The Memory Closet: A Novel (12 page)

But I didn’t think one of the maggots would be my mother!

Nothing could have prepared me for the revelation that Mama wasn’t who I thought she was! I never dreamed I’d see such sordid tawdriness in the demure woman who never raised her voice, never said an unkind word, the gentle woman who conducted her affairs with quiet dignity, and who would have laid down her life for Joel and me. How could I reconcile that woman with a … a sloppy, pathetic …
white-trash drunk
?

Suddenly, I was crying, great, heaving sobs that wracked my body like seizures. I cried until my sides and chest ached, and I could barely catch my breath. I cried harder than I cried when my mother died. This pain was jagged, serrated; it sliced open my soul.

For the first time, I felt a kinship, a bond with the little girl with blonde braids. I reached out to her somehow and we connected. And then I did what she wanted so badly to do with Windy in her arms and angry voices drifting up to her from the room below: I curled up in a ball in my bed and cried myself to sleep.

The next morning, I went downstairs in my nightgown and found Bobo at the kitchen table, just sitting, waiting for me before she started on her bowl of Rice Krispies.

“You look rode hard and put up wet. You up all night trying to put that furniture together? I seen them bookshelves you—”

“Bobo, I want to know about Mama’s drinking.”

She looked like I’d slapped her. The color drained out of her face. She said nothing, just let out her breath in a long sigh. She suddenly seemed smaller, older, more bent.

“What do you mean your Mama’s drinking?” She launched it out there, but it was a bluff and we both knew it.

“I remembered it last night.” I sank down into the chair across the table from her. “I remembered her fighting with Jericho. He hit her!” Bobo flinched. My voice started to break but I pushed on. “They were yelling and throwing things, breaking things.” I buried my face in my hands and choked out the rest through tears. “Windy was in bed with me and we both heard it. We were both scared.”

I lifted my head and looked at Bobo. “Tell me about Mama. The truth, all of it. I want to know. I have a
right
to know.”

“Sugar, you hadn’t ought to a’come here.” Her own eyes filled with tears but she didn’t cry. “Won’t do you no good a’tall to know about all this. You was better off—”

“Better off a freak? Better off taking a razor blade and slicing up my arm just so I could feel
something
instead of the emptiness inside me?” I yanked up my sleeve and showed her the thin white marks marching like railroad ties up the inside of my left arm.

“You cut your own—?”

“Better off sleepwalking and terrorized by nightmares, so timid I jump at my own shadow?” I was crying so hard I could barely get the words out. “You can’t forget your whole childhood and be
normal,
Bobo!”

She got up slowly and hobbled to the counter where a paper towel holder was mounted under the cabinet. She ripped off one, started to turn, then ripped off a second towel and came back to the table. She handed one to me and clasped the other in her knobby, disfigured fingers.

“Susan was a alcoholic.” She sat down in the chair and whispered the rest. “Just like Joel.”

“Joel?”

“Not your brother, Joel. My Joel, my boy. He hit a tree going 70 miles an hour 'cause he was too drunk to keep the car on the road.”

She wadded the paper towel into a tight ball in her hand.

“If your mama ever put a drop of liquor in her mouth before she met Jericho Johnson, I never seen it!” Then she shook her head. “But I s’pose there could have been a lot I didn’t see. Shoot, I didn’t even know she was going out with your daddy 'til she come home one day and said she was knocked up.”

I never saw Bobo’s incoming rounds quick enough to duck. This time, my head may actually have snapped back from the psychic blow because she looked at me questioningly.

“You did know your mama and daddy had to get married, didn’t you?”

“I like to think they
chose
to get married.” I sniffled. I wasn’t crying anymore, but there was a hitch in my breathing, like a little kid after a tantrum. I tried to breathe deep to make it stop, but it hung on like the hiccups. “As soon as I was old enough to do the math on the wedding date and my birthday, I figured it out.”

“Susan wasn’t what you’d call wild, just headstrong. She was only 18, but she up and decided she was going to get married and move to Kentucky, and you couldn’t have changed her mind for love nor money. Wasn’t nobody in the world any better with horses than Simon, and he’d got his self a job taking care of thoroughbreds.”

She made a
humph
sound in her throat.

“Cecil liked to a’swallowed a goat when she told him.”

I knew that, too. Mama hadn’t put it quite as colorfully as Bobo, but she told me once her father had been less than thrilled.

