Housekeeping

by Marilynne Robinson

She did not notice us standing at a distance watching her.

When we came back into the street the sun was shining warmly. There was a bright flow of water in the gutters.

When we came to the end of the sidewalk, there was no way for Sylvie to walk without now and then stepping over her shoes in water of one sort or another. This difficulty seemed to absorb her but not to disturb her.

The week after Sylvie arrived, Fingerbone had three days of brilliant sunshine and four of balmy rain.

It seemed that we had conjured a presence.

We went inside for lunch, and when we came out again, she was a dog-yellowed stump in which neither of us would admit any interest.

Sylvie played solitaire on the vanity while Lucille and I played Monopoly on the bed.

The water shone more brilliantly than the sky, and while we watched, a tall elm tree fell slowly across the road. From crown to root, half of it vanished in the brilliant light.

The losses in hooked and braided rugs and needlepoint footstools will never be reckoned.

Fungus and mold crept into wedding dresses and photograph albums, so that the leather crumbled in our hands when we lifted the covers, and the sharp smell that rose when we opened them was as insinuating as the smells one finds under a plank or a rock.

As with memories and relationships

The water was beginning to slide away. We could hear the lake groan under the weight of it, for the lake had not yet thawed. The ice would still be thick, but it would be the color of paraffin, with big white bubbles under it. In normal weather there would have been perhaps an inch of water on top of it in shallow places. Under all the weight of the flood water it sagged and, being fibrous rather than soft or brittle, wrenched apart, as resistant to breaching as green bones.

The afternoon was loud with the giant miseries of the lake, and the sun shone on, and the flood was the almost flawless mirror of a cloudless sky, fat with brimming and very calm.

But it was disturbing to have our aunts’ fear appear as prescience.

The clashes and groans from the lake continued unabated, dreadful at night, and the sound of the night wind in the mountains was like one long indrawn breath. Downstairs the flood bumped and fumbled like a blind man in a strange house, but outside it hissed and trickled, like the pressure of water against your eardrums, and like the sounds you hear in the moment before you faint.

“But we’re fine here,” Sylvie said. “We can cook our own food and sleep in our own beds. What could be better?” She shuffled the cards and laid them out for solitaire.

“Well, if a judge did take them, what would he do with them?” “Oh, send them to some place. I think there’s a farm or something.”

@_@

That was the first Lucille or I had heard of the interest of the state in the well-being of children, and we were alarmed. By the light of the candle on the vanity, Sylvie flipped and sorted through her deck of cards, plainly unaware that the black shape of judicial attention stood over us all, as enormous as our shadows.

But not till then did we dream that we might be taken from her.

A story Bout children in fear of abandonment, but also in fear of state control

an old man in a black robe

The reaper? Men in black?

Sylvie, at that moment, would hardly be noticed in a bus station.

“Why didn’t you have children?” Lucille asked. Sylvie lifted her shoulders. “It just wasn’t in the cards,” she said. “Did you want them?” “I always liked them.” “But, I mean, did you want to have them?” “You must know, Lucille,” Sylvie said, “that some questions aren’t polite. I’m sure that my mother must have told you that.” “She’s sorry,” I said. Lucille bit her lip. “It doesn’t matter,” Sylvie said. “Let’s play crazy eights. I’ve got the deck warmed up.”

The trapdoor had been left open,

Oh no

I’ve never seen such a dark night.” “Well, come back in!”

“It’s like the end of the world!”

When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.

I found myself reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to something less than that.

That left my grandmother’s room, which I dreaded entering because it was three steps lower than the kitchen.

“Sylvie?” She stood still as an effigy. I reached into her pocket and brought out a cold hand. I opened it and closed it and rubbed it between my hands, but she did not move or speak.

The fate of Helen?

During those days Fingerbone was strangely transformed. If one should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be told, “That is a splinter from the True Cross, and that is a nail paring dropped by Barabbas, and that is a bit of lint from under the bed where Pilate’s wife dreamed her dream,” the very ordinariness of the things would recommend them.

The restoration of the town was an exemplary community effort in which we had no part.

Alienated

This was the fairest description of our best qualities, and the kindest description of our worst faults.

If its fenestration was random, if its corners were out of square, my grandfather had built it himself, knowing nothing whatever of carpentry.

Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure.

To live up to the expectations set by a withering lineage

Two weeks after the water was gone people began to believe that our house had not been touched by the flood at all.

Uh oh

William Henry Harrison.

Shortest presidential term

Because we were quiet we were considered docile, and because our work was not exceptionally good or bad we were left alone.

Hours of tedium were relieved by occasional minor humiliations, as, for example, when our fingernails were checked for cleanliness.

“I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died.”

My cold, visceral dread of school I had learned to ignore. It was a discomfort that was not to be relieved, like an itch in an amputated limb.

Lucille was astonished to find that the teacher was so easily convinced of her guilt, so immovably persuaded of it, calling her up in front of the class and demanding that she account for the identical papers. Lucille writhed under this violation of her anonymity.

“I’m not going to school,” she said. “What are you going to tell Sylvie?” “Maybe I won’t go home.” “Where will you go?” “Down to the lake.” “It will be cold.” Lucille shrugged. “I’ll go, too,” I said. Lucille said, “Then we’ll both be in trouble.”

apprehended.

It seemed to us that we were cruelly banished from a place where we had no desire to be, and that we could not return there of our own will but must wait to return under duress and compulsion.

The combined effects of cold, tedium, guilt, loneliness, and dread sharpened our senses wonderfully.

We were almost accustomed by that time to the fact that Sylvie’s thoughts were elsewhere, but having waited so many days for someone to come for us, we found her obliviousness irksome.

Just notice us, our pain and your own!

“Ain’t our business,” the younger one said. They picked up their hats and strolled off down the beach in the other direction.

Oracles? Proper take-havers?

“I thought you would be in school.” “We didn’t go to school this week.” “But, you see, I didn’t know that. It never crossed my mind that you’d be here.” Sylvie’s voice was gentle, and she touched Lucille’s hair.

We were very upset, all the same, for reasons too numerous to mention. Clearly our aunt was not a stable person.

Sometimes they occurred in our heads,

Shakespeare? Unreliable narrator?