Housekeeping: A Novel (6 page)

“It’s really warmest by the stove,” said Nona. “Take your coat off, dear. You’ll warm up faster. I’ll poach an egg for you.”

“Do you like poached eggs?” Lily asked. “I could boil one.”

“Either way would be fine,” Sylvie said. “A poached egg would be very nice.” She unbuttoned her coat and slipped her arms out of the sleeves. “What a lovely dress!” Lily exclaimed. Sylvie smoothed her skirt with her long hands. The dress was a deep green, with a satiny shine. It had short sleeves and a large round collar on which there was a brooch, a little bunch of lilies of the valley. She looked at us all and looked down at her dress
again, clearly pleased that it had made an impression. “Yes, you look very nice, my dear. Very well,” Nona said, rather loudly. She really intended this observation for her sister, just as Lily’s compliment had been intended for her. They shouted, for the sake of the other’s comprehension and because neither of them could gauge her voice very well, and each of them considered her sister’s hearing worse than her own, so each of them spoke a little louder than she had to. And they had lived all their lives together, and felt that they had a special language between them. So when Lily said, with a glance at Nona, “What a lovely dress,” it was as if to say, “She seems rather sane! She seems rather normal!” And when Nona said, “You look very well,” it was as if to say, “Perhaps she’ll do! Perhaps she can stay and we can go!” Sylvie sat in the simple kitchen light with her hands in her lap and her eyes on her hands, while Lily and Nona stalked about on their stiff old legs, poaching eggs and dishing up stewed prunes, flushed and elated by their secret understanding.

“Did you know Mr. Simmons died?” Lily asked.

“He must have been very old,” Sylvie said.

“And do you remember a Danny Rappaport?”

Sylvie shook her head.

“He was a class behind you in school.”

“I guess I should remember him.”

“Well, he died. I don’t know how.”

Nona said, “The funeral was announced in the paper, but there was no article about it. We thought that was strange. Just a photograph.”

“Not recent, either,” Lily grumbled. “He looked nineteen. Not a line in his face.”

“Was Mother’s funeral nice?” Sylvie asked.

“Lovely.”

“Oh, yes, very nice.”

The old sisters looked at each other.

“Very small, though, of course,” Nona said.

“Yes, she wanted it small. But you should have seen the flowers! The whole house was full. We sent half of them over to the church.”

“She didn’t want flowers,” Nona said. “She would have called it a waste.”

“She didn’t want a service.”

“I see.”

There was a silence. Nona buttered a piece of toast and slid the jelled egg onto it and broke it up with a fork as if it were for a child. Sylvie took a chair at the table and ate with her head on her hand. Nona went upstairs, and in a few minutes came down again, carrying a hot-water bottle. “I’ve put you in the hall bedroom. It’s a little close, but that’s better than a draft. There are two heavy blankets on the bed, and one lighter one, and I put a comforter on the chair.” She filled the hot-water bottle with water from the kettle and bundled it in tea towels. Lucille and I each took a suitcase and followed Sylvie upstairs.

The stairs were wide and polished, with a heavy railing and spindle banisters, dating as they did from a time when my grandfather was growing confident enough of his carpentry to use good materials and to build things that might be considered permanent. But they terminated rather oddly in a hatch or trapdoor, because at the top of the stairs one came face to face with a wall so essential to supporting the roof (which had always
sagged somewhat in the middle) that my grandfather could not bring himself to cut another door in it. So instead he had worked out a device with pulleys and window weights that made the trapdoor (which was left over from the time when the second floor was merely a loft with a ladder up to it) rise at the slightest push and then fall shut again of its own accord with a little slam. (This device prevented drafts from sweeping down the polished steps in torrents, flooding the parlor, eddying into the kitchen.) Sylvie’s bedroom was really a sort of narrow dormer with a curtain closing it off from the hallway. There was a cot in it, fattened with pillows and blankets, and a little lamp, which Nona had left burning on a shelf. There was a single round window, small and high as a fully risen moon. The dresser and chair were outside the curtain, one on each side. Sylvie, in the half-dark hallway, turned and kissed each of us. “I’ll get you presents,” she whispered. “Tomorrow, maybe.” She kissed us again and went behind the curtain, into the narrow room.

