Housekeeping: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  We sat listening to the rasp of the knife as Sylvie buttered and stacked the toast, bumping our heels with a soft, slow rhythm against the legs of our chairs, staring through the warped and bubbled window at the brighter darkness. Then Lucille began to scratch fiercely at her arms and her knees. “I must have got into something,” she said, and she stood up and pulled the chain of the overhead light. The window went black and the cluttered kitchen leaped, so it seemed, into being, as remote from what had gone before as this world from the primal darkness. We saw that we ate from plates that came in detergent boxes, and we drank from jelly glasses. (Sylvie had put her mother’s china in boxes and stacked them in the corner by the stove—in case, she said, we should ever need it.) Lucille had startled us all, flooding the room so suddenly with light, exposing heaps of pots and dishes, the two cupboard doors which had come unhinged and were propped against the boxes of china. The tables and chairs and cupboards and doors had been painted a rich white, layer on layer, year after year, but now the last layer had ripened to the yellow of turning cream. Everywhere the paint was chipped and marred. A great shadow of soot loomed up the wall and across the ceiling above the stove, and the stove pipe and the cupboard tops were thickly felted with dust. Most disspiriting, perhaps, was the curtain on Lucille’s side of the table, which had been half consumed by fire once when a birthday cake had been set too close to it. Sylvie had beaten out the flames with a back issue of Good Housekeeping, but she had never replaced the curtain. It had been my birthday, and the cake was a surprise, as were the pink orlon cardigan with the imitation seed pearls in the yoke and the ceramic kangaroo with the air fern in its pouch. Sylvie’s pleasure in this event had been intense, and perhaps the curtain reminded her of it.

  In the light we were startled and uncomfortable. Lucille yanked the chain again, so hard that the little bell at the end of it struck the ceiling, and then we sat uncomfortably in an exaggerated darkness. Lucille began swinging her legs. “Where’s your husband, Sylvie?”

  There was a silence a little longer than a shrug. “I doubt that he knows where I am.”

  “How long were you married?”

  Sylvie seemed a little shocked by the question. “Why, I’m married now, Lucille.”

  “But then where is he? Is he a sailor? Is he in jail?”

  Sylvie laughed. “You make him sound very mysterious.”

  “So he isn’t in jail.”

  “We’ve been out of touch for some time.”

  Lucille sighed noisily and swung her legs. “I don’t think you’ve ever had a husband.”

  Sylvie replied serenely, “Think what you like, Lucille.”

  By that time the crickets in the pantry were singing again, the window was luminous, the battered table and the clutter that lay on it were one chill ultramarine, the clutter of ordinary life on the deck of a drowned ship. Lucille sighed again and consented to the darkness. Sylvie was relieved and so was I. “My husband,” Sylvie said, as a gesture of reconciliation, “was a soldier when I met him. He fought in the Pacific. Actually he repaired motors and things. I’ll find a picture . . .”

  At first Lucille imagined that our uncle had died or disappeared in the war, and that Sylvie had been deranged by grief. She forgave Sylvie everything for a while, until Sylvie, pressed repeatedly for a picture of her husband, finally produced a photograph, clipped from a magazine, of a sailor. After that Lucille forgave her nothing. She insisted on a light at suppertime. She found three place settings of china and began demanding meat and vegetables. Sylvie gave her the grocery money. For herself Sylvie stashed saltines in her pockets, which she ate as she walked in the evening, leaving Lucille and me alone in the lighted kitchen with its blind black window.

  There were other things about Sylvie’s housekeeping that bothered Lucille. For example, Sylvie’s room was just as my grandmother had left it, but the closet and the drawers were mostly empty, since Sylvie kept her clothes and even her hairbrush and toothpowder in a cardboard box under the bed. She slept on top of the covers, with a quilt over her, which during the daytime she pushed under the bed also. Such habits (she always slept clothed, at first with her shoes on, and then, after a month or two, with her shoes under her pillow) were clearly the habits of a transient. They offended Lucille’s sense of propriety. She would imagine what some of the sleek and well-tended girls at school, whom she knew only by name and whom no possible combination of circumstances could make privy to such details of our lives, would think if they saw our aunt’s feet on the pillow (for she often slept head downward as a cure for insomnia). Lucille had a familiar, Rosette Browne, whom she feared and admired, and through whose eyes she continually imagined she saw. Lucille was galled and wounded by her imagined disapprobation. Once, because it was warm, Sylvie took her quilt and her pillow outside, to sleep on the lawn. Lucille’s face flushed, and her eyes brimmed. “Rosette Browne’s mother takes her to Spokane for ballet lessons,” she told me. “Her mother sews all the costumes. Now she’s taking her to Naples for baton.” Sylvie suffered in such comparisons, it was true, and yet I was reassured by her sleeping on the lawn, and now and then in the car, and by her interest in all newspapers, irrespective of their dates, and by her pork-and-bean sandwiches. It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave.

  Lucille hated everything that had to do with transience. Once Sylvie came home with newspapers she had collected at the train station. At dinner she told us she had had a very nice conversation with a lady who had ridden the rods from South Dakota, en route to Portland to see her cousin hanged.

