The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  My sister and I make things in the garden—pictures, stories, garlands of flowers for our hair. We write secret comic books together, a series called Grumps. I draw pictures of our grandfather leaning over the table, slurping up food with his hands. I draw him belching, farting, guzzling whiskey and beer, throwing chairs at us with expletives shooting from his mouth. I feel bad about the comics, but they make my sister and grandmother laugh.

  Grandma only loves the garden when our grandfather isn’t there. She waters the lawn to get out of the house. She smokes Benson & Hedges beneath the magnolia tree after Grandpa whips her across the face with his belt for looking at him the wrong way. She smokes outside when he’s inside doing shots while rolling out filo dough and making his thick Bulgarian yogurt. She’d love for him to disappear so she could sit among the flowers, quiet and alone, with a tall glass of lemonade, a cigarette, and a slice of pecan pie.

  “Hey, did ya watch today? I can’t believe she’d go marry that son-of-a-bitch,” my grandma shouts across the bed of roses to Mrs. Bente. Grandma and Edna Bente love the soaps—As the World Turns, General Hospital, Days of Our Lives.

  “You don’t know what I have here,” she tells Edna, shaking her head and sucking in smoke.

  Mrs. Bente invites my grandma over when Grandpa is on the rampage. She invites me in too, offers me milk and cookies and tells me jokes in her living room beneath the portrait of her dead husband, Al, who used to swing me around by my arms before he died. Mrs. Bente grows neat little rows of marigolds, snapdragons, and petunias. Her door is always open when I need a place to hide.

  When my mother comes with us to visit our grandparents for the occasional Sunday dinner, she likes to go to the garden to smoke. Sometimes she walks in circles, taking quick puffs from her cigarette, talking to herself. The sunlight illumines her face; she looks beatific beneath the trees. She wears a sexy dress and high heels in the garden, sometimes a little scarf for color, red lipstick, and a dab of Tabu. Of all the things in the yard, my mother loves the trees most of all. They are giant green umbrellas; she can spread a blanket beneath the old blue spruce, sit and close her eyes, smoke her cigarettes, and rest. The shadow of the tree is soothing; her dark brown curls blend into the bark, making her disappear into the tree. Years later, when she is homeless, she will make charts of trees from all over the world. She’ll send me children’s books about the little animals that live inside them: squirrels, sparrows, chipmunks, and bugs. Even squirrels have a home to live in, she wrote me once on a McDonald’s bag from a Greyhound bus station. Even birds have a place to sleep.

  Some Sundays, Grandpa takes me to Saint Theodosius, his green onion-domed church on Starkweather Avenue, not too far from the West Side Market where he buys his kashkaval and freshly butchered lamb. Inside the church, Saint Theodosius is luminous and foreboding in candlelight, walls covered with bloody saints and gold. My mother doesn’t like that my grandfather takes me there. She says the priest would like to murder all the Jews.

  My grandma can’t stand Grandpa’s church either, or any other. When she’s not working in the credit office at Acorn Chemical Company, she shuffles around in pink floppy slippers, hand on hip, cigarette hanging from her pink, pouty lips. She carries a little notepad in the pocket of her housecoat that hangs below her knees. She is two inches shy of five feet and everything she wears looks too long. Grandma writes down phrases by Trotsky, Lenin, and Marx and pulls them out as needed. “Religion is the opiate of the people!” she says, squinting behind Coke-bottle glasses.

  At the eastern end of Saint Theodosius is a wall of icons rising up to the ceiling, the iconostasis—the golden wall separating sanctuary from nave. In the center is the “Beautiful Gate” through which only the priest and clergy can pass. People cry in front of the pictures and pray. The wall is a door between this world and the next, between sinners and the Incarnate God, His Mother, the angels, and the saints. In the church, there are deep voices chanting, incense and candles, and glowing things in every dark mysterious corner. What is on the other side of the golden wall? What do the pictures mean? Can a painting save a person’s life?

