Housekeeping: A Novel Read online

  And it must have seemed, too, that she had only the frailest and most inappropriate tools for the most urgent uses. Once, she told us, she dreamed that she had seen a baby fall from an airplane and had tried to catch it in her apron, and once that she had tried to fish a baby out of a well with a tea strainer. Lucille and me she tended with scrupulous care and little confidence, as if her offerings of dimes and chocolate-chip cookies might keep us, our spirits, here in her kitchen, though she knew they might not. Her mother, she told us, knew a woman who, when she looked out her window at night, often saw the ghosts of children crying by the road. These children, who were sky black and stark naked and who danced with the cold and wiped their tears with the backs of their hands and the heels of their hands, furious with hunger, consumed much of the woman’s substance and most of her thoughts. She put out soup, which the dogs ate, and blankets, which in the morning were dewy and undisturbed. The children sucked their fingers and hugged their sides as before, but she thought she might have pleased them in some way because they grew more numerous and came more often. When her sister mentioned that people thought it was strange to put supper out every night for the dogs to eat, she replied quite sensibly that anyone who saw those poor children would do exactly the same thing. Sometimes it seemed to me my grandmother saw our black souls dancing in the moonless cold and offered us deep-dish apple pie as a gesture of well-meaning and despair.

  And she was old. My grandmother was not a woman given to excesses of any kind, and so her aging, as it became advanced, was rather astonishing. True, she was straight and brisk and bright when most of her friends had hobbling heads or blurred speech or had sunk into wheelchairs or beds. But in the last years she continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing. She looked as if the nimbus of humanity were fading away and she were turning monkey. Tendrils grew from her eyebrows and coarse white hairs sprouted on her lip and chin. When she put on an old dress the bosom hung empty and the hem swept the floor. Old hats fell down over her eyes. Sometimes she put her hand over her mouth and laughed, her eyes closed and her shoulders shaking. In my earliest memories of her my grandmother was already up in years. I remember sitting under the ironing board, which pulled down from the kitchen wall, while she ironed the parlor curtains and muttered “Robin Adair.” One veil after another fell down around me, starched and white and fragrant, and I had vague dreams of being hidden or cloistered, and watched the electric cord wag, and contemplated my grandmother’s big black shoes, and her legs in their orangy-brown stockings, as contourless, as completely unshaped by muscle as two thick bones. Even then she was old.

  Since my grandmother had a little income and owned her house outright, she always took some satisfaction in thinking ahead to the time when her simple private destiny would intersect with the great public processes of law and finance—that is, to the time of her death. All the habits and patterns and properties that had settled around her, the monthly checks from the bank, the house she had lived in since she came to it as a bride, the weedy orchard that surrounded the yard on three sides where smaller and wormier apples and apricots and plums had fallen every year of her widowhood, all these things would suddenly become liquid, capable of assuming new forms. And all of it would be Lucille’s and mine.

  “Sell the orchards,” she would say, looking grave and wise, “but keep the house. So long as you look after your health, and own the roof above your head, you’re as safe as anyone can be,” she would say, “God willing.” My grandmother loved to talk about these things. When she did, her eyes would roam over the goods she had accumulated unthinkingly and maintained out of habit as eagerly as if she had come to reclaim them.

  Her sisters-in-law, Nona and Lily, were to come and look after us when the time came. Lily and Nona were twelve and ten years younger than my grandmother, and old as she was, she continued to think of them as rather young. They were almost destitute, and the savings in rent, not to mention the advantages of exchanging a little hotel room below ground for a rambling house surrounded by peonies and rose bushes, would be inducement enough to keep them with us until we came of age.

  2

  When, after almost five years, my grandmother one winter morning eschewed awakening, Lily and Nona were fetched from Spokane and took up housekeeping in Fingerbone, just as my grandmother had wished. Their alarm was evident from the first, in the nervous flutter with which they searched their bags and pockets for the little present they had brought (it was a large box of cough drops—a confection they considered both tasty and salubrious). Lily and Nona both had light blue hair and black coats with shiny black beads in intricate patterns on the lapels. Their thick bodies pitched forward from the hips, and their arms and ankles were plump. They were, though maiden ladies, of a buxomly maternal appearance that contrasted oddly with their brusque, unpracticed pats and kisses.

  After their bags had been brought in, and they had kissed and patted us, Lily poked up the fire and Nona lowered the shades. Lily carried some of the larger bouquets into the porch and Nona poured more water into the vases. Then they seemed at a loss. I heard Lily remark to Nona that it was still three hours till supper-time, and five till bedtime. They eyed us with nervous sorrow. They found some Reader’s Digests to read while we played go fish on the rug by the stove. A long hour passed and they gave us supper. Another hour and they put us to bed. We lay listening to their conversation, which was always perfectly audible, because they were both hard of hearing. It seemed then and always to be the elaboration and ornamentation of the consensus between them, which was as intricate and well-tended as a termite castle.

