The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  “It’s me. Rachel,” said my sister.

  How could we explain that we had changed our names so she could never find us? That we had been so scared of her all these years? She was the cry of madness in the dark, the howling of wind outside our doors. I had changed my name the year after my sister did, reluctantly, giving up the name signed at the bottom of my paintings so I would be harder to find. But I could never relinquish my first name. I simply exchanged a y for an i. My sister couldn’t give up her first name either and kept it sandwiched between the first and the last: Natalia Rachel Singer. She took Isaac Bashevis Singer’s last name, I took Béla Bartók’s.

  “Rachel? I thought you were dead.”

  “I’m not dead,” said my sister. “I’m here, right beside you.”

  “Is it really you?”

  Natalia pulled up a chair next to the bed. “It’s really me. How are you feeling?”

  “You girls have got to get me out of here! We have to go back to the house. There are criminals inside.”

  “Don’t worry, the house is fine,” I lied to her. “Everything is just like you left it. You can go home as soon as you are better.”

  After all these years, our mother was still obsessed about her parents’ house she’d sold in 1989. When she signed the papers over to the new owner, she believed that she was only renting it to him for a while. Not long after the sale, and after my sister’s and my last failed attempt to get her a legal guardian and medical treatment, our mother disappeared into the streets.

  “Do you have a husband?” my mother asked Natalia. “Are you wearing a ring?”

  “Yes,” said my sister. “I’ll tell you all about him.”

  Natalia, who had seventeen years of stored-up conversations, began to talk. But after a few minutes, I could tell our mother was too exhausted and frail to listen anymore.

  “She can’t tolerate that much talking or sound,” I said. “She gets overwhelmed like me. Just sit with her. That’s enough; she’s happy you’re here.”

  Natalia took out a brush from her purse. “Can I brush your hair?” she asked.

  “If you like,” said my mother.

  I looked at them, mother and eldest daughter, strangers for seventeen years. “I’ll leave you two alone,” I said, and left.

  If you glanced in the room at that moment, you would see two women in tranquil silence, one tenderly brushing the hair of the other, as if she had been doing it her entire life.

  When I called U-Haul, they confirmed our mother had a storage room there. It was at Kamm’s Corners in West Park, not far from our old neighborhood. Early the next day, on Thursday, before heading over to the hospital, Natalia and I drove to the U-Haul on Lorain Avenue. Natalia sat in the passenger’s seat, clutching the map, nervous about getting lost. I expected to get lost. I got lost nearly every day.

  When we arrived, the man at the counter said, “Norma used to change clothes in there sometimes, even in winter. There’s no light or heat in the rooms. She was one tough broad.”

  Natalia and I wound our way through the maze of corridors. I could see my breath and regretted not having brought a hat or a pair of gloves. Fluorescent lights hummed, casting a pale, eerie glow on the high metal walls. I wondered how many other homeless men and women used these rooms to store their belongings, to change, or to catch up on sleep. Finally we came to our mother’s room; it was just like all the others, eight-by-eight feet. I pulled the keys out of the sock. We tried them all. The last one fit; the padlock clicked open.

  I hesitated for a moment before I looked in. I was terribly curious to know what was inside, but I also wished I never had found the key. I was afraid of what we would find, even more afraid to find out what had been lost. Wasn’t it enough that we were here, now, in her final days? I shone my flashlight into the cold dark room. Things were piled up to the ceiling: furniture, boxes, trash, clothes, books, cans of soup. I imagined her changing clothes in the dark, shivering, cursing to herself, taking off one shirt and putting on another, then layering on three more for warmth. Natalia and I began to dig.

  My sister and I worked fast, sorting things into piles. We needed to get back to the hospital and didn’t have the luxury of taking our time. There was that familiar sense of purpose that I hadn’t felt in years, that old “it’s an emergency, let’s just get the job done” kind of feeling. I was glad not to do it alone.

  I first tried to separate all the trash from things that we needed to save. I almost tossed out one of my mother’s old grimy pocketbooks when I felt something hard inside. I pulled out a butcher knife. “Jesus, look at this,” I said.

  “Do you think that’s the one she had when the police caught her at Logan Airport?” said Natalia. “I’m sure she was on her way to find me.”

  Natalia and I excavated. We found a 1950s Geiger counter, and a bag of our mother’s hair with a note taped to it with instructions on how to make a wig. I found a chart she had drawn showing all the nuclear power plants in the world, similar to one she had sent me when I lived in the Norwegian Arctic ten years before. There were boxes crammed with newspaper articles on cryogenics, alien abductions, radon poisoning, global warming, child abuse, train wrecks, and unsolved murders in Chicago. I discovered a huge box labeled “Scribing Books” filled with notebooks devoted to my mother’s eclectic research: geometry, poetry, chemistry, botany, geography, art history, medicine, fairy tales, zoology, car mechanics, physics, and the Bible. For each subject, she made vocabulary lists with detailed definitions, something I would have done even before my brain injury. Her files could have been my files; her notes, mine.