  I’m at our grandparents’, sitting on the couch with my mother, listening to the radio drone on about how many soldiers are dying. I learn the word amputee and hobble around, pretending I am wounded in the jungles of Vietnam. Everywhere I go I hear about kids who’ve lost their fathers in the war. It’s on the radio and television, in the Plain Dealer and the Life magazine that gets delivered to the house. Is my father there too? My mother listens to the news while I stare at the pictures in Life of corpses in mass graves, hippies holding flowers out to soldiers in tanks. I’ve been Aunt Toda’s apprentice for months now and haven’t healed a single man, woman, or child and I’ve yet to see a miracle in the church with the big green dome. I pray in front of the golden wall every time my grandfather and I go, but nothing happens. Everyone I’m supposed to heal is still sick or dead. I’d rather watch The Monkees on TV or play Pioneer Days in the backyard with Rachel and Patty than sit beside people suffering from cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and stroke.

  It’s hot and my thighs stick to the thick plastic covering Grandma puts on all the furniture for protection. The furniture is old but she keeps the plastic on anyway. “Someday everything will be nice and new,” she says, “just like in House Beautiful.” My mother sits smoking, staring into space. “Catatonic,” the doctors have recently decided. Every time she’s admitted to the hospital, they give her shock treatment and a different diagnosis: Disassociative. Antisocial. Manic-depressive. Delusional. Psychotic. Paranoid schizophrenic. Hysterical. Mad. The kids in the neighborhood call her a drunk.

  I take my mother’s hand in mine. Her hands are cold, even in summer. Her latest obsession is the Jewish military leader, Moshe Dayan. She keeps a picture of him by her bed and takes it out from time to time to stare at it; she has conversations with him in her head. He wears a black patch over one eye just like I wore when I was five. I have no idea who he is but I think he’s a Nazi because his smile looks evil. There’s talk of my mother getting shock therapy yet again, of zapping the sick part right out of her head. She sits in silence, her ear tilted to news about massacres, jungles going up in flames. She smokes one cigarette after another. I picture my breath going into her body like a flowing river, a river of light, flowers, and vines.

  My grandparents have only one plant in their house, a spindly pathos with heart-shaped leaves that hangs over the kitchen sink from a small brass pot that can barely contain its twenty-year roots. Grandma pours leftover coffee in it sometimes, old tea and juice. When my mother comes over, the place looks like a bar—there are three people smoking eight to nine packs of cigarettes a day between them. How does that plant keep on growing? Sometimes I picture it creeping from its pot, slinking along the floor across the living room to my mother, growing into her mouth, filling her heart and lungs with leaves, wrapping its tendrils around her bones.

  “I have to tell you something important,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Don’t drink milk before going to bed.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because rats like milk.”

  “What?”

  “A rat will eat your face off if it smells milk. And Myra?”

  “What?”

  “You girls are my most precious possessions.”

  “I know.”

  “Promise me you’ll never leave.”

  “I promise,” I say.

  Years later, in one of her diaries, she will write: The same unhappy anxious dream as always: I am still young and have small children. The girls are ahead of me walking too fast. I don’t want them to leave. I try to call out their names but no sound comes from me. I have fear of radiation and cannot talk. The girls disappear. They always disappear in my dreams.

  One autumn day, when Toda and I go to Mitchell’s house, everyone is in a hurry. People rush around carrying things; someone wipes his forehead while a nurse hooks
him up to a big white machine. Mitchell’s eyes always look vacant but this time he stares right at me, like he finally knows who I am. There’s the smell of incense and beeswax burning, the smell of cloves. Toda mutters prayers over his body, tells me to go away. Mitchell is dying—why should I go away now? People from the church arrive, short ladies in black babushkas who don’t speak English, talking too loudly for the quiet dark room of a sick man. A woman blows her nose into a handkerchief at the foot of the bed.

  “Go outside and play!” Toda insists, pushing me out of the room. There is no place to go, just a busy street with a tiny front yard. It’s chilly outside and it’s begun to snow. I kick stones down the driveway. I wish my sister were here. We could make games, or sing something from The Monkees, like “Another Pleasant Valley Sunday” or a song from a Broadway show. These people don’t even have a tree. More cars pull into the driveway, men slam doors, women kiss each other’s cheeks and give advice, cry and blow their noses, drink endless cups of thick black Turkish coffee. I sit on the stoop and wait.

