“I messed up,” Gina said. “We should’ve spent more time with Mom and Dad. She adored them, and I deprived her.”
Gina waited for Paul to refute her claim. But he said, “Don’t beat yourself up. If you really want to know, Esther said yesterday that she was afraid you were dying.” He laughed.
“What?” Gina whispered, afraid Annie and Lester might overhear. “Why are you laughing?”
“Lighten up, Gina. You know Esther; she’s a catastrophizer. She’ll be fine. How are you doing?”
“Did you at least reassure her that I’m okay?”
“Are you?”
“We’re talking about Esther.”
“Of course I reassured her. I told her you were on a retreat with the Dalai Lama.” Again, he laughed.
Gina fought to contain her vexation. “She needs some attention. Can you just go and make—”
“She was fine before you called, Gina. You know Esther’s worrying about what’s going on with you—she’s trying to understand.” Paul spoke calmly, slowly. “She’s confused. You melt down at school. You go away alone. Then you don’t call. How can I reassure her when I don’t know what’s going on?”
Paul’s list of offenses roiled her. “Paul, I’m . . . I never go away. This is very hard for me. I leave for four days—four stupid days! And things there are falling apart. Can you just take care of it, of her?”
Dead silence. Gina looked at her phone; the battery had died. Would Paul think she’d hung up on him? She couldn’t remember ever having spoken to him so harshly. Next, she would lose all equilibrium and blame her husband for it, like her mother!
Annie and Lester’s bedroom door bumped shut. Alarmed and clammy, Gina went into the bathroom, with a cool soak in mind. She turned on the tub faucet and slumped against the cold, frictionless enamel in just a few inches of water. Closing her eyes, she felt almost human again, but when she opened them, she wasn’t prepared for the confrontation with her middle-aged toes, her middle-aged knees and breasts. What did they mean to her anymore? Tonight, they seemed almost to be parts of someone else’s body.
She was just stepping out of the tub when again, on the other side of the wall, she heard Annie and Lester thumping around.
Lester’s voice: “Why don’t you take it off—it’s too hot.”
Annie: “You’re right.”
Gina stood dripping on the bath mat, surprised to notice she was holding her breath.
Annie sighed, then Lester. Gina stayed still, listening, evaporating. The bed creaked, and Annie laughed softly. The bed talked more, with rhythm now. A groan, a long silence, another sigh. The low tones of words spoken with affection. Quiet.
A kind of shock took hold of Gina, and she broke out in a new layer of sweat. Looking in the mirror, she stifled a sob rising in her throat. It had been months since she and Paul had made love.
In bed, she churned. Of course, she should’ve called Paul back on the landline. She should’ve tried to explain to Esther what had happened at school, and she would, soon.
But how would she explain why they’d only gone to Maine once a year? She remembered Esther’s last few summers with her grandparents, when she’d spent much of her time combing the blackberry bushes in the field and picking flowers from the garden. “Pick as many as you want, dear; they’ll grow right back,” Eleanor had told her. Grandmother and granddaughter, exactly the same height that summer, had spent part of every day arranging and tending small bouquets in Eleanor’s collection of vases—just one of the many things Gina wished she herself had more time to do with Esther. With bittersweet curiosity, Gina observed her daughter’s pure and unfettered enjoyment of her mother, who was careful not to reveal her most troubling side to her grandchildren, only occasionally letting slip a note of bitterness. On what would be the last day they saw Gina’s parents alive, as they were leaving down the driveway, Esther had dissolved in tears, as if she knew. Gina had only been able to turn in her seat, reach out, and squeeze Esther’s hand.
Gina turned off the light. In the dark, there’d be no chance of escaping her thoughts, of being distracted by the details of the room: the exuberant zinnias, the cheerful flowered sheets, not even the mosquito waiting, bloodthirsty, on the wall.
