Housekeeping: A Novel (10 page)

“School isn’t out,” Lucille said.

“Well, I was right after all, then. The 1:35 just went
through a little while ago, so it must be pretty early still.” We walked with Sylvie along the railroad tracks toward home. She said, “I’ve always wondered what it would be like.”

“What was it like?” Lucille asked. Her voice was small and flat and tensely composed.

Sylvie shrugged and laughed. “Cold. Windy.”

Lucille said, “You just did it to see what it was like?”

“I suppose so.”

“What if you fell in?”

“Oh,” Sylvie said. “I was pretty careful.”

“If you fell in, everyone would think you did it on purpose,” Lucille said. “Even us.”

Sylvie reflected a moment. “I suppose that’s true.” She glanced down at Lucille’s face. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I know,” Lucille said.

“I thought you would be in school.”

“We didn’t go to school this week.”

“But, you see, I didn’t know that. It never crossed my mind that you’d be here.” Sylvie’s voice was gentle, and she touched Lucille’s hair.

We were very upset, all the same, for reasons too numerous to mention. Clearly our aunt was not a stable person. At the time we did not put this thought into words. It existed between us as a sort of undifferentiated attentiveness to all the details of her appearance and behavior. At first this took the form of sudden awakening in the middle of the night, though how the sounds that woke us were to be interpreted we were never sure. Sometimes they occurred in our heads, or in the woods,
and only seemed to be Sylvie singing, because once or twice we had awakened in the middle of the night when most assuredly we did hear Sylvie singing, though the next morning we disagreed about what the song had been. We thought we sometimes heard her leave the house, and once when we got out of bed, we found her playing solitaire in the kitchen, and once we found her sitting on the back porch steps, and once we found her standing in the orchard. Sleep itself compounded our difficulties. The furtive closing of a door is a sound the wind can make a dozen times in an hour. A flow of damp air from the lake can make any house feel empty. Such currents pull one’s dreams after them, and one’s own dread is always mirrored upon the dread that inheres in things. For example, when Sylvie looked over the bridge she must have seen herself in the water at the foot of the trestle. But as surely as we tried to stay awake to know for certain whether she sang, or wept, or left the house, we fell asleep and dreamed that she did.

Then there was the matter of her walking out onto the bridge. How far might she have gone had she not seen us watching her? And what if the wind had risen? And what if a train had come while she was still on the bridge? Everyone would have said that Sylvie had taken her own life, and we would not have known otherwise—as, in fact, we still did not know otherwise. For if we imagined that, while we watched, Sylvie had walked so far away that the mountains rose up and the shore was diminished, and the lake bellied and under her feet the water slid and slapped and shone, and the bridge creaked and teetered, and the sky flowed away and slid over the side of the earth, might she not have carried the experiment
a step further? And then imagine that same Sylvie trudging up from the lake bottom, foundered coat and drowned sleeves and marbled lips and marble fingers and eyes flooded with the deep water that gleamed down beneath the reach of light. She might very well have said, “I’ve always wondered what that would be like.”

We spent Friday at the shore, watching the bridge. Saturday and Sunday we spent at home with Sylvie. She sat on the floor and played Monopoly with us and told us intricate and melancholy tales of people she had known slightly, and we made popcorn. Sylvie seemed surprised and shyly pleased by our attention. She laughed at Lucille for hiding her five-hundred-dollar bills under the board, and for shuffling the Community Chest cards so thoroughly that the backs broke. I spent much of several games in jail, but Sylvie prospered, and she was full of her good fortune, and she made us each a gift of three hotels.

Monday Lucille and I went back to school. No one questioned us. Apparently it had been decided that our circumstances were special, and that was a relief, although it suggested that Sylvie had already begun to draw attention to herself. We spent the day waiting to go home, and when we came home Sylvie was there, in the kitchen, with her coat off, listening to the radio. Days and weeks passed the same way, and finally we began to think of other things.

