Singing School
At Home with Books Chapter 1: In the Guest Room with Chaim Potok's Davita's Harp
Last Friday, I released the prologue to my memoir-in-essays, At Home with Books. Today’s post is the first full chapter. It takes place in the guest room of the house that is lodged most deeply in my heart. If you’re able, carve out a spare thirty minutes, hopefully curled up in a comfortable spot with a cup of tea, and listen to me on audio or read the text below. If you like what you read or hear, please share this post with others. This story is for anyone who has needed to belong.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress”
~ W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”
“Rebecca’s future,” they whispered to each other late one autumn night, reducing their sound from a reverberating echo to a measured pianissimo. Laughter would soon increase the teenagers’ volume, and then another sixteen-year-old would remind the group to be quiet. Their parents had told them about my important test the next day and how I needed to sleep. They passed the admonition along in a stage whisper: Rebecca’s future, Rebecca’s future they would nod in near-silence, tossing the quieting line back and forth.
I lay in bed one floor above, drifting into dreams in a house made for them, in a home built for all the houses I would ever know. The sprawling, historic Asheville, North Carolina, bungalow was completed in 1914 and boasted the hand-crafted straight lines, natural curves, and heavy oak trim of the early twentieth century Arts and Crafts movement. Bookcases lined the walls and surprising turns of stair met me around unexpected corners, every nook and cranny bent to purpose.
At some point, artist Leah Arcouet Chiles, wife of the original owner (she became mayor of the neighborhood in the late 1920’s, and why shouldn’t she?) lent her brush to the upper walls’ borders: whimsical mushrooms adorned the deep, wide living and dining space; cheerful chefs in a wine cellar crowned the dark front entryway that might have doubled as an old English public house. Sleek-winged blue sparrows soared around the top of the room in which I tried to fall asleep.
After I had gone to bed at night in that living, breathing house, the teenagers–two, three, five or six of them–would compose rock songs in their homemade basement studio beneath my bedroom. The volume would ebb and flow: now a burst of keyboard and electric guitar, now a cloud of dim humming. I learned to use earplugs during that year and drifted into dreams against the rhythm of steady beats sounding through the joists and floorboards, up the bedframe, into my body.
I loved those teenagers. I wasn’t related to them at all.
On this particular evening, I had been living with a family (two parents, four children) for about half a year. I gathered myself toward early sleep, my rigid bedtime routine of toothbrushing, pajamas, a glass of water, and several minutes of reading served as a set of touchstones for success the next morning. I feared I was floating in life. I had landed in a particular place, as we all have at any given moment, but I couldn’t give myself permission to feel grounded. I was jobless at the close of my first year in the warm, green mountains of Western North Carolina, at age 29. This family had opened their doors to me.
It took months to answer, “Yes, okay, I will,” after the mother of the family first looked at me across a Bible study circle and intoned with deep and steady certainty, “Come live with us.” That isn’t the way you do things, I thought. What of work and earning a living? What of heading into my third decade of life with no career path on which to place my feet? Was I a child to be so housed, needy and cared for in such a way? Was there–I tried not to say this to myself–something wrong with me that I couldn’t do life like everyone else?
Once my savings account dwindled, the decision was made for me. Difficult roommates in my previous place of residence played a role in pushing me out the door, and I found myself spending a trial night in this low-roofed, dim-roomed house. On the first evening, I sat on a twin bed in the ground-floor bedroom, which was painted robin’s egg blue. Teenaged laughter and song floated from below, and I typed a note into my tiny Mac iBook: “Why didn’t I come here a long time ago?”
Meaning, why didn’t I say a swift “Yes” to that mother months before and move straight in with this family who opened its arms to me in my placelessness, come what may. If I was honest, I knew why. I had always felt a conflict within myself: what I knew I wanted or needed, and what I thought others expected me to do. I had spent most of my life capitulating to the latter.
Not this time. This time, I made the move, and I basked in the fullness of a home in which the parents encouraged their children’s very unique interests and strengths, and I discovered I didn’t mind feeling like one of the children myself, even though I was twice their age.
I came in after time out with friends and, entering through the kitchen screen door that slammed if you weren’t careful, crossed paths with the mother of the house or the father, who would sit at the table and talk and talk with me into the late hours. Other evenings, I heard strange sounds through the window and wandered out onto the front porch to find a clutch of neighborhood high schoolers crafting life-sized puppets or developing scenes for a local film competition, always ready to show me what they were creating. Whether they knew it or not, the teens and their parents were creating a place for anyone to belong–especially me, who had felt foreign to myself for so long.
