Dream House

by Catherine Armsden

  Of course, there were still some signifiers of wealth at Andrews: expensive stereo equipment, braces, nose jobs, ski vacations in Vail, and the river of cash flowing into the procurement of alcohol and drugs. What a laugh that her mother had believed her daughters’ morality would be better protected at boarding school than in Whit’s Point! Most of the supervising adults at Andrews were caring but quite a few spent their free time in much the same way as their students. (Mr. Grand, the history teacher, was known to be sleeping with a senior but at least she was eighteen.) At times Gina found the freedom at school overwhelming; it was a lot to manage work, fun, sleep, and the 24-7 demand for emergency peer counseling that substituted for parenting.

  But Gina had never spent a homesick day at Andrews. To be surrounded by so many interesting girls! Like having more sisters—slightly wounded sisters. Daughters of divorce, alcoholism, illness, and death: escapees, all. She loved how the place engaged her every molecule, how revelations seemed to come in the breakfast biscuits, how there was room for her to feel, to express, to create. She loved the three art studios—the ceramics room especially, where she worked until midnight some nights, building her clay ruins.

  She loved being out of earshot of her mother.

  So when her parents told her in September that she might not be able to return to Andrews for her senior year because of money problems, she secretly cried nearly every night for three months. It was never brought up again until they were driving her back to school after Christmas vacation and she asked from the backseat, “So, am I going to graduate from Andrews or not, do you think?”

  “Yes, of course,” her mother said. “You’re going to graduate from Andrews.”

  That was the end of it—subject closed, as usual on the topic of money. Gina held in her explosive relief until they’d left her at the dorm, and then she and her roommates gyrated to the Rolling Stones in a four-person bear hug.

  Now, she slipped the photograph of Mark into the tray of chemicals. It would always be magic to her the way a blank surface would slowly fill in with life. Peering at Mark’s portrait, she thought of the letter she’d just received from him, covered with painstakingly drawn caricatures of his teachers. She plucked the print from the last tray and clothespinned it to the line hanging over the sink. She hoped he’d call.

  She sat on the stool poking the tongs at the prints in the tray, tasting the pungent chemicals they soaked in. As her sculptures took shape on the paper, she felt pleased that in two dimensions the pieces—a series of “rooms,” made from raku-fired porcelain slabs—had lost little of their mystery and power. This was the first body of work she felt was truly hers.

  For an instant, she was pulled away by the sound of dinner preparations beyond the darkroom door. But her father switched on the print dryer, and its hum brought her back inside. She left the finished prints in the rinse tray and pulled the stool over to the dryer. When she and Cassie were little, they’d peel the prints from the hot silver drum quickly to avoid burning their fingers, then make a pile of them, dry and slightly curled like autumn leaves. Now, she picked off a photograph of a group of mostly smiling people posing against a layer of orange day lilies in front of Lily House: her mother, her grandparents, Fran, and a toddler—probably Sid—grinning and straddling a large, spotted dog. The women’s skirts were skewed by the wind.

  “Oh, take a look at this!” Her father plucked from the belt a photograph of her mother, dressed in an antique gown, standing on the stair at Lily House. “I took this the day I met her. The Historical people hired me, and Mom was the only one tiny enough to fit into Mary Banton’s dress. It was raining that day, and muddy in the driveway, so I picked Mom up and carried her across Lily House’s threshold. Isn’t she a beauty? She was the classiest girl around.”

  “Yeah,” Gina said. Her mother looked both regal and sultry, like a very short movie star. She imagined her father, falling in love through his viewfinder. But as always, she felt both mystified and irritated by the adoration in his eyes that she’d come to understand was what stood between him and the imperative to protect his daughters from their mother.

  More pictures of Lily House rolled out on the dryer belt: Lily House in all seasons, in the snow and spring, windows lit up at night; it was a photo-worthy house. From looking at the merry faces of the people gathered around it, you could almost believe it had once been the magical place her mother always said it was. Next came a series of recent photographs, clinical portraits of each room from every angle. Rooms of four-posted beds, curvy Victorian couches, caned chairs, clashing oriental rugs and stern portraits everywhere.

