It wasn’t exactly a house or, I guess, it was less than a house. Specifically, it was half of a house, three stories, divided top to bottom, clapboarded, on a corner lot in Somerville. There was a house on the left, where whoever lived there fought all the time—you could hear them through the wall, horsehair plaster and lath—and then there was the house on the right, where we, the loopy semi-vegetarians, lived in, I admit it, squalor, two thousand square feet of it, much of the time smelling of sex, salty and oil-and-vinegary. One night, everyone stood together in the second-floor hallway, listening to the shrieking on the other side of the wall—louder and wilder than the noises you hear at night in the woods, fox and vixen, courting, mating—trying to decide whether to call the cops. Tracy Chapman, who’d huddled in the hallway that night, wrote “Behind the Wall”: Last night I heard the screaming. I didn’t live there then, but later I heard that screaming, too.
I think Tracy found the house her junior year at Tufts. I was a year behind her. Don’t get your hopes up. We never met. I can’t tell you anything about Tracy Chapman, because I don’t know anything about Tracy Chapman, and probably, if I knew anything, I wouldn’t tell you. I moved in only after she’d moved out, but people would still call on the phone, asking for her. Fans, reporters, fans. Did we know where she was? Did we know how to reach her? Could we get a message to her? No. Wasn’t she amazing, the best thing ever in the whole wide, wonderful, cocked-up world? Yes.
This isn’t a story about Tracy Chapman. It’s a story about the house. There were six bedrooms, but sometimes there were eight or nine or ten or even a dozen people living there, because it was cheaper if you shared and the place was such a mess—what was one more sweaty body compared with two more hands to do chores and another person to split the rent? There was also a dog named Takisha and a cat named Buddha and another cat named Misha that S., who became a soil scientist, had inherited from his grandmother, who’d named him after Mikhail Baryshnikov, because of how high the cat could leap. When S. moved out—I think he went to Japan?—he gave Misha to a very nice old lady named Donna, who lived in a vinyl-sided yellow house next door. That cat strode down the street like a lion, king of the pride. Once, he won a battle with a pit bull. Man, that cat could fight.
None of the rest of us had anything like Misha’s self-possession, or not when I lived there. No one was who they meant to be, not yet, anyway. We were embryos, stem cells, brain stems of our future selves, wet behind the ears, wet all over. We lived in muddled, uncertain, thrilling, and dizzying chaos, slamming doors, crying into pillows, pondering the possibilities of turnips and menstrual cups and macrobiotics and Audre Lorde. One chapter of our lives had ended, but the next chapter hadn’t begun, and none of us were sure what we wanted, only that we wanted it, longed for it, were desperate for it. I’ve been told that it’s the work of young adulthood to learn that you are in charge of your own life. Easier said than done, but for sure wackier and more fun in a house with a bunch of other misfits, especially if at least one person knows how to make a decent frittata, though it can be a little tricky figuring out how to take charge of your life if you’re trying to do it in the shadow of Tracy Chapman.
How much yearning can one roof shelter? In the bathroom on the second floor, there was a spiral-bound lined notebook, the bathroom book, or, really, many books, a succession of notebooks, each with a pencil attached by a string, fishing lure to a rod. The idea for the bathroom book was, possibly, L.’s (she’s a book editor now). It was like a journal except not, because it was collective, something made together, like stone soup. You could write hostile, scolding notes (“Please stop fucking with the thermostat”) or issue pronouncements (“I have begun to study C. Wright Mills”) or scribble or doodle or write poetry or draft stories (me, I did this, compulsively, unstoppably). R., who’s now not only a clinical psychologist but also something of an amateur archivist, kept three of those bathroom books, a record of our past selves, traces of our naked, aching hunger, and he says there’s a lot of daffy roommate stuff in there, like this little riff on taking a shower.
I’ve sometimes wondered if, in one of those bathroom books, Tracy first composed the pierce-your-soul-with-an-icepick lyrics to “Fast Car.” I had a feeling that I belonged. I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone.
All I know I read in the newspaper. “I, Tracy Chapman, own six albums,” she told the Tufts Daily in 1982, when she was a freshman and played left wing on the soccer team. She won first prize at a Tufts talent show; she told the Daily she loved Joan Armatrading. The next year, when she was sophomore co-captain of the Lady Jumbos, she took out an ad in the back of the paper: “Wanted: FOLK/BLUES Musician looking for GUITARIST VOCALIST and PERCUSSIONIST to play mostly originals. Call Tracy Chapman 776-6318 evenings.”
