Housekeeping: A Novel (16 page)

“She’s growing up,” Mr. French said. “Education should matter. What
does
matter to you, Ruth?”

I shrugged. Mr. French shrugged, mocking me. “That’s what I mean,” he said, “by a problem of attitude.”

“She hasn’t figured out what matters to her yet. She likes trees. Maybe she’ll be a botanist or something.”

Mr. French eyed me doubtfully. “Are you going to be a botanist, Ruthie?”

I said, “I don’t think so.”

Mr. French sighed and stood up and put down his chalk. “You’re going to have to learn to speak for yourself, and think for yourself, that’s for sure.”

Lucille looked steadily at my face. “She has her own ways,” she said quietly.

That was the only time Lucille and I spent together at school. I saw her often, but she avoided me. She became one of a group of girls who ate lunch in the Home Economics room. I ate lunch wherever I could find enough space to seat myself without appearing to wish to insinuate myself into a group, or a conversation, and I read while I ate. Lunches were terrible. I could scarcely swallow. It seemed as if I were trying to eat a peanut-butter sandwich while hanging by the neck. It was a relief to go to Latin class, where I had a familiar place in a human group, alphabetically assigned. Schoolwork itself became a sort of refuge, and I became neat and scrupulous, though sometimes I would sweat with the urge to run home and see if the house was empty. When I could fix my thoughts again on a hypotenuse, I was relieved and even happy. Mr. French, after a month or two, called me to his office to tell me he was glad to hear that my attitude had in fact changed. He had a thick stack of my neat and perfect papers lying on the corner of his desk. I knew nothing then, and I know nothing now, of the mechanics of such things as attitudes, and if it pleased him to say that I had one, and that it had changed, I would not argue. But the fact was that I preferred Latin to lunch, and to daydreaming, and I was afraid to go down to the lake alone that autumn.

Sylvie was often at the lake. Sometimes she came home with fish in her pockets. She would rinse them under the tap to get the lint out of their gills and fry them with their heads on and eat them with catsup. Lucille had grown fastidious. She lived on vegetable soup and cottage cheese, which she ate by herself in the
orchard or the porch or in her room. Sylvie and I sat alone at dinner, in the dark, and we were silent. Sylvie took Lucille’s absence as a rebuke, or a rebuff, and was sad about it, clearly, for she had no stories at all to tell me. “It was cold today,” she would murmur, her face turned to the blue window, and her eyes as wide and mild as the eyes of a blind woman. Her hands would caress each other in a slow gesture of warming. Bones, bones, I thought, in a fine sheath of flesh like Sunday gloves. Her hands were long, and her throat long and her cheeks lank. I wondered if she could be warmed and nourished. If I were to take hold of those bone hands, could I squeeze warmth into them?

“There’s still some soup left,” I would say.

Sylvie would shake her head, no thank you.

One night as we sat like that, Lucille left for a dance, wearing an apricot dress she had made in the sewing room at school. She pulled her school coat over her shoulders without putting her arms in the sleeves, said good night, and went out to wait for her date by the side of the road. When Lucille closed the door behind her the house seemed very empty. I sat alone, watching Sylvie, and it seemed that she would never move. “I have something pretty to show you,” Sylvie said. “A place I found. It’s really very pretty. There’s a little valley between two hills where someone built a house and planted an orchard and even started to dig a well. A long time ago. But the valley is very narrow, and it runs north and south, so it hardly gets any sun at all. The frost stays on the ground all day long, up until July. Some of the apple trees are still alive, but they’re only as high as
my shoulder. If we go there now it will be all covered with frost. The frost is so thick that the grass cracks when you step on it.”

“Where is it?”

“North. I found a little boat. I don’t really think it belongs to anybody. One of its oarlocks is loose, but it doesn’t leak very much or anything like that.”

“I’d like to go.”

“Tomorrow?”

“No. I have to study tomorrow.”

“We could go Monday if you like. I could write you a note.”

“Monday I have a test. That’s why I have to study.”

“Another day, then.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to study now?”

“I have to write a book report.”

“What on?”

“The Prince and the Pauper
.”

“I don’t remember much about that one.”

“It’s pretty good.”

Sylvie said, “I should read. I don’t know why I stopped. I always enjoyed it.”

I went up to my room and she came up behind me. She found
Ivanhoe
on the dresser and lay down on Lucille’s side of the bed, holding the book above her face. When Sylvie lay down there was nothing of crouch or sprawl. Even when she slept, her body retained the formality of posture one learns when one sleeps on park benches, and as often as not she kept her shoes on.

For some time Sylvie peered up into the book with an expression of concentration and interest. Then she lowered
the book a few inches and peered up at the ceiling with just the same expression. Finally she lowered the book into her lap. Even when I sat at the vanity with my back to her, I was aware of her lying there, and I could not keep my mind on my work. “Sylvie,” I said once, but her eyes did not change. I waited a long time for Lucille to come home, though when she did come I hunched over my tablet and pretended not to notice. She came up the stairs and leaned in the doorway.

“Hi, Ruthie.”

“Hi, Lucille. Was the dance nice?”

She shrugged. “It was okay.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I’m tired. I’ll sleep downstairs.” She nodded toward Sylvie. “You should at least throw something over her,” she said, and she went downstairs.

I lifted
Ivanhoe
out of Sylvie’s hands and pulled off her shoes and spread a quilt up to her chin. Her eyes blinked shut and then opened again.

“Are you awake, Sylvie?”

“What? Yes.” She smiled.

“What have you been thinking about?”

“Old times, mostly. People you don’t know. Is Lucille home?”

“Yes. She said she’d sleep downstairs.”

