Housekeeping: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  Silence.

  “Now I look at Ruthie and I see Helen, too. That’s why families are so important. Other people walk out the door and they’re gone!”

  Silence. A shifting of the couch.

  “Families should stay together. Otherwise things get out of control. My father, you know. I can’t even remember what he was like, I mean when he was alive. But ever since, it’s Papa here and Papa there, and dreams . . . Like the poor woman with nine children. She was walking the floor the whole night!”

  No one said anything for a long time. Finally someone said, “Families are a sorrow, and that’s the truth,” and another one said, “I lost my girl sixteen years ago in June and her face is before me now,” and someone else said, “If you can keep them, that’s bad enough, but if you lose them—” The world is full of trouble. Yes it is.

  “Families should stay together,” Sylvie said. “They should. There is no other help. Ruthie and I have trouble enough with the ones we’ve lost already.” The ladies seemed absorbed in thoughts of their own. Finally someone said, “But, Sylvie, you have to keep her off the freight trains.”

  “What?”

  “She shouldn’t be riding around in freight cars.”

  “Oh, no,” Sylvie laughed. “That was just the one time. We were so tired, you know. We’d been out all night, and we just took the fastest way home.”

  “Out where?”

  “On the lake.”

  Murmurs. “In that little boat?”

  “It’s a perfectly good boat. It doesn’t look like much but it’s all right.”

  The ladies said goodbye, and left their offerings on the couch.

  I came in and sat on the floor with Sylvie, and we ate bits and morsels from the pots and plates they had left behind.

  “Did you hear what they said?” Sylvie asked.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “What did you think?”

  The room was dark. The cans in their towering stack gleamed blue and the effect was cold and melancholy. I said, “I don’t want to talk.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Sylvie said. “We could fix it up around here,” she said finally. “Some of this stuff could go out to the shed, I suppose.”

  The next day I combed my hair and went to school, and when I came home Sylvie had emptied the parlor of cans entirely and had begun to remove the newspapers. She had put a bouquet of artificial flowers on the kitchen table, and she was frying chicken. “Now, isn’t this nice?” she asked, and then, “Did you have a nice day at school?”

  Sylvie was pretty, but she was prettiest when something had just startled her into feeling that the world had to be dealt with in some way, and then she undertook the most ordinary things with an arch, tense, tentative good will that made them seem difficult and remarkable, and she was delighted by even partial successes.

  “School was fine,” I said. It was terrible. I had outgrown my dress, and whenever I ceased to control myself by a conscious effort of will, my feet began to dance or I bit my knuckles or twisted my hair. I could not appear to pay attention to the teacher for fear she might call on me and I would suddenly be the center of attention. I drew elaborate shapes all over my tablet, which I changed whenever they seemed on the point of becoming recognizable. This was to divert my thoughts from the impulse to walk out of the room, which was very strong, although I could count on the benignity of Miss Knoll, who was so obese that she wore laceless sneakers and the tongues popped up, and who wept when she read Keats and was ashamed.

  “Did you see Lucille?”

  “No.” Yes. Lucille was everywhere, but we did not speak.

  “Maybe she’s sick. Maybe I should go over there and find out how she is. I’m her aunt.”

  “Yes.” What could it matter? It seemed to me that the fragility of our household was by now so great that the breach was inevitable, and so it was futile to worry whether there was wisdom or sense in any particular scheme to save it. One thing or another would put an end to it soon.

  “I’ll take her some chicken,” Sylvie said. Yes, take her some chicken. Sylvie was so struck with this idea that she set apart the neck for herself and the wings for me and bundled all the rest into a tea towel. She washed her hands and pinned back her hair and set off for Lucille’s.

  It was late when she came back. I had chewed at the chicken wings and gone to bed with Not as a Stranger. She came upstairs and sat down at the foot of the bed. “Those women have been talking to Lucille,” she said. “Do you know what they want to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lucille told me. I don’t think they can do it, do you?”

  “No.” Yes.

  “I don’t think so, either. It would be terrible. They know that.”

  “Yes.” Yes. It would be terrible. They know that.

