Housekeeping: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  “Oh, she was nice,” Sylvie said. “She was pretty.”

  “But what was she like?”

  “She was good in school.”

  Lucille sighed.

  “It’s hard to describe someone you know so well. She was very quiet. She played the piano. She collected stamps.” Sylvie seemed to be reflecting. “I’ve never known anyone so fond of cats. She was always bringing them home.”

  Lucille shifted her legs and adjusted the thick flannel skirt of her nightgown around them.

  “I didn’t see much of her after she was married,” Sylvie explained.

  “Then tell us about her wedding,” Lucille said.

  “Oh, that was very small. She wore a sundress made of eyelet lace, and a straw hat, and she had a bouquet of daisies. It was just to please Mother. They’d already been married by a justice of the peace somewhere in Nevada.”

  “Why Nevada?”

  “Well, your father was from Nevada.”

  “What was he like?”

  Sylvie shrugged. “He was tall. Not bad-looking. Awfully quiet, though. I think he was shy.”

  “What kind of work did he do?”

  “He traveled. I think he sold some sort of farming equipment. Tools, maybe. I never even saw him, except for that one day. Do you know where he is now?”

  “Nope,” I said. Lucille and I were remembering a day when Bernice had brought our mother a thick letter. “Reginald Stone,” she had said, tapping the return address with a lavender claw. Helen gave her a cup of coffee and sat at the table picking idly at a loose corner of the postage stamp while Bernice whispered a scandalous tale of marital fracture and reconciliation involving a cocktail waitress Bernice knew very well. Apparently concluding at last that the letter would never be opened while she was there, Bernice finally left, and when she was gone Helen tore the envelope into fourths and dropped them in the trash. Glancing into our faces as if she suddenly remembered we were there, anticipating our questions, she said, “It’s best,” and that was all we knew of our father.

  I could conjure her face as it was then, startled by the sudden awareness of our watching. At the time I think I felt only curiosity, though I suppose I remember that glance because she looked at me for signs of more than curiosity. And, in fact, I recall the moment now with some astonishment—there was neither doubt nor passion in her destruction of the letter, neither hesitation nor haste—and with frustration—there was only that letter and never another one, and nothing else from him or about him at all—and with anger—he was presumably our father, and might wish to know what had become of us, and even to intervene. It occurs to me sometimes that as I grow older I am increasingly able to present to her gaze the face she seemed to expect. But of course she was looking into a face I do not remember—no more like mine than Sylvie’s is like hers. Less like, perhaps, because, as I watched Sylvie, she reminded me of my mother more and more. There was such similarity, in fact, in the structure of cheek and chin, and the texture of hair, that Sylvie began to blur the memory of my mother, and then to displace it. Soon it was Sylvie who would look up startled, regarding me from a vantage of memory in which she had no place. And it was increasingly to this remembered Sylvie that I presented my look of conscious injury, knowing as I did so that Sylvie could know nothing of that letter.

  What did Sylvie see when she thought of my mother? A girl with braided hair, a girl with freckled arms, who liked to lie on the rug in the lamplight, flat on her belly with her heels in the air and her chin on her two fists, reading Kipling. Did she tell lies? Could she keep secrets? Did she tickle, or slap, or pinch, or punch, or grimace? If someone had asked me about Lucille I would remember her with her mass of soft, fine, tangly hair concealing ears that cupped a bit and grew painfully cold if she did not cover them. I would remember that her front teeth, the permanent ones, came in, first one and much later the other, immense and raggedly serrated, and that she was fastidious about washing her hands. I would remember that when irked she bit her lip, when shy she scratched her knee, that she smelled dully clean, like chalk, or like a sun-warmed cat.

