Housekeeping

Sylvie wakes Ruth very early the next morning so that they can eat breakfast and set out on their little trip. It is nearly November, and the cold air outside makes Ruth sluggish. Sylvie is in a big hurry, and hardly waits for Ruth to tie her shoes before rushing her downstairs. Sylvie gives Ruth an egg on toast for breakfast, and tells her to eat it on the way. Ruth runs out the door after Sylvie, struggling to keep up through her haze of sleepiness. As Ruth follows Sylvie down to the lake, she thinks about how the two of them are the same—about how Sylvie might as well be her mother.

Down at the shore, Sylvie finds that the boat is not where she left it—someone else, she reasons, must have used it and tied it up somewhere else. Eventually, Sylvie spots a large tarp covered with branches and needles—she unearths the boat and oars from beneath the hiding-place, and Ruth helps her push it into the water. As Ruth climbs in, she can hear a man yelling after them, but Sylvie hops in and begins rowing anyway. The man’s voice grows louder and more full of rage the farther they get from shore, but Sylvie urges Ruth to ignore him—“He always acts like that,” she says.

The sun rises over the lake, and Sylvie remarks that maybe a hundred people live on the islands within it and the hills around it. She describes sometimes seeing smoke rising from one of the islands when she’s out on the boat by herself—she has gone towards the smoke before, and felt sure that she is in the presence of wild children, but can never quite see them. Sylvie confesses to Ruth that she once tried to “catch one”—she left marshmallows on the branches of the apple trees trying to lure a child out of an abandoned house in the woods. Sylvie tells Ruth that she didn’t want to take the feral child or get near to it—just “look at it.” Ruth intuits that the place Sylvie is describing is the place they’re rowing towards now.

Sylvie grows quiet, and she and Ruth float across the lake in silence. The boat rows unevenly, and the two are pulled towards the middle of the lake—as they are, Ruth thinks of Edmund, the grandfather she never met, pulling his entire family “unborn” behind him to Fingerbone.

Eventually, Sylvie and Ruth reach the outcrop they’ve been destined for and pull the boat to shore. They walk through the valley made by the surrounding mountains and eventually come upon the “fallen house” and “stunted orchard” Sylvie has described to Ruth. Sylvie asks Ruth if she thinks it’s pretty, and Ruth agrees that it is; Sylvie says they should wait for the sun to come all the way up, so they can see it at its prettiest. Sylvie wants to crouch and wait to see if they can spot any feral children, but Ruth is cold, so they head back to the boat. Ruth, hungry, digs through the lunch Sylvie has brought for them—"among the odds and ends” are some marshmallows, plus “a black banana, a lump of salami with a knife through it, [and] a single yellow chicken wing like an elegant, small gesture of defeat.”

Ruth builds a fire and toasts marshmallows while Sylvie naps. After a while, Sylvie wakes and stretches, declaring that it is warm enough now to return to the valley. Indeed, when they go back, Ruth finds the place “changed”—the frost on the ground, which looked before like barren salt, seems to have flowered, and the trees are alive with falling petals and dripping water. The older Ruth’s memories of the beautiful, frost-covered valley mingle with her present-day musings on the nature of growth, need, and loss.

Ruth looks around and realizes that Sylvie is gone. She wonders whether her aunt is teasing her by hiding in the woods, and so pretends not to know she is alone, or grow frightened by her aloneness. Ruth stays still and silent in the valley listening to the drip of melting snow and admiring the flowery trees. After a while, she walks out of the valley and down to the shore, sure that Sylvie has gone down to move the boat or fetch some food. When she doesn’t see her aunt, though, she sits on a log and waits, trying not to panic. Alone, without Lucille or Sylvie, Ruth feels a deep-seated dread, and imagines she can feel “cold, solitary children” from the woods creeping up behind her.

