Housekeeping: A Novel (7 page)

“What would you like for breakfast?” Sylvie asked.

“Cornflakes.”

She made cocoa and we ate and watched the day come. It had been a cold night that froze the slush and hardened the heaps of dirty, desiccated snow by the sides of the road.

“I’m going to take a little walk around town,” Sylvie said. “Before the roads all turn to mud again. I’ll be back soon.” She buttoned her coat and stepped out into the porch. We heard the screen door slam. “She should have borrowed a scarf,” I said. “She isn’t coming back,” Lucille replied. We ran upstairs and put on our jeans, stuffing the skirts of our nightgowns into them. We pulled our boots on over our bedroom slippers and grabbed our coats and ran outside, but she was gone already. If she was leaving, she would go into town, to the station. If she was not leaving, she would probably go to town anyway, unless she went to the lake. Since she was bareheaded, and had neither gloves nor boots, the shore would be miserably difficult and cold. We walked toward Main Street as fast as we could over the frozen slush and the frozen ruts and shards of ice. “I bet Lily and Nona told her to leave,” I said. Lucille shook her head. Her face was flushed and her cheeks were wet. “It’ll
be all right,” I said. She wiped her face roughly with her sleeve.

“I know it’ll be all right, but it makes me mad.”

We turned the corner and saw Sylvie in the road ahead of us, chucking chunks of ice at four or five dogs. She would pick up a bit of ice and toss it from hand to hand, walking backward, while the dogs followed after her and circled behind her, yapping. We saw her pelt one squat mongrel in the ribs, and all the dogs scattered. She sucked her fingers and blew into her cupped hands, and then picked up another piece of ice just as the dogs came back and began yapping and circling again. Her manner was insouciant and her aim was deft. She did not notice us standing at a distance watching her. We stood where we were until the last of the dogs turned and trotted back to its porch, and then we followed her at a distance of two blocks into downtown Fingerbone. She walked slowly past the drugstore and the dime store and the dry-goods store, stopping to look into each of the windows. Then she walked directly to the railroad station and went inside. Lucille and I walked down to the station. We could see her standing by the stove, with her arms folded, studying the chalked list of arrivals and departures. Lucille said, “I’m going to tell her she forgot her bags.” I had not thought of that. When Sylvie saw us coming in she smiled with surprise. “You left your stuff at our house,” Lucille said.

“Oh, I just came in here to get warm. Nothing else is open. It’s early, you know. I forgot how early the sun rises these days.” She rubbed her hands together in the warmth of the stove. “It still
feels
like winter, doesn’t it?”

“Why don’t you wear gloves?” Lucille asked.

“I left them on the train.”

“Why don’t you wear boots?”

Sylvie smiled. “I suppose I should.”

“You also need a hat. You should use hand lotion.”

Sylvie put her hands in her pockets. “I think I should stay for a while,” she said. “The aunts are too old. I think it’s best for now, at least.”

Lucille nodded.

“We’ll get some pie when the café opens. And then you can help me choose a scarf, and maybe some gloves.” She groped in her pockets and brought out a little ball of paper money and some change. She looked at the money doubtfully and did not count it. “We’ll see.”

“We have hand lotion at home,” Lucille replied.

At nine o’clock we followed Sylvie to the five-and-ten, where she bought a plaid scarf and gray gloves. It took her some time to choose them, and some time to explain who she was to the woman at the cash register, who, though Sylvie thought she looked familiar, was new in town and knew nothing of our family. When we came back into the street the sun was shining warmly. There was a bright flow of water in the gutters. When we came to the end of the sidewalk, there was no way for Sylvie to walk without now and then stepping over her shoes in water of one sort or another. This difficulty seemed to absorb her but not to disturb her.

“That woman reminded me of someone, but I can’t think who,” Sylvie said.

“Do you still have friends here?” Lucille asked.

Sylvie laughed. “Well, the fact is, I never did have
many friends here. We kept to ourselves. We knew who everyone
was
, that’s all. And now I’ve been away—sixteen years.”

“But you came back sometimes,” Lucille said.

“No.”

“Where were you married?” Lucille asked.

“Here.”

“Then that’s once.”

“Once,” Sylvie said.

Lucille squashed a lump of slush with her boot, and I slapped her because some of it flew against my leg.

We went up the walk to our porch. Lily and Nona were in the kitchen, rosy with warmth and perturbation.

“Here you are!” Lily said.

“What a day to go walking!”

Sylvie had pried off her sodden loafers in the porch, and we had pulled off our coats and boots. The aunts clucked their tongues when they saw us in our jeans and slippers, and still in our nightgowns with our hair uncombed. “Ah!” they said. “What is this?”

Lucille said, “Ruthie and I woke up early this morning, and we decided to go outside to see the sun come up. We went clear downtown. Sylvie was worried, so she came out looking for us.”

“Oh, I’m surprised at you girls,” Nona said.

“Such a thoughtless thing to do.”

“I hope Sylvie gave you a good talking-to.”

“Poor Sylvie!”

“If we’d been here by ourselves, we’d have died of worry.”

“We
would
have.”

“The roads are so treacherous. What would we have done?”

They brought Sylvie a cup of coffee and a pan of hot water for her feet, clucking and commiserating and patting her hands and her hair.

“You have to be young to deal with children!”

“That’s a fact.”

“We’d have had to get the sheriff.”

“It might have taught them a lesson.”

