610 Signal Hill
by
Antonia Callas
Recently, some good friends of ours were forced to sell their rambling Spanish style home tucked into the mountains of Malibu. Joe and Beth had put their heart and soul as well as plenty of cash into refurbishing their ramshackle place into a unique, funky retreat and the result was a peaceful, wooded oasis that seemed far from the stress of Los Angeles. For seven years, they had generously shared their extraordinary home and hospitality with our circle of friends and more than a few of us grieved over their imminent move, myself included.
Joe and Beth decided to throw a farewell party so we could all say our good-byes to the house. They called it a “closure party.” Clearly, they were doing their best to put a new-age face on less than ideal circumstances. As the date approached, I found I was absolutely dreading the party, but there was no way out of it. While I was upset they blew through their fortune, they were still my close friends. My intense aversion to attending didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
So when my husband and I arrived that evening, I was surprised to find that it felt like any other party with good friends and too much good wine. I was completely detached from my earlier emotions and at the end of the night I walked away without a backward glance. Later, I was intrigued enough by my emotional about-face to give it some thought. Why wasn’t I the slightest bit sad that evening? Or mad. Or sympathetic. Or… anything? I let it percolate for a few days and then like a long-lost child, the reason slid quietly into my mind.
I had gone through it before. I disconnected from their loss because I had already lost a home. A home I loved deeply and lived in for a short time when I was a young girl. Only it was more than just a home that was lost, it was an entire family.
I grew up on the second floor of a two-flat on the Northwest side of Chicago. Jefferson Park was a typical blue-collar neighborhood, lined with neat rows of brick homes and hard-working people who were suspicious of anybody who wasn’t exactly like them. They guarded their meticulous, postage stamp-sized front lawns with a ferocity unmatched since the Huns invaded Constantinople. My father was a young architect on his way up and my mom stayed home to take care of my brother and me. My Greek grandparents, who owned the building, lived on the first floor below us.
One day, it seemed to me out of the blue, my dad told my brother and me that he wanted to show us something. He pulled a meticulous, cardboard scale model of a house attached to a large piece of cardboard from its hiding place under his bed and set it on the dining room table. It took up half of the table. We gathered around. “What do you think of it?” my dad wanted to know. He paused a moment for full effect before delivering the bombshell. “This is going to be our house.” My brother and I were stunned. “Your dad designed it himself,” mom informed us, her voice full of pride. They told us we were buying a five-acre lot in the country, a place called Barrington, and they were taking us to see the property that very weekend. I was in shock. Barrington? I’d never heard of the place. Our own house? That such an enormous thing had happened without my knowledge felt completely unreal to me.
We saw the property on a blustering day in November. That’s when it began to feel real. We were moving to the country! But even better, we were going to have our own home and it was going to be beautiful, huge – fantastic! Five whole acres of land! In my wildest imagination I never had dreamed that such a wonderful thing could happen to me – could happen to our little family.
We started building our dream house on 610 Signal Hill Road on a very cold day in early spring. I remember my mom shaking us awake one morning with an eager tone, “Come on, we’ve got to get out to the property today. They’re pouring the foundation!” So we hurried out to the property and watched them pour the gray, viscous cement into the deep, narrow trenches lined with wooden boards dug into the clay earth. My parents were exhilarated. After that, we spent most weekends at the property, helping my dad and the workers. My father knew an extraordinary amount about building and it seemed to me that he was everywhere during construction; putting up the framing with the construction crew, carrying drywall, installing pipes. Several years ago, I came across a photo of my dad during that year. He was standing on the roof, sunburned and shirtless, holding a hammer in his hand. Wiry and thin as a rail, he was beaming with the crazy optimism and pride of a young man literally building his dream.
My mom was right there with him, working just as hard. She put in all of the insulation for the house by herself. I remember her running the electrical wiring with my dad, calling out wire colors. When my dad cut off the tip of his finger because he was hurrying to finish hand cutting the wood shakes for the barn roof before it got dark, my mom took over, sawing and hammering on the barn roof as night descended.