I have often wondered what it seemed like to Sylvie to come back to that house, which would have changed since she left it, shifted and settled. I imagine her with her grips in her bare hands, walking down the middle of the road, which was narrowed by the banks of plowed snow on either side, and narrowed more by the slushy pools that were forming at the foot of each bank. Sylvie always walked with her head down, to one side, with an abstracted and considering expression, as if someone were speaking to her in a soft voice. But she would have glanced up sometimes at the snow, which
was the color of heavy clouds, and the sky, which was the color of melting snow, and all the slick black planks and sticks and stumps that erupted as the snow sank away.

How must it have seemed to step into the narrow hallway which still kept (as it seemed to me) a trace of the rude odor that the funeral flowers had begun to make before Nona could bring herself to throw them away. Her hands and feet must have ached from the warmth. I remember how red and twisted her hands looked, lying in the lap of her green dress, and how she pressed her arms to her sides. I remember that, as she sat there in a wooden chair in the white kitchen, smoothing her borrowed-looking dress and working her feet out of her loafers, sustaining all our stares with the placid modesty of a virgin who has conceived, her happiness was palpable.

The day after Sylvie arrived, Lucille and I woke up early. It was our custom to prowl the dawn of any significant day. Ordinarily the house would belong to us for an hour or more, but that morning we found Sylvie sitting in the kitchen by the stove, with her coat on, eating oyster crackers from a small cellophane bag. She blinked at us, smiling. “It was nice with the light off,” she suggested, and Lucille and I collided in our haste to pull the chain. Sylvie’s coat made us think she might be leaving, and we were ready to perform great feats of docility to keep her. “Isn’t that nicer?” In fact, the wind was badgering the house, throwing frozen rain against the windows. We sat down on the rug by her feet and watched her. She handed us each an oyster cracker. “I can hardly believe I’m here,” she said finally. “I was on
the train for eleven hours. There’s so much snow in the mountains. We just crept along, for hours and hours and hours.” It was clear from her voice that the trip had been pleasant. “Have you ever been on a train?” We had not. “They have heavy white tablecloths in the dining car, and little silver vases bolted to the window frame, and you get your own little silver pot of hot syrup. I like to travel by train,” Sylvie said. “Especially in the passenger cars. I’ll take you with me sometime.”

“Take us where?” Lucille asked.

Sylvie shrugged. “Somewhere. Wherever. Where do you want to go?”

I saw the three of us posed in all the open doors of an endless train of freight cars—innumerable, rapid, identical images that produced a flickering illusion of both movement and stasis, as the pictures in a kinetoscope do. The hot and dangerous winds of our passing tattered the Queen Anne’s lace, and yet, for all the noise and clatter and headlong speed, we flickered there at the foot of the garden while the train roared on and on. “Spokane,” I said.

“Oh, somewhere better than that. Farther away. Maybe Seattle.” There was a silence. “But that’s where you used to live.”

“With our mother,” Lucille said.

“Yes.” Sylvie had folded the empty cellophane wrapper in quarters and she was creasing the folds between finger and thumb.

“Would you tell us about her?” Lucille asked. The question was abrupt, and the tone of it was coaxing, because adults did not wish to speak to us about our mother. Our grandmother never spoke of any of her
daughters, and when they were mentioned to her, she winced with irritation. We were accustomed to this, but not to the sharp embarrassment with which Lily and Nona and all my grandmother’s friends reacted to our mother’s very name. We had planned to try Sylvie, but perhaps because Sylvie had her coat on and appeared so very transient, Lucille did not wait till we knew her better, as we had agreed to do.

“Oh, she was nice,” Sylvie said. “She was pretty.”

“But what was she
like?
”

“She was good in school.”

Lucille sighed.

“It’s hard to describe someone you know so well. She was very quiet. She played the piano. She collected stamps.” Sylvie seemed to be reflecting. “I’ve never known anyone so fond of cats. She was always bringing them home.”

Lucille shifted her legs and adjusted the thick flannel skirt of her nightgown around them.

“I didn’t see much of her after she was married,” Sylvie explained.

“Then tell us about her wedding,” Lucille said.

“Oh, that was very small. She wore a sundress made of eyelet lace, and a straw hat, and she had a bouquet of daisies. It was just to please Mother. They’d already been married by a justice of the peace somewhere in Nevada.”

“Why Nevada?”

“Well, your father was from Nevada.”

“What was he like?”

Sylvie shrugged. “He was tall. Not bad-looking. Awfully quiet, though. I think he was shy.”

“What kind of work did he do?”

