Dream House (7 page)

She stood and went to find Ben, who was squatting over his
Illustrated Encyclopedia of Machines
dressed only in his underwear. “Look,” he said. “Elevators are just like big pulleys.”

Gina knelt next to him and said, “Cool,” more about his boundless curiosity than the impressive diagram of the elevator. She put some clothes out for him. “Here you go. Get dressed now, okay?”

“Can we work on the rocket when you get home tonight?” he asked. A quarter of his floor was covered with plastic K'NEX pieces
and the beginnings of a complicated rocket model they'd been building together. It was apparent to Gina that he had better innate spatial skills than she and probably could have constructed the rocket alone. But he liked having her help.

“Sure,” she said. “We could finish the fins.”

Ben turned his big eyes up at her and studied her face. “Your voice sounds different,” he said.

Gina cleared her throat. “Really? How is it different?”

“Older.”

Wilted inside, she smiled and hugged him. “Hmm. Well, I
am
older than I was yesterday, right? And so are you.”

She surveyed his floor—origami paper and Legos, an open package of flower seeds and a small dirty sock—and even surrounded by the kid mess and primary-colored plastic, she felt the inevitability of his growing up, looming like a kidnapper in the shadows.

And Esther! In her stuffy, quiet room, filled with the nature she was deprived of growing up in the city: shells and rocks and bird nests, bits of obsidian, sea glass, cow bones and feathers, several cacti and a Venus Flytrap, Gina could almost hear her daughter growing, exhaling her innocence into the room. Everywhere, there were clues that she was ready to be older. Last week, Gina had been rummaging to find an overdue library book and came across a stash of tampons behind Esther's cherished collection of
Redwall
rat adventures. Esther hadn't started her period yet, but the fourth grade curriculum included a detailed unit on puberty, and it was so like Esther to be thoroughly prepared—even, possibly, years in advance. Later, she'd come home from school with the news that she'd decided she wanted to go to sleep-away camp this summer. She'd never wanted to before, and that night, in private, Gina and Paul had differed about whether she was ready to be away for two weeks. “She's been so ambivalent,”
Gina had reasoned. But Paul didn't worry about the kids when they were out of his sight; he imagined only the best: their pleasure at being with other children and under the enlightening influence of other adults. “Maybe it's Esther's mom who's the most ambivalent?” he'd said to Gina.

He was right, and it wasn't just about camp—she was relieved when the next day, Esther reversed her decision; she was already dreading the days when Esther and Ben would leave for college. Surely this was not normal!

Esther was still asleep, curled facing the doorway. Every day she looked more like Paul, with her sharply contoured face and dark hair, but her long, flat eyebrows were from Gina's mother. Gina opened the window curtains to reveal six scraggly petunias still wearing a few anemic blossoms. She'd planted them in the window box to mitigate Esther's view of the neighbor's brown siding, four feet away, but lately she'd neglected to water them.

She kissed Esther's cheek. “Time to get up, Estie.”

Esther's eyes fluttered open. “Did you look for a photograph for my project?” she asked.

“Not yet. But I will now.”

Gina left her and went down the hall to the study. The room was lined with books—volumes of architectural theory and monographs on the lower shelves, and above, novels—upright, piled, lying, leaning—but also photographs of family: the inheritance of a photographer's daughter. She'd returned from Maine with a box of childhood photos and in the middle of the night when she couldn't sleep, she'd been looking through them obsessively, the way one looks for something lost. Like the novels, the photos were stories that had already taken place. She wondered when she would she begin to select which stories to keep and which to throw away. Did people
ever lose their fear of forgetting?

Now, in more than three decades' worth of photographs, she was determined to find a recent picture of her parents alone for Esther's project. But so far, Eleanor and Ron had shown up only in groups, usually with one of Gina's children: Esther with grandmother Eleanor sailing the Cape Dory in Maine, Ben and grandfather Ron rowing the dinghy, Esther—a year older—with Ron and Eleanor, standing on their dock. Their stage for all these activities was the luminous cove that had always made everyone their photogenic best. In the pictures, her parents sparkled with jubilance; they
had
been jubilant, as though with their grandchildren they were experiencing the joys of parenting for the first time.

