The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  I sit in the cool dank room until my eyes adjust to darkness. It’s quiet here, calm. I sit for twenty minutes or an hour or so or more. No one comes. It’s peaceful among the peppers and the guns. All those jars in rows, such order, such silence. I hear someone walking above my head. I shut the door behind me and go into the other part of the basement where the television is, where my grandma keeps her books, the big ones: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, and James. I reach behind them till I find what’s hidden, shiny and smooth, Grandma’s stack of True Crime magazines. I hear a door open and Grandfather’s heavy feet at the top of the stairs; he singsongs my name into the basement to see where I have gone. “I’m down here, Grandpa,” I say. “No need to worry.” I place the magazine I’d taken inside an oversized book, Beowulf or maybe Westward Ho. I put it there so I can hide it fast.

  Everyone is napping or pretending to nap, and Ginger creeps downstairs with her tail between her legs to sit beside me and gnaw her bone. I turn on the record player. The needle falls onto the worn-down vinyl groove. It’s Maria Callas singing Verdi. I tilt my head to listen. Her voice reminds me of my mother when she sits at the piano but cannot play, her hands suspended above the keys. The song is the ache I feel when I look at Renaissance paintings at the museum—not the angels or the saints, the bloody Christs or prim Madonnas, but what is in the distance: the cypress trees on the horizon, pink clouds tinged with gold, birds disappearing into blue mountains. Callas sings the beckoning world I see inside the white pelican’s eye. Her voice fills me up like a bottomless well and I open the window so she can sing into all the tidy darkening yards and secret lives, into the windows of the red brick houses and the trees where the owls live, where in my dreams I travel and build a home of sticks and feathers and leaves. I sit back down and turn the pages of the latest True Crime. I read about nice old men who lure children into their homes, feed them peppermint candy, soda, and chocolate cake, then kill them, put them in a pot to boil. Callas’s voice soars, drowning out the waking voices above my head, the shifting of feet on creaking floors, windows slammed shut next door. I feel sorry for these old men I read about, how hungry they are for innocence, for someone else’s life—a beating heart, a tiny hand, a delicate and beautiful ear.

  When it’s time to leave for my lesson, I tiptoe past Grandpa, who is passed out on the couch. “Come on,” I whisper to my mother, still planted in the kitchen chair in front of her plate of cold congealing meat. “It’s time to go.”

  She stares ahead at nothing, fork in one hand, in her other a burning cigarette. “Let’s go,” I say. “It’s getting late.”

  I want stay a little longer today, even though it means coming home in the dark; maybe copy of one of the Audubon prints. Maybe today I will start to sketch the pelican. My mother says nothing; I sit down next to her at the table.

  “We should call and tell him we’re going to be late,” I say. “Should I wait for you? Should I see if Rachel wants to go?”

  The clock ticks three o’clock, four o’clock, five. I hold her hand; it is soft and cool. Her fingers are long and slender, and can reach far beyond one octave on the piano. They possess a kind of music I could never play in a million years.

  We are frozen at the table in the kitchen, with its white lace curtains stained yellow from smoke and the spindly pathos plant hanging in the window above the sink. I can hear the sound of a sitcom from the downstairs TV and my grandma’s nervous cackling. Suddenly my mother turns to me, as if she just noticed I am there. Her voice is devoid of feeling.

  “We can’t go there anymore.”

  She has no explanation. I think, could it be just a fleeting fear, one among many? Maybe she’s afraid I’ll get kidnapped. Or a cyclone could hit on our way home. Hadn’t she predicted the flood in July? All those fallen trees, the waters rushing into the streets like the end of the world? My mother warns me all the time now, about what is coming down the road: A tree could fall on your head. A man could rape you. A hurricane could sweep you away. Should Rachel chop up more pills in her food? Would that do the trick? But there are so many Sundays; I’ll get the Khachaturian next week or the week after that. My mother stares right through my face as if I am a ghost and says, “There are those who wish us dead.”

