Dream House (30 page)

She had work to do! Loving not only meant
being there,
but also taking turns, trusting, knowing when to leave and let go.

Memories of Lester's close call and their conversation replayed in her mind. She wondered whether she should stay an extra day to help Annie and worried about finishing the drawings of the house. She wouldn't even pretend to be able to fall asleep. She switched on the light and took
Homeward
's logbook from the table. The pages rippled in the fan's breeze as she turned the log's first entry, in her father's hand.

August 24, 1977

Ellie, Ron, and Gina and one happy pup aboard. Made it to the Isles of Maine last night in an hour forty with Cap'n Eleanor at the helm. Woke up to fog. Some roll but not uncomfortable. E made pancakes for all, complete with blueberries and maple syrup. Went ashore on Little Neck Is. Explored abandoned house and grounds. Yellow seaweed, light rocks, patches of grass, dark rich green spruce. Like a primeval forest blended by the misty soft light. Rain caught us on the rocky beach, and we took shelter under the spruces that march down to the shore. Finally braced the elements and putted back to Homeward. Spent time housekeeping, reading. Wonderful lazy day.

Closing the logbook, she wondered: how had she come, so suddenly it seemed, to be forty-five? That day her father wrote about—cold rain, the shallow cave they'd explored, filled with fluorescent green mosses—was still vivid, though she had been only seventeen. She remembered how contented her mother and father had seemed, immersed in nature's elements and later, tucked in
Homeward
's cabin, out of the pouring rain. Usually, these occasional peaceful interludes with her family would buoy her with reassurance. But that August, she couldn't be comforted. She'd never felt more alone.

Outside and inside are both intimate
—
they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a border-line surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.

Gaston Bachelard,
The Poetics of Space

Eleanor's unfinished paintings filled Gina's room, so Gina was staying in Cassie's for the summer, which was painted lavender and faced the driveway.

It was a curse to be stuck for three months in Whit's Point where she'd lost touch with even her closest friends. During her first year at Andrews, Gina always called Sandy when she was home, but Sandy was never around. After a while, she'd given up.

“You'll need some buffers there,” Cassie had advised Gina. “Invite some people up.” Since her girlfriends at Andrews lived too far away, she invited Mark, who would come at the end of July. In the meantime, all she was equipped with were her worries about college applications and a weighty reading list of Hermann Hesse.

There was her four-days-a-week job at a sandwich shop, but it too felt alien. When she'd heard about the job, she'd pictured a Formica-filled room teeming with flirty, tan teenagers making ice cream cones and
flipping burgers. But this sandwich shop, set in a colonial house buried deep within the four-acre Riversport Historic Preservation Project, was a small triangle of space behind the wood counter that formed its hypotenuse. The walls of the room were painted Williamsburg blue. She and her mother had selected two dresses for her that would complement the genteel setting; both were covered with small flowers, and one was trimmed with a little lace on the collar.

She worked alone. Her customers were the employees of the Preservation Project: the blacksmith, the gift shop cashiers, the costumed docents who took tourists through the twelve historic houses; and the tourists themselves, bringing their fascination with all things old.

One day she looked up from the cucumber and tomato sandwich she was making to see Kit, like an apparition from the modern world, his long hair, beard, and denim shirt powdered with dust. She hadn't seen him in three years and felt a confusing surge of excitement she knew she'd have to suppress or she'd scare him off.

“Well, hey,” he said, his smile shy. “How long have you been workin' here?”

Suddenly self-conscious in her girly dress, Gina folded her arms across her stomach. When she told him just a week he said, “Cool. Can you make me a ham and Swiss on rye, please? That would be great.”

Gina moved from the refrigerator to the bread to the cutting board, feeling Kit's eyes on her. “So what do you do here?” she asked when he'd paid her for the sandwich.

“I'm the boat builder—in the shop by the Governor Goodwin house. Come check it out sometime.”

During the next week, Kit came in for his ham and Swiss at lunch-time and sometimes a cookie in the late afternoon, ordering trancelike, watching her get his order together in a way that made her reluctant
to say anything that might break the spell he seemed to be under. She fantasized that he'd become captivated by the lilac-scented innocence of the scene in which she played, so harmoniously enhanced by every detail: the smaller-than-life scale of the doors, the divided pane windows, the delicate stencils along the top of the wall, the vase of wildflowers on the counter, and the bit of lace that brushed her cheek when she leaned over the cutting board. What was he seeing when he looked at her? A child he once knew? A seductress? She couldn't guess; there were many days when she felt every bit as innocent, as
colonial,
as the cream, pink, and blue dress she wore. Still, on other days, she felt she was somehow tricking him; that Kit, like herself, was seeing not Gina, but something he could no longer have.

Cassie was in love. “Shacking up!” Eleanor shrieked at Ron when they returned from their surprise visit to Cassie. They'd driven three hours to her apartment and knocked on her door at ten in the morning. Dropping in was Eleanor's habit with friends and family; she wouldn't consider calling ahead—for fear, Gina suspected, of being turned down. She'd ambushed Cassie a few other times, but this time, Wes, Cassie's boyfriend of two years, had answered the door in his boxers.

Gina walked to Tobey's Market to call Cassie on the pay phone. “The morality police!” Cassie grumbled. “You should've seen her face—it was like I'd stabbed her through the heart!”

