The Memory Palace (9 page)

When she’s feeling a little better, our mother takes my sister and me to the art museum or the zoo. Once in a while she ushers at Severence Hall so the three of us can get in for free. She doesn’t talk about the music, but there is something unspoken between us—the way she squeezes my hand when George Szell lifts his baton before the symphony begins. We almost always leave before the concert is over, though, because something inexplicable has happened that makes her whisper obscenities in the aisle.

In the summer the three of us go to the Impett Park swimming pool, rub zinc oxide on our noses, and nap in the hot sun, our mother’s little transistor radio always tuned to the classical music station. She places the radio right next to her ear, between her head and mine. Rachel and I do handstands in the water; we call out, “Look at me, Mommy! Look at me!” We swim, then play cards, the sound of someone else’s tinny radio bleating nearby, more voices invading my mother’s delicate brain—“Going to a Go-Go,” “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat,” Gary Lewis and the Playboys crooning “This Diamond Ring.” Sometimes all that sound is just too much for her to bear. Within each song is the enemy’s menacing threat. We want to stay but she gets up abruptly, stubs out her cigarette, lights another, and hurries us into the blazing afternoon.

One summer day, Rachel and I are on our hands and knees in the grass behind our grandparents’ red brick house. We call out to our turtle, who is lost, “Henry, Henry, come back!” We search beneath stones, behind bushes. “Henry, please come home!” The phone inside is ringing. Grandpa shouts from the back door. Rachel and I snap to attention; we run as fast as we can
to see what he wants. We can never run fast enough. “You, not her,” he says to me. “Smarties spoil the party.”

My grandfather and I climb into the shiny white new Chevy and drive east. I can smell the sun-warmed seats and my grandfather’s Old Spice aftershave cologne.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Girls should be seen and not heard. Just do as you’re told.”

We stop at a package store to pick up a case of beer. The black guys hanging out in front joke around and slap him on the back. He is everyone’s pal. He goes inside and is gone for a long time. It’s hot and humid in the car. The windows are all rolled up but I sit, hands folded in my lap, and don’t roll them down. When he returns, he totters back to the car, his face red and damp with sweat.

“Just look at those niggers doing nothin’ all day,” he says.

Grandpa lights up a big cigar, then starts the engine. “You want ice cream?” he asks. “Ice scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” He tickles me hard in the gut until it hurts, singsonging, “Eenie meenie meiny mo, catch a nigger by the toe!” He buys a mint chocolate chip cone for me down the street, golden vanilla for himself.

“Who loves you most?” he asks.

“You do,” I say, ever obedient.

Grandpa smiles and lays his clammy hand on my little knee. He keeps it there all the way to his sister’s house.

When we arrive, Aunt Toda is slicing lemons. She makes lemonade just like Grandpa—lots of sugar, a squeeze of orange, and sprig of fresh mint. Toda is a wide woman in wide black skirts, with swollen feet and ankles; she keeps her coarse gray hair piled beneath a black net and a bright red babushka. My grandma says she’s a backward but well-meaning quack. My mother says never trust anyone who believes in saints.

We sit in her stifling kitchen, windows shut, bundles of herbs hanging above our heads. Toda, like my grandfather, believes the wind carries disease and destruction. Does he think that was how our mother got so sick?
Grandpa pops opens a beer. He says something in Bulgarian and goes out back to take a look at her garden. Toda pours me a glass of lemonade and offers me
komat
, the same cheese pie made with feta and buttery filo dough my grandfather bakes on Sundays.

“Eat,” she says, pushing the plate toward me. “You want a little yogurt? You like the yogurt? How ’bout a nice little peach?”

Toda’s kitchen smells of Bulgarian rose, a distillation she makes from hundreds of petals, then stores in miniature glass vials. Each vial is encased in a slim wooden bottle painted with a red rose, the word bulgaria burned into the side. The bottle tops look like the onion domes that crown my grandfather’s Russian Orthodox church. His side of the family is not Jewish, a fact, I gather, he is proud of, since he sometimes calls my grandma a “fat-ass money-grubbing son-of-a-bitch kike.”

