Dream House (25 page)

She quickly deleted it and wrote:

Allison, trust your instincts about taking the wall down. I think you're going to love the openness. Of course, once you've lived in it a while, if you find yourself wanting a screen, you can always have one made.

The measurements of her parents' house stared up at her from the table. She sat down, pulled out a sheet of fresh vellum, taped it to the desk, and sharpened her lead. Sticky from the heat, her fingers left prints on the paper as she set down her scale to measure the first line. She sharpened her lead. Studied the numbers on her drawing.
Stood and pulled down the shade halfway to shut out the sun, then went into the bathroom and splashed water on her face. Realizing she was thirsty, she fetched a glass of water from the kitchen and took it to the desk. She sat down, picked up her leadholder and sharpened it for a third time. She glanced at the clock: one forty-five. She'd been procrastinating for an hour! Finally, Annie's joke about calling the Coast Guard got the best of her. She decided to walk to the church in hopes of intercepting Lester at the book sale.

The sidewalk along Pickering Road had given Gina her very first taste of freedom as a child, but now as she scuffed along the worn concrete squares, she considered the constraints of marriage and aging. Lester had been the one to whom people had gone for advice and comfort; now he created concern when he was a little late getting home—in the middle of a hot but otherwise fine day! But then, she herself had fantasized that Ben had been kidnapped at school with a kind of terror she couldn't have imagined before she had children. And Paul—his close monitoring of her lately had made her feel claustrophobic. (And now she realized she'd again left her phone at the house.) She thought of Kit's apparent contentedness, pictured him in the morning, emerging from
Homeward's
cabin to assess water and sky before rowing ashore to spend the day building boats. No one was worrying about him, and he seemed to be doing very well. Was it not possible to maintain at least a
feeling
of independence when you were married and raising a family?

She crossed the lawn in front of Whit's Point Congregational Church—a typical eighteenth-century New England structure with white clapboards and two tall windows flanking the forest green front door. The church had no adornment except a steeple stump that lacked a culminating spire. Several tables scantily lined with books
were set up on the grass, and people were milling and chatting. Gina scanned the crowd but didn't see Lester or recognize anyone else.

The church doors were open, and she stepped inside to cool off. Funerals and weddings—since she'd stopped attending Sunday school at age eleven, they were the only occasions that had brought her to the church. She remembered seeing Cassie walk into the foyer before her parents' service, flanked by Wes and their three teenagers. The sun pouring in through the doors was so bright that Gina had trouble seeing their faces. Backlit figures bent to hug Cassie, and she flapped and nodded in her usual, demonstrative way. Unlike Gina, she'd continued to be in touch with old family friends and had always thrived on ceremony. On her wedding day, Cassie'd come down the aisle of this very church—could it have been the same red carpet?—on their father's arm, looking bridal-radiant in ivory and flower-child vintage, even though their mother had quipped that she might have considered a red dress “under the circumstances.”

Back outside, Gina scanned the book tables once more for Lester and this time spotted Lowell Strong, the church's minister, stooping to listen to the woman standing with him. Lowell had conducted the wedding ceremonies for both Gilbert sisters, presided over Fran's funeral, and come out of retirement to perform Gina's parents' service. Gina remembered him the day of the funeral, ascending slowly and gracefully to the pulpit, announcing gravely, “This day has come much too soon.”

Looking up now, Lowell spotted Gina and waved as she crossed the lawn.

“How wonderful to see you here,” he said when she walked up. “I was hoping you Gilbert girls weren't gone for good!”

Gina felt touched by his warmth but saddened, too, by the notion of being
gone for good.
She asked about Lester, and Lowell said he'd
seen him at the book sale about an hour ago. As Gina said goodbye, he clasped her hand, and she was struck by the tears in his eyes that seemed to say that whether or not it had mattered to her, she'd always be a part of this community.

Gina walked back to Lily House, opened the front door and yelled, “Lester?”

No answer. It was two-thirty. She paced in the kitchen, wolfing down some yogurt that barely put a dent in her hunger, and sat on the back steps staring into the garden. Why didn't these older people carry cell phones! Suddenly realizing her own carelessness, she went into the house and turned on her phone. It rang immediately, displaying Paul's number.

When she answered, Paul asked sharply, “What's going on there? How come you don't answer your phone?”

“I forgot to take it with me. Everything okay?”

“Could you try to remember to have your phone with you? We need to be able to be in touch. I want to know how you're doing.”

Gina felt awful—harassed and at the same time guilty for not sharing with Paul everything she was experiencing. “I'm fine, Paul; please stop worrying. I just need this time to . . .” Time to
what?
“I'm going to make drawings of the house.”

A long pause. Then, Paul said, “That's a great idea. For a keepsake, you mean?”

She was grateful for this simplistic interpretation: everyone understood a
souvenir.
“Yeah,” she said. “What's going on there?”

“I went to Marin to check on things. Today's one of those perfect summer days up there.”

Marin, Gina thought. Dry brown grass, empty blue skies. Did she even remember how it smelled?

“Seventy-nine degrees,” Paul said. “People wearing shorts, eating
ice cream cones—the whole nine yards. Being on the site reminded me how ready I am to move. But, then I had this thought.” He paused. Finally he said, “We need to talk seriously about this project.”

Gina panicked. “Can I call you back later?” she interrupted. “I need to find Lester—he's kind of disappeared, and Annie's worried. I'll call you back.”

Paul sighed. “Okay, well please try to. I hope he's all right.”

