Dream House (13 page)

From the window she took in the disparate sights of Route 1 north: a Greek Revival house with a “DiAngelo's Funeral Parlor” sign plastered against its fluted columns; beside it, a picket fence encircling a display of turquoise pools; a Mr. Tux shop whose plywood bride and groom were dressed in soot. Across an enormous empty parking lot stood a colonial barn, its ancient weathervane peeking out over a giant green-and-red dragon promising authentic Chinese Cuisine. All were rooted in a sea of black on this June day, hot-enough-to-fry-an-egg black, appearing liquid in places, as though asphalt had flowed from some nearby volcano.

This stretch of Route 1 was an authentic sample of America, though not an uplifting one. Soon, Gina began to notice that not everything had succumbed to the highway. A white clapboard house clung to a patch of green just big enough for a laundry line and a chained-up German shepherd. An occasional majestic, century-old tree sprang from the center of a parking lot, its canopy providing an oasis of shade for the cars huddled below it. And Queen Anne's lace sprouted from cracks in the asphalt, reaching up to hug the highway guardrail. Despite the continuous assault of noise and poisons, of greed, ugliness, and extreme weather, in the New England tradition, these survivors held their ground.

She turned from the window and let her head fall back on the headrest. Thirty-one years in New England hadn't made
her
resilient. She hadn't had another episode like the one at school that day, but still she felt fear waiting in her recesses, as if all this time she'd been flourishing from the ground up, while under her, fragile roots struggled to keep hold. When she was younger, she wanted to explore, to be productive, to be excited by life. Now, more than anything she wanted to be
strong.

She thought of Esther and Ben and felt her hand slip into her carry-on for her phone. But she stopped herself. She was determined this time to focus on being only here, undivided and self-reliant.

Her shoulder pressed the window as the bus swerved off the highway into the parking lot of King's Clam House, its last stop in Massachusetts before reaching New Hampshire. A group of shirtless boys waited in line at the takeout window, brushing sweat from their foreheads with their T-shirts. Gina could almost smell the fishy grease mingling with the flat odor of scorching asphalt. It made her queasy, but it was summer,
real
summer, not like bundling up to hover over the barbeque in San Francisco.

Along the highway, the asphalt let up, giving way to lush grass and woods of maple, ash, and birch trees, already at their deepest summer green. In California, Gina missed this abundant green and the undisciplined, untended growth that graced the New England landscape. In California it was housing that grew this way: forests of pitched-roof variations on an affordable dream house sprouting from hillsides, flanked by identical trees, each with its own IV of water to fool it into believing it was not growing in a desert. Unfair, perhaps, but making these comparisons was irresistible; every year, no matter how hard she tried to
play the detached tourist, she found herself drinking in the lushness of eastern summer.

The bus exited the wide, pristine highway at the “Entering Riversport” sign and, as it squeezed through the twisty city streets, seemed to pass from one century into a previous one. Colonial houses stood shoulder-to-shoulder along both sides of the street, some brick, most wood, and nearly all with window shutters, a later Victorian embellishment. Riversport bore the signs of prosperity brought by Yuppie refugees from Boston: concrete sidewalks widened and replaced with brick, uniform rows of trees, Starbucks.

Warm air, thick with ocean saltiness, embraced her as she stepped off the bus. She found herself surrounded by the moist flesh of evening strollers so took off her thin sweater and tied it around her waist. She loved the intimacy of exposed limbs on a warm summer day. People greeted each other, hands touching skin, bare heels pulled up out of sandals by a hug.

She searched the street for a taxi to take her the remaining five miles to Whit's Point. She'd be staying with Annie and Lester, and they'd offered to pick her up at the bus station, but she'd told them “No, thank you;” her need to be alone was so pressing that she hadn't even told Cassie she was coming east.

In the taxi, she opened both backseat windows to let in the sea breeze. In a few minutes they were crossing the Piscataqua River, which separated New Hampshire from Maine. Lobster buoys were pulled flat against the water's surface by the river's powerful current. A frantic crowd of seagulls dove at the wake of a fishing boat roaring downriver with its catch.

