Housekeeping: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  Sylvie was often at the lake. Sometimes she came home with fish in her pockets. She would rinse them under the tap to get the lint out of their gills and fry them with their heads on and eat them with catsup. Lucille had grown fastidious. She lived on vegetable soup and cottage cheese, which she ate by herself in the orchard or the porch or in her room. Sylvie and I sat alone at dinner, in the dark, and we were silent. Sylvie took Lucille’s absence as a rebuke, or a rebuff, and was sad about it, clearly, for she had no stories at all to tell me. “It was cold today,” she would murmur, her face turned to the blue window, and her eyes as wide and mild as the eyes of a blind woman. Her hands would caress each other in a slow gesture of warming. Bones, bones, I thought, in a fine sheath of flesh like Sunday gloves. Her hands were long, and her throat long and her cheeks lank. I wondered if she could be warmed and nourished. If I were to take hold of those bone hands, could I squeeze warmth into them?

  “There’s still some soup left,” I would say.

  Sylvie would shake her head, no thank you.

  One night as we sat like that, Lucille left for a dance, wearing an apricot dress she had made in the sewing room at school. She pulled her school coat over her shoulders without putting her arms in the sleeves, said good night, and went out to wait for her date by the side of the road. When Lucille closed the door behind her the house seemed very empty. I sat alone, watching Sylvie, and it seemed that she would never move. “I have something pretty to show you,” Sylvie said. “A place I found. It’s really very pretty. There’s a little valley between two hills where someone built a house and planted an orchard and even started to dig a well. A long time ago. But the valley is very narrow, and it runs north and south, so it hardly gets any sun at all. The frost stays on the ground all day long, up until July. Some of the apple trees are still alive, but they’re only as high as my shoulder. If we go there now it will be all covered with frost. The frost is so thick that the grass cracks when you step on it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “North. I found a little boat. I don’t really think it belongs to anybody. One of its oarlocks is loose, but it doesn’t leak very much or anything like that.”

  “I’d like to go.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “No. I have to study tomorrow.”

  “We could go Monday if you like. I could write you a note.”

  “Monday I have a test. That’s why I have to study.”

  “Another day, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to study now?”

  “I have to write a book report.”

  “What on?”

  “The Prince and the Pauper.”

  “I don’t remember much about that one.”

  “It’s pretty good.”

  Sylvie said, “I should read. I don’t know why I stopped. I always enjoyed it.”

  I went up to my room and she came up behind me. She found Ivanhoe on the dresser and lay down on Lucille’s side of the bed, holding the book above her face. When Sylvie lay down there was nothing of crouch or sprawl. Even when she slept, her body retained the formality of posture one learns when one sleeps on park benches, and as often as not she kept her shoes on.

  For some time Sylvie peered up into the book with an expression of concentration and interest. Then she lowered the book a few inches and peered up at the ceiling with just the same expression. Finally she lowered the book into her lap. Even when I sat at the vanity with my back to her, I was aware of her lying there, and I could not keep my mind on my work. “Sylvie,” I said once, but her eyes did not change. I waited a long time for Lucille to come home, though when she did come I hunched over my tablet and pretended not to notice. She came up the stairs and leaned in the doorway.

  “Hi, Ruthie.”

  “Hi, Lucille. Was the dance nice?”

  She shrugged. “It was okay.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I’m tired. I’ll sleep downstairs.” She nodded toward Sylvie. “You should at least throw something over her,” she said, and she went downstairs.

  I lifted Ivanhoe out of Sylvie’s hands and pulled off her shoes and spread a quilt up to her chin. Her eyes blinked shut and then opened again.

  “Are you awake, Sylvie?”

  “What? Yes.” She smiled.

  “What have you been thinking about?”

  “Old times, mostly. People you don’t know. Is Lucille home?”

  “Yes. She said she’d sleep downstairs.”

  “Well, we can’t let her do that.” Sylvie got up and slipped on her shoes and went downstairs. In a few minutes she came back up again and said, “Lucille isn’t here.”

  “She has to be.”

  “I can’t find her.”

