The Memory Palace (23 page)

“Where’s the Sky World?” a girl asks. “Is that where the aliens live?”

“I don’t know much about aliens,” I say, “but I’ll tell you a story instead.”

I tell them the Inuit myth about Sedna, a woman who lives at the bottom of the sea, and how, when she was trying to escape her angry seabird-husband, his flapping wings conjured a terrible storm. Her parents threw her overboard to save their own lives. Sedna tried to cling to the boat but her father cut off her hands and she slipped away. She sank to the bottom of the sea, where her fingers grew back as fish, whales, walruses, and seals. The creatures made a home in her hair. Without hands she couldn’t comb her long tresses tangled with sea-beasts and fish. All she could do was sit on the sea floor and watch her hair grow longer each day. I tell the children how some people believe that the angakoks, the shamans, swim down to the depths of the ocean to comb Sedna’s hair for her. In gratitude, she sends hunters all the creatures of the sea.

“Is she beautiful?” asks another girl.

“I think so,” I say. “But I’m not sure. I’ve never seen her.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see one of the museum’s docents, an elderly woman with a cane, walking toward me. She pulls me aside. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s a lady in Education waiting to see you. She says it’s an emergency. I’d hurry, if I were you.”

The docent offers to stay and show the children the rest of the show. I tell her to take them down to the art room afterward so they can draw until I return—if I return, I add. “She seemed quite upset,” the woman says. “She says she’s your mother, but I wasn’t sure if that was true.”

I hurry past the display of Northwest Coast Native American art—cases of transformation masks—birds turning into men, men into bears, bears into otters, otters into whales. What is she doing here, in my refuge, my labyrinth of secret rooms, my cabinet of wonders? How dare she come here? This is my
home
. I have to run through the large central hall of the museum
to get to the staircase on the other side leading down the stairs to Education. The two giant bull elephants, whose solid presence always comforted me in the past, look like monsters now. I break into a run.

What if someone lets her speak on the PA system, like when I was in high school and she showed up at the football game, calling my name for everyone to hear? Or when she circled Newton D. Baker Junior High on her rusty red bike. She is the relentless silver bell in my ear, even here, where I thought I was safe.
Myra, Rachel, where are you? It’s your mother, come home!

I run to where the docent said my mother was waiting, outside the Education office, but she isn’t there. I search the halls. Not a trace. Then panic grips me. Someone might have told her I was in the Arctic Hall. She could be upstairs. She could be talking to the children if they haven’t already left, interrogating them.
Where’s your teacher? Which way did she go?
But why should I be afraid? She’d never hurt a child. Or would she? If they aren’t in the art room by now, there will be twenty little children standing in front of a case of sacred hoop masks, waiting to make magic faces from paper plates, feathers, and sticks. I don’t want my mother to scare them.

My mother is nowhere to be found in any of the rooms in the basement corridor, so I run back to where I began, upstairs by Tunghak and the other Eskimo masks. The children are gone. I look around the exhibit for my mother, but she isn’t there. I head downstairs once again. As I hurry to the Education office I see a woman pacing in the hall, puffing on a cigarette beneath the no smoking sign. She looks up and rushes over to me.

“I’ve been searching for you everywhere,” she says. “We have to leave right now.”

My mother is wearing white rubber boots without socks, and her favorite winter coat, the blue one with the brown fake fur trim. Her hair looks like it hasn’t been brushed in days. She is Sedna waiting for someone to comb the beasts from her hair.

“Why are you here?” I say. “I am working.
You have to go.”

“Something is wrong with Grandma. You have to come home right now. I’ll pay for the bus. This place is full of cameras. It’s all been prescripted. We have to find somewhere safe where they can’t see.”

“You can’t just get on a bus and interrupt my life.”

“I’m starving,” she says, grinding her cigarette into the floor with her boot. “I want a corned beef sandwich and a cup of hot coffee. Let’s get out of here. Everywhere I look they have a gun pointed at my head.”

I take my mother to a little Greek place called the Artist’s Café on Michigan Avenue and watch her devour her food. She acts like she hasn’t eaten in days. She has mustard all over her mouth and doesn’t bother to wipe it off. Her voice is too loud and I feel sick to my stomach about what she could blurt out in public. It could be anything—Nazis, aliens, rape, murder, the forced removal of my womb. I am ten years old again, head hung low; slouching in my seat, hoping no one looks our way.

“Please keep your voice down,” I say.

My mother takes a huge gulp of coffee and lights up a cigarette. “If you loved your mother you would come home.”

“If you loved me you would leave.”

“Sit up straight or your spine will grow crooked. When’s the last time you had your hair done? It looks awful. You should get a perm.”

“You have to take the bus home.”

“Only if you come too.”

“I can’t. I’ll come visit soon, I promise.”

“I dropped one of Grandma’s cups and she went crazy. You don’t know how she can get. She blames me for everything. Can you fix the cup? You used to do that kind of thing. If you come home you can have your own room.”

