Housekeeping: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

her shoulders shaking. In my earliest memories of her my grandmother was already up in years. I remember sittingunder the ironing board, which pulled down from the kitchen wall, while she ironed the parlor curtains and muttered “Robin Adair.” One veil after another fell down around me, starched and white and fragrant, and I had vague dreams of being hidden or cloistered, and watched the electric cord wag, and contemplated my grandmother’s big black shoes, and her legs in their orangy-brown stockings, as contourless, as completely unshaped by muscle as two thick bones. Even then she was old.
    Since my grandmother had a little income and owned her house outright, she always took some satisfaction in thinking ahead to the time when her simple private destiny would intersect with the great public processes of law and finance—that is, to the time of her death. All the habits and patterns and properties that had settled around her, the monthly checks from the bank, the house she had lived in since she came to it as a bride, the weedy orchard that surrounded the yard on three sides where smaller and wormier apples and apricots and plums had fallen every year of her widowhood, all these things would suddenly become liquid, capable of assuming new forms. And all of it would be Lucille’s and mine.
    “Sell the orchards,” she would say, looking grave and wise, “but keep the house. So long as you look after your health, and own the roof above your head, you’re as safe as anyone can be,” she would say, “God willing.” My grandmother loved to talk about these things. When she did, her eyes would roam over the goods she had accumulated unthinkingly and maintained out of habit as eagerly as if she had come to reclaim them.
    Her sisters-in-law, Nona and Lily, were to come andlook after us when the time came. Lily and Nona were twelve and ten years younger than my grandmother, and old as she was, she continued to think of them as rather young. They were almost destitute, and the savings in rent, not to mention the advantages of exchanging a little hotel room below ground for a rambling house surrounded by peonies and rose bushes, would be inducement enough to keep them with us until we came of age.

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    When, after almost five years, my grandmother one winter morning eschewed awakening, Lily and Nona were fetched from Spokane and took up housekeeping in Fingerbone, just as my grandmother had wished. Their alarm was evident from the first, in the nervous flutter with which they searched their bags and pockets for the little present they had brought (it was a large box of cough drops—a confection they considered both tasty and salubrious). Lily and Nona both had light blue hair and black coats with shiny black beads in intricate patterns on the lapels. Their thick bodies pitched forward from the hips, and their arms and ankles were plump. They were, though maiden ladies, of a buxomly maternal appearance that contrasted oddly with their brusque, unpracticed pats and kisses.
    After their bags had been brought in, and they had kissed and patted us, Lily poked up the fire and Nona lowered the shades. Lily carried some of the largerbouquets into the porch and Nona poured more water into the vases. Then they seemed at a loss. I heard Lily remark to Nona that it was still three hours till supper-time, and five till bedtime. They eyed us with nervous sorrow. They found some
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to read while we played go fish on the rug by the stove. A long hour passed and they gave us supper. Another hour and they put us to bed. We lay listening to their conversation, which was always perfectly audible, because they were both hard of hearing. It seemed then and always to be the elaboration and ornamentation of the consensus between them, which was as intricate and well-tended as a termite castle.
    “A pity!”
    “A pity, a pity!”
    “Sylvia wasn’t old.”
    “She wasn’t young.”
    “She was old to be looking after