Dream House (31 page)

“What?” Gina said.

“Why are you spending so much time with Kit?”

Gina read her mother's disapproval and seized the opportunity to provoke her. “He's really great,” she said.

“I'm sure. Has he gone to college yet?”

“Nope. Didn't need to, to build boats.”

“Well, don't take his interest in you too seriously.”

Furious, Gina decided that from here on out, she'd make sure to torture her mother by announcing her “dates” with Kit.

Kit was an attentive listener, and she took full advantage, freely complaining to him about her home life. He was
kind,
never forgetting to stow cookies and an extra sweater for her, just in case. She felt a natural ease with him—a familiarity deep in her bones. But she had to admit to herself that although his obvious crush on her felt exciting, she wasn't attracted to Kit. It was possible that he was “too nice,” the words she and her friends used to describe boys who weren't sexy to them. While masquerading for her mother, she'd have to be careful not to stoke his romantic interest. Besides, she had a boyfriend.

Sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed wrapped in a blanket, Gina read Mark's letter for the second time.
It is not really horniness
at all,
he'd written, in response to a letter she'd sent to him about not wanting to feel pressured into having sex all the time.

Mark as you see him now, is the product of a great deal of hurt, abused trust, and self-hatred. Mark's social life, especially the last few years since he left his nerd scene in Manhattan and tried to make it in WASP-ville, Connecticut, was nightmarish . . .

Gina was riveted by these worldly revelations. What was “WASP”? After describing several cycles of self-loathing and cockiness, Mark came to his conclusion, which was that he felt most loved

. . .
when my head is buried in your neck and my hands in your jeans; yes, behind the tree, in the car, under the table. P.S. As for loving you for your body, have you looked in the mirror lately? You gotta know, honey, there's some hungry men out there, and some of us still wear retainers at night.

A snorting bull illustrated the P.S.

Ugh! He was infuriating! He could talk circles around her, seducing her with his vulnerability, scaring her with his effrontery.

She missed him.

She folded the letter, stuffed it into the envelope, and hid it with her journal in the bottom drawer, under Cassie's Miss Andrews Academy Award, which she had dubbed “the good girl award.”

On the day that Mark was to arrive, Gina felt gorgeous. She'd acquired a deep tan and her long hair was sun-streaked from her days at the beach. She put on her light blue halter top and looked in the mirror—yep, she was looking good and felt strong, more than ready to take on Mark.

At five o'clock she put down the top on their recently purchased secondhand Mustang and climbed into the driver's seat. The car smelled warm and leathery. She'd only had her learner's permit for a
week and already loved to drive. She cocked the rearview mirror to check her face as her father sat down next to her—oh, if she could just save forever this perfect moment of anticipation, this feeling of omnipotence and today's zitless face that looked at her from the mirror! She drove slowly and carefully to the Trailways station, savoring her excitement. When they pulled in, Mark bounced down the bus steps wearing jeans, a denim jacket, and carrying a backpack, looking even sexier than she'd remembered him. He fingered his dark shoulder-length hair behind his ear as he surveyed the parking lot.

“Mark!” Gina called.

“How goes it?” Her father said when Mark shook his hand. Ron climbed into the backseat, and Mark sat down next to Gina. His clothes smelled deliciously of detergent and cigarette smoke. As he leaned over to give her a little kiss near her ear, he put his hand on her knee and quickly slid it up to the top of her thigh, nestling it between her legs. Unnerved, with one eye on her father in the rearview mirror, Gina pushed his hand away.

On the way home, twice she nearly turned left into oncoming traffic.

“God, you're lookin' good, Gina Lo-La.” After Gina's mother had greeted Mark and gone inside, Mark slipped his hands around Gina's waist. “Have you missed me?”

“Yeah.”

A little breeze brushed her bare back and made her shiver. Mark rubbed her breasts with both hands. “Ooh, I've missed my friends,” he cooed.

