Housekeeping: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

That summer, Lucille remains “loyal” to Ruth and Sylvie more out of necessity than anything else—they are both her “chief problem” and her “only refuge.” Ruth and Lucille are always together, and they spend much of their days indulging in reminiscences of their mother. They have begun to remember her differently, though, and often quarrel about what she was really like. Lucille begins describing their mother as “a widow […] who was killed in an accident,” but Ruth sees her mother as “the abandoner, and not the one abandoned.”

The girls realize—Lucille rather reluctantly—that they are “in Sylvie’s dream with her.” As they play at truancy and hide in the woods, they realize they have in all likelihood never come to a place where Sylvie has not been before them. One night, Lucille and Ruth wander too far into the woods while trekking to a small inlet to do some fishing, and are forced to spend the night. The girls enjoy a hike to the inlet where they catch, cook, and eat fish and huckleberries without any thought as to the time, and soon realize it is too late to return home through the woods. They pass an uncomfortable night in a makeshift hut—Ruth is haunted by visions of her mother, her grandmother Sylvia, and Sylvie, dreaming the half-dreams of uneasy sleep.

As dawn approaches, the girls walk home through the woods and eventually along the railroad tracks. They arrive home to find Sylvie waiting for them with quilts and tea, and Ruth, wrapped in a blanket, quickly falls asleep right at the kitchen table. Ruth has more upsetting half-dreams in which she’s waiting for her mother to come in the front door. She feels as if she’s dying, and though she can make out Lucille and Sylvie speaking to one another, she can’t hear what they’re saying. When she startles herself awake much later, Sylvie smiles at her and tells her that sleep is best when one is exhausted—“you don’t sleep,” she says, “you just die.”

Ruth goes upstairs, where Lucille is getting dressed. As Lucille helps Ruth brush out her hair and choose an outfit for the day, she confesses that she, too had a bad dream upon falling asleep, in which a woman who “reminded [her] of Sylvie” was trying to “smother” her with blankets. The two of them walk to the drug store, and when Ruth crosses her arms over her chest once they get to town, Lucille warningly tells Ruth she’ll just “make people notice it more.” Ruth notices how Lucille has learned to set her hair, dress, and walk with a swing in her hips, while Ruth just feels tall and out of place no matter what she wears or how she does her hair.

Ruth is not enjoying the shopping trip and tells Lucille she wants to go home, but Lucille entices her to stay in town for a Coke. While the girls drink their sodas, they’re joined by two girls Lucille knows from school. As Lucille looks over a magazine with the other girls, Ruth retreats into herself. She tells Lucille that she wants to go home, but Lucille pinches her and whispers to her that their home is “Sylvie’s house now,” and they must learn to “improve” themselves without her. Ruth ignores Lucille and leaves, walking towards home.

As Ruth approaches the house, she feels comforted by the familiar sight of the orchard, but also finds herself taking stock for the first time of the changes that have “overtaken” it. The lawn is high and unkempt, and the steps of the porch have shifted to meet the height of the foundation. Ruth observes that the house looks as if it is about to either founder or float.

Lucille arrives home with an armful of dress patterns and fabric. Lucille describes the pattern for a skirt and small jacket in detail, and urges Ruth to help her sew it. They clear aside the cans and bottles Sylvie has collected on the kitchen table and set to work. When Lucille asks Ruth to grab the dictionary and look up pinking shears, Ruth finds dried flowers pressed between several pages—roses under R, Queen Anne’s lace under Q. Lucille tells Ruth to throw the flowers in the stove—they’re not good for anything, anymore, she says. Ruth says she’ll save the flowers in another book, but Lucille begins picking them out and crushing them. Ruth tries to hit Lucille with the dictionary, but when Lucille blocks the blow, she drops it to the floor and storms out of the kitchen.

Lucille and Ruth don’t speak for several days, and Lucille often goes into town to spend time with her new friends at the drug store. Ruth is hurt by Lucille’s avoidance, and though she tries to peek in on Lucille’s work on the dress, Lucille yells at Ruth any time she comes into the spare bedroom where she’s working. One afternoon, Lucille emerges from the bedroom with the completed dress in her arms and puts it into the stove. She bunches newspaper and throws that in as well, then lights everything on fire with a match and lets it burn. Lucille sits at the kitchen table with Ruth, and the girls apologize to one another. Lucille tells Ruth that she thinks they spend too much time together, and need “other friends.”