Gina decided not to share that her mother had been crying on and off ever since, and cracked, “Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk free!”

“I've never felt this way about someone before,” Cassie said. “Wes is so wonderful.”
Won-der-ful
unfurled like a lazy wave; it was the
first time in her life Gina had heard the sound of real, swooning love, and for some reason, it made her want to cry.

There was a pause she would always remember: the smell of the Juicy Fruit gum stuck to the telephone infusing her sense of loss. It reminded her of when her family had gone swimming at Lake Winnepesaukee, and for the first time Cassie was allowed to swim beyond the necklace of buoys that separated safe from dangerous. After that day, she never again swam inside the buoys with Gina. Gina had worried; would she be safe without her big sister?

Cassie was in love now, and even though she'd left home a long time ago, she'd formed a new kind of bond that could take her even further away. In her mind, Gina too had traveled far from Whit's Point, but her body still got driven to Maine and parked high and dry every year about the same time that the boats in town got released from their cradles back into the water.

“That's so neat, Cass.” She wanted badly to sound happy for her, since no one else at home was.

Gina said goodbye to Cassie and walked home along Pickering Road's narrow sidewalk feeling tall and out of scale next to the small houses that sat practically on the street Their blank windows seemed to stare as she slipped by. I'll get used to it, she told herself; it was always like this at the beginning of summer: the dissociation, the self-consciousness that came from being recognized, but not really known. After a few more weeks, she'd feel the warm moist air, the cool grass, and salty water welcoming her back into the landscape, and she would belong.

Three weeks after she'd started her job, lonely and heady with Kit's daily dose of admiration, Gina surprised herself one day after work
by walking right up to him while he was sanding a boat bottom. “Hi,” she said.

Kit looked up, startled. She smiled. She'd taken out her barrettes so her hair could drift around her face, and she was carrying her shoes. Kit scanned her as if she might not be the same girl he'd only seen behind a counter. “Hi,” he said.

“Are you almost done for the day? I'm going to walk over to the wharf to look at the schooner, and I was wondering if you'd like to . . .”

“Oh,” Kit said.

He surveyed the shop. There were tools and sawdust everywhere; clearly, he wasn't ready to close up. But she could feel his wanting to go, could feel he wouldn't say no.

“Sure,” he said. “I can just come back after to clean up.”

She smiled and brushed her hand down her dress, smoothing it against her body.

Kit locked the barn door, and as they traversed the grounds of the Preservation Project, Gina realized that she'd premeditated only the invitation and had no idea what should come next. She was glad that without the counter between them, Kit seemed more relaxed and chatty. He'd recently run into her parents at the town dock and admired their new boat,
Homeward.
“Did you see them movin' those houses?” he asked.

“It was kind of strange,” Gina said, remembering the three historic houses that had been relocated to the Preservation Project from another part of town. “They looked so undignified stacked on those truck beds. I mean, the idea of just up and moving a house from the place it's been standing for a few hundred years. Like moving an old tree. Or a famous ruin. It almost seems sacrilegious.”

Kit said, “Hmm. I hadn't thought of it that way. I guess because I'm a builder, I just think of the buildings in terms of their construction, not as something with roots in a place.”

A builder.
“So, where do you go to college?” she asked.

Kit laughed and Gina, realizing her error, flushed with embarrassment. “I don't,” he said. “I'm a full-time boatwright.” He told her about the rowing shells he and his father made that were sleek and fast—nothing like the traditional wood dories he built at the Preservation Project.

They crossed the street, and halfway down the old wood wharf where the historic schooner was docked, a sharp pain pierced the ball of Gina's foot. Kit took her hand and led her to a bench along the wharf's railing where she hitched up her dress and crossed her foot over her knee so they could examine it. “Piece of glass in there,” Kit said. He was leaning so close she could smell the sweetness of the sawdust in his hair. He stood and searched his pockets. “Rats. Tell you what—if you can sort of hop back to the shop with me, I've got some tweezers there.” He wrapped his arm firmly around her waist—a necessary and natural gesture, but one that made her feel cared for in a way she'd never been before. “Go ahead and lean on me,” he said.

Back at the shop, he pulled a chair close to hers and held her foot in his lap. The old barn—filled with the fragrance of wood and varnish and decorated with antique tools—transported Gina back to all the special places she'd spent time with Kit when they were younger. Now, it felt romantic to be entrusting her foot to him. In seconds, he'd removed the piece of glass. He dabbed first aid cream on the wound and put on a Band-Aid.

“Ah . . . what a relief! Thank you!” Gina laughed and kicked her repaired foot in the air. When she looked at Kit again, his eyes were sparkling.

“You're lovely,” he said. His eyes held hers long enough that she had to look away. “Well. I guess I better get this place cleaned up, and we should both get home.”

The encounter with Kit took on magic in the following days; every time he walked out of the sandwich shop, Gina remembered the very lovely way he'd said
lovely
and the way it had made her feel . . . well,
lovely.
Certainly,
lovely
was not the kind of word favored by Mark, who described her breasts as “boobalicious.” So she said
yes
when Kit asked if she'd like to go out rowing with him the next Saturday, and the following one, too.

Their outings on the water provided vital respite from her parents. The third time Gina was leaving the house to go rowing with Kit, her mother said, “What's all this about?”