  When Gina asked about the photos, her father said, “Mom wanted them, to keep track of furniture and paintings and whatnot. She doesn’t trust the Historical Society.”

  “Why did she sell the house to them, then? I thought she wanted to live in Lily House someday—she always worshipped it. Did she sell it because of . . . what happened with Fran?”

  “Fran?” Her father cocked his head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think Mom ever wanted to live at Lily House. She likes it here, being on the water.”

  Not for the first time lately, Gina had the thought that her father might not just be long-suffering but also oblivious.

  Just once, Gina had asked her mother why she’d sold Lily House to the Historical Society, but her mother had changed the subject. Gina figured it was because the sale had to do with the taboo subject of money. “But why’d she’d sell to them?” she pressed her father now.

  “She wanted to be able to sell it to someone for a better price—a lot more than what we ended up getting from the Historical people. If she had, we would’ve gotten our hands on all these things in the house.” He pointed at the photograph of Lily House’s dining room sideboard. “But we couldn’t because the Washington letters never showed up.”

  “I don’t get it. What do the Washington letters have to do with anything?”

  “Your grandpa wrote in his will that if the letters weren’t found, Lily House and everything in it had to be sold to the Historical Society so they could protect the hidden letters. If they’re even there. Isn’t that silly? But remember: don’t say anything to anyone about the letters; it’s a Banton family secret, like all the others.” His chuckle came out more like a cough.

  Gina felt an irrepressible urge to pour all of her questions into the dark room. This must have been what a confessional felt like! “How come Mom never talks about the fact that Bill Holloway was Sid’s father?” she blurted.

  Her father sighed and shifted his weight. “It’s a long story. Mom will tell you about it sometime.” He shook his head. “Those Bantons. They’re quite a bunch.”

  It was the only indictment about family Gina had ever heard her father make, and it seemed to include her mother, since she and Sid were the only Bantons left. The safety of the darkroom must have emboldened him, too.

  She took another chance. “Don’t you think there’s something wrong with the Bantons?”

  “Oh, well, I’m not sure how you mean that . . . Sid’s a little light in his loafers; is that what you mean?”

  “What? No, I don’t mean . . .” Gina felt embarrassed for Sid and angry at the same time. “Who cares about that?”

  “Well, maybe you kids don’t, but it’s a little tough to swallow. For adults. Parents.”

  “Like who? He doesn’t have parents. Why do you care? He doesn’t even talk to us.”

  “Oh, I’m not saying I care, particularly. They have a right to the way they want to live, as far as that goes. But it was pretty hard on Mom and Fran.”

  Gina thought of all the pain Fran and her mother had caused the family and even though she had no reason to feel protective of her estranged cousin, she couldn’t help feeling indignant that he was being implicated in their misery. She felt herself shut down.

  The hum of the dryer filled the room as they continued to pick prints off the belt.

  After several minutes, her father
said, “I didn’t mean to sound like I don’t approve of how Sid is. It’s just that with Sid, it’s not so simple. Remember, he’s Sidney Banton. The last in the famous line of Sidney Bantons. There was a certain expectation. Your mother thinks that was the last straw for Fran. That night she did herself in. Sid told her about . . .” here, her father dropped his voice, “being a homosexual.”

  Gina’s jaw was clenched tight. Taking a breath, she aimed to take a good shot at her father. “I was there that day,” she said. “It wasn’t because of Sid. Fran and Mom were totally out of control. Both of them.” To twist the knife, she added, “Cassie thinks Mom’s sick and needs a psychiatrist.”

  “Oh?” Her father laughed, infuriating her. “She does, huh? Well, Mom and Fran did always have their problems with each other. And Mom has had her ups and downs, but it’s not all that bad; is it?”

  The intimacy Gina had felt earlier shrunk into the room’s yellowed darkness. She was struck with an urge to grab her father and shake him out of his . . . amnesia, or stupor, or whatever it was.

  Ron held up a photograph. “Look at this great Chippendale desk. Sidney Banton’s very own.”

