Housekeeping

by Marilynne Robinson

Everyone would have said that Sylvie had taken her own life, and we would not have known otherwise—as, in fact, we still did not know otherwise. For if we imagined that, while we watched, Sylvie had walked so far away that the mountains rose up and the shore was diminished, and the lake bellied and under her feet the water slid and slapped and shone, and the bridge creaked and teetered, and the sky flowed away and slid over the side of the earth, might she not have carried the experiment a step further?

And then imagine that same Sylvie trudging up from the lake bottom, foundered coat and drowned sleeves and marbled lips and marble fingers and eyes flooded with the deep water that gleamed down beneath the reach of light. She might very well have said, “I’ve always wondered what that would be like.”

This is some Bly Manor shit, sister

She sat on the floor and played Monopoly with us and told us intricate and melancholy tales of people she had known slightly, and we made popcorn.

Like Lucille and the narrator

I spent much of several games in jail, but Sylvie prospered, and she was full of her good fortune, and she made us each a gift of three hotels.

Apparently it had been decided that our circumstances were special, and that was a relief, although it suggested that Sylvie had already begun to draw attention to herself.

Days and weeks passed the same way, and finally we began to think of other things.

That's how psychotic breaks be

One read Powers Meet, and another, which had been the flap of an envelope,

had a penciled message in anonymous hand: I think of you.

Not like this scoob

I noticed that the leaves would be lifted up by something that came before the wind, they would tack against some impalpable movement of air several seconds before the wind was heard in the trees.

This meant that in summer we were seldom sent to bed before ten or eleven o’clock, a freedom to which we never became accustomed.

mine a defrocked bride with a balding skull and Lucille’s a filthy and eyeless Rose Red. Long after we knew we were too old for dolls, we played out intricate, urgent dramas of entrapment and miraculous escape. When the evenings came they were chill because the mountains cast such long shadows over the land and over the lake.

Hereditary trauma. Dolls made effigies, perhaps foreshadowing some coming nonsense

Then we would take our dolls inside and play on the floor in the circle of chairs and couches, by the refracted, lunar light of the vacant sky, while darkness began to fill the room, to lift the ice-blue doilies from the sodden sleeves of chairs.

THIS AINT GOOD CHIEF

We looked at the window as we ate, and we listened to the crickets and nighthawks, which were always unnaturally loud then, perhaps because they were within the bounds that light would fix around us, or perhaps because one sense is a shield for the others and we had lost our sight.

Blindnes is protection

the mountains

Those which cast freezing shadows over Fingerbone

in December.

The depths of Winter

She was wearing, besides her rubbers and her hunting jacket, two dresses and seven flannel shirts, not to keep off the cold, Sylvie said, but to show herself a woman of substance.

Schizotypal tings

She had crept off to the freight yard one morning in the dark, leaving no word but a pearl ring which had never before been known to leave her hand. The pearl was brown as a horse’s tooth and very small. Sylvie kept the ring in a little box with her hairpins.

In Butte the old woman had lain on her back and laced her fingers, and her breath had stood above her. When she arrived in Wenatchee, the ghost was gone, the exorcism accomplished.

“You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time,” Sylvie said. When she remembered that we were there and that we were children she sometimes tried to make her stories useful.

It was the wind, Alma said. The wind was as rank as a hunter and never the same twice. At night it retreated into the mountains where the creatures prowl and whelp, and before day it came down again, smelling of blood.

What in the goddamn

All three pieces were painted creamy white, and would have been completely unremarkable, except that my grandfather had once ornamented them. On the doors of the wardrobe there appeared to have been a hunting scene, turbaned horsemen on a mountainside. On the head of the bed he had painted a peacock, hennish body, emerald tail. On the dresser he had put a wreath or garland, held in the hands of two cherubs who swam in ether, garments trailing. Each of these designs had been thought better of and painted out, but over years the white paint had absorbed them, floated them up just beneath the surface. I was always reminded of pictures, images, in places where images never were, in marble, in the blue net of veins at my wrists, in the pearled walls of seashells.

Symbolic of Sylvie and the girls; maybe Molly, Helen, and Sylvie

These had clearly been taken from a photograph album, because they were especially significant or because they were not especially significant. None of them was of a person or a place we knew. Many were of formally dressed gentlemen posing in front of a rose arbor.

