Gina drew a sharp breath and quickly noted the drawing’s date: May fifth. Yankee must have decided not to go ahead with the purchase, making it available to Sid. She laid the drawing back in the trash can and set the birdhouse on top of it.
She should’ve been relieved that at least one design disaster had been averted. But the over-the-top plans, made by someone who didn’t know the house, seemed to mock her for standing here like a relic on its rotting porch. There’d be more plans soon, of course, and she wondered: when a house was reshaped, were the memories it contained reshaped too? Or simply lost?
The drawings loudly announced that the house was moving on; it had no allegiance to Gina and wouldn’t wait for her to be finished with it. She needed to let it go now.
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Chapter 8
Gina climbed in the car and drove back to Lily House. Just before turning into the driveway, she pulled over when she spotted Annie with a group of people standing outside the front door. Lily House had been constructed so close to the road that when the stone wall was built to buffer it from traffic, the front door became virtually inaccessible. Now, she could see Annie pointing out the details of the exemplary Georgian colonial—its symmetrical façade with two brick chimneys on each end; five multipaned windows on the upper floor, four on the lower; the central entry with a six-panel door, flanking pilasters and entablature. Lily House, with its esteemed architecture and history, would likely be preserved forever; it would never meet the fate of her family’s rental.
Gina pulled into the driveway next to two unfamiliar cars and climbed the porch steps between the orange day lilies that crowded up against the house’s lattice base. Once inside the house, she stood for a moment in the hall, eavesdropping on Annie’s tour, which had moved upstairs.
“And what is this?” A soft-spoken man asked.
“Oh, that’s a radiator. It’s for heating the room, but it isn’t original.”
“How does it work? When did they invent this?” A woman asked.
She was young, Gina could tell. The tour guide laughed, “I don’t actually know. But to heat water for their bath, they—”
“Where did they take baths?” a child asked.
“In the basement.”
“Where did they go to the bathroom?”
“In chamber pots that they carried to the outhouse.”
Silence. “Chamber pots?”
Gina went into the kitchen where there was a note on the counter:
Gina—help yourself to brownies. Paul called. He told me to ask
you to please keep your cell phone on. —A
Gina pulled her cell phone from her purse, feeling bad that she hadn’t checked in with Paul since she’d arrived. But she knew calling him would worsen her ambivalence about being away from her family and her confusion about why she’d even come to Whit’s Point. She looked at her watch. If she waited until later to return Paul’s call, Esther and Ben would be home, too. She turned on her phone to listen to a voicemail from Allison Brink, who was wondering if Gina had had time to work on her great room.
The tour group clumped down the stairs and said their goodbyes to Annie at the back door. Annie whizzed into the kitchen.
“The most darling family from India,” she said. “Imagine being from a place like that where things are thousands of years old, being interested in a little old—young—house like this. Isn’t it wonderful? Yikes! I need lunch.” She tied on an apron that said, I Eat, Therefore I Am. “How about cheddar and tomato? What have you been up to?” She handed Gina a loaf of bread.
“I went to the house,” Gina said, pulling bread slices from the bag. “It was unlocked, so I went in and looked around.”
Annie was rinsing a tomato, her back to Gina. There was a small sweat stain at the neckline of her shirt. “How was that?” she asked. “Toasted or not toasted?”
“Pardon?”
“Your bread.”
Gina told her not toasted.
“Stick mine in the toaster, would you, dearie?” Annie finished slicing the tomato, opened the refrigerator, and took out a block of cheese.
Gina gathered her courage. “Annie, have you heard anything about Sid’s plans?”
“For the house, you mean?” Annie handed Gina the cheese.
The doorbell rang, and Annie dashed to the front door. Gina wondered if she was only imagining that Annie was being evasive. She sliced the cheese and finished making their sandwiches.
When Annie returned, she was waving a package. “My new weeding trowel,” she said. “Gee, it’s just too damn hot for anything! These look yummy!” She took her sandwich and whisked out the screen door.
Gina ate, though she wasn’t hungry. She wished she felt at ease enough with Annie to press her further for information about Sid and the house. On the other hand, whatever Sid had in mind, there was nothing to be done about it because she couldn’t imagine being face-to-face with Sid Banton, who in her mind, had become the embodiment of the Banton family’s misery.
Ugh! She felt pathetic: afraid to call her family, afraid to face her past. How had she become boxed in by fear and how would she get out?
She decided the only way to escape her anxiety would be to settle down and draw. When she finished eating, she went into the bedroom and laid out the plans she’d made in San Francisco of Allison Brink’s project. When Allison gave Gina a tour of her home, Gina was careful, as she was with all her clients, to express interest in only the bones of the house, not the flesh, and not to let her eyes rest on anything personal: family photographs, medicine vials, messages on the refrigerator door. This was architect protocol. Like a doctor giving a physical, she would no more ask, “Is this your mother in the photograph?” than a doctor would observe, with her patient prone on the table, “Great tan, been on vacation?” Still, later when she’d spent several hours in the house measuring, she’d learned much about Allison; she had a thing for athletic shoes, for instance, as well as French cafe prints, Pepperidge Farm cookies, and mauve.