  I came across the chiffon scarf I had bought for her in New Orleans years ago. In the same box were many of my favorite books from childhood. I pulled out a collection of Jack London I’d read when I was about eleven. After reading Call of the Wild, I became obsessed with polar exploration. If a man could survive by boiling his boots, or walking out onto the glacial ice with nothing but a few sled dogs and a piece of seal blubber in his pocket, then certainly I could withstand whatever obstacles came my way.

  At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifully illustrated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed, To Rachel, from Daddy. The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off. Then it dawned on me—both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl. I had always remembered the books and our father’s dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, “The only paradise is paradise lost.”

  As I paged through the Russian fairy tale book, a piece of paper fell out—a photocopied picture of a piano keyboard. Was this how my mother played music all these years? Did my homeless mother, once a child prodigy, play Bach inside her head, her hands fluttering over imaginary keys?

  What I found next took my breath away. “Nat,” I said. “She saved my pony.”

  I took out the old palomino horse I used to call Pony from a torn moldy box. The horse’s right foreleg was broken. My mother had tried to mend it with a piece of packing tape, then wrapped it in a red wool hat I had sent her for her birthday two years before. I put it in my bag to take back to the hotel. In the same box were all the letters I had written my mother over the last seventeen years. There were also photocopies she had made of her letters to me. Natalia glanced over to see what I was looking at. I wondered what she felt as she saw me sifting through the stack. We had barely spoken about our mother for years.

  At the bottom of the box were thirteen pairs of scissors. Right after her divorce, when
I was four, my mother tried to slit her wrists with a pair of cutting shears and was rushed to the hospital. I remember sitting at the foot of the stairs, my grandfather looming over me, puffing on a cigar. He handed me a rag and told me to wipe the blood off each and every stair. At the top of the staircase was the open door to our apartment; inside, a limp frilly blouse draped over an ironing board, on the floor a pair of scissors and a pool of blood. My sister remembers the incident too but neither of us recalls the other being there. Did it even happen? Before the age of ten, children have a kind of childhood amnesia. We lack developed language skills and a cognitive sense of self, especially when we are very young. It’s hard to even know if our memories are real. Even though we feel they are, they might not be. And in family narratives, what if the person you learned your early autobiography from couldn’t tell the difference from reality and a dream?

  In another box were all the museum date books I had sent my mother over the years. I found a little stuffed owl, a teddy bear, and a children’s book I once sent her called Owl Babies, about a mother owl who disappears but is reunited with her children in the end. There were nursing textbooks and lists of medical schools my mother planned to apply to. When she turned seventy-nine she wrote to tell me that although she was now legally blind she had decided to study medicine: I am thinking of going to nursing school, maybe in a foreign country. That way, if I ever get sick or lose my sight completely, I’ll know what to do. I found a set of her teeth stuck inside an old eyeglass case. I uncovered dozens of legal claims filed by her, accusing various moving companies, housing projects, the Chicago Transit Authority and the city of Cleveland of stealing her teeth, her glasses, her house, her hair, her children, her memory, and her youth. I pulled out stacks of drawings she had made of street scenes, family members, flowers, and fairies. One was titled Rachel Has No Flowers in Her Hair, a desolate stretch of gray land with nothing in it but one scraggly tree.

  Our mother was expecting us and we had already been at U-Haul for over two hours. My hands were so cold I could barely feel my fingers anymore. I’d been about to suggest leaving when I found the box.

  “Nattie,” I said. “You better take a look.”

  We dragged the heavy box out into the hall. It was stuffed with diaries, seventeen years of secrets: typewritten journals in bulging three-ring binders, others pocket-sized and written by hand. I skimmed through them for half an hour or more, but had to stop. It reminded me of when I was a teenager and hid in our grandparents’ attic, digging through boxes, searching for a father who had disappeared, searching for a mother before she lost her mind. Then I saw several papers stapled together, stuck in between two journals. At the top of the page, my mother had written, “Life Story.” It began like this:

  There was danger imparted to me at birth. The street was well kept and quiet during the day. You hardly saw anyone. In 1945 I suffered a childhood nervous breakdown. I was nineteen. My father and I were supposed to go to a party at my uncle’s, but instead, we went to a foreign film and as we returned home by bus on 148th Street, my father became angry and said something about not liking my uncle’s associates. Leaving the bus I dropped coins in the fare box. My father was angry that I paid for myself. He became more and more enraged and I became mildly hysterical. When we were in the house, he seized a lamp and said, “I’ll kill you” to parties unknown. My early childhood was deprived in some respects. I did not view television until 1963 and now I see that little bits of my life in distorted form have gotten into movie stories. I still have received no compensation for that. Ultimately, what I do know is this: I am a homemaker, my records have never been straightened out, and my need for privacy and house is greater than ever. I write this in a motel room looking out onto garbage bins.

  I slumped down onto the floor and couldn’t move. I write this in a motel room looking out onto garbage bins. How much more did I really want to know about her life on the street? My brain was done for the day.

