The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  “I know what’s what,” she said. “You’re so naïve. We’re Jews. There are those who wish us dead.”

  My sister became frantic when she found out my mother’s plans. What was to stop her from killing all of her friends? What was to stop her from killing us? We took the revolver away from our mother and gave it to our grandma, who took the gun back to the store. She yelled at the owner for selling a firearm to someone who was mentally ill. He gave back our mother’s money and apologized. “Sorry isn’t good enough,” my grandma told him, always more forthright outside the confines of home. “My daughter is a sick person. Anyone can see that. She was going to kill a boy! Who knows what could have happened? You should be ashamed.”

  After the gun, my mother is hospitalized once again, although she isn’t kept in as long as usual. She returns from her two- or three-week incarcerations trembling, inarticulate, and drugged. Which is worse? To lock her up in a place where she is left to sit all day in pajamas, or for us to be locked up in our basement hell, the phone torn from the wall, our mother trying to break into our bedroom late into the night?

  When we are forced to commit her, each stay in the psych ward at CPI—Cleveland Psychiatric Institute—seems to be shorter than the last. This is 1974, and for the last ten years, asylums have been releasing more and more patients out into the streets. This had been President Kennedy’s revolutionary plan for reforming the nation’s shameful treatment of the mentally ill. We would replace our backward state hospital system with newer and better neuroleptic drugs and free comprehensive community care. But for my mother, in 1974, not much has changed. The doctors still pump her with drugs that make her mute, incontinent, and unable to move. They strap her down in restraints and zap her with what she thinks is radiation. She imagines Nazis torturing her. I will fight until the end, she thinks. I will save my girls. There’s a reason for everything. A reason poltergeists set fire to my chair. Everything is a sign. The only change is that they release her before my sister and I have had a chance to catch our breath. The miracle drugs the doctors give her at CPI, first Thorazine, then Haldol, don’t seem to help her at all. As for the comprehensive community care, we are still waiting for it to arrive.

  When I begin my senior year the fall of ’75, my sister leaves for Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The year before, our mother had ripped up all her college acceptance letters but my sister swiftly cleared up that nearly devastating snafu. She is fiercely determined to succeed. What will life be like without her? I am dreadfully sad she is leaving. What if she just disappears; gets tired of all this trouble at home? What if she leaves me too? How heavy is a dresser when you’re the only one pushing it against the door? I feel truly on my own. If there is an emergency, it will be up to me to figure things out. My grandmother doesn’t want the job anymore. She has enough on her plate these days without having to deal with her daughter Norma who is out of control, now that she’s got cataracts, a husband she hates who is sick with cancer, one girl in college, a dog to take care of, a big unruly yard. Since she retired she spends most of her time sitting in front of the TV watching soap operas, sitcoms, detective shows, anything to transport her away. “I’m too tired to deal with this crap,” she informs me. “She’s your responsibility now.”

  There is a picture from that time, after my sister leaves home. It lurks in some subaqueous place in my brain: My mother grabbing my arm and squeezing hard, trying to pull me away from the front door. I push her back; she falls against the red plaid couch littered with ashtrays and plates of old food. Everything falls to the dirty shag-carpeted floor. She comes at me, fists flying; I push her back again.

  I remember the catalyst: me wanting to go out that night with a boy named Jerry from my school. Jerry wants to be a minister or a gospel singer or an artist. He comes from hardship too, but what kind I don’t really know. Something sad from when he and his parents lived down South, before they all found Jesus. When I’m at his house, we make out in his room but never get far. We are both saving ourselves for marriage, and besides, we can hear Milly, his mother, in the kitchen cooking and singing gospel songs and hymns. Jerry’s mom, perfect hair and smile, always baking or sewing clothes, arranging flowers in a vase. His chain-smoking dad, Roy, stout and good-natured, loves to talk about how Jesus, once crucified, rose gloriously from the dead. All three believe in miracles.

  My mother is enraged that I want to date a boy, especially a born-again Christian. She says I am only sixteen and calls me jailbait. “You aren’t going anywhere with that Jesus freak. You’re staying right here. We have a lot to discuss.”