The aunts hurried away to finish packing. Lucille opened the newspaper to the crossword puzzle, and found a pencil in a drawer, and sat down across the table from Sylvie.

“The element represented by the symbol Fe,” she said.

Sylvie answered, “Iron.”

“Wouldn’t it start with F?”

“It’s iron,” Sylvie said. “They try to trick you.”

That evening Lily and Nona were taken by a friend of my grandmother’s back to Spokane and we and the house were Sylvie’s.

The week after Sylvie arrived, Fingerbone had three days of brilliant sunshine and four of balmy rain. On the first day the icicles dripped so rapidly that the gravel under the eaves rattled and jumped. The snow was granular in the shade, and in the sun it turned soft and clung damply to whatever it covered. The second day the icicles fell and broke on the ground and snow drooped low over the eaves in a heavy mass. Lucille and I poked it down with sticks. The third day the snow was so dense and malleable that we made a sort of statue. We put one big ball of snow on top of another, and carved them down with kitchen spoons till we had made a figure of a woman in a long dress, her arms folded. It was Lucille’s idea that she should look to the side, and while I knelt and whittled folds into her skirt, Lucille stood on the kitchen stool and molded her chin and her nose and her hair. It happened that I swept her skirt a little back from her hip, and that her arms were folded
high on her breasts. It was mere accident—the snow was firmer here and softer there, and in some places we had to pat clean snow over old black leaves that had been rolled up into the snowballs we made her from—but her shape became a posture. And while in any particular she seemed crude and lopsided, altogether her figure suggested a woman standing in a cold wind. It seemed that we had conjured a presence. We took off our coats and hats and worked about her in silence. That was the third day of sunshine. The sky was dark blue, there was no wind at all, but everywhere an audible seep and trickle of melting. We hoped the lady would stand long enough to freeze, but in fact while we were stamping the gray snow all smooth around her, her head pitched over and smashed on the ground. This accident cost her a forearm and a breast. We made a new snowball for a head, but it crushed her eaten neck, and under the weight of it a shoulder dropped away. We went inside for lunch, and when we came out again, she was a dog-yellowed stump in which neither of us would admit any interest.

Days of rain at just that time were a disaster. They hastened the melting of the snow but not the thawing of the ground. So at the end of three days the houses and hutches and barns and sheds of Fingerbone were like so many spilled and foundered arks. There were chickens roosting in the telephone poles and dogs swimming by in the streets. My grandmother always boasted that the floods never reached our house, but that spring, water poured over the thresholds and covered the floor to the depth of four inches, obliging us to wear boots while we did the cooking and washing up. We lived on the second floor for a number of days. Sylvie played solitaire on the
vanity while Lucille and I played Monopoly on the bed. The firewood on the porch was piled high so that most of it stayed dry enough to burn, though rather smokily. The woodpile was full of spiders and mice, and the pantry curtain rod was deeply bowed by the weight of water climbing up the curtains. If we opened or closed a door, a wave swept through the house, and chairs tottered, and bottles and pots clinked and clunked in the bottoms of the kitchen cabinets.

After four days of rain the sun appeared in a white sky, febrile and dazzling, and the people who had left for higher ground came back in rowboats. From our bedroom window we could see them patting their roofs and peering in at their attic windows. “I have never seen such a thing,” Sylvie said. The water shone more brilliantly than the sky, and while we watched, a tall elm tree fell slowly across the road. From crown to root, half of it vanished in the brilliant light.

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere. That flood flattened scores of headstones. More disturbing, the graves sank when the water receded, so that they looked a little like hollow sides or empty bellies. And then the library was flooded to a depth of three shelves, creating vast gaps in the Dewey decimal system. The losses in hooked and braided rugs and needlepoint footstools will never be reckoned. Fungus and mold crept into wedding dresses and photograph albums, so that the leather crumbled in our hands when we lifted the covers, and the sharp smell that rose when we opened them was as
insinuating as the smells one finds under a plank or a rock. Much of what Fingerbone had hoarded up was defaced or destroyed outright, but perhaps because the hoard was not much to begin with, the loss was not overwhelming.

The next day was very fine. The water was so calm that the sunken half of the fallen tree was replaced by the mirrored image of the half trunk and limbs that remained above the water. All day two cats prowled in the branches, pawing at little eddies and currents. The water was beginning to slide away. We could hear the lake groan under the weight of it, for the lake had not yet thawed. The ice would still be thick, but it would be the color of paraffin, with big white bubbles under it. In normal weather there would have been perhaps an inch of water on top of it in shallow places. Under all the weight of the flood water it sagged and, being fibrous rather than soft or brittle, wrenched apart, as resistant to breaching as green bones. The afternoon was loud with the giant miseries of the lake, and the sun shone on, and the flood was the almost flawless mirror of a cloudless sky, fat with brimming and very calm.

Lucille and I pulled on our boots and went downstairs. The parlor was full of light. Our walking from the stairs to the door had set off an intricate system of small currents which rolled against the floorboards. Glyphs of crimped and plaited light swung across the walls and the ceiling. The couch and the armchairs were oddly dark. The stuffing in their backs had slid, and the cushions had shallow craters in the middles of them. Water seeped out when we touched them. In the course of days the flood had made a sort of tea of hemp and horsehair and
rag paper in that room, a smell which always afterward clung to it and which I remember precisely at this minute, though I have never encountered its like.