The Memory Palace (19 page)

Authors: Mira Bartók

“I am leaving whether you like it or not,” I say.

She lights a cigarette and takes a quick puff. “Over my dead body.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“I’m your mother! You must obey!”

In our stifling living room, I have no miracles up my sleeve and little faith in salvation. I make a move to put on my coat. My mother reaches out to grab my hair.

I run to the walk-through kitchen. On the stove is a pan of burnt chicken legs, black little things, inedible and shriveled up. The air smells like sour milk and trash; the sink is black with cigarette ashes.

“I’m calling the police,” I say, and sneak a small carving knife from a drawer into the back pocket of my jeans.

“I’ll tear the phone out if you do. You stay put or else.”

“I need to get out of this place or I’ll go nuts.”

“What are you planning?” she asks. “Who are you really going to see?”

“I told you a hundred times. I’m going to see Jerry.”

“Who are his associates? I want you to sit down right now and make a list, names and numbers, addresses too.”

“I’m warning you,” I say. “Leave me alone or else.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” she shouts. “I’m your mother!”

I walk to the door but my mother beats me to it. She locks the deadbolt and stands arms crossed, blocking my way. There is no moving her. “All right,” I say, pretending to comply. “Let’s sit down and talk.”

My mother glares at me, then finally returns to the couch. She lights up another cigarette. “Let’s start with that boy. That Jerry, if that is his real name. No more boys from faith-healing families. It’s going to be a whole new ball game around here.”

“I thought you liked Jerry.”

“Don’t question my authority. Just do as I say.”

She starts in again; she can’t help herself:
Did a man ever touch you down there, is your sister a whore, are you menstruating, has someone stolen your womb?
I am always trying to be calm, to be passive and invisible, but this time something snaps a little inside. I need to get out of there, even if it’s only an hour or two. I rise from my chair and pull out the knife I had slipped in my pocket. I would never harm her; I just want to scare her off until I can back out of the door. She throws herself on me; suddenly she wants the knife. She is
pure adrenaline and fire; so am I. Her lit cigarette drops onto the carpet; we could both go up in smoke, this place, the street, but I don’t care anymore, I just want a little bit of peace. I grab her wrist that reaches for the knife.

“Stop, you’re hurting me,” she pleads.

I tell her that I will kill myself if she doesn’t let me leave. I tell her that’s why I got the knife. I’m not serious, for I have never been suicidal, but I want to scare her into stopping. Her response startles me. She picks up the phone and dials the hospital, while I run to the bedroom. She tells the intake nurse at CPI to prepare a bed for her daughter, who is mentally ill and wants to take her own life. I use the old dresser trick once again, blocking the door. In this moment, it seems fortuitous that we live in a basement, with a window opening right onto the street.

My mother is still on the phone when I open the window and screen, climb out, and run down Triskett Road. She doesn’t even know that I am gone. I don’t have time to bring a thing—a jacket, a purse, my books for school. I run down the road in the chill autumn air till I come to a gas station and call Jerry with a dime I always keep in the pocket of my pants. There is always a dollar in my shoe.

The next day, Roy, Jerry’s father, is talking to my mother on the phone. “No, Norma, we won’t let her come back until you get help. Your daughter is fine. She can stay here as long as she likes.” He is kind to her, not condescending. But he is stubborn, unwilling to take me home if she is still there. He tells her that if she shows up at their house, he will call the police.

For some reason, she backs down. Maybe she is afraid that I’ll never come back. I don’t want to go home. Why would I? Milly, Jerry’s mom, is making me a new set of clothes: a ruffled gray skirt that falls to the floor, a frilly gray-and-white-striped blouse. I look like a Victorian missionary in my new clothes, feminine and prim. Jerry’s mom helps me to make French braids; puts fancy clips in my hair. She cooks sit-down meals of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. At Jerry’s house there is always milk, and cereal in the cupboard, and in the bathroom there are fresh clean towels. The three of them pray before supper, “Thank you, Jesus, for your great and wonderful gifts,” while we hold
hands and smile, then tuck in to our meal. After supper Jerry takes me up to his room and we listen to music: bluegrass, gospel, and Christian rock. His attic bedroom is huge, the ceiling pointing up like a steeple. On his knotty pine walls are his paintings, portraits of homeless men, old women standing alone in sad, rainy streets. People he wants to help someday. How long do I stay there? Days? Weeks? I won’t go back until my mother checks herself into the hospital. It’s the only deal I’ll cut with her. She tells me on the phone that I am like Patty Hearst, who fell in love with her captors.

