The Memory Palace (10 page)

“Mommy? Mommy?”

“Leave me alone,” she says. “Let me sleep.”

“Look, look what I found.”

She slowly turns around, the color drained from her face. “What is it?”

I pull the wilted flower from my pocket and place it in her hand. She sighs and lets the petals, now stained red, fall to the floor. “It said ‘hello’ to me,” I say. “The flower said hello.”

When school starts up in September I enter the first grade. One day our teacher, Mrs. Atzberger, announces we are going to have show-and-tell. Mrs. Atzberger is big and loud and not at all like my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Bemis. She tells us to get out the special things we brought from home. Each child clutches a small treasure—a Barbie doll, a stuffed bear, a little red car, a portrait of Jesus, a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. I hold my prize in a brown paper bag. One by one the children talk about their things. When it’s my turn I stand petrified in front of the class, bag in hand. Mrs. Atzberger tells me to show-and-tell what I have brought. I can’t speak. I haven’t brought a toy, a bear, or a blue-eyed Jesus. I have made a grave mistake. “Open it,” the teacher barks. I slowly lift a small dead sparrow, decaying in its nest, and hold it out to show the class.

Mrs. Atzberger’s face contorts in rage. “What is that?” she demands. “Throw it away!”

I want to say to her and the other children that it’s a bird, and that it isn’t dead, it’s only sleeping, and that after I found it beneath a tree I put it on my windowsill by my bed so I could watch it change every day, and that the nest had soft green moss in it and little bits of colored string, and that the bird is magical, and how do they know that I can’t raise something from the dead? Who says I can’t save someone’s life?

My mother is summoned to school to meet with my teacher but she never shows up. The event is forgotten. I’m a good student, quiet and dutiful, and when we have show-and-tell the next time I bring in one of my three toys, Pony, my beautiful plastic horse. My mother gets invitations to PTA meetings and open houses at school but never RSVPs. She is just the signature, sometimes neat, sometimes wobbly, at the bottom of my report cards from school. My mother is the mother no one sees—at least not yet.

Behind the house on West 148th, we each have our favorite things. Grandpa fusses over his tea roses, especially the red ones. He gently plucks Japanese beetles off their leaves each morning and drowns them in a jar of soapy water. He is proud of his fruit trees and has one of each: apple, plum, peach, and pear. Grandpa wears a sleeveless tee and baggy tan pants when he’s working in the garden, his belt loose around his waist. He clenches a cigarette between his teeth as he bends over the bed with his clippers and trowel. I watch and learn. “Dead heads no good,” he says, and shows me how to clip off brown leaves and dying blooms. How to pinch back the parsley, prune a rose’s long thorny stems.

In spring I help Grandpa clean the beds and plant tiny seeds in rows. When shoots start pushing up through the soil, I weed the beds for hours. I am a good girl; Rachel doesn’t like to weed, she is bad. It’s as simple as that. In the summer, Grandpa takes us to pick yellow peppers on a farm somewhere in the hot sun. I like driving out of the city, the way the factories disappear and turn to rolling hills and fields of waving corn. I love the scent of earth when I’m pulling peppers off tough green stems. I stack the peppers in a basket and count them at the end of the day while Grandpa supervises, a can of Budweiser in one hand, cigarette in the other. He is
waiting for my sister to make a mistake. I want him to think she is good. Things would be easier if he did. She planted a sunflower seed in the hard rocky yard out back of our apartment and it grew six feet tall but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that she teaches our new friend Stephanie, and Patty and me how to write poems in the basement at the house on West 148th. She writes one about seasons on a cracked blackboard on the wood-paneled wall: “Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall / These are seasons count them all / One, two, three, four.” We recite the poem together, then write it down. Rachel checks for our mistakes. My grandfather yells down into the basement, “What you girls doing down there? Smarties spoil the party!”