Now I had been here almost six months, and I had never felt so at home in particular, or so displaced in the general scheme of life. I loved the family, this home, but I told myself I had to move into a place of my own. I had found an in-between, placeholder kind of job, but the slim paycheck would never pay enough to sign my own lease. I schemed a solution in a second round of graduate school. My Master’s degree in English hadn’t anchored me to any predictable career, but a Library degree would do the trick. I buckled down to study for the GRE, and the dread test loomed in the morning. Never a good sleeper even when anxiety wasn’t an active bedfellow, I lay in my narrow bed against the wall, rolled a fresh pair of spongy, purple ear plugs between my forefinger and thumb and made it through the night better than anticipated.
Around the same time, I sat with the teen boys and their younger sister around the cloth-covered table in a big vintage kitchen, the wood floor painted into a geometric-patterned rug, and the children discussed what I had become to them. “What do we call you?” They ruminated.
“Aunt?” one suggested. No, not old enough.
“Sister?” Too old for that.
They settled on Sister-Cousin, a double belonging, and I welcomed the name, forgetting for a moment to worry about my future. I might have missed it: the fact that these boys and this young girl right here in front of me, seventeen- and fifteen- and thirteen-years-old and tender and wise and creative as anyone I’ve ever known, had made me their own. What were any prospective life plans to this? Why did I have to leave? Was this burgeoning present not world enough? Who makes the rules about these things, anyway?
Had I been clear-sighted enough to ask these questions aloud, I might have discovered the answers sooner. Only later did the children of the house tell me how I’d manifested during their basement recording session before I took the test that ushered me out of their lives. Rebecca, Rebecca. Her future. Shh! Rebecca.
I once tried to describe the music of singer-songwriter Patty Griffin to a friend. “She knows the ache of life in this world,” I said.
“Doesn’t everyone?” the friend asked. “Well, everyone who’s honest,” she amended.
A year and a half before taking the GRE, 28-years-old, life-tattered and spirit-wounded, I had driven my thirteen-year-old Honda Accord from Athens, Georgia, where I’d been in school for ages and then worked almost as long, to Asheville, North Carolina, where my future was a question mark. Patty Griffin sang the sorrows of searching for home from the car’s CD player: “When It Don’t Come Easy” and the appropriately-titled “Useless Desires.” As road signs announced the approach of this city where I’d taken a new job, I began to feel queasy. My right foot shifted to the brake pedal. The road crossed a substantial river. I looked over at my best friend in the passenger seat, riding along to help me move, and began to panic, “What am I doing?”
“No turning back now,” she raised an emphatic eyebrow. She was right, but in the moment, I felt groundless. We sped under the impossibly high mountain pass at Long Shoals Road, which still feels like the gateway to Western North Carolina when I visit, the signifier that I am almost home.
We followed a pickup truck full of most of my earthly belongings, exited onto Brevard Road and turned now left, now right among clusters of small, old bungalows with plenty of character, and pulled up in front of our destination, not the Asheville family home that would mean so much to me, but the house that came before it: a little Cape Cod fronted by a white picket fence and two dormer windows topped with small, peaked roofs like raised eyebrows, giving the impression the place was surprised to see me.
The dormer on the right housed the bedroom waiting for me; strangers inside said hello and introduced themselves as my new roommates. An hour of carrying and arranging furniture and belongings, of sitting cross-legged on the bed with my closest friend, postponing the inevitable. And then I was waving on the small concrete stoop as she drove back in the truck to Georgia and the home I knew, and the mists covering my upcoming days parted to show this one house, this new room of mine, and not much more.
“This place isn’t for everybody,” the friend who secured me the job interview that had moved me in the first place crinkled her eyebrows in some concern when I told her I’d accepted the ad agency position and was Asheville-bound. “I’m worried you won’t like it there. Not everyone fits in.”
Her worries were unnecessary. The city suited me, and in a very short time, it made itself home. On one of my early days working at the agency, I parked my car at the bottom of the downtown hill and ascended the sidewalks, block after block of artsy, grungy storefronts and individuals who didn’t fit any perceivable mold. I grabbed my morning coffee-with-cream at Izzy’s, walked the block-and-a-half further to the office, and was stopped short by a man sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. As I stepped off the curb to pass him, I saw that he was cheerfully arranging and rearranging a set of California Raisin figurines.