Standing in her garden, Allison had asked Gina to design a playhouse for her children. “My ex wants to build it himself.” She’d snorted when she said this.
Gina gathered her T square and drawing tools to consider Allison’s great room. She laid tracing paper over the floor plan and, with her pen, traced the perimeter of the existing kitchen and dining room, leaving out the nest of little spaces people in another century found indispensable: butler’s pantry, maid’s room, dumbwaiter. By getting rid of them, the kitchen gained eight feet of new window area looking into the garden. She removed the wall separating the narrow kitchen from the dark dining room, making both areas lighter and more spacious, and sketched an island where the wall had been. A hundred times before, she’d made these same moves on someone’s plans; each time it had felt like liberating the house so it could breathe.
Hearing voices outside, for the first time Gina took a long look out the window at the garden, an expanse between the house and the garage where Annie was talking quietly to a visitor and fondling the blooms of her tuberoses. The garden was magnificent. Unfussy with its juxtapositions of color, texture, and shape. Annie had planted a sampler of all of Gina’s favorite New England flowers: zinnias, tiger lilies and irises, daisies and phlox, lobelia, campanula, hydrangea. Gina was quite sure that when she was growing up, Fran hadn’t kept a garden here.
She went back to work, her tools sticky in her hands, an occasional drop of sweat falling from her forehead onto the drawing. Voices floated in from other rooms. The image of the developer’s bloated plan of her family’s house occasionally interrupted her concentration. But then she lost herself in the challenge of Allison’s great room. The precision and sharp focus of drawing, measuring, drawing, and the clack of the triangle against the T square quieted her like a meditation. There was magic to mechanical drawings; for Gina, they brought a house to life, ev
oked emotions, and stirred the imagination, the way photographs moved some people. She’d seen her clients become attached to and protective of them, the way they might be of an X-ray of their child’s bones. Now, she thought of her father, who’d shared her interest in graphically depicting the world. He’d pored over her architectural drawings with undisguised awe and seemed surprised by the drawings’ precision, as if it were not compatible with the grown daughter who appeared sporadically and reticently—sketchlike—against the walls of his house. Those were the moments—leaning over her drawings, walking him through floor plans—when Gina had most connected with him.
For a little while, Annie took a break from gardening and was playing her violin somewhere—upstairs? outside?—the music creating a dreamy ambiance. Annie had taught Gina to play the violin in the fourth-grade coatroom; in the beginning, she’d been wretchedly squeaky on her instrument. But the next year, Annie took her students to the annual children’s concert in Portland, and Gina had relished the power of pulling her bow across the strings with a hundred other kids, creating big, beautiful music! Remembering this now, she filled with fresh affection for her parents’ old friend.
By two o’clock, she’d finished a scheme she could send to Allison. As she watched Allison’s great room slide through the fax machine, she was surprised by the satisfaction she felt, having solved another house puzzle. It excited her to be able to refresh her clients with a new environment; after all, when a person took a book into nature to read, time would be spent looking for the ideal place to sit, wandering from tree to tree, comparing views from each spot, observing sun angles and wind direction, the relative hospitableness of ground cover. Gina adhered to this same selectivity as she imagined her clients moving about the houses she designed. She created the architectural “weather” they woke up to and came home to every day to feel comforted, loved, and forgiven—and every day that weather had to be good. There was some nobility in the birthing of Dr. Allison Brink’s great room, wasn’t there?
She looked again out the window. Annie stooped to pluck strands of a clematis vine from the garden bed. Even in her slouchy, faded gardening clothes, she had an elegance about her; her face, with its sloping forehead, close-set eyes, and prominent nose, brought to mind a regal bird. She worked intently, pulling green twist-ties from her apron pocket, winding them onto the nails in the fence, then around the vine. But the vine was too heavy and pulled the nails out. She stood back to assess the situation, hands on her hips.
Gina went into the kitchen, took the pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator and two brownies and stepped out into the garden. By this time of the afternoon, her yard in San Francisco would be in wild motion with the fierce summer wind and fog that cruelly stood between her and her little piece of earth. But Annie’s garden was silent and still, exuding sensuous aromas of rich, warm earth, and Gina could feel it work its magic on her, making her breathing fuller, softening her layers.
“The garden’s amazing, Annie!” she said. “Do you plan it all out before you plant?”
“Oh, heavens, no. I start with the seeds of my favorites and have a loose idea of what I want. Then I see what happens. What grows, what dies—much depends on the weather, of course, and the soil, and how busy I get with other things—and it sort of evolves, and I surrender to it as I tend it. Is designing buildings sort of like that?”
Gina thought about this. “Hmm. Well, I wish it could be more like that. There are so many parameters to pay attention to—program, cost, building codes, neighborhood restrictions, engineering . . . designs evolve when I’m meeting with clients. But, really, we try to plan every little detail before a single nail gets hammered—it’s all about control.” She laughed.
