles stood on top of the piano, and a small pinecone wreath hung in front of the portrait of Governor Brickman. The folded mahogany dining room table stood in the doorway of the darkroom, awaiting its call like a star in the wings.

  Her mother came into the room and said, “Oh, hi, Gin,” without a smile. Her eyes were watery, and she didn’t remark on how unusually late Ginny had slept. She pointed to the floor under the piano bench.

  “Ron, you missed some.”

  It was the kindest thing she’d said to him in days. She turned to Ginny. “Feel like polishing some silver? Daddy and I have to go over to the hospital in a little while. Fran’s sick.”

  Ginny stared hard at her mother, trying to read her. Surely, she wouldn’t be thinking about crumbs and silverware if Sid had died, but what was wrong with Fran? She wasn’t sick yesterday. She took the jar of polish from her mother. She could think of nothing more comforting, more normal, than polishing silver. In the kitchen, she sat at the table filled with silverware and the rarely used silver bowls and poked her rag into the polish, pulling out a pink licorice-smelling glob. She worked the paste into the intricate pattern on the dinner forks. Rubbing away the tarnish was like waking the silverware from a long sleep.

  As her parents came in and out of the kitchen, gathering the holiday table settings from the cupboards’ deepest recesses, Ginny studied their somber faces for clues. Her mother said something to her father in the piano room, too quietly for Ginny to hear the words.

  But as they moved back toward the kitchen her mother mumbled miserably, “. . . everything is always everyone else’s fault with her. She just damn well better pull through.”

  Ginny felt hollow. No one had even asked her if she’d had breakfast, and it was almost noon. When she finished the silver, she took it to the table in the piano room and next to each plate placed a little fork, big fork, knife, and spoon. She gazed at the sparkling, luxuriant table, asserting itself in the little room like a peacock in the barnyard.

  So far, her mother hadn’t cancelled Christmas, and there was still time to decorate the tree before dinner, when Cassie came home. Ginny pulled on her boots under her nightgown so she could go out to the yard and check on the ornaments. Just as she opened the front door, the phone rang, sounding artificially loud. She stepped outside and shut the door hard behind her. In the trampled snow, she found strands of silver tinsel, an elf’s hat, and the glass angel that had always sat at the top of their tree. The angel’s wings were still intact, but a piece of her halo had broken off.

  The front door banged open. Ginny turned to see her father helping her mother down the steps, even though they weren’t icy. At the bottom, they paused and squinted at her as if they were having trouble seeing in the bright snow-light.

  “I found the angel,” Ginny said, holding it up. “Where’re you going?”

  Her father was looking at the ground, one arm still around her mother.

  “To the hospital,” her mother said. “Fran. Well, she’s . . . well, Fran died. Unexpectedly.”

  “Died?” Ginny exclaimed. Her teeth chattered; all at once she realized how cold she was, standing in the snow with no coat. “How could she just die! She wasn’t even sick yesterday!”

  Her mother hesitated in a way that made Ginny think she was hiding something and then, looking at the ground she said, “Well, no, she wasn’t sick, but . . . well, terrible things happen and . . .”

  Ginny gasped. “Did Sid kill her?”

  Her mother’s mouth dropped open. “Ginny,” she said, her voice wobbling. “Of course not. What a terrible thing to say. Why would you . . . ?”

  Gina’s cheeks burned. How could her mother accuse her of being terrible after everything she had said to Fran yesterday? She could see her mother begin to move toward the car, but she wasn’t going to let her get away without some answers. “Then how did she die?”

  Her father stared at the ground, but her mother turned to her. “Fran did it to herself, Ginny.” She pulled away from Ginny’s father and started down the path ahead of him.

  Ginny watched their car roll slowly down the driveway as her head filled with all the gruesome ways a person could kill herself. She dropped to the snow, stretched out on her back, and tried to swish out an angel. Did it to herself. She cranked her arms up and down but no angel appeared; the snow was too crusty, unyielding.

  Back inside, Ginny’s legs shook as she stood on the chair to perch the glass angel on top of the bare Christmas tree. When she climbed off the chair and looked up at the tree, she burst into tears. Maybe the angel was still mostly whole, but Ginny felt broken into a million pieces.

  She went into the piano room—yesterday the studio, now the dining room again. She stood at the head of the table looking past Great Aunt Louise’s candlesticks, the footed silver salt and pepper shakers, the blue and white plates from China, and the crystal goblets she wasn’t allowed to carry. She looked past the vase of white chrysanthemums and out of the window. The window, like an eye, was the only thing that stayed the same within these four walls that had so many faces; its view to the driveway’s end, where it intersected with the roadways to the rest of the world, would always be the most important feature of the piano room. Her eyes followed the snowbank down the driveway, past the elm tree and her melting fort-ruin, past the playing dogs to where it touched the road. Waiting, hoping with dark fear in her heart, for a car to turn in. For Cassie.

  A landscape seen through a window is essentially a backdrop, parallel to the wall, unless we step close to the window and thus leave the room visually to enter the outside space.

  Rudolf Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form

  Chapter 7

  “Wha
t’s on the agenda today? How about some breakfast?” Lester asked the next morning, when Gina walked into the kitchen. He was dressed in a pale blue plaid shirt and khakis, sitting at the counter cutting a cantaloupe. The room smelled of toast and vibrated with sunniness—yellow walls, yellow cabinets, yellow-and-white curtains. Blue Willow china lined the shelves over the table, and a blue glass vase on the counter was crowded with yellow snapdragons. If the room hadn’t reminded her of Monet’s Giverny kitchen, Gina would have found the Bridges’ paint colors oppressive.

  “Oh, no thanks, Lester; too early for me—West Coast time.”

  Lester eyed her as she slung her purse over her shoulder. “Have I scared you away already?” He reached in his pocket and pulled out his keys. “Why don’t you take my car? I’m going to stay put.”

  Gina thanked him. She was anxious to get out of Lily House before her history with it hijacked her, so had planned to take a walk. But she’d be grateful for the car’s air conditioning. On her way to the door, she passed Annie in the dining room with a feather duster.

  “This is my job,” Annie laughed. “I pick things up, dust under them and put them back. Three or four times a week. Did you know the feather duster was invented in 1870? You’d think that in a hundred and thirty-five years, we’d have moved beyond feather dusters, but no.”

  Gina laughed. “Have you liked it here, Annie? Being the caretakers and everything?”

  “It’s glorious!” Annie said. “An honor, really.”

  Gina found Annie’s enthusiasm hard to believe—their confinement to the lesser rooms of the house, the lack of privacy with tourists coming through.

  “I love seeing all the curious folks. A group’s coming this afternoon,” Annie said. “First one in a week and a half. It’s been so hot, I think people are mostly going to the beaches.”