Housekeeping

by Marilynne Robinson

were clearly the habits of a transient. They offended Lucille’s sense of propriety.

Property of what, Lucille? Be real with me here

Lucille had a familiar, Rosette Browne, whom she feared and admired, and through whose eyes she continually imagined she saw.

Lucille, you're crazy, dawg

Spokane

We keep hearing about Spokane. Some far-off Shangri-La, though Sylvie has assured the children that Spokane is unremarkable.

Sylvie suffered in such comparisons, it was true, and yet I was reassured by her sleeping on the lawn, and now and then in the car, and by her interest in all newspapers, irrespective of their dates, and by her pork-and-bean sandwiches. It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave.

Let us behold why

Lucille put down her fork. “Why do you get involved with such trashy people? It’s embarrassing!

“I wouldn’t say ‘trashy,’ Lucille. She didn’t strangle anyone.”

GO OFF QUEEN

Lucille was at this time an intermediary between Sylvie and those demure but absolute arbiters who continually sat in judgment of our lives.

Rosette Browne’s mother might say, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” and Rosette Browne might say, “Ignorance of the law is the crime, Mother!”

Even as she offered them, Lucille must have known that such arguments were extraneous. She herself regarded Sylvie with sympathy, but no mercy, and no tolerance.

fallow little park that memorialized war dead,

The fallowness of war cannot be rectified by even the blood of its dead

It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible—incompletely and minimally existent, in fact.

"incompletely and minimally" does Ruth exist

It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares. But my allusion to this feeling of ghostliness sounded peculiar, and sweat started all over my body, convicting me on the spot of gross corporeality.

“Well, maybe that will change,” Sylvie said. We walked a while without speaking. “Maybe it won’t.” I dropped a step behind and watched her face. She always spoke to me in the voice of an adult dispensing wisdom. I wanted to ask her if she knew what she thought, and if so, what the experience of that sort of knowledge was like, and if not, whether she, too, felt ghostly, as I imagined she must. I waited for Sylvie to say, “You’re like me.” I thought she might say, “You’re like your mother.” I feared and suspected that Sylvie and I were of a kind, and waited for her to claim me, but...

Her advice to me never held her attention even as long as it held mine.

She stripped a willow switch and broke the necks of dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace that bloomed near the road.

Interesting, violent diction

“She’s leaving,” I said. “She always does that. She just wanders away.” Lucille picked up her dish towel and threw it at the front door.

In such cases the advocate will merge with the accused.

“They’re all over by the station. I had an idea about pancakes.” She made Bisquick batter, and stirred the berries into it while we attempted to list all the nations of the world.

Despite being "transient" and eccentric, Sylvie continues to take care of them. Even when Lucille lashes out.

We were close then, like you two.”

Latvia,”

A Balkan state, and therefore a product of being broken up without consent.

“We always forgot Liechtenstein. Or Andorra. Or San Marino.”

The three small, isolated countries; not unlik them.

Lucille’s mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow (more than I ever knew or she could prove) who was killed in an accident. My mother presided over a life so strictly simple and circumscribed that it could not have made any significant demands on her attention. She tended us with a gentle indifference that made me feel she would have liked to have been even more alone—she was the abandoner, and not the one abandoned.

Lucille accused me once of trying to defend Sylvie at our mother’s expense.

Revealing

For by now we knew, though the certainty was not especially reassuring, that Sylvie was ours.

At last we had slid from her lap like one of those magazines full of responsible opinion about discipline and balanced meals.

As we sometimes realized, we were now in Sylvie’s dream with her.

But we went there, leaving the house at dawn, joined at the road by a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg, and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at such length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again. She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clambered up the rocks and into the dusty dark of the woods.

we said we had cut the devil’s throat.

and to look for huckleberries.

to be smoked as we walked.

Emulating their smoker-mother

We walked north, with the lake on our right hand. If we looked at it, the water seemed spread over half the world. The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light.

But the lake at our feet was plain, clear water, bottomed with smooth stones or simple mud. It was quick with small life, like any pond, as modest in its transformations of the ordinary as any puddle. Only the calm persistence with which the water touched, and touched, and touched, sifting all the little stones, jet, and white, and hazel, forced us to remember that the lake was vast, and in league with the moon (for no sublunar account could be made of its shimmering, cold life).

Like Fingerbone itself