Housekeeping: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

The week after Sylvie arrives in Fingerbone, the weather is sunny and balmy. Lucille and Ruth play in the snow and build a snow-woman who looks as if she’s “standing in a cold wind.” The girls feel they have “conjured a presence,” but after lunch time, the woman has begun to melt and has grown “dog-yellowed”; Lucille and Ruth abandon her.

The sunny weather soon turns rainy, and rain during the late winter months in Fingerbone is a “disaster.” The snow melts but the ground doesn’t thaw, and after three days of rain, the entire town is flooded. Normally, Sylvia’s home is high enough up that it’s safe from the floods—but this year the flooding is so bad that the first floor of the house is covered in four inches of water, and Ruth, Lucille, and Sylvie are forced to live upstairs for a number of days and wear galoshes anytime they have to enter the kitchen.

Ruth, Lucille, and Sylvie eat dinner upstairs, and afterwards, Sylvie suggests they play cards. Lucille, bored, says she doesn’t want to play—she wants to “find some other people.” She says that tomorrow she wants to “wade up to higher ground” and find people camping up in the hills. Sylvie says she doesn’t see any reason to leave the house, as the three of them are perfectly cozy and have enough food. When Lucille says she’s tired of being alone in the house with Ruth and Sylvie, Sylvie warns Lucille not to let herself be bothered by her loneliness—often, attempts to remedy one’s loneliness often end in more sorrow and isolation. Sylvie describes the lonely women she’s met during her travels and shares their sad stories with Ruth and Lucille. The stories disturb the girls, and one about a woman losing custody of her children alarms them particularly.

Lucille and Ruth are still uncertain that Sylvie will stay with them for good. She looks so much like their mother that they find themselves conflating the two, and half-waiting for Sylvie to abandon them at any moment. They have also noticed that Sylvie rarely takes off her coat—they worry that this means she’s planning to leave them soon.

Lucille asks Sylvie why she doesn’t have any children. Sylvie tries to dodge the question, but when Lucille persists, Sylvie curtly tells her that “some questions aren’t polite.” She suggests they play cards after all, but before she sets up the game, she asks Ruth and Lucille to come downstairs with her and help her fetch warm bricks from the stove. Lucille and Sylvie take candles downstairs so that Sylvie can see what she’s doing, but on the way to the kitchen, Sylvie decides to go out to the porch for some wood for the stove. Out there, she gets distracted by the immense darkness of the night. While Ruth and Lucille stand silently inside, and Sylvie stands outside, Ruth feels as if there is “no proof that [any of them are] there at all.”

Lucille snaps Ruth—and, it seems, Sylvie—from their moonlit trances by saying she’s tired of waiting. Sylvie goes over to the stove, puts the wood in, and retrieves their hot bricks. Ruth and Lucille carry chairs for cards upstairs to the bedroom, but notice that Sylvie is not behind them. Ruth goes out to the top of the stairs to shout for Sylvie, but her aunt does not return her calls.

Ruth goes downstairs and all through the house looking for Sylvie, and at last finds her standing in Sylvia’s old bedroom. Ruth asks Sylvie to come upstairs, and Sylvie says she’ll be up in a minute. Ruth wades through the water and the dark towards where Sylvie is standing by the window and touches her face tenderly before pulling back her arm and hitting Sylvie in the middle. The two of them wordlessly make their way back upstairs, where they wrap themselves in blankets and play gin rummy with Lucille.

“Fragments of the quotidian” wash up in strange places throughout Fingerbone as the flood recedes into the lake and the river, leaving the earth “warped and awash in mud.” Sylvie, Ruth, and Lucille do not participate at all in the slow restoration of the town—they and their whole family, the late Sylvia included, are known as “standoffish” throughout Fingerbone. They give out some canned goods to their neighbors, who with “polite envy” survey the comfort and order of the house up on the hill. Two weeks after the water is gone, most of their neighbors believe that their house has not been touched by the flood at all.