Housekeeping: A Novel (9 page)

“It’s your turn to go downstairs,” I said. “Get a coal from the stove to light it with.” Lucille went and stood on the stairs for a long time.

“I’ll go, Lucille,” Sylvie said.

Lucille almost ran down the stairs. We heard the slish and moil of her steps in the hall and kitchen, and the business at the stove. She came back upstairs holding a coal in a china cup. I held the wick against it and blew, and the room was light again. Sylvie walked over to the vanity. The cards were dealt for a third hand. “You started without me,” she said. We put bricks on the floor for our feet and wrapped ourselves in quilts and played gin rummy.

During those days Fingerbone was strangely transformed. If one should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be told, “That is a splinter from the True Cross, and that is a nail paring dropped by Barabbas, and that is a bit of lint from under the bed where Pilate’s wife dreamed her dream,” the very ordinariness of the things would recommend them. Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. So Fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance. But then suddenly the lake and the river broke open and the water
slid away from the land, and Fingerbone was left stripped and blackened and warped and awash in mud.

The restoration of the town was an exemplary community effort in which we had no part. My grandmother had been rather isolated because she had no interest in people younger than herself. We and the paperboy were the only people under sixty to whom she was consistently polite. Lily and Nona, of course, had had little contact with local society, and Sylvie claimed not to know anybody in Fingerbone at all. Now and then she would say that someone on the street resembled So-and-so, was just the right height and the right age, but she was content simply to marvel at the resemblance. Then, too, for whatever reasons, our whole family was standoffish. This was the fairest description of our best qualities, and the kindest description of our worst faults. That we were self-sufficient, our house reminded us always. If its fenestration was random, if its corners were out of square, my grandfather had built it himself, knowing nothing whatever of carpentry. And he had had the good judgment to set it on a hill, so while others were pushing drowned mattresses out second-story windows, we simply spooled up our living-room rug and propped it on the porch steps. (The couch and chairs were imponderably heavy, so we stuffed rags under them and left them to drip for a week or so.) We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, though somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. If my family were not as intelligent as
we were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter of indifference to everybody whether we were intelligent or not. People always interpreted our slightly formal manner and our quiet tastes as a sign that we wished to stay a little apart. This was a matter of indifference, also, and we had our wish.

The neighbors satisfied themselves now that we were alive, accepted with thanks a few cans of corn and succotash, glanced with polite envy at the relative comfort and order of our household (“I would ask you to sit down,” Sylvie always explained, “but the couch is full of water”), and slogged home again. An old gentleman came to our door to ask for a slip of philodendron, since his had drowned, and various women came to ask after cats and dogs that they thought might have sheltered with us. Two weeks after the water was gone people began to believe that our house had not been touched by the flood at all.

After the mud had been shoveled away, school took up again. Fingerbone had a tall red-brick junior high school. It was named for William Henry Harrison. It stood on an expanse of uneven concrete, surrounded on three sides by a hurricane fence which had been placed there, perhaps, to catch wind-borne paper bags and candy wrappers. It was a square, symmetrical building with high windows that had to be worked by long poles. There we did elaborate multiplication and division, working on pulpy tablet paper with thick black pencils. Lucille was a grade behind me, so we were together only in study hall and at lunchtime. Then we stood apart and hugged our ribs, and looked back over our shoulders. Because we were quiet we were considered docile, and because our work was not exceptionally good or bad we were left alone. Hours of tedium were relieved by occasional minor humiliations, as, for example, when our fingernails were checked for cleanliness. Once I was
required to stand by my desk and recite “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died.” My cold, visceral dread of school I had learned to ignore. It was a discomfort that was not to be relieved, like an itch in an amputated limb. I had won the attendance prize for my grade in the last year of my grandmother’s life, and it might never have occurred to me not to go to school if it had not occurred to Lucille. But one morning she was accused of looking over someone’s shoulder during a history test. The next day was Saturday, but the following week she stayed home with a series of symptoms which did not worry Sylvie because they never included fever or loss of appetite. After an absence of more than three days, the school required a note from a doctor. But Lucille had not wanted to see the doctor, and had never really seemed ill enough to need to, as Sylvie explained in a note to the principal. “Look at this,” Lucille said. We were walking to school together, Lucille with Sylvie’s note. It was a piece of flowered stationery folded over twice. On it Sylvie had written, in her loopy, liquid hand, “Please excuse Lucille’s absence. She had pains in her wrists and knees, a buzzing in her ears, a sore tongue, faintness, a stomachache, and double vision, but no fever or loss of appetite. I did not call the doctor, because she always seemed quite well by 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning.”

“We’ll have to get her to write another note,” I said. “Say you lost that one.” Lucille crushed the note into a little ball and dropped it behind a tree.

“What if they call her?”

“She never answers the phone.”

“Well, they might send someone to get her.”

“I don’t think they will.”

“What if they do?”