Ruth is hurt. Neither of them have ever really had any friends other than each other—Lucille’s friends are brand new. While thinking about how she and Lucille have leaned on one another to make sense of the world around them, Ruth recalls a night a little while ago when she and Lucille observed Sylvie brushing her hair and styling it different ways in the mirror. They’d once watched their mother do the same thing, and though the girls tried to interpret the moment as a “meaningless” coincidence, they both watched Sylvie a very long time that night. Ruth is snapped back to the present moment when Lucille announces that she can’t wait to leave Fingerbone and go to Boston. When Ruth asks Lucille why she wants to go to Boston, Lucille responds: “Because it isn’t Fingerbone.”

As August passes, Lucille begins doing exercises and brushing her hair a hundred strokes each night. School is approaching, and Ruth knows her sister is “determined now to make something of herself.” Lucille reads almost constantly and ignores Ruth’s invitations to go play down by the lake. Lucille also begins keeping a diary, which Ruth reads hoping to divine her sister’s thoughts. Instead, she finds only a list of exercises, a table grace, and a list of instructions for setting the table at a dinner party. Ruth knows that the “old Lucille” is gone.

On the first day of school, Lucille leaves early, without Ruth. During first period, the girls are called to the principal’s office from their separate classes. The principal, Mr. French, confronts the girls about their truancy, and Lucille assures the principal that her attitude has changed, but throws Ruth under the bus by telling the principal that Ruth can’t be reasoned with when it comes to “practical things”—they don’t matter to Ruth. The principal asks Ruth what does matter to her, and she shrugs. The principal shrugs back, mocking her. Lucille speaks for Ruth, saying her sister hasn’t figured out what matters to her yet—she “likes trees.” The principal urges Ruth to learn to speak and think for herself. Looking right in Ruth’s eyes, Lucille tells the principal that Ruth “has her own ways.”

The girls hardly see each other at school anymore, and Ruth often eats lunch alone. She focuses on her schoolwork intently as a way of finding “refuge” without her sister’s company, and after a month or two, Mr. French calls Ruth into his office to tell her he’s proud of the improvement in her work ethic. Lucille, meanwhile, grows increasingly “fastidious” and refuses to eat the dinners Sylvie cooks, or even join Sylvie and Ruth for meals. Ruth can tell that Lucille’s absence saddens Sylvie, and though Ruth longs to comfort her aunt, she doesn’t know how to.

One night, when Lucille goes out to a school dance, Sylvie excitedly tells Ruth that she has a “pretty” place to show her. Nearby, Sylvie says, there is a little valley with a house and an orchard. The valley is small, and barely gets any sun at all; frost covers the ground all day long, even in July. Sylvie wants to take Ruth to the valley right away, in a little boat, but Ruth has studying to do. Sylvie offers to write Ruth a note so that she can skip school on Monday and they can go together, but Ruth insists she has a report due. When Ruth goes upstairs to read, Sylvie comes up behind her and sits on Lucille’s side of the bed to read alongside Ruth.

When Lucille comes home, she sees Sylvie asleep in the bed and offers to sleep downstairs. When she goes down, though, Sylvie, having heard her, gets up from the bed to go downstairs and offer the bed back to Lucille. She comes back up, though, after a moment to announce that Lucille is not in the house. The next morning, Sylvie and Ruth will learn that Lucille went to the home of Miss Royce, her Home Economics teacher, a “solitary woman” with a “frightened devotion” to her students. Miss Royce let Lucille stay in the spare room, and after that night, Ruth had “no sister”—Miss Royce effectively adopts Lucille as her own.

Before Sylvie and Ruth know any of this, though, they spend the night wondering whether they should call the sheriff or go out looking for Lucille. Sylvie says they shouldn’t bother the police—Lucille is probably just at a friend’s house. The next morning, though, Miss Royce knocks on the door, and she and Sylvie talk out on the porch for a long while. Sylvie comes back in to retrieve some of Lucille’s things and bring them back out to Miss Royce. When Sylvie comes back inside, she relays to Ruth that Lucille, apparently, has said that Ruth can have all her things. Ruth says perhaps Lucille doesn’t plan to be gone very long. She asks Sylvie if she’ll still write her the excuse note to get out of school the next day.