Housekeeping: A Novel Page 7

  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.

  5

  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 h
ear. 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.”

  “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 o
ur 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.