  I do not think Sylvie was merely reticent. It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows. Sometimes we used to watch trains passing in the dark afternoon, creeping through the blue snow with their windows all alight, and full of people eating and arguing and reading newspapers. They could not see us watching, of course, because by five-thirty on a winter day the landscape had disappeared, and they would have seen their own depthless images on the black glass, if they had looked, and not the black trees and the black houses, or the slender black bridge and the dim blue expanse of the lake. Some of them probably did not know what it was the train approached so cautiously. Once, Lucille and I walked beside the train to the shore. There had been a freezing rain that glazed the snow with a crust of ice, and we found that, when the sun went down, the crust was thick enough for us to walk on. So we followed the train at a distance of twenty feet or so, falling now and then, because the glazed snow swelled and sank in dunes, and the tops of bushes and fence posts rose out of it in places where we did not expect them to be. But by crawling up, and sliding down, and steadying ourselves against the roofs of sheds and rabbit hutches, we managed to stay just abreast of the window of a young woman with a small head and a small hat and a brightly painted face. She wore pearl-gray gloves that reached almost to her elbows, and hooped bracelets that fell down her arms when she reached up to push a loose wisp of hair underneath her hat. The woman looked at the window very often, clearly absorbed by what she saw, which was not but merely seemed to be Lucille and me scrambling to stay beside her, too breathless to shout. When we came to the shore, where the land fell down and the bridge began to rise, we stopped and watched her window sail slowly away, along the abstract arc of the bridge. “We could walk across the lake,” I said. The thought was terrible. “It’s too cold,” Lucille replied. So she was gone. Yet I remember her neither less nor differently than I remember others I have known better, and indeed I dream of her, and the dream is very like the event itself, except that in the dream the bridge pilings do not tremble so perilously under the weight of the train.

  “What would you like for breakfast?” Sylvie asked.

  “Cornflakes.”

  She made cocoa and we ate and watched the day come. It had been a cold night that froze the slush and hardened the heaps of dirty, desiccated snow by the sides of the road.

  “I’m going to take a little walk around town,” Sylvie said. “Before the roads all turn to mud again. I’ll be back soon.” She buttoned her coat and stepped out into the porch. We heard the screen door slam. “She should have borrowed a scarf,” I said. “She isn’t coming back,” Lucille replied. We ran upstairs and put on our jeans, stuffing the skirts of our nightgowns into them. We pulled our boots on over our bedroom slippers and grabbed our coats and ran outside, but she was gone already. If she was leaving, she would go into town, to the station. If she was not leaving, she would probably go to town anyway, unless she went to the lake. Since she was bareheaded, and had neither gloves nor boots, the shore would be miserably difficult and cold. We walked toward Main Street as fast as we could over the frozen slush and the frozen ruts and shards of ice. “I bet Lily and Nona told her to leave,” I said. Lucille shook her head. Her face was flushed and her cheeks were wet. “It’ll be all right,” I said. She wiped her face roughly with her sleeve.

  “I know it’ll be all right, but it makes me mad.”

  We turned the corner and saw Sylvie in the road ahead of us, chucking chunks of ice at four or five dogs. She would pick up a bit of ice and toss it from hand to hand, walking backward, while the dogs followed after her and circled behind her, yapping. We saw her pelt one squat mongrel in the ribs, and all the dogs scattered. She sucked her fingers and blew into her cupped hands, and then picked up another piece of ice just as the dogs ca
me back and began yapping and circling again. Her manner was insouciant and her aim was deft. She did not notice us standing at a distance watching her. We stood where we were until the last of the dogs turned and trotted back to its porch, and then we followed her at a distance of two blocks into downtown Fingerbone. She walked slowly past the drugstore and the dime store and the dry-goods store, stopping to look into each of the windows. Then she walked directly to the railroad station and went inside. Lucille and I walked down to the station. We could see her standing by the stove, with her arms folded, studying the chalked list of arrivals and departures. Lucille said, “I’m going to tell her she forgot her bags.” I had not thought of that. When Sylvie saw us coming in she smiled with surprise. “You left your stuff at our house,” Lucille said.

  “Oh, I just came in here to get warm. Nothing else is open. It’s early, you know. I forgot how early the sun rises these days.” She rubbed her hands together in the warmth of the stove. “It still feels like winter, doesn’t it?”