I found page 2 of a brochure of, it seemed, great and obvious significance. It was slick and heavy, like a page from National Geographic, and it was folded in thirds like a letter. At the top of the page was printed, Tens of millions in Honan Province alone. Then there was a series of photographs. One showed a barefoot boy standing in stark sunlight, squinting at the camera. Another showed a barefoot man squatting against a wall, his face hidden in the shadow of a large hat. Another showed a young woman feeding a baby from a cup. The fourth was of three old women standing in a row, shading their eyes with their hands. The fifth was of a squinting girl and a thin pig. The pig was not facing the camera. At the foot of the page was printed, in italics, I will make you fishers of men.

Christianity, clearly, but I wonder what more??

Her net would sweep the turning world unremarked as a wind in the grass, and when she began to pull it in, perhaps in a pell-mell ascension of formal gentlemen and thin pigs and old women and odd socks that would astonish this lower world, she would gather the net, so easily, until the very burden itself lay all in a heap just under the surface. One last pull of measureless power and ease would spill her catch into the boat, gasping and amazed, gleaming rainbows in the rarer light.

White savior, Christoimperialism

Such a net, such a harvesting, would put an end to all anomaly. If it swept the whole floor of heaven, it must, finally, sweep the black floor of Fingerbone, too.

Fingerbone is Hell

From there, we must imagine, would arise a great army of paleolithic and neolithic frequenters of the lake—berry gatherers and hunters and strayed children from those and all subsequent eons, down to the earliest present, to the faith-healing lady in the long, white robe who rowed a quarter of a mile out and tried to walk back in again just at sunrise, to the farmer who bet five dollars one spring that the ice was still strong enough for him to gallop his horse across. Add to them the swimmers, the boaters and canoers, and in such a crowd my mother would hardly seem remarkable. There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole.

Parallels with how Ruth talked about Sylvia's post-widowing conception of rightness

It was perhaps only from watching gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds that dragged rain the length of the lake that I imagined such an enterprise might succeed. Or it was from watching gnats sail out of the grass, or from watching some discarded leaf gleaming at the top of the wind. Ascension seemed at such times a natural law.

:ozymandias:

For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

A painful yearning for it all to mean something

The months that intervened were certainly the last and perhaps the first true summer of my life.

Summer as ...?

Then our being there on a bitter morning in ruined and unsuitable clothes, wordlessly looking at the water, would be entirely understandable.

Needing to be MORE traumatized to feel like their pain is valid

Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection.

YALL STOP PRAYIN FOR GRANDPA HE IS TOO STRONG

Say that this resurrection was general enough to include my grandmother, and Helen, my mother. Say that Helen lifted our hair from our napes with her cold hands and gave us strawberries from her purse. Say that my grandmother pecked our brows with her whiskery lips, and then all of them went down the road to our house, my grandfather youngish and high-pocketed, just outside their conversation, like a difficult memory, or a ghost. Then Lucille and I could run off to the woods, leaving them to talk of old times, and make sandwiches for lunch and show each other snapshots.

While she became a small woman, I became a towering child. What twinges, what aches I felt, what gathering toward fecundity, what novel and inevitable rhythms, were the work of my strenuous imagining.

No one would find us.

NotLikeThis

strawberry

so overgrown and rounded by grass that we could not tell just where the verge was.

(which we only looked at and threw things into)

I don't like where thos is headed

wild strawberries

In gardens they perish.)

like children at a funeral.

I myself felt the gaze of the world as a distorting mirror that squashed her plump and stretched me narrow.

But I went to the woods for the woods’ own sake, while, increasingly, Lucille seemed to be enduring a banishment there.

Evening was her special time of day.

It was pleasant when she scolded us for coming in late, for playing in our school clothes, for staying out in the cold without our coats on.

Anything! Anything at all!!

Then Lucille began to scratch fiercely at her arms and her knees. “I must have got into something,” she said, and she stood up and pulled the chain of the overhead light.

Lucille had startled us all, flooding the room so suddenly with light, exposing heaps of pots and dishes, the two cupboard doors which had come unhinged and were propped against the boxes of china.

Sylvie had beaten out the flames with a back issue of Good Housekeeping, but she had never replaced the curtain.

the clutter of ordinary life on the deck of a drowned ship.

Lucille sighed again and consented to the darkness.

Sylvie was relieved and...