  “I thought they just wanted to talk about the freight train. I thought they understood. But Lucille says now it’s because we spent the night on the lake. Well, I’ll explain to them.”

  Explain to them, Sylvie.

  “Don’t worry.” She patted the lump my knee made in the blanket. “I’ll explain it all to them.” I finally fell asleep despite the noise Sylvie made washing and stacking dishes. In the morning the kitchen table was cleared and scrubbed and there was a bowl and a spoon and a box of cornflakes and a glass of orange juice and two pieces of buttered toast on a saucer and the vase of artificial daisies. Sylvie was filthy with newsprint and there were cobwebs in her hair.

  “This is nice,” I said.

  She nodded. “What a mess! Honestly. I was up the whole night. Now, you eat breakfast. You’ll be late for school.”

  “Do you think I should stay home and help?”

  “No! You go to school, Ruthie. I’ll help you brush out your hair. You’ve got to look nice.”

  I had never imagined that Sylvie was capable of haste or urgency. I was surprised, in fact, that she would go to such lengths for my sake. It had always seemed to me that Sylvie and I were there together purely as a matter of accident—the wind blows a milkweed puff and two seeds do not fly. It seemed to me that we shared the house amicably because it was spacious enough and we both felt at home there and because habits of politeness were deeply engrained in us both. If a judge were to appear and whisk me under his black robes like a hobo in our grandmother’s cautionary tales, and carry me off to the rumored farm, a shock would roll through the house, and rattle the plates, and totter the cups, and ring in the glasses for days, perhaps, and Sylvie would have another story to tell, not so very sad compared with others. Yet here was purpose and urgency. I knew we were doomed. I put on a skirt which Sylvie had let down for me and pressed (things like that matter to them, she said), and my best sweater, and Sylvie worried the largest snarls out of my hair with a wide-tooth comb. “Now stand up straight,” she said as I went out the door. “Smile at people.” I spent the day in misery and suspense, and I came home to find Sylvie sitting in a swept and catless parlor, speaking softly with the sheriff.

  It is a terrible thing to break up a family. If you understand that, you will understand everything that follows. The sheriff knew it as well as anyone, and his face was slack with regret. “There’ll be a hearing, Mrs. Fisher,” he said, wearily, because whatever Sylvie might say, he could make no other reply.

  “It would be a terrible thing to do,” Sylvie said, and the sheriff dropped his palms on his knees by way of agreement and said, “There’ll be a hearing, ma’am.” When I came into the room he rose and clutched his hat under his belly. He had all the formality of manner of an undertaker, and I said “Good evening” to him out of kindness. “Excuse us grown folks,” he said. “We got to talk.” So I went up to my room and left my fate to work itself out, since I had no curiosity about what was destined for me, and no doubt.

  10

  Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job’s children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her childr
en; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory—there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.

  Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground—a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God Himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his Creator. God troubled the waters where He saw His face, and Cain became his children and their children and theirs, through a thousand generations, and all of them transients, and wherever they went everyone remembered that there had been a second creation, that the earth ran with blood and sang with sorrow. And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair. One cannot cup one’s hand and drink from the rim of any lake without remembering that mothers have drowned in it, lifting their children toward the air, though they must have known as they did that soon enough the deluge would take all the children, too, even if their arms could have held them up. Presumably only incapacity made infants and the very old seem relatively harmless. Well, all that was purged away, and nothing is left of it after so many years but a certain pungency and savor in the water, and in the breath of creeks and lakes, which, however sad and wild, are clearly human.

  I cannot taste a cup of water but I recall that the eye of the lake is my grandfather’s, and that the lake’s heavy, blind, encumbering waters composed my mother’s limbs and weighed her garments and stopped her breath and stopped her sight. There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.

  Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again. He even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him—a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail. Yet this was no more than tinkering. Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like. He is known to have walked upon water, but He was not born to drown. And when He did die it was sad—such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was. There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.

  Sylvie did not want to lose me. She did not want me to grow gigantic and multiple, so that I seemed to fill the whole house, and she did not wish me to turn subtle and miscible, so that I could pass through the membranes that separate dream and dream. She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be. For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. She could forget I was in the room. She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her—this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.