“That’s when Cecil changed the trust, said he wasn’t goin’ to give Susan her inheritance when she turned 21 like he done the boys. She needed to grow up some. If she didn’t have no more sense than that, she could just wait ‘til she was 30.”

Bobo unconsciously wadded up the paper towel, then unwadded it as she spoke.

“I s’pose she might a’been drinking all along. But she went to school when you was a little bitty thing and become a secretary, and she took care of herself and you just fine after your daddy left. And I never seen no sign of her drinkin’ when she first moved back to Goshen after Joel was kilt.”

Bobo’s voice changed.

“Then she met Jericho and her whole life went to hell in a handbasket.”

A dozen questions buzzed around in my head, angry hornets shaken up in a Mason jar. But I kept silent. I didn’t squeeze the soap.

“She hadn’t ought to a’married Jericho. I tried to tell her but she wouldn’t listen to a meddlin’ old woman.” She reached into her mouth and removed the lower plate of her dentures but left the top plate in place. Only her lower lip caved into her face, but I was used to it by then and I hardly noticed.

“He wasn’t no good.” She took my hand in her gnarled fingers and squeezed, and her husky voice had a sharp steel edge. “Jericho was a bad man, Anne. Not just selfish bad or crude or plain ornery. He was
evil
.”

She released my hand and massaged her gums absentmindedly.

“Susan couldn’t see it, though. She was lonely and Jericho was good looking and he paid her lots of attention, made her feel pretty and wanted again.” She sighed. “Soon as she married him, it was like she become a drunk overnight. Him being a bartender, he could hold his liquor, and he knowed how to make them sweet drinks, daiquiris and such, that tasted like sody pop. Ever' now and again I’d see him set out a drink for her on the bedside table before he went to work at night—so she could have it soon as she opened up her eyes the next morning!”

“I remembered hearing them through the pipes, yelling at each other. Jericho was hateful and mean … “ I stopped and struggled to get the words out. “But Bobo, Mama sounded just as bad! She was so drunk, she couldn’t even stand up. I heard her falling into things; she pitched a music box through the window and screamed at Jericho like a—”

“Don’t you sit there and judge your mama!” Bobo’s tone slapped me hard in the face. “You wasn’t there. You don’t know. You ain’t never been married. You ain’t never loved a man and give him your whole self like she done Jericho, and then he throws it all back in your face. Anne, a man can drag a woman down, turn her into something she never was. That, and booze, it can … change you.”

“But Bobo, why—?”

“I’m done. I ain’t talking 'bout this no more.” She didn’t bark at me though, just said it quiet, sad. “I loved my Susie.” Her voice cracked. “She was all I had left.”

She wasn’t crying, but tears streamed down her wrinkled face and she made no effort to wipe them away with the paper towel crumpled in a ball in her hand.

“The rest was gone, all of them gone. And that man was destroyin’ her.”

She stood up, put her hands on the table and leaned toward me.

“But what could
I
do?” Her eyes were pleading. “Who was I gonna tell about it, about what was going on in this house? Who could I go to for help, an old woman nobody’d believe?”

She straightened up and buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders began to shake. I went to her, put my arms around her and pulled her close. She felt so fragile, her bones like the thin sticks in a baby bird’s wings. The tears on my wet face dripped down off my chin into her wispy white hair.

“I’m sorry, Bobo. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to watch your only daughter ruin her life.”

“Not just her life. Joel’s, too.”

“Joel’s?”

She pulled out of my arms and stepped back so she could look up at me.

“That’s what wrong with him.” She saw the shock on my face and her gaze softened in sympathy. “I guess you didn’t know that, did you, Missy?”

She reached out and patted my arm, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Some big structure inside me collapsed like a skyscraper imploding, and the roar rumbled with the tinnitus in my ears so loud Bobo’s words barely made it through.

“We didn’t know at the time, of course, but later. We found out later. Her drinkin’ when she was pregnant with him done something. Messed up something. That’s why he’s slow like he is.”

Joel! My precious Joel. He’s a Fetal Alcohol Syndrome child.

“After Susie got sober at AA, she spent the rest of her life trying to make up for the mistakes she made when she was married to Jericho.” She shook her head, eased back down into the chair and added softly, “
All
the mistakes she made.”

But I barely heard her. I wasn’t listening to Bobo. I was listening to my mother.

“I swear before God I didn’t intend to … but I’m going to burn in hell for it just the same.”