  When school starts up after Christmas, my mother announces one day that a man has been following her. “He’s planning to kidnap and rape us. Do unmentionable things. It’s been planned for months now. Don’t you know that the Gestapo is everywhere? Outside the window, beneath your bed?”

  She keeps the man’s letters in the same drawer where she stores copies of ones she writes to some doctor in Los Angeles. She says he was her psychiatrist when she first became ill and that he raped her at every appointment. “This bastard is targeting all three of us,” she says. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  At first I think the letters from my mother’s stalker are real, and I’m frightened. They are full of sexual references to her body and to her “sexy little girls.” But when I examine them more closely, I’m not so sure. They have my mother’s loopy, trembling m, her messy sprawl of words when she is on a downward spiral, the way she signs our report cards right before a trip to the psych ward. The t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted so hard that there are holes right through the onionskin paper.

  “Go to your room; pull the shades down. Stay away from the window. Someone is watching us. I don’t want you to go to school today.”

  Is that when our mother begins to come into our room late at night when we are deep in our watery dreams? In our grandfather’s house, where closed doors are taboo except for his? Where all the locks have been removed, all the keys thrown away? It’s so easy to just barge in, flip on a light, and interrogate a small, startled child. Has a man ever touched you there? Is that sperm on your leg? Are you having sex for money? Why won’t you tell me the truth? Did Rachel and I heave the dresser against the door then, or did that come later, the next year or the next? We huddle beneath thin blue covers as the door creaks open and the light from the hallway pours in. I am your mother! I have a right to know!

  At night, Rachel climbs into my little bed; we hold hands and tremble. I try to think of all the Audubon birds I know and list them in my head: Painted bunting, swallow-tailed hawk, great cinereous owl, whip-poor-will, the hemlock warbler... When our mother finally returns to her bed in the basement, I lie awake thinking about Audubon, trekking across America, seeking all those elusive birds. I consider what Mr. Benjamin told me once, how Audubon killed up to a hundred birds at a time to create a perfect picture. When I think of my mother beating her cold white fists against our flimsy door, and how I can’t go to my lessons anymore, I don’t know whether to kill her or to take her in my arms and sing her to sleep.

  Each wintry Sunday leading up to my recital in February, I still got dressed and ready to go. My mother could always change her mind. I tried to practice as much as I could, like Mr. Benjamin had suggested, just in case. He had once told me how difficult it was for Audubon to rally support for his Birds of North America. Few believed in him, and most thought he was crazy, his goal out of reach. I envisioned Audubon in the Louisiana bayou with nothing but a shotgun and his paints, surrounded by a labyrinth of brackish waters, interlocked and never-ending. At home, a dark and interminable swamp surrounded us all—my mother’s moments of faint lucidity had disappeared, and Grandpa’s rages became the norm. The days when our mother seemed to not know whether my sister or I came or went were few and far between. Now she had eyes at the back of her head. And yet, when I sat at the piano or when I drew, I felt a glimpse of something boundless and divine, something Audubon must have found in the forest, at the edge of a bog, on the shore of a vast and shimmering sea.

  The day of my recital I woke to the songs of birds—chickadees, juncos, and sparrows, the ones that stay behind, even in winter. I was up before everyone except Ginger, who, like every morning, came running to me to lick my face. Outside my window, the lapis sky was tinged with pi
nk. I packed a sandwich, suited up, and headed out the door. It had rained the day before, but during the night the temperature had dropped. By morning the ground had turned to ice. I plodded slowly across the slippery yard, walked past the tree-lined border separating our yard and the world beyond, and made my way to the woods.

  After a couple tries, I found a tree I could climb. I perched on a low sturdy branch glazed with ice. I leaned against the trunk and waited. I don’t remember if I thought about my recital that day, but I remember what I drew: a little black-capped chickadee, Poecile atricapillus, clinging to the underbelly of a branch. More chickadees arrived and I worked quickly to capture their busy little bodies, their black crowns and throats, their puffy white faces and rusty flanks. They didn’t seem to be afraid of me at all. I could have picked one up and held it in my hand if I wanted, but was content to listen to their song: two single notes, low-pitched and slow. I drew until they vanished in one swift sweep up toward the sky.