I don’t remember how my mother ends up back at the hospital. Maybe she agrees to check herself in or maybe my grandmother reluctantly commits her. My grandma hates to make the call. What if the neighbors hear about it? After all these years, she’s still afraid what people will think. While my mother is gone, I live in the apartment by myself. I pay the rent with money I make at Higbee’s and the theater, and my grandmother helps out too. I cook for myself, clean the place up; even have friends over a few times. My friends from school think it’s cool that I have my own apartment. They look longingly at the pool with the cheap concrete patio out back, the tiny kitchenette inside our claustrophobic flat, the coin-operated washers and dryers down the hall with little boxes of powdered soap in machines, the ultramodern avocado-colored everything. “I wish we didn’t have to live in a stupid old house,” one friend says. “Some people have all the luck.”

When my mother is gone I get busy. I work on my portfolio and fill out college applications for the following year. I work extra hours at Higbee’s so I can save as much money as I can. Rachel reminds me on the phone that when the time comes, I will get out. I’ll have my own place, far away, just like her.

One warm spring weekend while my mother is still at CPI, Jerry picks me up and tells me he has a surprise. He says we are going on a picnic but he won’t tell me where. After we head out of the city, he stops the car and ties a red bandanna around my eyes. “You can’t look until we get there,” he says. Jerry
has packed a basket of food, a blanket to spread on the grass somewhere, and I know once we get there he will sing, and when Jerry sings it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.

His car has a sunroof, so I stick my head out to feel the wind. It’s like when I was five and wore the black patch over my eye, pretending to be blind, only this time I feel safe and happy with Jerry by my side, my mother far away. It feels like I’m in a boat on the sea, all that wind in my face and hair. I promise myself that someday I will see the ocean. I will sail out so far that I won’t even be able to see any land and then I will jump right in. Below me will be fish and dolphins and whales, and above, the clearest blue sky. If my mother saw me with that bandanna she would think I had been kidnapped, but she isn’t here and I try not to think of her. Jerry takes me down winding roads; opens up all the windows. We are laughing, exuberant, and free. Suddenly the road gets bumpy; we are driving on dirt. “Okay,” he says, “we are almost there. Hold on.” He slows down; the tires roll onto grass, then stop. “You can look now.”

We are in the biggest meadow I have ever seen. Surrounding us are wildflowers and hills, houses in the distance, a herd of grazing cows. Above is a vast azure sky. “Where are we?” I ask. “Amish country,” says Jerry. No, I think. This isn’t any country; this is heaven. Heaven is a sea of grass, the longest day in the world, and no one to answer to; it is guilt lifted for an afternoon, it is a boy singing, and a girl closing her eyes to listen for a while, to breathe and to rest.

Later, back at the apartment, my grandma calls to tell me that my mother is coming home. When she arrives she is shaken to her bones—slurred speech, trembling hands, eyes glazed, full of sleep and fear. I know it is only a matter of time before the cycle begins again. But this time, something feels different. The system is changing; I am changing, and in a year I will be leaving home for good. This time, my mother’s return is the beginning of a new kind of knowledge, different from when Medusa first emerged. I feel in my bones that my mother will always be sick. She might have a week or two of some semblance of normalcy. Maybe even a month. But she will forever be spinning in some dangerous orbit, knife in hand, and if I’m not careful, I will forever be that small child frozen behind the wall. At sixteen, I vow to
hold on to beauty, no matter what—to sitting in a rich carpet of grass, a concert hall, a museum full of art—in a place that has nothing to do with the unbearable glare of grief.

In my palace, in a chamber below, I glance back to see my mother across the room pacing, waiting for me to swim back and save her. I can barely make her out, but she is there, a she-wolf moving toward me in sleep, over water, over shore, pulling me into her den. She wanders without love or shelter, ever hungry, waiting for my return. And I am forever a dolphin in blue sleepless waves, swimming toward a distant fathomless light.

Something is Missing

Now, after everything else, something is missing. Apparently, someone comes into my storage room every day to make my life miserable. Recently I had to glue Myra’s little horse together. Someone had broken its leg. I am trying hard to come out of their “spell” but they even bid on stolen dreams. It may well have been planned when I was of the age of infancy although I never was an infant any more than I was a child. Do they really die, or do they just metal horse into another costume? The question really is: are they of this planet? There may be those in their world who also suffered wrongdoing, I would not deny that, but I am and will continue to be concerned only with Norma, that is Baby Norma, as I am a baby who has known its bones at birth and a baby who thinks ahead of her time and hopes to be allotted the time of biology and its accompanying changes. They have no knowledge of appearance as they are hideously ugly and an attractive, healthy appearance is only a commodity to them so they can kidnap you and exchange you for someone else. I know how fast they can move when motivated. Do not curse them while walking, even in thought. Be a good girl, Norma. Rest. Study. Stay calm. Keep hate and rage below. Think of all your nursey rhymes. Stay alert. Remember to replace stolen cane, stolen thoughts. Dress warm. I am my own mother.