Rachel starts a secret club and we meet each week under the magnolia tree, and even though she’s the only one allowed to be president we don’t care because none of us wants the job. Grandpa calls her a little cunt, bitch, whore, words we don’t know the meaning of yet. But she gives us new words—poems and stories, and a phrase no one else can know except the members of our club: “Red snake over the green grass.”

My sister and I make things in the garden—pictures, stories, garlands of flowers for our hair. We write secret comic books together, a series called
Grumps
. I draw pictures of our grandfather leaning over the table, slurping up food with his hands. I draw him belching, farting, guzzling whiskey and beer, throwing chairs at us with expletives shooting from his mouth. I feel bad about the comics, but they make my sister and grandmother laugh.

Grandma only loves the garden when our grandfather isn’t there. She waters the lawn to get out of the house. She smokes Benson & Hedges beneath the magnolia tree after Grandpa whips her across the face with his belt for looking at him the wrong way. She smokes outside when he’s inside doing shots while rolling out filo dough and making his thick Bulgarian yogurt. She’d love for him to disappear so she could sit among the flowers, quiet and alone, with a tall glass of lemonade, a cigarette, and a slice of pecan pie.

“Hey, did ya watch today? I can’t believe she’d go marry that son-of-a-bitch,” my grandma shouts across the bed of roses to Mrs. Bente. Grandma and Edna Bente love the
soaps—
As the World Turns, General Hospital, Days of Our Lives.

“You don’t know what I have here,” she tells Edna, shaking her head and sucking in smoke.

Mrs. Bente invites my grandma over when Grandpa is on the rampage. She invites me in too, offers me milk and cookies and tells me jokes in her living room beneath the portrait of her dead husband, Al, who used to swing me around by my arms before he died. Mrs. Bente grows neat little rows of marigolds, snapdragons, and petunias. Her door is always open when I need a place to hide.

When my mother comes with us to visit our grandparents for the occasional Sunday dinner, she likes to go to the garden to smoke. Sometimes she walks in circles, taking quick puffs from her cigarette, talking to herself. The sunlight illumines her face; she looks beatific beneath the trees. She wears a sexy dress and high heels in the garden, sometimes a little scarf for color, red lipstick, and a dab of Tabu. Of all the things in the yard, my mother loves the trees most of all. They are giant green umbrellas; she can spread a blanket beneath the old blue spruce, sit and close her eyes, smoke her cigarettes, and rest. The shadow of the tree is soothing; her dark brown curls blend into the bark, making her disappear into the tree. Years later, when she is homeless, she will make charts of trees from all over the world. She’ll send me children’s books about the little animals that live inside them: squirrels, sparrows, chipmunks, and bugs.
Even squirrels have a home to live in
, she wrote me once on a McDonald’s bag from a Greyhound bus station.
Even birds have a place to sleep.

Some Sundays, Grandpa takes me to Saint Theodosius, his green onion-domed church on Starkweather Avenue, not too far from the West Side Market where he buys his kashkaval and freshly butchered lamb. Inside the church, Saint Theodosius is luminous and foreboding in candlelight, walls covered with bloody saints and gold. My mother doesn’t like that my grandfather takes me there. She says the priest would like to murder all the Jews.

My grandma can’t stand Grandpa’s church either, or any other. When she’s not working in the credit office at Acorn
Chemical Company, she shuffles around in pink floppy slippers, hand on hip, cigarette hanging from her pink, pouty lips. She carries a little notepad in the pocket of her housecoat that hangs below her knees. She is two inches shy of five feet and everything she wears looks too long. Grandma writes down phrases by Trotsky, Lenin, and Marx and pulls them out as needed. “Religion is the opiate of the people!” she says, squinting behind Coke-bottle glasses.

At the eastern end of Saint Theodosius is a wall of icons rising up to the ceiling, the iconostasis—the golden wall separating sanctuary from nave. In the center is the “Beautiful Gate” through which only the priest and clergy can pass. People cry in front of the pictures and pray. The wall is a door between this world and the next, between sinners and the Incarnate God, His Mother, the angels, and the saints. In the church, there are deep voices chanting, incense and candles, and glowing things in every dark mysterious corner. What is on the other side of the golden wall? What do the pictures mean? Can a painting save a person’s life?

