Housekeeping: A Novel (21 page)

“But you and Ruthie are together a lot.”

“Oh, all the time now. She’s like another sister to me. She’s her mother all over again.”

There was a long silence.

The ladies who came to speak to Sylvie had a clear intention, a settled purpose, yet they were timid about threading the labyrinths of our privacy. They had some general notions of tact but very little practice in the use of it, and so they tended to err on the side of caution, to deal in indirection, and to succumb to embarrassment. They had salved the injured and tended the ill and soothed and grieved with those who mourned, obedient to Biblical injunction, and those who were too sad and solitary to want their sympathy they had fed or clothed, to the extent of their slender means, in the silence of heart that made their charity acceptable. If their good works supplied the lack of other diversions, they were good women all the same. They had been made to enact the gestures and attitudes of Christian benevolence from young girlhood, until these gestures and attitudes became habit, and the habit became so strongly engrained as to seem to be impulse or instinct. For if Fingerbone was remarkable for anything besides loneliness and murder, it was for religious zeal of the purest and rarest kind. There were, in fact, several churches whose visions of sin and salvation were so ecstatic, and so nearly identical, that the superiority of
one church over another could be argued only in terms of good works. And the obligation to perform these works rested squarely with the women, since salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.

Their motives in coming were complex and unsearchable, but all of one general kind. They were obliged to come by their notions of piety and good breeding, and by a desire, a determination, to keep me, so to speak, safely within doors. For surely they had in recent months remarked in me a tendency to comb my hair almost never, and to twist it and chew at it continually. They had no way of knowing that I spoke at all these past few months, since I spoke only to Sylvie. So they had reason to feel that my social graces were eroding away, and that soon I would feel ill at ease in a cleanly house with glass in its windows—I would be lost to ordinary society. I would be a ghost, and their food would not answer to my hunger, and my hands could pass through their down quilts and tatted pillow covers and never feel them or find comfort in them. Like a soul released, I would find here only the images and simulacra of the things needed to sustain me. If the mountain that stood up behind Fingerbone were Vesuvius, and if one night it drowned the place in stone, and the few survivors and the curious came to view the flood and assess the damage, and to clean the mess away with dynamite and picks, they would find petrified pies and the fossils of casseroles, and be mocked by appearances. In much the same way, the tramps, when they doffed their hats and stepped into the kitchen as they might do when the weather was
severe, looked into the parlor and murmured, “Nice place you have here,” and the lady who stood at the elbow of any one of them knew that if she renounced her husband and cursed her children and offered all that had been theirs to this lonely, houseless, placeless man, soon or late he would say “Thanks” and be gone into the evening, being the hungriest of human creatures and finding nothing here to sustain him, leaving it all, like something dropped in a corner by the wind. Why should they all feel judgment in the fact that these nameless souls looked into their lighted windows without envy and took the best of suppers as no more than their meager due?

Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand. Perhaps, pious as they were, these ladies did not wish to see me pass into that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one’s neighbors.

“Do you hear anything from their father?”

Sylvie must have shaken her head.

“Or Mr. Fisher?”

“Who?”

“Your husband, dear.”

Sylvie laughed.

There was a long silence.

Finally someone said, “Do you know why we’re asking all these questions?”

Maybe Sylvie nodded, or shook her head. She said nothing.

The lady persisted. “Some people—some of us—feel that Ruthie should have—that a young girl needs an orderly life.”

“She’s had so much trouble and sorrow.” So much, yes, she has, it’s the Lord’s truth, it’s a pity. It is.

“Really, she’s all right,” Sylvie answered.

Murmurs. One of them said. “She looks so sad.”

And Sylvie replied, “Well, she
is
sad.”

Silence.

Sylvie said, “She should be sad.” She laughed. “I don’t mean she
should
be, but, you know, who wouldn’t be?”

Again, silence.

“That’s how it is with family,” Sylvie said. “You feel them the most when they’re gone. I knew a woman once who had four children, and she didn’t seem to care for them at all. She’d give them string beans for breakfast, and she never even cared if their shoes matched. That’s what people told me. But I knew her when she was old, and she had nine little beds in her house, all made up, and every night she’d go from one to another, tucking the children in, over and over again. She just had four, but after they were all gone she had nine! Well, she was probably crazy. But you know what I mean. Helen and Papa were never close.”

Silence.

“Now I look at Ruthie and I see Helen, too. That’s why families are so important. Other people walk out the door and they’re gone!”

Silence. A shifting of the couch.

“Families should stay together. Otherwise things get out of control. My father, you know. I can’t even remember what he was like, I mean when he was alive. But ever since, it’s Papa here and Papa there, and dreams . . . Like the poor woman with nine children. She was walking the floor the whole night!”

No one said anything for a long time. Finally someone said, “Families are a sorrow, and that’s the truth,” and another one said, “I lost my girl sixteen years ago in June and her face is before me now,” and someone else said, “If you can keep them, that’s bad enough, but if you lose them—” The world is full of trouble. Yes it is.

“Families should stay together,” Sylvie said. “They should. There is no other help. Ruthie and I have trouble enough with the ones we’ve lost already.” The ladies seemed absorbed in thoughts of their own. Finally someone said, “But, Sylvie, you have to keep her off the freight trains.”

“What?”

“She shouldn’t be riding around in freight cars.”

“Oh, no,” Sylvie laughed. “That was just the one time. We were so tired, you know. We’d been out all night, and we just took the fastest way home.”

“Out where?”

“On the lake.”

Murmurs. “In that little boat?”

