Marilynne Robinson - Lila

Standing right there by the credenza, with the key still in her hand, Mrs. looked Lila over like she’d never seen her before and said, “You ain’t a pretty girl, but you might try smiling, Rosie.”

“Yes, ma’am. Yes, I will.” Talking to her like that, calling her ma’am. It was a thing Lila blushed to remember, how much she was giving that woman. Doll’s knife. But why shouldn’t she stop being Lila Dahl and take another made-up name and let herself be glad there was someone telling her what to do every minute, no matter if she hated it. She could smile if she had to. People smile. When she was trying on that pink dress, Mrs. had the girl Lucy come in and pick up the dress she’d been wearing and her shoes and leave her an old flannel nightgown. Lucy said, “I guess you won’t be going nowheres now.” Lila blushed to remember how hurt she was that Mrs. thought she might run off. She’d thought, Now I gave her my knife, she’s got it locked up, the one thing in the world I had that was mine. And she was glad that she’d given it up, that Mrs. didn’t have to find it and take it from her the way she did that girl’s letters. Lila had tried to think of anything else she could give her. As soon as she started earning a little money. My locket. What was she thinking? It was the old man’s locket. She didn’t even have it yet when she lived in that house. But if she had — she blushed at the thought that she’d have asked for her help with the clasp, and that she’d have been glad to feel her lift it from her neck, to see it lying in that claw of a hand. She loved it that much. Lila said out loud, “You poor child, your mother is a crazy woman.”

The dress they gave her to wear had net under the skirt of it, like tiny little chicken wire, and the top just covered what it had to, and the rest was bare. Then those pink shoes she could hardly walk in. Peg would sing, You’re all dressed up to go dreaming, and laugh, which was a mean thing to do because some of them just loved that song. It was bare feet and a raggedy old nightgown, except when there were gentlemen. Mrs. never even looked at her. She treated her like she was nothing at all. Lila tried smiling.

They’d be dressed up the best they could and dancing to the Victrola when the gentlemen started coming in, one uglier than the next, but all of them feeling rich because they could pay for an evening. There was one the girls were scared of because he was always drunk and mad and telling them he’d see to it that they all died in jail, telling them that he’d had his wallet stolen one time and when he figured out who’d done it he swore he would beat her within an inch of her life. Mrs. never made him go away. Ten dollars meant that much to her. It was the other gentlemen who put him out the door if anybody did, because some of them liked a little talk.

How could she tell the old man about things she didn’t understand herself? First there was Doll saying, I don’t know you, and then there was that box with somebody in it that could have been her father, and all those cousins or whatever they were turning their backs on her, as if a bad joke had been played on them that she wasn’t any more than she was. And then looking for Doll everywhere, creeping down through cellar doors, even, hoping she might be out of the weather, then walking out into the cornfields where a person could hide or be lost till the buzzards found them.

There was one man they called Mack. He didn’t have much of anything wrong with him, but he liked to come by, and the girls liked to have him there because he teased them and brought them chocolates and they thought he looked like a man you might want around even if he wasn’t paying. He was always laughing or about to laugh, and it didn’t matter if there was something a little mean about the way he did it. He was a workingman, you could tell, but he knew some ballroom dancing, the waltz and the fox trot, so they’d put the Victrola on and he’d dance with every one of them, even with Lila. The parlor wasn’t big enough for more than three couples, but they’d push the chairs back and dance themselves winded. Sal said once, “This is what it sposed to be like!” They all loved Mack, but he favored one girl, the short, plump one they called Missy. And after a while he’d start up the stairs and she’d go tagging after him, because that’s how it was.

Lila was horribly in love with that man. You can’t go on forever thinking about nothing at all, and he had a nice face and that laugh, and what harm was there in it since she could hardly even bring herself to look at him. But he could tell somehow, and he started teasing her about it. Rosie, Rosie, give me a smile, he would say, and she couldn’t do that at all because she just wanted to hide her face. Rosie, give me a peck on the cheek, just a little one, making a joke of her when he was the only thing she cared about in this world and he seemed to know it. When just a few gentlemen came, Lila was always left sitting, and if Mack saw her there he’d say, “Rosie here is the kind of girl a man could want to marry. There are good-time girls and there are girls you’d want to take home.”

Missy would say, “Why, she’s tough as a mule. I guess you might take her home if you needed some plowing done.”

And he’d say, “A man wants a girl the other fellas ain’t gonna come hankering after.”

And she’d say, “Well, I guess that’s old Rosie, all right. There’s nobody comes hankering, that’s for sure.”

But it made Missy jealous that he said those things. Once, she flew at Lila for nothing and pulled her hair all this way and that so the pins fell out and the other girls laughed as if it was something they’d been wanting to do themselves and hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

Lila never knew people could be so mean. She was mean, too, because the sadness in that house was like a dream that made everything strange and wrong. Mack could run his finger along her cheek and she would feel the warmth rising to follow it. He would touch her neck sometimes, and it would make the tears come every single time he did it, no matter who else was watching. It was terrible, and it was mostly what she lived for. The other girls laughed at her, and they were jealous because he paid even that kind of attention to her. So she made a kind of plan. There was an old man who was supposed to come before sunrise to stoke the coal furnace. Sometimes he did, and sometimes he just wandered in when he felt like it. There was nothing any of them hated more than getting up to a cold house. Lila liked that kind of work a lot better than what she’d been doing, or trying to do. She owed Mrs. more money by the day, and she couldn’t think of any other reason she was kept on, except to make everybody else feel like they were better. She couldn’t walk in those damn shoes and she couldn’t keep “that look” off her face. A couple of times Mrs. slapped her for it, but that didn’t help. Once, Mack touched her tears with the tip of his finger and then touched the wet to her lips. “She’s a sweet girl, Missy. See that? Like a little child.” She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t even breathe. And there he was watching her, smiling.

So the next morning she went down cellar in her nightgown and bare feet, and stood there in the darkest dark with her back to the furnace for the warmth. If she stoked it too early, Mrs. would be after her for the coal she wasted, and if she waited too long, the old man might come to do it. If he did come she decided she’d shake the shovel at him a little and he’d probably run off the best he could, scrawny as he was. Mrs. had to pay him something, but Lila would be working off a debt, so Mrs. would see it was best to let her have her way. Then she’d scrub down the kitchen, which needed it something terrible. It was high time somebody beat those rugs.