Gina smiled and shrugged, even though she remembered the acquisition of the yacht well. It had arrived just after her fourteenth birthday with as much excitement as a new baby.
She walked forward, scanning the boat-filled harbor. It was so unchanged it seemed impossible that twenty-eight years had passed since she and Kit were on the water together. Yet, she also felt how far she’d traveled from here. Did Kit, too, feel this lurch of time and distance? She hadn’t read it in his casual manner. Maybe time was different when you lived in one place all your life; like a word seen always in context, you felt unalterable and known.
As Kit coiled a line, Gina stole glances. He’d grown more handsome with age; his face had filled out to a rugged squareness. She admired the sinewy arms that, as a girl, had rescued her on more than one occasion.
She walked back to the cockpit and leaned over the transom to see what name Kit had chosen for the boat. She was surprised to see he’d kept it Homeward.
“So what’ve you been up to in life?” Kit asked, sinking onto the seat beside her. “I heard you went and became an Ivy Leaguer since I saw you last, huh?”
His teasing put her at ease. “I’m still me,” she said, “Even so, they granted me a master’s degree.”
Kit laughed. “I remember your father throwin’ his hands in the air. ‘Can you believe it? Our daughter at a place like that!’”
Gina smiled. It was true; her parents had been proud. But they often let their daughters know they felt left behind by them. What they never knew was how often Gina herself had felt like an outsider in her different milieus—too hayseed in some, too privileged in others, like here at the town dock.
“What sort of stuff do you design out in California?” Kit asked. When she told him, he laughed. “Houses! They’re trouble!” he said.
He shook his head, and Gina sensed he had a story he was eager to tell. “How so?” she asked.
“I tried buildin’ a house with the woman I’d been with for a few years, Janice, out on Bailey’s Island Road,” he said. “She worked with Phelps and Sons—you know that company?” Gina shook her head no. “Well, anyhow, me and Janice liked everything the same—you know: the water, boats, buildin’. We were buildin’ the house for ourselves, and like, we thought since we’d built a boat or two together, a house would be the same kinda deal.”
“And?”
“Not even close. Houses have those things called foundations, ya know? Once that concrete’s poured into the ground, people kinda freak out. But boats . . .”
“Boats are like the anti-house. They’re all about impermanence and escape.”
Kit bounced his eyebrows up and down at her. “To you, professor, maybe. Not to me—I’m not an escaper type. Anyways, since you’re an architect, I think you’ll appreciate this story. So, one day Janice and I are layin’ floor joists, and out of the blue she says, ‘What if this house turns out to be too small?’ ‘For what?’ I asked, and she wouldn’t answer. So I said, ‘If it’s too small, we’ll sell it. We don’t have to love the house for the rest of our lives just because we built it.’ She got all mad. ‘How can you say that?’ she said. She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day.”
Kit stood and went forward to adjust a fender.
When he sat down again, Gina said, “Maybe Janice wasn’t talking about the house. Maybe she was talking about having a family?” She assumed she was observing the obvious.
Kit drew in his chin. “Maybe. She was always thinkin’ ahead, or about something more. It’s my mantra to take one day at a time. Janice knew that. She left before we’d even framed the roof.”
Even as a kid, Kit had seemed wise, Gina remembered. Now though, she felt drawn into something more deeply than she wanted to be.
“Janice is already with someone else,” Kit said.
“How about you?”
Kit gazed out to sea. “I kind of like being on my own,” he said, turning back to her. “I finished the house—it’s awesome.”
“You live there?”
“Nope! I live right here, seven months of the year. You’re sittin’ in my livin’ room.”
Gina gazed around at the waterlogged boat cushions that lined the varnished cockpit, the paint peeling around the engine gear and fathometer. She thought of the hours spent here with her family, semi-reclined, toes flirting with the cold brass winch, sometimes pleasantly dazed, often half-listening, and other times bored by the protracted exposure to water, sky, sun.
Kit handed her a bottle of Orangina and opened one for himself. As he raised it to his lips, she noticed half his pinky finger was missing.
