Housekeeping: A Novel (14 page)

“Do you know where we were last night?” Lucille asked.

Sylvie laughed. “You were dining with John Jacob Astor,” she said.

“John Jacob Astor,” Lucille grumbled.

The quilt was warm and soft around my arms and shoulders and my ears. I fell asleep where I sat, with the cup of brimstone tea in my lap, held carefully in both hands so as not to spill. Sleep made one sensation of the heat in my palms and the sugar on my tongue. I slept precariously upright, aware of my bare feet, hearing the wood in the stove crackle. More words passed between Sylvie and Lucille, but I could not make them out. It seemed to me that whatever Lucille said, Sylvie sang back to her, but that was dreaming.

So this is all death is, I thought. Sylvie and Lucille do not notice, or perhaps they do not object. Sylvie, in fact, brought the coffeepot and warmed the cup in my hands, and arranged the quilt, which had slid from my shoulder a little. I was surprised and touched by her solicitude. She knows, I thought, and I felt like laughing. Sylvie is
sitting beside the stove, flipping through old magazines, waiting for my mother. I began listening for the sound of the door opening, but after a very long time my head fell sharply to one side and I could not lift it up again. Then I realized that my mouth was open. All this time the room was filling with strangers, and there was no way for me to tell Sylvie that the tea had tipped out of my hands and wet my lap. I knew that my decay, now obvious and accelerating, should somehow be concealed for decency’s sake, but Sylvie would not look up from her magazine. I began to hope for oblivion, and then I rolled out of my chair.

Sylvie looked up from her magazine. “Did you have a good sleep?” she asked.

“All right,” I said. I picked up the cup and brushed at the dampness of my pant legs.

“Sleep is best when you’re
really
tired,” she said. “You don’t just sleep. You die.”

I put the cup in the sink. “Where’s Lucille?”

“Upstairs.”

“Sleeping?”

“I don’t think so.”

I went up to our room, and there was Lucille, dressed in a dark cotton skirt and a white blouse, setting her hair in pin curls.

“Have you been sleeping, too?”

Lucille shrugged. Her mouth was full of pins.

“I had a strange dream,” I said. Lucille took the pins out of her mouth. “Change your clothes,” she said. “I’ll fix your hair.” There was urgency in her manner.

I put on a plaid dress, and came to her to be buttoned. “Not that,” she said. I found a yellow blouse and a
brown skirt. These Lucille accepted without comment. Then she began combing the tangles out of my hair. She was not gentle or deft, nor was she patient, but she was utterly determined. “Your hair is like
straw
,” she said, wetting a strand once again with her comb. Another strand uncoiled itself and the pin fell. “Aah!” She slapped my neck with the comb. “Don’t move!”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, don’t! We’ll get some of that setting gel at the drugstore. Do you have any money?”

“Forty-five cents.”

“I have some.” Her fingers at my neck were very cold.

“Aren’t you going to sleep a little?” I asked.

“I already did. I had a terrible dream. Hold still.”

“What about?”

“Not about anything. I was a baby, lying on my back, yelling, and then someone came and started wrapping me up in blankets. She put them all over my face, so I couldn’t breathe. She was singing and holding me, and it was sort of nice, but I could tell she was trying to smother me.” Lucille shuddered.

“Do you know who it was?”

“Who?”

“The woman in the dream.”

“She reminded me of Sylvie, I guess.”

“Didn’t you see her face?”

Lucille adjusted the angle of my head and began combing water into the hair at my nape.

“It was just a dream, Ruthie.”

“What color was her hair?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Do you want me to tell you what I dreamed?”

“No.”

Lucille tied a nylon scarf over my pin curls and another one over her own. We went downstairs. Lucille took some money from the kitchen drawer where Sylvie kept it. “My, you both look
nice!
” Sylvie said as we passed, but, as I always did when attention was drawn to my appearance, I felt very tall. By the time we reached the end of the walk I had folded my arms over the empty front of my blouse.

“You just make people notice it more,” Lucille said.

“Notice what?”

“Nothing.”

I felt the notice of people all over me, like the pressure of a denser medium. Lucille, impatient with my sorrows, had pried the heels off my shoes to make me shorter, but it seemed to me that without them the toes turned up. At times like this I was increasingly struck by Lucille’s ability to look the way one was supposed to look. She could roll her anklets and puff her bangs to excellent effect, but try as she might, she could never do as well for me. She had even developed a sauntering sort of walk that made her hips swing a little, but the easy and casual appearance she strove for was very much compromised by my ungainliness, my buzzard’s hunch. We were on our way to buy setting gel and nail polish. I hated these excursions, and I would begin to think of other things in order to endure them. That particular day I began thinking about my mother. In my dream I had waited for her confidently, as I had all those years ago when she left us in the porch. Such confidence was like a sense of imminent presence, a palpable displacement, the movement in the air before the wind comes.
Or so it seemed. Yet twice I had been disappointed, if that was the word. Perhaps I had been deceived. If appearance is only a trick of the nerves, and apparition is only a lesser trick of the nerves, a less perfect illusion, then this expectation, this sense of a presence unperceived, was not particularly illusory as things in this world go. The thought comforted me. By so much was my dream less false than Lucille’s. And it is probably as well to be undeceived, though perhaps it is not.

“I’m
talking
to you,” Lucille said.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“Well, why don’t you keep up with me? Then we could talk.”

“What about?”

“What do other people talk about?”

I had often wondered.

“Anyway,” Lucille said, “you look strange following after me like that.”

“I think I’ll go home.”

“Don’t
go home.” Lucille turned to look at me. From beneath lowered brows her eyes beseeched me fiercely. “I brought money for Cokes,” she said.