Tracy and L. and R. lived on campus in the Tufts Crafts House, artsy, lefty, a place for the sort of students who staged sit-ins to protest tenure decisions and to call for divestment from South Africa. At Tufts, I lived in the dorms. I was an Air Force R.O.T.C. cadet. The Crafts House kids were the kinds of kids who hated the R.O.T.C. kids. “We would have shunned you,” R. admitted. Shunning was the least of it. I’d walk across campus in uniform, and kids sitting on the quad would throw shoes at me.
I didn’t entirely blame them. I was crazy proud of being in the Air Force, but I wasn’t so excited about Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the vow you had to take, one by one, in front of a whole auditorium of R.O.T.C. students from M.I.T., Harvard, Tufts, and Wellesley, that you were not now nor had you ever been a homosexual. I, embryo, stem cell, brain stem, couldn’t look straight. I couldn’t think straight. I was a wreck. I don’t remember much, but I do remember watching Tracy play her guitar on the roof of the library. She was unbelievably beautiful and handsome and cool, Crafts House cool, an anthropology major, an ethnomusicologist, and I’d have been too intimidated even to try to look her in the eye. I barely looked anyone in the eye, except my commanding officer, and that was because you had to. I was a math major, I was a biology major, I was an English major, I was . . . minor. Best stored in a petri dish, an incubator. I went to talk to my creative-writing professor and found myself unable to speak, able only to weep, wordlessly.
Eventually, I quit R.O.T.C., but then I had to work ten thousand hours a day to pay for school, or else I’d have had to drop out. Maybe secretly I had always wanted to be more of a Crafts House kid? I took a photography class and rode a bike I’d painted with polka dots all over Somerville and Medford, taking pictures of religious statuary—Mary in the half shell behind a chain-link fence—as if I were amused and detached, when, really, I missed Mass, holy water, the grace of God, confession, absolution. I borrowed a shoulder-mounted video camera from the library and walked around campus asking people, “Are you a feminist?” In an internship at a cable-access TV station, I made a dreadful documentary about battered women. I had spiky hair and spectacles, and I wore a giant men’s woollen overcoat that I’d got at a thrift place called Dollar-A-Pound, which is how much the stuff there cost—you picked ratty clothes up off piles on the floor and put them on an industrial scale—and I played field hockey, left wing, and was, very briefly, a sports reporter for the Daily, though I seem to have also once written about U.S. foreign policy, to which I strenuously if vaguely objected, for the Tufts Observer. I wished I were edgy but knew I had no edges at all, like an amoeba, a protozoan. I was a blur.
I’m pretty sure the first time I heard Tracy play was on campus in November, 1984, but I didn’t go out to see live music much. I was either drilling or at field-hockey practice or at work or in the library or, if all else failed, in my dorm room, knitting and listening to bootleg cassettes of Joan Armatrading and Jane Siberry and Kate Bush on a shitty boom box my mother won at bingo. Mainly, homesick, I was trying to ignore my assigned roommate, who was very rich and very bulimic; she ate all day, and all night rode a stationary bike that took up all the floor space and sounded like a bird with a broken wing attempting liftoff—ffftt, ffftt, ffftt, ffftt.
In 1985, house lore has it, Tracy found the place in Davis Square—Davis Square being the Paris of the eighties, people liked to say—between Tufts and Harvard but about a mile away from each, and therefore cheap. R. told me that Tracy rented it sight half seen; she hadn’t been able to go inside, so she’d had to stand on a milk crate to look in a window. Tracy, L., R., and three friends moved in. R. said they wanted to start their own crafts house—an artsy coöperative—and that Tracy had the idea that they should build a six-sided table, each making a sixth of it, like a pie slice, like a potluck. R. was in a band called Planned Obsolescence. Tracy listened to Robert Johnson. For Halloween, they’d hold a raucous party, part masked ball, part avant-garde performance art. A. dressed up as an Englishman named Nigel and talked with a Cockney accent (she ended up becoming a fashion designer). Out in the back yard, they hoisted a globe that was meant to sway in the wind but mostly just dangled there, a world not turning.