  Lucille put down her fork. “Why do you get involved with such trashy people? It’s embarrassing!”

  Sylvie shrugged. “I didn’t get involved. She couldn’t even come for supper.”

  “You asked her?”

  “She was worried that she’d miss her connection. They’re always prompt about hanging people.” Lucille lay her head on her arms and said nothing. “She’s his only relative,” Sylvie explained, “except for his father, and he’s the one that was strangled . . . I thought it was kind of her to come.” There was a silence. “I wouldn’t say ‘trashy,’ Lucille. She didn’t strangle anyone.”

  Lucille said nothing. Sylvie had missed the point. She could not know that Rosette Browne’s mother had looked up from her sewing (Lucille told me she was embroidering dish towels for Rosette’s hope chest) startled and nonplused. How could people of reasonableness and solidity respond to such tales? Lucille was at this time an intermediary between Sylvie and those demure but absolute arbiters who continually sat in judgment of our lives. Lucille might say, “Sylvie doesn’t know that you don’t make friends with people who fly on their backs a thousand miles, twelve inches from the ground, even to see a hanging.” Rosette Browne’s mother might say, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” and Rosette Browne might say, “Ignorance of the law is the crime, Mother!” Sometimes I think Lucille tried to approach our judges as an intercessor, saying perhaps, “Sylvie means no harm.” Or, “Sylvie resembles our mother.” Or, “Sylvie’s very pretty, when she combs her hair.” Or, “Sylvie’s our only relative. We thought that it was kind of her to come.” Even as she offered them, Lucille must have known that such arguments were extraneous. She herself regarded Sylvie with sympathy, but no mercy, and no tolerance. Once Lucille and I were on our way to the Post Office when we saw, in the fallow little park that memorialized war dead, Sylvie lying on a bench, her ankles and her arms crossed and a newspaper tented over her face. Lucille stepped into the lilacs. “What should we do?” She was white with chagrin.

  “Wake her up, I guess.”

  “You wake her up. Hurry!” Lucille took off, running toward home. I went over to the bench and lifted the newspaper. Sylvie smiled. “What a pleasant surprise,” she said. “And I have a surprise.” She sat up, groped in her trench-coat pocket, and pulled out a Mountain Bar. “Is that still your favorite? Look at this,” Sylvie said, spreading the paper in her lap. “T
here’s an article here about a woman in Oklahoma who lost an arm in an aircraft factory, but who still manages to support six children by giving piano lessons.” Sylvie’s interest in this woman struck me as generous. “Where’s Lucille?”

  “Home.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” Sylvie said. “I’m glad to have a chance to talk to you. You’re so quiet, it’s hard to know what you think.” Sylvie had stood up, and we began to walk toward home.

  “I suppose I don’t know what I think.” This confession embarrassed me. It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible—incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares. But my allusion to this feeling of ghostliness sounded peculiar, and sweat started all over my body, convicting me on the spot of gross corporeality.

  “Well, maybe that will change,” Sylvie said. We walked a while without speaking. “Maybe it won’t.” I dropped a step behind and watched her face. She always spoke to me in the voice of an adult dispensing wisdom. I wanted to ask her if she knew what she thought, and if so, what the experience of that sort of knowledge was like, and if not, whether she, too, felt ghostly, as I imagined she must. I waited for Sylvie to say, “You’re like me.” I thought she might say, “You’re like your mother.” I feared and suspected that Sylvie and I were of a kind, and waited for her to claim me, but she would not. “You miss too much school,” she said. “Childhood doesn’t last forever. You’ll be sorry someday. Pretty soon you’ll be as tall as I am.”

  Most of the way home was along First Street, a row of cottages and bungalows with swings on their porches and shady lawns. The sidewalk on First Street was heaved and buckled like a suspended bridge in a high wind. It was shadowed by lilac and crab and pine trees that grew so near the walk that we had to bend to pass under some of them. I fell farther behind Sylvie, relieved that her thoughts seemed to have moved on to other things. Her advice to me never held her attention even as long as it held mine. We turned onto Sycamore Street, where there was no sidewalk. Sylvie walked in the road, and I followed her. This was our street. The houses were set back from the road and widely spaced. Dogs trotted out growling to sniff our ankles as we passed. Sylvie had a transient’s dislike of watchdogs, and tossed sticks after them. She stood still in the road to watch a long train pass. She stripped a willow switch and broke the necks of dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace that bloomed near the road. When finally we came to our house we found Lucille in the kitchen, in a tumult of cleaning, with the lights on, although it was not evening yet. “Now we find you asleep on a bench!” she shouted, and was unmollified by Sylvie’s assurances that she had not been asleep. “Probably nobody saw her,” I said.

  “In the middle of town? In the middle of the afternoon?”

  “I mean, recognized her.”

  “But who else—Ruthie, who else would—” Lucille threw her dish towel at the cupboards. I heard Sylvie open the front door.

  “She’s leaving,” I said.

  “She always does that. She just wanders away.” Lucille picked up her dish towel and threw it at the front door.