  For the last couple weeks I have been staying with her every evening after school and on weekends because she doesn’t want to be alone, now that it’s just the two of us. I’ve had to take off work from Higbee’s Department Store and call in sick at the Cleveland Play House dinner theater where I work weekend nights. If I don’t get out of our apartment I will explode.

  My mother rises up off the couch and narrows her eyes. “Now sit down and answer my questions.”

  “I am leaving whether you like it or not,” I say.

  She lights a cigarette and takes a quick puff. “Over my dead body.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  “I’m your mother! You must obey!”

  In our stifling living room, I have no miracles up my sleeve and little faith in salvation. I make a move to put on my coat. My mother reaches out to grab my hair.

  I run to the walk-through kitchen. On the stove is a pan of burnt chicken legs, black little things, inedible and shriveled up. The air smells like sour milk and trash; the sink is black with cigarette ashes.

  “I’m calling the police,” I say, and sneak a small carving knife from a drawer into the back pocket of my jeans.

  “I’ll tear the phone out if you do. You stay put or else.”

  “I need to get out of this place or I’ll go nuts.”

  “What are you planning?” she asks. “Who are you really going to see?”

  “I told you a hundred times. I’m going to see Jerry.”

  “Who are his associates? I want you to sit down right now and make a list, names and numbers, addresses too.”

  “I’m warning you,” I say. “Leave me alone or else.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” she shouts. “I’m your mother!”

  I walk to the door but my mother beats me to it. She locks the deadbolt and stands arms crossed, blocking my way. There is no moving her. “All right,” I say, pretending to comply. “Let’s sit down and talk.”

  My mother glares at me, then finally returns to the couch. She lights up another cigarette. “Let’s start with that boy. That Jerry, if that is his real name. No more boys from faith-healing families. It’s going to be a whole new ball game around here.”

  “I thought you liked Jerry.”

  “Don’t question my authority. Just do as I say.”

  She starts in again; she can’t help herself: Did a man ever touch you down there, is your sister a whore, are you menstruating, has someone stolen your womb? I am always trying to be calm, to be passive and invisible, but this time something snaps a little inside. I need to get out of there, even if it’s only an hour or two. I rise from my chair and pull out the knife I had slipped in my pocket. I would never harm her; I just want to scare her off until I can back out of the door. She throws herself on me; suddenly she wants the knife. She is pure adrenaline and fire; so am I. Her lit cigarette drops onto the carpet; we could both go up in smoke, this place, the street, but I don’t care anymore, I just want a little bit of peace. I grab her wrist that reaches for the knife.

  “Stop, you’re hurting me,” she pleads.

  I tell her that I will kill myself if she doesn’t let me leave. I tell her that’s why I got the knife. I’m not serious, for I have never been suicidal, but I want to scare her into stopping. Her response startles me. She picks up the phone and dials the hospital, while I run to the bedroom. She tells the
intake nurse at CPI to prepare a bed for her daughter, who is mentally ill and wants to take her own life. I use the old dresser trick once again, blocking the door. In this moment, it seems fortuitous that we live in a basement, with a window opening right onto the street.

  My mother is still on the phone when I open the window and screen, climb out, and run down Triskett Road. She doesn’t even know that I am gone. I don’t have time to bring a thing—a jacket, a purse, my books for school. I run down the road in the chill autumn air till I come to a gas station and call Jerry with a dime I always keep in the pocket of my pants. There is always a dollar in my shoe.

  The next day, Roy, Jerry’s father, is talking to my mother on the phone. “No, Norma, we won’t let her come back until you get help. Your daughter is fine. She can stay here as long as she likes.” He is kind to her, not condescending. But he is stubborn, unwilling to take me home if she is still there. He tells her that if she shows up at their house, he will call the police.

