Rabbit Rabbit #5: Keeping House

Still from Housekeeping (1987)

I hate clutter. It’s everywhere: in the sink, the back of the freezer, on the subway, and strewn in the streets. But boy, do I love getting rid of it. I spend much of the day ensuring that my path –to the end of the day, to ultimate greatness– is devoid of it. Cleaning has a relaxing effect on me; doing the dishes feels almost meditative, a sweeping of the floor a sweeping of the soul. There is a distinct connection between the clutter-free work/living environment and the clutter-free mental space.

The problem is, I’ve begun to rely on my anti-clutter campaign as a means of staving off the countless other tasks on my palette. If I have an email to answer or a certain newsletter to write, instead of diving in, I’ll scrub the entire shower clean of pink mold with gloves, bleach, and Brillo pads first. Or I’ll Swiffer the floors, or wash my sheets, or do any other remedial task except the one I should really be doing. I find that I cannot start the “real” work until the air has, literally, been cleared.

I know this is not uncommon. Procrastination is as old as the work-play divide. Da Vinci accidentally doodled his way into inventing an early version of the helicopter while he was supposed to be working on the Mona Lisa, which took him a whopping sixteen years to complete. It has gotten me thinking about my organizational habits –nay, addictions– and how I keep house.

I currently live in my third official apartment, following my senior year village housing at Oberlin and my sublet in the East Village two summers ago. There’s my childhood bedroom, of course, and then the slew of old dorm rooms, bunks at two summer camps, and the nine-person flat I shared in England one summer. In each of these places, I kept house for an extended period of time, feverishly shaping my own domestic habits while cultivating my creative spirit as the hours ticked by.

I’ve been wracking my brain about how to discuss my all-time favorite book, Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 debut novel, Housekeeping. There’s a lot to unpack about the novel, including its meditations on sisterhood, memory, motherlessness, and abandonment I was so overwhelmed with where to begin, I neglected to even consider its title. Housekeeping.

The novel follows two sisters, Ruth and Lucille Stone, as they come of age in the 1950s under the care of a series of older female relatives —a doting grandmother, bumbling great aunts— after their mother drives her Ford off a cliff, careening into the vast lake that anchors the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho. The last of these idiosyncratic caregivers is Sylvia “Sylvie” Fisher, their mother’s strange and itinerant sister.

Ruth, who serves as the novel’s narrator, recognizes immediately upon Sylvie’s arrival that she is quite different. She wanders the streets at odd hours, keeps newspaper clippings and a twenty-dollar bill pinned to the underside of her lapel, and tells rambling stories about her time spent traveling by freight car.

“Clearly, our aunt was not a stable person,” Ruth declares, recounting an afternoon she and Lucille discover Sylvie perched dangerously atop Fingerbone’s bridge, surveying the townscape.

But what Sylvie lacks in social graces, she makes up for in an astute determination to keep house, her way. While her battered copy of Good Housekeeping magazine never goes missing, the Fingerbone cottage begins to pile up with other curious things– tin cans, newspapers, leaves, and “thirteen or fourteen cats.” Sparrows begin nesting in the attic, and Sylvie drags the sofa outside for days to air it out.

Despite the apparent clutter of the house, everything seems to have its right place, where things go “here and not elsewhere, thus and not otherwise.” Ruth, more so than Lucille, adopts these rhythms and begins to regard them as a semblance of comfort, accepting that she and her sister are “now in Sylvie’s dream with her.”

It often appears as though Sylvie is dreaming when she cleans. In one of my favorite lines, Ruth states that “once, she washed half the kitchen ceiling and a door.” But if it is Sylvie’s housekeeping that brings her and Ruth closer together, it is her housekeeping too that threatens to drive them apart. In fact, Sylvie’s arrival does drive apart Ruth and Lucille.

The people of Fingerbone have a distaste for Sylvie’s alternative lifestyle. Ruth stops attending school altogether, choosing instead to accompany Sylvie on escapades to the lakeshore. First Sylvie’s pious, churchgoing contemporaries, then the school headmaster, and finally the Fingerbone sheriff take issue with the girls’ upbringing.