“Wasn’t it hard to give up the house after working so hard on it?” she asked.
“Nah. I wasn’t attached. Do you get attached to the houses you design?”
“Not usually. But I’m only with them once a week during construction, not day after day.”
“I love buildin’, but it’s just a job. I sold the house, bought Homeward, and nevah looked back.”
Gina didn’t quite believe him; this boat—Kit’s world—seemed tiny. “What’s it been like, living in Whit’s Point all your life?”
“Hmm. Well . . . it’s not like I can compare it to anything else. It’s home.” He spread his arms as if he meant the whole harbor, the islands, the sea beyond. “Everything I love is here. Why would I live anywhere else?”
It was what her mother and father had always said about Whit’s Point. Words she wished she could say.
“But I mean . . . a person can feel at home anywhere, right?” Kit said, and Gina thought: he’s reassuring me, as always. “Home isn’t necessarily just the place you grew up, or the place you live now—it’s more like . . . any place that stays alive inside you no matter where you are.”
“I guess that’s true,” Gina said, though right now this notion made her feel all the more conflicted.
“So who ended up with your folks’ place, anyway? I know those Yankee people were after it. It would be a crime if someone put up a McMansion there. You checkin’ into that? That why you’re here?”
“No.” Gina felt her defenses rising. “Sid Banton bought the house. There’s nothing I can do about whatever he wants to do. It wasn’t even our house to begin with.” She paused, reaching for things to say. “I’m designing, or trying to design, a house for my family north of San Francisco.”
Kit’s eyes shifted to the horizon. “Ca-li-fornia,” he said, in a way that reminded her of how she—and everyone else in Maine, as far as she could tell—had envisioned the golden state they’d never seen: a playground of endless sun-drenched beaches, plastic people in expensive, spotless cars. “California,” Kit said again, as if seeing a mirage. “It can’t be more beautiful than here!”
Gina smiled. “It’s just different,” she said, realizing how far from California she felt now. She shifted her gaze to the west, where billowy white and gray clouds were gathering in the hazy sky. Often during a heat wave, they’d sit there all day like that, threatening.
“So how do you feel about Sid owning your place?” Kit asked. “I saw him at the hardware store last week. Haven’t seen him in maybe ten years. Barely recognized him. You in touch with him?”
Gina felt her body tighten. “No. Have you seen him in the last couple of days?” she said, trying to sound casual.
“Naw. Boy, he’s burned some bridges. Made enough money in New York to buy and sell a few different houses ‘round town.” He laughed. “I don’t know him, but people have always said he’s a kinda wheeler-dealer with a drinkin’ problem.”
This, Gina realized, was why she lived in a big city and not a small town. “So, do people in Whit’s Point talk about how messed up the Bantons were?”
Kit smiled. “Relax. First of all, there’s nothing special about the Bantons’ craziness. Every family’s nuts, right? Besides, they don’t have to talk to me about the Bantons. I was there. Remember?”
Remember was exactly what Gina didn’t want to do. But remember
she did: Kit was there, always. He’d been fun and reliable as a playmate and had grown up to be a kind young man with a crush on her. Gina shrank inwardly, recalling how, when she was seventeen, she’d abruptly ended their friendship.
“Gosh, didn’t mean to bum ya out,” Kit said, as if reading her thoughts. “All that seems like a long time ago to me. I thought it would to you, too. Hey! Doug! How ya doin’?” Kit smiled and waved to a man in rubber boots coming down the ramp. Turning back to Gina, he said, “Your mom wasn’t so bad. I mean, she was always pretty snobby about me and my family when I was a kid. But as soon as she got Homeward and started runnin’ into me at the dock, we totally bonded. Maybe she shoulda lived on a boat. She was a water person, like me. I think she’d be really happy to know you and I are sittin’ here together now.”
“Yes,” Gina agreed, remembering how her mother had lit up when they were out on the water. “She would be.”
Gina was exhausted. She and Kit had been navigating the gaps, calibrating the reach of their conversation—pulling back, casting out, retreating, like yo-yos. She needed to go. She stood to scan the harbor, a wash of blues, grays, and greens, flecked with gulls. It was an uncomplicated, soothing scene, but she was rattled.