Aunt Toda is talking to me but I can’t understand. I find her a little scary, her coarse stubby hands and ruddy face, her dark skirts and mustache, the little white hairs poking out from her chin. She tells me in broken English that I have “the gift.” She leads me to the back of the house, past icons lit by small red candles—the “Not-Made-by-Hands” bloody Christ, the “Tenderness Mother of God,” and “St. Theodosius,” patron saint of Grandpa’s and her church. Toda smudges the hallway mirror with ash from her finger to ward off evil. She smudges every shiny surface she sees. We go to where she keeps her concoctions and herbal tinctures, her seedlings under glass, strange roots floating in oil; I breathe in essence of rose, the scent of oranges, cloves, and something from the dark center of the earth.

“You are old enough now,” she says. “Sit.”

Toda teaches me the ancient doctrine of signatures. How God made plants to cure men’s ills. He gives us clues to guide us in selecting the right ones. Something in the way they look, an external “signature,” suggests the inner virtue of the plant. Red clover heals the blood, walnuts heal the brain; kidney beans cure the kidneys. Is there a plant that could heal my mother? Toda pulls out dried herbs and roots from different drawers, tells me to crush them between my fingers and hold them up to smell. She opens a book and turns the pages to a picture of plants surrounding a human figure, lines drawn to each corresponding body part. What marked me from
birth, made me special in the eyes of God? Is it the birth defect I have, the way my arms bend out from the elbow when they should fall straight? Or the bump I have on the side of each foot? Is it the moon-shaped scar above my knee? Did I possess a special sign that could make my mother happy and well?

Toda shows me how to lay hands on the infirmed, how to concentrate and summon all my inner power, let it flow into their sick and dying bodies, and into their souls.

After my lesson, Toda takes out jars of legumes and seeds, trays of herbs and roots, and sets them on the big oak table in the kitchen. I help her sort, bundle, and count. “Bad peas here, good peas in the pot.” Grandpa returns from the garden with a basket of peppers and goes into the living room to take a nap. I can hear him hacking up phlegm.

“He’s got the bad lung,” says Toda. “I make him something to take home.”

A lion roars on Grandpa’s Wild Kingdom show; the sound mingles with his coughing while the narrator drones on about survival on the African savanna. I separate peas and beans for my great-aunt, just like I do for Grandpa at his house. Toda looks like Baba Yaga, the witch in the Russian fairy-tale book our father sent from far away. She has the same heavy skirts and red babushka. She makes me divide and sort, divide and sort, cut, separate, and soak; I do everything I’m told. But I have a glimmer of hope burning inside me now. I will find a miracle to save my mother. I would go into the dark forest to search for magic plants to save her, spin a room of golden thread in a single night, weave a thousand golden shirts, cross a bridge of fire.

Grandpa snores in the living room, Aunt Toda naps in a chair by the sink, while I dream and sort, dream and sort, a thousand petals simmering atop the stove.

If I’m not at school, no matter what I’m doing, if my grandfather gets the call, we jump in the car and drive to Aunt Toda’s house. When my grandfather is drunk we swerve unsteadily along the roads while I hold on tight to my seat. Toda and I visit ailing pregnant women, sick old ladies, old men who smell
like cabbage and pee. Once, we visit a little boy with no hair. “Poison blood,” Toda says in my ear when we leave. “From the Evil Eye.” I place my hands on all of them, close my eyes, and wait.

One day we go to visit a man named Mitchell, a relative on my grandfather’s side who suffers from multiple sclerosis. He’s in his forties but looks much older; the doctors say he is dying. Mitchell lies on a hospital bed in a dark room, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. A page from a newspaper is projected from a contraption someone has jerry-rigged so he can read what’s going on in the world. The room smells of urine and rosewater. The curtains are drawn, the windows shut tight. Like everyone else on that side of the family, Mitchell’s parents think that the wind carries evil and sickness into the home. Toda dribbles a foul-smelling tea down his throat, then motions for me to get started. I sit beside him like I sit beside the others Toda takes me to, and place my hands upon his arm. I close my eyes and imagine ivy springing from my fingertips, growing into Mitchell’s body, his lifeless arms and legs. Aunt Toda says my hands are magic. She makes me believe they contain rivers and clouds, valleys and colorful birds, someone else’s destiny. I sit in the silent room while Toda gossips and smokes in the kitchen with the family, drinks thick Turkish coffee from little gold cups. When we leave, Mitchell’s father hands Toda a slab of bloody lamb wrapped in brown paper and a fat envelope stuffed with dollars.

