Page 71 of Crate Expectations
He went back downstairs and I lowered the needle.
Donny Hathaway filled the third floor of the home, the house that had been my grandmother’s, then my mother’s, then mine, and now was ours, and I sat on the floor in front of the wall the way I had been sitting on this floor in some way or another my whole life, and put both hands on my stomach and talked to my daughter.
I told her about a little girl who grew up in a house full of records. Who learned before she had words for it that music was not decoration, not background, not something you put on to fill the quiet. That it was a language, and that language had a grammar, and the grammar was feeling, and feeling was the most serious thing there was, and you did not apologize for the size of yours.
I told her that her grandmother had known this. That Celeste James had stood behind turntables all over Philadelphia and understood that her job was not to play music at people but to give the space what it needed, to read it, to respond, to find the record before the room knewit needed it. I told her that this was a gift, and that it lived in the blood, and that she was going to have it, and that I hoped she understood it earlier than I had.
I told her that love was not a moment. That it was a practice. It was the soup. Even bowing shelves in need of repair on a rainy Saturday morning. The lamp for the reading chair that appeared without being asked for. All details noted in silence. Because more importantly, it was the second chair. Steady and present, in every room you ever shared with another person.
I told her there was always a room waiting for her.
That somewhere in her life there would be a space that needed exactly what she had to give, and that she would feel it before she could name it, the pull of a room that was hers to walk into. That she would know it the way her grandmother had known rooms, the way I had learned to know them, in the sternum before anywhere else.
And that when she walked in, she should walk in completely. No drawer. No management. No careful distance between herself and the thing she wanted most.
That the room would hold her. That every room she ever loved would too.
That she was coming into a house that had been holding women like her for generations, and the walls knew her already, and the records knew her name, and the third stair would creak for her the way it had creaked for all of us, announcing her arrival, saying she was here, saying she was home.
Donny Hathaway sang. The morning light came through the front windows at the low angle that madeeverything look chosen. Downstairs, the house made the sounds of a man who lived in it and loved the people inside it and was making eggs on a Saturday morning because it was Saturday and that was what Saturday was for now.
I put both hands on my stomach and felt my daughter move, the small, certain presence of her, already herself, already here, already becoming the person she was going to be.
“The tingle,” I said, “never lies.”
She kicked, like she was already calling it.