Kit took a slug from his drink and stood. “Before you leave, go below and check it out!”
Reluctant but curious, Gina climbed through the companionway into the cabin, taking in its familiar smell—a mingling of bilge water, wet wood, and canvas. The seat cushions where her family had been rocked to sleep at night were still covered with the blue denim her mother had sewn; two toothbrushes sat in the metal holder her mother had fastened to the galley wall. Gina’s fondest memories of family life were from summer cruises down-east on Homeward, her mother at the tiller navigating swells with a broad smile, at night, the four of them snug in the cabin.
Kit climbed down behind her just as the wake of a motorboat hit Homeward. The boat rocked and Gina lurched sideways, nearly losing her balance. She felt Kit’s hands take a firm hold on her waist. “Whoa, where’re your sea legs?” He laughed and, when the rocking stopped, pulled his hands away.
Gina turned. Her eyes met Kit’s, slate-gray with an intensity mitigated by the fine smile lines that fanned from their corners. A familiar sense of him—his gentle touch and salty smell, his protectiveness—flooded her, and she thought of all the small, private spaces, like this one, that she and Kit had shared as kids. Snow caves, rowboats, forts, and beds when they were young enough for sleepovers—they’d huddled to commiserate about the bruises of their complicated childhoods. How could she have known then how rare such resonance and loyal companionship were? Standing with Kit in the cabin, she felt closer than she ever had to the parts of her past that had seemed safe and good.
All this pumped through her mind in the few seconds it took for her to become flustered and say, “It’s so cool that you live here.” She felt lightheaded, dumb.
Kit smiled, leaned toward her, and reached out his hand. She experienced a visceral memory of pulling away from him, but now she didn’t recognize the part of herself that had once needed to and, in fact, was worried about the part that might not want to. But Kit’s hand continued to reach beyond her to take hold of something on the shelf.
“One of your father’s logbooks,” he said, handing it to her. “I guess I’ve been saving it for you.”
Gina looked down at the small black notebook labeled “1977–1979” with her father’s perfect printing. “Thank you,” she said, hoping he hadn’t read the range of emotion that had hijacked her.
Kit turned and she followed him back on deck. “So if you’re not lookin’ into the house, what’re you up to here?” he asked.
A soft breeze touched Gina’s cheek. “I’m . . . it’s hard to . . .” she fumbled. “I’ve been feeling out of sorts . . . The thing is, if I can just make this house in California happen, I’ll feel better. At the same time, I don’t think I can make the house happen until I feel better. And I still can’t let go of the old house here.”
Kit shook his head and chuckled. “Still tortured! You haven’t changed a bit. I mean have you had some untortured years since I saw you last?”
Kit’s words jabbed. But he couldn’t know just how tortured she’d been feeling recently, and she saw in his eyes that his remark had more to do with the hurt she’d inflicted on him years ago.
Was there a point in addressing her regrets now? She thought of her missed opportunity with Annie yesterday. “I was really confused back then,” she said. “I had a lot going on and . . . You were always so kind.” She felt her cheeks flush. Her words hardly seemed adequate, but they were something, at least.
When Kit smiled, a shyness softening his lined face, she felt rewarded. “Well, we were both lonely, huh?” he said, as if addressing her implied apology. “Our parents believed us kids were immune to their crap. Eleanor really got to you, and when my dad left my mom, it was just the beginning of trouble for me.” He stood. “Anyway, about the house—you’ll figure it out, right? That’s why you’ve come out here. And then you’ll feel better!”
An outboard motor started up at the float, enveloping them in a cloud of gasoline fumes. Gina looked at her watch. “Yes. I just need to get down to it!”
She put out her hand, but Kit surprised her with a hug. “Hey—come look for me next time you’re at the dock,” he said. “Oof! You’re stiff as a two-by-four. I can tell you’re needin’ a good row!”
The feeling of Kit’s arms around her awakened a slumbering sadness that threatened to draw her too deeply into her younger self. She pulled back from their embrace. “Yes. I think I do need a row!”
