Temple of Books and Voices

A book, a book, a book: everywhere I went, I took a book. I read in the car and never got sick. I read on the bus to and from school every day. I took novels to school and hid them on my lap to read when I was supposed to be doing something else. The only recess I ever sat as a form of punishment was in the fourth grade: we had a speaker that day who bored me beyond comprehension, so I ignored him in favor of actually reading the glossary in my Social Studies text. (Now that is boring, ladies and gentlemen.) As penance, I spent 30 minutes sitting next to the fence at the playground – without a book. It was torture.

Once a week, the class had Library Day. Needless to say, this was the highlight of my elementary school career: in my mind, a library was more sacred than a church. In fact, if I’m to tell the truth, I have to admit that if it came down to it, I’d pick a library over a church any day. Church buildings have always made me uncomfortable. I don’t like the smell of them; I don’t like the way the air seems to press in and make me feel small and stifled. A church has the wrong kind of solemnity to me: I always sense an undercurrent of fear flowing along beneath the reverence, a sense of responsibility tied to some primal fear of punishment for non-compliance. Maybe that’s just me, or maybe I haven’t been to the right building yet. I don’t quite know – but I worship in a coffee shop for a reason.

If a church is a world in a box that’s been nailed shut then a library is a world in a treasure chest, flung open and glimmering with rubies and gold: you are limited in your taking only by what you can carry in one trip. And I would go to great lengths to carry as many books as possible. If I could’ve stuffed books in my shoes and my pockets and down the front of my shirt, I would have. I practically did, when I went to the public library: I was allowed one plastic grocery sack full of books per visit, and I’d stuff that sack as full as I could possibly get it without it falling completely apart. Sometimes I had to put my hand under it on the way back to the car to hold everything in. But on Library Day at school, we were only permitted to check out one book at a time. For some of my classmates, this was just fine; general consensus seemed to be, Why read more than we absolutely have to? But in my bibliophilic little brain, the one-book rule led to some excruciating moments of indecision that could only be solved by every child’s last resort: eeny, meeny, miney, moe.

I always forced myself to hurry so that I could snatch a few minutes of quality time with my chosen book before library period ended. I’d sit at one of the round, gleaming wooden tables, open it up, and dive right in. One day I was absolutely engrossed in The Secret Garden when the librarian came over to me, pulled out a chair, and sat down. I was annoyed. I squared my body off and put up an invisible wall: Go away, woman. I’m reading. But the librarian leaned closer. “What book is that?” she asked. I showed her, grudgingly. Then she said, “Oh, I love that book,” and smiled.

The Tiffany shut up inside my head huffed: So do I. And I’ll love it even more when you leave me alone so I can get back to it. But the librarian did not leave me alone. Instead she made a strange request: “Will you read me some?”

It is worth noting, here, that I actually liked this lady under most circumstances, by which I mean any circumstances that did not involve her interrupting my reading time. How could I not like her? As far as I knew, she was the keeper of the keys to my favorite kingdom. That made her worthy of adoration. But getting between me and a story? Come on, now. Surely, as Queen of the Books, she knew better. I gazed at her steadily: Go. Away. She gazed back. Finally I determined that the only way for me to get what I wanted was to give her what she wanted. I sighed.

“Where do you want me to start?”

She took the book, flipped some pages, pointed out a line.

“When do you want me to stop?”

“I’ll say when.”

Suppressing the urge to roll my eyes to the ceiling, I resumed possession of the book and began to read:

She went out of the room and slammed the door after her, and Mary went and sat on the hearth-rug, pale with rage. She did not cry, but ground her teeth.

"There was some one crying--there was--there was!" she said to herself.

She had heard it twice now, and sometime she would find out. She had found out a great deal this morning. She felt as if she had been on a long journey, and at any rate she had had something to amuse her all the time …”

I got so caught up in the reading, the librarian had to touch my shoulder to silence me. She sat looking at me as if I were some sort of holy revelation. “My goodness!” she said. “You really do read well!”

It didn’t occur to me that she was surprised because she’d never actually heard a third-grader read The Secret Garden. As was always the case back then, I had the sneaking suspicion that she thought I was some kind of slobbering idiot because I walked funny – it was clearly what my classmates thought, so I generalized it to everyone. Consequently, a lot of the academic things I did well as a child were spitfire attempts to show everyone up: Oh yeah? Watch this. But reading was too much of a passion for me to allow it to fall into that category, even for a moment. I was so flattered to be praised for it that all I could do was blush and look down at my lap.

After that, the librarian kept aside books she thought I might like. As time went by, she introduced me to Summer of the Monkeys, The Yearling, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Caddie Woodlawn, and so many more. It was through her that I read about the wooden doll named Hitty who was a hundred years old and swam in the sea – Hitty, one of the cast of characters brought to life again and again over the years keep me company in my loneliness. Bambi was the same way. Book Bambi was different from Disney Bambi, so much more real to me on a page than on a screen. Also Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Heidi and her grandfather, and Pippi Longstocking, who mopped the floor with brushes attached to her shoes.