“He traveled. I think he sold some sort of farming equipment. Tools, maybe. I never even saw him, except for that one day. Do you know where he is now?”

“Nope,” I said. Lucille and I were remembering a day when Bernice had brought our mother a thick letter. “Reginald Stone,” she had said, tapping the return address with a lavender claw. Helen gave her a cup of coffee and sat at the table picking idly at a loose corner of the postage stamp while Bernice whispered a scandalous tale of marital fracture and reconciliation involving a cocktail waitress Bernice knew very well. Apparently concluding at last that the letter would never be opened while she was there, Bernice finally left, and when she was gone Helen tore the envelope into fourths and dropped them in the trash. Glancing into our faces as if she suddenly remembered we were there, anticipating our questions, she said, “It’s best,” and that was all we knew of our father.

I could conjure her face as it was then, startled by the sudden awareness of our watching. At the time I think I felt only curiosity, though I suppose I remember that glance because she looked at me for signs of more than curiosity. And, in fact, I recall the moment now with some astonishment—there was neither doubt nor passion in her destruction of the letter, neither hesitation nor haste—and with frustration—there was only that letter and never another one, and nothing else from him or about him at all—and with anger—he was presumably our father, and might wish to know what had become of us, and even to intervene. It occurs to me sometimes that as I grow older I am increasingly able to present to her gaze the face she seemed to expect. But of course she
was looking into a face I do not remember—no more like mine than Sylvie’s is like hers. Less like, perhaps, because, as I watched Sylvie, she reminded me of my mother more and more. There was such similarity, in fact, in the structure of cheek and chin, and the texture of hair, that Sylvie began to blur the memory of my mother, and then to displace it. Soon it was Sylvie who would look up startled, regarding me from a vantage of memory in which she had no place. And it was increasingly to this remembered Sylvie that I presented my look of conscious injury, knowing as I did so that Sylvie could know nothing of that letter.

What did Sylvie see when she thought of my mother? A girl with braided hair, a girl with freckled arms, who liked to lie on the rug in the lamplight, flat on her belly with her heels in the air and her chin on her two fists, reading Kipling. Did she tell lies? Could she keep secrets? Did she tickle, or slap, or pinch, or punch, or grimace? If someone had asked me about Lucille I would remember her with her mass of soft, fine, tangly hair concealing ears that cupped a bit and grew painfully cold if she did not cover them. I would remember that her front teeth, the permanent ones, came in, first one and much later the other, immense and raggedly serrated, and that she was fastidious about washing her hands. I would remember that when irked she bit her lip, when shy she scratched her knee, that she smelled dully clean, like chalk, or like a sun-warmed cat.

I do not think Sylvie was merely reticent. It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.
Sometimes we used to watch trains passing in the dark afternoon, creeping through the blue snow with their windows all alight, and full of people eating and arguing and reading newspapers. They could not see us watching, of course, because by five-thirty on a winter day the landscape had disappeared, and they would have seen their own depthless images on the black glass, if they had looked, and not the black trees and the black houses, or the slender black bridge and the dim blue expanse of the lake. Some of them probably did not know what it was the train approached so cautiously. Once, Lucille and I walked beside the train to the shore. There had been a freezing rain that glazed the snow with a crust of ice, and we found that, when the sun went down, the crust was thick enough for us to walk on. So we followed the train at a distance of twenty feet or so, falling now and then, because the glazed snow swelled and sank in dunes, and the tops of bushes and fence posts rose out of it in places where we did not expect them to be. But by crawling up, and sliding down, and steadying ourselves against the roofs of sheds and rabbit hutches, we managed to stay just abreast of the window of a young woman with a small head and a small hat and a brightly painted face. She wore pearl-gray gloves that reached almost to her elbows, and hooped bracelets that fell down her arms when she reached up to push a loose wisp of hair underneath her hat. The woman looked at the window very often, clearly absorbed by what she saw, which was not but merely seemed to be Lucille and me scrambling to stay beside her, too breathless to shout. When we came to the shore, where the land fell down and the bridge began to rise, we stopped and watched her window sail
slowly away, along the abstract arc of the bridge. “We could walk across the lake,” I said. The thought was terrible. “It’s too cold,” Lucille replied. So she was gone. Yet I remember her neither less nor differently than I remember others I have known better, and indeed I dream of her, and the dream is very like the event itself, except that in the dream the bridge pilings do not tremble so perilously under the weight of the train.