Dream House (14 page)

To: Gina Gilbert

From: Allison Brink

Gina: Here's a description of everything I'd like accommodated in the remodel. The kitchen should open to the family/dining area. This “great room” should not be so large that it's not cozy, and should
have a place for intimate family meals as well as formal dining for larger groups. The room should include a seating area and a couch and chairs for watching TV and playing video games, a desk for the computer, printer and fax, and an area for the children's homework and art projects. I can't stand clutter, so there should be ample storage for all supplies, as well as cabinetry that will hide the TV from view. Also, my grandmother's upright piano will need to be in this room. Because the kids and my friends like to help cook, I'd like a Wolfe professional twelve-burner range; state-of-the-art lighting, and a gigantic window overlooking the garden. There should be an oversized kitchen island and a place to put away small appliances to maximize counter space. Do you think you might have something to show me by tomorrow?

“Just put it right here like this,” Gina overheard Annie instruct Lester. “Don't forget the lemon pepper.”

How would it be, staying at Lily House? Gina wondered, trying not to think about her unease in April when she'd been here with Cassie. The nearest hotel was twenty minutes away, and she'd wanted to make the trip efficient and inexpensive. No rental car, no hotel. Annie and Lester knew Sid had bought the house, and Gina had told them vaguely that she wanted to revisit it; they'd been thrilled she was coming and hadn't asked questions.

“So what's the job?” Lester asked, when he and Annie had brought out plates of roast beef, mashed potatoes and corn-on-the-cob. “I mean the fax—I didn't read it, but it looks . . . complicated.”

“You did
too
read it, you fibber!” Annie scolded. If she'd embarrassed Lester, it didn't show.

“It's a potential new project, yes,” Gina said. “Allison's a surgeon, a recent divorcée and mother of two who relies so completely on her Guatemalan housekeeper that her three-year-old son speaks no
English. She hopes opening up the main rooms will give her more togetherness with the kids during the two hours a day that they're all at home.”

“Huh.” Lester shook his head at his roast beef. “Think a remodel will solve her problems?”

“I don't know,” Gina said. “This is the fourth project I've done for her. She's a serial remodeler. It's a kind of addiction, I think.”

“Well,” Lester said, leaning back in his chair. “You probably know the story about Thomas Jefferson, how when his wife died ten years after they married, he became consumed with remodeling Monticello. He added two half-octagons and several years later, a dome. His house was a construction site until three years before his death.”

Gina laughed. “At least he was his own architect. Fewer meetings.” She thought of her clients who'd remodeled for years to keep up with the changes in their family lives and sometimes missed the deadlines. Like one couple who was still perfecting an elaborate teen rec room even though their son had had his first child and moved to France.

“You hear about people in California,” Lester said, “. . . how they . . . I don't know . . .”

“Lester, please pass Gina the butter,” Annie interrupted, shooting Lester a look that Gina, not Lester, noticed.

“Hold on, Annie.” Lester planted his knife and fork on the table like ski poles. “I just mean, it seems to me people are trying too hard to have it all. Is having a family nowadays just running a small business in a house that has a fancy kitchen and jets in the tub?”

Lester took a bite of roast beef and peered at Gina. All at once, she felt his criticism might be aimed at her.

“Gina's had a long day,” Annie said quickly. “She doesn't want to hear your cynical views on modern parenting.”

Lester wiped his forehead with his napkin. “Okay, you're right. Boy!” he said. “How about this weather—hot 'nuff foah ya?” Again,
he turned his gaze on Gina. “What about your property up north . . . Marin, is it? Paul was telling us about it after the funeral. Any progress? It's a
vacation
house, right?”

“Oh, no!” Gina said, her body tightening as if she'd been accused of something. “It's a remodel—it would . . .
will
be our full-time . . . our
only
house. We have the permits. Now I've just got to get busy and draw the plans.”

“Well, then,” Lester said. “Easier said than done, I'm sure.”

Gina nodded and Lester seemed to know she didn't want to say more. When she asked them how their sons and families were, Annie said, “Mike and Karen are visiting Randy and Susan in Alaska this week. But Mike usually comes up every third weekend with one or both kids. Karen sometimes stays home. I don't blame her—they're a rowdy bunch! It must be dreamy to have the house to herself.”

Gina wondered, would she find it “dreamy” when her kids were gone? It was hard to imagine; her own mother had made her empty nest seem like solitary confinement.

“Is that a hint, Annie? Should I take a trip?” Lester teased good-naturedly.

“Take a trip, Lester,
please.
”

“I think she likes her violin more than she likes me sometimes,” Lester said. He reached over and squeezed Annie's shoulder and she laughed.

Despite her unease, Gina soaked up their mutual esteem and affection and felt intuitively that they respected her privacy, too. They didn't mention her half-eaten dinner while they were washing dishes together or question why she wanted to turn in early.

Gina couldn't remember ever having been in Lily House's one-story “summer ell,” which was off the kitchen and housed two small
bedrooms and a tiny bathroom. She was enormously relieved that she wouldn't be sleeping upstairs where Banton ghosts surely would be lurking. The guest room was predictably New England: blue pinstripe wallpaper, a braided oval rug, a cotton quilt. Annie and Lester had taken out a chair to fit in a worktable for Gina that overlooked the yard and placed a vase of zinnias—Annie couldn't have known they were Gina's favorite—on the bureau. The one window was propped open with a wooden ruler but offered not a breath of air. She stretched out on the high, four-posted bed and aimed the fan on the nightstand at her face.

Crickets peeped; a motorcycle roared by on the road. Somewhere, but not close, a dog barked. The floorboards squeaked outside her room, a door bumped shut. When she thought Annie and Lester were settled in for the night, she crept to the bathroom she would share with them. Out of the hot silence of the house came Lester's voice. “That's what money . . .” he said. The thump of shoes against the floor. Then, “It's just real estate to them.”

It was curious how clear his voice was, and Gina stooped to discover a rectangular hole in the wall near the baseboard under the sink, perhaps cut for a heating vent. She kneeled to look through it. A similar hole was cut in the plaster of Annie and Lester's room, and she could see their floor.

Gina brushed her teeth and padded back to her room, alert and prickly. It would be hours before she fell asleep—jetlag, the smothering heat, the smart of criticism. Now, she sensed the ghosts of Lily House, loitering like a gang outside the bedroom door, waiting to pounce.

Rooms which are too closed prevent the natural flow of social occurrence and the natural process of transition from one social moment to another. And rooms which are too open will not support the differentiation of events which social life requires.

Christopher Alexander,
A Pattern Language

“Isn't it just lovely?” Ginny's mother said in her movie star voice. “There isn't a breath of wind, and the snow is sticking on every little branch.”

Mother and daughter stood looking out the piano room window at the huge elm tree that had been transformed by the night's surprise snowstorm into a lacy veil of white, delicately outlined by black branches. Against the gray sky, it looked more like a pencil drawing than a real tree. Ginny stared, entranced. At ten, she'd come to rely on such beauty, on the harmony it inspired; as she stood in silence with her mother, a fleeting but immutable understanding passed between them.

“Good morning!” her father said when Ginny and her mother came into the kitchen. He was squeezing the last drops of juice from an orange and despite his kid-like grin of disorganized teeth, he looked distinguished in his dark gray sweater.

“Ron, I think you'd better get the camera out and shoot that tree after breakfast,” her mother said. She was scrambling some eggs, and they sizzled when she poured them into a pan.

Ginny's father set four glasses of orange juice on the table and put his hands in his pockets. “I don't think I'll have time today. Bruce Ruby's coming in so I can shoot his bread.”

Her mother reeled around, spoon midair. “What? You're kidding!
Today
?” The spell of the elm tree had broken.

“I thought I told you that last week, sweet pea. He needs to get his catalogue out the first of the year.”

“I'm sure he does.”

Ginny could have predicted this conversation, her mother's sarcasm that heralded a fresh conflict. She turned and looked out the window, where the snow was so deep that bushes spread out like dunes on a wide white beach. Icebergs that had been forming in the cove all week made it impossible to tell if the tide was in or out. Six geese scuttled up the hill, looking for handouts from Ginny's mother, who often tossed them breakfast scraps. The outdoor world was so smooth and without lines their house could be set in a cloud; the kitchen, in comparison, appeared cluttered and worn. Ginny wolfed down her eggs, determined to get outside.

“After you practice,” her mother said. “And somebody's going to have to get that laundry in.”

On the back porch, Ginny's breath made a cloud around her head, and the cold bit her cheeks. Clothespins marched down the line like white bunny ears; beneath them hung the laundry, frozen stiff. She yanked the line in and after pulling off the pins, laid the crunchy clothes in the bottom of the basket. Upstairs, she draped them over the long hall railing and spread the socks on the radiator.

In the piano room, she practiced her violin, letting the notes float directly from the page to her fingers so she could keep her mind free to think about other things. Her squeaking was accompanied by the
crunch and shoosh of her father's shovel, thrusting coal from the cellar bin into the furnace. Soon, he was with Ginny in the piano room, setting up floodlights, preparing for Mr. Ruby. Ginny finished practicing, put her music away in the bench, and pushed it as far as it would go under the piano, an old out-of-tune upright that was not nearly glamorous enough to have a room named for it. “Every house should have a piano,” Ginny had heard her mother say, even though she didn't know how to play. Connected to the darkroom by a door, the piano room was also her father's office and studio. And, on special occasions and after a lot of furniture shuffling, it became the dining room.

Ginny liked the room best in its studio mode, full of lights, cameras, and her father's customers—all of which made him seem more important—and she felt a twinge of excitement, anticipating Mr. Ruby.

Stuffed into her snow clothes, Ginny plunged into the white silence beyond the front porch where only the tracks of their dog, Painter, disturbed the powdery surface. She leaned to grab a fistful of snow; it tasted deliciously fresh.

The “Ronald Gilbert—Commercial Photographer” sign that hung on the garage was whited-out. Ginny grabbed the toboggan and towed it around back to the best sliding hill in the neighborhood. A gang of kids had already packed a good track and were standing in line at the top of the hill, waiting their turns to go down. She was disappointed not to find Kit because the plow had pushed up giant piles of snow in the driveway, and she wanted him to help her build a fort later. Since he was twelve now and in junior high, she didn't dare to go knock on his door.

After an hour and a half, Ginny's snow pants were soaked, and her toes felt dead, so she headed back to the house. In the front hall,
she peeled off everything with her numb fingers and sat down on the stairs to thaw. Soon the ache set in—her toes first, then her fingers. When she was younger this sometimes made her cry, but now she got a certain pleasure from the pain of play.