Ruth returns to the valley to wait for Sylvie there, but the stone steps of the sunken house are too cold to sit upon, and Ruth shivers in the wind. She wonders how the house came to fall into such disrepair, and thinks of all the stories she’s heard of families in Fingerbone struggling to survive in their old houses during the harsh, bitter winters. Ruth remembers thinking about abandoned places and abandoned people, and, as an adult, remarks on how “loneliness is an absolute discovery.”

Ruth begins pulling loose planks from the ruins of the house to make a fire, and as she does, she imagines that she will find the feral children buried in the wreckage below. She soon grows both tired and fearful of the stories she’s telling herself, though, and sits in the grass and cries as she fears Sylvie has abandoned her. She almost longs for the feral children to come “unhouse [her] of [her] flesh” and pry the house of her body apart—she wants to be with her mother, and her grandmother Sylvia, and all those she has lost.

Sylvie returns to the valley and wraps her arms around Ruth, startling the girl. They look at one another and say nothing. Sylvie bundles Ruth in her coat and sways her back and forth, and Ruth tries to let herself be comforted by the “awkward” embrace. Ruth begins weeping, and tells Sylvie that she couldn’t see the children. Sylvie assures they’ll find them “another time,” and then they get up to leave. Sylvie takes her coat off and puts it on Ruth, buttoning her up safe inside. Ruth feels heartened and sheltered by the gesture.

Sylvie and Ruth climb into the boat and set off back across the lake. Ruth is worried that the boat will capsize and she will sink to the bottom of the lake, just like her mother did. As she thinks of the reflective power of water, she realizes that though her mother tried to erase herself from the world by driving into the lake, her actions only refracted her into “a thousand” pieces that Ruth sees whenever she closes her eyes.

Sylvie rows the boat underneath the bridge, and she and Ruth sit and wait for the train in the dark. Ruth is tired and confused, and as she waits with Sylvie she recalls the morning that she and Lucille found their grandmother Sylvia dead in her bed, positioned as if “she had leaped toward ether” in her final moments. Ruth grows frustrated with waiting. As the tedious minutes pass by, Ruth says Sylvie’s name several times to get her attention, but her aunt doesn’t respond. After several attempts, Ruth calls out to Sylvie by the name of “Helen,” and in that moment, the bridge begins to rumble and the train passes by overhead. Sylvie wonders aloud how many dead bodies are at the bottom of the lake—and how many unknown, unseen transients riding the rails perished in the great train accident which claimed Edmund’s life.

Ruth tells Sylvie she’s cold, and Sylvie says they can go home. She rows the two of them back to shore against the current, and it takes a long time for them to travel a short distance—Ruth, frightened, wonders if they are “tethered to the old wreck on the lake floor.” Ruth offers to row for a while, but she can’t make any headway either. The two of them give up and lie down in the boat, wishing aloud for hamburgers, pie, coats, and blankets. They keep from falling asleep by singing songs and telling stories.

As the sun rises, Sylvie and Ruth drift to the lake’s opposite shore and clamber out of the boat and up onto the bridge. They hop aboard an eastbound freight train and share a boxcar with an old woman. As the train heads for town, it becomes clear that Sylvie and the woman know one another. After disembarking at the freight yard in Fingerbone, Sylvie and Ruth walk home together, disheveled and tired. As they pass through town, Sylvie tells Ruth to ignore everyone’s stares. When they walk past the drug store, Sylvie sees Lucille there with her friends, but doesn’t make eye contact so as not to embarrass her sister.

At home, Sylvie makes a fire for Ruth and then heads to bed. Ruth nearly falls asleep at the kitchen table, but snaps to attention when Lucille comes in and sits down with her. She asks Ruth where she and Sylvie have been, but Ruth finds that she cannot put the trip with Sylvie into words. She has strange visions of drifting through the dark with Sylvie across the bridge and into the lake. Ruth becomes aware that Lucille is talking to her and offering her the chance to come stay with her and leave Sylvie behind, but Ruth cannot manage a response.