  That February 1972 I turned thirteen, started my period, and kissed a black-haired boy who smelled of wintergreen. I let my hair grow long and kept it wild. On Sundays I shoveled manure at the horse stables in the park in exchange for free rides, and one day I lost my virginity on a fast brown mare while racing through a bumpy field without a saddle. I thought about this secretly in English class, while reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, and drew birds and tigers around the margins of the text. I thought of that liquid feeling of losing time and self while sailing through a meadow; how birds rise up from the grasses with one single whoosh; how no one can reach you when you have four strong legs and are galloping toward the horizon. No one can catch you when you are in a tree, minute as a hummingbird beneath a leaf, or on the ice spinning circles around a pond.

  I never returned to Mr. Benjamin’s. Instead, I bought the Khachaturian at a music store and learned the piece on my own. I would play it my way, right or wrong. And maybe someday, in the distant future, I would walk up to my teacher’s big oak door once again.

  These were the things I drew after my year with Audubon: red tanagers eating berries on a branch, the great blue heron, the cormorant and quail. I sketched the common birds around me—sparrow, robin, mourning dove, and chickadee—until, after weeks and months of keen observation, they ceased to be common, but rather things of infinite wonder. I drew what surrounded me, and what lay deep in my wildest dreams—a firebird like one from our Russian fairy-tale book, a bird that sings to the lonely and forsaken deep in the heart of the woods. I thought of the firebird when I played the Khachaturian for the recital that never came, and when our mother burst into our rooms late at night. And one night, in a dream, I followed the white pelican. I grew wings and flew from my grandparents’ roof over the small square yards of red brick houses and rows of sycamore, buckeye, and pine. I flew back to Mr. Benjamin’s quiet house, with its plush carpet of red, his gleaming pianos, his steadfast and magnificent birds. And I kept going—high over Severence Hall, the Art Museum, and lagoon of golden koi and swans, over Terminal Tower and the seedy Flats, the winnowing Cuyahoga, bubbling with petrochemical debris. I kept flying far above the clouds, beyond the dying, smoke-filled city.

  Flood

  Flooding in streets, awoke to more rain. Went for coffee and toast then out again at four a.m. for the obligatory pie. Fell asleep at motel, thinking I wouldn’t mind sitting in on a séance to see if I can plummet something or someone in my subconscious I have never known and should have known, someone from my family perhaps? Then I thought, I wonder how those white birds can fly so far from the lake, and yet are in this area when it rains? These days, one must carry an umbrella wherever one goes.

  Woke up today with strong desire to be “home.” Memory of three figures sitting on the piano bench—two obscured, one a smiling corpse. If I ever have anything close to a normal life, I might feel like killing myself. I have not found my little Atlas since the flood. I think it was stolen. Why? Why the persistent harassment? Wasn’t there something that was going to be done for me? My American College Dictionary was stolen too. I feel toward it as a child feels toward a teddy bear. My reading has been, since the womb, a hodge-podge of letters in a foreign script I have not yet learned. Dream again, this time of Myra who won’t obey me and is trying to run away. There are spectators who leave in cars down a rain-drenched street. The White Goddess says: do not go into that part of the forest but I am always in that part of the forest so what can I do? I wish I had a better biography of myself. Will have better memory when I do more drawings. At our first apartment in Cleveland, the girls made drawings for the walls. I remember sitting there alone, not seeing the pictures even though they were in every room. Memory is tricky. Was I projected into the future? I am feeling distance from the old me. You might say I am wrong but I have evidence: shoes with heels I have not worn in years, my music in storage, this endless, pulsing rain.

  7

  Wing back down the round sleep of waters

  ... tell them it never ends.

  Give me peace.