  “Why don’t you wear gloves?” Lucille asked.

  “I left them on the train.”

  “Why don’t you wear boots?”

  Sylvie smiled. “I suppose I should.”

  “You also need a hat. You should use hand lotion.”

  Sylvie put her hands in her pockets. “I think I should stay for a while,” she said. “The aunts are too old. I think it’s best for now, at least.”

  Lucille nodded.

  “We’ll get some pie when the café opens. And then you can help me choose a scarf, and maybe some gloves.” She groped in her pockets and brought out a little ball of paper money and some change. She looked at the money doubtfully and did not count it. “We’ll see.”

  “We have hand lotion at home,” Lucille replied.

  At nine o’clock we followed Sylvie to the five-and-ten, where she bought a plaid scarf and gray gloves. It took her some time to choose them, and some time to explain who she was to the woman at the cash register, who, though Sylvie thought she looked familiar, was new in town and knew nothing of our family. When we came back into the street the sun was shining warmly. There was a bright flow of water in the gutters. When we came to the end of the sidewalk, there was no way for Sylvie to walk without now and then stepping over her shoes in water of one sort or another. This difficulty seemed to absorb her but not to disturb her.

  “That woman reminded me of someone, but I can’t think who,” Sylvie said.

  “Do you still have friends here?” Lucille asked.

  Sylvie laughed. “Well, the fact is, I never did have many friends here. We kept to ourselves. We knew who everyone was, that’s all. And now I’ve been away—sixteen years.”

  “But you came back sometimes,” Lucille said.

  “No.”

  “Where were you married?” Lucille asked.

  “Here.”

  “Then that’s once.”

  “Once,” Sylvie said.

  Lucille squashed a lump of slush with her boot, and I slapped her because some of it flew against my leg.

  We went up the walk to our porch. Lily and Nona were in the kitchen, rosy with warmth and perturbation.

  “Here you are!” Lily said.

  “What a day to go walking!”

  Sylvie had pried off her sodden loafers in the porch, and we had pulled off our coats and boots. The aunts clucked their tongues when they saw us in our jeans and slippers, and still in our nightgowns with our hair uncombed. “Ah!” they said. “What is this?”

  Lucille said, “Ruthie and I woke up early this morning, and we decided to go outside to see the sun come up. We went clear downtown. Sylvie was worried, so she came out looking for us.”

  “Oh, I’m surprised at you girls,” Nona said.

  “Such a thoughtless thing to do.”

  “I hope Sylvie gave you a good talking-to.”

  “Poor Sylvie!”

  “If we’d been here by ourselves, we’d have died of worry.”

  “We would have.”

  “The roads are so treacherous. What would we have done?”

  They brought Sylvie a cup of coffee and a pan of hot water for her feet, clucking and commiserating and patting her hands and her hair.

  “You have to be young to deal with children!”

  “That’s a fact.”

  “We’d have had to get the sheriff.”

  “It might have taught them a lesson.”

  The aunts hurried away to finish packing. Lucille opened the newspaper to the crossword puzzle, and found a pencil in a drawer, and sat down across the table from Sylvie.

  “The element represented by the symbol Fe,” she said.

  Sylvie answered, “Iron.”

  “Wouldn’t it start with F?”

  “It’s iron,” Sylvie said. “They try to trick you.”

  That evening Lily and Nona were taken by a friend of my grandmother’s back to Spokane and we and the house were Sylvie’s.