So we went on to the drugstore, and while we were drinking our Cokes, two older girls whom Lucille had somehow contrived to know slightly sat down beside us and began to show us patterns and cloth they had bought to sew for school. Lucille stroked the cloth and studied the patterns so intently that the older girls became patronizing and voluble, and showed us a magazine they had bought because it was full of new hairstyles, with setting instructions. Even I was impressed by the
earnestness with which Lucille studied the photographs and diagrams.

“We should get this, Ruthie,” she said. I went over to the magazine stand as if to browse. The magazine stand was just inside the door. Lucille came over and stood next to me. “You’re going to leave,” she said. This was equally statement and accusation. I could think of no reply.

“I just want to go home,” I said, and pushed the door open. Lucille grabbed me by the flesh above my elbow. “Don’t!” she said, pinching me smartly for emphasis. She came with me out onto the sidewalk, still grasping the flesh of my arm. “That’s
Sylvie’s
house now.” She whispered hissingly and looked wrath. And now I felt her nails, and her glare was more pleading and urgent. “We have to
improve
ourselves!” she said.
“Starting right now!
” she said. And again I could think of no reply.

“Well, I’ll talk to you about it later,” I murmured, and turned away toward home, and to my amazement, Lucille followed me—a few paces behind, and only for a block or two. Then she stopped without a word and turned and walked back to the drugstore. And I was left alone, in the gentle afternoon, indifferent to my clothes and comfortable in my skin, unimproved and without the prospect of improvement. It seemed to me then that Lucille would busy herself forever, nudging, pushing, coaxing, as if she could supply the will I lacked, to pull myself into some seemly shape and slip across the wide frontiers into that other world, where it seemed to me then I could never wish to go. For it seemed to me that nothing I had lost, or might lose, could be found there,
or, to put it another way, it seemed that something I had lost might be found in Sylvie’s house. As I walked toward it, and the street became more and more familiar, till the dogs that slept on the porches only lifted their heads as I passed (since Sylvie was not with me), each particular tree, and its season, and its shadow, were utterly known to me, likewise the small desolations of forgotten lilies and irises, likewise the silence of the railroad tracks in the sunlight. I had seen two of the apple trees in my grandmother’s orchard die where they stood. One spring there were no leaves, but they stood there as if expectantly, their limbs almost to the ground, miming their perished fruitfulness. Every winter the orchard is flooded with snow, and every spring the waters are parted, death is undone, and every Lazarus rises, except these two. They have lost their bark and blanched white, and a wind will snap their bones, but if ever a leaf does appear, it should be no great wonder. It would be a small change, as it would be, say, for the moon to begin turning on its axis. It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost. At Sylvie’s house, my grandmother’s house, so much of what I remembered I could hold in my hand—like a china cup, or a windfall apple, sour and cold from its affinity with deep earth, with only a trace of the perfume of its blossoming. Sylvie, I knew, felt the life of perished things.

And yet as I approached the house I was newly aware of the changes that had overtaken it. The lawn was knee high, an oily, dank green, and the wind sent ripples across it. It had swamped the smaller bushes and the walk and the first step of the front porch and had risen to the
height of the foundation. And it seemed that if the house were not to founder, it must soon begin to float.

When Lucille came home she was carrying a bag in which there was a dress pattern with four yards of cream-and-brown-checked wool. She explained that what seemed to me to be a dress was in fact a skirt and a small jacket. The jacket, she explained, could be worn open with a blouse or with a brown or cream skirt. The skirt could be worn with a blouse or sweater. When she had finished this outfit, she would make a brown skirt and get a sweater to match it. “It will all be coordinated,” she said. “It will go with my hair.” She was deeply serious. “You have to help me. The instructions tell how to do it.” We cleared away the clutter on the kitchen table, which was considerable. Sylvie had taken lately to keeping tin cans. She washed the labels off with soap and hot water. There were now many of these cans on the counters and the windowsill, and they would have covered the table long since if Lucille and I had not removed them now and then. We did not object to them, despite the nuisance, because they looked very bright and sound and orderly, especially since Sylvie arranged them open end down, except for the ones she used to store peach pits and the keys from sardine and coffee cans. Frankly, we had come to the point where we could hardly object to order in any form, though we hoped that her interest in bottles was a temporary aberration.

We spread the big tan sheet of instructions out on the table. Lucille knelt on a chair and leaned across the table to read step 1. “We’ll need a dictionary,” she said, so
I went to get one from the bookcase in the living room. It was old, one of my grandfather’s books. We had never used it before.

“The first thing to do,” Lucille said, “is spread out the cloth. Then you pin on all the pieces of the pattern, and then you cut them out. Look up
pinking shears
.” I opened to
P
. At that place there were five dried pansies—one yellow, one blue-black, one mahogany, one violet, one parchment. They were flat and stiff and dry—as rigid as butterfly wings, but much more fragile. At
Q
I found a sprig of Queen Anne’s lace, which was smashed flat and looked very like dill. At R I found a variety of roses—red roses, which had warped the page on each side a little to their shape, and pink wild roses.

“What are you doing?” Lucille asked.

“This dictionary is full of pressed flowers,” I said.

“Grandpa.”

“He put lady’s slippers under O. Probably
orchids
.”

“Let me see that,” Lucille said. She took the book by each end of its spine and shook it. Scores of flowers and petals fell and drifted from between the pages. Lucille kept shaking until nothing more came, and then she handed the dictionary back to me. “Pinking shears,” she said.

“What will we do with these flowers?”

“Put them in the stove.”

“Why do that?”

“What are they good for?” This was not a real question, of course. Lucille lowered her coppery brows and peered at me boldly, as if to say, It is no crime to harden my heart against pansies that have smothered in darkness
for forty years. “Why won’t you help me with my dress? You just don’t want to help.”