The lake which sits at the center of Fingerbone is vast, deep, and full of both bodies and secrets, making it a complex symbol of life and loss. The novel opens with a recreation of a pivotal moment in the town’s history—a train accident in which a passenger train traveling along the large bridge over the lake slid “like a weasel” into the frigid depths, killing the Foster patriarch (Edmund) and several other individuals. Years later, Lucille and Ruth’s suicidal mother, Helen, drives herself off a cliff and into the lake in a neighbor’s borrowed car, adding her body to the uncountable remains which lie at its bottom. The lake is a place of fear and loss, but also, strangely, one of beauty and refuge. Though Ruth and Lucille know that their mother and grandfather have lost their lives to the lake, they ice-skate along its surface for hours each day in winter and explore its sandy shores in summer.
A place of pleasure and pain alike, the lake claims life but also hosts and gives life. The many islands which dot its vast surface are a source of intrigue to Sylvie and Ruth, and the lake’s status as an almost holy place which houses life and death alike is cemented late in the novel when the two of them set out to explore a forgotten valley on one such island. Sylvie has been several times, and believes that she can hear feral children playing in the woods just out of sight; however, when Ruth enters the valley, which has become Sylvie’s “special place,” she encounters nothing but fear and dread. She worries Sylvie will abandon her and she will be alone forever, and as her thoughts spiral out of control, she meditates on the moment of her own conception (to which she was, she states, “unconsenting”) and the metaphysics of craving and longing.
Each time the lake appears in the novel, it is rendered differently: both imposing and inviting, placid and menacing, the lake becomes a potent symbol of life, death, and rebirth. As Ruth, Lucille, and Sylvie explore the woods and sandy shores around the lake, the islands within it, and the bridge which hovers over its surface, they poke and prod fruitlessly at the answers to life’s undulating patterns of joy, loss, and despair, as well as the truth about what awaits in the realms beyond.
The Lake Quotes in Housekeeping
Now and then Molly searched Sylvie’s room for unreturned library books. Occasionally Helen made a batch of cookies. It was Sylvie who brought in bouquets of flowers. This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean. The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so. And the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water.
Lucille and I took our skates to school, so that we could go to the lake directly and stay there through the twilight. Usually we would skate along the edge of the swept ice, tracing its shape, and coming finally to its farthest edge, we would sit on the snow and look back at Fingerbone.
We felt giddily far from shore, though the lake was so solid that winter that it would certainly have supported the weight of the entire population of Fingerbone, past, present, and to come. Nevertheless, only we and the ice sweepers went out so far, and only we stayed.
I knew why Sylvie felt there were children in the woods. I felt so, too, though I did not think so. […] I knew that if I turned however quickly to look behind me the consciousness behind me would not still be there, and would only come closer when I turned away again. […] In that way it was persistent and teasing and ungentle, the way half-wild, lonely children are. This was something Lucille and I together would ignore, and I had been avoiding the shore all that fall, because when I was by myself and obviously lonely, too, the teasing would be much more difficult to disregard. Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them.
The Lake Symbol Timeline in Housekeeping
