Housekeeping: A Novel (24 page)

“We’ve got to go if we’re going,” Sylvie said. “Are you all buttoned up? You should have a hat.” She put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed me. She whispered, “It’s not the worst thing, Ruthie, drifting. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

It was a dark and clouded night, but the tracks led to the lake like a broad path. Sylvie walked in front of me. We stepped on every other tie, although that made our
stride uncomfortably long, because stepping on every tie made it uncomfortably short. But it was easy enough. I followed after Sylvie with slow, long, dancer’s steps, and above us the stars, dim as dust in their Babylonian multitudes, pulled through the dark along the whorls of an enormous vortex—for that is what it is, I have seen it in pictures—were invisible, and the moon was long down. I could barely see Sylvie. I could barely see where I put my feet. Perhaps it was only the certainty that she was in front of me, and that I need only put my foot directly before me, that made me think I saw anything at all.

“What if a train comes?” I asked.

And she answered, “There’s no train till morning.”

I could feel the bridge rising, and then suddenly a watery wind blew up my legs and billowed my coat, and more than that, there were the sliding and shimmering sounds of the water, quiet sounds but wide—if you dive under water and stay down till your breath gives out, when you come up into the air again, you hear space and distance. It was like that. A wave turned a stick or a stone on some black beach how many miles away, and I heard it at my ear. To be suddenly above the water was a giddy thing, an elation, and made me uncertain of my steps. I had to think of other things. I thought of the house behind me, all turned to fire, and the fire leaping and whirling in its own fierce winds. Imagine the spirit of the house breaking out the windows and knocking down the doors, and all the neighbors astonished at the sovereign ease with which it burst its tomb, broke up its grave. Bang! and the clay that had held the shape of the Chinese jar was shattered, and the jar was a whirl
in the air, ascending . . . bang! and the bureau mirror fell in shivers the shape of flame and had nothing to show but fire. Every last thing would turn to flame and ascend, so cleanly would the soul of the house escape, and all Fingerbone would come marveling to see the smoldering place where its foot had last rested.

I did not dare to turn my head to see if the house was burning. I was afraid that if I turned at all I would lose my bearings and misstep. It was so dark there might have been no Sylvie ahead of me, and the bridge might have created itself under my foot as I walked, and vanished again behind me.

But I could hear the bridge. It was wooden, and it creaked. It leaned in the slow rhythm that moves things in water. The current pulled it south, and under my feet I could feel it drift south ever so slightly, and then right itself again. This rhythm seemed to be its own. It had nothing to do, as far as I could tell, with the steady rush of water toward the river. The slow creaking made me think of a park by the water where my mother used to take Lucille and me. It had a swing built of wood, as high as a scaffold and loose in all its joints, and when my mother pushed me the scaffold leaned after me, and creaked. That was where she sat me on her shoulders so that I could paddle my hands in the chestnut leaves, so cool, and that was the day we bought hamburgers at a white cart for supper and sat on a green bench by the seawall feeding all the bread to the sea gulls and watching the ponderous ferries sail between sky and water so precisely the same electric blue that there was no horizon. The horns of the ferries made huge, delicate sounds, like cows lowing. They should have left a milky breath
in the air. I thought they did, but that was just the sound lingering. My mother was happy that day, we did not know why. And if she was sad the next, we did not know why. And if she was gone the next, we did not know why. It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously, like a thing in water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad and heady dance.

Sylvie has, pinned to the underside of her right lapel, a newspaper clipping with the heading,
LAKE CLAIMS TWO
. It is so long that she had to fold it several times before she put the pin in. It describes our attempt to burn the house. It explains that there was soon to have been a custody hearing—neighbors were alarmed by increasingly erratic behavior. “We should have seen this coming,” one area man remarked. (Mention is made of the fact that my mother had died in the lake, also an apparent suicide.) Dogs traced us to the bridge. Townspeople began searching at dawn for the bodies, but we were never found, never found, and the search was at last abandoned.

It happened many years ago, now, and the worst of it is that in all those years we have never contacted Lucille. At first we were afraid we would be found if we tried to telephone her or send a note. “After seven years they can’t get you for anything,” Sylvie said, and seven years passed, but we both knew they could always get you for increasingly erratic behavior, and Sylvie, and I, too, have that to fear. We are drifters. And once you have set your foot in that path it is hard to imagine another one. Now and then I take a job as a waitress, or a clerk, and it is
pleasant for a while. Sylvie and I see all the movies. But finally the imposture becomes burdensome, and obvious. Customers begin to react to my smile as if it were a grimace, and suddenly something in my manner makes them count their change. If I had the choice, I would work in a truck stop. I like to overhear the stories strangers tell each other, and I like the fastidious pleasure solitary people take in the smallest details of their small comforts. In rain or hard weather they set their elbows on the counter and ask what kind of pie you have, just to hear the long old litany again. But after a while, when the customers and the waitresses and the dishwasher and the cook have told me, or said in my hearing, so much about themselves that my own silence seems suddenly remarkable, then they begin to suspect me, and it is as if I put a chill on the coffee by serving it. What have I to do with these ceremonies of sustenance, of nurturing? They begin to ask why I do not eat anything myself. It would put meat on your bones, they say. Once they begin to look at me like that, it is best that I leave.

