Dream House Read online

  Now, her father lowered his head to catch her mother’s murmured remarks to Ginny.

  “Isn’t it interesting how quiet his colors are compared to the others? Just exquisite!” Ginny and her father leaned their faces closer to Eleanor’s; the rapture emanating from her felt almost like love. “You can see the way he made the shadow with different shades of blue and purple.”

  Her mother touched Ginny’s arm, and the three shifted to the next painting. “And look at the simple, soft shapes in this one,” she said. “Don’t they remind you of your paintings?”

  They did, Ginny thought, but only because they seemed inaccurate, like hers.

  “Psst!”

  Ginny swiveled to see Sid, her mother’s coat hooked on his thumb over his shoulder, peeking at her from around the door frame of an adjacent gallery. Behind him hung an intriguing and enormous black-and-white image. Keeping an eye on her family, she moved toward Sid into the room where a sign announced, “The Pleasure of Ruins.”

  Sid poked her in the back. “Hey, don’t look so sad.”

  “I’m not sad,” she said.

  Sid laughed. “Look over there at your sis.”

  Ginny turned; Cassie looked like she always did: pretty, serious.

  “She’d rather be anywhere but here. But it’s your mum’s birthday. Your mum and mine, they’re sensitive and get their feelings hurt easily. So we have to try to be extra nice to them.”

  Now, Ginny did feel sad. “I know,” she said.

  “Cheer up, kid! We’re in the presence of greatness.” Sid gestured to the artwork. “This is the really great stuff,” he said. He was standing so close to her that she could feel his excitement, as if bugs were jumping from him to her. She circled the room, trancelike, astonished by the photographs covering the walls: columns rising from rubble and huge blocks of stone standing upright in a field, heavy crumbling walls and windows with only sky behind. Their labels read: “Stonehenge,” “The Parthenon,” “The Forum,” “The Baths of Caracalla.” The images filled her with a wonder she felt in her bones.

  She’d nearly forgotten Sid was there until he said, “These places are more alive in death than most places are at birth. They’re cool, huh?” Ginny almost understood what he meant; mostly, she jittered with the idea that he’d speak to her in this grown-up way. “What do you think?” he asked.

  Ginny looked at him, wondering what in the world he expected her, his nine-year-old cousin, to say. His dark eyes danced. “I like that they’re mysterious,” she said.

  “Ginny?” She almost didn’t hear her father, who’d come up behind them. “Great shots, aren’t they?” he said. But it wasn’t the ruins that captivated her now. Still under Sid’s spell, she slid her hand inside her father’s, and they left the gallery to once more traipse through the halls of Degas and Van Gogh and Bonnard and the three M’s: Monet, Matisse, and Morandi.

  At dinnertime, the Vietnam War silently flickered on the TV as it did every night.

  The kitchen was cramped and brightly lit, with uncurtained black windows that steamed up from a single boiling pot. A birdcage hung in one corner, but their liberally supervised finch, Pepe, was not inside, having found a warmer place to perch somewhere in the house. While her father peeled potatoes and opened cans of corned beef hash—a favorite quick dinner of their mother’s—Ginny put candles on a small cake in her father’s darkroom. The birthday had gone smoothly enough; all the way to the bus station to drop off Sid, Eleanor had plied him with questions about which colleges he was interested in (“No idea”), whether he had a girlfriend (he didn’t), and if he’d be in Whit’s Point for the summer (“I hope not.”). When he got out of the car, Eleanor said, “He’s so handsome. I can’t believe he doesn’t have a girlfriend.” Cassie had said, “Maybe because he smokes pot. Or, maybe he likes boys.” Ginny had braced for her mother’s reaction, but all she’d said was, “Poor thing. He’s awfully good to his mother.” Then she’d said to Cassie, “Too bad school’s so important you couldn’t come home for my birthday weekend.” Gina had squirmed while Cassie explained in a tight voice that she’d had a long play rehearsal on Saturday.

  Now, Ginny was already missing Cassie, but she excitedly eyed the wrapped presents on the worktable. The biggest one, she knew, was a white Singer sewing machine that would replace her mother’s ancient black one.