  “A pity!”

  “A pity, a pity!”

  “Sylvia wasn’t old.”

  “She wasn’t young.”

  “She was old to be looking after children.”

  “She was young to pass away.”

  “Seventy-six?”

  “Was she seventy-six?”

  “That’s not old.”

  “No.”

  “Not old for her family.”

  “I remember her mother.”

  “Spry as a girl at eighty-eight.”

  “But Sylvia had a harder life.”

  “Much harder.”

  “Much harder.”

  “Those daughters.”

  “How could things have gone so badly?”

  “She wondered herself.”

  “Anyone would wonder.”

  “I know I would.”

  “That Helen!”

  “Well, what about the little one, Sylvie?”

  There was a clucking of tongues.

  “At least she doesn’t have children.”

  “So far as we know, at least.”

  “An itinerant.”

  “A migrant worker.”

  “A drifter.”

  There was a silence.

  “She ought to be told about her mother.”

  “She should.”

  “If we could figure out where to find her.”

  “The ads in the papers might help.”

  “But I doubt it.”

  “I doubt it.”

  There was another silence.

  “These two little girls.”

  “How could their mother have left them like that?”

  “No note.”

  “No note was ever found.”

  “It couldn’t have been an accident.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “That poor lady who lent her the car.”

  “I felt sorry for her.”

  “She blamed herself.”

  Someone got up from the table and put wood in the fire.

  “They seem to be nice children.”

  “Very quiet.”

  “Not as pretty as Helen was.”

  “The one has pretty hair.”

  “They’re not unattract
ive.”

  “Appearance isn’t so important.”

  “More important for girls, of course.”

  “And they’ll have to get along on their own.”

  “Poor things.”

  “Poor things.”

  “I’m glad they’re quiet.”

  “The Hartwick was always so quiet.”

  “It was.”

  “It certainly was.”

  When they had gone to bed Lucille and I got up and sat by the window wrapped in a quilt and watched the few clouds fly. There was a bright moon in a storm ring, and Lucille made plans to build a moon dial out of snow under our window. The light at the window was strong enough to play cards by, but we could not read. We stayed awake the whole night because Lucille was afraid of her dreams.

  Lily and Nona stayed with us during the depth of that winter. They were not in the habit of cooking. They complained of arthritis. My grandmother’s friends invited them for pinochle, but they had never learned to play. They would not sing in a church choir because their voices had cracked. Lily and Nona, I think, enjoyed nothing except habit and familiarity, the precise replication of one day in the next. This was not to be achieved in Fingerbone, where any acquaintance was perforce new and therefore more objectionable than solitude, and where Lucille and I perpetually threatened to cough or outgrow our shoes.

  It was a hard winter, too. The snow crested, finally, far above our heads. It drifted up our eaves on one side of the house. Some houses in Fingerbone simply fell from the weight of snow on their roofs, a source of grave and perpetual anxiety to my great-aunts, who were accustomed to a brick building, and to living below ground. Sometimes the sun would be warm enough to send a thick sheet of snow sliding off the roof, and sometimes the fir trees would shrug, and the snow would fall with surprisingly loud and earthy thuds, which would terrify my great-aunts. It was by grace of this dark and devastating weather that we were able to go very often to the lake to skate, for Lily and Nona knew that our house would fall, and hoped that we at least might be spared when it did, if only to die of pneumonia.

  For some reason the lake was a source of particular pleasure to Fingerbone that year. It was frozen solid early and long. Several acres of it were swept, for people brought brooms to tend and expand it, till the cleared ice spread far across the lake. Sledders heaped snow on the shore into a precipitous chute that sent them sailing far across the ice. There were barrels on the shore for fires to be built in, and people brought boxes to sit on and planks and burlap bags to stand on around the barrels, and frankfurters to roast, and clothespins to clip frozen mittens to the lips of the barrels. A number of dogs began to spend most of their time at the ice. They were young, leggy dogs, affable and proprietary, and exhilarated by the weather. They liked to play at retrieving bits of ice which sped fantastically fast and far across the lake. The dogs made a gallant and youthful joke of their own strength and speed, and flaunted an utter indifference to the safety of their limbs. Lucille and I took our skates to school, so that we could go to the lake directly and stay there through the twilight. Usually we would skate along the edge of the swept ice, tracing its shape, and coming finally to its farthest edge, we would sit on the snow and look back at Fingerbone.

  We felt giddily far from shore, though the lake was so solid that winter that it would certainly have supported the weight of the entire population of Fingerbone, past, present, and to come. Nevertheless, only we and the ice sweepers went out so far, and only we stayed.