I remember Sylvie walking through the house with a scarf tied around her hair, carrying a broom. Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the
corners. They were leaves that had been through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins. There were scraps of paper among them, crisp and strained from their mingling in the cold brown liquors of decay and regeneration, and on these scraps there were sometimes words. One read
Powers Meet
, and another, which had been the flap of an envelope, had a penciled message in anonymous hand:
I think of you
. Perhaps Sylvie when she swept took care not to molest them. Perhaps she sensed a Delphic niceness in the scattering of these leaves and paper, here and not elsewhere, thus and not otherwise. She had to have been aware of them because every time a door was opened anywhere in the house there was a sound from all the corners of lifting and alighting. I noticed that the leaves would be lifted up by something that came before the wind, they would tack against some impalpable movement of air several seconds before the wind was heard in the trees. Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie’s housekeeping. Thus did she begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows. Sylvie talked a great deal about housekeeping. She soaked all the tea towels for a number of weeks in a tub of water and bleach. She emptied several cupboards and left them open to air, and once she washed half the kitchen ceiling and a door. Sylvie believed in stern solvents, and most of all in air. It was for the sake of air that she opened doors and windows, though it was probably through forgetfulness that she left them open. It was for the sake of air that on one early splendid day she
wrestled my grandmother’s plum-colored davenport into the front yard, where it remained until it weathered pink.

Sylvie liked to eat supper in the dark. This meant that in summer we were seldom sent to bed before ten or eleven o’clock, a freedom to which we never became accustomed. We spent days on our knees in the garden, digging caves and secret passages with kitchen spoons for our dolls, mine a defrocked bride with a balding skull and Lucille’s a filthy and eyeless Rose Red. Long after we knew we were too old for dolls, we played out intricate, urgent dramas of entrapment and miraculous escape. When the evenings came they were chill because the mountains cast such long shadows over the land and over the lake. There the wind would be, quenching the warmth out of the air before the light was gone, raising the hairs on our arms and necks with its smell of frost and water and deep shade.

Then we would take our dolls inside and play on the floor in the circle of chairs and couches, by the refracted, lunar light of the vacant sky, while darkness began to fill the room, to lift the ice-blue doilies from the sodden sleeves of chairs. Just when the windows went stark blue Sylvie would call us into the kitchen. Lucille and I sat across from each other and Sylvie at the end of the table. Opposite her was a window luminous and cool as aquarium glass and warped as water. We looked at the window as we ate, and we listened to the crickets and nighthawks, which were always unnaturally loud then, perhaps because they were within the bounds that light would fix around us, or perhaps because one sense is a shield for the others and we had lost our sight.

The table would be set with watermelon pickles and canned meats, apples and jelly doughnuts and shoestring potatoes, a block of pre-sliced cheese, a bottle of milk, a bottle of catsup, and raisin bread in a stack. Sylvie liked cold food, sardines aswim in oil, little fruit pies in paper envelopes. She ate with her fingers and talked to us softly about people she had known, her friends, while we swung our legs and ate buttered bread.

Sylvie knew an old woman named Edith who came to her rest crossing the mountains in a boxcar, in December. She was wearing, besides her rubbers and her hunting jacket, two dresses and seven flannel shirts, not to keep off the cold, Sylvie said, but to show herself a woman of substance. She sailed feet first and as solemn as Lincoln from Butte to Wenatchee, where she was buried at public expense. It was such a winter, Sylvie said, so cold, that the snow was as light as chaff. Any wind would blow a hill bare and send the snow drifting, as placeless as smoke. In the face of such hard weather the old woman had grown formal and acquiescent. She had crept off to the freight yard one morning in the dark, leaving no word but a pearl ring which had never before been known to leave her hand. The pearl was brown as a horse’s tooth and very small. Sylvie kept the ring in a little box with her hairpins.