  At the funeral, the priest chants and glides toward Mitchell’s casket; his white and gold robes form a great sparkling bell. The crowd parts to let him pass. He stands over Mitchell’s long thin body and blesses him with holy water, then says a prayer as he swings the silver censer back and forth like a pendulum. The smell of burning spices makes me dizzy. I’ve never seen a dead body before. I had seen dead birds before and once saw three dead rabbits, but never a man lying face-up, like a mannequin in a box.

  Toda leans over and kisses Mitchell’s forehead. “Now you,” she says.

  “What?”

  “You kiss him. Don’t worry, I help you up.”

  “No!”

  “Kiss him! People are waiting, now kiss!”

  I start to back away but feel my body lifted off the ground. Toda’s big leathery hands are around my waist and she has me pinned against the casket. She pushes my head down so my nose touches Mitchell’s. Pee is trickling down my legs. I can feel everyone staring.

  “Kiss him,” says Toda. “Do as I say.”

  She hisses something in Bulgarian and pushes me down again. I squirm and kick. I can hear people whispering in the crowd. I’m afraid they will crush me or shove me into the coffin, slam the box shut, and that’ll be that. The line of mourners goes on forever, winding around the corner into the sanctuary of the church. Finally, I slip out of Toda’s sweaty grip and shove my way through the crowd to the door. I heave it open and run around to the back of the church. I pause beneath a crabapple tree and look for a place to hide. But here, in the world of the living, there is only the cold rainy street, the city beyond the hill, the impenetrable sky.

  After Mitchell died that fall, our mother was sent to CPI, Cleveland Psychiatric Institute. She had stayed up several nights in a row, walking back and forth down the street in the rain, shouting about some man in California who she said raped her when she was nineteen. “I just want what’s due me,” she said. “That bastard has to pay up.” When she made cuts all the way up her arms, my grandma finally called the police. “What will people think?” was my grandma’s constant refrain.

  I visit her in the psych ward with my grandma. At first we can’t find her, but then we see her in a corner of the common room, dressed in a nightgown, smoking and talking to herself, a television game show blaring nearby. Grandma and I start to approach her, but are intercepted by a young woman with greasy long dark hair. “Did you bring me something? What’d you bring?” the woman shouts. She looks right at me. I grab my grandma’s hand. “Who invited you to the party, bitch?”

  An elderly white nurse is passing out tiny cups of pills and water. Another nurse, a hefty black woman, doles out cigarettes, one to a patient, then lights them. The nurse with the cigarettes is in earshot. She turns her head.

  “Hey, you little slut,” says the dark-haired woman. “Where’s my money?” The woman is coming straight toward me. “Where’s my fuckin’ money?”

  The black nurse puts the tray down and walks in long strides over to us. She places her hands on her hips and stands in front of the woman, blocking her path. The dark-haired woman backs off, cowering, and shuffles back to her chair.

  Grandma and I go up to my mother and I hug her carefully, as if she were made of glass. She looks up, then quickly looks away, like she is looking for someone who didn’t come.

  “He says... he says... They tie you down here,” she says. “They use microphones, camera tricks.”

  “I made you some pictures,” I say.

  “Where are my cigarettes? Where’s Rachel? You’ve got to get me out of here.”

  I offer her a stack of drawings—bunnies, flowers, horses and dinosaurs, Snoopy and Charlie Brown. For years to come I will make pictures and bring them to the hospital, but her smile, when she sees them, will be ever so brief.

  My mother ignores the pictures, takes a quick puff on her cigarette. She is trembling and cold. How can I stop her from shaking? I wish I had painted a tiny icon she could wear around her neck—a golden saint lifted up by birds or a Madonna with a wreath of flowers around her head.

