Singing School
In the Guest Room with Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok
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.