  Gina didn’t look.

  “Virginia, are you in there?” her mother’s voice shot through the darkroom door.

  Gina ignored her.

  “Virginia?” Eleanor yelled again. “Phone’s for you. It’s Mark. We’re going to eat!”

  Gina picked up the phone on her father’s worktable. “Hi, Gina Lo-La,” Mark said.

  Gina turned her back to the room and moved her lips closer to the receiver to ask him how he was. She’d hoped he’d call, but not now, with her father standing right there.

  “Four days into vacation, and I’m already going nuts,” Mark complained. “Rachel has three other pre-pubes here all the time, Martin is king, and Trudy thinks she’s my best friend, only hipper.”

  Gina remembered being scandalized the first time she’d heard Mark call his parents by their first names. During parents’ weekend, Trudy’s skin-tight jeans and silk halter top had made her a standout among the other khakis-and-wool-skirted parents. She’d never met a parent she’d call sexy. Her own mother snorted in disgust at the Closeup toothpaste ads and ruined every TV make-out scene with her loud negative commentary about swapping spit. In their house, Gina’s sexuality slinked off like a guilty dog.

  Mark was focused 100 percent on losing his virginity, and Gina was the girl he intended to lose it with. She was flattered; he was handsome and smooth, never fumbling a kiss. She loved lying next to him in the field near school, skin against skin. Peeling off clothes, breaking the rules sneaking into his dorm room—minutes charged with the exciting danger of getting caught. She thought now of the night last month he’d thrown pebbles at her window, and she’d sneaked out of her dorm to find him huddled against the maple tree. He’d just returned from the funeral of a best friend back home who’d crashed his car. When he laid his head in Gina’s lap and cried, she felt more alive and purposeful than she ever had, more connected to everything—to Mark, to the trees just beginning to push out tiny buds—and grounded by the profoundness of this act of comforting that transcended her middle-of-the-night fatigue, the rules they were breaking, the exam she had the next day.

  These feelings, Gina realized, had little to do with wanting to have sex. She had no intention of losing her virginity to Mark. She’d told him so. First of all, she wasn’t ready (the reason she gave him), and she wasn’t in love with him (the reason she didn’t give him), if she even knew what love was. Furthermore, the horniness that peppered his every joke and gesture was a turnoff.

  There were plenty of other girls who might have been ready, but Mark soldiered on with determination and loyalty—not her father’s hangdog kind of loyalty but the frisky kind. She was worth waiting for! What she was willing to give, she figured, must have been worth what she was not willing to give up.

  Though sometimes—like now as he pleaded, “Can’t you pul-eeze get your bod down here for a couple of days?”—he made her seriously doubt that he was interested in anything more than her body.

  “I’m still not feeling good.” She coughed a juicy cough. “Plus,” she whispered, “we can’t afford the bus fare right now.”

  This was sort of true. Her father had been short of work for the past three months, and while she was home they’d been eating waffles and canned tuna for dinner.

  “That sucks. D’you miss me?”

  “Yeah, I do,” she said, though she realized she’d missed him more before he’d called.

  “I want you, Lo. I can’t stand having to wait until school on Monday. Please come visit—I’ll pay for the ticket.”

  Gina turned again and glanced at Mark’s confident face hanging on the line, dripping into the sink. She hated his begging. “I can’t—really—I mean, I want to, but I’m sick, and I’ve got my art history paper to write.”

  “Ron?” her mother’s bark, through the door. “What are you waiting for, a personal invitation?”

  “Oh—dinnertime already? Be right there!” her father chirped. So innocent, as if he hadn’t heard the reproach. “Gina . . .” Looking deflated, he gestured toward the door.

  “Mark, I’ve gotta go eat—I’ll call you back later, okay?”

  “Maybe we can do some more after dinner,” her father said, when Gina had hung up. “We’ll see what Mom wants to do.” His sorry tone meant there would be no more darkroom revelations tonight. Silently, they finished loading the washer.

  Gina took hold of the doorknob just as her father placed a firm hand on her shoulder.