The Daily ran a profile, “Tufts Junior Sings Her Way to Fame.” “Oh, God, it was crazy. I was hanging out with a friend of mine, and almost everybody else in the house we lived in had gone home for Thanksgiving,” Tracy once said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “We didn’t have anything to do, and we didn’t have any money. I was playing my guitar, and she said, ‘Why not go in the square and play?’ ” That night, during Thanksgiving break, was the first time she busked on the streets of Harvard Square. When everyone else in the house was gone for the holiday. That house, her house, the house. My house?
Afterward—after “Tracy Chapman,” her début album, came out in 1988 and reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts and all but swept the Grammys the next year—everyone who had been at Tufts when Tracy was there said they knew Tracy or had known Tracy or had at least once talked with Tracy. Not me.
Brian Koppelman knew her. He was a year behind me and he was a leader of the Tufts student divestment movement, and someone told him he should get her to play at an anti-apartheid rally, and he went to see her perform at Cappuccino’s, the coffeehouse in the student union, and left in tears. At the rally, she sang “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.” And it sounds like a whisper. The way I remember it, people all but fainted. Simon & Garfunkel in Central Park singing “Homeward Bound” had nothing on Tracy Chapman at that rally. Brian’s father was a music executive; he helped get Tracy a record deal. She moved out of the house. It was as if a giant bird high up in the sky, some kind of wayward stork, swooped down, landed on the asphalt roof, pecked a hole in it, tipped its broad school-bus-yellow bill down into her room, plucked her up, and flapped away.
I graduated, answered a housemate-wanted ad in the paper, and went for an interview that ended with my being asked to clean the kitchen, a trial run. As a kid, I’d gotten a fake work permit to take a job as a chambermaid at a trashy motel where truckers stopped to meet prostitutes. I knew how to clean.
At the house, I got the smallest room, a nook on the third floor, like Anne of Green Gables, and there I hunkered, under the eaves, on a mattress I’d found on the street, reading William Faulkner and bell hooks by the light of a lamp I’d found in a dumpster outside a Harvard dorm. Home. I don’t remember who the landlords were, and I never met them, and they never came by, so we did whatever work on the house that it needed or, to be fair, didn’t need. Someone pasted a paper moonscape on a wall of the dining room, or maybe it was a view of the Earth from the moon, blue marble, and in the living room N., who became a pediatrician, painted a mural, and I can almost picture it—the sea? a field?—but in the end I can’t. E. and I once painted the kitchen walls rose, and E. slopped paint all over the windowpanes, and D. said that was because he came from money and didn’t know how to do things like paint a window, but I loved it anyway, and I loved E., and after that whatever light came into our kitchen had a beatific pink tint, like a winter sunset. I learned how to cane chairs and fixed all the broken ones. I stitched a tablecloth out of old jeans. D., a structural engineer, could teach anyone how to do and make and fix things, anything; she even had her own loom. Someone was always plucking at a guitar. Maybe there was a banjo? We baked bread and dried herbs and cooked stews and brewed beer and held cantankerous house meetings and wondered about Reagan and the fate of the nation and the world. The Cold War was ending, apartheid was collapsing, the global war on terror hadn’t yet begun—an American interregnum. Were we talking about a revolution? Don’t ya know you better run, run, run, run, run? ’Cause finally the tables are starting to turn. Make art, not bombs. Make love, not war. Make art, make love, make art. And it sounds like a whisper. Unfortunately, the tables did not turn.
There were phone cords everywhere, stapled up and down doorframes and duct-taped to baseboards along the hallways. There was only one phone number, but all of us wanted an extension in our rooms. S. had a modem; no one else really knew what that thing was for except tying up the line. R. got a tape recorder and named it Posterity, and when people were sitting around, just blathering, musing, jamming, he would say, “Let’s record this for Posterity.”
I have one photograph of myself from those years, a self-portrait, my camera perched on a tripod in front of a mirror. I’m wearing Tufts athletic-department sweats and, inexplicably, a bowler hat. Hanging on the wall behind me is a quilt I’d made, featuring, ironically or maybe not ironically, Bert and Ernie reading books on a couch. In the foreground, taped to the mirror, is a copy of Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Layers.” I have walked through many lives, / some of them my own, / and I am not who I was, / though some principle of being / abides, from which I struggle / not to stray. My anthem. Autobiography of a blur.