I developed a habit of getting through the days by imagining that I was a character in my very own book. It had no discernible premise other than the fight to get through each day, but that was all I needed: in books, the meat of the story is the primary character’s valiant struggle to overcome some kind of challenge or ordeal. My ordeal was life itself, and so I made my life into a story and imagined it shut between two covers, with a title page and a copyright and a pocket in the front for a library card. And then, when things got too difficult for me to live through in the first person, I imagined that whatever was happening to me was just some spine-tingling part of the plot and I would come through it a hero.

Perhaps I have dwelt too much on the subject of books. I must confess that I have gone on about books to such an extent because, well, I don’t know where to go from here – and I’m telling you that because this is stream-of-consciousness writing, and my brain is telling me to tell you that I don’t know where to go from here. Congratulations; you have become privy to writer’s block.

There are so many ends I could pick up. I have told you about Boyleston, about Plum Street, about Benjii and the chickenpox. I have told you about Hostage and about the basement and about the begging ritual and morning stretches; about rehab and Mrs. Kaiser and the cat called Sweetie and my love of books. If I could, I would pry open the doors and windows of self-expression and take you inside how it really felt to be me, how it really felt to suffer and be forever clamped in terror but somehow hold on to life by a second, by a word, by a giggle, but I can’t do that. I know I am not the only one to have suffered these things, but there is a kind of wild lonesomeness in the fact that all the words I know, all the words I could ever learn, will never express everything I need to say. They won’t do it for me, and they won’t do it for anyone else: survivors of childhood trauma are a group of people together, alone. We share what we can. What we cannot share will never be shared at all, because there is no way to share it. It is a profound  loneliness, knowing the things that I know, having in my mind all the memories that depravity handed me. Sometimes when I pray, I think my very soul cries out: the words don’t come because they don’t exist, but something inside me reaches for God like a child wanting her father’s lap. That’s the only way I can explain it; the only way.

I have never been very religious. I even shy away from spirituality more than I’d like, though I crave that dimension, that facet of basic human existence, with every last pore of my body sometimes. I just don’t seem to be capable of faith; not like other people are capable – I don’t trust it. I half-expect it not to be real. I’m afraid of going through life fooling myself. For someone with such a rich imagination as I have, I am very oriented to things I can see, touch taste, hear and smell. If I’m going to invest myself so completely in something as big as faith, I damn well better be able to hold it in my hands and hear its heart beat. The objective, academic part of my brain talks me out of faith at every turn. I have to keep trying again and again and again to just believe. I have to start over every day, intentionally shutting off my analytical processes and persuading myself that I am not just some bones and skin with some neurons firing here and there. I do the best I can, but I am afraid: I am afraid that what I fight for isn’t really faith at all, but a farce. I’m afraid God will reject my effort, deem me not good enough, and then sit back and watch me suffer, just like so many others have done.

There are two basic times I can connect with God: when I’m feeling that wild, ragged loneliness and the very essence of who I am cries out without input from my brain, and when I am singing.  

I have always loved to sing. I’m no star or anything – in fact, my vocal range is quite limited and my breath control sucks – but singing has always soothed me. Maybe there’s a memory buried somewhere in my brain of “Farther Along” being hummed over me as I lay cuddled in my Memaw’s lap. Maybe I subconsciously credit singing with saving me from complete madness back in the basement, especially before Sweetie came along. Maybe, after so many long days of screaming and sobbing, I just like to hear a lilt in my voice. Whatever it is, I am comforted by the act of singing. Singing allows me to forget myself for a few moments, to push everything out of my mind but the sound of the notes coming off my lips. It takes me from a fenced-in place of fear to a place where there are no walls or gates, an open meadow of being where fear cannot exist. There, in that place, I can meet God – God as a peace, God as a feeling of surrender, God as a sense of awareness that somehow, someway, I am connected to all the things that my spirit needs and that I am good and right simply because I live and breathe and hope.

Sometimes, I’ll admit, I only go to church for the singing. If there is a weekly church service someplace that exists simply for the purpose of singing, singing, and more singing, I want to find it. Song is my worship. Everything else can so easily turn me upside-down and inside-out with anxiety and confusion. Everything else must be thought about, analyzed, made sense of, filed away. Singing just is. I don’t know how else to explain it.

I have been in some kind of choir or chorus or some singing ensemble since I was a little girl in Music class at school. I never particularly cared what I was singing, either – there are very few songs I really can’t stand, and most of those are on popular radio. For many years, I had a music teacher who made us sing Anne Murray every week. The rest of my classmates grumbled, but I didn’t give a damn who wrote the song or performed it. Half the time, I didn’t even care about the words. I just wanted to sing.