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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Housekeeping, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Women and Sisterhood
Transience and Impermanence
Memory
Abandonment and Loss
Nature
Summary
Analysis
Lily and Nona arrive from Spokane, Washington, to “[take] up housekeeping” in Fingerbone. They are nervous, plump women, “maiden ladies” alike in appearance and disposition. As they settle into the house they seem not to know how to talk to or what to do with Ruth and Lucille, and feed them and put them to bed too early. Upstairs, Ruth and Lucille lie in their beds and listen to their aunts’ conversation. The women remark on how young Sylvia died, at only seventy-six, and wonder how things could have gone “so badly” for both Sylvia and her daughters. They discuss Helen’s suicide and Sylvie’s itinerance—they describe her has a “drifter,” and wonder how they will track her down to inform her of Sylvia’s passing.
Lily and Nona’s housekeeping is, right off the bad, unfamiliar and insufficient. They are less concerned with helping the girls and attending to their needs than they are with gossiping with one another and trying to get to the bottom of what has gone wrong in the Foster family.
Themes
As the winter goes by, Lily and Nona refuse to make friends in town or learn how to cook, and complain often of 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, and are often the last to leave the lake each night. On one such night, Lily and Nona reprimand them for staying out too late, and then become distressed when a blizzard hits in the middle of dinner, taking out the power. That night, in bed, Ruth and Lucille again overhear their aunts conversing, wishing aloud they could take the girls back to Spokane and away from Fingerbone. They admit that the girls are hard to take care of, and that someone younger might have an easier time with them—someone like Sylvie.
Lily and Nona are inadequate caregivers, and so Ruth and Lucille lean on one another for support, care, and a sense of normalcy. Despite the trauma of their mother’s suicide in the lake, they skate upon its surface blithely and happily throughout the deep winter months. Their actions befuddle their great-aunts, who begin to fear they are unequipped to deal with such strange and occasionally rebellious girls.
Themes
One day soon, a letter from Sylvie arrives. She does not know that Sylvia is dead, and has written to tell her mother that she is staying in Montana. After the aunts devise a gentle response and send it off, Lucille and Ruth find themselves anticipating Sylvie’s arrival with excitement—they hope that she will look like their mother, and will be able to tell them stories about Helen as a young girl.
The girls are intrigued by the mystery that is their aunt Sylvie. They don’t know her at all, but believe that once they meet her, they’ll be able to unlock their mother’s secrets, sustain her memory, and perhaps even retain a piece of her through getting to know and love her sister. They assume that Helen and Sylvie are similar and even interchangeable because of the simple fact of their sisterhood.
Themes
Lily and Nona, too, stay up late each night discussing the possibility of Sylvie’s arrival with excitement. They feel they have been chosen to be Ruth and Lucille’s guardians in error, and that even if Sylvie is the “errant” child, her mistakes must be forgiven and she should be given a chance to return home. As the days pass, all four of them increasingly anticipate Sylvie’s homecoming to Fingerbone.
Everyone is thrilled and slightly nervous about whether Sylvie will respond and decide to come to Fingerbone. Lily and Nona are desperate to get out of the situation they’ve been thrust into, and Ruth and Lucille desire both a better caretaker and a way of reconnecting with their mother’s memory.
Themes
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