Mostly we ate beans and rice and tofu, and the food was horrible, honestly, but it cost hardly anything, and, as for drugs, there must have been a lot of pot and mushrooms, but I, abstemious and naïve, would not have noticed. Anything that got infested with grain flies D. boiled and fed to Takisha, the dog. I lived there for two years while I worked as a secretary at Harvard, perfecting the art of finding excuses to go to Widener Library. Nights, I had a job at a bookstore in Davis Square, until I got fired because the manager thought I was stealing from the cash register. (The real thief was the assistant manager, but I figured he must’ve really needed the money.) E. worked at the Somerville Theatre and got us in for free. We watched a lot of movies from the balcony. Every movie. Mostly, I tried to write a novel, outlining plots in the bathroom book. A. says a lot of the stuff in that book, when she lived there, was dumb or nasty—dirty pictures, feeble attempts to be shocking. “We were trying so hard not to be normal,” she said, a little wearily, a little wistfully. Some of us did not have to try very hard.
No house can contain the messiness of those years of yearning and wanting, wanting, wanting, and I hated it and I loved it and mostly I loved it even if no small number of the constantly changing housemates drove me up a wall. P., who was older than everyone else and had the biggest room, on the second floor, just past the bathroom, practiced primal-scream therapy, meaning he was always in his room with the door shut just yowling. One woman was reading “The Courage to Heal” and had decided she’d recovered memories of sexual abuse that were somehow, mysteriously, associated with washing dishes, which meant that she skived off all kitchen chores. K., who had been horribly burned at the age of two, worked as a nurse at the Shriners burn hospital and had the biggest heart and most unfathomably bottomless gentleness of anyone I have ever known, excepting my mother, and for a long time she debated whether to order a pair of glue-on prosthetic ears, because she was very self-conscious about having no ears, and P. was lovely with her about that, so sweet, and we all forgave him for screaming all the time.
“We all thought we could do anything then,” A. says now. She moved into R.’s old room when he moved into Tracy’s old room. He left behind a drawing of a vagina. A. was not amused. You could sleep with anyone; no one needed to be in any closet. I slept with a Yale guy one block over who, with his five Yale roommates, sold semen to a sperm bank, and they pooled the profits to buy an espresso maker for six hundred dollars. “They pooled their semen?” D. asked, incredulous. “Well,” I said. “Not really. But, yeah.” No one in the house ever forgave me for that guy. Our house, we had values, principles, the “Moosewood Cookbook.” Plus a cat, fighting weight.
There were, inevitably, abortions and miscarriages and broken hearts, blood on the floor, our very guts unravelling all over the place, twining around the balusters and bannisters. I slept with only one person who lived in our house, and not until after I moved out: house rules. Group living is not for everyone, but in those years it was for me. D. taught me how to knit socks and can tomatoes. E. took me to New York. The people came and went, as if that house were a train station, a way station, or not half a house but a halfway house. One woman left for an ashram. E. went to medical school. Another guy went off to study whale song. J. graduated from law school, changed his name, and dedicated himself to abolishing male circumcision. Someone whose name nobody remembers went off to the Peace Corps in Timor. D. went on a bike trip in Europe. In Utrecht, she walked down a street lined with posters for Tracy’s first album; later, on another bike trip, in Germany, she fell in love and never came back.
The point at which stem cells begin to differentiate—to become the kinds of cells they’re going to be—is called stem-cell fate determination. In my experience, it feels like hell. When my GRE scores came in the mail, I opened them at the kitchen table, and J., cooking dinner, looked over my shoulder. “Eight hundreds?” he said. “Yeah, probably apply to graduate school, dude.” No stork was coming for me. I gave up on being a writer.
Once, years later, S. and R. went back to visit Donna, next door. Misha had died. She missed him madly.
“He looked right through you,” Donna said. “He knew what was going on.”
“His color was very pretty,” Donna’s cousin Dottie said. “It was like a bluish gray.”
“Russian blue,” S. said.
“He was the toughest cat on the street,” Donna said. But elegant.
“You could put a bow tie on that cat,” Dottie said. Or a bowler hat?
Donna told S. that she kept Misha’s ashes in an urn on the mantel. Posterity, remains, traces. S. leaned in and kissed her cheek.
Tracy would sometimes stop by the house. D. said once they sat together in the living room and talked about weaving, warp and weft. I wish I’d been there. I’d already left. ♦
.png)