When did I become so unlike other people? Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain. Or it was at my conception.

Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and
suddenly—My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me. But this I have in common with all my kind. By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. So they seal the door against our returning.

Then there is the matter of my mother’s abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

I believe it was the crossing of the bridge that changed me finally. The terrors of the crossing were considerable. Twice I stumbled and fell. And a wind came up from the north, so that the push of the wind and the pull of the current were the same, and it seemed as though they were not to be resisted. And then it was so dark.

Something happened, something so memorable that when I think back to the crossing of the bridge, one moment bulges like the belly of a lens and all the others are at the peripheries and diminished. Was it only that the wind rose suddenly, so that we had to cower and lean against it like blind women groping their way along a wall? or did we really hear some sound too loud to be heard, some word so true we did not understand it, but merely felt it pour through our nerves like darkness or water?

I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses,
while that I have merely imagined. I will try to tell you the plain truth. Sylvie and I walked the whole black night across the railroad bridge at Fingerbone—a very long bridge, as you know if you have seen it—and we were obliged to walk slowly, by the wind and by darkness. In simple truth, we were not far from shore when dawn came, and we clambered down onto the rocks just before the eastbound rumbled out of the woods and across the bridge toward Fingerbone. We caught the next westbound and drowsed among poultry crates all the way to Seattle. From there we went to Portland, and from there to Crescent City, and from there to Vancouver, and from there again to Seattle. At first our trail was intricate so that we would elude discovery, and then it was intricate because we had no particular reason to go to one town rather than another, and no particular reason to stay anywhere, or to leave.

Sylvie and I are not travelers. We talk sometimes about San Francisco, but we have never gone there. Sylvie still has friends in Montana, so now and then we pass through Fingerbone on the way to Butte or Billings or Deer Lodge. We stand in the door to watch for the lake, and then to watch it pass, and to try to catch a glimpse of the old house, but we cannot see it from the tracks. Someone is living there. Someone has pruned the apple trees and taken out the dead ones and restrung the clothesline and patched the shed roof. Someone plants sunflowers and giant dahlias at the foot of the garden. I imagine it is Lucille, fiercely neat, stalemating the forces of ruin. I imagine doilies, high and stiff, and a bright pantry curtain, there to rebuke us with newness and a smell of starch whenever we might wander in the door.
But I know Lucille is not there. She has gone to some city, and won the admiration of skeptics by the thoroughness, the determination, with which she does whatever it is she does. Once, Sylvie called information in Boston and asked if Lucille Stone had a number listed there. Lawrence, Linda, and Lucas, the operator said, but no Lucille. So we do not know where she is, or how to find her. “She’s probably married,” Sylvie says, and no doubt she is. Someday when I am feeling presentable I will go into Fingerbone and make inquiries. I must do it soon, for such days are rare now.

All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation. For example, I pass again and again behind my grandmother’s house, and never get off at the station and walk back to see if it is still the same house, altered perhaps by the repairs the fire made necessary, or if it is a new house built on the old site. I would like to see the people who live there. Seeing them would expel poor Lucille, who has, in my mind, waited there in a fury of righteousness, cleansing and polishing, all these years. She thinks she hears someone on the walk, and hurries to open the door, too eager to wait for the bell. It is the mailman, it is the wind, it is nothing at all. Sometimes she dreams that we come walking up the road in our billowing raincoats, hunched against the cold, talking together in words she cannot quite understand. And when we look up and speak to her the words are smothered, and their intervals swelled, and their cadences distended, like sounds in water. What if I should walk to the house one night and find Lucille there? It is possible. Since we are dead, the
house would be hers now. Perhaps she is in the kitchen, snuggling pretty daughters in her lap, and perhaps now and then they look at the black window to find out what their mother seems to see there, and they see their own faces and a face so like their mother’s, so rapt and full of tender watching, that only Lucille could think the face was mine. If Lucille is there, Sylvie and I have stood outside her window a thousand times, and we have thrown the side door open when she was upstairs changing beds, and we have brought in leaves, and flung the curtains and tipped the bud vase, and somehow left the house again before she could run downstairs, leaving behind us a strong smell of lake water. She would sigh and think, “They never change.”

Or imagine Lucille in Boston, at a table in a restaurant, waiting for a friend. She is tastefully dressed—wearing, say, a tweed suit with an amber scarf at the throat to draw attention to the red in her darkening hair. Her water glass has left two-thirds of a ring on the table, and she works at completing the circle with her thumbnail. Sylvie and I do not flounce in through the door, smoothing the skirts of our oversized coats and combing our hair back with our fingers. We do not sit down at the table next to hers and empty our pockets in a small damp heap in the middle of the table, and sort out the gum wrappers and ticket stubs, and add up the coins and dollar bills, and laugh and add them up again. My mother, likewise, is not there, and my grandmother in her house slippers with her pigtail wagging, and my grandfather, with his hair combed flat against his brow, does not examine the menu with studious interest. We are nowhere in Boston. However Lucille may
look, she will never find us there, or any trace or sign. We pause nowhere in Boston, even to admire a store window, and the perimeters of our wandering are nowhere. No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.