Marilynne Robinson - Lila

“It don’t matter.” She had put her hands to her face. “I was just thinking.”

He stood looking at her. “Well, why don’t you come down to the church with me. It’s quiet today. Some people are coming from Des Moines to talk with me about a funeral. I didn’t really know the fellow, he just happened to die here, and I have to have something to say about him. But you could wait for me in the sanctuary. Do your thinking there.”

She shook her head. “It ain’t that kind of thinking.” She said, “It’s on my mind now, so I might as well get it done with. It’s so different here it makes me remember other places I been. I guess I have to do that. Sort things out a little. Seems like I don’t even know myself, everything’s so different.”

“Yes. Well, as soon as I can get away I’ll be home. Unless you want the afternoon to yourself.”

“I’ll come to find you like I always do.”

“All right.” He kissed her forehead. “Five o’clock, then.”

It came over her, before he had even closed the door behind him, the thought of that house in St. Louis. It was just pure misery. Misery must have been what she was looking for, because she felt it the minute she walked in that door. The twilight of the parlor made her feel as if she had stepped into deep water with her eyes open. Breathing came hard and sound reached her a heartbeat after she should have heard it. She could hardly speak. Nothing was the way it was in daylight, but the place had its own ways and you got used to them. Like death, if something comes after it. That first day there were girls fighting over a hairbrush. Mrs. got up from her chair and went and took the brush away from them and put it in the credenza. When they saw her coming they shrank away from her, watching her. “Now,” she said when she came back to Lila, “you get a safe place to live, so long as you act right. Any trouble and you’re gone. I don’t like drinking or yelling. I don’t want you out on the street. This is a respectable house. Quiet. Our gentlemen like it that way.” She called them gentlemen. And the girls were supposed to be ladies.

But they were always fighting over something, a pair of shoes or a scrap of ribbon. And Mrs. would be slapping or pulling hair. The gentlemen brought in liquor, so they didn’t have to steal it out of the cabinet unless they just wanted to. Mrs. went off sometimes to visit her sister and left the woman they called Peg in charge, and she’d let them drink if they let her boss them around a little. Then they’d fight over nothing at all, and cry for their mothers, and say they were going to leave that place and that life and never look back, and the gentlemen would say, “Sure you will, sugar. Just not tonight.” But they never opened the shades or stepped out the door, and they never touched the credenza. Then they were glad when Mrs. came back. She’d yell at them for their cheap carousing and say she was going to toss them all out, and she’d add what she said was the cost of the liquor to the amount of money she said they all owed her already, and they’d just be glad she was back anyway, and they’d be so quiet and so careful to mind her that she had to calm down sometime. They’d be begging her to let them brush out her hair. A few of them had lived there since they were almost children, one or two of them probably feeble-minded. And two or three of them were just like Lila, no better and no worse. All crowded into two rooms, sleeping on cots so that the other rooms stayed nice for entertaining.

If one of them got sick they’d all get sick, or say they were, and Mrs. would close every blind and turn off every light, so the gentlemen would know they couldn’t have company, she said, but really to make everything miserable enough to get back at them if they ever dared pretend. When a house is shut up like that in the middle of a summer day the light that comes in through any crack is as sharp as a blade. And there would be a pot of potato soup simmering from morning to night, and the steam from it would bring out the tobacco smells and the sour old liquor smells in the rugs and the couches and the drapes. And she’d put the poker deck and the checkerboard in that damned credenza, and anything else that could help the time pass. Not that they could have seen the spots on the cards, dark as it was. In a day or two they’d start saying they were better, and could they open a window a crack. Just the darkness made some of them cry. Then when she had turned on some lights and opened a window or two and they had put the place to rights, she would open the credenza and pass out the things she had put in it, the darning egg and the harmonica, and they’d be happy to have them back, as if she had done them a kindness. That credenza was the shape of a coffin, with little legs on it, and flowers of lighter-colored wood on the front of it, some of them peeling off, some of them gone, just the glue left. It was always locked. Any one of the girls could have figured a way to break into it, but they never did. One time Mrs. found some letters that belonged to the girl they called Sal and locked them up, for safekeeping, she said. That girl was begging for them until finally she just gave up, and that was when Mrs. got around to letting her have them back for a while. Lila had hidden her knife in a gap between boards in a closet floor. There were boxes stacked in that corner and the knife was underneath them, so she thought it was safe. Mrs. had nothing that mattered to take from her, nothing of hers to lock away.

Lila was called Rosie because no one else was Rosie, and the pink dress fit her well enough. Sal and Tilly showed her how to tie her hair up in rags so it would curl. They rinsed it with henna first. Mrs. charged her a quarter for the henna and five dollars for a pair of pink high-heeled shoes that were half worn out but she’d never find any cheaper. She could pay a couple dollars a week for the dress. Buying it would put her too far in debt, but she could rent it. So she was seven and a quarter dollars behind already, sitting there with her hair in rags and them about to punch holes in her ears with a darning needle. Then there was room and board, but that could wait till she’d made her start, Mrs. said. Once you’re bringing in some regulars. Lila was just listening to all this, trying not to do the arithmetic. She should have walked out right then, but the other girls stayed there and put up with it, the damn credenza and the ugly gentlemen and all of it. After a while she was one of the older girls, and when a young one came to her all upset, she would say just what they all said, Don’t you come crying to me and What did you expect when you come here? Then Lila would be patting the girl’s hands or putting her hair in pin curls just to quiet her down. When they weren’t working or fighting they were usually setting each other’s hair.

That one day Mrs. asked her, “Do you have any little treasures you want to keep safe? Anything you want to give me?”

And Lila said, “I got a knife. That’s the only thing. I been wanting to give you my knife.” The words were just there, and she said them, and she meant them, too.

“Bring it to me. Let me keep it for you, dear. We don’t want a knife lying around the house.”

So Lila went to the closet and found it still hidden there and took it and handed it over, amazed as she did it, thinking, This is it. I’m here now. This is the life I’m going to have. Mrs. just looked at it lying there in her hand like it was an ugly thing, so Lila said, “Somebody killed my father with it.” And then, because she didn’t want to lie to the woman, she said, “He might’ve been my father.” Mrs. smiled a little. She said, “I see.” And Lila watched her lock it away. Well, she’s got me now. And what sense did that make. But she felt that way, and it gave her a kind of ease.