As she often did when she couldn’t sleep, she lured her mind from troublesome territory by returning to the unrealized Marin house, sifting through a kit of parts: morphing volumes, one story and two story, linear and compact; casement windows and sash windows; pitched, arched, and shed roofs; stucco, metal, clapboard, board-and-batten. Piecing together limitless combinations of features, she manipulated her house like a Mr. Potato Head, hoping that eventually the perfect one would reveal itself. Perhaps it was the haphazard sloppiness of the process that sometimes allowed sleep to sneak in and steal her away. But even when sleep did not come, the house she’d hoped to find through her meditation continued to elude her.
Deeper, dreamless sleep darted just ahead of her, leading her through the forest of gnarled anxieties that was insomnia. On her kitchen island, Allison Brink delivered a baby while her children looked on. “Speak to me in English!” she commanded. “Practice the piano while I finish up here.” A second later, Allison’s kitchen became Gina’s parents’, filled with dust and plaster. The outside wall of the kitchen had fallen completely away; swallows took turns around the room. “Oh, how gorgeous!” her mother said, putting dinner on the table. “We could leave it open like this and just tell Hickle it fell off.” The wall popped up again. Her mother stormed out. A door slammed shut; Gina heard Esther crying but she couldn’t turn the knob that would take her to her.
A house is a machine for living in.
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture
Lily House had been sold. Ginny hadn’t heard a word about why or to whom; her mother had been sulking for three days and sobbing about “all those beautiful family things” and how she’d “never set foot in that house again.” Ginny had no inclination to ask her parents about the sale. Questions, she felt intuitively, would only generate more bad humor in the house.
She asked Cassie, who didn’t know and didn’t seem to care. “Good riddance to Lily House,” she’d said.
Ginny, too, was secretly glad Lily House was out of their lives, but she was still shocked; it seemed to her that her mother had worshipped Lily House and had been planning to move into it someday.
She doubted her mother would ever get over this loss. On top of that, it had been wedding season, and her father had been photographing brides nearly every Saturday, “completely ruining the weekends,” according to her mother. As excited as Ginny was about finishing seventh grade—all that annoying business of what to wear to school and dancing with short boys was behind her!—she was not at all optimistic about the summer.
But on this first morning of vacation, she was greeted in the kitchen by her parents’ cheerful voices drifting in from the shed. The screen door whacked behind them as they came into the room.
“Good morning to youooo!” her father warbled, squeezing her shoulders.
Her mother looked fresh and relaxed in her khaki jumper. Gina poured herself a bowl of Rice Krispies and slid onto a chair, feeling the little circles of the caned seat imprinting themselves on her bare thighs. Sun streamed in through the window. Maybe a day for swimming, she thought, turning to check out the cove. The tide was about halfway in and on the outhaul, their dinghy pointed east into a breeze so light it barely wrinkled the water.
Her mother dumped a cup of detergent into the washing machine and then pushed its door shut with her foot. “Well, Gin,” she announced, “get ready for a new kitchen! We’re going to change this place like you wouldn’t believe!”
So that was it—a Project. There were only a few things—sailing, entertaining out-of-town guests, or a Project—that could alter her mother’s mood so dramatically. Projects seemed to appear out of nowhere and always involved some aspect of house, boat, or yard maintenance. With this news, a certain equilibri
um was achieved between the June day outside and the June day inside, which Ginny experienced as a soaring sense of freedom; the walls of the kitchen seemed almost to evaporate.
Within a few days, the house buzzed with the dismantling of the kitchen. “Take it away!” Ginny’s mother exclaimed after breakfast one day.
“Yes, ma’am!” Her father laughed, and Ginny understood that this really was how he wanted to spend his summer vacation.
Ginny watched her parents start at one corner of the kitchen and work counter-clockwise, tearing out the old, preparing for the new. It was reassuring to see them elbow-to-elbow toiling away, dust in their hair. Both of them wore old blue sneakers, her mother’s laced only halfway because of her high arches.
“Ron, hold the thing down like this and then pull,” her mother instructed as she tore up a square of old linoleum.
“Okay, right-o. Well, that works! Your mother’s so clever; isn’t she?”
Ron turned and winked at Ginny. What did it mean, that wink? Though it was hard to believe that his flattery was sincere, given the way her mother treated him, Ginny could see in his open expression that it was.