  Lucille, as we learned the next morning, had walked in her dancing dress and her apricot slippers to the home of Miss Royce, the Home Economics teacher. She had walked around the house, rapping at every window she could reach, until she managed to startle the lady from her tense slumbers, and then she was invited in and the two of them talked the night about Lucille’s troubles at home. Miss Royce was a solitary woman, too high-strung to be capable of friendships with children. She fluttered around her students with frightened devotion. Now and then she made a small inroad into their indifference—they would laugh at some little joke, or address some casual remark to her. Once, some of the boys had locked her in the supply closet, and once, someone had made a rabbity caricature of her face and hung it up beside the athletic trophies. At such times her eyes streamed tears. But embarrassment was dull routine for her, while acceptance was vivid and remarkable and memorable. And now here was Lucille, wandering through the dark to her house. Miss Royce gave her the spare room. In effect, she adopted her, and I had no sister after that night.

  It surprised me that Lucille left so abruptly. I walked up and down Sycamore Street—not looking for her, of course, but acting as if I were, since I had no other way to soothe my disquiet. It was a windy, chilly night. I knew that Lucille would not go off in the dark by herself if she did not have somewhere to go. No one could be more concerned with Lucille’s well-being than she was.

  When I went back into the house Sylvie was sitting in a kitchen chair with the telephone book in her lap and her hands folded on it. “We should call the sheriff,” she said.

  “All right.”

  She opened the book and smoothed it open with her hands. “Do you think we should call him?”

  “I suppose.”

  “It’s so late,” she said. “Maybe we should call him in the morning.”

  “He’ll probably wonder why we waited so long.”

  “That’s true,” Sylvie said. She closed the book and put it aside. “It’s usually best not to bother them. They have that way. Suddenly everything you do seems wrong. The simplest things.” She smiled and shrugged.

  “She probably went to a friend’s house.”

  “I’m sure she’s all right,” Sylvie said. “I really don’t want to bother the sheriff. She should come back any minute. I’ll wait up for her.”

  The next morning Miss Royce, in her church clothes, knocked at the door. She and Sylvie talked for a while on the front step. I watched them from the parlor window—little old Miss Royce in her brown box suit with the salmon-pink bow at the throat, talking tensely and earnestly to Sylvie, who shrugged or nodded and looked to the side. Finally, Sylvie came in and went upstairs and came down again carrying Lucille’s school-books and her diary. She set them down on the step and Miss Royce packed them one by one into a carpet bag. Sylvie came back in before Miss Royce had finished arranging them. She sat down on the couch beside me and took up a doily and plucked at it. My grandmother’s doilies used to be giant and stiff and bristling, like cactus blossoms, and now they were drab as lint, and fallen. “Lucille said you could have her things,” Sylvie said. “She didn’t want any of her clothes. Not even her hairbrush.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t plan to be gone long.”
r />   “Maybe she doesn’t.” Sylvie smiled at me. “Poor Ruthie. Well, we’ll be better friends. There are some things I want to show you.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “That’s Monday.”

  “You can write an excuse for me.”

  “All right.”

  8

  Sylvie made up a lunch that night after supper and we set the alarm clock for five and went to sleep early, with our clothes on. Nevertheless, Sylvie had to tease me awake. She pinched my cheek and pulled my ear. Then she set my feet on the floor and pulled me up by the hands. I sat down on the bed again and fell over onto the pillow, and she laughed. “Get up!”

  “In a minute.”

  “Now! Breakfast is ready!”

  I crouched on the covers, hoarding warmth and sleep, while they passed off me like a mist. “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” Sylvie said. She picked up my hand, patted it, toyed with my fingers. When I was no longer warm enough or quite asleep, I sat up. “Good girl,” Sylvie said. The room was dark. When Sylvie put the light on, it still seemed sullen and full of sleep. There were cries of birds, sharp and rudimentary, that stung like sparks or hail. And even in the house I could smell how raw the wind was. That sort of wind brought out a musk in the fir trees and spread the cold breath of the lake everywhere. There was nothing out there—no smell of wood smoke or oatmeal—to hint at human comfort, and when I went outside I would be miserable. It was almost November and long before dawn, and I did not want to leave my bed.

  “Come, Ruthie,” Sylvie said, and pulled me by both hands toward the door.

  “My shoes,” I said. She stopped, still holding my hands, and I stepped into them, but she did not wait for me to tie the laces.