Over the years, Ruth and Lucille watch their grandmother’s house shapeshift, passed down in ownership from one caretaker to the next, and haunted by the ever-increasing amount of ghosts who have passed through it, most prominently the girls’ mother Helen. And when, at the end of the novel, Ruth and Sylvie are forced to abandon the cottage in favor of a life of transience, Ruth continues to imagine its dwellers to come.

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One recent morning, on my way to work, I deliberately passed by my old sublet on Avenue B. I squinted up at the third-floor windows, three across, bathed in sunlight. I saw a cat bed suctioned to the wall. How funny, I thought, to think of the people living there now. Are they young? Do they have books stacked on the windowsill? Does the oven knob stick for them?

It is certain they have no idea about me, and the little three-month life I spent there rehearsing standup routines, rearranging the clothes in my closet, and catching the early evening summer light on my face. Another time; I miss it deeply. Somewhere in the corners, there must be tiny bits of me in the dust, stuck between the floorboards, for no one can keep house that scrupulously.

What to make of the fact that, with every move toward a new phase in life, there exists equally as fervent a sense of loss?

In her brilliant essay on Housekeeping, Madelaine Lucas describes Robinson herself writing the novel as a young mother of two settling in Seattle in the mid-1970s while completing her PhD at the University of Washington. “Here,” she writes, “early descriptions of Ruth, Lucille, and Sylvie appear amongst notes for her dissertation on Part Two of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, hastily jotted phone numbers for child-care centers, and drafts of letters to friends or family that discuss everything from the impeachment process against Richard Nixon to the progress of her garden.”

It becomes clear from Robinson’s personal archive that for her, there is no gulf between the domestic and the creative. The same goes for many artmakers, especially in a physically and spiritually crowded city like New York. We must somehow make proper space for the work that brings us joy, yet we are equipped with the knowledge that domestic ritual does not assure stability. Mrs. Meyers in Radish scent is, unfortunately, not an accredited remedy for anxiety.

Lucas agrees and posits that domestic acts and rituals serve “to protect ourselves against abandonment, separation, loss. What else is housekeeping but a kind of magical thinking, a wish against the things we fear the most?”

What Ruth and Sylvie fear most is their separation from one another. When a court hearing threatens to upend Sylvie’s right to legal guardianship over her niece, she springs into action, burning her newspaper collection, staying up all night dusting, and combing Ruth’s hair. Keeping house means keeping what’s left of her family together.

So perhaps I keep diligent house not only to quell the storm of endless to-do lists, but to remind myself, and ward off my greatest fear, that I am not without purpose. I am wholly responsible for the state of my very own private space. It is undeniably nice to feel in control of something, for no one warns students in their final hour about the disorientation, that feeling of being completely unmoored, that accompanies one’s grand exit from schooling. It’s a bit like being “turned out of house,” as Ruth describes it. Until college graduation I always had tasks to do, my next steps were laid out in front of me in a clutter-less path. I’ll take these classes next semester, and audition for these two plays. Over the summer I will intern here. Now, I have to create the steps for myself, a daunting yet exciting prospect.

And what of writing? Well, what else to do when I know where I’d like to be but have no clue how to get there? “It never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged. It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words,” Ruth says. I imagine that Robinson found the time to salvage her words, which would eventually become the manuscript for Housekeeping, between her children’s naps, after their bedtime, and in the marginalia of her notebooks.

So I think of her when I wake from a dream and rush to scribble it down before making breakfast. Because here is a truth: inspiration does still strike. Writing, like cleaning, makes comprehensible the meandering blazes of the mind –the clutter– and is thus a housekeeping of its own.

P.S. Recs of the month! Bunny by Mona Awad (aptly titled), this Slate article with a hot take on the ending of TÁR, & a lovely dive into Virginia Woolf’s private life from the New Yorker.