The Memory Palace (18 page)

Woke up today with strong desire to be “home.” Memory of three figures sitting on the piano bench—two obscured, one a smiling corpse. If I ever have anything close to a normal life, I might feel like killing myself. I have not found my little Atlas since the flood. I think it was stolen. Why? Why the persistent harassment? Wasn’t there something that was going to be done for me? My American College Dictionary was stolen too. I feel toward it as a child feels toward a teddy bear. My reading has been, since the womb, a hodge-podge of letters in a foreign script I have not yet learned. Dream again, this time of Myra who won’t obey me and is trying to run away. There are spectators who leave in cars down a rain-drenched street. The White Goddess says: do not go into that part of the forest but I am always in that part of the forest so what can I do? I wish I had a better biography of myself. Will have better memory when I do more drawings. At our first apartment in Cleveland, the girls made drawings for the walls. I remember sitting there alone, not seeing the pictures even though they were in every room. Memory is tricky. Was I projected into the future? I am feeling distance from the old me. You might say I am wrong but I have evidence: shoes with heels I have not worn in years, my music in storage, this endless, pulsing rain.

Wing back down the round sleep of waters
... tell them it never ends.
Give me peace.

Michael Donaghy, from “Envoi”

In my palace is a chamber that is hard to find; inside, an endless sea. To enter you must possess the vigilance of dolphins, which sleep with half their brain awake. You must be swift as a fish; possess the heart of a determined young girl. I stand at the threshold of the room and see them just below the surface of a dream—a pair of sleek white dolphins, arcing through deep waters. It’s my sister and I, transformed by the hand of some benevolent god, escaping into waves.

There are fleeting pictures in twisted hallways of my palace, improbable stairs, like an Escher print, leading to doors that do not open, rooms too dark to see. This is how the memory of trauma works, how we glimpse forgotten years trapped inside the amygdala, that almond-shaped center of fear in our brain. Years are erased or condensed into hazy snapshots: The three of us moving out of our grandparents’ house into a place called the Stuart House on Triskett Road in 1972. The name resonates with Old English aristocracy, but our two-room basement apartment is really a dump. Barely any furniture:
cheap plaid couch made of foam where my mother will sleep, smoke, and interrogate us, plastic card table to eat upon, dirty yellow shades, low ceilings, dark walk-in kitchen. In the room where my sister and I sleep in our single bed, there’s just room enough to turn around. A torn Degas print pinned to the wall, a child’s cheap plastic turntable, a ficus straining toward the sun. An enigmatic self-portrait I will find years later in my mother’s storage unit. The only view out the window is the bottom half of people walking back and forth, or cats meowing to get in, or dogs depositing their business behind a bush. And then this picture: My mother shooting a gun off behind the building. Birds scatter, squirrels, chipmunks, a neighbor’s dog. Doesn’t anyone hear her? Why don’t they call the police? Another image flashes by: My mother showing up at a football game looking for my sister and me, calling out our names on the PA at halftime:
Myra, Rachel, come home at once!
My sister, on the field, a pom-pom girl in distress, forcing a smile to cheer her team on while sinking deeper into despair, and me slipping into shadows beneath the bleachers, an invisible cat. Then another picture, repeated many times like a Muybridge print: two girls in perpetual motion, heaving a heavy dresser against their bedroom door to keep their mother out. We have been up all night, vigilant, holding down the fort.
Let me in, let me in! I’m your mother! I have a right to know!
our mother cries, pounding on the door, but what is it she really wants to know? That we have been raped? That we have sex with men for money? She questions us over and over again, the same old thing, it doesn’t matter what we say. This could be an interrogation room in some gray cell in East Berlin circa 1955. There is no right answer for someone so ill; there is nothing to make her stop.

The year I turned fifteen my mother bought a gun. I had been sifting through her drawers for something, more disturbing letters to that doctor in California, or some other rambling missives to strangers. I’d look for these things and destroy them, as if by ripping them up or setting them on fire on the top of the stove I could delete them forever from my mother’s brain. I found the gun in her underwear drawer. Or did my sister find it? Did we find it together? We always worked best as a team.

Our mother said she needed the gun for protection. Protection from whom? I asked. Kidnappers, of course. How could I be so naïve? Patty Hearst, the newspaper baron’s daughter, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. They threw her in the trunk of a car. Now they’re holding her at gunpoint until their demands are met. What’s to stop them from coming here?

I demanded that my mother tell me where she got the gun and why. How could anyone sell a woman so obviously ill a loaded weapon? She finally confessed that she needed it to kill my sister’s best friend John.
He’s a Nazi. You can tell by his name. John Heilman. Heil Mann
, my mother said.
See? A man who salutes Hitler. It’s right in front of your eyes.
My mother could break the secret code for just about anything.
We have to arm ourselves against him,
she said.
Against them all. If I don’t protect you girls, who else is going to?

“Have you shot the gun at anything?” I asked, trying to remain calm.

“Just for target practice.”

“What target?” I said. “Where?”

“Outside in back. I shot at a garbage can but missed.”

“You could have killed someone—a child, the neighbors, a dog!”

“I know what’s what,” she said. “You’re so naïve. We’re Jews. There are those who wish us dead.”

My sister became frantic when she found out my mother’s plans. What was to stop her from killing all of her friends? What was to stop her from killing us? We took the revolver away from our mother and gave it to our grandma, who took the gun back to the store. She yelled at the owner for selling a firearm to someone who was mentally ill. He gave back our mother’s money and apologized. “Sorry isn’t good enough,” my grandma told him, always more forthright outside the confines of home. “My daughter is a sick person. Anyone can see that. She was going to kill a boy! Who knows what could have happened? You should be ashamed.”

After the gun, my mother is hospitalized once again, although she isn’t kept in as long as usual. She returns from her two- or three-week incarcerations trembling, inarticulate, and drugged. Which is worse? To lock her up in a
place where she is left to sit all day in pajamas, or for us to be locked up in our basement hell, the phone torn from the wall, our mother trying to break into our bedroom late into the night?

When we are forced to commit her, each stay in the psych ward at CPI—Cleveland Psychiatric Institute—seems to be shorter than the last. This is 1974, and for the last ten years, asylums have been releasing more and more patients out into the streets. This had been President Kennedy’s revolutionary plan for reforming the nation’s shameful treatment of the mentally ill. We would replace our backward state hospital system with newer and better neuroleptic drugs and free comprehensive community care. But for my mother, in 1974, not much has changed. The doctors still pump her with drugs that make her mute, incontinent, and unable to move. They strap her down in restraints and zap her with what she thinks is radiation. She imagines Nazis torturing her.
I will fight until the end,
she thinks.
I will save my girls. There’s a reason for everything. A reason poltergeists set fire to my chair. Everything is a sign.
The only change is that they release her before my sister and I have had a chance to catch our breath. The miracle drugs the doctors give her at CPI, first Thorazine, then Haldol, don’t seem to help her at all. As for the comprehensive community care, we are still waiting for it to arrive.

When I begin my senior year the fall of ’75, my sister leaves for Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The year before, our mother had ripped up all her college acceptance letters but my sister swiftly cleared up that nearly devastating snafu. She is fiercely determined to succeed. What will life be like without her? I am dreadfully sad she is leaving. What if she just disappears; gets tired of all this trouble at home? What if she leaves me too? How heavy is a dresser when you’re the only one pushing it against the door? I feel truly on my own. If there is an emergency, it will be up to me to figure things out. My grandmother doesn’t want the job anymore. She has enough on her plate these days without having to deal with her daughter Norma who is out of control, now that she’s got cataracts, a husband she hates who is sick with cancer, one girl in college, a dog to take care of, a big unruly yard. Since she retired she spends most of her time sitting in front of the TV watching soap operas, sitcoms, detective shows, anything to transport her away. “I’m too tired to deal with this
crap,” she informs me. “She’s your responsibility now.”

There is a picture from that time, after my sister leaves home. It lurks in some subaqueous place in my brain: My mother grabbing my arm and squeezing hard, trying to pull me away from the front door. I push her back; she falls against the red plaid couch littered with ashtrays and plates of old food. Everything falls to the dirty shag-carpeted floor. She comes at me, fists flying; I push her back again.

I remember the catalyst: me wanting to go out that night with a boy named Jerry from my school. Jerry wants to be a minister or a gospel singer or an artist. He comes from hardship too, but what kind I don’t really know. Something sad from when he and his parents lived down South, before they all found Jesus. When I’m at his house, we make out in his room but never get far. We are both saving ourselves for marriage, and besides, we can hear Milly, his mother, in the kitchen cooking and singing gospel songs and hymns. Jerry’s mom, perfect hair and smile, always baking or sewing clothes, arranging flowers in a vase. His chain-smoking dad, Roy, stout and good-natured, loves to talk about how Jesus, once crucified, rose gloriously from the dead. All three believe in miracles.

My mother is enraged that I want to date a boy, especially a born-again Christian. She says I am only sixteen and calls me
jailbait
. “You aren’t going anywhere with that Jesus freak. You’re staying right here. We have a lot to discuss.”

For the last couple weeks I have been staying with her every evening after school and on weekends because she doesn’t want to be alone, now that it’s just the two of us. I’ve had to take off work from Higbee’s Department Store and call in sick at the Cleveland Play House dinner theater where I work weekend nights. If I don’t get out of our apartment I will explode.

My mother rises up off the couch and narrows her eyes. “Now sit down and answer my questions.”