Marilynne Robinson - Lila

She hated to remember how swept up in it all she had been, how ridiculous she would have seemed to anyone who knew what she’d been thinking. That’s one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don’t let them. Oh, they noticed that she was acting different, and they tried to guess the reason for it, how she could have a boyfriend when she was so tough and wore out and never even curled her hair now that she was just a cleaning woman. Never you mind. He’s some old bum on the street. No business of yours. Probly found him picking through a trash can. They were just mean no matter what, so she didn’t even listen.

Lila spent her time waiting, working so far as anyone could see, but really just passing the time. Sometimes, when Missy didn’t want to go downstairs, bringing a little supper from the kitchen. Missy didn’t like her any better for it, but that was all right. She was so sad there was nothing she liked, nothing and nobody. Mack didn’t come around, and she never mentioned him. She knew better than to trust him at all, but he had favored her for a long time, and she must have missed him. It got so that Lila had to open the seams of the biggest nightgown she could find, and pin up the hem of it, too, since Missy was no taller than a child. She’d bring a basin of water for her feet, thinking whatever comforted Missy might comfort the child. She tried to sleep lightly enough to hear, over the noise there always was in that house at night, any sound that might mean the birth was coming. Then one morning she came up from the cellar, and there was Missy with a coat she’d never seen before thrown over her and holding a carpetbag, standing at the door with a short, plump woman who had one hand on the doorknob and the other on Missy’s elbow. “My sister,” she said. “We’re leaving. We don’t want no part of this place.”

The sister said, “Then let’s go, Edith. The sun will be up.”

But Missy just stood there, looking at the credenza. Lila said, “Something of yours in there?” The lower edge of the door hung an inch or so below the bottom shelf. She could just pull at it and pop the door open, it was so dry and shabby. She knew this from all the times she’d tried to polish it. So she did, and it opened, and she said, “Take what’s yours.” She saw Missy pause over the sad little odds and ends and then take at least half of them, even Doll’s knife. “Well,” she said, “that ain’t yours, that knife. I don’t know about the rest.”

The sister said, “She don’t want any of it. Put it back. You don’t want nothing from this damn place, Edith, not one thing.”

Lila said, “Where you going?”

“None of your business,” the sister said. “A long way from here, that’s for sure.” So Missy left without whatever it was that had kept her lingering, and Lila had Doll’s knife in her hand again, the shape and weight of it so familiar she felt as if it had always been there. Mrs. would yell when she saw what had happened to that cabinet. The little tongue of the lock had pulled right through the wood, splintering it. But Lila just stood there thinking, I never will see that baby. I’ve been almost feeling it in my arms, singing to it, and I’ll never even see it. How could I have been so sure Missy would have it here, that she never would tell anybody where to find her damn sister? I never even believed she had a sister. Why did I think I knew how things would happen? It was because time was about to bring her back to the old life, where it seemed as though she could do what was asked of her. She had a dream sometimes that she was running along a road and there was Doll ahead of her, waiting for her, and she just ran into her arms, and she thought, It’s over now, I’m not lost anymore, and the dream had all the sweetness of a mild day in summer. If you could smell in dreams, it would be the smell of hay on the softest breeze and sunlight warming the fields. She thought that was going to be waiting for her, that life, and she never even stopped to wonder about herself for thinking that way. I been crazy for a long time, she said.

The morning Missy left, Lila found a suitcase in a closet and put a few things in it, a hairbrush and a towel and a nightgown, slipped the knife into her stocking, and left the house. She walked until the sun came up, and until there were people in the street. There was just no end to the city. So she went into a hotel and asked if they could use a cleaning woman. And then the years passed. She didn’t mind so much. It was just work. No need to smile at people you’ll never see again. The other women would tell her to ease up a little. You start doing that, they going to start expecting it. Lila heard them talking about her, and they meant for her to hear. She don’t have another job to go to when she done here. She don’t have no children to look after. Nobody going to be hanging on her skirts, fussing for their supper.

But there’s no pleasure in work if you don’t break a sweat. Out in the fields you feel any little breeze. You know it’s coming, you hear it in the trees, you almost can’t wait for it, and then there it is, like a cold drink of water. Well, when she finished with her rooms Lila went to help another of the women finish hers. She didn’t think of it as helping, it was just a way to pass the time. She’d hear them talking about their mothers and their children, so she kept to herself as much as she could. One woman gave her a jar of cream for her hands, and Lila couldn’t even say thanks. She thought about doing it, but then pretty soon it was so long ago she gave it to her that it would probably seem strange to mention it. There was a time when I just quit talking, she said to the child. I’d go a day, a week, and never say a word, except to myself. To Doll sometimes. I’m probably talking to myself right now. No, you’re there, I feel you there.

She had a room on the third story of a rooming house with a window that looked out on the street, and in the evening she would watch people pass by. She noticed when babies started walking, when an old man began to use a cane. At first there was a sway-back mule that pulled a wagon of odds and ends along the street, standing patiently while the junk man lowered the tailgate every block or so to let people see what he had to sell. At the end of the second winter they were gone. Somebody opened a sandwich shop. Now and then a new car came down the street. There were always papers blowing along the pavement, men talking and smoking by the streetlight. There were drunks, at night mostly. Sometimes she’d hear laughing or shouting or singing until morning, and she didn’t mind it. Just people doing what they do.

She went to the movies. Every payday she put aside the money it would cost her to go two times a week, and then she got by on whatever was left after the rent. Those women were right, no children to feed. She could live on just about anything, but for a child you had to find something nourishing. So at least she always had a movie to think about. And when she was sitting there in the dark, sometimes, when it was crowded, with somebody’s arm or knee brushing against hers, she was dreaming some stranger’s dream, everybody in there dreaming one dream together. Or they were ghosts all gathered in the dark, watching the world, seeing all the scheming and the murder and having no word to say about it, weeping with the orphans and having nothing to do for them. And then the dancing and the kissing, and all of the ghosts floating there just inches from a huge, beautiful face, to see the joy rise up in it. Like sparrows watching the sun come up, all of them happy at once, no matter that the light had nothing much to do with them. Another day eating bugs, that was what it amounted to. Or maybe they ate the bugs so that they could watch another sunrise. Well, the movie was beautiful, even when it scared her. The music they played before the feature made it seem like something so important was about to happen that she could hardly stay in her chair. She could have watched that lion roar all day. Then the movie. If it wasn’t very good, it was still all there was in her mind for an hour or two, a week or two. She might look like some woman going about her work, sitting by her window, but she’d be remaking a story in her mind. If they decided not to kill the old man but just took off in his car. They could pay him back afterward. She took most of the killing out of the movies, and most of the fighting. She kept the dancing and the weddings. But the best part was always to be sitting there in the dark, seeing what she had never seen anywhere before, and mostly believing it. If she had been a ghost watching Doane and Marcelle, so close she could have seen the change in their eyes when they looked at each other, it would have been there for sure. She imagined a wedding for them, both of them young, Marcelle with her arms full of roses. What to imagine for Doll. That she had never cut that old man. That she’d never held a knife or spat on a whetstone. That she was wearing a new shawl that was really the old one on the day whoever owned it first had bought it. She couldn’t wish that scar away, or how Doll never forgot to hide her face from anyone but Lila. The ghost couldn’t really be part of the dream. Lila would just be there, so close, seeing that tender, ugly face. Just her. Nobody else would even want a dream like that.