  “Where’s your sister? You kids have got to get me out of here. They’re poisoning my food. Did someone kidnap Rachel? They’re killing me in this place.”

  I wish I had made a towering wall of luminous saints and flowers, a hundred vats of rosewater, a thousand pots of magic tea.

  She tells me they’re going to perform a lobotomy on her and take out her womb. “It’s common knowledge they sterilize the poor.”

  “Get ahold of yourself, Norma. You don’t know what I have to contend with,” my grandma tells her daughter, who is rocking back and forth. “It’s hard enough with that bastard, and now I got the girls. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll behave.”

  “Give me a cigarette. I’m dying here,” my mother says. “The cheapskates only give you three a day.”

  Later, I’m in the garden with Rachel. I don’t want to tell her about the hospital, the zombies in pajamas, the nurses with their long trays of pills. All that suffocating smoke, the windows with bars, the crazy lady going after me. Instead, I open and close the mouth of a yellow snapdragon, pretending it can talk. We are putting on a play using snapdragons as characters. The cast is made of tiny lions; the cluster of colorful stones and violets by our feet is our stage. We are the Queens of the Flowers, rulers of earth and sky. My sister will make up stories with anything at hand. She can’t help herself—a bunch of wilting daisies, a rotten apple, a caterpillar, or a rock. Outside we can do anything, be anything at all. When we finish our play we run fast holding hands across the three adjoining yards, our grandparents’, the Bentes’, and the Budds’. We run out behind the row of spruce and pine trees, out to the fields and woods to no-man’s-land.

  We would like to keep running and running away. She could write stories and I would paint pictures and explore the world. We could travel to France or maybe to the Amazon. We could live in the jungle or Paris or London or maybe someplace in Africa where people eat breadfruit and antelope meat. We don’t want to be martyrs or priests, doctors or saints. We would like to be wolf pups or birds. We would like to be fast horses. We want to be all the flowers of the field. How far can we go in this stretch of tall grass and goldenrod? How far in this forest of fragrant trees?

  Nobody Hears a Mute But I Hear Myself

  Today when I came back to Friendly Towers, the Jesus Hotel, I sat down and tried to study one of Diego Rivera’s “Day of the Dead” paintings from a book I got out from the library. Unusual for me these days as I am slowly going blind. But blindness doesn’t mean muteness. Nobody hears a mute but I hear myself. In the picture I could make out white skeletons floating in the air and the color red, and faces like the masked people I see in the corners of my room. The picture was trying to tell me something. But as I stared at it, a radiologist in the clinic across the street or perhaps the drug pusher next door, or someone from my future who I haven’t seen yet, p
rojected gas into the room and I dozed off with the book in my lap. As they say, the days fly by whether you are in or out of love. Or in my case, a Baby of the War left without a pot to piss in. In regards to pain and sorrow, you might say it is the universal human condition. But I have learned to discipline myself and reserve my pain and sorrow only for sleep time. That said, sometimes in my dreams I am taken out of the city to a place where they monitor the hearts of Jews and other marginalized citizens. Recently, I discovered I was given a pacemaker without consent.

  4

  No se puede mirar. (One cannot look.)

  Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, inscribed below a print from his series Disasters of War

  The Eye of Goya

  Once when she was homeless, my mother sent me a postcard from a Chagall exhibit with a letter written on the back of a Dunkin’ Donuts bag:

  Dear Daughter:

  I am trying to adjust to life with a white cane. Many years ago, there was a man in Cleveland who made a point of rap-tap-tapping by my way but I am a little slow in the game of Simon Says. These days I keep a journal. There is always the continuous anxiety of blanking out again, and I need to be reminded of myself constantly. One can’t always rely on who was there, but on oneself. Within your sphere of interest, the painting you made for me in the 80’s called “Selective Forgetfulness” is missing, stolen or confiscated. I have some Complaints going as you can imagine. By the way, when you translate the message in the above dots, you will learn nine (9) letters of the Braille alphabet. Note to your artist—the color pencils you sent are being used by yours truly. I thank you. P.S. when I have something nice to write about I’ll let you know.