On a different evening, I sat in a Bible study circle full of new faces. One of the younger women shared a joke that the whole group seemed in on. “They say this town is where the awkward people go.” She looked around at her friends. “It’s a place for people who don’t fit anywhere else.” Everyone laughed in agreement.
“I love it here!” I crowed to my best friend later, recounting the stories. “Everyone belongs.”
But just as I was falling in love with the city and my place in it, the job I had moved for unexpectedly ended. My checking account dwindled, then my savings, and now the house with the dormers needed to cast me out. I was sent on my way to stop over with the family of the teenage musicians, a guest for who knew how long. I did not know that, much like these enfolding mountains and this strange, sweet city, the home with the blue downstairs bedroom, hand-painted birds singing the upper circuit of the wall, had been waiting to house me all along.
I had so often felt unhoused. Ironically, I spent the first eighteen years of my life in the same North Atlanta suburb, only moving house once and not even changing schools. But on the inside, I was unmoored, often at odds with what the cultural intersections around me valued: name-brand clothing, upwardly-mobile jobs, quick conversation, dogmatic faith. I knew I was different in a number of ways, but I was afraid to stand out. I was afraid of my own shadow, and I hid my true self so deeply that I walked through my days feeling lost.
Then came the single twenty-something years with their higher stakes and more of the same pain and confusion on a larger scale. Despite my advanced degree, I was only able to secure a parade of low-paying jobs–some of them very interesting, like Intern for International Students, and some of them brain-numbing, like Medical Records Entry–each lasting barely more than a year and hardly paying enough to cover rent.
There were relationships I threw my entire heart into but couldn’t figure out how to sustain. There were roommates I couldn’t figure out how to live with and apartments so uncomfortable for various reasons that I switched housing at the end of almost every lease. Year after year, I tried to live a life that made sense, but I was always on the edge, making mistakes and poor decisions, both professional and personal, and making many of those decisions in an activated haze of confusion, not understanding my hidden, fearful self enough to choose well.
Somehow, when the friend who was concerned whether or not I would fit into Asheville secured me the ad agency interview, and then when the agency itself offered me the job, I made a good decision. I said “Yes.” But now I was one year into my new Asheville life with no paycheck. I’d been putting off moving into this house that belonged to others and not to me, this place brimming with the boisterous life of three teens still at home and several businesses run out of the house. It was time to lean into being a part of this family that welcomed me in my need as one of their own, but the home’s chief beauty–its figuratively revolving door–was my biggest concern, besides the fact that one just doesn’t do this kind of thing, move in with people because I couldn’t make it financially on my own.
I worried: would I ever be able to be alone? I knew my need for a peaceful, predictable environment. Would I lose myself there?
If there is anyone in literature who is at risk of losing herself, it is Davita Chandal. Years after moving away from the Asheville family, I would turn the pages of Chaim Potok’s novel Davita’s Harp and weep. Like me, Davita had moved numerous times; unlike me, all her changes of house and apartment were against her eight-, ten-, eleven-year-old will.
The titular door harp is a pear-shaped wooden heirloom of her father’s that hangs on the front door of every New York City tenement to which the young girl and her parents move, and there are many such moves in Davita’s story; no character or romance about the small, cold apartments her family rents. Her parents host regular meetings in the living rooms of these places, always after Davita has gone to bed. But through the walls, she hears each guest enter to the gentle ping and hum of the harp, the door opening and closing, the maplewood balls swinging, bouncing, singing, and ushering friends in and out upon the “gentlest and sweetest of tones.”
First reading Davita's story in a house more years and moves away than I could bear from that Asheville home I’d found, I wanted to cry instead of sing–for her, for myself, for the homes that wouldn’t house and the roots that wouldn’t hold. But there is more to Davita’s story than the moves or the late-evening guests ushered in on the melody of the door harp.
The truth about her moves, about her parents’ friends, isn’t gentle or sweet. Davita’s family has relocated and relocated, from neighborhood to dingiest 1930’s neighborhood, due to regular evictions. Her parents, seeking a kinder and fairer world, believe communism will pave the way to redeeming hurts–their own and others’–and in a spirit of goodwill, they host meetings of like-minded people. They are trying to solve the problem of pain.
And as the door swings and the harp sings, comrades coming and going many evenings of the week, discussions and arguments and boisterous song sounding from the living room, Davita falls asleep to overheard phrases of a world off-center. Her father, who keeps going into the heart of the action for the sake of journalism, brings home first-hand accounts of danger and death. Davita’s mind begins to reel; she’s too young for this, but she can’t look away, and her parents are too busy with their world-changing efforts to notice that her world is collapsing. Ultimately, her father travels again for the cause, and he dies in Guernica, 1937. Her mother sinks into her own isolating depression, and of course Davita’s mind cracks; no child can bear this kind of knowledge, this kind of loss, without support.