  “Come on, come on. Down the stairs, now.”

  “Do we have to hurry?”

  “Yes. Yes. We have to hurry.” She opened the trapdoor and went down the stairs ahead of me, still pulling me by one hand. In the kitchen she stopped to scoop an egg out of the frying pan and set it on a piece of bread. “There’s your breakfast,” she said. “You can eat it while we walk.”

  “I have to tie my shoes,” I said to her back as she walked out to the porch. “Wait!” but the screen door slammed behind her. I tied my shoes and found my coat and pulled it on, and ran out the door after her.

  The grass was blue with frost. The road was so cold it rang as I stepped on it, and the houses and trees and sky were one flat black. A bird sang with a sound like someone scraping a pot, and was silent. I had given up all sensation to the discomforts of cold and haste and hunger, and crouched far inside myself, still sleeping. Finally, Sylvie was in front of me, and I put my hands in my pockets, and tilted my head, and strode, as she did, and it was as if I were her shadow, and moved after her only because she moved and not because I willed this pace, this pocketing of the hands, this tilt of the head. Following her required neither will nor effort. I did it in my sleep.

  I walked after Sylvie down the shore, all at peace, and at ease, and I thought, We are the same. She could as well be my mother. I crouched and slept in her very shape like an unborn child.

  “Wait here,” Sylvie said when we came to the shore. She walked down to a place where trees grew near the water. After a few minutes she came back. “The boat is not where I left it!” she said. “Well, we’ll have to look for it. I’ll find it. Sometimes it takes a while, but I always find it.” She climbed up onto a rock that stood out from the hillside, almost to the water, and looked up and down the shore. “I’ll bet it’s over there.” She climbed down from the rock and began walking south. “See those trees? I found it once before, in a place just like that, all covered with branches.”

  “Someone was trying to hide it,” I suggested.

  “Can you imagine? I always put it right back where I find it. I don’t care if someone else uses it. You know, so long as they don’t damage it.”

  We walked down to where a stand of birch and aspen trees sheltered a little inlet. “This would be a perfect place for it,” Sylvie said, but it was not there. “Don’t be discouraged,” she said. “We’re so early. No one could have got to it first. Wait.” She walked up into the woods. Behind a fallen log, and behind a clump of fat, low-growing pines, was a heap of pine boughs with poplar branches and brown needles and leaves. Here and there an edge or a corner of tarpaulin showed. “Look at that,” Sylvie said. “Someone went to a lot of trouble.” She kicked away the branches until on one side the tarpaulin and the shape of the rowboat were exposed. Then she lifted the side of the boat until it fell over upright on the heap of branches. She pulled at the tarpaulin that had been spread under the boat until she found the oars. She stuck them under the seat. The boat made a thick, warm sound as we pushed it through the pine needles. It scraped dully across some big rocks, then dragged through the sand. We pushed it into the water. “Get in,” Sylvie said. “Hurry.” I climbed in and sat down on a narrow, splintery plank, facing the shore. “There’s a man yelling at us,” I said.

  “Oh, I know!” Sylvie pushed the boat out in two long strides, and then, with a hand on each gunwale, half leaped and half pulled herself into it. The boat wallowed alarmingly. “I have to sit in that seat,” she said. She stood up and turned around and stooped to hold the gunwales, and I crawled under her body and out between her legs. A stone splashed the water inches from my face, and another rattled into the bottom of the boat. Sylvie swung an oar over my head, settled it into the lock, crouched, and pulled us strongly away from the shore. A stone flew past my arm. I looked back and saw a burly man in knee boots and black pants and a red plaid jacket. I could see that he was wearing one of those shapeless felt hats that fishermen there decorate with preposterous small gleams and plumes and violent hooks. His voice was full of rage. “Just ignore him,” Sylvie said. She pulled again, and we were beyond reach. The man had followed us into the water until he was up to his boot tops in it. “Lady!” he bawled. “Ignore him,” Sylvie said. “He always acts like that. If he thinks someone’s watching him, he just carries on more.”