My brother and I helped too, only we were relegated to tasks like hauling piles of wood scraps and errant bricks in wobbly wheelbarrows. We must have picked up a thousand nails that littered our property. We discussed what our new lives would be like and what kind of horse dad would buy us and whether moving to the country meant we were rich now. It was a very exciting time, a time of possibilities.
As the house took shape, I thought it looked like a castle. Only a few modern one. Mies Van Der Rohr had been my dad’s teacher in his student days at the Illinois Institute of Technology and his vision had affected my dad tremendously. My dad also admired Frank Lloyd Wright, so naturally the house reflected both architectural influences. It was a contemporary design, but had Wright’s lines. Slung low into the hillside, the house meshed organically with the landscape. It was one-story affair with a rough cedar face and a shake roof. But the roof! It soared to the sky. At the apex, its peak reached twenty-two feet. Every room in the house, including the garage, was shaped like an octagon and it fit together like some giant structural puzzle.
I learned every inch of that house and every detail of my dad’s design as the building went on. I liked that the house was set far back from the road, at the end of a long gravel driveway that looped at the end. A deep ravine with a creek ran in front of the house and cut along the side of it. To get to the front door, you had to cross the ravine on a picturesque wooden bridge. I loved walking over the bridge. Looking back, the parallel of a princess crossing the drawbridge over a moat to get to her castle nestled deep in the forest seems obvious. It never occurred to me then.
We finally moved in a year later. The house was not finished. There were no doors and we needed flashlights at night because the house wasn’t completely wired. Once the house was wired and the doors installed, work on the house slowed way down. My mom told us that we had spent a lot of money and that it was going to take us a little while longer to finish.
My brother and I started in our new schools. I was in the fifth grade and my brother the fourth. My dad had gone into business for himself and was trying to make a go of his new company. My mom got a job as a bookkeeper to help make ends meet. Suddenly, my brother and I were latch-key kids, coming home to a big, empty house. I was incredibly bored and lonely in Barrington and I hated that my mom wasn’t home for us anymore. I think probably most princesses living alone in remote castles were lonely too. I spent a lot of time reading books and cooking dinner for our family. I finally found the only girl my age that lived anywhere near us and she was a total weirdo. Still, we became friends by necessity.
I tried very hard to make everything fine. Even though I missed my grandparents and my best friend, I kept thinking I shouldn’t miss them. The dream of being rich, of having a house in the country is what everyone wants, what everyone works for. So how could I possibly think things weren’t wonderful? We had the house, though I was less sure about the rich part, and the view out the back windows from the top of our hill was unobstructed for miles. It was all undeveloped land back then, grasslands and ponds and groves of oaks.
My brother thrived in the country, taking our dogs on all day expeditions. I tried to accompany my brother on his outdoor adventures, but they always ended in disaster for me.
We amassed a vast menagerie of animals, which was a great diversion. At one point we had a horse, a goat, two dogs, seven cats, one goose, and a miserable cockatoo name “Happy.” At any given time we also had a wide assortment of snakes, frogs, mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, turtles and whatever else my brother might bring home, including a large snapping turtle, a raccoon, a skunk, chickens, a ferret, tiny motherless baby bunnies and various random eggs that we hatched over the pilot light on the stove. It was pretty crazy.
Through all this, the house was our touchstone. It really was stunning and one of a kind. We were so proud of it that it induced a kind of unavoidable conceit. I didn’t know anyone else who had an eight-foot, glass-walled, open-air terrarium in their hallway. Or a massive rock wall in their living room with a fireplace built into it with a water fountain cascading down one side of the stone. I found myself boasting about it even though I didn’t mean to. At the same time, our ethnic origins were such that the compliments and awe it inspired in our friends and relatives made us slightly embarrassed. I guess you could say we appeared to be nouveau riche, but without the “riche.” It was an odd place to inhabit.