  But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing. Imagine that my mother had come back that Sunday, say in the evening, and that she had kissed our hair and that all the necessary business of reconciliation had been transacted between her and my grandmother, and that we had sat down to supper, and Lucille and I had grown restless listening to stories about people we did not know, and had gone out to play on the chill grass in the strange, deep yard, hoping our mother would notice how late it was, and hoping she would not. Say we had driven home the whole night long, Lucille and I asleep on the back seat, cramped and aware of the chilly air that whistled through the inch of open window, diluting my mother’s perfume and the smoke from her cigarettes. She might sing, “What’ll I do when you are far away,” or “Love letters straight from your heart,” or “Cottage for sale,” or “Irene.” Those were her favorite songs. I remember looking at her from the back seat as we drove toward Fingerbone, the waves in the crown of her hair, the square shoulders of her good gray dress, her long hands at the top of the steering wheel, the nails gleaming a deep red. I was struck by her calm, by the elegant competence of her slightest gesture. Lucille and I had never seen her drive before, and we were very much impressed. The interior of Bernice’s car smelled dusty, like an old sofa. We held on to the thick gray cord that hung across the back of the front seat and bounced up and down as if we were driving a stagecoach. The air filled with dust particles that looked like tiny bent threads, or hairs, which someone had once told us were atoms. We fought and counted horses and cemeteries, and she never spoke to us once. We asked to stop at an ice-cream stand by the road in the woods and she stopped and bought us hot fudge sundaes, and the lady there said we were nice and our mother smiled absently and said, Sometimes they are.

  It seemed to me that in all this there was the hush and solemnity of incipient transfiguration. Perhaps memory is the seat not only of prophecy but of miracle as well. For it seems to me that we were recalled again and again to a sense of her calm. It seems that her quiet startled us, though she was always quiet. I remember her standing with her arms folded, pushing at the dust with the toe of her pump while she waited for us to finish our sundaes. We sat at a hot green metal table, weather-dulled and sticky, and loud black flies with rainbows in their wings fed at the pools of drying ice cream and then scrubbed their maws meticulously with their forelegs, like house cats. She was so tall and quiet in her silvery gray dress, never looking toward us, and we were sweaty and sticky and cloyed and tired of each other. I remember her, grave with the peace of the destined, the summoned, and she seems almost an apparition.

  But if she had simply brought us home again to the high frame apartment building with the scaffolding of stairs, I would not remember her that way. Her eccentricities might have irked and embarrassed us when we grew older. We might have forgotten her birthday, and teased her to buy a car or to change her hair. We would have left her finally. We would have laughed together with bitterness and satisfaction at our strangely solitary childhood, in light of which our failings would seem inevitable, and all our attainments miraculous. Then we would telephone her out of guilt and nostalgia, and laugh bitterly afterward b
ecause she asked us nothing, and told us nothing, and fell silent from time to time, and was glad to get off the phone. We would take her to a restaurant and a movie on Thanksgiving and buy her best-sellers for Christmas. We would try to give her outings and make her find some interests, but she would soften and shrink in our hands, and become infirm. She would bear her infirmities with the same taut patience with which she bore our solicitude, and with which she had borne every other aspect of life, and her silence would make us more and more furious. Lucille and I would see each other often, and almost never talk of other things. Nothing would be more familiar to us than her silence, and her sad, abstracted calm. I know how it would have been, because I have observed that, in the way people are strange, they grow stranger. We would have laughed and felt abandoned and aggrieved, never knowing that she had gone all the way to the edge of the lake to rest her head and close her eyes, and had come back again for our sakes. She would have remained untransfigured. We would never have known that her calm was as slight as the skin on water, and that her calm sustained her as a coin can float on still water. We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills, and sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror, and there is, as I have said before, a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches. When we were children and frightened of the dark, my grandmother used to say if we kept our eyes closed we would not see it. That was when I noticed the correspondence between the space within the circle of my skull and the space around me. I saw just the same figure against the lid of my eye or the wall of my room, or in the trees beyond my window. Even the illusion of perimeters fails when families are separated.