Edith found her boxcar and composed herself in it, while the trainmen went about the jamming and conjoining of cold metal parts. In such weather one steps on fossils. The snow is too slight to conceal the ribs and welts, the hollows and sockets of the earth, fixed in its last extreme. But in the mountains the earth is most ceremoniously buried, with all its relics, against its next
rising, in hillock and tumulus. In Butte the old woman had lain on her back and laced her fingers, and her breath had stood above her. When she arrived in Wenatchee, the ghost was gone, the exorcism accomplished. Sylvie said that she and Edith had picked berries together, and that once they had both worked in a canning factory. That winter a mutual friend had had the use of a cousin’s house in Butte. The old woman had sat by the stove and sucked her fingers (in summertime there would have been unexpungeable sweet stains), and talked at trying length of other days. “You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time,” Sylvie said. When she remembered that we were there and that we were children she sometimes tried to make her stories useful.

It was with a certain Alma that Sylvie had sat one Sunday on a stack of pine boards in a lumberyard outside Orofino, waiting for the sun to rise, waiting through all the alarms, the birds’ sudden risings from their woods, and the dogs’ barking. It was the wind, Alma said. The wind was as rank as a hunter and never the same twice. At night it retreated into the mountains where the creatures prowl and whelp, and before day it came down again, smelling of blood. “That’s what frightens the birds,” Sylvie assured us, because she had never seen the sun come up but the birds first rose and cried what warning they could.

A hundred yards from the railroad track was a truck stop. Its windows lit up, and they could just hear “Irene.” And farther down the road was the state institution among its fallow, isolating fields, where Sylvia and Alma had a mutual friend whom they both at that moment
would have wished to see, except that too often she pulled her long hair down so that it hid her face, and wept with anger.

But when the sunlight came, after the woods were no longer black or the sky cold and high and pink, then it was excellent to drowse there while the boards breathed incense. A cat found them and lay in Sylvie’s lap for a while. Alma brought back hot dogs from the café. They sang “Irene” over and over, as if to themselves. “When you’re traveling,” Sylvie always said, “Sundays are the best days.”

Sylvie had moved downstairs, into my grandmother’s room. This room was off the kitchen, three steps below the level of the rest of the ground floor on that side of the house. It had glass double doors opening into the grape arbor, which was built against the house like a lean-to, and into the orchard. It was not a bright room, but in summer it was full of the smell of grass and earth and blossoms or fruit, and the sound of bees.

The room was plainly furnished. There was a wardrobe by the double doors and a chest under the window, both built by my grandfather, as could be seen from the fact that the front legs of the wardrobe and the legs on the left side of the chest were somewhat longer than the back or right legs, to compensate for the slope of the floor. Two of the bed’s legs stood on wedge-shaped blocks. All three pieces were painted creamy white, and would have been completely unremarkable, except that my grandfather had once ornamented them. On the doors of the wardrobe there appeared to have been a hunting scene, turbaned horsemen on a mountainside. On the head of the bed he had painted a peacock, hennish body,
emerald tail. On the dresser he had put a wreath or garland, held in the hands of two cherubs who swam in ether, garments trailing. Each of these designs had been thought better of and painted out, but over years the white paint had absorbed them, floated them up just beneath the surface. I was always reminded of pictures, images, in places where images never were, in marble, in the blue net of veins at my wrists, in the pearled walls of seashells.

My grandmother had kept, in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers, a collection of things, memorabilia, balls of twine, Christmas candles, and odd socks. Lucille and I used to delve in this drawer. Its contents were so randomly assorted, yet so neatly arranged, that we felt some large significance might be behind the collection as a whole. We noted that the socks, for example, all appeared unworn. There was a shot glass with two brass buttons in it, and that seemed proper. There was a faded wax angel that smelled of bayberry, and a black velvet pincushion in the shape of a heart, in a box with a San Francisco jeweler’s name on it. There was a shoebox full of old photos, each with four patches of black, felty paper on the back. These had clearly been taken from a photograph album, because they were especially significant or because they were not especially significant. None of them was of a person or a place we knew. Many were of formally dressed gentlemen posing in front of a rose arbor.