Housekeeping: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  The sky was whited by a high, even, luminous film, and the trees had an evening darkness. The shore drifted in a long, slow curve, outward to a point, beyond which three steep islands of diminishing size continued the sweep of the land toward the depths of the lake, tentatively, like an ellipsis. The point was high and stony, crested with fir trees. At its foot a narrow margin of brown sand abstracted its crude shape into one pure curve of calligraphic delicacy, sweeping, again, toward the lake. We crossed the point at its base, climbing down its farther side to the shore of the little bay where the perch bit. A quarter of a mile beyond, a massive peninsula foreshortened the horizon, flung up against it like a barricade. Only out beyond these two reaches of land could we see the shimmer of the open lake. The sheltered water between them was glossy, dark, and rank, with cattails at its verge and water lilies in its shallows, and tadpoles, and minnows, and farther out, the plosh now and then of a big fish leaping after flies. Set apart from the drifts and tides and lucifactions of the open water, the surface of the bay seemed almost viscous, membranous, and here things massed and accumulated, as they do in cobwebs or in the eaves and unswept corners of a house. It was a place of distinctly domestic disorder, warm and still and replete. Lucille and I sat down and tossed pebbles at dragonflies for a while. Then we fished for a while, opening the belly of each fish as we caught it from gills to tail and gutting it with our thumbnails, tossing the guts up onto the beach for raccoons. Then we made a shallow fire, and pierced a few of the perch through the gills with a green stick, and set it up like a spit between two forked sticks. This was our invariable method, though at worst the spit collapsed and the fish dropped into the fire, and at best, which was very little better, their tail fins scorched and smoldered before the gleam of consciousness had quite left their eyes. We ate them in considerable numbers. We found ripe huckleberries on bushes that grew up among the rocks behind the shore and ate them, too. These rituals of predation engrossed us until late afternoon, and then we suddenly realized that we had stayed too long. If we had hurried back then we might have got home before it was entirely dark, but the sky was increasingly beclouded and we could not be sure of the time. Both of us were frightened at the thought of making our way along the miles of difficult shore, with the black woods above us on our right hand and only the lake on our left. If the clouds brought a wind and waves, we would be driven up into the woods, and the woods at night terrified us. “Let’s stay here,” Lucille said. We dragged driftwood halfway out on the point. We used a big stone in its side as one wall, we made back and side walls of driftwood, and we left the third side open to the lake. We pulled down fir limbs and made a roof and floor. It was a low and slovenly structure, to all appearances random and accidental. Twice the roof fell. We had to sit with our chins on our knees to avoid bringing a wall down. We sat for a while side by side, adjusting our limbs cautiously, scratching our ankles and shoulder blades with the greatest care. Lucille crawled out and began writing her name in pebbles on the sand in front of the door. Evening seemed to have struck an equilibrium. The sky and the water were one luminous gray. The woods altogether black. The two arms of land that enclosed the bay were like floes of darkness, pouring into the lake from mountains brimming darkness, but stopped and turned to stone in the brilliant ether.

  We crawled into our hut and fell uneasily asleep, never forgetting that we must keep our heels against our buttocks, always aware of the mites and flies in the sand. I woke up in absolute darkness. I could feel the branches at my side and the damp at my back, and Lucille asleep against me, but I could see nothing. Remembering that Lucille had crawled in behind me, and that she crouched between me and the door, I scrambled out through the roof and over the wall into darkness no less absolute. There was no moon. In fact, there appeared to be no sky. Apart from the steady shimmering of the lake and the rush of the woods, there were singular, isolated lake sounds, placeless and disembodied, and very near my ears, like sounds in a dream. There were lisps and titters, and the sounds of stealthy approach—the sense of a disturbing intention, its enacting inexplicably deferred. “Lucille,” I said. I could hear her stand up through the roof. “What time do you think it is?” We could not guess. Coyotes cried, and owls, and hawks, and loons.

  It was so dark that creatures came down to the water within a few feet of us. We could not see what they were. Lucille began to throw stones at them. “They’re supposed to be able to smell us,” she grumbled. For a while she sang “Mockingbird Hill,” and then she sat down beside me in our ruined stronghold, never still, never accepting that all our human boundaries were overrun.

  Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent. While it was dark, despite Lucille’s pacing and whistling, and despite what must have been dreams (since even Sylvie came to haunt me), it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent.

  When the light began to come (we were warned, as Sylvie said we would be, by the roar of the woods and the cries of birds, far ahead of time) Lucille began to walk toward Fingerbone. She did not speak to me, or look back. The absolute black of the sky dulled and dimmed and blanched slowly away, and finally half a dozen daubs of cloud, dull powder pink, sailed high in a pale-green sky, rust-red at the horizon. Venus shone a heatless planetary white among these parrot colors, and earth lay unregenerate so long that it seemed to me for once all these blandishments might fail. The birds of our world were black motes in that tropic.

  “It doesn’t seem to get any lighter,” I said.