  After dinner, her father lit the candles on the cake, and Ginny carried it into the kitchen singing “Happy Birthday.” Her father set the presents on the floor next to her mother’s chair.

  “Well,” Eleanor said, looking down at the sewing machine box, wrapped in Christmas paper. “What a surprise—poinsettias in October!”

  “Oops,” Ron said, shifting his weight awkwardly. “Guess I was just reaching for the biggest piece in the box.”

  Ron helped Eleanor pull the paper off the sewing machine and stepped back, as if it might explode.

  “Wowie!” she exclaimed. “A sewing machine! Now let’s see . . . are you going to learn how to sew, Ron?”

  Her father’s nervous laugh. “Oh . . . well, sure, why not?” They’d been warming the kitchen with the open oven, and it had grown too hot; perspiration beaded on his forehead.

  Eleanor unwrapped Cassie’s present—a knit hat—and said, “Ooooh.”

  Ginny waited, excited about her present—a pair of pajamas. They were her idea, even though she knew her parents usually slept without anything on, which she surmised was because pajamas were a luxury. Her father had taken her to Riversport to buy them. She picked out a cotton pair with green and white stripes; her mother was practical and wouldn’t like frilly, silky ones.

  As Eleanor unwrapped the pajamas, Ginny stood at her elbow and held her breath. Her mother picked up the starched, long-sleeved shirt-style top, inspected it, then looked up at Ron. She carefully laid it back in the box.

  “Why, Ginny!” she exclaimed, pulling Ginny toward her. “Thank you, sweetie.” Ginny looked into her mother’s face. Her lips were smiling, but her eyes were not.

  Late at night Ginny was awakened by her mother’s shout, “This goddamn pigsty!” Silence. Her father, mumbling. She looked at the door that connected her room to her parents’. In the past few years, it had become dangerous, like the door she’d been told never to open if she smelled smoke and the wood felt hot to the touch.

  “You don’t know anything! She’ll turn that boy against me . . . Oh, how I loved him. He could have been mine . . .” Her mother wept, steadily and quietly enough that it nearly lulled Ginny back to sleep. But then a mournful tune filled the darkness: “Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me . . .” Her mother’s singing was so creepy Ginny wished she’d go back to crying. Her father mumbled. Her mother: “You really have no idea; do you!” Then, a tearing sound: zripp—zripp—zripp!

  “Oh, honey, don’t . . .” Her father’s plaintive voice.

  “Don’t touch me! You think I’m just going to be the servant in this pigsty for the rest of my life? Well, don’t count on it! This isn’t life...this is some kind of death! Oh . . . oh . . . oh . . . I wish I could just die.”

  The door was burning; her mother’s cries leapt through its old wood like flames. Ginny wrapped the pillow around her head and scratched it with her fingernails, scratch-scratch-scratching away the world. Tonight, she would begin to practice forgetting; she would build a wall-of-forgetting. The less you heard, the less there was to be forgotten.

  She must have dozed off. She awoke to the squeal of her parents’ window sash going up and slamming down.

  It seemed like hours before she could fall back to sleep.

  In the morning, she raised her shade slowly, so the noise wouldn’t wake her parents. It was so early that it was still dark, and across the cove the silhouette of pine trees was just barely distinguishable against the sky.

  After switching on the light, she stretched up her arms and looked around her room. Was it a “pigsty”? It was messy but in a good way, in her opinion, because the mess
was what she herself had created. Everything else in the room—desk and bookshelves, bed and bureau, pale pink walls and most of her clothing—had been passed down to her. She’d divided the room into zones: one for sleeping, one for homework, one near the window for thinking and reading, one for dressing, one for art making. She’d nearly covered the pink walls with her artwork; everywhere, there were so many animals and books and knick-knacks to look at, that the looking nearly silenced the world outside the room. Perhaps, she thought for the first time, she should sleep with her light on.

  She began picking up the clothing layered on her desk chair, separating dirty from clean. The dirty things went into a pile near the door; the clean things she hung up in her closet or folded neatly in drawers.