I’m at our grandparents’, sitting on the couch with my mother, listening to the radio drone on about how many soldiers are dying. I learn the word
amputee
and hobble around, pretending I am wounded in the jungles of Vietnam. Everywhere I go I hear about kids who’ve lost their fathers in the war. It’s on the radio and television, in the
Plain Dealer
and the Life magazine that gets delivered to the house. Is my father there too? My mother listens to the news while I stare at the pictures in
Life
of corpses in mass graves, hippies holding flowers out to soldiers in tanks. I’ve been Aunt Toda’s apprentice for months now and haven’t healed a single man, woman, or child and I’ve yet to see a miracle in the church with the big green dome. I pray in front of the golden wall every time my grandfather and I go, but nothing happens. Everyone I’m supposed to heal is still sick or dead. I’d rather watch
The Monkees
on TV or play Pioneer Days in the backyard with Rachel and Patty than sit beside people suffering from cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and stroke.

It’s hot and my thighs stick to the thick plastic covering Grandma puts on all the furniture for protection. The furniture is old but she keeps the plastic on anyway. “Someday everything will be nice and
new,” she says, “just like in
House Beautiful.”
My mother sits smoking, staring into space. “Catatonic,” the doctors have recently decided. Every time she’s admitted to the hospital, they give her shock treatment and a different diagnosis: Disassociative. Antisocial. Manic-depressive. Delusional. Psychotic. Paranoid schizophrenic. Hysterical. Mad. The kids in the neighborhood call her a drunk.

I take my mother’s hand in mine. Her hands are cold, even in summer. Her latest obsession is the Jewish military leader, Moshe Dayan. She keeps a picture of him by her bed and takes it out from time to time to stare at it; she has conversations with him in her head. He wears a black patch over one eye just like I wore when I was five. I have no idea who he is but I think he’s a Nazi because his smile looks evil. There’s talk of my mother getting shock therapy yet again, of zapping the sick part right out of her head. She sits in silence, her ear tilted to news about massacres, jungles going up in flames. She smokes one cigarette after another. I picture my breath going into her body like a flowing river, a river of light, flowers, and vines.

My grandparents have only one plant in their house, a spindly pathos with heart-shaped leaves that hangs over the kitchen sink from a small brass pot that can barely contain its twenty-year roots. Grandma pours leftover coffee in it sometimes, old tea and juice. When my mother comes over, the place looks like a bar—there are three people smoking eight to nine packs of cigarettes a day between them. How does that plant keep on growing? Sometimes I picture it creeping from its pot, slinking along the floor across the living room to my mother, growing into her mouth, filling her heart and lungs with leaves, wrapping its tendrils around her bones.

“I have to tell you something important,” she says.

“What?”

“Don’t drink milk before going to bed.”

“Why not?”

“Because rats like milk.”

“What?”

“A rat will eat your face off if it smells milk. And Myra?”

“What?”

“You girls are my most precious possessions.”

“I know.”

“Promise me you’ll never leave.”

“I promise,” I say.

Years later, in one of her diaries, she will write:
The same unhappy anxious dream as always: I am still young and have small children. The girls are ahead of me walking too fast. I don’t want them to leave. I try to call out their names but no sound comes from me. I have fear of radiation and cannot talk. The girls disappear. They always disappear in my dreams.

One autumn day, when Toda and I go to Mitchell’s house, everyone is in a hurry. People rush around carrying things; someone wipes his forehead while a nurse hooks him up to a big white machine. Mitchell’s eyes always look vacant but this time he stares right at me, like he finally knows who I am. There’s the smell of incense and beeswax burning, the smell of cloves. Toda mutters prayers over his body, tells me to go away. Mitchell is dying—why should I go away now? People from the church arrive, short ladies in black babushkas who don’t speak English, talking too loudly for the quiet dark room of a sick man. A woman blows her nose into a handkerchief at the foot of the bed.