Authors: Catherine Armsden
“Probably everyone is if you go back far enough.”
Ginny thought about this. It seemed likely; first there was Jesus, and then kings and queens, then George Washington and witches, and then everyone else.
“Do you think that means my family was rich once?”
“Maybe. But lots of people, like my dad's parents, lost all their money because of the Depression.”
Ginny considered Kit's explanation. She'd heard about depression; Cassie often talked about “Mom's depression,” and that Mom did such-and-such because she was depressed. Of course, Ginny thought, her mother's depression was probably why they never had enough money. Things were starting to make sense.
She rowed a big loop around the cove while Kit looked for minnows over the side. When he spotted a school, she scooped them up with the bailer and in the same movement released them in a small waterfall. After a while, they hauled the boat up on the far side of the cove, rolled up their pants, and scavenged along the high tide line, collecting mussel shells and good fort-building wood. Ginny's legs itched from the tall grass that grew along the spongy mud bank. It had turned straw-colored.
When it was close to dinnertime, Ginny took the oars, and they headed back. Halyards of the few remaining boats moored in the
harbor slapped against their masts, sounding like a percussion section that had lost its orchestra. Had it been that long since summer? She could still see her mother's smile and ocean eyes sparkling against the sail of their dinghy. Now the October light flagged, staining the sky pink.
The tide was turning, and a fresh breeze came up, strong enough to edge the dinghy shoreward, but not enough to keep her mother's wail from reaching them. “Goddamn you to hell!” Slam! The back door. Ginny pretended not to hear and laughed nervously, the giggling like ginger ale settling her insides. She gazed up the hill at her plain white houseâsmall and vulnerable, as if it could blow down the hill in one big storm. Her bedroom window was a black eye; but soon, her mother's window blazed and sobbed, a sound as familiar to Ginny as the cries of seagulls settling at night.
Ginny was certain all the ears on the cove must have been trained on her house. Kit wouldn't look at her.
Finally he said, “Are they gonna get divorced?”
Ginny felt she might fold in half, but she sat up. Anger clenched her hands tight as she dug the oars deep into the inky water. “I wish they would,” she said.
You've got to bumble forward, into the unknown.
Frank Gehry
Two weeks laterâanother inhospitable June morning, desolate with fog. Gina sat in her storefront office reviewing a set of drawings in anticipation of her eight-thirty meeting. As was her inclination, she lingered on things that dissatisfied her, starting with the virginal twenty-pound bond paper on which the floor plans had been plotted, untouched by an architect's hand, and the printsâno longer the iconic blue, fragrant with ammonia, but an odorless white, printed offsite and delivered in a roll. There were the drawings themselves, corrupted by the computer's distinctly unhuman mistakes: a wall missing its inside line, an incomplete dimension string, and worst of all, the ghost of a demolished room floating in the middle of the Stones' living room. Before computer-aided design, lines were drawn with deliberateness! Qualities! Each had been assigned a special line-weight, then pulled across the vellum by a loving hand, leadholder twisting between fingers, traveling just beyond the intersection with another line to make a crisp corner. CAD lines were all the same, and all were sprinters, finding the quickest path between two points. Her clients' drawings were as artless as a wiring diagram. Looking at them, Gina felt her artistry faltering, too. Wasn't something important in the design process lost when the brain and the hand didn't make their connection on paper? Besides, she loved the feel of the rough vellum, the
graphite on her fingers, the whir of her electric eraser.
CAD was a form of sensory deprivation, she thought now, not unlike the fog-wind that swirled outside the windows, stirring up eddies of soot and sushi bar flyers, shutting out spring.
At eight forty-five, Jeff Stone called to say something had come up, and they wouldn't make it to the meeting. Gina pushed their drawings aside and cleared everything off her desk so she could use her Mayline parallel rule, the only one in the office. She pulled her year-old schematic drawing for the Marin house out of the flat file, laid it on her desk, and had just rolled some tracing paper over it when her cell phone rang in her purse. She fished it out, and when she saw her friend Joni's name on the screen, she gasped, “Oh, no!”
In the open, loftlike office, her seven employees craned around their partitions to look at her. “Joni!” She said quietly into the phone, “I completely forgot about book group last night! I'm so sorry! I know. No, I'm okay, I think, except I'm still not sleeping well, and I was so out of it that I didn't even check my messages last night. Andâaghh! I was supposed to bring the entrée. What did you
eat
?”
After more apologizing, she hung up and went into the conference room for some privacy and rested her head on the table. She felt terrible. It was not like her to forget her plans; she always looked forward to seeing her friends. Though now that she thought about it, she'd been fending off their caring efforts all spring. She tried to reconstruct her evening the night before and realized she'd been preoccupied with their trip to Marin all through dinner. Only later, when she and Ben had been working on the rocket, had she felt present.
She gathered herself and returned to her desk. For an hour, she pushed her pen around the tracing paper, considering sun angles and wind direction, views and the slope of the lot, while trying to resolve the lines that would contain the house's rooms. While she drew, her mind's eye drifted through the rooms of the Maine house, up the
steep stair to the window with its view of the cove. She found herself wishing they weren't restricted to a one-story house by a ridgetop ordinance in Marin. She tried an “H” scheme, a courtyard scheme, a bar scheme, and a wall scheme. Her trash can filled with the crumpled evidence of her failure. She felt a strange, bracelike tightening around her chest and shifted in her chair, unsuccessfully trying to relieve the sensation.
Determined to take the plans to the next level, she put the tracing paper aside and taped down a sheet of vellum, hoping the commitment to a more serious paper would somehow force progress. She drew her squeaky Mayline down its cables, placed her triangle against it, and began to draw, the black lines of her leadholder emerging reluctantly, vibrating against the bright white paper. Occasionally, her young employees stopped by her desk and briefly watched, as if she were demonstrating a lost art. Another half hour, and her eyes burned and blurred with fatigue. She looked down at what she'd accomplished: nothing.