  She went to her easel and flipped through sheets of newsprint. None of the paintings she’d made of flowers and bowls of fruit looked real. When she took her sketchpad outside, on the boat or in the yard, lines and brushstrokes seemed to have wings. But here in her room, she couldn’t get the shapes right. She thought of the ruins at the museum that seemed more like creations of nature than of human hands. She thought of the mysterious Sid and wondered when they’d meet again.

  After sorting through every one of her drawings, she selected a few to clip back onto the easel. The rest she stacked on the floor next to her dirty clothes.

  Now, she carefully placed the tubes of paint in their box in order by color. Pinched the dry, hard spots off her modeling clay, then rewrapped each color. Switched her Cray-pas around in their box, matching each one with its named slot. She eyed her art supplies; organized in little rainbows, they were as tantalizing as the cookies in a bakery case. She liked arranging and deranging them almost more than drawing with them.

  Through the door, she heard her father snore, like a warm-up for the blub-blub-blub of a lobster boat starting up now, on the other side of the cove. She hastily assessed her cleaning effort. With everything in its proper place, the room looked bigger, sleeker, its horizontals and verticals clearer. Surely, she thought, this would make her mother happy. If she was still alive, that is. On mornings after a night like last night, she could never feel sure she would see her mother again.

  It was seven o’clock, time to get back in bed. She turned off the light and went to the window. The sun was up, and it set the edge of the red sumacs ablaze. The rocks of Miller’s and Poison Ivy Island were black against the midnight blue sea; the trees were losing their leaves, and she could see all the way to New Hampshire. When she turned ten next year, she’d be allowed to sail their boat across the harbor and river mouth, to New Hampshire. To another state, by herself!

  She raised her window, unlocked the storm window and propped it open at the bottom to get a feel for the new day. Her eyes dropped to something on the porch below her parents’ window. She squinted. Lying next to the empty planter boxes were the green-and-white striped pajamas she’d given her mother, shredded and in a wad, their tags still attached.

  Quickly, she put down the window, threw up her wall-of-forgetting, and climbed back into bed.

  The hall floor creaked, and soon she heard her father moving toward her bed. This morning, she would pretend to be asleep; she needed to feel the caress of his fingers on her cheek.

  “Get up now, okay sleepyhead?” he whispered.

  She waited, relishing the tender stroke of his hand that assured that her mother was still alive and that she hadn’t yet made her father leave. Finally, she opened her eyes. Her father looked like autumn in his brown khakis and red-and-black checked shirt. It didn’t seem like too much to hope he might offer a sympathetic acknowledgement of what had gone on during the night. But he never did.

  Glancing around the room, he said, “Wow! Pretty spiff.”

  In the kitchen, Ginny sat at the table with a bowl of Rice Krispies and opened her notebook. “I need Mom’s help with homework questions,” she told her father.

  “Something I can help you with?”

  “No, it’s about ancestors.”

  Her father looked very hard at something on the floor. “I guess I better wake her up,” he said and headed upstairs.

  Ginny looked out the kitchen window and saw that the pajamas were gone from the porch. Something thumped the ceiling above her; the bathroom door slammed. Her father’s slow footsteps on the stair. Back in the kitchen, he dropped two slices of toast into the toaster and put the teakettle on to boil.

  Finally, Eleanor came in, her blue bathrobe tied loosely around the waist, her eyes puffy. Ginny felt almost sick with relief to see her mother alive. But a moment later, she hated her for last night’s declaration that she wished she were dead. “Brrr,” Eleanor said. “Winter’s coming. Rigor mortis is setting in.”

  “Can I ask you my homework questions now?” Ginny asked.

  “Fire away,” her mother said, sitting down at the table.

  “Okay. Number one, where did my ancestors come from?”

  “England and France, mostly. We’re descended from kings! Haven’t I shown you the genealogy book your grandpa made?”

  Her mother glowed, as if a light inside her had switched on. She left the room and came back carrying a large, black notebook.

