Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

but that morning we found Sylvie sitting in the kitchen by the stove, with her coat on, eating oyster crackers from a small cellophane bag. She blinked at us, smiling. “It was nice with the light off,” she suggested, and Lucille and I collided in our haste to pull the chain. Sylvie’s coat made us think she might be leaving, and we were ready to perform great feats of docility to keep her. “Isn’t that nicer?” In fact, the wind was badgering the house, throwing frozen rain against the windows. We sat down on the rug by her feet and watched her. She handed us each an oyster cracker. “I can hardly believe I’m here,” she said finally. “I was onthe train for eleven hours. There’s so much snow in the mountains. We just crept along, for hours and hours and hours.” It was clear from her voice that the trip had been pleasant. “Have you ever been on a train?” We had not. “They have heavy white tablecloths in the dining car, and little silver vases bolted to the window frame, and you get your own little silver pot of hot syrup. I like to travel by train,” Sylvie said. “Especially in the passenger cars. I’ll take you with me sometime.”
    “Take us where?” Lucille asked.
    Sylvie shrugged. “Somewhere. Wherever. Where do you want to go?”
    I saw the three of us posed in all the open doors of an endless train of freight cars—innumerable, rapid, identical images that produced a flickering illusion of both movement and stasis, as the pictures in a kinetoscope do. The hot and dangerous winds of our passing tattered the Queen Anne’s lace, and yet, for all the noise and clatter and headlong speed, we flickered there at the foot of the garden while the train roared on and on. “Spokane,” I said.
    “Oh, somewhere better than that. Farther away. Maybe Seattle.” There was a silence. “But that’s where you used to live.”
    “With our mother,” Lucille said.
    “Yes.” Sylvie had folded the empty cellophane wrapper in quarters and she was creasing the folds between finger and thumb.
    “Would you tell us about her?” Lucille asked. The question was abrupt, and the tone of it was coaxing, because adults did not wish to speak to us about our mother. Our grandmother never spoke of any of herdaughters, and when they were mentioned to her, she winced with irritation. We were accustomed to this, but not to the sharp embarrassment with which Lily and Nona and all my grandmother’s friends reacted to our mother’s very name. We had planned to try Sylvie, but perhaps because Sylvie had her coat on and appeared so very transient, Lucille did not wait till we knew her better, as we had agreed to do.
    “Oh, she was nice,” Sylvie said. “She was pretty.”
    “But what was she
like?
”
    “She was good in school.”
    Lucille sighed.
    “It’s hard to describe someone you know so well. She was very quiet. She played the piano. She collected stamps.” Sylvie seemed to be reflecting. “I’ve never known anyone so fond of cats. She was always bringing them home.”
    Lucille shifted her legs and adjusted the thick flannel skirt of her nightgown around them.
    “I didn’t see much of her after she was married,” Sylvie explained.
    “Then tell us about her wedding,” Lucille said.
    “Oh, that was very small. She wore a sundress made of eyelet lace, and a straw hat, and she had a bouquet of daisies. It was just to please Mother. They’d already been married by a justice of the peace somewhere in Nevada.”
    “Why Nevada?”
    “Well, your father was from Nevada.”
    “What was he like?”
    Sylvie shrugged. “He was tall. Not bad-looking. Awfully quiet, though. I think he was shy.”
    “What kind of work did he do?”
    “He traveled. I think he sold some sort of farming equipment. Tools, maybe. I never even saw him, except for that one day. Do you know where he is now?”
    “Nope,” I said. Lucille and I were remembering a day when Bernice had brought our mother a thick letter. “Reginald