Whenever we return to Mitchell’s, it’s the same routine. Toda forces tea down his throat, mutters a prayer, and leaves me alone in the room. Mitchell never looks at me, or talks, just stares at the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
illuminated above. Sometimes, after I’m done, Toda and I have baklava and sweet black tea in the kitchen with Mitchell’s parents. Toda shows me how to read signs from tea leaves and Turkish coffee grounds. I drain my sugary tea, tip the cup over like her, and spin it three times. I turn it back up, stare into the bottom. The patterns of tiny clumps look like a dancing man, a greenish black heart, a furry monster, and a bird. She predicts I’ll have five children, and a rich husband from the Old Country who won’t beat me. She says nothing about our father coming back or if our mother will get better again.

It’s
morning and my mother has been up all night pacing the floors. (When did the pacing start? Was it the day of Medusa? Was it the day I was born?) She gets ready for bed when the rest of the world is waking. Rachel is reading in our room, and I am in the bathroom watching my mother take a bubble bath. I’ve made a picture for her of a mother horse and its little brown colt. I hold on to it, a scroll rolled up and tied with ribbon, waiting for the right moment to give her the gift.

She lowers her languid body one limb at a time into the steaming tub, luxuriating beneath the lime-green foam. I sit on the damp floor and listen to her hum. The night before, I could hear her conversing angrily with someone who wasn’t there while
Aida
played on the stereo. (Or was it
La Bohème
, the scene when Mimi dies in Rodolfo’s arms? For every memory about her there is a melody hidden inside my brain.) After her bath, the moment never quite comes to give her the picture, so I stick it in a drawer. Later, someone is reading to me from
Through the Looking Glass.
My mother? My sister? Alice is lost in a garden of talking flowers.

“O Tiger-lily,” says Alice. “I wish you could talk!”

“We can talk,” says the flower, “when there’s anybody worth talking to.”

The radio is on low while my mother naps in her bed. It’s still summer vacation, so Rachel and I run over to our grandparents’ to play in their yard. In the garden, my sister reads while I pretend I’m a bee. I sip nectar from honeysuckles and fly around the yard. I pluck little plums, split them open, scoop out the pits, and pop them in my mouth. When I’m outside I can hear singing. It’s the wind but I hear music too—arias, the trembling of leaves, mourning doves and sparrows, melodies my mother plays on the piano. Everything else is background noise—the Vietnam War and race riots, all the sick people Aunt Toda wants me to heal, my mother’s night voices, her despair. Lately a book called
In Cold Blood
distresses her. She says things like, “You never know who’s going to try to kill you when you’re asleep.” Or, “There are men with guns who watch you at night,” which she will continue to say for years to come. I block out her voice and listen to the mockingbird and chickadee, the goldfinch up above.

I spy a volunteer lily that has sprung up in the middle of the backyard. Light glows from the inside of the flower—maybe it’s the way the sun falls on it, maybe it’s magic, either way I am struck dumb by
its radiance. Is there a fairy inside the bloom? Has it come to take me away, to leave another in my place? I tear the bloom apart to see where the light is coming from, to see what’s inside—sepal, anther, stigma, stamen. The flower smells sickly sweet; a lush river of seeds, sticky and pungent, clings to my hands. I press the petals to my face and cover my nose with pollen, then squish what’s left of the flower into my pocket.

When Rachel and I return home after dinner, I run into my mother’s room to show her what I have found. She’s lying on her side, her face to the wall. There are tiny drops of blood on the sheet; one of her arms is covered in gauze. I tap her back with my little hand. I am always afraid she will die.