Ginny helped carry out the vertical board cabinets and the black slate sink that she knew had to be ancient because Louisa May Alcott had bought the very same sink for her family’s house in Concord. While they were waiting for the new sink to arrive, Ginny and Cassie washed dishes, fruits, and vegetables in the chemical-coated darkroom sink, which to Ginny seemed like a health hazard no matter how careful she was. The new stainless steel sink was built into a new counter that covered the top of the washing machine on one side, the dishwasher on the other. The countertop was plastic laminate trimmed with wood that was finished with the same varnish Ginny had used for the rowboat oars the week before. Above the sink, cabinet faces cut from hollow-core doors were installed. Smooth surfaces! This was the clean, modern look her mother was after.
Every morning, Ginny came downstairs and breathed in the smells of renewal: paint, putty, glue, sawdust. She associated the mostly toxic smells so strongly with her mother’s good moods that they always triggered a feeling of well-being.
The Project didn’t interfere with the usual goings on of summer; there were drop-in visitors nearly every day, and her mother graciously abandoned her putty knife to play hostess. At the end of the day, she and Ginny’s father would clean up the mess, her mother pointing out little piles of dust for him to suck up with the vacuum cleaner. Making dinner, her mother was always a little stooped, looking even smaller than her four feet ten inches, and her sighs reminded everyone of her arthritic back. But during dinner, Ginny could hear in her mother’s voice the vigor spawned by the progress of the Project. Chipped beef on toast had never tasted so good.
With Cassie at her summer job at the Navy yard and her parents occupied in the kitchen, Gina’s days stretched out before her, breezy and free. On a hot Tuesday, she called to invite Sandy Finch to come over and go swimming. She slipped into Cassie’s hand-me-down bathing suit, a luscious orange and purple bikini that made her think of an island paradise. She was thrilled to discover that her breasts finally filled out the skimpy top. In the mirror, she rubbed her hands along the expanse of bare stomach, trying to ignore her hopelessly skinny legs and knees that reminded her of the branches of old apple trees.
Downstairs, her parents were standing in the corner of the kitchen admiring their latest handiwork, small pieces of lumber strewn around their feet. Ginny startled them when she walked in. “Pretty swish,” her father said. Her mother just smiled; Ginny knew she’d never liked Cassie’s bikini.
Ginny peeked behind the refrigerator, where an old servant’s stair had been taken out long ago. It had always seemed odd that there’d been a second staircase in a house that had so little room for a main stair. Even stranger was the idea that there would be maids in such a small house. She’d enjoyed musing about this sneaky staircase and the leftover door-to-nowhere behind Cassie’s bed that once had connected her bedroom to the kitchen. Now, her parents had finally claimed this leftover space, and she was impressed by how efficiently they’d made use of it, outfitting it with shelves of varying depths, an area for the vacuum cleaner, and a large masonite pegboard to hold all of the Revere Ware, in order of size.
“Wow!” Ginny turned to see her parents’ proud grins. “This gives me an idea.” She stepped to the narrow closet where the old water heater stood. “Why don’t you clear this out and make it a storage area, too?” she said, opening the closet. “I mean, since there’s a new water heater in the cellar, and we don’t need this one.”
Hands on their hips, her parents stood staring at the water heater closet. Ginny turned and left the kitchen quickly; she’d been enjoying the time to herself and didn’t want to be drawn into the Project. Also, Tuesday was her usual day to vacuum, and she hoped they’d forget with all the confusion.
In her room, she grabbed a towel and headed down the hill to the cove with a National Geographic. She spread the towel on the grass and stretched out to wait for Sandy, inhaling the smell of fermenting crab apples and grass she’d mowed yesterday. She was transported to the Mayan ruins of the Yucatan until the buzz of lawnmowers and sporadic hammering from the kitchen brought her home again. She sat up to brush an ant off her thigh and spotted Kit, who was messing with a few lobster traps on the shore in front of his house. She wondered if he’d seen her. Just in case he hadn’t, she stood and walked out onto the dock where she swished her toe in the water. She lingered, displaying her bikini-clad self for a few drawn-out moments before sitting down. Disappointingly, Kit didn’t appear to notice. Until recently, their two-year age difference hadn’t gotten in the way of their friendship, but Kit was in high school now, and he’d become mysterious—deep-voiced and tall, his curly blonde hair long and pulled into a ponytail—as if he were someone else altogether. Ginny was very curious about this someone else who’d sprung from her sweet boy companion.