Yet I remember too, feeling a little lost in that big house. At night, it was too dark and quiet for us transplanted city kids. The house was extensive enough for my brother and me to decide every errant creak was really a psychotic killer and we concocted elaborate schemes for thwarting him and escaping.
Then my dad’s solo business faltered. It was the 1970’s. There was a recession going on. No one was building – or hiring architects. My dad had put everything we had into that house, more than we had, in fact. My parent’s marriage began to crumble. There were never big fights, but years of non-communication strained the relationship, and the stress of our dream house cracked it open. My dad moved into the guest room, leaving my brother and me to ask questions like, “Are you guys getting divorced?”
One holiday before things completely deteriorated, my parents threw a big party for all their new friends and co-workers. I had secretly mixed my first drink – an awful tasting screwdriver – and was sipping it when my brother ran over, wide-eyed, to whisper that he overheard one woman say to her boyfriend, “Let’s go home and fuck.”
My brother’s innocence didn’t last long. Pretty soon he was smoking pot with his friends and listening to acid rock. I was an underdeveloped teenager with braces, glasses and insanely curly hair. My brother and I fought demonically. He was a troubled adolescent and he took it out on me, tormenting me horribly, but there was no one around to stop him.
During his rare times home, my dad had would hang out in my bedroom listening to “Me and Mrs. Jones,” on my stereo over and over. Sometimes he even wore headphones. My mother developed a friendship with a cute married Puerto-Rican accountant she met at work. We had become unrecognizable to each other and I couldn’t figure why or how to stop it.
It was as if we had been thrust out of the safe womb of our old life and were startled to discover that the great quantity of air and space that now surrounded us had transformed each of us into someone else, someone new and different. And then the verdant country hills had rolled us, very quietly and almost imperceptibly, apart from each other, until we were each stranded on our own little summits, completely and utterly alone.
I tried to talk to my parents about what was happening and how bad I felt, but no seemed able to do anything. I thought that swallowing a bottle of Bufferin might get someone to notice, but that only worked for a few days. The only outcome I recall is that my parents decided to divorce and we sold the house on Signal Hill. We had lived there just five years.
We lost everything. My brother and I stayed with my mother and we found a small house not two miles from our home. My dad moved into a cheap apartment building. My parents were dead broke and the divorce became a bitter, nasty affair that poisoned their relationship so deeply they still have trouble speaking more than twenty-five years later. My brother got into trouble and drugs and found his way back to Signal Hill by stealing from the new owners. I kept up my studies, burying myself in books and extra classes.
The disappointment of leaving our home on Signal Hill was enormous. It took us years to regain our footing and sometimes I think some of my family members never really found it again. Like an underground river, the current of those times etched itself upon us, creating fatal whirlpools and deep eddies that still continue to bubble under the surface of our lives.
As an adult, I’ve gotten good at telling amusing anecdotes about the house. I’ve gotten good at spinning my past into the kind of stories that make me unique and incite cheerful envy among my peers at my “eccentric” childhood. But I know better. When I close my eyes, the images that remain from that time are burned into my eyelids sharp and clear. It’s as though an extraordinarily brilliant spotlight had trapped my family in its beam for a brief moment. I wonder, was it the blinding glare of good fortune bestowed upon us by the gods that caused us mere mortals to stumble and lose our way? Or were we just another American family casualty – a divorce statistic of the 1970’s? I’m not sure why we fell out of grace or what we did wrong, but it seemed as though our gift was yanked from our hands as soon as it was given.
The house has had several owners since then. They have added on, changed the driveway, filled in the ravine and taken out the wooden bridge, among other things. I haven’t seen any of this with my own eyes. I’ve only heard about them. Because even though I still drive out that way at least twice a year and pass within half a mile of Signal Hill, I can’t bring myself to travel that driveway again. In my mind’s eye, I still see our house exactly as it was meant to be. I don’t need to see anything else.