What will rescue her, this child at the whims of the fracturing world? I long to reach into the pages and shake her parents and say to them, “Wake up! See your daughter in the apartment with you! She is falling to pieces!” They don’t see her for quite some time. Davita’s world is frayed, and she doesn't know how to sing against the pain.
For better or worse, I listened to the old inner voice that said Normal is best, that told me a nontraditional, belonging kind of life would never do. Against the healing and the beauty, the family and the community, I left the Asheville home I had found with those musical teenagers, those parent friends. I left it for a better job. I left it for a place of my own. I left it, essentially, for a paycheck. I moved for all these reasons, and also for the promise of that new stab at grad school and the chance of a library career–for the chance of a career altogether. For the dream of fitting into the world in an acceptable manner.
One of the job listings I stumbled across in the same place as the Library program was Study Abroad Advisor to Students with Disabilities at the University of North Carolina. Surprisingly, it combined a number of the previous work experiences I’d had. Fleeting as each job was, I had worked with undergraduates in a number of capacities; I had traveled abroad; I had experience in disabilities support. More surprisingly, I got an interview. Most surprisingly, I was offered the position. It paid more than any job I’d had before, but it was in Chapel Hill, a four-hour drive from the family I loved.
“You can keep thinking of this as home,” the mother of the house told me. Her face lit up. “Come back once a month. It will be like you’re away at college, but not gone forever.”
Maybe this notion, the possibility of return, is what enabled me to accept the position in the new town. That, and the same university had accepted my application to their Library Science program. Indeed, I thought. I’m just going away to school. Nothing will change.
Patty Griffin released a new album that spring while I was making plans to go. I drove back and forth between Asheville and Chapel Hill hunting for an apartment, windows down to the warm air, “Heavenly Day” sounding from my old car speakers. I drove the backroads to my radio job singing along to “Getting Ready” and “No Bad News.” And I soaked up all the time I could with friends in my favorite areas of town–Jack of the Wood pub for live New Orleans jazz, a Dave Rawlings Machine show at the Grey Eagle Theater, hikes to Craggy Pinnacle a few miles above town on the Blue Ridge Parkway just as spring was stepping into the mountains.
The day before leaving, my sparrow-circled room packed up and tidier than it had been for ten months, the youngest son, now sixteen with a driver’s license, rode with me to pick up the U-Haul truck. What fun we had on the way! How I teased him like a sibling: “You sure I can trust you to drive this fine vehicle of mine back to the house?” I inhabited these moments like they would never end. I laughed like I was only enjoying ordinary days with these brother-cousins and not in the final acts of leaving them behind.
I have pictures from a few hours later: the two brothers and their cats sitting on the top of the truck’s trailer, on break from loading my meager store of furniture and boxes. I have pictures from the next morning: the oldest son, an artist, copying the image of Vincent van Gogh’s “Cafe Terrace at Night” perfectly onto his younger brother’s bicep with Crayola markers before wrapping my print of the painting in a blanket and slipping it alongside my other frames in the truck.
Not pictured: the youngest son flipping my kitchen table upside-down and scraping it along its top down the length of the trailer bed. I loved him so much, I only laughed at the scratches I’d find. Also not pictured: the mother busying herself with other work that morning, hiding away in sorrow. I see now that she, perhaps alone out of all of us, knew I was actually saying goodbye.
I crunched my car out of the gravel drive, following the moving truck to a new place, much like I had followed the pickup into Asheville two years before, except that I was a different person now than the one who had first arrived in this city. I was someone who had, for the first time ever, found home within myself and the world, even though I couldn’t put my finger on how or why.
What did I think was going to happen when I arrived at my destination after leaving that kind of belonging behind?
In Potok’s novel, the child Davita wanders out of her bedroom early one morning. There is no guest room in the small apartment, but she spies a strange person sleeping on the living room sofa. Jakob Daw, she will learn later at the breakfast table, is an important friend of her parents, and he will soon become Uncle Jakob to her, a beloved adopted member of the family. Davita returns quietly to her room to retrieve her glasses, with which she peers from the living room entrance at this rumpled, tattered man, and when she finally turns back to the hallway, she first goes over to the door, as a child will, to lift and drop the balls on the door harp, ping, ting, as if she knows intuitively what healing this new friendship will bring and seeks to announce it to herself.
