Housekeeping Summary

The adult Ruth Stone looks back on her unrooted childhood. After Ruth and Lucille’s mother, Helen, commits suicide, the two sisters go to live in Fingerbone, Idaho, with their grandmother Sylvia Foster. After their grandmother’s death, the girls enter the care of their anxious spinster great-aunts Lily and Nona, and then at last their mother’s sister, Sylvie, comes to Fingerbone to take up housekeeping and look after them. Sylvie is eccentric and odd, and has been living for years as a transient drifter. Despite having once been married, she seems loath to acknowledge that she ever had a husband or to answer questions about where her husband is. Sylvie reminds Lucille and Ruth intensely of their mother, but she is perhaps even more mysterious and inscrutable. They grow afraid that Sylvie will soon leave them, too, but in the weeks that follow her arrival, being forced to endure a severe flood together bonds the three of them close together.

Ruth and Lucille, tempted by the beautiful spring weather, begin skipping school almost every day to spend their days down at the vast lake at the center of Fingerbone—the same lake which claimed their grandfather Edmund, years before their birth, in a terrible and legendary train accident, and the same lake into which their mother drove when she took her own life. Sylvie aids the girls in their truancy rather than scolding them, writing notes to their teachers explaining that they’re out sick with “the discomforts of female adolescence.” Despite Sylvie’s friendship, her eccentricities when it comes to housekeeping and her love of impractical, ephemeral clothes and objects soon alienate Lucille, and Ruth begins to sense that her sister longs to live in the world of “common” people.

In the summer, Lucille begins asking Sylvie increasingly personal questions about her life and past—questions which Sylvie resists answering. Lucille grows frustrated with Sylvie’s embarrassing habits, which mark her as a transient through and through—she sleeps with her shoes under her pillows and often takes naps on public park benches. As Lucille resists entering the world of Sylvie’s “dream,” she begins constructing false memories about their mother, whom she recalls as a jovial and doting “widow […] killed in an accident.” Sylvie offers friendship, kindness, and love in equal measure to both Ruth and Lucille, but Lucille increasingly longs to spend time with a group of girlfriends from school and join them in learning about makeup, sewing, cooking, and entertaining. After Lucille and Ruth have a terrible fight, Lucille begins ignoring Ruth in earnest—they return to school in the fall and must face the principal to explain their truancy, and Lucille alludes to Ruth’s lack of stability and direction. She stops spending time with Ruth at lunch, refuses to eat the dinners that Sylvie cooks, and eventually even moves out of the house to live with her home economics teacher, Miss Royce, when she comes home from a school dance one night to find Sylvie sleeping on the bed that Lucille ordinarily shares with Ruth.

The morning after Lucille’s departure, Sylvie wakes Ruth up early so that they can go on an adventure out on the lake—Sylvie has a “special” place she wants to show Ruth. Sylvie rushes Ruth out the door and together they steal a neighbor’s boat, rowing out to the middle of the lake to avoid his shouts and screams when he catches them in the act. They arrive at a small island in the center of the lake, where Sylvie leads Ruth to a hidden, frost-covered valley, at the center of which sits a fallen-down house. Sylvie tells Ruth that sometimes, when she comes here, she believes she can hear the voices of feral children, and longs to meet them and take a look at them. Ruth and Sylvie spend the day on the island, eating lunch on the shore before returning to the valley once the sun warms it, but Ruth becomes lost in thought and gets separated from her aunt. Fearing Sylvie has at last abandoned her, as Ruth feared she would all along, Ruth becomes sad and frightened. Sylvie returns to find Ruth disoriented and weeping, and hurries her off the island and back into the boat. They float on the lake until sunrise, then climb up the bridge at the center of the lake and ride a freight train back into town.

As rumors of Sylvie and Ruth’s boxcar ride spreads throughout town, the sheriff and several neighbors become concerned about Ruth’s well-being and drop by the house to check on her. The house has begun to fall into disrepair—Sylvie’s hoarded magazines and newspapers are piling up, and mice and cats have overrun the place. Realizing that a hearing has been scheduled to determine whether she is indeed a fit caregiver, Sylvie cleans up the house and begins putting on a normal, neighborly face. In spite of these changes, Ruth knows that the town of Fingerbone fears transience, and that she and Sylvie are “doomed.”

One night, Ruth and Sylvie build a bonfire in the backyard and begin burning old newspapers and magazines. After the fire goes out, Ruth hides from Sylvie in the orchard in a kind of cruel game, knowing that with all the neighbor’s eyes on her, Sylvie cannot run around calling for her. When the sheriff comes by to check up on things, Sylvie is forced to admit that Ruth has hidden away in the orchard. Ruth comes out, sheepish and shamed, and when the sheriff suggests she come spend the night at his house, she screams “no” hysterically. After the sheriff leaves, Ruth and Sylvie work together to set fire to the house and burn it down. It is tough to get the blaze started, and they are forced to leave without being entirely confident that the house will go up in flames. As Sylvie and Ruth run across the bridge over the lake and out of Fingerbone forever, Ruth cannot bring herself to look back at the house they’ve left behind. In the wake of the fire, news spreads that Sylvie and Ruth have died, “claim[ed]” by the lake in a terrible accident. For over seven years they ride the rails around the country, staying with Sylvie’s friends and exploring the world, always together. Ruth never searches for Lucille or returns to Fingerbone, though she wonders daily what her sister is up to—whether Lucille has taken up housekeeping in the old house or moved to a big city, and if Lucille, too, thinks constantly of Ruth and Sylvie.