Finally, the perfect photograph appeared, taken on her parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary—the diminutive Eleanor looking cheerfully up at Ron, who held her hands in both of his. A picture is worth a thousand words, she thought, and can hide a thousand more.

On the desk, the phone rang; Gina picked it up. “Dearie, it's Annie Bridges. I couldn't reach Cassie, and I bet you're running around trying to get out of the house at this hour. But I wanted to tell you that the ‘for sale' sign at your house is gone.”

“Wow—thank you, Annie, for letting me know. We all knew it was going to happen, but it still feels kind of strange.”

“It sure does! Well, I'll let you go. We'll chat at a better time.”

When Gina hung up, she was buzzing; Annie's news had triggered the memory of Cassie's call about her parents' accident two months ago. After that call, too, she'd been standing here in the study, trying to fathom the loss, feeling as if there were something she should be doing but rendered helpless by geographical distance.

She turned to leave the study and glanced at the framed sixteen-by-twenty, black–and-white photograph of the cove that sat on the desk, waiting to be hung. As soon as she'd returned from Maine, she'd
gone to look for it in the storage closet and had taken it to be framed. She resolved to put it up today, when she got home from work.

In the bathroom, Paul shaved; Gina put in her contacts. Ben came in and pulled out the stool to brush his teeth.

“I got a cancellation today, so I have a couple free hours beginning at eleven,” Paul said, rinsing his razor. “What's your day like? Think you might be able to get away? We could go up to the property—it'll be nice and warm there.”

A year and a half ago, they'd bought a place north of the city, in Marin, that they were planning to remodel and move into. Gina hadn't yet been able to come up with a design she was happy with, and she knew Paul was getting impatient. She had the time to go to the property today. But she balked at the pressure it would put on her to get going on the plans.

Paul smiled at her in the mirror. “Aw, come on. The weather will be like summer there. It'll be a good break for you,” he said.

Gina managed a smile. “Okay.” But she thought: what I really need is a break from myself. And a good night's sleep.

Ben left and Esther came in and handed Gina a hairbrush. “French braids, please,” she said.

“Won't it be nice to have a second bathroom?” Paul said.

“I like this,” Gina told him, wanting to counter his insinuation for Esther's sake. She pulled the photograph of her parents out of her bathrobe pocket for Esther and braided, occasionally glancing up at her family in the mirror, absorbing the tender scene as deeply as she could. This was an unexpected side effect of sleep deprivation; she'd discovered it created a slower internal pace that made her more present in these ordinary moments with her kids.

Esther looked back and forth from the photo to herself in the mirror, her long eyebrows shifting up and down. “This is a perfect picture,” she finally said. “They look so happy.”

“See you in a few,” Paul said, kissing Gina goodbye after breakfast. Gina loaded Esther, Ben, and their springer spaniel, Stella, into the station wagon and drove to school.

At eleven, after a difficult meeting about expensive change orders with the Stones and their contractor, Gina left her office to pick up Paul. When she opened the car door, she was horrified to discover Stella panting and pacing in the back.

“Stella! Oh, no!” She'd brought Stella so she could come with them to the country, but had forgotten to take her into the office with her. She assessed the temperature inside the car: because of the fog, it was still cool. She poured bottled water into Stella's travel bowl, and Stella lapped it up.

Rattled, she drove toward Paul's medical office. Usually as she crossed town cresting the succession of hills, views of the pastel city and bridges would lift her spirits. Not today. The wind and gray muted everything: color, shape, expectations, the time of day, her mood. She was dropping stitches, getting flustered, feeling the glass half-empty more and more each day, and she couldn't blame it only on lack of sleep, though that wasn't helping.