Gina pulled away from him as her mother popped out of the screen door holding a Coke for Mark. “Virginia, why don't you get the stuff to set the table out here. It's such a gorgeous evening.
Paper
plates.”

Gina went inside to get silverware, napkins, and the flimsy paper plates that always soaked through before you were halfway done with a lobster. When she returned, Mark and her parents were standing with their toes against the garden, their focus cast over the hill, out to sea.

“With a southwesterly wind like this, we can get to the Isles of Maine in less than two hours,” her mother was saying.

“No kidding,” Mark said. “So Eleanor, have you always been a sailor?”

“Oh, yes. We'd take the train up from Long Island for the summer at Lily House—my family's house. I was the only girl around here who sailed in those days, and my old friend Bill Holloway and I . . . we usually won all the Sunday races.”

“A good sailor, this Bill?” Mark said. He shifted to glance at Gina, and she smiled. She loved his sly command of her mother. She set four places at the table, then stretched out in the hammock, just within earshot.

“Oh,
yehhhhhs
!” Her mother said in that breathy Hollywood way. “Bill was my best friend. He went to Yale and then was a lieutenant in the Air Force—his plane was shot down in the Korean War. But anyway, on my twenty-first birthday, Bill rowed me blindfolded out to Miller's Island—that's the one there, with the lighthouse. It was the most beautiful day. We had a fire on the rocks and baked lobster and potatoes . . . isn't it funny, I remember he'd forgotten a flashlight. But we didn't care . . .”

Bill Holloway's name always came up when Eleanor was talking about sailing, but the older Gina got, the more starry-eyed her mother's references to him became. Gina had tried to ignore this disturbing lapse, but now she heard something clear as a bell in her mother's story: unrequited love. It was disgusting! Bill Holloway had been her
sister Fran's fiancé and Sid's father! Gina checked Mark's expression; he appeared to be amused by it all.

“Anyway,” Eleanor went on, “the tide went out, and we had to haul the boat halfway across the island to get it back in the water. It was very late . . . my sister Fran was
furious
when I got home . . .”

Gina watched a mountainous white cloud float in front of the sun, making the world dimmer for a minute.

“You have to watch the tide here,” Eleanor said. “The current in the river will suck you all the way up to the naval prison. Our girls figured that out the hard way.” She paused and flapped her arms. “What a day! It would have been nice to get out on the water, but Ron just wants to putter, I guess.” Her mother laughed as if it were just a little joke, but Gina bristled at her deteriorating tone. “I've been trying to get him to take the storm windows off for two months, so what's he doing on the most beautiful day in July?” Eleanor gestured to the two windows propped up against the house. “Oh, this house is a dump! But isn't it marvelous? It's the best piece of property on the cove, the one with the
real
view straight out the harbor. I wanted to live in this house the very first time I laid eyes on it.”

Right now, in fact, Gina thought her mother looked as if she were stoned on the view.

“I hope at least Ron's putting the lobsters in. I still can't stand doing that, you know, even after all these years!”

When Eleanor had gone into the house, Mark flung himself on top of Gina in the hammock and buried his face in her hair. “She's all right,” he said. “Not so bad. Who's this Bill guy? She clearly had the hots for
that
dude.”

“The guy she wishes she'd married, I'm pretty sure,” she said.

“So, Mark, have you given any thought to where you might apply to college in the fall?” Eleanor asked when they'd sat down for dinner.

The little patch of flat grass at the edge of the hill facing the cove
was their makeshift patio where they put their table. A
real
patio was on her mother's “if this house were mine” list. There were only three plastic chairs with the table, so Ron had brought out a wood one for Mark. Gina shifted her seat a little so she could have a better view of the cove. It was a gentle evening; a layer of stratus clouds took the sharpness out of the blue sky and even though the breeze had died down, the mosquitoes hadn't yet found them. With the question about college, Gina became hopeful that the conversation might advance beyond her mother's past.