  I turned around and watched Sylvie. Her handling of the boat was strong and easy. When we were about one hundred yards from the shore she turned the boat toward the north. The man, now back on the beach, was still yelling and dancing his wrath and pitching stones after us. “It’s pitiful,” Sylvie said. “He’s going to have a heart attack someday.”

  “It must be his boat,” I suggested.

  Sylvie shrugged. “Or he might just be some sort of lunatic,” she said. “I’m certainly not going to go back and find out.” She was unperturbed by our bare escape and by her drenched loafers and the soggy skirts of her coat. I found myself wondering if this was why she came home with fish in her pockets.

  “Aren’t you cold, Sylvie?”

  “The sun’s coming up,” she said. The sky above Fingerbone was a floral yellow. A few spindled clouds smoldered and glowed a most unfiery pink. And then the sun flung a long shaft over the mountain, and another, like a long-legged insect bracing itself out of its chrysalis, and then it showed above the black crest, bristly and red and improbable. In an hour it would be the ordinary sun, spreading modest and impersonal light on an ordinary world, and that thought relieved me. Sylvie continued to pull, strongly and slowly.

  “You wouldn’t believe how many people live out here on the islands and up in the hills,” Sylvie said. “I bet there are a hundred. Or more. Sometimes you’ll see a little smoke in the woods. There might be a cabin there with ten children in it.”

  “They just hunt and fish?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Have you ever seen any of them?”

  “I think I have,” Sylvie said. “Sometimes if I think I see smoke I go walking toward it, and now and then I’m sure there are children around me. I can practically hear them.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s one reason I keep crackers in my pockets.”

  “I see.”

  Sylvie rowed on through the gilded water, smiling to he
rself.

  “I’ll tell you something. You’ll probably think I’m crazy. I tried to catch one once.” She laughed. “Not, you know, trap it, but lure it out with marshmallows so I could see it. What would I do with another child?”

  “So you did see someone.”

  “I just stuck marshmallows on the twigs of one of the apple trees, almost every day for a couple of weeks. Then I sat sort of out of sight—there’s still a doorstep there with lilacs growing on both sides of it. The house itself fell into the cellar hole years ago, of course. I just sat there and waited, but it never came. I was a little bit relieved,” she said. “A child like that might claw or bite. But I did want to look at it.”

  “This was at the place we’re going to now.”

  Sylvie smiled and nodded. “Now you’re in on my secret. Maybe you’ll have better luck. And at least we don’t have to hurry. It was so hard to get home in time for you and Lucille.”

  Sylvie pulled and then pulled, and we slid heavily through the slosh and jostle of the water. Sylvie looked at the sky and said no more. I peered over the side now and then, into the murky transparencies of the upper waters, which were clouded and crude as agate. I saw gulls’ feathers and the black shapes of fish. The fragmented image of jonquil sky spilled from top to top of the rounding waves as the shine spills on silk, and gulls sailed up into the very height of the sky, still stark white when they could just be seen. To the east the mountains were eclipsed. To the west they stood in balmy light. Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable. They reminded me of my grandfather’s paintings, which I have always taken to be his vision of heaven. And it was he who brought us here, to this bitter, moon-pulled lake, trailing us after him unborn, like the infants he had painted on the dresser drawers, whose garments swam in some ethereal current, perhaps the rim of the vortex that would drag them down out of that enameled sky, stripped and screaming. Sylvie’s oars set off vortices. She swamped some leaves and spun a feather on its curl. The current that made us sidle a little toward the center of the lake was the draw of the river, and no vortex, though my grandfather’s last migration had settled him on the lake floor. It seemed that Sylvie’s boat slipped down the west side of every wave. We would make a circle, and never reach a shore at all, if there were a vortex, I thought, and we would be drawn down into the darker world, where other sounds would pour into our ears until we seemed to find songs in them, and the sight of water would invade our eyes, and the taste of water would invade our bowels and unstring our bones, and we would know the seasons and customs of the place as if there were no others. Imagine my grandfather reclined how many years in his Pullman berth, regarding the morning through a small blue window. He might see us and think he was dreaming again of flushed but weightless spirits in a painted sky, buoyant in an impalpable element. And when our shadow had passed he might see the daylit moon, a jawless, socketed shard, and take it for his image in the glass. Of course he was miles away, miles south, at the foot of the bridge.