Housekeeping

by Marilynne Robinson

offended by the elopement and the out-of-state marriage, and wrote to tell Helen that she would never consider her genuinely married until she came home and ...

Apparently no snapshots were made of this event.

Her girls were quiet, she must have thought, because the customs and habits of their lives had almost relieved them of the need for speech.

These thing were known.

It was Sylvie who brought in bouquets of flowers.

Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean.

And the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water.

Sometimes Edmund would carry buckets and a trowel, and lift them earth and all, and bring them home to plant, and they would die.

They were rare things, and grew out of ants’ nests and bear dung and the flesh of perished animals.

the ruins of a porcupine, teeth here, tail there.

In a month those flowers would bloom. In a month all dormant life and arrested decay would begin again.

Edmund was like that, a little.

The rising of the spring stirred a serious, mystical excitement in him, and made him forgetful of her.

He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them.

Characterization perhaps indicative of his behavior towards his family

a soul all unaccompanied,

So the wind that billowed her sheets announced to her the resurrection of the ordinary.

And she would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child.

the unkindness of her children, or of children in general.

If a friend was in the room her daughters would watch his face or her face intently and tease or soothe or banter, and any one of them could gauge and respond to the finest changes of expression or tone, even Sylvie, if she chose to. But it did not occur to them to suit their words and manners to her looks, and she did not want them to.

She was then a magisterial woman, not only because of her height and her large, sharp face, not only because of her upbringing, but also because it suited her purpose, to be what she seemed to be so that her children would never be startled or surprised, and to take on all the postures and vestments of matron, to differentiate her life from theirs, so that her children would never feel intruded upon.

She was constant as daylight, and she would be unremarked as daylight, just to watch the calm inwardness of their faces. What was it like.

light and soft as...

And above the pale earth and bright trees the sky was the dark blue of ashes.

She burrowed her hand under a potato plant and felt gingerly for the new potatoes in their dry net of roots, smooth as eggs. She put them in her apron and walked back to the house thinking, What have I seen, what have I seen.

The earth and the sky and the garden, not as they always are. And she saw her daughters’ faces not as they always were, or as other people’s were, and she was quiet and aloof and watchful, not to startle the strangeness away. She had never taught them to be kind to her.

spread like somber tents over hoards of goods crated up,

“Sparrow in the Treetop” and “Good Night, Irene”

But of all this, from our vantage, we saw only the tented top. Gulls sat in rows on our porch railing and peered for scavenge.

The impoverished

In the back wall of the main room was a door which opened into a carpeted hallway, and which was never opened.

A door in the main room that was never to be opened???

It was blocked, in fact, by a big green couch so weighty and shapeless that it looked as if it had been hoisted out of forty feet of water.

“Don’t forget the way / She put the water inside”

Helen put lengths of clothesline through our belts and fastened them to the doorknob, an arrangement that nerved us to look over the side of the porch, even when the wind was strong.

A strange, idiosyncratic method of parental control; but they were given the “nerve” to be brave by their mother, even when “the wind” threatens them to topple over.

She was an old woman, but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease.

Ouchie

she would laugh and prod my mother’s arm with her lavender claws.

“Lavender flowers represent purity, silence, devotion, serenity, grace, and calmness. Purple is the color of royalty and speaks of elegance, refinement, and luxury, too. The color is also associated with the crown chakra, which is the energy center associated with higher purpose and spiritual connectivity.”

Helen leaned in the doorway, smiled at the floor, and twined her hair.

Bernice liked to bring us custard, which had a thick yellow skin and sat in a copious liquid the consistency of eyewater.

Yellow bile?

But she loved us for our mother’s sake.

She put our suitcases in the screened porch, which was populated by a cat and a matronly washing machine, and told us to wait quietly.

Then she went back to the car and drove north almost to Tyler, where she sailed in Bernice’s Ford from the top of a cliff named Whiskey Rock into the blackest depth of the lake.

They searched for her. Word was sent out a hundred miles in every direction to watch for a young woman in a car which I said ...

When they got the Ford back to the road she thanked them, gave them her purse, rolled down the rear windows, started the car, turned the wheel as far to the right as it would go, and roared swerving and sliding across the meadow until she sailed off the edge of the cliff.

peremptory old men who would show us Spanish coins, and watches, and miniature jackknives with numerous blades designed to be serviceable in any extremity, in order to keep us near them and out of the path of possible traffic.

and in the house opposite lived a Catholic lady who kept a huge parrot on her balcony. When the bells rang the lady would come out with a shawl over her head and she would pray, and the parrot would pray with her, the woman’s voice and the parrot’s voice, on and on, between clamor and clangor.

Ettie waved it all away with her hand and pretended to sleep.

The fires consuming the devout

For five years my grandmother cared for us very well. She cared for us like someone reliving a long day in a dream.

And she whited shoes and braided hair and turned back bedclothes as if re-enacting the commonplace would make it merely commonplace again, or as if she could find the chink, the flaw, in her serenely orderly and ordinary life, or discover at least some intimation that her three girls would disappear as absolutely as their father had done.

Once, she told us, she dreamed that she had seen a baby fall from an airplane and had tried to catch it in her apron, and once that she had tried to fish a baby out of a well with a tea strainer.

as if her offerings of dimes and chocolate-chip cookies might keep us, our spirits, here in her kitchen, though she knew they might not.

she replied quite sensibly that anyone who saw those poor children would do exactly the same thing.

Sometimes it seemed to me my grandmother saw our black souls dancing in the moonless cold and offered us deep-dish apple pie as a gesture of well-meaning and despair.

"Our black souls"

She looked as if the nimbus of humanity were fading away and she were turning monkey.