I don’t know how, but I convince my mother to go back to Cleveland. I beg her, I cajole; I make promises I’ll never keep. She has traveled over three hundred miles to see me but I put her right back on the bus after we eat. I feel profoundly sad for her, and hopeless. I promise that I will come home the following week and help her figure out what is wrong with Grandma. I promise to replace her typewriter ribbon, help her hang a picture on the wall, fix a million broken things.

“I know what has to be done,” says my mother, as I lead her to the bus. “You have to come home and take charge. Your sister won’t do it. She lives in a fantasy world.”

“We’ll talk about that when I come,” I say.

“You’re kicking out your own flesh and blood,” she says, as I help her to her seat. “You don’t love me anymore.”

“I love you but I’m really mad. You must never,
ever
do this again. Ever. I could lose my job. Just don’t do this anymore. I’ll see you in a week.”

I turn and walk away, without kissing her goodbye.

At the end of December, my sister comes from Massachusetts to visit. Even though my mother has been calling me for weeks, threatening to kill herself if I don’t come home, I decide to throw the New Year’s Eve party I had planned anyway. I am setting out food before the guests arrive when someone rings the doorbell and doesn’t stop. I press the intercom.

“Who is it?”

“Your mother, now open up!”

There is no question about what to do. When the police come, we meet them downstairs and the party goes on without us. Rachel and I spend most of the night at the hospital; our mother stays there a month. I am surprised they keep her so long. When she is released I send her home by herself on the train, heavily sedated and depressed. When I call my grandma to explain what happened, she doesn’t quite understand. Something is definitely wrong with her, whether it is Alzheimer’s or elderly dementia, but regardless, she is too old and tired to take care of our mother. Rachel and I decide that, if we have to, we will take legal action to get our mother a court-appointed guardian to make her medical and financial decisions. She just can’t show up on our doorsteps anymore.

I imagine my life if nothing is done to change things—I see a pale green hospital waiting room at midnight, a television blaring soap opera reruns, and a vending machine dispensing endless cups of burnt coffee and tea. I see myself eternally waiting, unemployed and alone. This will be my purgatory: the knock at the door at midnight, my mother, hair wild as snakes, the sound
of sirens and doors slamming shut, the violent rush of arms and hands, my mother placed in restraints and handed over to strangers. And me, sitting in a green room beneath cold fluorescent lights, tapping my foot to a song I played long ago.

A quote by the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci that I write down in my journal a month after my mother returns home:
The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.
If I don’t do something different, who will become the monster, my mother or me?

The Year of the Horse

The horse is a large, strong animal with four legs, solid hoofs, flowing mane and tail. Domesticated in pre-historic times, it has long served mankind for drawing and carrying loads and riders. Specifically a full-grown male is called a gelding or stallion, the female is a mare. The horse is of the family Equidae that includes the ass, zebra, etc. It has a long breeding time. A single foal is born after conception in about eleven months. Size ranges from the smallest (falabella, height under 2½ feet) to the largest (shire, height over six feet). Today they are mostly ridden for pleasure and sport. In Chinese astrology, this is the Year of the Horse: a year for self-reliance, independence and travel. As for me, when I don’t have fits of blanking out, which are numerous in this city, I try to be productive. I am working now on covering an old quilt with an abstract sheet. I had sent one to my cousin and would send one to my oldest daughter if I knew where she lived. I decided I needed one for myself to keep warm. They are called “comforters.” From now on, I look after Number One.

Thou shall fly without wings, and conquer without any sword. Oh, horse...

Bedouin

In my memory palace, there is a painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The painting has two titles, The Racetrack and Death on a Pale Horse,
but I always misremember it as
Death, the Rider. Albert Pinkham Ryder, an American artist and favorite of my mother’s and mine, painted it in the late 1800s. The story behind the painting goes like this: Ryder had a friend, a waiter, and, like Ryder, he was very poor. One day, the waiter mortgaged his house and bet his entire life savings on a horse. He told Ryder that if he lost, he would kill himself. The day of the race came and his horse didn’t win. Ryder mourned the loss of his friend and made the painting shortly after he died. In the picture, Death brandishes a scythe, galloping on horseback the wrong way around a track. Sometimes Ryder referred to the painting as
The Reverse
. In the background is a dead tree. A snake observes Death from below; above hovers an armlike cloud reaching out to pluck the rider from his seat.

Ryder had an odd way of painting; he brushed on thick coats of varnish in between layers of wet paint. Consequently, none of his paintings survived very well. The surfaces are cracked and the colors have changed dramatically from their original state. Several years ago, my mother wrote me from a
motel to say that she was protecting her “posters of intent” by putting a coat of varnish on them.
But now they’re turning yellow,
she explained.
They are starting to look like Ryder’s painting of Death. What should I do? I wish you were here to teach me. Please advise, Mother.