“Well, so far, I'm thinking maybe Harvard, Stanford, and possibly Berkeley.”

“Really? California? Good for you—an adventurer, like me! Of course, I didn't get to go to college because . . . well, anyway . . .”

Her mother rolled her eyes and laughed. What a hypocrite she was to make Mark sound like some kind of pioneer! She would never let Gina apply to a college that far away.

“I hope you're going to put some thought into their art programs,” her mother went on. “You've got such talent.”

The way she tilted her head! Gina thought. Was she
flirting
with him?

“I hear you've been doing some painting yourself. You must've inherited Gina's talent.” Mark winked at Eleanor.

“Oh, there's talent in the Banton family all right. That's my family, I mean. In fact my nephew, Sid, is a marvelous painter. He
was,
anyway. He's thrown all that talent away to work in the antiques business.” She tsked, casting her glance into the distance, then caught herself and looked back at Mark. “Well of course, Virginia's the
real
artist in the family,” she said, smiling. She turned to Gina. “How about those . . . clay sculptures you did for your . . . semantics project?”

“Semiotics,” Mark corrected.

Her mother snapped a leg off her lobster. “Oh right.
Semiotics.
”

Gina tried to ignore the conversation, turning to the cove where two kids were swimming off their rowboat. She waited for the delayed rattle of oarlocks and the
thwack!
as they hit the water.

“The pieces are very evocative, though, aren't they?” Mark said. “Romantic. Like Stonehenge in
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
”

He was masterful!

“I think you have something there,” her mother said, even though Gina was quite sure her mother had never read Hardy. “Virginia, sweetie, could you go in and get another Coke for Mark?”

“That's okay—I'll get one,” Mark said. He rose from his chair, producing an awful crack. “Uh-oh,” he groaned, looking down at the stretcher he'd snapped off.

“Don't even think about it!” Eleanor said. “That chair's so old, it's probably been repaired a hundred times. Cassandra Westwick's chair,” she added.

“Cassandra West . . .” Mark took a second look at the chair.

“Cassandra was a relative of ours—a Salem witch,” Eleanor said. “Since Cassie was supposed to be born on Halloween, we thought it would be fun to give her a witch name.”

In her head, Gina did the math. She noted Cassie's birthday: September eighteenth, nineteen fifty-five. Her parents were married in nineteen fifty-five, too, in February. Seven months. How premature could a baby be? “What? Cassie was premature?” she said.

“Certainly,” her mother said.

“I'm sure Gina's told you about her other famous American ancestors?” her father said.

“Dad,” Gina protested. “I'm sure Mark has his own famous American ancestors and doesn't—”

“No, no. I don't. I'm Jewish, remember?” Mark said.

“Oh, well, that's all right then,” her father said. Under the table, Gina felt the wind of her mother's leg kicking her father.

Before Mark was up the next morning, Gina rode her old bike to the phone booth at Tobey's. She had to call Cassie; she couldn't get the mystery about Cassie's birth out of her head. She'd never heard that Cassie was almost six weeks premature and had been a small baby.

“Oh yeah,” Cassie sleepily confirmed on the phone. “Did it just occur to you? Why else do you think they'd get married in the winter—in
Maine
?”

Now, her mother's ranting about Cassie's immorality filled Gina with fury. She wanted Cassie to share her outrage or at least to wonder with her how the pregnancy might have happened. But she realized that Cassie probably had no answers and worse, was not even interested in speculating. She was
gone
; that was all. Gina let their conversation wind down with chitchat and rode home.

Back at the house, she examined a photograph of her mother and father on the hall desk, taken when her mother was probably not yet thirty. Gina had walked past this picture thousands of times, but hadn't seen the two people she saw now, perched on the deck of a sailboat, their strong, tan limbs touching. Her mother had made love to this man! Impossible! Though her father often embraced her mother, she never reached out for him, except to push him away. Yet once, she'd wanted him enough to let herself go too far.