Entering Whit's Point, she felt the drop in temperature that never failed to surprise her. The road wound through an unkempt townscape
that had barely changed since she was a child. Unpruned trees threatened phone lines, a jungle gym she could remember climbing on now rusted in a yard, mailboxes bore the same names they had for decades. Farther along were the formidable entrances to the Naval shipyard and the brick schoolhouse where Gina had attended junior high. Then there were only the tired but stalwart houses lining the road with their unapologetic boxiness, white, gray, or yellow clapboards, and tall chimneys. She liked to look at them every year, to see how they might've changed. “You still designing houses?” an architecture school classmate had asked her last year, as if she were stuck in some evolutionary stage. But she'd always been a respectful admirer of houses. Not houses presented in magazines as lifestyle showcases, but houses as objects in the landscape, like trees, and as containers of life. Tall bare-boned houses that sprouted from the middle of vast, flat farmlands, the tiny stone cottages of Ireland, Native American dwellings in the recesses of cliffs. Even the monotonous rows of tiny, expressionless facades in San Francisco's Sunset District were intriguing—to think of the multiplicity of stories behind those ubiquitous picture windows!

But
these
were the kinds of houses her clients often yearned for, she thought; not just their old windows or gable roofs or the patina of something old, but something sensory about them, like the way sunlight slanted through a window. Not the staccato of balusters below a porch railing, but the memory of friends gathered on the porch to eat popcorn and play Monopoly in a thunderstorm.

As the taxi swerved around two bike riders, Gina sucked in her breath. The driver caught her eye in the mirror. “The bridge into Whit's Point was up for an hour today,” he said. “Some clown in a yacht got his signals crossed, and there musta been four boats under the span trying to sort it all out. What a mess.”

Gina laughed, but her heart galloped. In a moment after they'd passed the high school, she could see the bridge. It was up. Not
even all the way yet, and there was a line of cars waiting. She hadn't counted on this little delay; she'd made every arrangement she could think of to avoid surprises on the trip.

Leaning out the window, she spotted the culprit, a tall-masted sloop motoring up-river. To distract herself from her thudding heart and the tingling in her shoulders, she imagined herself in the boat, lightly sunburned and relaxed after a long afternoon sail. But she was immediately back, trapped in the taxi. The bridge was up, no way out. She closed her eyes and wiped her moist palms on her thighs.

Once, waiting in this spot with her parents, she'd been the villain. She was twenty-two, had been up for the weekend, and they were taking her to the bus station to go home to Boston.

Just before they reached the bridge, her mother had said, “Why don't you give us a key to your apartment? It would be so convenient for Daddy and me to stop in there when we're in Boston shopping.”

In the backseat, Gina had seethed. She had had a powerful sense her mother was wrong, on principle, to ask for the key, but it was confused, as always, with her own guilt about being secretive and unwelcoming. Giving them a key would have meant her apartment could be subject to her parents' scrutiny without notice. She had pictured the incriminating evidence they might encounter—like her boyfriend's T-shirt hanging on the bathroom hook—and had imagined Eleanor descending into a self-pitying harangue about how her daughter had failed her. But
not
giving them a key would have been felt as a brutal rejection, like all of Cassie's and Gina's assertions of independence.

The gravitational pull of their mother's suffering had kept Gina and Cassie in a tight orbit around her. Gina had never said a flat-out “no” to her mother before. Beyond wanting to avoid conflict, there had been pragmatic reasons for this, like Eleanor's threat to cut off her college tuition. But Gina was financially independent now and
would soon start paying off her school loans. In the front seat, her mother's silence screamed. Gina prepared her speech, short and devoid of words that might Velcro themselves to Eleanor's memory.

She had cleared her throat. “Mom,” she had said, her eyes focused on the back of her mother's seat. “I don't—”

“Say no more!” Eleanor had shot back.