  “Here—look. You remember your ancestor Cassandra Westwick, the Salem witch, don’t you?” she said. “The one Cassie’s named after? She was an honest-to-goodness witch from Salem, burned at the stake and everything! And you see . . . here’s your grandpa, Sidney Banton, and here’s his father, Sidney Banton, and so on, till you get to the Sidney Banton who owned Lily House. He was the one who was George Washington’s private secretary; and did you know that the president came to visit him at Lily House once? He did, and he sat in the Hepplewhite lolling chair. You know the one I mean?” Ginny was pretty sure she knew the chair, but her mother didn’t wait for an answer. “And the president—George Washington—left some important letters—letters from Thomas Jefferson!—at Lily House. The letters disappeared after the president died, and some people think Sidney Banton burned them up, but your grandpa was positive that he hid them in the house somewhere.” Her mother tilted her long, dark eyebrows at Ginny. “Now that’s not something you can tell anyone about, though, okay?” Ginny thought her mother looked a little puffed out, like Pepe when she was cold.

  Sidney Banton: Ginny had heard the name all her life, and it occurred to her for the first time that fame was why his name had been passed down through generations, to her grandfather. Now she wondered how Sid ended up with the name, since it was his mother, not his father, who was a Banton. When she asked her mother, she frowned.

  “Oh. Well, since Sid’s father ran off before he was born, Fran didn’t see why Sid should have his last name, so she gave him her last name, and it worked out, because Sid’s the only grandson, and it would be a shame for Sidney Banton’s name not to be passed down.”

  Her mother fell silent and looked far away, out the window. “God only knows . . . Fran has probably done something with those Washington letters. Oh, well, doop-de doo,” she said, shutting the book. She shook her head. “All those precious things at Lily House.”

  Her father must have thought she was talking to him. “Well, there’ll be a war about them someday,” he said. “I think it would’ve been better if your father or grandfather had just given it all away to a museum or library or something.” He buttered the toast and put it on a plate in front of her mother, apparently unaware that she was glaring at him. When he slipped a teabag into her cup and began to pour steaming water from the kettle into it, Ginny felt suddenly panicked that someone was going to get burned.

  “Give it away? Give it away? It’s all we’ve got, goddamn you! Give it away and then what? We can go live in a tent for the rest of our lives?”

  Ginny peered into her bowl of beige Rice Krispie mush.

  “Oh, okay,” her father said. “I’m really not the one to . . .”

  “You’ve got that right—you’re an idiot!”

  “Okay, I’m an idiot th
en,” her father said, looking like he’d just eaten something sour.

  Ginny felt the cereal rise in her throat and swallowed hard. She looked at the clock, then at the last question on her paper, “What makes you proud of your ancestors?” She didn’t ask it out loud, though; it seemed like a personal question.

  She and her mother pressed their lips together in their ritual goodbye kiss.

  Her father walked her to the front door, and she turned to give him a worried look. He gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Better get a wiggle on. See you later, alligator.”

  She was halfway down the walk when she turned abruptly.

  “Daddy—” she called, turning to see him still standing at the door. “Were there any real ancestors on your side?”

  “No one important that I know of, honey,” her father said, putting his hands in his pockets. “Your grandfather brought us to America from England when I was a baby. He came to find a better job here as a toolmaker.”

  Ginny rarely saw her paternal grandfather from Michigan, but she loved the way he said “garage” to rhyme with “carriage.” She remembered him playing his marimba and singing in a rich baritone voice. He knew a lot about things, it seemed, like juggling and electricity.

  When she got to her desk at school, she opened her notebook and answered the question, “What makes you proud of your ancestors?” She wrote: “They were smart and interesting, and some of them can sing.”

  On the way home from school, Ginny zipped her jacket and put up her hood. The air’s cold edge reminded her that Halloween was only six days away.

  She stepped into the house and felt immediately that the storm her mother had whipped up last night hadn’t passed. No one was in the kitchen, and the darkroom door stood wide open. She put one foot on the stairs to go up, but when she caught her mother’s crying from the bedroom, she went back outside.

  She ran down the hill to the fort she’d built on the rocks at the edge of the cove with salvaged, waterlogged plywood. It was her refuge when the house didn’t feel safe, when she’d been marooned by things she didn’t understand. The three-sided structure was open on the cove side and equipped with a few old kitchen utensils. It was just big enough for two: Ginny and her best friend, Sandy.