Is that what Mama meant? Was she talking about Joel?

The doorbell sang its ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong-ding chorus. Julia called out her presence from the parlor and waddled into the kitchen where Bobo was seated at the table and I was standing beside her. She could see we both were upset and turned to leave us alone.

“I weel get the dirty clothes now, sí?”

Bobo suddenly pushed her chair back and stood up. When she looked at Julia, her face was an empty room, blank and vacant.

“What’d you put this in my pocket for?” She reached into the folds of her apron, the one she kept hanging on a hook by the back door under her prairie settler bonnet, and pulled a can of WD-40 from the pocket. “I ain’t got no use for this stuff.”

She held it out and Julia took it without comment, just shot me a glance Bobo didn’t see.

“And you leave my room alone when you’re cleanin’. Don’t you touch nothing, hear? I got everything ready to put in my suitcase.” She turned to me. “Just so you know, I’m goin’ home the end of the week.”

I
 ran as hard as I could go through the neighborhood of my missing childhood. Full out until I couldn’t run another step. When I finally staggered to a stop, I leaned over, gasping. I put my hands on my knees and dry-heaved. I’d had no breakfast and there was nothing in my stomach but bitter, yellow bile that scalded the back of my throat.

Gradually, the heaving stopped, my breathing returned to normal and I jogged away from the stink of my vomit down the street to the tall, white, scary-looking structure I used to think looked like a haunted house out of a movie. Now, I knew it really was full of ghosts.

I showered, then dressed in Anne’s Official Uniform—a T-shirt, jeans and moccasins without socks. When I turned on my blow dryer, it tripped a breaker and the electricity in the bedroom and bathroom blinked off, so I went outside and sat in Bobo’s porch swing to let the warm morning breeze dry my hair.

Back and forth, back and forth.

Wreek-wreek. Wreek-wreek.

The grating sound felt soothing somehow. White noise.

In the past 24 hours I’d experienced freeze-dried life. Just add water and stir and a whole world is served up for you that wasn’t there a few minutes before.

My mother was a drunk. An alcoholic.

No!

I wanted to argue that it wasn’t true, but, of course, it was. I
remembered
it. And it explained so many minor mysteries in my life.

Those men and women at her funeral, the scraggly, worn-out, beat-up looking people. I couldn’t imagine where my mother could possibly have met people like that when she worked for a stock broker. Now I knew. She’d met them at Alcoholics Anonymous.

When we first moved to Louisville, Mama had taken a ceramics class that met for an hour three times a week. I always wondered why I never saw the first piece of pottery from that class, not so much as an ashtray.

Mama wasn’t making coffee mugs; she was going to AA!

The more I thought about life with Mama, the more I could see that this was the missing piece that made the rest of the puzzle fit together tight and snug.

She hovered over Joel, overprotected him, sacrificed for him like a religious zealot because she knew what her drinking had done to him. Guilt was the canvas on which every one of her days was painted.

And now—finally—I understood why Mama never did anything about what was undeniably an industrial strength case of post-traumatic stress syndrome in me. She was glad I’d forgotten my childhood because I’d forgotten her secret along with it. That’s why she taught me to fear and distrust psychiatrists—so I’d never seek professional help to remember.

It all made sense now.

Sense. Intellectual sense. Rational, reasonable, Aristotelian logic sense. But on a gut level it made no sense at all. My mother was a lady, not some boozed-up floozy. The woman I knew was as different from that screaming drunk as
… as I am from the little girl in braids who picked up a tarantula.

Julia opened the front door and stepped out on the porch. “I thought I heard the swing squeak.”

“Needs some WD-40.”

She grinned. “The phone’s for you.”

As I walked in with Julia, I told her about the power outage in my bedroom, and she waddled off to reset the switch in the breaker box, hidden behind a picture somewhere in the house.

The caller was Dusty.

“I’ve heard from my psychologist friend about those pictures.”

“Did they tell her anything?”

“Told her a lot.”

“What?”

“Have dinner with me tonight?”

“Huh?”

“Have dinner with me and we can talk about what Karen said.”

I was too thunderstruck to speak. When he heard nothing but silence, he started to laugh.

“My intentions are honorable. I’m not inviting you to go snipe hunting or cow tipping or back to my place to see my etchings.”

Don’t do it. Make up an excuse. You’re sick. You’re tired. Your left leg just fell off. Something! Say no.