  “It will,” Lucille replied. We walked along the shore, more quickly than we had walked by daylight. Our backs were stiff and our ears hummed. Both of us fell repeatedly. As we were easing our way past a mass of rocks that jutted into the lake, my feet slipped on a silty face of submerged stone and I slid full-length into the water, bruising my knee and my rib and my cheek. Lucille pulled me up by the hair.

  At last it became ordinary day. Our jeans clung, our cuffs dragged, our hair hung in damp snarls. Our fingernails and our lips were blue. We had lost our fishing rods and our creel, as well as our shoes. Hunger sat heavily in our bowels, like guilt. “Sylvie will kill us,” Lucille said, without conviction. We climbed up the embankment to the railroad tracks, leaving a dark trail where our passing precipitated the mists that still dimmed the weeds and grasses. The railroad ties felt warm and ordinary under our feet. We could see some of the orchard trees, twisted and crotched and stooped, barren and age-stricken. We took a little path through the trees, down to the nearest door, the door that opened into my grandmother’s room. Sylvie was sitting in the kitchen, on a stool, perusing a back issue of National Geographic.

  When we came into the kitchen Sylvie stepped down from her stool, smiling, not at us, and pushed two chairs in front of the stove. She had put two folded quilts on the wood box behind the stove. She wrapped one of them around Lu
cille and one around me, and we sat down. She poured boiling water and then a can of condensed milk and a quantity of sugar into the coffeepot and poured us each a cup. “Brimstone tea,” she said.

  “Do you know where we were last night?” Lucille asked.

  Sylvie laughed. “You were dining with John Jacob Astor,” she said.

  “John Jacob Astor,” Lucille grumbled.

  The quilt was warm and soft around my arms and shoulders and my ears. I fell asleep where I sat, with the cup of brimstone tea in my lap, held carefully in both hands so as not to spill. Sleep made one sensation of the heat in my palms and the sugar on my tongue. I slept precariously upright, aware of my bare feet, hearing the wood in the stove crackle. More words passed between Sylvie and Lucille, but I could not make them out. It seemed to me that whatever Lucille said, Sylvie sang back to her, but that was dreaming.

  So this is all death is, I thought. Sylvie and Lucille do not notice, or perhaps they do not object. Sylvie, in fact, brought the coffeepot and warmed the cup in my hands, and arranged the quilt, which had slid from my shoulder a little. I was surprised and touched by her solicitude. She knows, I thought, and I felt like laughing. Sylvie is sitting beside the stove, flipping through old magazines, waiting for my mother. I began listening for the sound of the door opening, but after a very long time my head fell sharply to one side and I could not lift it up again. Then I realized that my mouth was open. All this time the room was filling with strangers, and there was no way for me to tell Sylvie that the tea had tipped out of my hands and wet my lap. I knew that my decay, now obvious and accelerating, should somehow be concealed for decency’s sake, but Sylvie would not look up from her magazine. I began to hope for oblivion, and then I rolled out of my chair.

  Sylvie looked up from her magazine. “Did you have a good sleep?” she asked.

  “All right,” I said. I picked up the cup and brushed at the dampness of my pant legs.

  “Sleep is best when you’re really tired,” she said. “You don’t just sleep. You die.”

  I put the cup in the sink. “Where’s Lucille?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Sleeping?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I went up to our room, and there was Lucille, dressed in a dark cotton skirt and a white blouse, setting her hair in pin curls.

  “Have you been sleeping, too?”

  Lucille shrugged. Her mouth was full of pins.

  “I had a strange dream,” I said. Lucille took the pins out of her mouth. “Change your clothes,” she said. “I’ll fix your hair.” There was urgency in her manner.

  I put on a plaid dress, and came to her to be buttoned. “Not that,” she said. I found a yellow blouse and a brown skirt. These Lucille accepted without comment. Then she began combing the tangles out of my hair. She was not gentle or deft, nor was she patient, but she was utterly determined. “Your hair is like straw,” she said, wetting a strand once again with her comb. Another strand uncoiled itself and the pin fell. “Aah!” She slapped my neck with the comb. “Don’t move!”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, don’t! We’ll get some of that setting gel at the drugstore. Do you have any money?”

  “Forty-five cents.”

  “I have some.” Her fingers at my neck were very cold.

  “Aren’t you going to sleep a little?” I asked.

  “I already did. I had a terrible dream. Hold still.”

  “What about?”

  “Not about anything. I was a baby, lying on my back, yelling, and then someone came and started wrapping me up in blankets. She put them all over my face, so I couldn’t breathe. She was singing and holding me, and it was sort of nice, but I could tell she was trying to smother me.” Lucille shuddered.

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman in the dream.”

  “She reminded me of Sylvie, I guess.”

  “Didn’t you see her face?”

  Lucille adjusted the angle of my head and began combing water into the hair at my nape.

  “It was just a dream, Ruthie.”

  “What color was her hair?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you want me to tell you what I dreamed?”

  “No.”

