On Losing My Second Copy of Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is the most exquisite book I know of. I went back to it for a second or third read, this time really taking to heart Doris Lessing’s advice, to read it slowly, and then more slowly, because it’s true: every sentence is something to savor. I’m thinking randomly of how Ruth’s grandmother’s aging is described, how her halo of white hair takes on “the altered shape of a remembered thing.” Or the summer where Lucille divorces herself from her sister and aunt, and the disentanglement swiftly realizes itself one night, with Lucille boarding with the Home Economics teacher; the passage ends simply, “And from that night on, I no longer had a sister.” It’s poorly reenacted here, but I cried while reading that on the train. And then the beautiful, recurring passages about memory and longing, how longing is a form of fulfillment. Ruth uses huckleberries to demonstrate, saying that without longing for the fruit the pleasure and fulfillment of eating it does not exist. This concept came to mind yesterday when a friend told me that she accidentally smashed a just-purchased bottle of wine on the corner of a building while walking home and didn’t have enough money to buy another one.

I would double-check these passages, and probably type up several more, like the one where the train slips over the tracks while crossing the bridge and dives into the water “like an eel,” or Robinson’s descriptions of the lake breaking and moaning, and the recurring absolute darkness, or her wonderful use of the word “verge,” but I can’t. I lost my second copy of the book at Therapy—not the place where I see my therapist, but the Hell’s Kitchen gay bar.

You know how sometimes you find something and you are certain from the get-go it is going to be around forever? I feel this way about several zip up sweaters that I own, as well as a scarf and a wooden spoon and a pencil holder and many of my friends. And then there are other things that you buy or receive which you immediately know you will lose, or break, or for whatever reason won’t stick around? I feel this way about virtually everything I’ve ever bought at Urban Outfitters, and my stemless wine glasses, and people I've gone on dates with. I also felt this way about a bracelet that my dad had made for me. It is a silver identity bracelet on which he mounted my mom’s birthstone and a few diamonds from her jewelry and engraved her initials—sounds strange but it is lovely. I was slightly terrified to accept it, because at the moment of receipt I could feel what it would be to have lost it. And then one Thanksgiving I did (well, nine months later I found it; it slipped into the lining of a jacket; but the point is that when I did think it was gone, my reaction was more confirmation of a privately honored fatalism than shock or outrage). Housekeeping is one of these latter items for me. I couldn’t hold on to my first copy of that book—I think I loaned it to someone who left the country—and when my friend from Macmillan gave me a new one, I just knew that my time with it would be brief (though I did hope that I’d at least be able to finish rereading before I lost it). Maybe this is a fitting thing for a book about a transient.