The car had crested the hill, and Gina had seen it: the line of cars at the foot of the bridge and the subtle movement of the span rising in the air. There had been a race that afternoon, and there was a parade of masts lined up to go under the bridge. Gina's stomach had lurched as her mother let out one of her been-stabbed-in-the-heart wails. “Oh-oh-oh! After everything I've done for my children, and this is what I get! Am I really that rotten?”

Eleanor had spoken these words so many times that they were incapable of eliciting empathy. She had bawled. Her feet had been up on the glove compartment as she slathered rose-scented Jergen's lotion onto her short, sturdy legs. Ron had tapped his finger on the steering wheel and stared out to sea. Gina, her stomach clenched, had watched a peaceful green settle over the water as, one by one, boats had made their way to their moorings. She had learned to navigate the schisms between the ugliness inside and the beauty outside and had found that over time the contrasts, like complementary colors, sharpened her experience of each part.

Remembering the scene now, Gina suspected those fifteen minutes waiting for the bridge had defined the relationship she would have with her mother for the rest of her life—the final, deferred act of her childhood, sitting in the backseat, her jaw set, resolutely holding her silence. Language, time, or circumstances had defused other conflicts sparked by her defiance, but this act, this simple utterance of “I don't,” words too close to “no” for her mother to bear, was crystalline.

What had made Gina's independence such a heartache for her
mother? Gina had wondered, again and again. She'd believed with time, her mother would come to understand the nature of her own deep discontent and its effect on her family. Instead, Gina had watched Eleanor's woundedness age in her eyes. Now she was gone.

The bridge was on its way back down, but it was too late: her body had been hijacked by heat and then cold and her chest tightened, like that day at Ben's school. The car crossed the bridge and passed the Congregational church and the rose-covered pergola where she and Paul had been married. Then the scenery blurred. She held the door handle and closed her eyes.

“So what's the address on Pickering Road again?” the driver asked.

She opened her eyes to see Lily House's stone wall. “Right . . . here . . . this is good,” she said.

The driver pulled over, and she scrambled out of the car. Paul was right; she shouldn't have come. She paid the driver, and he tugged her suitcase from the trunk. When he'd driven away, she again reached for her phone to call home but then stopped.

She leaned against the stone wall, focusing on the things that usually brought her comfort: the warm, fading glow of a summer evening, the rich smell of the sea, and the humidity that put a gentle wave in her hair. But she felt like a stranger—as if she were observing herself from a distance: a slender woman, dressed in pale summery clothes, her light brown hair twisted into an unfastened braid. She might have been painted into a landscape like this one, appearing serene, her trembling imperceptible.

She gathered herself and stepped up Lily House's porch stairs.

Lester answered the door with a big grin. “Ginny, you great girl, how are you?” He held a handful of paper. “Wow, haven't seen one of
these things in a long time!” He nodded at the T square poking from Gina's bag.

“She's
Gina
now, Lester.” Annie stepped into the hall wearing Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless white blouse. She took Gina's suitcase and gave her a quick hug.

Lester planted his hand on Gina's shoulder and stepped back to inspect her. His weathered face creased with a grin. “You must be starved. Come sit down—dinner's ready.”

Gina put down her bag and followed Annie and Lester, glancing into the living room as she passed. The six sash windows were thrown open and an enormous bouquet of what must have been ten different kinds of flowers sat on a table. The house was redolent of the hearty dinners the older generation cooked, too heavy for a hot night. She hoped she'd be able to muster an appetite.

As if sensing she wasn't feeling her best, Lester pulled out a chair for her at the table in the sunroom. “For you,” he chuckled, sliding the paper he was holding in front of her. “Your clients have found you already.”

He disappeared with Annie into the kitchen.

The sunroom door was open, giving Gina a view of the blue hydrangea bushes through the screen. She sat down on the creaky antique chair and picked up the paper. A couple of her clients had nearly panicked when they heard Gina would have Internet access only on her phone, so Annie and Lester had borrowed a fax machine for her visit, which now sat on one end of the sunroom table. While an egg-beater whirred in the kitchen, she read: