The Memory Palace (8 page)

I don’t know how it ends, this scene—the beginning of knowledge, the knowledge that I have a secret I must keep from the outside world. In this scene, my mother is forever spinning, wielding a knife. My sweet beautiful mother merges with Medusa—they meld into one another, pull apart, and come together again, morphing into other restless creatures—characters from TV shows, mythological monsters, demons from my dreams. She is forever spinning and I am forever watching her with my one good eye—a small child frozen behind a wall, both of us surrounded by so many beautiful books.

Dreamless Nights

Sign of Mars, Dreamless nights. Sunshine, continued cool. Go ahead, browse those voice personals and find that special someone. It’s only $1.89 per minute. Tomorrow scattered showers in morning, cloudy the rest of the day. Things I intend to do in the not too distant future—study Braille, leave Chicago, read poetry, continue vocabulary study, talk to a dentist, wear a wig. I would be glad to “let my smile be my umbrella on a rainy day” but to date have not found a dentist with a realistic price. I need new scarves and paint. Should I or should I not enter Goldblatt’s? They sold me bad paint a year ago. When I lived in Cleveland, a young woman told me that Baldwin Wallace College was doing experiments with rats. At times, I have an idea there is life from outer space and with free condoms advertised in the
New City
paper, some of them might be inside, adopting “human” form. I have no affection for this city. Must think of something neutral to control rage. Birth flower, May, lily of the valley, stemless convallariaceous herb, Convallaria majalis, with a raceme of drooping, bell-shaped fragrant white flowers. Think of something cheerful: a sweet pea. Draw a picture of it.

O fall, fall from that burning sky, white blossoms,
Come down! You insult our Gods, pale phantoms.
Holier is the saint who has known the abyss.

Gérard de Nerval, from the “Chimeras”

I still paint a picture of it every year: Passiflora, the passionflower. In Latin,
passio
is “suffering,”
flos
means “flower” and the verb “to wander.”
Passiflora:
flower of martyrs and paradise lost. Some say it can cure insomnia, melancholy, even madness. After the tragedies of 9/11, I painted one with crimson petals and sent it to my mother, who had been sleeping in baggage claim at the Cleveland airport before they kicked all the homeless people out. She wrote back:
Thank you for the package containing hosiery, warm gloves and the red flower. A ray of sunshine on a storm-ridden day.

My mother made lists of plants and their medicinal properties in the journals we found at U-Haul. She stopped to draw plants on her walks and kept copious notes on how to make botanical tinctures for when she finally returned home. In her letters, she told me that if she discovered the right remedy, she could cure herself of hair loss, age spots, and the memory lapses she attributed to radioactive gas. She was particularly fond of the roses in the garden behind the house on West 148th Street, and in her diaries, she lamented her loss of the pink azaleas on the front lawn.
My greatest regret,
she said in one of her last letters to
me,
was that I never learned how to put something in the ground. Maybe when we all move back to Grandma’s house, you can teach me.

Two months before I got the call from the hospital, my mother wrote from the women’s shelter:
Most plants spend their lives rooted in one place and produce seeds to make new ones. Plant cells have tough, thick walls made of cellulose and contain a special substance called chlorophyll. Almost all plants belong to a group. Rachel has a birthday tomorrow. Where is the birthday girl? Where has everyone gone?

In my palace, I leave Medusa and my mother behind and pass through a pillared hall of shadows. I enter another room. The ceiling is high and arched like the nave of a small church; the walls are a pale and lustrous gold. On the wall, a passionflower, glowing like an icon. The colors are shades of crimson, ocher, a deep Prussian blue. If you saw the flower from a distance, you might think it a portrait of a saint.

Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist and grandfather of order and taxonomy, once invented a flower clock. He discovered, after careful observation, certain flowers opened and closed at specific times throughout the day. As a child, I search for sleeping flowers in my grandfather’s garden. I know when they wake up each morning. My favorite looks like a tiny rose, its leaves juicy and small, its petals flashy neon pink:
Portulaca grandiflora
, the little moss rose. It closes when it’s cloudy and goes to sleep at night.

I know when all the flowers go to bed, when the neighbors take their naps. When people are sick or sad I paint flowers for them. I make pictures for Mrs. Budd, the lady down the street, who drinks when her husband is away. I leave the pictures taped to her door when I know she is sleeping. I make pictures for my friend Patty’s parents, Ruth and Army Armstrong, who live across the street from my grandparents and hide my sister and me when our grandfather is mean and drunk. When my mother is asleep, I place pictures by her bed so when she wakes up she’ll find them. Maybe if I make enough pictures, pick enough flowers, she will stop talking to people who aren’t there.

After Medusa arrived on Triskett Road she never left for good. I quickly grasped the order of things. If I heard strange sounds in the living room I never went in there, for who knew what I might find? I told no one about the invisible guests who came late at night uninvited or the ghosts who whispered to her through the walls. On days of agitated pacing and our mother’s fierce conversations with herself, my sister and I stayed out of her way. We’d run to the back of our building, to the parking lot and small yard with the chain-link fence and rusty swing set, the overflowing trash cans, the lone pine. In the weeks leading up to these episodes, our mother would be nearly catatonic; she’d sit on the couch enveloped in blue tendrils of smoke, dismissing my sister and me with a wave of her cigarette if we said we were hungry. In our cupboard, these were our staples: pimiento-stuffed olives, moldy jars of cocktail sauce, TV dinners, stale melba toast.

“Grandma can feed you,” she’d say. “Or go to a friend’s.”

Rachel would grab my hand and pull me out to the street, careful to look both ways. She kept an eye out for mean dogs and boys, and hurried me across Triskett Road. We walked the three blocks to our grandparents’ house for the food that we knew would be there—corned beef on rye and
kashkaval
, the hard salty cheese from the West Side Market, honey-sweet halvah, warm pita with tomatoes and feta, peaches and pears from the yard.

After stuffing ourselves, we’d slip out the back barefoot and run as fast as we could to the field and woods behind the house. On summer days there was always the scent of rose and honeysuckle in the air. We came and went as we pleased as long as our grandfather wasn’t raging at one of us for misplacing the butter dish, a pencil, or a spoon. “Hillbillies,” kids called us, but I thought of us like sisters of Mowgli from
The Jungle Book
. If things got worse, Rachel and I could always live in a wolf den in the middle of the woods.

Sometimes we spent the night at our grandparents’. Rachel and I slept upstairs in our grandmother’s room in two twin beds side by side. We covered ourselves with thin scratchy blankets while Grandma curled up on
the love seat in the guest room. Our grandfather slept alone in the master bedroom, in his four-post king-sized bed. No one was to enter uninvited or they’d get the belt. “Good night,” I’d say to him from the doorway, the sinister red rooster lamp glaring at me from his nightstand. “Good night, girlie,” Grandpa would say from his bed, cigarette dangling from his lips, the air around him thick with smoke.

At breakfast, I’d tilt my head back so Grandpa could spoon orange-blossom honey into my mouth with his callused meaty hands. When I had a cold, he placed a string of garlic around my neck. Garlic and honey could cure anything; so could the raw eggs he tossed back in the morning with whiskey, or the yogurt he made in a vat, warm cultures growing beneath his brown leather coat. My grandfather told me what I should eat from his garden to make me strong and healthy—parsley for “the halitosis,” plums for “the constipation,” mint and apples to keep the doctors away.

Outside the house there was always something stirring in the deep ripe earth—green shoots poking up, rows of tomatoes and green beans, clusters of flowers and herbs. At our grandparents’ there were three yards: the front lawn, tidy for show, with a silver ball on a white plaster pedestal; the middle one, with rose beds, dogwood and plum trees, and the birdbath Grandpa always forgot to fill; and the backyard, where the garden was, a shady magnolia, fruit trees, and a lush carpet of grass. The backyard was connected to the Bentes’ and the Budds’; Rachel and I reigned over all three. Beyond the wall of trees that lined the yards was where the owls and the deer hid. At night I’d think about the quiet deer, and imagined wolves living in warm dark caves, waiting for my sister and me to come.

In the summer of 1965 I am six and Rachel is seven. Our mother sleeps all day and wakes right before dinner. She paces in the apartment or outside, where everyone can see her muttering under her breath. Will she have to go to the hospital? Who will call? Our grandma is ashamed to call but she’s the only one who does. Grandma says, “What will the neighbors say now?” as the ambulance screeches into the driveway on Triskett Road and muscular strangers come bounding up the stairs. Where does she go? When our
mother returns weeks later, she walks like a drifting boat. She says that the Nazis hooked her head up to machines at the hospital; they set her brain on fire.

“That mother of yours better straighten up her act,” our grandmother tells us. And every few weeks, our mother seems to snap out of it. She dresses up, applies for a temp job as a medical secretary or stenographer, and for a few days or a week or two she is a working mom. “What a waste of those hands,” our grandmother says. “She should be playing Severence Hall.”