The prospect was painful. Sylvie knew nothing about the history test, and we would have no chance to explain it to her. Lucille was much too indifferent to school ever to be guilty of cheating, and it was only an evil fate that had prompted her to write Simon Bolivar, and the girl in front of her to write Simon Bolivar, when the answer was obviously General Santa Anna. This was the only error either of them made, and so their papers were identical. Lucille was astonished to find that the teacher was so easily convinced of her guilt, so immovably persuaded of it, calling her up in front of the class and demanding that she account for the identical papers. Lucille writhed under this violation of her anonymity. At the mere thought of school, her ears turned red. And now, possibly, Sylvie would be brought to school and the whole matter gone into again, and Lucille accused again, this time not only of cheating but of lying and truancy.

“I’m not going to school,” she said.

“What are you going to tell Sylvie?”

“Maybe I won’t go home.”

“Where will you go?”

“Down to the lake.”

“It will be cold.”

Lucille shrugged.

“I’ll go, too,” I said.

Lucille said, “Then we’ll both be in trouble.”

The prospect seemed oddly familiar and comfortable. We walked back to the railroad and followed the tracks down to the lake. We expected someone to step out
from behind a rabbit hutch or a tree or the sheets on a clothesline and question us, but no one did.

We spent the whole of that week at the lake. At first we tried to decide how to get ourselves back into school—for the difficulty was no longer just Lucille’s. The problem of inventing excuses for us both baffled us, and after the third day, when, in theory, both of us would need doctor’s excuses, we decided that we had no choice but to wait until we were apprehended. It seemed to us that we were cruelly banished from a place where we had no desire to be, and that we could not return there of our own will but must wait to return under duress and compulsion. Of course our aunt Sylvie knew nothing of our truancies, and so there would be her to face. All of this was too dreadful to consider, and every aspect of the situation grew worse with every day that passed, until we began to find a giddy and heavy-hearted pleasure in it. The combined effects of cold, tedium, guilt, loneliness, and dread sharpened our senses wonderfully.

The days were unnaturally lengthy and spacious. We felt small in the landscape, and out of place. We usually walked up a little sheltered beach where there had once been a dock, and there were still six pilings, upon which, typically, perched five gulls. At intervals the gull on the northernmost piling departed with four cries, and all the other gulls fluttered northward by one piling. Then the sojourner would return and alight on the southernmost piling. This sequence was repeated again and again, with only clumsy and accidental variations. We sat on the beach just above the place where the water wet it and sorted stones (Fingerbone had at the best a rim or lip
of sand three or four feet wide—its beaches were mostly edged with little pebbles half the size of peas). Some of these stones were a mossy and vegetable green, and some were as white as bits of tooth, and some of them were hazel, and some of them looked like rock candy. Farther up the beach were tufts of grasses from the year before, and leafless vines, and sodden leaves and broken ferns, and the black, dull, musky, dormant woods. The lake was full of quiet waves, and smelled cold, and smelled of fish.

It was Thursday that we saw Sylvie at the shore. She did not see us. We were sitting on a log talking about this and that, and waiting for another cold hour to be gone, when we saw her down the beach, very near the water, with her hands in her coat pockets. “She’s looking for us,” Lucille said, but she only looked across the lake, or up at the sky if a gull cried, or at the sand and the water at her feet. We sat very still. Nevertheless, she should have seen us. We were almost accustomed by that time to the fact that Sylvie’s thoughts were elsewhere, but having waited so many days for someone to come for us, we found her obliviousness irksome. She stood looking at the lake for a long time, her hands deep in the pockets of her big, drab coat and her head to one side, and lifted, as if she hardly felt the cold at all. We heard a train whistle across the lake, and then we saw the train creep out of the woods and onto the bridge, its plump white plume tilted and smeared a little by the wind. From such a distance it seemed a slight thing, but we all watched it, perhaps struck by the steady purpose with which it moved, as methodical as a caterpillar on a straw. After the train had crossed the bridge
and sounded its whistle one last, long time, just when it would have been passing behind our house, Sylvie began to walk back toward the bridge. We followed, very slowly because Sylvie walked very slowly, and at a distance behind her. She nodded at two men in plaid jackets and dusty black pants who were sitting on their heels under the bridge, and they exchanged pleasant-sounding words we could not hear. She walked up the bank, and stood looking across the bridge for a moment, and then she began carefully, tie by tie, out onto it. Slowly she walked on and on, until she was perhaps fifty feet out over the water. Lucille and I stopped and watched our aunt, with her fisted hands pushed against the bottoms of her pockets, glancing up now and then at the water and at the sky. The wind was strong enough to press her coat against her side and legs, and to flutter her hair. The elder of the hoboes stepped out from under the bridge and looked up at her.

“Ain’t our business,” the younger one said. They picked up their hats and strolled off down the beach in the other direction.

Sylvie stood still and let the wind billow her coat. She seemed to become more confident of her balance after a moment. She peered cautiously over the side of the bridge where the water slapped at the pilings. Then she glanced up the shore and saw us watching her. She waved. Lucille said, “Oh.” Sylvie made her way back to the shore a little hurriedly, smiling. “I had no idea it was so late!” she called as we walked toward her. “I thought it would be an hour or so until school was out.”