“Yes, I’d like that. Having dinner, I mean.”

“You do Mexican?”

“I don’t know—”

“Because it’s either Mexican or the steak house. Or we drive to Amarillo or Lubbock. And it’s OK, I don’t mind driving if that’s what you want to do.”

“No, no, Mexican is fine.”

“What time’s good for you?”

“Maybe half seven.”

“Half seven? What’s that, three-thirty twice?”

“I’m sorry, I mean seven-thirty. The British, that’s how they … well, they put things differently.”

“Half seven it is.”

When I answered the ding-dong song that evening, I was expecting the sheriff. He didn’t show up; Dusty came in his place. He was out of uniform, wearing a Western-cut shirt, jeans and boots, and he held a well-used, gray Stetson in his hands.

Over the course of the afternoon, I’d tried on every garment I’d brought with me to Texas, while a stupid robot yelled, “Danger! Danger! Danger!” in my head. I greeted Dusty wearing a pale blue hand-knit sweater from Harrod’s Department Store over dark slacks, with earrings and a matching necklace from Ireland—Celtic crosses.

And it was instantly obvious that I was overdressed. I prayed fervently that lightning would strike me dead where I stood.

“I like your hair down,” he said.

I’d pulled the hair around my face back into two small braids clipped together behind my head. The rest hung free down my back.

“Of course, you’d look more normal to me if all of it were in braids. That sweater from England? It’s a beautiful color.”

He opened my car door and kept the conversation going on our way to the restaurant with minimal input from me. He drove to a hole-in-the-wall place on one of the few side streets off Main Street in Goshen, and was greeted—in Spanish—by the manager and the servers like he was family.

The restaurant had more charm than I was expecting, nestled as it was between the State Farm Insurance Agency and the Hair Affair Beauty Parlor. The small room was festive, red walls and yellow tablecloths, each with a cactus centerpiece and napkins of blue and red neckerchiefs. Piñatas hung suspended from the ceiling and huge, colorful sombreros and painted sets of maracas adorned the walls. The waitresses were dressed in full, layered skirts like flamenco dancers; the manager wore a poncho.

When the waitress came to our table to hand us menus, I tensed. I hadn’t a clue what to order. But Dusty had already thought of that and waved her off.

“My friend doesn’t eat a lot of Mexican food,” he said, “so just bring us the sampler platter. We’ll share.”

She headed to the kitchen, and Dusty turned his attention to me.

“OK, so tell me about England.”

I hated it when people said that. How can you condense a country and a culture into a couple of pithy sentences? I was always tempted to respond in a one-breath stream, like Harold Hill’s
Trouble in River City.

Well, you got rain, my friends, right here, I say rain right here in all of England—you got Stonehenge-Shakespeare-Big Ben-Robin Hood-Windsor Castle-Mary Poppins-London Bridge-John-Paul-George-Ringo—and rain, rain, rain, rain, rain.

“It’s kind of damp,” I said.

“How did a little girl from Goshen, Texas, wind up in London?”

“Oxford. I live in Oxford.
Lived
in Oxford.”

“How did you wind up in Oxford then? Your work take you there?”

Where should I start in a description of my work history? Did I tell him about the abysmal failure of my first attempt at employment out of college?

He just sat, waited patiently. No pressure. It occurred to me that he was treating me like I treat Bobo: don’t squeeze the soap. The suspicion that I was being “managed” ought to have offended me. It didn’t. It felt considerate.

“The story starts with the abysmal failure of my first attempt at employment out of college. Are you ready for this? I minored in art, but I majored in elementary education.”

His smile broadened. The statue can join more than one or two words together in a sentence after all. Well done.

“And that was a bad choice because … ?”

“How could I possibly expect to teach a classroom full of children when I never was one? I had no childhood, remember?”

“None at all. You don’t remember anything at all?”

I studied the hem of the red neckerchief that served as my napkin.

“I didn’t tell you and Amy the whole story. The truth is, I don’t just have a few holes in my memory. I’ve forgotten everything.”

“How much everything? A little of everything? A lot of everything. Most of everything?” He wasn’t exactly making light of my plight, but he wasn’t taking it in somber, death-knell terms either.

“All
of everything.”

I struggled for an analogy that would help him understand.