“Where’d you get the bikini?” Sandy broadcasted from the top of the hill. She was wearing a bright pink tank suit, and her thick red hair lay against the ample breasts that were the talk of the boys in their class.
Ginny watched Kit look up from what he was doing and glance over at her. Self-conscious, she plunged off the dock. Sandy ran down the hill and jumped in after her.
“It’s freezing!”
“It’s not!”
“You lie like a rug!”
They effervesced with wild, breathless giggling brought on by the bracing water, enough silliness to drown them both. Ginny and Sandy had a two-person club and the center of the cove, where they treaded water, was their clubhouse.
“Robert G.!”
“Hahahaha! You’re crazy! Davey Chick?”
“Rhymes with . . . Hahaha!”
Sandy’s head pivoted. “Oooh, look!” she said.
“Shhhh . . . I know. But he pretty much ignores me. Watch. He knows it’s us out here, but he won’t even wave. Stop looking at him! Turn sideways!”
The girls turned to face each other, trying not to giggle. Ginny hoped that Kit would prove her wrong.
The motor on Kit’s boat started up, and Ginny turned to look, but Kit didn’t wave as he swung the boat around and headed out of the cove. A moment later, they smelled the cigarette he was smoking.
“I told you,” Ginny said.
“My sister says he smokes pot.”
“Probably everyone does in high school.”
Sandy howled. “You can’t go to boarding school and leave me here alone!”
At that very moment, submerged to her chin, feet pumping, sun hot on her cheeks, at this very place, where the cove and Sandy’s million freckles were the center of the universe, Ginny’s heart, too, felt torn. “Don’t worry! Nothing will change,” she promised. But everything would, she knew, and on most days, she couldn’t wait.
Two days later at lunchtime, Ginny sat on the back porch with her family, devouring a BLT. Cassie dramatically plucked and di
scarded first the bacon and then the bread from her sandwich as their mother outlined the plan for the afternoon that would include Ginny and Cassie. The conversion of the old water heater closet was nearly finished. The space was a mere eighteen inches wide but Ginny’s mother had transformed it into a fine-tuned storage compartment, managing to tweak every square inch to the exact specifications of each furnishing intended for the space. There was a counter-height surface that would hold all of the everyday silverware; below it a liquor cabinet equipped to meet every possible cocktail request and above, a tray cabinet. Ron had painted the shelves that would line the cabinets, and they lay drying on the back porch.
After lunch, Ginny and Cassie worked on their assignment, placing hooks inside the cabinets for cups and cooking implements. Aware of their exacting taskmaster, they carefully measured the location of each screw before putting it in place. By the time they were finished, the shelves were dry, and their father wriggled them into place. “Voilà!” he beamed when the last one was in. The day had grown more humid, and beads of sweat dotted his bald head.
Ginny and Cassie helped move all the dishes from the darkroom onto the kitchen table. Later, after a quick dinner on the porch, they would load them into the refurbished cupboards. Surveying the stacks of plates and bowls, Gina was doubtful that they would fit.
“Great job, girls and boy! We’ll go get ice cream cones at The Mrs. And Me to celebrate after dinner!” her mother announced.
Ginny had never seen her mother so happy in the house. Nights since the Project began had been peaceful, not a single middle-of-the-night alarm, no mention of Lily House. When her mother’s hands were busy, not with laundry or cooking or cleaning, but with creating something new and useful, the sun seemed to smile more brightly upon their house.
Ginny basked in that light now but then checked herself; a storm could blow in any time with no warning.
Finished with their job in the kitchen, Ginny and Cassie lay in the hammock, Ginny’s head at the apple tree end, Cassie’s at the birch tree end. Cassie was reading Anna Karenina.
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