  “You know, honey, if Mark really cares about you, he won’t pressure you like that.”

  He’d startled her. From what remote region of him had this protectiveness suddenly emerged? She wanted to linger, to make sense of this fatherly concern. But it had come too late; the minute they left the darkroom, she knew, it would evaporate.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, unlocking the door and stepping into the angry, bright light of the kitchen.

  Valid ambiguity promotes useful flexibility . . . The calculated ambiguity of expression is based on the confusion of experience as reflected in the architectural program. This promotes richness of meaning over clarity of meaning.

  Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

  Chapter 11

  Gina was eager to finish drawing the plans, but her concern about Lester grew. Could he be quietly working somewhere in the house? She went outside, lifted the old wood doors on the cellar bulkhead and stepped down into the dark, dirt-floor space. The light caught the metal of a hanging chain, and she pulled it, illuminating a workbench with all kinds of tools, a stack of logs, an old lawnmower, and some beach chairs. No sign of Lester.

  Perhaps he was asleep upstairs. She went inside and stepped gingerly up to the second floor where she couldn’t remember ever having been. There were three bedrooms opposite the stair. She quickly peeked into them, then turned down the hall where the two main bedrooms occupied the front of the house, facing Pickering Road. One of them had been the original Sidney Banton’s; she recognized his writing desk from her father’s photographs. The room appeared untouched, its bookshelves lined with old leather volumes. She turned and faced the closed door across the hall and a chill ran through her as she realized it probably led to the room where Fran had died. Heart thrumming, she put her ear to the door, all at once thinking of the trapped bird at her parents’ house.

  “Lester?” she said quietly. She knocked and, hearing nothing, she reached for the doorknob. A loud pop! pop! pop! made her lunge for the stair but then she realized a car on Pickering Road had backfired. She took a breath and opened the bedroom door.

  To her great relief, the room had been divested of all signs of habitation and was being used for storage. Boxes and furniture filled the furnace-like space; she recognized a couch slipcovered in peony chintz from Annie and Lester’s old house. She wondered if it was an accide
nt or because of Fran’s untimely death that this room had been relegated to storage. Would its disuse honor Fran or merely preserve the tragedy by remaining a metaphor for a life not fully lived?

  Gina stepped around the boxes to look out the window facing east. From this high perspective, she could see that despite Annie’s description of letting the plants, time, and weather inform her gardening, there was nevertheless a pleasing structure to her garden. And something else caught her eye: on the old barn, a skylight running the length of its roof. A skylight! In Whit’s Point, this was such an unexpectedly modern sight it might as well have been a spaceship perched on the shingled ridge. She ran downstairs and outside to investigate.

  The barn was large relative to the house and had the saggy look of a forgotten outbuilding, though its clapboards were freshly painted. The padlock that hung from the door latch was unlocked.

  She pulled open the door and what came to life before her was so unexpected she nearly gasped: a soaring, bright, open space enclosed by whitewashed walls, a refinished wide board floor and an exposed beam ceiling strung with light cables. A huge wooden fan was suspended from the center truss, whirring loudly. On the walls hung several richly colored rugs: Navajo, Oaxacan, and Turkish, perhaps souvenirs from Annie and Lester’s travels. At the end of the room where Gina stood was an upright piano; next to it, Annie’s violin and a music stand that held the music for a Bach concerto. A pile of music books, notebooks, envelopes of photographs and a half-full coffee cup emblazoned with a treble signature were scattered across a large unfinished pine table. In the corner nearest the door stood the ladder Gina needed and Annie’s garden tools: rake and spade, a watering can, and a bucket that held a dibble, trowel, and pruning shears.

  Gina froze. She felt she’d stumbled upon something intensely private—sacred, like the forts she’d built as a child. The place was the personification of Annie and Lester—tall and powerful, warm and engaging. Slowly, she moved to the center of the room where she could fully absorb the life emanating from its walls. Under the skylight the space was so luxuriously unfettered—defined only by a large worn oriental rug and a single overstuffed chair—she wanted to spread her arms and dance!