Uncle Jakob, it turns out, is a storyteller, and his repeated refrain for Davita amid her distress is the tale of a bird who hears music as it flies above the world, a strain so lovely the creature can hardly bear it. But the bird also sees ugly things as it travels from one land to another, fighting and pain, suffering and loss. Davita thinks about the overheard bedtime conversations and the Spanish Civil War reading material her parents keep around the house.
In Uncle Jakob’s story, the bird decides the problem is the music; the tune is too comforting. It is lulling people into a soporific sense that everything is okay, when obviously everything isn’t. The bird decides to find the source of the beautiful music and put a stop to it, so the people will see what they are doing and stop their harmful ways. For a time, in the worst days of loss for Davita and her mother, the singing harp comes down from their door. Silence, no song.
When I left that home, I thought I had to go. I was an adult; I was not related to these people; I had an obligation to make my own way, but even as I went, something inside me twigged, a sense of wrongness in the whole situation. When I arrived at my new position, I sat in my bright, shiny office at my sterile new desk, gazed down at the computer and thought, Is this what I left them for?
All alone in my new town, I felt only loneliness and loss, a crushing self-doubt and a sleep-impairing silence. No music, no song.
Should I have left for that job? Or should I have stayed with the family? It is no kind of question. There is no answer, and “should” is too wide a word to swim. When I first made the plan to go, someone who knew me commented that I’d been bouncing around a lot, meaning from job to job. “How does it feel for your life finally to be taking direction?” he asked. That, also, felt like the wrong question.
In his book The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Farrar Capon says, “We are homeless enough as it is.” He is describing the impersonal misery of enduring small talk at a 1960’s cocktail party, where no individual’s presence matters particularly, just warm bodies filling up a liquor-drenched room. We are homeless enough as it is, I thought even then, to explain our lives in terms of bouncing around versus landing somewhere worthily productive.
One night, late in Davita’s story, a bad dream tatters the edges of her sleep. “I had a nightmare,” she says to her parents at the breakfast table the next morning. She tells them she was chased by Baba Yaga, that crone-ish threat who leers through centuries of Slavic storytelling. But in her nightmare, Davita does something most unusual: she throws a door harp on the ground between herself and the witch, and the instrument becomes a wide, separating swath of water—a protection.
In his poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” Poet W.B. Yeats bemoans the world around him as it fails to look at what matters. How paltry it all is, he suggests . . . unless. Unless “Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress.” He speaks of “singing school.” Where can we go to find the song? He suggests the timelessness of art as an antidote.
Me? I was learning, even while leaving that Asheville home, that vague notions of “should” and “shouldn’t” have always left me naked to the world, ragged as a scarecrow. How can a mere paycheck, necessary though it is for putting food on the table, wage any sort of war against the tatters that inevitably rend our mortal dress, our hearts and minds and bodies, as we walk through this world? Yes, I followed the U-Haul down the mountain and away from one of the few places I had found full belonging, but something in me already knew that this was not the way to catch the tune.
Leaving, staying, looking for a better job and a life that looks right, longing for a home and a life that rings true. What else should I have done? What makes a life, anyway? What makes a home? Who are the people we intersect with as we walk through our days? That shining, unbreakable rock of goodness that carries on into memory long after the moving truck has deposited your belongings at another, and another, and yet another location. I was only beginning to see that what matters, what lasts, is, in fact, the heart and soul of the people who are right in front of you, in any given room of any given house where you lay your head.
As I lay in bed under the blue sparrows in the house that wasn’t mine on the night before taking the test, I could not yet say with confidence that doing life differently was okay. I could not choose to live according to my own ways and needs. Still, the teenage musicians intoned their acceptance of me as they reminded each other to stay quiet, to let me sleep. Rebecca’s future, Rebecca’s future, they whispered to each other.
And when I look back on my time living as a guest in their house, whenever I am particularly missing that family, I hear something even better, sweet as a door harp: Rebecca’s present, Rebecca’s present, they smile and sing to me out of the past.
That night, the percussion and guitar sounded beyond my plugged ears, the vibrations soothed my body, and I slept. I fell asleep knowing those beloved, adopted sibling-cousins of mine were nearby, greeting the tattered realities of their lives in their own manner and making music out of it. They were my door harp thrown down between the uncertainties of my present and the unknown of the future.
You are homeless but home, they assured me, and both things were true.
Beautiful excavation of the human longing to belong amid all the homelessness that comes with the human condition
Rebecca, you captured the feeling of homelessness and longing so well.