  For some reason, she backs down. Maybe she is afraid that I’ll never come back. I don’t want to go home. Why would I? Milly, Jerry’s mom, is making me a new set of clothes: a ruffled gray skirt that falls to the floor, a frilly gray-and-white-striped blouse. I look like a Victorian missionary in my new clothes, feminine and prim. Jerry’s mom helps me to make French braids; puts fancy clips in my hair. She cooks sit-down meals of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. At Jerry’s house there is always milk, and cereal in the cupboard, and in the bathroom there are fresh clean towels. The three of them pray before supper, “Thank you, Jesus, for your great and wonderful gifts,” while we hold hands and smile, then tuck in to our meal. After supper Jerry takes me up to his room and we listen to music: bluegrass, gospel, and Christian rock. His attic bedroom is huge, the ceiling pointing up like a steeple. On his knotty pine walls are his paintings, portraits of homeless men, old women standing alone in sad, rainy streets. People he wants to help someday. How long do I stay there? Days? Weeks? I won’t go back until my mother checks herself into the hospital. It’s the only deal I’ll cut with her. She tells me on the phone that I am like Patty Hearst, who fell in love with her captors.

  I don’t remember how my mother ends up back at the hospital. Maybe she agrees to check herself in or maybe my grandmother reluctantly commits her. My grandma hates to make the call. What if the neighbors hear about it? After all these years, she’s still afraid what people will think. While my mother is gone, I live in the apartment by myself. I pay the rent with money I make at Higbee’s and the theater, and my grandmother helps out too. I cook for myself, clean the place up; even have friends over a few times. My friends from school think it’s cool that I have my own apartment. They look longingly at the pool with the cheap concrete patio out back, the tiny kitchenette inside our claustrophobic flat, the coin-operated washers and dryers down the hall with little boxes of powdered soap in machines, the ultramodern avocado-colored everything. “I wish we didn’t have to live in a stupid old house,” one friend says. “Some people have all the luck.”

  When my mother is gone I get busy. I work on my portfolio and fill out college applications for the following year. I work extra hours at Higbee’s so I can save as much money as I can. Rachel reminds me on the phone that when the time comes, I will get out. I’ll have my own place, far away, just like her.

  One warm spring weekend while my mother is still at CPI, Jerry picks me up and tells me he has a surprise. He says we are going on a picnic but he won’t tell me where. After we head out of the city, he stops the car and ties a red bandanna around my eyes. “You can’t look until we get there,” he says. Jerry has packed a basket of food, a blanket to spread on the grass somewhere, and I know once we get there he will sing, and when Jerry sings it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.

  His car has a sunroof, so I stick my head out to feel the wind. It’s like when I was five and wore the black patch over my eye, pretending to be blind, only this time I feel safe and happy with Jerry by my side, my mother far away. It feels like I’m in a boat on the sea, all that wind in my face and hair. I promise myself that someday I will see the ocean. I will sail out so far that I won’t even be able to see any land and then I will jump right in. Below me will be fish and dolphins and whales, and above, the clearest blue sky. If my mother saw me with that bandanna she would think I had been kidnapped, but she isn’t here and I try not to think of her. Jerry takes me down winding roads; opens up all the windows. We are laughing, exuberant, and free. Suddenly the road gets bumpy; we are driving on dirt. “Okay,” he says, “we are almost there. Hold on.” He slows down; the tires roll onto grass, then stop. “You can look now.”

  We are in the biggest meadow I have ever seen. Surrounding us are wildflowers and hills, houses in the distance, a herd of grazing cows. Above is a vast azure sky. “Where are we?” I ask. “Amish country,” says Jerry. No, I think. This isn’t any country; this is heaven. Heaven is a sea of grass, the longest day in the world, and no one to answer to; it is guilt lifted for an afternoon, it is a boy singing, and a girl closing her eyes to listen for a while, to breathe and to rest.