  “Nattie,” I said. “Maybe we should go.” My sister didn’t hear me; she was lost in her own little world. She sprang up into a standing yoga posture, stretching her arms high above her head. Before my injury, I would have been just as resilient. After a few more stretches, Natalia went back in. I gathered my reserves and went back in too.

  “Look at this!” she said. She pulled out something big, white, and fuzzy from deep within our mother’s den. It was a teddy bear the size of a toddler, dressed in a festive red dress. The red bow around its neck said 2000.

  “It’s a millennium bear,” I said.

  I tried to remember where I was on New Year’s Day 2000, but couldn’t. Where was my mother that day? Who gave her this bear? Would she still be here this coming January 1?

  “Let’s bring the bear,” said Natalia. “We better go back,” she added. “You look tired. Besides, she’s going to think we’re not going to come.”

  Before we left, we made a stack of things our mother might want at the hospital. My sister placed The Brothers Karamazov on the pile and a torn almanac from 1992. “Definitely this,” she said, holding up our mother’s Glenville High School yearbook from 1945. “She loved looking at pictures of her old friends.”

  I flipped through the pages to find her maiden name, Norma Kurap. The portrait of her in a simple white blouse was sweet and demure. She was eighteen, and schizophrenia had yet to rear its ugly head. I read the list of activities below her smiling face: Orchestra, Play Production, Choral Club, Accompanist, Student Council, Music Appreciation Club, National Honor Society, the list went on. She was voted “Most Versatile” in the Popularity Poll. Her classmates wrote: Good luck at Carnegie Hall! May your magic piano fingers charm all the hearts of the world. One boy wrote, To my dream girl, the sweetest and prettiest gal at Glenville. Another wrote, So when are you going to teach me how to rumba? And another, It will take more than a war to make me forget you. The introduction to her yearbook, written by a boy named Marvin, is titled “War Baby.” He writes at the end: We are the class of January, 1945—a war class. We leave Glenville, determined to finish the fight.

  I never realized until then that my mother lost her mind the year we dropped the bomb. Seven months after she graduated, in August 1945, America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shortly afterward while on a bus coming home from a movie with her father, the voices inside my mother’s head arrived unannounced, in all their terrible glory.

  Our mother was wide awake when we arrived. “Where were you? I thought you weren’t going to come. You girls need to help me. We have to get back to the house before it’s too late.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ve got everything under control.”

  “But I’m so worried about everything.” My mother reached up and touched the back of my head. “And you. What about your little noggin? Does it still hurt?”

  “My head’s okay,” I said. “Just some problems here and there, you know.”

  “You should wear a helmet,” she said. “That way, they can’t get you again.”

  When I injured my brain, I almost didn’t write her about it, but changed my mind. It seemed like the kind of thing a mother should know, even if she was indigent and ill. When I wrote, I spared her the gory details, like I did with most things.

  “They stole my memory too,” she whispered, as I straightened out her pillows. “They have their tricks.”

  When the truck hit, I was in the passenger’s seat, leaning over, looking for a cassette. The man driving my car, who suffered whiplash in the accident, was a guy I was dating at the time. We were on our way home from my sister’s house in northern New York. The truck driver, who must have fallen asleep, swerved toward the right and tried to put on his brakes. The next thing I recall was a pair of white-gloved hands reaching in to pull me out of the car. I remember a blur of blinking lights, and the feeling of hot lava dripping down the back of my head.

  When I eventually told my mother about the accident, I said that I suffered from memory loss, mostly sho
rt-term but some long-term memory as well, which isn’t that common with traumatic brain injury. I didn’t tell her about the strange sensations of lost time that one doctor thought might be temporal lobe seizures, or that I no longer could follow directions, that I didn’t know how to leave a tip, and had trouble reading, writing, and doing just about anything that required over ten minutes of concentration. Why tell a homeless woman who slept at the airport that it felt like it was raining inside my body and ants were crawling up and down my legs? My mother thought there were rats living inside her body, aliens in her head.

  Natalia and I returned to the storage room before dinner. “We should have worn headlamps,” I said. “It’s like going down into a cave.”

  “Let’s not stay long,” said my sister. “I want to go back tonight to see her. How are you doing, by the way? You look exhausted.”

  Even though I usually appear fine to the outside world, when I do too many things, say, shop for food and have coffee with a friend on the same day, I might not be able to drive home or talk to anyone for two days after that. If I’m exhausted, I stutter or shut down. If I go to a noisy dinner party, I can easily press down on the accelerator instead of the brake on my way home. Because I didn’t learn how to drive until I was almost forty, the act of putting my foot on the brake isn’t the same kind of habitual memory as tying my shoe. It’s frightening when the part of my brain that’s supposed to process all those stimuli being hurled at me won’t do its job anymore. I get terribly frustrated with myself and with friends who don’t understand. My judgment isn’t always the best either. I think I’m able to handle much more than I really can.

  “You have to drive back, you know,” said Natalia. “We didn’t put me down on the rental. Maybe we should do that tomorrow.”

  “I’m fine. Let’s keep going,” I said.

  I was packing more journals to take back to the hotel when Natalia found a big black trunk with brass trim. We hauled it out and yanked the top open.