She pulled into a loading zone near Paul's building and watched him cross the street. Tall and athletically built with a cropped beard, he appeared younger than his forty-eight years. She noticed he was wearing his new Italian high-top shoes that he was so proud of.

“Boy, this car needs a good clean out,” he said when he got in. He gathered a binder, paper cups, and an old roll of drawings from the floor and threw them into the backseat. “Feeling okay?”

Gina rolled her eyes at him. “I think I only slept three hours last night. Also, my clients don't need an architect; they need a shrink!”

Paul laughed. “I take it you just had a difficult meeting?”

“Not difficult, exactly. More like crazy. You know how the Stones' house is set at the back of the lot? They've decided they want
the garage to be right under the kitchen, so they have an idea about tunneling through the hill from the street all the way to the house. But the thing is, once they drive in, they won't have room to turn around. They want a turntable installed so they won't have to back out. It'll mean
months
of grueling neighborhood meetings.”

“Is it legal to do that kind of massive excavation?”

“Sure. The question is, is it
moral
to blast away almost a thousand cubic yards of the planet just because you can?” Gina sighed. “All my clients just want more and more of everything.”

Paul smiled the all-knowing smile she'd come to dread. “Ah,” he said. “Is this the architect's indictment of those who don't understand that ‘less is more,' or are you perhaps a little envious that your clients have no qualms about saying exactly what they want?”

She groaned; it was all of the above. She'd felt lucky after she'd first opened her office twelve years ago and jobs had flowed steadily her way, but recently she'd been wondering if, in building a thriving business, she'd compromised her architectural vision. While some residential clients, like the Stones, had given her ample freedom to assert her ideas, most just wanted her to put a barely artful spin on their own versions of beauty and function. Le Corbusier and Palladio hadn't looked over Gina's shoulder in a long time. Their cries of “Light! Space! Proportion! Harmony!” were too often drowned out by “Payroll! Budget! Schedule!”

On the Golden Gate Bridge, the wind gusted with fog so wet that Gina had to turn on her windshield wipers. But within minutes, they emerged from the envelope into blinding sunshine. She was groping in her purse for her sunglasses when her phone rang. She didn't answer, but listened to the voicemail from a contractor trying to get a final inspection on a project.

“Bob here. We got that bitchy electrical inspector. First she wanted to know why we'd use ugly steel windows on an old house,
and then she told me the architect was stupid for using a plug strip instead of putting the outlets in the backsplash—blah, blah, blah. She left without even checking out the electrical panel. She's holding us way up, Gina. If we don't get these inspections . . .”

Gina ended the message, and they drove on in silence. Her head began to throb.

Soon they were on the small road that wound through oaks and scrub brush, mailboxes, and garages of weathered redwood that signaled “neighborhood,” though not a soul could be seen. Eucalyptus trees drooped along the road, not from perpetual thirst, as Gina had thought the first time she'd seen them, but because that was what eucalyptus trees did.

Gina parked in a stand of trees on the north side of their two-acre property that stretched south toward a shallow valley bounded by low hills. Since their first frigid summer in San Francisco thirteen years ago, she and Paul had dreamed they would move somewhere warmer and closer to nature, with an easy commute to the city.

Paul took off his new shoes and put on his sneakers. Gina got out and opened the tailgate; Stella shot out, her short tail wagging. Under the blazing sun, Gina felt enervated as she and Paul walked toward the derelict '60s ranch house, with its flat roof, splintered redwood siding, and cheap aluminum sliders. She tried to conjure the excitement and confidence she'd felt a year and a half ago when she'd tentatively begun a modest plan for it. Usually, when she worked on the schematics for a house, a feeling about the site, both sensory and emotional, would take over and inform her design decisions, right down to the window trim. Here, she could imagine the sun on her shoulders as she bent over a garden they would plant. The crunch of brown August grass under her sneakers as she climbed the hill to the south and the smell of ripe fruit from the lone peach tree . . . searching for toads and lizards with Esther and Ben and, after they'd gone to bed, sitting out under the stars with
Paul, the air still warm and fragrant.