Kit pointed behind her at a float crowded with skiffs and inflatable rubber dinghys. “You can take out my boat, even if I’m not around,” he said. “It’s the shell secured with a red line over there. The oars are in the clubhouse with my name on them.”
“Thanks a lot,” she said, smiling. “That would be really great.”
But in a quick couple of days, she thought with some relief, she’d be gone.
The Plan is the generator. Without the plan, you have lack of order, and willfulness. The Plan holds in itself the essence of sensation.
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture
Chapter 10
As she walked up the ramp and down the dock, Gina pulsed with all that Kit had stirred up. Crossing the street in front of Tobey’s, she forgot to look and had to make a dash for the sidewalk to avoid a car.
By the time she reached Lily House, she understood that Kit was right: she hadn’t yet found what she’d come to Whit’s Point for and had to return to the old house. She marched down Pickering Road and stood again in the front yard.
Nothing had changed since yesterday, not the stifling heat that by now had burned the blue out of the sky, nor the white husk of a house, nothing except the cove, which held an hour’s less water than it had at the same time yesterday. From the yard, she sized up the house, trying to imagine what she would do to it if it were her architectural project. But no matter how she pushed and pulled its walls in her mind, appending the old house with new rooms or windows, a coherent vision of an improved house didn’t come to her. It was what it was—unmalleable, complete. And yet it left her feeling incomplete.
The house looked back at her, as confounding and impenetrable as her mother. But it was a house—wood, glass, lines and angles—and she was an architect; she had the tools to get inside and know this entity.
All at once it struck her: she would make drawings of the house. Usually, drawings marked a beginning of something new. She’d ask her client, “What do you want?” and turn the answer into a plan, the plan into a house. Now, she would work backward—more like an archaeologist than an architect—and with her drawings deconstruct the house wall by wall in hopes of discovering what she wanted from it.
Propelled by this mission, she mostly ran the quarter-mile to and from Annie and Lester’s to fetch paper, clipboard,
her tape measure and camera. When she got back to the house, she had to sit under the birch tree to catch her breath and cool off.
On the pad of paper, she sketched the footprint of the house on which she would put her exterior measurements. She stood and walked the house’s perimeter, hooking the measuring tape on each corner and dragging it along the wall. She placed each ground-floor window on the plan, noting its distance from the ends of the wall. Then she added the front and back doors, the porches and steps leading from them, and the shed off the kitchen.
As she measured, she felt drawn to the house in a new way, not unlike what she’d felt with Kit in Homeward’s cabin: an appreciation that came from not only a shared history but also a more focused and seasoned perspective.
She finished the plan of the exterior walls and collapsed under the tree again to gaze at what she’d drawn. For every wiggly line that represented a wall of the house, there were four more parallel to it that merely served the purpose of noting dimensions. There was no hierarchy in this kind of sketch, just a mess of lines and numbers that were legible mostly only to the measurer. Yet there was strict, underlying precision in the apparent disarray, which later would translate into a plan that documented the house to within a quarter of an inch. This preliminary work had always suited Gina: the part of her that liked to scrawl with pen and paper, the part of her that wanted to create order by revealing a house’s factual image. A house’s history could be uncovered in these lines, and its future would rest on their foundation. Now, she experienced something different as she recorded this house: the lines and numbers were alive on the paper, a breathing reality that revived her family’s past.
The front door was still unlocked. She glanced down the driveway before pushing it open. Willing herself through the house’s stuffy rooms, she quickly sketched the floor plan: living room, kitchen, piano room, and darkroom, grouped around the steep stair. Then she went upstairs, where the walls of the four bedrooms aligned with those below. “We’re all on top of each other!” her mother often complained, and indeed they were; the “foursquare” house, popular everywhere in America at the turn of the century, defined family life with its compact, centralized plan. It was the floor plan of choice for Gina’s clients who strove for togetherness; her wealthier clients, however, chose houses with wings where they could flee from their children and their caregivers, their housekeepers, and cooks.
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