“Well, we can’t let her do that.” Sylvie got up and slipped on her shoes and went downstairs. In a few minutes she came back up again and said, “Lucille isn’t here.”

“She has to be.”

“I can’t find her.”

Lucille, as we learned the next morning, had walked
in her dancing dress and her apricot slippers to the home of Miss Royce, the Home Economics teacher. She had walked around the house, rapping at every window she could reach, until she managed to startle the lady from her tense slumbers, and then she was invited in and the two of them talked the night about Lucille’s troubles at home. Miss Royce was a solitary woman, too high-strung to be capable of friendships with children. She fluttered around her students with frightened devotion. Now and then she made a small inroad into their indifference—they would laugh at some little joke, or address some casual remark to her. Once, some of the boys had locked her in the supply closet, and once, someone had made a rabbity caricature of her face and hung it up beside the athletic trophies. At such times her eyes streamed tears. But embarrassment was dull routine for her, while acceptance was vivid and remarkable and memorable. And now here was Lucille, wandering through the dark to her house. Miss Royce gave her the spare room. In effect, she adopted her, and I had no sister after that night.

It surprised me that Lucille left so abruptly. I walked up and down Sycamore Street—not looking for her, of course, but acting as if I were, since I had no other way to soothe my disquiet. It was a windy, chilly night. I knew that Lucille would not go off in the dark by herself if she did not have somewhere to go. No one could be more concerned with Lucille’s well-being than she was.

When I went back into the house Sylvie was sitting in a kitchen chair with the telephone book in her lap
and her hands folded on it. “We should call the sheriff,” she said.

“All right.”

She opened the book and smoothed it open with her hands. “Do you think we should call him?”

“I suppose.”

“It’s so late,” she said. “Maybe we should call him in the morning.”

“He’ll probably wonder why we waited so long.”

“That’s true,” Sylvie said. She closed the book and put it aside. “It’s usually best not to bother them. They have that way. Suddenly everything you do seems wrong. The simplest things.” She smiled and shrugged.

“She probably went to a friend’s house.”

“I’m sure she’s all right,” Sylvie said. “I really don’t want to bother the sheriff. She should come back any minute. I’ll wait up for her.”

The next morning Miss Royce, in her church clothes, knocked at the door. She and Sylvie talked for a while on the front step. I watched them from the parlor window—little old Miss Royce in her brown box suit with the salmon-pink bow at the throat, talking tensely and earnestly to Sylvie, who shrugged or nodded and looked to the side. Finally, Sylvie came in and went upstairs and came down again carrying Lucille’s school-books and her diary. She set them down on the step and Miss Royce packed them one by one into a carpet bag. Sylvie came back in before Miss Royce had finished arranging them. She sat down on the couch beside me and took up a doily and plucked at it. My grandmother’s doilies used to be giant and stiff and bristling, like cactus blossoms, and now they were drab as lint, and fallen.
“Lucille said you could have her things,” Sylvie said. “She didn’t want any of her clothes. Not even her hairbrush.”

“Maybe she doesn’t plan to be gone long.”

“Maybe she doesn’t.” Sylvie smiled at me. “Poor Ruthie. Well, we’ll be better friends. There are some things I want to show you.”

“Tomorrow.”

“That’s Monday.”

“You can write an excuse for me.”

“All right.”

Sylvie made up a lunch that night after supper and we set the alarm clock for five and went to sleep early, with our clothes on. Nevertheless, Sylvie had to tease me awake. She pinched my cheek and pulled my ear. Then she set my feet on the floor and pulled me up by the hands. I sat down on the bed again and fell over onto the pillow, and she laughed. “Get up!”

“In a minute.”

“Now! Breakfast is ready!”

I crouched on the covers, hoarding warmth and sleep, while they passed off me like a mist. “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” Sylvie said. She picked up my hand, patted it, toyed with my fingers. When I was no longer warm enough or quite asleep, I sat up. “Good girl,” Sylvie said. The room was dark. When Sylvie put the light on, it still seemed sullen and full of sleep. There were cries of birds, sharp and rudimentary, that stung like sparks or hail. And even in the house I could smell how raw the
wind was. That sort of wind brought out a musk in the fir trees and spread the cold breath of the lake everywhere. There was nothing out there—no smell of wood smoke or oatmeal—to hint at human comfort, and when I went outside I would be miserable. It was almost November and long before dawn, and I did not want to leave my bed.

“Come, Ruthie,” Sylvie said, and pulled me by both hands toward the door.

“My shoes,” I said. She stopped, still holding my hands, and I stepped into them, but she did not wait for me to tie the laces.

“Come on, come on. Down the stairs, now.”

“Do we have to hurry?”

“Yes. Yes. We have to hurry.” She opened the trapdoor and went down the stairs ahead of me, still pulling me by one hand. In the kitchen she stopped to scoop an egg out of the frying pan and set it on a piece of bread. “There’s your breakfast,” she said. “You can eat it while we walk.”

“I have to tie my shoes,” I said to her back as she walked out to the porch. “Wait!” but the screen door slammed behind her. I tied my shoes and found my coat and pulled it on, and ran out the door after her.

The grass was blue with frost. The road was so cold it rang as I stepped on it, and the houses and trees and sky were one flat black. A bird sang with a sound like someone scraping a pot, and was silent. I had given up all sensation to the discomforts of cold and haste and hunger, and crouched far inside myself, still sleeping. Finally, Sylvie was in front of me, and I put my hands in my pockets, and tilted my head, and strode, as she did,
and it was as if I were her shadow, and moved after her only because she moved and not because I willed this pace, this pocketing of the hands, this tilt of the head. Following her required neither will nor effort. I did it in my sleep.