  Lucille tied a nylon scarf over my pin curls and another one over her own. We went downstairs. Lucille took some money from the kitchen drawer where Sylvie kept it. “My, you both look nice!” Sylvie said as we passed, but, as I always did when attention was drawn to my appearance, I felt very tall. By the time we reached the end of the walk I had folded my arms over the empty front of my blouse.

  “You just make people notice it more,” Lucille said.

  “Notice what?”

  “Nothing.”

  I felt the notice of people all over me, like the pressure of a denser medium. Lucille, impatient with my sorrows, had pried the heels off my shoes to make me shorter, but it seemed to me that without them the toes turned up. At times like this I was increasingly struck by Lucille’s ability to look the way one was supposed to look. She could roll her anklets and puff her bangs to excellent effect, but try as she might, she could never do as well for me. She had even developed a sauntering sort of walk that made her hips swing a little, but the easy and casual appearance she strove for was very much compromised by my ungainliness, my buzzard’s hunch. We were on our way to buy setting gel and nail polish. I hated these excursions, and I would begin to think of other things in order to endure them. That particular day I began thinking about my mother. In my dream I had waited for her confidently, as I had all those years ago when she left us in the porch. Such confidence was like a sense of imminent presence, a palpable displacement, the movement in the air before the wind comes. Or so it seemed. Yet twice I had been disappointed, if that was the word. Perhaps I had been deceived. If appearance is only a trick of the nerves, and apparition is only a lesser trick of the nerves, a less perfect illusion, then this expectation, this sense of a presence unperceived, was not particularly illusory as things in this world go. The thought comforted me. By so much was my dream less false than Lucille’s. And it is probably as well to be undeceived, though perhaps it is not.

  “I’m talking to you,” Lucille said.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Well, why don’t you keep up with me? Then we could talk.”

  “What about?”

  “What do other people talk about?”

  I had often wondered.

  “Anyway,” Lucille said, “you look strange following after me like that.”

  “I think I’ll go home.”

  “Don’t go home.” Lucille turned to look at me. From beneath lowered brows her eyes beseeched me fiercely. “I brought money for Cokes,” she said.

  So we went on to the drugstore, and while we were drinking our Cokes, two older girls whom Lucille had somehow contrived to know slightly sat down beside us and began to show us patterns and cloth they had bought to sew for school. Lucille stroked the cloth and studied the patterns so intently that the older girls became patronizing and voluble, and showed us a magazine they had bought because it was full of new hairstyles, with setting instructions. Even I was impressed by the earnestness with which Lucille studied the photographs and diagrams.

  “We should get this, Ruthie,” she said. I went over to the magazine stand as if to browse. The magazine stand was just inside the door. Lucille came over and stood next to me. “You’re going to leave,” she said. This was equally statement and accusation. I could think of no reply.

  “I just want to go home,” I said, and pushed the door open. Lucille grabbed me by the flesh above my elbow. “Don’t!” she said, pinching me smartly for emphasis. She came with me out onto the sidewalk, still grasping the flesh of my arm. “That’s Sylvie’s house now.” She whispered hissingly and looked wrath. And now I felt her nails, and her glare was more pleading and urgent. “We have to improve ourselves!” she
said. “Starting right now!” she said. And again I could think of no reply.

  “Well, I’ll talk to you about it later,” I murmured, and turned away toward home, and to my amazement, Lucille followed me—a few paces behind, and only for a block or two. Then she stopped without a word and turned and walked back to the drugstore. And I was left alone, in the gentle afternoon, indifferent to my clothes and comfortable in my skin, unimproved and without the prospect of improvement. It seemed to me then that Lucille would busy herself forever, nudging, pushing, coaxing, as if she could supply the will I lacked, to pull myself into some seemly shape and slip across the wide frontiers into that other world, where it seemed to me then I could never wish to go. For it seemed to me that nothing I had lost, or might lose, could be found there, or, to put it another way, it seemed that something I had lost might be found in Sylvie’s house. As I walked toward it, and the street became more and more familiar, till the dogs that slept on the porches only lifted their heads as I passed (since Sylvie was not with me), each particular tree, and its season, and its shadow, were utterly known to me, likewise the small desolations of forgotten lilies and irises, likewise the silence of the railroad tracks in the sunlight. I had seen two of the apple trees in my grandmother’s orchard die where they stood. One spring there were no leaves, but they stood there as if expectantly, their limbs almost to the ground, miming their perished fruitfulness. Every winter the orchard is flooded with snow, and every spring the waters are parted, death is undone, and every Lazarus rises, except these two. They have lost their bark and blanched white, and a wind will snap their bones, but if ever a leaf does appear, it should be no great wonder. It would be a small change, as it would be, say, for the moon to begin turning on its axis. It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost. At Sylvie’s house, my grandmother’s house, so much of what I remembered I could hold in my hand—like a china cup, or a windfall apple, sour and cold from its affinity with deep earth, with only a trace of the perfume of its blossoming. Sylvie, I knew, felt the life of perished things.