Free Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson

her eyes off her. She wouldn’t let her go outside, or play with other children. When the little girl fell asleep the woman would paint the little girl’s nails and comb her hair into ringlets, and then she would wake her up to play with her, and if the little girl cried the woman cried, too. If the woman on the bus was as lonely as she said she was, she’d have her children with her. Unless she didn’t have any children, or the court had taken them. That’s what happened to the other little girl I was talking about.”
    “What court?” Lucille asked.
    “A probate court. A judge, you know.”
    “Well, if a judge did take them, what would he do with them?”
    “Oh, send them to some place. I think there’s a farm or something.”
    That was the first Lucille or I had heard of the interest of the state in the well-being of children, and we were alarmed. By the light of the candle on the vanity, Sylvie flipped and sorted through her deck of cards, plainly unaware that the black shape of judicial attention stood over us all, as enormous as our shadows. Lucille and I still doubted that Sylvie would stay. She resembled our mother, and besides that, she seldom removed her coat, and every story she told had to do with a train or a bus station. But not till then did we dream that
we
might be taken from
her
. I imagined myself feigning sleep while Sylvie brushed my short brown hair into long golden ringlets, dropping each one carefully on the pillow. I imagined her seizing my hands and pulling me after her in a wild waltz down the hall, through the kitchen, through the orchard, the night moonless and I in my nightgown, almost asleep. Just when the water in the orchard had begun to rush from us and toward us and to leap against the trunks of trees and plash against our ankles, an old man in a black robe would step from behind a tree and take me by the hand—Sylvie too stricken to weep and I too startled to resist. Such a separation, I imagined, could indeed lead to loneliness intense enough to make one conspicuous in bus stations. It occurred to me that most people in busstations would be conspicuous if it were not for the numbers of others there who would otherwise be conspicuous in the same way. Sylvie, at that moment, would hardly be noticed in a bus station.
    “Why didn’t you have children?” Lucille asked.
    Sylvie lifted her shoulders. “It just wasn’t in the cards,” she said.
    “Did you want them?”
    “I always liked them.”
    “But, I mean, did you want to
have
them?”
    “You must know, Lucille,” Sylvie said, “that some questions aren’t polite. I’m sure that my mother must have told you that.”
    “She’s sorry,” I said. Lucille bit her lip.
    “It doesn’t matter,” Sylvie said. “Let’s play crazy eights. I’ve got the deck warmed up.”
    We needed more chairs, and we needed to bring up the bricks that we heated on the top of the stove to hold in our laps and put under our feet, and to take down the bricks that had gone cold. Sylvie took the bricks down in a gunny sack and Lucille and I each carried a candle. When we got to the hall our candles went out. The trapdoor had been left open, admitting too strong a flow of air from below to permit a candle flame. Our matches died before we could even light the wicks. “Well,” Sylvie said. She waded ahead of us to the kitchen. It was absolutely dark. We felt our way along the wall. When we came to the kitchen it was silent, except for the settling sounds of the low fire and the familiar, idle rummaging of the water in the depths of the pantry.
    “Sylvie?”
    “Here.” Her voice came from the porch. “I’m just getting some wood. I’ve never seen such a dark night.”
    “Well, come back in!”
    We heard the wash, wash, wash of her footsteps. “I really never have,” she said. “It’s like the end of the world!”
    “Well, let’s go back upstairs.”
    But Sylvie had fallen silent again. Guessing that she must be listening to