  4

  The week after Sylvie arrived, Fingerbone had three days of brilliant sunshine and four of balmy rain. On the first day the icicles dripped so rapidly that the gravel under the eaves rattled and jumped. The snow was granular in the shade, and in the sun it turned soft and clung damply to whatever it covered. The second day the icicles fell and broke on the ground and snow drooped low over the eaves in a heavy mass. Lucille and I poked it down with sticks. The third day the snow was so dense and malleable that we made a sort of statue. We put one big ball of snow on top of another, and carved them down with kitchen spoons till we had made a figure of a woman in a long dress, her arms folded. It was Lucille’s idea that she should look to the side, and while I knelt and whittled folds into her skirt, Lucille stood on the kitchen stool and molded her chin and her nose and her hair. It happened that I swept her skirt a little back from her hip, and that her arms were folded high on her breasts. It was mere accident—the snow was firmer here and softer there, and in some places we had to pat clean snow over old black leaves that had been rolled up into the snowballs we made her from—but her shape became a posture. And while in any particular she seemed crude and lopsided, altogether her figure suggested a woman standing in a cold wind. It seemed that we had conjured a presence. We took off our coats and hats and worked about her in silence. That was the third day of sunshine. The sky was dark blue, there was no wind at all, but everywhere an audible seep and trickle of melting. We hoped the lady would stand long enough to freeze, but in fact while we were stamping the gray snow all smooth around her, her head pitched over and smashed on the ground. This accident cost her a forearm and a breast. We made a new snowball for a head, but it crushed her eaten neck, and under the weight of it a shoulder dropped away. We went inside for lunch, and when we came out again, she was a dog-yellowed stump in which neither of us would admit any interest.

  Days of rain at just that time were a disaster. They hastened the melting of the snow but not the thawing of the ground. So at the end of three days the houses and hutches and barns and sheds of Fingerbone were like so many spilled and foundered arks. There were chickens roosting in the telephone poles and dogs swimming by in the streets. My grandmother always boasted that the floods never reached our house, but that spring, water poured over the thresholds and covered the floor to the depth of four inches, obliging us to wear boots while we did the cooking and washing up. We lived on the second floor for a number of days. Sylvie played solitaire on the vanity while Lucille and I played Monopoly on the bed. The firewood on the porch was piled high so that most of it stayed dry enough to burn, though rather smokily. The woodpile was full of spiders and mice, and the pantry curtain rod was deeply bowed by the weight of water climbing up the curtains. If we opened or closed a door, a wave swept through the house, and chairs tottered, and bottles and pots clinked and clunked in the bottoms of the kitchen cabinets.

  After four days of rain the sun appeared in a white sky, febrile and dazzling, and the people who had left for higher ground came back i
n rowboats. From our bedroom window we could see them patting their roofs and peering in at their attic windows. “I have never seen such a thing,” Sylvie said. The water shone more brilliantly than the sky, and while we watched, a tall elm tree fell slowly across the road. From crown to root, half of it vanished in the brilliant light.

  Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere. That flood flattened scores of headstones. More disturbing, the graves sank when the water receded, so that they looked a little like hollow sides or empty bellies. And then the library was flooded to a depth of three shelves, creating vast gaps in the Dewey decimal system. The losses in hooked and braided rugs and needlepoint footstools will never be reckoned. Fungus and mold crept into wedding dresses and photograph albums, so that the leather crumbled in our hands when we lifted the covers, and the sharp smell that rose when we opened them was as insinuating as the smells one finds under a plank or a rock. Much of what Fingerbone had hoarded up was defaced or destroyed outright, but perhaps because the hoard was not much to begin with, the loss was not overwhelming.

  The next day was very fine. The water was so calm that the sunken half of the fallen tree was replaced by the mirrored image of the half trunk and limbs that remained above the water. All day two cats prowled in the branches, pawing at little eddies and currents. The water was beginning to slide away. We could hear the lake groan under the weight of it, for the lake had not yet thawed. The ice would still be thick, but it would be the color of paraffin, with big white bubbles under it. In normal weather there would have been perhaps an inch of water on top of it in shallow places. Under all the weight of the flood water it sagged and, being fibrous rather than soft or brittle, wrenched apart, as resistant to breaching as green bones. The afternoon was loud with the giant miseries of the lake, and the sun shone on, and the flood was the almost flawless mirror of a cloudless sky, fat with brimming and very calm.