“About what?”
“That I’m making us sell everything.”
“It’s fine; we’ve been through this. I’m okay with it.”
Cassie was broke. Her husband, Wes, had lost his software engineering job out on route 128 two years ago, and they had three teenagers and two maxed-out credit cards. Gina and Cassie had agreed to assign a value to each of the house’s furnishings so that if there was something Gina wanted, she would buy it from the estate. Everything else they’d try to sell.
“I just wouldn’t be able to stand it if you got mad at me,” Cassie said. “All that fighting that Mom and Aunt Fran did when they were dividing up the Banton things!”
“We’re not going to fight,” Gina said. “We aren’t fighters.”
The memory of her mother and aunt poked Gina with two cold, witchy fingers. She shivered and pulled her phone from her pocket, hoping she might be able to catch Paul between his patients. Again, she got his voicemail.
“Jeez, Gina,” Cassie said when Gina hung up without leaving a message. “That’s the third time you’ve tried Paul today. Are you that worried about Esther? Her dad’s there.”
Gina bristled. She missed her kids painfully and perhaps unreasonably, too. Secretly, sometimes she was seized by the fear that if she turned her attention from them, they could be swept off the earth. “It’s not the same with Paul,” she told Cassie. “You know a mother empathizes with her kids in a way no one else can.”
Cassie rolled her eyes. “Well, not all mothers,” she said. They exchanged a grim look, a kind of emotional osmosis that came with their history—our sistory they called it.
They got to work on #1 Throw out all the crap, beginning in the kitchen with corks, jars, and twist ties, mounds of hoarded plastic cutlery and stacks of plastic cups from Barnacle Bob’s—her parents’ favorite fish ’n’ chips place. Then, with an unspoken understanding, they separated and began eviscerating the house room by room, stuffing thirty-gallon garbage bags to be taken to Goodwill or the dump.
Upstairs, Gina pulled from a blanket chest a sack of hems that their tiny mother had cut from her skirts. She was about to shove it into a garbage bag when she felt something hard; she fished around and pulled out a slender cardboard box, secured with a rubber band. Inside was a scrap of burgundy-colored velvet labeled, “A piece of Gen. Washington’s cloak” and a tightly folded piece of paper with a large tag attached that said, “Lady Martha Washington’s hair.” Carefully, she peeled back the delicate ancient paper to have a look. The tiny nest of dark strands gripped her with a fascination that years of her mother’s reciting the family history had failed to inspire.
“Cassie! Come here!”
Cassie bounded up the stairs, and when Gina held out her findings, she drew a deep breath. For a few moments, they beheld their treasure with silent reverence.
“God!” Cassie finally burst out. “Was Mom hoarding these? Why didn’t she sell them! She thought it was so important that we got to spoon our sugar from Sidney Banton’s silver bowl every morning, and meanwhile, she and Dad could hardly pay the coal bill.”
Cassie’s tirade so soon after the accident made Gina squirm; though as usual, she completely agreed. Cassie stood and gestured to the leather bound books—several bearing presidential signatures—that they’d cleared from the bookshelf. “And the things here aren’t even the half of it. Do you remember all the beautiful stuff at Lily House?”
“Only vaguely,” Gina said. She hadn’t been in Lily House since Fran had lived there. When Fran died in the 1970s, the house was sold with all its furnishings to the New England Historical Society. Her parents’ best friends, Annie and Lester Bridges, had been Lily House’s caretakers for years.
“Annie and Lester really want us to come by,” Cassie said. “I’d like to see them, but . . . you realize that everything in that house should be ours, and going there . . . It’s like salt in the wounds. I know I shouldn’t be thinking this way, but it’s just . . .” Cassie gazed, glassy-eyed, out the window. “Wes didn’t get that job he was so hopeful about last month.”
Gina stroked her sister’s muscular back. She knew Cassie hated to talk about money; they’d been taught not to. “I know,” she said. “Something will change.”
Make a place in the house...which is kept locked and secure; a place which is virtually impossible to discover...a place where the archives of the house or other more potent secrets might be kept.
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
By the end of Tuesday, Gina’s parents’ fifteen-year-old VW station wagon was fully packed for the dump. Gina loaded the skunk between the centerboard from a long-gone family boat and several faded bolts of paisley cloth, vintage 1970. She had just put the key in the ignition when Cassie popped out of the house and said, “Damn, the skunk!”
“Tuesday’s dead animal day,” Gina said.
“Yeah, but I just remembered the dump closes at three-thirty on Tuesdays.”
Gina dropped her forehead to the steering wheel. She’d slept only five hours last night and was vibrating with fatigue and frustration. After a few moments, she climbed out of the car and gazed up at the promising blue sky. The weather had no rules, she thought; there could be a sudden thaw, and she would be able to bury the skunk.
Back in the house, Gina stood above the two-foot-by-two-foot opening in the attic and lowered down boxes covered with dust and bits of tar from a sloppy roofing job to Cassie. At least thirty of the boxes were filled with photographs and negatives from their father’s commercial photography business that he’d operated from home; others held the artifacts of their childhood. Cassie and Gina carried them down to the living room, leaving a trail of black behind them.
“Check this out,” Cassie said, pulling something framed from a box. She turned it for Gina to see. “My junior year French award. And...” She reached her other hand into the box. “Ta-da! The Miss Andrews Academy Award.”
“Pretty hot stuff,” Gina said.
Cassie laid the documents back in the box. “Yeah, well, I remember Mom told me back then not to have them out for people to see because it was too braggy.”
“I’m sure. But she bragged about us to other people.”
“Only when we weren’t around to enjoy it. Remember how she’d say, ‘Don’t let it go to your head’? Have you ever, even once, said that to one of your kids? She called it ‘being modest’, but I think she was just jealous.”
Cassie’s insight was knife-sharp. Their mother was impossible—not just volatile, but childish and manipulative. Gina had always been reluctant to share achievements with her. Now she wondered: how could a mother feel competitive with her children? She’d always hoped that Esther and Ben would surpass her in feeling fulfilled in life.
“Not to mention,” Cassie said with a snicker, “she hated that boys liked us.”
A