  “But what if she really leaves?”

  “It couldn’t be worse.” Clearly Rosette Browne’s mother had had Lucille on the rack that afternoon. In such cases the advocate will merge with the accused. “I don’t know what keeps her here. I think she’d really rather jump on a train.”

  We did not know where to look for her, so Lucille turned out the lights and we sat at the kitchen table, trying to name the states of the union, and then the capitals of the states, in alphabetical order. Finally we heard her quiet steps and her tentative opening of the kitchen door. “I was afraid you’d have gone to bed. I left these on the bench today. They were too nice to waste.” She opened a newspaper parcel, and we smelled huckleberries. “They’re all over by the station. I had an idea about pancakes.” She made Bisquick batter, and stirred the berries into it while we attempted to list all the nations of the world. “Your mother and I used to make these. We used to go to that same place when we were little girls. Liberia. We were close then, like you two.”

  “We always forget Latvia,” Lucille said.

  Sylvie said, “We always forgot Liechtenstein. Or Andorra. Or San Marino.”

  7

  For that summer Lucille was still loyal to us. And if we were her chief problem, we were her only refuge. She and I were together, always, everywhere. Sometimes she would only be quiet, sometimes she would tell me that I ought not to look at the ground when I walked (my posture was intended not so much to conceal as to acknowledge and apologize for my increasingly excessive height), and sometimes we would try to remember our mother, though more and more we disagreed and even quarreled about what she had been like. Lucille’s mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow (more than I ever knew or she could prove) who was killed in an accident. My mother presided over a life so strictly simple and circumscribed that it could not have made any significant demands on her attention. She tended us with a gentle indifference that made me feel she would have liked to have been even more alone—she was the abandoner, and not the one abandoned. As for her flight into the lake, Lucille declared that the car had been stuck, that Helen had accelerated too much and lost control of it. Then why had she left us at our grandmother’s, with all our things? And why had she driven her car off the road to the middle of the meadow? And why had she given the boys who helped her not just her money but her purse? Lucille accused me once of trying to defend Sylvie at our mother’s expense. We were both silent for some time afterward, regretting that the comparison had been made. For by now we knew, though the certainty was not especially reassuring, that Sylvie was ours. Our mother swept and dusted, kept our anklets white, and fed us vitamins. We had never heard of Fingerbone until she brought us here, knew nothing of our grandmother until we were left to wait for her on her porch. When we were supposed to be asleep Lucille and I used to watch our mother sitting on the couch, one foot tucked under her, smoking and reading The Saturday Evening Post. Always at last she would raise her eyes from the page and gaze into the center of the room, sometimes so intently that one of us would get up for a drink of water and to assure ourselves that there was no one in the room with her. At last we had slid from her lap like one of those magazines full of responsible opinion about discipline and balanced meals. Sylvie could never really surprise us. As we sometimes realized, we were now in Sylvie’s dream with her. In all our truancies, perhaps we never came to a place where she had not been before us. So she needed no explanation for the things we could not explain.

  For example, once we spent the night in the woods. It was a Saturday, so we had worn our dungarees, and had carried our fishing poles and a creel that contained cookies and sandwiches as well as jackknives and worms. But we had not planned to stay the night, so we had no blankets. We walked miles up the shore to a small inlet where the water was shallow and still. These waters were full of plump little perch disturbingly avid for capture. Only childen would trifle with such creatures, and only we among children would walk so far for fish that bit with equal avidity within a hundred feet of the public library. But we went there, leaving the house at dawn, joined at the road by a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg, and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at such length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again. She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clambered up the rocks and into the dusty dark of the woods.

  It became a hot day. We rolled our jeans up in wi
de cuffs and unbuttoned our blouses so that we could tie them in a knot above our waists. Sometimes we walked on a narrow rim of sand, but more often we limped across beaches of round gray stones the size of crab apples. When we found flattish stones, we skipped them. When we found stones the shape of eggs, we threw them high, with a backward spin, and when the water received them with a gulp, we said we had cut the devil’s throat. In some places brush and grass grew right down to the water, and then we would wade on slippery rocks covered with strands of silt, dim and drifting like drowned hair. I fell in, with the creel, and then we ate our sandwiches, because they were wet already. It was not noon, but we planned to roast perch on green sticks and to look for huckleberries.

  The shore was littered with driftwood. There were trunks with stiff tangles of roots, and logs all stripped of their bark and spindled tight like cable. In places they were heaped, one huge carcass on another, like ivory and bones in an elephant graveyard. When we found twigs, we snapped them into finger lengths and stashed them in our pockets, to be smoked as we walked.

  We walked north, with the lake on our right hand. If we looked at it, the water seemed spread over half the world. The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light.

  But the lake at our feet was plain, clear water, bottomed with smooth stones or simple mud. It was quick with small life, like any pond, as modest in its transformations of the ordinary as any puddle. Only the calm persistence with which the water touched, and touched, and touched, sifting all the little stones, jet, and white, and hazel, forced us to remember that the lake was vast, and in league with the moon (for no sublunar account could be made of its shimmering, cold life).