Housekeeping: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

After the mud has been cleared, school starts up again. Ruth and Lucille are in junior high, and attend school in a square, symmetrical red-brick building named for William Henry Harrison. Ruth is a year older than Lucille, and though they aren’t together in classes, they spent time with one another in study hall and at lunch. Neither is a particularly good or bad student, and because they are quiet and unremarkable, they are largely left alone. Ruth has a “cold, visceral dread” of school, but has learned to ignore this discomfort, which is “not to be relieved.”

One day, when Lucille is caught cheating off of a classmate, she stays home from school the following week feigning illness. When she returns to school, she does so with a required note from Sylvie—the note basically states that Lucille was faking sick every day and would not be made to go to school. Lucille crunches the note up and throws it into the road on the way to school, and though she frets that someone from school will call Sylvie on the phone or come by the house, Ruth assures her everything will be fine. Still, as they approach the building, Lucille’s fear increases, and she tells Ruth that she’s going to skip school and spend the day down by the lake. Ruth says she’ll go, too, unworried about getting into trouble.

Every day that week, Lucille and Ruth skip school and spend their days down at the lake. They try to come up with ideas to explain their absences, but after the third day of skipping, they give up on making excuses and decide they have no choice to “wait until [they are] apprehended.” They are afraid to go back to school, and feel “cruelly banished from a place where [they have] no desire to be.” Sylvie knows nothing of the girls’ truancy, and they dread facing her once she finds out what they’ve been up to.

On the fourth day the girls spend down by the lake, they see Sylvie at the shore. Lucille worries that Sylvie is looking for them, but Sylvie seems to be there just to look out across the lake and get lost in thought. The girls find themselves irked by her obliviousness, and almost wishing she’d catch them after all. The girls follow Sylvie as she walks up onto the bridge, talks briefly with some hobos, and walks fifty or so feet out into the middle of the lake on the train tracks. As the girls stare up at Sylvie, she spots them at last. She greets them with a wave and hurries back to them.

Sylvie remarks that she didn’t realize it was late enough for school to be out—Lucille replies only that “school isn’t out,” and Sylvie says nothing more about their absences. As the three of them walk home, Sylvie remarks that she always “wondered what it would be like” to stand out on the middle of the bridge. Lucille chides Sylvie for being so careless, and points out that if she had fallen in, “everyone would think you did it on purpose. Even us.” Sylvie apologizes for upsetting the girls, but states that she didn’t know they were skipping school and had no idea they’d be down at the lake.

The incident upsets Ruth and Lucille, who realize that their aunt is “not a stable person.” The girls, however, never discuss their fears about Sylvie outright. Sometimes they wake in the night to the sound of their aunt signing, and often find her awake and wandering about the house in the middle of the night—sitting on the back porch steps, standing in the orchard, or playing solitaire in the kitchen. As the girls fight sleep night after night hoping to figure out what Sylvie’s up to, they find themselves having difficulty telling what’s real and what isn’t when it comes to their aunt. They worry often about what would have happened if she hadn’t seen them up on the bridge, and whether she would have kept walking, been hit by a train, or flung herself into the lake.

Despite Ruth and Lucille’s worries after the incident on the bridge, they have a pleasant weekend with Sylvie, playing Monopoly and listening to the stories of people she’s met during her travels around the country. On Monday, the girls go back to school, and despite their absences, no one questions them. They realize that someone at school has decided that their circumstances are “special.” As the days and weeks pass, the girls fall into a regular routine of going to school and coming home to Sylvie, slowing growing used to their aunt and her eccentricities.

Sylvie fails to sweep the leaves from where they have gathered over the course of the winter in the corners of the house, and yet she “talk[s] a great deal about housekeeping.” She soaks tea towels in water and bleach for days on end and airs out all the cupboards in the kitchen—she believes “most of all in air,” and often accidentally leaves doors and windows open all day. She only likes to eat supper after dark, and so during the summer Lucille and Ruth eat late and stay up late. Sylvie likes cold food, mostly—cheese, doughnuts, sardines, and fruit pies—and always eats with her fingers. She has endless entertaining stories of her days riding the rails and meeting all sorts of strange, eccentric people, and Lucille and Ruth delight in her tales, which she often tries to make “useful” for the two of them through morals and lessons.

Sylvie moves from upstairs to downstairs and takes over Sylvia’s old room off the kitchen. Three steps below the rest of the ground floor, the room has glass double doors which open onto the orchard. Sylvie keeps the room furnished very plainly, and Lucille and Ruth occasionally spend time digging through the bottom drawer of a chest which once belonged to their grandmother. The drawer is full of odds and ends—old candles, unworn socks, twine, and pamphlets for missionary work in China. As Ruth spends hours playing with the odds and ends, she imagines disparate things—her aunt Molly off in China, the bottom of the lake in Fingerbone and all the treasures it must hold, and the “fragments” of the lives of people all around her.

Ruth is content with Sylvie and loves her very much. Lucille, however, begins appearing to Ruth as someone on “a slowly sinking boat,” who looks at the other people in Fingerbone as “a not-too-distant shore.” When Sylvie brings home blue sequined velveteen ballet slippers for the girls to wear, Lucille pulls all the sequins off; when Sylvie goes out shopping, Lucille gripes at the things she brings back to eat. Ruth begins to see how practical and common her sister is in contrast to Sylvie’s dreamy flightiness. Sylvie showers the girls in “treasures” both physical and emotional of which Lucille wants no part.