  The town itself seemed a negligible thing from such a distance. Were it not for the clutter on the shore, the flames and the tremulous pillars of heat that stood above the barrels, and of course the skaters who swooped and sailed and made bright, brave sounds, it would have been possible not to notice the town at all. The mountains that stood up behind it were covered with snow and hidden in the white sky, and the lake was sealed and hidden, yet their eclipse had not made the town more prominent. Indeed, where we were we could feel the reach of the lake far behind us, and far beyond us on either side, in a spacious silence that seemed to ring like glass. Lucille and I worked that winter on skating backward, and pivoting on one foot. We were often the last to leave, so absorbed we were in our skating and in the silence and the numbing sweetness of the air. The dogs would run out to us, rowdy and obstreperous, overjoyed that not everyone had left yet, and they would nip at our mittens and run circles around us so that we had no choice but to leave. And as we glided across the ice toward Fingerbone, we would become aware of the darkness, too close to us, like a presence in a dream. The comfortable yellow lights of the town were then the only comfort there was in the world, and there were not many of them. If every house in Fingerbone were to fall before our eyes, snuffing every light, the event would touch our senses as softly as a shifting among embers, and then the bitter darkness would step nearer.

  We would find our boots and pull off our skates, and the dogs, excited by our haste, would put their muzzles in our faces and lick our mouths and run off with our scarves. “Ah, I hate those dogs,” Lucille would say, and throw snowballs after them, which they chased with increasingly raucous delight and shattered in their teeth. They would even follow us home. We walked the blocks from the lake to our grandmother’s house, jealous to the point of rage of those who were already accustomed to the light and the somnolent warmth of the houses we passed. The dogs shoved their muzzles into our hands and romped around us, nipping at our coats. When we finally came to our house, which was low and set back and apart by its orchard, we were not much surprised to see it still standing, the porch and kitchen lights shining as warmly as any we had passed. We pulled our boots off in the porch, smelling the warmth of the kitchen, and limped into the kitchen in our socks with our hands and feet and faces aching, where our aunts sat flushed by the vapors that rose from their stewing of chicken and baking of apples.

  They smiled nervously at us and looked at each other. “This is much too late for little girls to come in!” Lily ventured, smiling at Nona. They watched us tensely and timidly, to see the result of their reprimand.

  “The time went by so fast,” Lucille said. “We’re really sorry.”

  “You see, we can’t go out looking for you.”

  “How could we find you?”

  “We might get lost, or fall down on the road.”

  “The wind here is terrible, and there are no streetlights. They never sand the roads.”

  “Dogs are not on chains.”

  “And the cold is so bitter.”

  “It could freeze the life out of us. We feel it even in the house.”

  “We won’t come back after dark any more,” I said.

  But since Lily and Nona were not really angry, they could not really be mollified. They felt only alarm. Here we were, cheeks flushed and eyes bright, already febrile, or lethally chilled, but, it may be, destined that night to plunge dreaming to the cellar floor, where we would lie under tons of snow and planks and shingles while above us neighbors scavenged in the ruins for kindling. And granting that this and even subsequent winters might spare us, there were still the perils of adolescence, of marriage, of childbirth, all formidable in themselves, but how many times compounded by our strange history?

  Lily and Nona considered our prospects, and were baffled. Their appetites suffered, and so did their sleep. That particular evening a blizzard of remarkable ferocity blew up while we were eating our supper, and continued for four days. Lily was ladling stewed chicken over our biscuits when a limb from the apple orchard flew against the side of the house, and not ten minutes later a cable snapped somewhere, or a pole fell, and all of Fingerbone was plunged in darkness. It was not an unusual thing. Every pantry in town had in it a box of thick candles, the color of homemade soap, for use at such times. But my aunts grew silent, and watched each other. That night when we went to bed (with Vicks on strips of flannel pinned round our throats) they sat by the stove, turning over and over the fact that the Hartwick Hotel had never been known
to accept a child, even for a single night.

  “It would be lovely to take them home.”

  “They’d be safer.”

  “Warmer.”

  They clicked their tongues.

  “We’d all be more comfortable.”

  “So near the hospital.”

  “That’s an advantage, with children.”

  “I’m sure they’d be quiet.”

  “They’re very quiet.”

  “Girls always are.”

  “Sylvia’s were.”

  “Yes, they were.”

  After a moment, someone poked up the fire.

  “We’d have help.”

  “Some advice.”

  “That Lottie Donahue could help. Her children are all right.”

  “I met the son once.”

  “Yes, so you said.”

  “He had an odd look. Always blinking. His nails were chewed down past the quick.”

  “Oh, I remember. He was awaiting trial for something.”

  “I don’t remember just what.”

  “His mother never said.”

  Someone filled the teapot.

  “Children are hard.”

  “For anybody.”

  “The Hartwick has always kept them out.”

  “And I understand that.”

  “I don’t blame them.”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  They were quiet, stirring their tea.

  “If we were Helen’s age . . .”

  “. . . or Sylvie’s.”

  “Or Sylvie’s.”

  Again they were quiet.

  “Young people understand them better.”

  “They don’t worry so much.”

  “They’re still almost children themselves.”

  “That’s the truth. They haven’t seen enough to worry like we do.”

  “It’s as well.”

  “It’s better.”