  Later, back at the apartment, my grandma calls to tell me that my mother is coming home. When she arrives she is shaken to her bones—slurred speech, trembling hands, eyes glazed, full of sleep and fear. I know it is only a matter of time before the cycle begins again. But this time, something feels different. The system is changing; I am changing, and in a year I will be leaving home for good. This time, my mother’s return is the beginning of a new kind of knowledge, different from when Medusa first emerged. I feel in my bones that my mother will always be sick. She might have a week or two of some semblance of normalcy. Maybe even a month. But she will forever be spinning in some dangerous orbit, knife in hand, and if I’m not careful, I will forever be that small child frozen behind the wall. At sixteen, I vow to hold on to beauty, no matter what—to sitting in a rich carpet of grass, a concert hall, a museum full of art—in a place that has nothing to do with the unbearable glare of grief.

  In my palace, in a chamber below, I glance back to see my mother across the room pacing, waiting for me to swim back and save her. I can barely make her out, but she is there, a she-wolf moving toward me in sleep, over water, over shore, pulling me into her den. She wanders without love or shelter, ever hungry, waiting for my return. And I am forever a dolphin in blue sleepless waves, swimming toward a distant fathomless light.

  Something is Missing

  Now, after everything else, something is missing. Apparently, someone comes into my storage room every day to make my life miserable. Recently I had to glue Myra’s little horse together. Someone had broken its leg. I am trying hard to come out of their “spell” but they even bid on stolen dreams. It may well have been planned when I was of the age of infancy although I never was an infant any more than I was a child. Do they really die, or do they just metal horse into another costume? The question really is: are they of this planet? There may be those in their world who also suffered wrongdoing, I would not deny that, but I am and will continue to be concerned only with Norma, that is Baby Norma, as I am a baby who has known its bones at birth and a baby who thinks ahead of her time and hopes to be allotted the time of biology and its accompanying changes. They have no knowledge of appearance as they are hideously ugly and an attractive, healthy appearance is only a commodity to them so they can kidnap you and exchange you for someone else. I know how fast they can move when motivated. Do not curse them while walking, even in thought. Be a good girl, Norma. Rest. Study. Stay calm. Keep hate and rage below. Think of all your nursey rhymes. Stay alert. Remember to replace stolen cane, stolen thoughts. Dress warm. I am my own mother.

  8

  Come away, O human child! To the woods and waters wild.

  W. B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child”

  Changelings

  “Mother, when were you the happiest?”

  “When you girls were babies.”

  “Why w
as that?”

  “Because you were all mine.”

  “And what was I like as a baby?”

  “You were very, very good.”

  “How was I good?”

  “You never cried once.”

  There’s a room inside my palace you need to break a spell to enter. In the middle of the room is a small wooden table. Perched on the table is a white dove; beside it is the head of a porcelain doll. The doll’s head is a prop from a short film I made years ago. In it, a madwoman believes her infant has been stolen and a changling has been left in its place.

  It is 1980, and after two years of college in Michigan, I am living in Chicago, going to art school. My mother lives with my grandparents in the old house on 148th Street; my sister is out of school and working in Seattle. I live in a huge loft with my roommate Amy and six pet doves in an old converted warehouse called the Paulina Building. Our neighborhood in Wicker Park, just northwest of downtown, is a mix of Polish bakeries, Mexican apothecaries, and dilapidated brownstones with men who sit on stoops and sing as I pass by: Que bonito culo! Tienes tetas bonitas! At night, our bleak and gritty corner of Milwaukee and Paulina pulses just below the surface. You can hear the thumpety-thump from boom boxes and cars below, gunshots and screeching tires, sirens, breaking glass, and sometimes, late at night, a foreboding silence.

  Amy and I are both twenty-one and go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We work part-time at Matsumoto’s, a Japanese art repair studio downtown, where we paint mended antiques. I also help a quadriplegic artist some evenings to put myself through school. Amy and I split next to nothing to live on the Paulina Building’s top floor, with easy access to the roof. To have so much studio space is worth the gangs and muggings in the neighborhood, the two-shower bathroom that all eight floors have to share, the rickety elevator that rarely works, the neighborhood fires, the cockroaches and occasional rats, the break-ins, and the fact that we are renting a nearly condemned building from slumlords. Everyone covets our place.