Housekeeping

Ruth begins to sense that Lucille’s loyalties lie in “the other world”—the world of normal people. The girls stop going to school at the end of March, as soon as the weather is nice, though they don their school clothes and walk in the direction of the junior high each morning “as a courtesy to Sylvie.” The girls go to the lake each day, ignoring the advice their grandmother Sylvia taught them long ago about staying away from both trains and hoboes. Ruth often wonders if she, her sister, and the hoboes are awaiting some kind of “resurrection” of all the bodies at the bottom of the lake—including the bodies of Ruth and Lucille’s mother and grandfather, Helen and Edmund.

Sylvie occasionally receives notes from school informing her of the girls’ truancy, and she writes back explaining that “the trouble lay with the discomforts of female adolescence.” Sylvie’s notes are not entirely untrue: Lucille, though younger than Ruth, is becoming a “touchy, achy, tearful creature” whose clothes “bind and pull” as she develops breasts that “alarm” Ruth. While Lucille transforms into a “small woman,” Ruth remains a “towering child.”

The girls often play at an old quarry in the forest, though the woods “disturb” them. They like finding small clearings where wild strawberries and buttercups grow, but become frightened and nervous when they enter the deeper parts of the woods. Still, they often stay in the forest until well into the evening as spring turns to summer, forced home only by the chill settling into the evenings. Ruth notices that she loves being in the woods “for the woods’ own sake,” while Lucille “seem[s] to be enduring a banishment there.”

Each night when the girls arrive home, Sylvie is waiting for them in the dark of the evening—her “special” time of day. Many evenings, the dark is, to Sylvie’s mind, too beautiful to disturb, and they cook and eat supper with the lights out, using their “finer senses” to accomplish tasks in the kitchen. One of these evenings in the dark, Lucille, feeling itchy, goes to the light switch to turn it on and see if she has bug bites or a rash. As soon as the kitchen is flooded with light, it transforms from a place of serenity and magic to a dirty, sloppy room marked by dust, soot, and shabby dinnerware. Lucille determines that she has no bites and hurriedly turns the light off again.

Lucille grows increasingly frustrated with Sylvie’s way of housekeeping. Sylvie does have odd habits—she keeps her clothes, hairbrush, and toothpaste in a box under her bed, and always sleeps in her clothes with her shoes under her pillow. Obviously the habits of a transient person, Sylvie’s odd rituals “offend” Lucille, and she begins growing worried that the more “well-tended” and popular girls at school—girls whom she knows “only by name”—will somehow find out about the strange way she and Ruth are living. Lucille complains to Ruth about Sylvie’s strange and embarrassing ways, but Ruth actually takes comfort in Sylvie’s oddities, believing that as long as Sylvie’s able to indulge the transient behaviors she’s found comfort in in the past, she’ll stay in Fingerbone with the girls forever.

Any time Sylvie makes any allusion to her former transience—bringing home newspapers she’s collected at the train station for the girls to do crosswords in, talking about meeting someone who’d ridden the rails to Fingerbone—Lucille becomes irate and accuses Sylvie of acting embarrassingly. Lucille feels the constant pressure, Ruth notes, of wondering how people of “reasonableness and solidity [might] respond to such tales.” Lucille constantly compares herself to one of her classmates, Rosette Brown, and imagines how Rosette and her mother would react to Sylvie’s stories. Though Lucille regards Sylvie with sympathy, she behaves towards her with “no mercy, and no tolerance.”

One day, Lucille and Ruth are on their way to the post office when they see Sylvie sleeping on a park bench. Lucille is horrified, and orders Ruth to wake Sylvie up while she herself runs towards home to avoid being seen with Sylvie. When Ruth manages to wake Sylvie, Sylvie is happy to see her, and pulls a chocolate bar from her pocket for Ruth to enjoy. Sylvie confesses that she’s glad to have a moment to talk to Ruth alone—Ruth is so quiet, Sylvie says, it’s hard to know what she thinks. Ruth confesses, to her own embarrassment, that she doesn’t quite know what she thinks. She often feels invisible and incomplete, like a ghost. Ruth waits for Sylvie to respond, hoping that she will say Ruth is a lot like her—but Sylvie does not “claim” her.

Sylvie and Ruth walk home together, and when they arrive, Lucille confronts both of them, shouting at Sylvie for sleeping on a bench in the middle of town in the middle of the afternoon where anyone could have seen her. Sylvie goes out the door into the orchard, and Ruth yells at Lucille for frightening Sylvie off. Ruth warns Lucille that if she’s cruel to Sylvie, she might leave for real, but Lucille insists they’d be better off without Sylvie around. Exhausted and sad, the girls sit at the kitchen table playing a game in which they list the capitals of the states and the countries of the world until Sylvie returns from her walk. She has fresh berries for the girls, and makes them pancakes for dinner. As the pancakes cook, she joins in the game they’re playing, noting that she and Helen used to play the same game as girls.