This Be the Place: A Wind at the Door

The house was straight out of a magazine. Well, technically, a mail-order catalog. A hundred years ago, Sears, Roebuck and Co. delivered a Craftsman kit house in parcels like a Lego set to this little street in East Nashville called Chicamauga.

We stumbled across the rental listing on Craigslist. It was weirdly affordable, a dream for three grad students like us—Mary, Liz, and me. The house had so many rooms. And the finishes: a mission-style fireplace with a stone hearth, glass knobs adorning every paneled door, thick friezes around the entryways. The wooden floors were original planks stained a dark mahogany. The trim—there was trim—tall, beautiful trim painted white. It was second in beauty only to the light, which beamed through the old, thick panes, seeming to ripple through the glass, casting prisms across the house. We signed a lease; it was a given.

I had my own office, too, which astonished me. I’d sneak in unseen through a miniature door at the end of my low, vaulted closet, like Alice finding the lush Wonderland garden again and again—golden key, bright flowers, cool fountains, prelapsarian. The door opened to a small dormer room above the front porch, which smelled like wood, dust, and old books, something out of a Dickens novel. Being hidden away but still able to glance out at the street below made me feel I’d found an in-between place where, in the privacy of my own thoughts, anything might happen. I stationed against the wall a desk I’d thrifted from one of the local stores. That office is where I wrote the poems that became my first book.

We’d been living there six months or so when a knock came at the front door.

It was a gray, windy day—unusually warm for February, rain imminent. I had opened the office’s windows to let in the humidity. As I shuffled downstairs, I left the cursor blinking in the open Word document of my suddenly abandoned poem.

Another flurry of knocks erupted as my roommates and I converged at the door. Liz turned the knob. On the threshold appeared a middle-aged woman with blond hair and a billowing black blouse. “Oh, darlins,” she said, one hand flirtatiously on her hip, head tilted. “I just hope I’m not a bother. I’m Susan, and I used to live here as a little girl. I was driving by, and I don’t know, do you think I could come in?”

We obliged, humored, and received a walking tour of our own house. “And this is where Daddy stored all his mail with bobby pins and empty tissue boxes taped up on the walls for organization,” Susan said in what was now our dining room.

“What did your dad do for work?” I asked.

“Oh, you know, bits and bobs,” she said. “And carpentry sometimes. Did you know this street used to be known as Cocaine Lane?”

“Interesting! I did not,” Mary said, raising her eyebrows.

“Mind if I use the restroom?” Susan asked, already ducking into the hall toilet. After the flush, while the faucet ran, we heard vague tapping on the walls.

“Is she…,” Liz whispered before revoking her thought. “You guys hear that right?”

“We’ve got ourselves an amateur drummer,” Mary said.

“Maybe she’s self-soothing,” I offered.

When Susan emerged and joined us again in the kitchen, her face changed. She seemed offended. “This island thing didn’t used to be here like this,” she said. “It should be a wall.”

She knocked on the cheap Formica, as though to test if it were solid. “It makes the place feel confused, like each room don’t know what it’s for, don’t you think? Daddy wouldn’t have liked that. Not one bit.”

“The new owners must’ve put that in when they decided to rent it,” I said, unsure what else to say. “It’s nice to have the extra counter space.”

On our way back out through the living room where we’d started, Susan paused and pondered.

“I almost forgot,” she said, pointing in the general direction of the coffee table. “Mama died right here in this very room.”

“Oh,” we said almost in unison, exchanging glances.

“Don’t worry, it was the most peaceful passing.”

I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to feel something as Susan waved her hands in the air as if to conjure a scene.

“We set her up real comfortable in a bed out here and when she started reaching, grabbing up at the ceiling, saying all sorts of stuff like, for instance, ‘I want a fish sandwich!,’ well, what else, we got her a fish sandwich and a Neapolitan milkshake. That calmed her right down. Then she died.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s no big thing. Old news,” Susan said.

We all sighed in relief when Susan left. Liz closed the door and turned to Mary and me. “What was that?”

Mary frowned. “I was thinking,” she said, glancing out the window. “She mentioned she was driving by, but I didn’t notice any car."

We jumped onto the couch to peer out the front window: no woman and no car, only a sky that had finally busted apart and started to pour. Remembering my poem and the open windows that now needed to be shut, I mounted the stairs and returned to my office, to the unfinished line.

When I consider the process of writing, when the words are really working, it doesn’t feel generative, not exactly. It feels receptive, like a satellite dish picking up signals from someplace both far away and very near.

There’s a concept from Celtic tradition that Mary happened to be studying that year: thin places, like dawn and dusk, where the membrane between the material and the immaterial becomes, if not fully dissolved, permeable. The house, for all I knew, could be a thin place itself. There were times when I’d felt unsettled on the couch, alone at night. Strange noises often seemed to emanate from the unfinished basement; the door rattled on its tiny latch. A draft, I thought. It was cool and dark down there, the water heater looming over the dim space. And once, truly, an unlit candle fell off the mantle of its own accord. I found it in the morning while rushing out the door to class.

Writing poems feels like I’ve tricked my meat-brain into accessing information from a thin place where images or personalities arrive and invite themselves in. Toni Morrison talked about this, how her characters simply would not shut up.

That’s how it happens—voices, impressions, music, shimmers of stories that walk through walls to steer the poem toward a surprise I could not have imagined on my own, even though I’m alone. Susan was an example of that—someone who showed up, crossed the threshold, and had lots to say. I’d sneak into my office and sit. As the light ambered across the room, animating the wood grain and dust, I’d get going on a piece of writing that was very often bad, but just maybe starting to improve.

Weeks later, I was writing a poem when another knock came at the door.

Of course, it was Susan. This time, she had pulled up in a black Cadillac, a cigarette stiff between her fingers.

When we answered the door, she announced she was looking for something.

“Looking for what?” Liz asked.

“I’m just gonna say: there’s money hidden in this house.” Then, leaning in a little, as if not to be overheard, she whispered, “Daddy’s money.”

It seemed like a tall tale, yet we let her in again, too intrigued to turn her away. Perhaps some part of us wanted it to be true—not only because of the juicy allure of a hidden fortune, but because we imagined ourselves living in a place, maybe even a thin place, where outlandish things were possible. Poetry had already taught me that entertaining the impossible was part of the gig. And so we found ourselves joining in, rapping our knuckles along the rooms’ walls, testing the sound, pressing our ears to the house’s many hollows.