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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
The Housekeeping quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Lake. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
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.
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Chapter 2
Quotes
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.
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Chapter 8
Quotes
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.
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Get the entire Housekeeping LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Lake Symbol Timeline in Housekeeping
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Lake appears in Housekeeping. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...the mountains and settled in Fingerbone—a damp town largely at the mercy of an ever-flooding lake. Edmund rose through the ranks as a railroad worker until one night, a “disaster” of...
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...amateur diver said he was able to find the train at the bottom of the lake, but the dive wore him out and he could not descend to it again. The...
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...be nearer to family and friends, unable to stand the sight or smell of the lake, Sylvia remained in the house Edmund had built for her. Ruth suspects the woman never...
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...Sylvia’s house, Helen drove Bernice’s car up a mountain and off a cliff into the lake at the bottom of Fingerbone, the same lake where her own father, Edmund, had perished.
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Chapter 2
...arthritis pain. Ruth and Lucille, though, enjoy the season, and go skating on the frozen-over lake every day after school. They teach one another to skate backward and on one foot,...
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Chapter 4
...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...
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Chapter 5
...tells Ruth that she’s going to skip school and spend the day down by the lake. Ruth says she’ll go, too, unworried about getting into trouble.
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...day that week, Lucille and Ruth skip school and spend their days down at the lake. They try to come up with ideas to explain their absences, but after the third...
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On the fourth day the girls spend down by the lake, they see Sylvie at the shore. Lucille worries that Sylvie is looking for them, but...
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...didn’t know they were skipping school and had no idea they’d be down at the lake.
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...she would have kept walking, been hit by a train, or flung herself into the lake.
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...and ends, she imagines disparate things—her aunt Molly off in China, the bottom of the lake in Fingerbone and all the treasures it must hold, and the “fragments” of the lives...
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Chapter 6
...the junior high each morning “as a courtesy to Sylvie.” The girls go to the lake each day, ignoring the advice their grandmother Sylvia taught them long ago about staying away...
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Chapter 7
...herself.” Lucille reads almost constantly and ignores Ruth’s invitations to go play down by the lake. Lucille also begins keeping a diary, which Ruth reads hoping to divine her sister’s thoughts....
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Chapter 8
...to keep up through her haze of sleepiness. As Ruth follows Sylvie down to the lake, she thinks about how the two of them are the same—about how Sylvie might as...
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The sun rises over the lake, and Sylvie remarks that maybe a hundred people live on the islands within it and...
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Sylvie grows quiet, and she and Ruth float across the lake in silence. The boat rows unevenly, and the two are pulled towards the middle of...
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Sylvie and Ruth climb into the boat and set off back across the lake. Ruth is worried that the boat will capsize and she will sink to the bottom...
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...by overhead. Sylvie wonders aloud how many dead bodies are at the bottom of the lake—and how many unknown, unseen transients riding the rails perished in the great train accident which...
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...a short distance—Ruth, frightened, wonders if they are “tethered to the old wreck on the lake floor.” Ruth offers to row for a while, but she can’t make any headway either....
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Chapter 9
In the weeks following Ruth and Sylvie’s excursion to the lake, the sheriff comes by the house twice. Though the sheriff has many ceremonial duties in...
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Chapter 10
...that if her own mother had not committed suicide, and had come back from the lake to resume a normal day with her daughters and Sylvia, Ruth would not remember her...
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Chapter 11
...Sylvie suggests there is only one thing to do: walk across the bridge over the lake on foot. Ruth agrees that they should go. Sylvie tells Ruth that she’ll find that...
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As the two of them make their way across the bridge over the lake, Ruth worries that a trail will come and crush them, but Sylvie insists there isn’t...
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...Sylvie and Ruth’s attempt to burn the house down—and their subsequent, supposed death in the lake at the foot of Fingerbone. It has been many years since Ruth and Sylvie fled,...
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...is unsure of whether it happened when she followed Sylvie across the bridge above the lake, or when Helen abandoned her, or perhaps even at her own conception (an event to...
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