What You Don't Know
A brief interlude, in which the memoirist discovers that the answers won't satisfy
What you don’t know until you write a book to find out why one particular house meant so much to you is that the answer will change by the season. It’s because you were autistic. It’s because you’re artistic. It’s because of trauma. A hundred other things.
You will wish you could rewrite the story over and over and over again. You will understand everything when you are ten years older than now, or twenty. You will never understand. You hope you will learn by the time you die to receive the gift of that house you once lived in without needing to parse the ways it saved you.
What I didn’t know until I had written the book and published most of it on Substack is that I would leave out the most important parts, like the fact that I am wrong about almost everything. That there are no answers. That there are a thousand. That very few of them matter.
*
I have a black-and-white digital image of a photo taken inside that Asheville house. In it, the original occupant sits before a row of book-filled shelves that divide the living room from the dining area. Those bookcases had come down by the time I lived there almost 100 years later. The only evidence of their existence was two shallow wooden strips in the floor. In the photo, light shines through a window. The man crosses his legs to display fashionably cuffed suit pants and high-heeled loafers. He holds a large book open in his hands and unsuccessfully hides a smirk. The photograph is staged, but the shelves were real.
*
The family I lived with moved away from that house four years ago. No, five. Time refracts. Soon after, the father forwarded me a link to the current listing. “You might want to see what they’ve done.” He admitted, “I can hardly bring myself to look.”
I hardly recognized the place. Original paintings that had bordered the walls were gone. Muted colors that the family had so carefully matched to reflect the historic color scheme had been repainted in crisp black-and-white. One room was now a screened porch; the foyer had become a different place entirely. “It looks like a circus,” the father says.
It felt like a travesty. The destruction of a history—mine, I mostly mean. How could I figure out what happened to me in that house when there wasn’t a there to revisit? At the same time, all the stair removals and new materials and shifted windows and walled-off doorways solidified something: the house the way it was for the short time it was my home was crystalized now in memory and nowhere else.
A thousand things can be true at the same time, including:
That house is both only and very living and active in my memory, making me reckon even now with the pain alongside the peace wrought between those walls.
Also, you can’t go home again. (A famous Asheville writer once said that.)
I scrolled through the images on the screen and thought those things, and then I noticed that one item had been restored. In the upside-down renovation, the living room bookshelves were back, just where their original owner sits beside them in my photograph.
*
I dream about the house. It is exactly the way I left it. The family has offered to sell it to me before they leave. It is different in every way. I return to it, an old woman. I raise my young children there. I am 29 years old again, moving in. It becomes mine in a hundred different ways. I will never enter it again in this lifetime.
What I didn’t realize until the middle of my life is that what is given, even in hindsight, is so often different from what we imagine. What is given is the cat scratch rubbing alongside the magic of a snow-filled night with teenaged sibling-cousins, ten hours after meeting my now-husband and a week after interviewing for a job that would, three months later, move me out of that old Asheville house and away from the city and the family I loved.
What you don’t understand until you begin to see your own autistic need for order and explanation is that there are no rules about the things that matter most. What you don’t know until you build your life over again in more houses than you ever wanted to count is that you can again find a place in which every bone in your body knows it is home.
It is all travesty. It is all gift.
I...heart...this. (I mean, my heart feels this, and likes it, and feels the hurt, too.)
When I moved to London for what would be five years, I visited some teammates in a house with a yellow door and as I walked inside, I thought, "This is my house." A year later a new roommate and I moved into it. I moved back to the US in 2002, and my last visit to London was in 2008. I stayed with friends who lived next to the yellow-door house...only it wasn't a yellow-door house anymore. Some new tenants (after the ones who lived there after me) were gutting it and, it sounds like, doing something to it similar to what was done in your Asheville house.
"My" house still exists, but, like yours, only in my memory. Hugs if you want them. 😊
I wish there was only one truth, and it arrived to us fully formed right when we needed it. It would be easier, but boring too., I guess. I have recently propped on my bookshelf a photo of me at my 7th birthday party. I am surrounded by fellow children who have been invited. Most are not looking at the camera. I am staring into the lens with a smile and a party hat fastened with elastic under my chin. I am leaning on my favorite gift, a game based on the movie Jaws. I am trying to understand that little girl, to see if the smile reaches all the way to her eyes, as we say. I wonder what she is thinking. She is still with me. I am like a Russian doll, with every age I've ever been inside me. I feel the need to take it apart and look but only briefly. I can only stand a quick glimpse. I think your houses are like that doll, each stacked inside the other.