  Michael Donaghy, from “Envoi”

  The Vigilance of Dolphins

  In my palace is a chamber that is hard to find; inside, an endless sea. To enter you must possess the vigilance of dolphins, which sleep with half their brain awake. You must be swift as a fish; possess the heart of a determined young girl. I stand at the threshold of the room and see them just below the surface of a dream—a pair of sleek white dolphins, arcing through deep waters. It’s my sister and I, transformed by the hand of some benevolent god, escaping into waves.

  There are fleeting pictures in twisted hallways of my palace, improbable stairs, like an Escher print, leading to doors that do not open, rooms too dark to see. This is how the memory of trauma works, how we glimpse forgotten years trapped inside the amygdala, that almond-shaped center of fear in our brain. Years are erased or condensed into hazy snapshots: The three of us moving out of our grandparents’ house into a place called the Stuart House on Triskett Road in 1972. The name resonates with Old English aristocracy, but our two-room basement apartment is really a dump. Barely any furniture: cheap plaid couch made of foam where my mother will sleep, smoke, and interrogate us, plastic card table to eat upon, dirty yellow shades, low ceilings, dark walk-in kitchen. In the room where my sister and I sleep in our single bed, there’s just room enough to turn around. A torn Degas print pinned to the wall, a child’s cheap plastic turntable, a ficus straining toward the sun. An enigmatic self-portrait I will find years later in my mother’s storage unit. The only view out the window is the bottom half of people walking back and forth, or cats meowing to get in, or dogs depositing their business behind a bush. And then this picture: My mother shooting a gun off behind the building. Birds scatter, squirrels, chipmunks, a neighbor’s dog. Doesn’t anyone hear her? Why don’t they call the police? Another image flashes by: My mother showing up at a football game looking for my sister and me, calling out our names on the PA at halftime: Myra, Rachel, come home at once! My sister, on the field, a pom-pom girl in distress, forcing a smile to cheer her team on while sinking deeper into despair, and me slipping into shadows beneath the bleachers, an invisible cat. Then another picture, repeated many times like a Muybridge print: two girls in perpetual motion, heaving a heavy dresser against their bedroom door to keep their mother out. We have been up all night, vigilant, holding down the fort. Let me in, let me in! I’m your mother! I have a right to know! our mother cries, pounding on the door, but what is it she really wants to know? That we have been raped? That we have sex with men for money? She questions us over and over again, the same old thing, it doesn’t matter what we say. This could be an interrogation room in some gray cell in East Berlin circa 1955. There is no right answer for someone so ill; there is nothing to make her stop.

  The year I turned fifteen my mother bought a gun. I had been sifting through her drawers for something, more disturbing letters to that doctor in California, or some other rambling missives to strangers. I’d
look for these things and destroy them, as if by ripping them up or setting them on fire on the top of the stove I could delete them forever from my mother’s brain. I found the gun in her underwear drawer. Or did my sister find it? Did we find it together? We always worked best as a team.

  Our mother said she needed the gun for protection. Protection from whom? I asked. Kidnappers, of course. How could I be so naïve? Patty Hearst, the newspaper baron’s daughter, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. They threw her in the trunk of a car. Now they’re holding her at gunpoint until their demands are met. What’s to stop them from coming here?

  I demanded that my mother tell me where she got the gun and why. How could anyone sell a woman so obviously ill a loaded weapon? She finally confessed that she needed it to kill my sister’s best friend John. He’s a Nazi. You can tell by his name. John Heilman. Heil Mann, my mother said. See? A man who salutes Hitler. It’s right in front of your eyes. My mother could break the secret code for just about anything. We have to arm ourselves against him, she said. Against them all. If I don’t protect you girls, who else is going to?

  “Have you shot the gun at anything?” I asked, trying to remain calm.

  “Just for target practice.”

  “What target?” I said. “Where?”

  “Outside in back. I shot at a garbage can but missed.”

  “You could have killed someone—a child, the neighbors, a dog!”