Gina and Esther had a tradition of going out for milkshakes on the last day of school. This would be Ben's first year to join them. Gina left work early so she could change her clothes before picking them up. Walking in the front door of the house, she nearly tripped over the recycling box she'd forgotten to put out, and Stella danced around her, letting her know she wanted a walk.
She was making tea in a travel cup when the doorbell rang, sending Stella racing to the front of the house in a spasm of barking. Gina followed, opening the door to two blue-blazered, beaming young men, one of whom was saying, “. . . and it looks like this one's built to the maximum allowable envelope.”
“Hi, Mrs. Goodson?” The other man said, one hand caressing
the portico column. “We're from the Town Real Estate Company? Perhaps you heard that the home here on your blockâ2323âsold for $2.2 million last week? Mrs. Goodson, we're wondering if you were thinking about selling your home.”
Gina froze, trying to make sense of what he was saying. “
Excuse me?
” she said. “No, no . . . Mrs. Goodson is my husband's mother. This was her house but hasn't been for seven years.”
The agent cocked his head and furrowed his face as if she were an unintelligible old woman. “Mrs. Paul Goodson, right?”
Gina felt the brace again and now her heart banged against it. “Right, but no, I'm not . . . I'm Gina Gilbert. Paul Goodson is my husband, but we're not selling his . . .” She shook her head and waved her hands. “It's not for sale!” She shut the door hard and stepped back on Stella's foot, eliciting a sharp yelp. “I'm sorry, Stella!”
The walls of the narrow hallway pressed in; she was tight and hot, toast in a toaster.
Hoping Paul would be between patients, she pulled her cell phone from her purse and called him. When he answered, she said, “I feel really weird. Sick, maybe; I don't know.”
“Do you think you're just exhausted? I could pick up the kids ifâ”
“No!” she said, too firmly. “It's their last day.” She'd never missed a last-day-of-school milkshake celebration and was determined not to.
“They'll understand if you're not feeling well, you know. I could take them for milkshakes a little later.”
“No. I'm okay,” she lied. What did she want from Paul? Certainly not his usual advice to not worry about the kids. “Cassie really wants me to call Sid to talk about the house,” she blurted, to change the subject.
“I thought you'd decided not to. Is this what's upsetting you?”
“No. I don't know. It's just . . . A couple of real estate agents just rang our doorbell and wanted to know if we were selling our house!”
Paul laughed. “It's just the real estate business. They do that all the time.”
“It's not nice.”
Paul was quiet. Then he said, “Gina, what's this about?”
What's this about? she parroted in her head. She and Paul rarely quarreled, but lately arguments seemed to sprout like weeds in some dark room inside her. “I can't design our house, Paul. I've filled a trashcan ten times with shitty plans. It's like I'm so polluted with other peoples' houses I can't see my own. But how can we even know what a new house will mean to us? We're living in your parents' house now,
your
house, and the only house that has ever felt like mine is three thousand miles away and wasn't even mine.”
“Gina . . .” Paul started.
Why didn't he just say the first thing that came to mind? Gina thought. What she'd always loved about him was how he never turned away from emotion. He didn't just mist up over sad movies; he
cried.
In his silence, she imagined he was fuming. She was the one who'd jumped on the chance to move into his childhood home when his mother decided seven years ago that she could no longer maintain it. He and Gina had been renting a two-bedroom, third story walk-up, and Gina was pregnant with Ben. When she'd asked Paul if it would be strange for him to live in his family's house, he'd said not at all, even though she knew he had some sad associations with it, growing up as an only child with a father suffering from multiple sclerosis. The decision to move in was one of those made when one spouse provides the forward thrust. Now, she knew that Paul felt an insistent desire to create a home whose history would begin with her, Esther, and Ben.
“Do you think . . .” Paul spoke slowly, deliberately, “that maybe you're romanticizing the Maine house? It was a beautiful place to grow up, but you've been trying to leave that house for as long as
I've known you.”
Emotion surged through Gina. “Yes, but the house has always been there, if I wanted it. Now it's leaving
me. Here.
What am I doing here?” She felt the constriction in her chest that she'd felt earlier. “I don't even know where I belong anymore.”
Paul was silent. Then he said quietly, “Do you think you're depressed?”
Her cheeks burned. She didn't want a diagnosis; she wanted him to grope around in the dark with her instead of looking for the light switch.
Paul's patient had arrived, and they hung up. Gina raced downstairs to the garage and backed out of the driveway too fast, nearly overlooking a young woman on the sidewalk who frowned at her when she mouthed, “I'm sorry.” She drove toward Esther and Ben's school, her head swimming, alternating waves of heat and cold moving up and down her body. She was seized by a desperate urgency to tend to this familiar task, something routine that would reset her internal machinery: Esther and Ben. Milkshakes!
Robotically, she moved back through the intersections, timed lightsâtraffic moving smoothly. Doing okay. At a stoplight, she felt her body almost catch up with her, and she took a deep breath. Almost there; just have to get to the carpool line . . . Picturing Esther and Ben, her heart calmed. Then she was in line, and Esther spotted her from the sidewalk.
“Hi, Mom,” Esther climbed into the backseat without looking at her. “Last day of school! Milkshakes, right?” She pinned Gina with a look that left no room for “maybes.”
“You bet!” The musical confidence of Gina's words was a promise to herself that no matter what, the day would end with happy ceremony. “Where's Ben?”
“He's somewhere. I think the little kids all had parties cuz it was
the last day. So maybe he's still getting his stuff.”