Housekeeping

by Marilynne Robinson

And all of it would be Lucille’s and mine.

Her sisters-in-law, Nona and Lily,

Sylvie's

they searched their bags and pockets for the little present they had brought (it was a large box of cough drops—a confection they considered both tasty and salubrious).

Me as fuck

It seemed then and always to be the elaboration and ornamentation of the consensus between them, which was as intricate and well-tended as a termite castle.

There was a bright moon in a storm ring, and Lucille made plans to build a moon dial out of snow under our window.

Divine from the stormy moon (mother?)

We stayed awake the whole night because Lucille was afraid of her dreams.

Lily and Nona, I think, enjoyed nothing except habit and familiarity, the precise replication of one day in the next.

It was by grace of this dark and devastating weather that we were able to go very often to the lake to skate,

The moon image

For some reason the lake was a source of particular pleasure to Fingerbone that year.

The death of Sylvie narratologicaly "caused" this. Thes small respites. As if they were celebrating her passing in a bittersweet, atlastshemayrest way. The whole town is celebrating her.

The dogs made a gallant and youthful joke of their own strength and speed, and flaunted an utter indifference to the safety of their limbs.

Usually we would skate along the edge of the swept ice, tracing its shape, and coming finally to its farthest edge, we would sit on the snow and look back at Fingerbone.

Traveling through trauma together?

The town itself seemed a negligible thing from such a distance.

Indeed, where we were we could feel the reach of the lake far behind us, and far beyond us on either side, in a spacious silence that seemed to ring like glass.

we would become aware of the darkness, too close to us, like a presence in a dream. The comfortable yellow lights of the town were then the only comfort there was in the world, and there were not many of them. If every house in Fingerbone were to fall before our eyes, snuffing every light, the event would touch our senses as softly as a shifting among embers, and then the bitter darkness would step nearer.

Death, its threat

We walked the blocks from the lake to our grandmother’s house, jealous to the point of rage of those who were already accustomed to the light and the somnolent warmth of the houses we passed.

They smiled nervously at us and looked at each other. “This is much too late for little girls to come in!” Lily ventured, smiling at Nona. They watched us tensely and timidly, to see the result of their reprimand.

house.” “We won’t come back after dark any more,” I said.

“It would be lovely to take them home.” “They’d be safer.” “Warmer.”

In yo basement-ass house? Nah

“I’m sure they’d be quiet.” “They’re very quiet.” “Girls always are.” “Sylvia’s were.” “Yes, they were.”

“I don’t blame them.”

Because they're hard???

“That’s the truth. They haven’t seen enough to worry like we do.”

HMMMMMMMMMMM

So it must have seemed like providence when a note arrived from Sylvie herself.

though it was quite impressive and much admired. For my grandmother’s passing had brought to mind the disaster that had widowed her.

the most striking event in the town’s history, and as such was prized.

There was no picture of my grandmother. For that matter, the time of the funeral was not mentioned.

Yikes, dog

I was simply alarmed. It suggested to me that the earth had opened.

But in the dream the surface that I walked on proved to be knit up of hands and arms and upturned faces that shifted and quickened as I stepped, sinking only for a moment into lower relief under my weight.

So she was borne to the depths, my grandmother, into the undifferentiated past, and her comb had no more of the warmth of a hand about it than Helen of Troy’s would have.

My grandmother’s will did not mention Sylvie.

And we overheard Lily and Nona in the kitchen at night, embroidering their hopes.

their basement room in the red-brick and upright Hartwick Hotel, with its stiff linens and its bright silver, where the arthritic bellhop and the two old chambermaids deferred so pleasantly to their age and their solitude and their poverty)

Sylvie came into the kitchen behind her, with a quiet that seemed compounded of gentleness and stealth and self-effacement.

“You’re Ruthie. And you’re Lucille. Lucille has the lovely red hair.”

“The funeral was announced in the paper, but there was no article about it. We thought that was strange. Just a photograph.”

Just a phptograph

“Was Mother’s funeral nice?” Sylvie asked.

at the top of the stairs one came face to face with a wall so essential to supporting the roof (which had always sagged somewhat in the middle) that my grandfather could not bring himself to cut another door in it.

There was a single round window, small and high as a fully risen moon.

I’ll take you with me sometime.” “Take us where?” Lucille asked. Sylvie shrugged. “Somewhere. Wherever. Where do you want to go?”

Sylvie had folded the empty cellophane wrapper in quarters and she was creasing the folds between finger and thumb.

The question was abrupt, and the tone of it was coaxing, because adults did not wish to speak to us about our mother. Our grandmother never spoke of any of her daughters, and when they were mentioned to her, she winced with irritation.

People are really like this

Helen gave her a cup of coffee and sat at the table picking idly at a loose corner of the postage stamp while Bernice whispered a scandalous tale of marital fracture and reconciliation involving a cocktail waitress Bernice knew very well.

and when she was gone Helen tore the envelope into fourths and dropped them in the trash. Glancing into our faces as if she suddenly remembered we were there, anticipating our questions, she said, “It’s best,” and that was all we knew of our father.

It occurs to me sometimes that as I grow older I am increasingly able to present to her gaze the face she seemed to expect.

Sylvie began to blur the memory of my mother, and then to displace it.

Soon it was Sylvie who would look up startled, regarding me from a vantage of memory in which she had no place. And it was increasingly to this remembered Sylvie that I presented my look of conscious injury, knowing as I did so that Sylvie could know nothing of that letter.

What did Sylvie see when she thought of my mother? A girl with braided hair, a girl with freckled arms, who liked to lie on the rug in the lamplight, flat on her belly with her heels in the air and her chin on her two fists, reading Kipling. Did she tell lies? Could she keep secrets? Did she tickle, or slap, or pinch, or punch, or grimace? If someone had asked me about Lucille I would remember her with her mass of soft, fine, tangly hair concealing ears that cupped a bit and grew painfully cold if she did not cover them. I would remember that her front teeth, the permanent ones, came in, first one and much later the other, immense and raggedly serrated, and that she was fastidious about washing her hands. I would remember that when irked she bit her lip, when shy she scratched her knee, that she smelled dully clean, like chalk, or like a sun-warmed cat.

This one hurts

It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.

“We could walk across the lake,” I said. The thought was terrible. “It’s too cold,” Lucille replied. So she was gone.

Yet I remember her neither less nor differently than I remember others I have known better, and indeed I dream of her, and the dream is very like the event itself, except that in the dream the bridge pilings do not tremble so perilously under the weight of the train.

“I know it’ll be all right, but it makes me mad.”

That's the key