When they'd hung up, Gina slapped a mosquito on her cheek so hard that her eyes watered and her hand tingled for a long time afterward. Of all times for Paul to want “serious talk” about the Marin house! Just the thought of it yanked at the delicate threads that were keeping her grounded here.

And, she realized now, he hadn't told her how Esther and Ben were doing.

Her San Francisco life bearing down on her, she was determined to get the as-builts of her family's house done. She convinced herself that Lester must have stopped in to see a friend. As soon as the drawings were done, she'd call back Paul.

She shut everything out except the paper in front of her. Hunched over the table, she broke a sweat and two leads as she began the ground floor plan. The first three lines she drew were wrong, and she nearly wore a hole in the vellum erasing them. But then, they began to fall into place almost on their own.

When she'd added the interior doors to the plan, she stood back from her work. For a contractor, most lines on a drawing represented something to be bought at the lumber store; to Gina the lines represented every surface she had touched, listened to, or looked through. But the bold curves of the doors described nothing tangible; they were about the kinetic quality of the house, and they posed questions—“Who's there? What's going on in
there? Can I come in? When will you come home?”—that filled its rooms as they swung back and forth, tracing their invisible arcs over and over again, unifying or dividing spaces and people. Now they seemed irrelevant, and she scrubbed them from the paper.

With the first floor plan complete, she printed the name of each room on the drawing. She hesitated when she came to the room that had been her father's darkroom until he retired and it became the dining room. After some consideration she printed “DR,” pleased by the coincidence.

Long before she'd been drawn to architecture, her father had helped lay the groundwork for her career by inviting her into his private domain—the darkroom—to teach her the magic of his own art. With a smile this memory brought, she erased “DR” and in its place wrote, “Darkroom.”

At a certain age, most children have the desire to build some sort of shelter. It may be a real cave dug into a bank, or a primitive hut of rough boards . . . The child's play is continued in the grown-up's creation . . . he progresses from the cave game to more and more refined methods of enclosing space.

Steen Eiler Rasmussen,
Experiencing Architecture

“Can I come in, Dad?” Gina leaned into the darkroom door and pressed her ear against it.

“Hold on a minute, honey.”

She stayed slumped against the closed door, waiting. She had tremendous respect for this door. Unofficially, the darkroom doors were the only ones in the house that were allowed to be closed during waking hours, besides the bathroom's and her mother's, when she was sulking. No one ever told Gina and Cassie directly that they shouldn't retreat behind doors; this was her mother's unspoken rule. A closed door would lend itself to all kinds of interpretations—a desire for privacy, for instance, which might be viewed as rejection or rebellion. When the darkroom doors were closed, though, it was a straightforward, technical matter of having to make the room dark. They even had locks.

Her mother was coming downstairs. “Virginia?”

Eleanor had taken to calling Gina “Virginia,” her full name, ever
since Cassie had come up with the idea of “Gina.” It was her mother's way of protesting. “Gina? Italian, isn't it?” was all she'd said when Gina had announced the change three years ago.

Gina was relieved when the bolt on the darkroom door scraped in the lock, the door gave way, and she fell into the dim glow of the yellow safety lights. She locked the door behind her.

“What's cookin', chum?” her father asked.

“Sick of researching my art history paper. Would this be a good time to print my stuff?”

Ron plucked a photo from the stop bath and dropped it into the water tray. “Sure. I developed your roll this morning. It'll just take a minute for me to finish these up.”

Gina went to the other end of the room and hoisted herself up on her father's worktable to wait. She loved the darkroom; it was her favorite room in the house. Its furniture—mostly machines—had a purposefulness and objectivity to them, unlike the fought-over Banton antiques elsewhere. The darkroom teemed with an industry that had nothing whatsoever to do with the household, but rather was dedicated to life in the outside world. Hanging above the table was a photo calendar showing March with one of her father's typical boat and lighthouse scenes, and next to it a large-format picture of Whit's Point Harbor and outlying islands, framed on the left side by a huge elm tree. Foreground, middle ground, background—Gina had begun to see this as her father's compositional trademark. On the adjacent wall was a photo of Vice President Nixon enjoying a lobster dinner at a picnic table with Pat, Tricia, and Julie; Nixon wore a boldly striped polo shirt and Pat a puffy skirt and a kerchief tied too tightly around her neck (you could tell it was bright red and matched her lipstick, even though the photo was black and white). Julie and Tricia, in matching sunsuits, scrunched their faces at the lobster-eating ordeal.
Gina remembered how proud her father had been to be asked to take the portraits.

The lights snapped on; Gina felt her sleepy reverie shrink away.

“Let's get these babies into the washer!” Ron upended the tray of limp photos into the print washer and flipped a switch, starting the big cylindrical cage turning in the tub of water. The room filled with a pleasant sloshing. Beyond it, Gina could hear the clanging of pots in the kitchen. She glanced at the clock—five-thirty—still early.

Ron held up Gina's negatives, pictures she'd taken of a few friends and of her artwork, for her college portfolio. “Want to take a look?”

She hopped off the table and stood next to her father while he brought her first frame into focus with the enlarger. The darkness created an intimacy she hadn't felt with him since he used to wake her for school with his tender caress of her cheek. At times like this, she could believe that underneath the submissive man she witnessed with her mother, there was a strong father who could help teach Gina to recognize and make the best use of her power in the world. She watched his confident hand adjust the aperture, his muscular arm below his rolled-up sleeve; they'd always seemed incongruous, but reassuring, on his wiry frame. A grainy face appeared and disappeared on the back of his hand as it passed over the easel.