“It’s a perfectly good boat. It doesn’t look like much but it’s all right.”

The ladies said goodbye, and left their offerings on the couch.

I came in and sat on the floor with Sylvie, and we ate bits and morsels from the pots and plates they had left behind.

“Did you hear what they said?” Sylvie asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

“What did you think?”

The room was dark. The cans in their towering stack gleamed blue and the effect was cold and melancholy. I said, “I don’t want to talk.”

“I don’t know what to think,” Sylvie said. “We could fix it up around here,” she said finally. “Some of this stuff could go out to the shed, I suppose.”

The next day I combed my hair and went to school, and when I came home Sylvie had emptied the parlor of cans entirely and had begun to remove the newspapers. She had put a bouquet of artificial flowers on the kitchen table, and she was frying chicken. “Now, isn’t this nice?” she asked, and then, “Did you have a nice day at school?”

Sylvie was pretty, but she was prettiest when something had just startled her into feeling that the world had to be dealt with in some way, and then she undertook the most ordinary things with an arch, tense, tentative good will that made them seem difficult and remarkable, and she was delighted by even partial successes.

“School was fine,” I said. It was terrible. I had outgrown my dress, and whenever I ceased to control myself by a conscious effort of will, my feet began to dance or I bit my knuckles or twisted my hair. I could not appear
to pay attention to the teacher for fear she might call on me and I would suddenly be the center of attention. I drew elaborate shapes all over my tablet, which I changed whenever they seemed on the point of becoming recognizable. This was to divert my thoughts from the impulse to walk out of the room, which was very strong, although I could count on the benignity of Miss Knoll, who was so obese that she wore laceless sneakers and the tongues popped up, and who wept when she read Keats and was ashamed.

“Did you see Lucille?”

“No.” Yes. Lucille was everywhere, but we did not speak.

“Maybe she’s sick. Maybe I should go over there and find out how she is. I’m her aunt.”

“Yes.” What could it matter? It seemed to me that the fragility of our household was by now so great that the breach was inevitable, and so it was futile to worry whether there was wisdom or sense in any particular scheme to save it. One thing or another would put an end to it soon.

“I’ll take her some chicken,” Sylvie said. Yes, take her some chicken. Sylvie was so struck with this idea that she set apart the neck for herself and the wings for me and bundled all the rest into a tea towel. She washed her hands and pinned back her hair and set off for Lucille’s.

It was late when she came back. I had chewed at the chicken wings and gone to bed with
Not as a Stranger
. She came upstairs and sat down at the foot of the bed. “Those women have been talking to Lucille,” she said. “Do you know what they want to do?”

“Yes.”

“Lucille told me. I don’t think they can do it, do you?”

“No.” Yes.

“I don’t think so, either. It would be terrible. They know that.”

“Yes.” Yes. It would be terrible. They know that.

“I thought they just wanted to talk about the freight train. I thought they understood. But Lucille says now it’s because we spent the night on the lake. Well, I’ll explain to them.”

Explain to them, Sylvie.

“Don’t worry.” She patted the lump my knee made in the blanket. “I’ll explain it all to them.” I finally fell asleep despite the noise Sylvie made washing and stacking dishes. In the morning the kitchen table was cleared and scrubbed and there was a bowl and a spoon and a box of cornflakes and a glass of orange juice and two pieces of buttered toast on a saucer and the vase of artificial daisies. Sylvie was filthy with newsprint and there were cobwebs in her hair.

“This is nice,” I said.

She nodded. “What a mess! Honestly. I was up the whole night. Now, you eat breakfast. You’ll be late for school.”

“Do you think I should stay home and help?”

“No! You go to school, Ruthie. I’ll help you brush out your hair. You’ve got to look nice.”

I had never imagined that Sylvie was capable of haste or urgency. I was surprised, in fact, that she would go to such lengths for my sake. It had always seemed to me that Sylvie and I were there together purely as a matter
of accident—the wind blows a milkweed puff and two seeds do not fly. It seemed to me that we shared the house amicably because it was spacious enough and we both felt at home there and because habits of politeness were deeply engrained in us both. If a judge were to appear and whisk me under his black robes like a hobo in our grandmother’s cautionary tales, and carry me off to the rumored farm, a shock would roll through the house, and rattle the plates, and totter the cups, and ring in the glasses for days, perhaps, and Sylvie would have another story to tell, not so very sad compared with others. Yet here was purpose and urgency. I knew we were doomed. I put on a skirt which Sylvie had let down for me and pressed (things like that matter to them, she said), and my best sweater, and Sylvie worried the largest snarls out of my hair with a wide-tooth comb. “Now stand up straight,” she said as I went out the door. “Smile at people.” I spent the day in misery and suspense, and I came home to find Sylvie sitting in a swept and catless parlor, speaking softly with the sheriff.

It is a terrible thing to break up a family. If you understand that, you will understand everything that follows. The sheriff knew it as well as anyone, and his face was slack with regret. “There’ll be a hearing, Mrs. Fisher,” he said, wearily, because whatever Sylvie might say, he could make no other reply.

“It would be a terrible thing to do,” Sylvie said, and the sheriff dropped his palms on his knees by way of agreement and said, “There’ll be a hearing, ma’am.” When I came into the room he rose and clutched his hat under his belly. He had all the formality of manner
of an undertaker, and I said “Good evening” to him out of kindness. “Excuse us grown folks,” he said. “We got to talk.” So I went up to my room and left my fate to work itself out, since I had no curiosity about what was destined for me, and no doubt.