“Playing my violin for the symphony’s a little like that. A hundred years of watching the little black notes on the page, getting them just right so the music will sound the way the composer intended it to. If my mind wanders for a second, I’ll make a mistake. But what I love about gardening are the possibilities . . ..” She smiled as she surveyed her garden. “Gorgeous things happen whether I intend them to or not.”
Gina heard the wisdom in Annie’s words and hoped she would discover such creative balance in her own life.
A hummingbird buzzed by Gina, then hovered with its beak in a gladiolus. “Annie, there’s a bird trapped in the house.”
Annie turned. “Where?”
“At Mom and Dad’s, I mean. I heard it fluttering around in the attic, but the ladder’s gone, so I couldn’t go up.”
“Oh, gosh, poor thing. You can take our ladder over, if you want.” Annie held her glass while Gina filled it. “Thanks, hon. The Historical Society replaced this fence, and I’ve been trying to get the old vine back onto it.”
“Why don’t I hammer the nails in and get the ties around them while you hold the vines?”
Gina took off her sneakers to let her feet bathe next to Annie’s in the cool grass. Annie had on red flip-flops and a Band Aid wrapped her baby toe. Holding the ties between her teeth, Gina reached over a clump of tiger lilies to set the first nail. The scent of damp garden earth and her own sweat mingled; with every nail she hammered, she could feel the tension in her body loosen. The two women worked silently and methodically, swatting mosquitoes with a violence well accepted in these parts, hitching up the vine until most of the fence was covered.
When they got to the corner of the yard Annie stared into the bed of petunias. “I miss your mother and father terribly, you know,” she said.
Surprised by Annie’s sudden dolefulness, Gina couldn’t think of what to say. “You guys spent a lot of years together,” she said finally.
“Not just years; we spent a lot of . . . energy together, and I don’t mean only in the boats and on the beach with you kids and whatnot. I mean, kids grow up fast. They’re with you, what, eighteen years or less? And after that, we parents are still together twenty and thirty years later, grilling hamburger from Tobey’s Market or breaking the law by chucking the smelly remains of our lobster feasts into the dumpster at the town dock.”
Gina laughed. Annie kneeled to deadhead a petunia. “Lord, how your ma and pa missed you.”
A lump rose in Gina’s throat; the firm grip of guilt turned the peaceful garden into a trap. She took a breath and stepped back from the flowerbed, all at once feeling her children gone. “It must be a terrible shock when your kids leave home.”
Holding the last bit of vine, Annie swiveled and looked at Gina, as if she’d heard the full depth of her fear. “Ayup—it’s a toughie,” she said, before turning back to the fence. “But you know, it depends on how they leave home. If you play your cards right, they come on back and even paint your fences once in a while.”
Gina smiled and pounded in the last nail.
Stretched out on the bed that night, Gina closed her eyes and thought about her guardedness with Annie. She’d missed perhaps the only opportunity she’d have to communicate something deeper about her parents. She wondered: Would her mother have shared with Annie the kind of intimate things Gina talked about with her closest friends?
She picked up her phone, now nearly desperate to talk to Esther and Ben, hoping to soothe the small injuries of her day. Ben answered, excited to tell her about the giant bubble maker they’d bought at Toys “R” Us. “It was too windy in the yard, so Dad let us do them in the garage so there’s, like, soap slime all over the floor! Esther’s mad at you, or something.”
Gina asked Ben to put Esther on. While she waited, she could hear the hammering scales of The Rugrats theme song.
“You have to!” she heard Ben yell.
More waiting. Finally, Esther picked up. “Hi,” she said weakly. When Gina asked, “What’s new?” she said, “Nothing, except Nicky’s parents are getting divorced. By the way, I Googled food poisoning, and it doesn’t sound anything like how you acted at school that day.”
“Oh, Estie . . . I’m sorry about Nicky. And you’re right; it wasn’t food poisoning, but I�
��m just fine, and we’ll talk all about it when I see you.”
Esther was silent for a few moments. “What’re you doing, anyway?” she finally said. “Can’t you just come home?” She began to sob.
“Esther? Sweetie, what’s the matter?”
Esther struggled to speak. Gina had nearly given up on her when she said, “Other kids see their grandparents on Christmas, not just in the summer! We never spent a single Christmas with Gran and Granddad. It’s not fair! Why did we always stay so short in Maine?”
The question left Gina dumbstruck. There was a clattering sound on the phone, as if Esther had dropped the receiver.
“Esther?” Gina waited, close to tears, her stomach twisted in a knot.
Paul picked up the phone. “Hey! How come you didn’t call last night?”
“I’m sorry. I was out of it. Boy, Esther’s really having a hard time.”
“She’s tired. And I think she’s missing you.”
Gina stiffened. “Missing me? I’ve only been gone two days.”
“Yes, but remember, other than when you were east to clean out the house, you’ve never been away from them for two days in their lives.”
The remark pushed all of Gina’s buttons. “What are you saying—that I should feel bad about leaving them and bad about not leaving them, too?”
Paul was silent. Finally he said, “Gina, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. It’s normal for Esther to be missing you.”
There was that word normal again, the surest way to make her feel abnormal. “But she’s . . . It’s more than that.”
“Well, what do you think is bothering her?”
Dream House Page 14