“It’s like a house that’s just under roof. There are outside walls, but when you go inside there’s nothing but the concrete floor and a wooden framework where rooms are going to be—and you can see all the way through from one end to the other. I know the bare framework, what happened, the people who were there in my childhood because I’ve been told about it. But I don’t actually remember it. My memories start when I was 11 years old.”

“You were 11 when you were in the car wreck.”

“That’s the first memory. Kneeling in the dirt on the roadside with the burning car in the gulley.”

How did we get here? I don’t want to talk about the worst moment in my life over dinner.

“So, without a childhood, I found it a little difficult to relate to a bunch of seven-year-olds.”

I could tell Dusty wanted to know more about the construction site of my first decade and how it happened. But he didn’t go there.

“You got all the way to a classroom before you found that out?”

“Yep. It was awful. The worst year of my life.” I decided to give not-taking-myself-so-seriously a try. “Well,
maybe
the worst year of my life. How would I know?”

He grinned. “So what did you do then?”

“I became a librarian.”

“A librarian?”

“Books don’t talk back. They don’t stick their tongues out at you, kick you in the shins, Super Glue your desk drawer shut or set fires in your trash can.”

“They
didn’t!”

I shook my head
oh-yes-they-did.

“Sounds like elementary school has changed since you and I were there!” he said. There was a beat, and then we spoke in unison.

“But how would you know?”

“But how would I know?”

The laughter felt like holding cold fingers in front of a fire.

“Connect the dots for me. How did Miriam the Librarian end up in London, I mean in Oxford?”

“It wasn’t
my
idea!” The intensity of my response surprised him; he didn’t realize how absurd that would have been. Anne Mitchell decides to pick up and move to England, leave everything safe and secure behind and strike out on a grand adventure and a new life?

I don’t think so!

“I didn’t ask to go. I was sent there. I didn’t have any choice. Did you know that the Bodleian Library at Oxford University is the third largest library in the world, second only to the British Library in London and the Library of Congress?”

The waitress brought our drinks while I explained how the Louisville Public Library system became Oxford’s “sister library,” like cities become sister cities. How one librarian out of the whole Louisville system was selected to be part of a staff exchange program with the Oxford University library.

“And that one librarian was you.”

“Uh-huh.”
I ripped open the little white sugar packet and poured it into my steaming tea. “Mere words cannot describe how badly
I didn’t want to go!”

He laughed. He tried not to, but the chuckle bubbled out in spite of his efforts to stifle it.

“So they duct-taped you to the mast of a ship, and—”

“It’s not funny!” But of course it was; I just never thought so until now.

I stirred the sugar into my tea and took a small sip. “Ahhhh. Nectar of the gods.”

Then I gave him the ten-cent tour of the Bodleian Library.

“It has 110 miles of shelves and seven million books, and every year they have to add another two miles of shelves.”

Dusty whistled softly. “Where in the world do they put it?”

“In underground tunnels. The library was built in 1320, and the Bodelian guy who funded most of it had two rules: No book could ever leave the library, and there could never be fire of any kind, either for warmth or light, anywhere on the premises. So we’re talking sunlight— which is in short supply in England—to read by, and no heat.” 
I took a sip of my tea. 
“And don’t think you can just waltz in there today and check out a book. They still won’t let a single volume leave the library.”

“Really?”

“A system of conveyor belts delivers books through the tunnels to 29 reading rooms in the various library buildings. Believe me, they know the exact location of every volume, down to the chair where the reader is sitting.

“And there are grates in the sidewalks in Oxford where the air’s vented from the tunnels below, so when you walk over them you can smell the old book smell.”

I thought of the first time I stood on the sidewalk, drinking it in, and I smiled. “I’d forgotten how much I loved that smell. The first time I stood … “

Suddenly, an astonishing realization hit me: I was doing all the talking! I stopped in midsentence and color flooded my cheeks.

“I’m so sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean to, I’ve been monopolizing the conversation … “

“No, no, it’s OK. I wanted to know. It’s fascinating.”

But my systems were shutting down. Doors slammed, bang, bang, bang.

“Don’t stop now. I want to know how Oxford led to Filbert.”

He was doing his best to put me at ease, but I had strayed too far out of my comfort zone and the electric fence around it had given me a nasty shock.

“Tell me about Filbert. Please!”

“I sat beside the art director for Bristlecone Publishing on a flight back to the U.S., and he noticed my drawings of a frog,” I told a lot of story in a few words. “He liked them and offered me a job.”