The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  It’s late February, the week of Carnival and my twenty-first birthday, and a costume party is just getting started. Amy is dressed as the Virgin Mary, auburn hair flowing down below the waist of her bright blue gown she has covered with tiny plastic babies and glittering stars. I wonder what my old Catholic and born-again neighbors in Cleveland would think if they came to our party—the Virgin Mary in one corner, the devil in another, everyone else dancing, getting drunk, and making out.

  Amy stands close to the wall so she can plug herself in; her halo and dress draped with Christmas lights twinkle on and off in time to the music. The year before, for Halloween, Amy had been a galaxy, before that the Arc de Triomphe. Next year she wants to be the Eiffel Tower lit up at night. Her costumes always involve large pieces of cardboard, movable parts, and electricity. Her bearded date, Saint Francis of Assisi, has also plugged himself into the wall so his tape recorder, hidden below his burlap robe, can play Gregorian chants all night long. I am a cross between Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and G.I. Joe—broad-brimmed hat tipped over one eye, a little black dress, and combat boots with steel-enforced toes. Perched on my shoulder, a nervous white dove.

  In the center of the room, part of which Amy uses as her studio, is an old claw-foot bathtub filled with ice and beer. Shortly after we moved in, I had pulled a dead rat out of the drain. When I told my mother about it on the phone, she warned me: I told you rats eat your face off at night. You better move right away. When the phone rings I always jump to answer it. I leap at the slightest sound, thinking it’s an emergency and I’m the only one who can perform triage. I’m not really afraid of her hurting me but of her harming herself. Who knows when the voices might tell her to go to the window, open her arms to the world, and fly?

  Since I left Cleveland four years before, my life still revolves around her roller-coaster cycles. There are days when I don’t hear from her. But things always escalate over three or four weeks until the calls starting coming ten to twenty times a day. When the phone rings in the middle of the night I’m sure everyone in the building can hear it. The walls are paper-thin, and someone is always up. The building buzzes with people making art or movies or installations. On the first floor is a painter; on two is a sculptor; above him is a performance artist who choreographs dances inside canoes. There are the animators on six, painters, photographers, filmmakers on four, five, and seven. Can any of them hear my mother talking to me? Can they hear her ask me if I have sperm on my legs, aliens in my bed, a surgically removed womb?

  Ever since I left home in ’76 and she moved back in with my grandparents, my mother has been getting steadily worse. Even though she goes to the occasional “recovery meeting” at the community mental health center they finally built in the neighborhood. She learns little phrases she says to herself to keep her head above water: Pat yourself on the back. Do something constructive every day. Take baby steps and soon you’ll walk a mile. It does help, especially the cooking classes she takes now and then, and the arts-and-crafts workshop where she learns how to make wallets and small things out of clay. She sees a social worker there, and a doctor for free who gives her prescriptions she rarely ever fills. But how much does it help? There’s talk of shutting the center down anyway, now that Reagan is in power. The last time my mother had a setback it was very bad. She took the bus to Chicago and barged into the plant store I was working at over the summer to tell me that a friend of mine was planning to choke me to death with a rope. She started screaming in front of customers and I got fired on the spot. How long before she shows up at the art repair studio where I work, at school, or at the house of one of my friends? When she asks for phone numbers and addresses, I give them to her right away. I am hardwired to tell the truth and obey.

  Our flat is swiftly filling up with monsters, furry beasts, and devils, vampires, and fantastical birds. I watch a couple in orange jump suits and gorilla masks climb up the ladder to a cubbyhole in the wall and disappear. I can’t tell who they are or their sexes, but they seem to be in a hurry. Nearby, in front of a tall window, are steps leading up to a platform with two love seats. Bill, the shy sweet graduate student I’ve been dating, is drinking a beer with a friend. I feel ambivalent about Bill; his Catholic upbringing makes him feel guilty about sex and he is always afraid I will get pregnant. Surprisingly, my mother likes him even though he’s not a Jew, and believes he is going to be famous someday. She wants us to get married and sends us little domestic hints: a set of sheets, dish towels, a frying pan, a clock. When are you going to make me a grandmother? she asks. I hope your womb wasn’t taken out when you were sleep.

  I shout hello across the room to Bill. His shoulders are slumped, his shirt buttoned right up to his chin, even though our place is hot from all the dancing bodies. Bill reminds me of the boys from St. Mel’s, the Catholic school on Triskett; always that look of shame in his eyes, like he’s just done something wrong. I wonder if I have the same guilty look too, from choosing not to stay home to take care of my mother.

  I need a break from the people and the noise, so I head to my studio, a large high-ceilinged room off a long narrow hall. In the doorway, a giant male fairy with butterfly wings is lighting the cigarette of a waiflike girl dressed in black. She looks like a French gamine, a little on the elfish side. Pixie hairdo, tiny turned-up nose.

  “You guys all set for beer?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” says the gamine. “We’re cool.”

  “Great. See you later.”

  “Wait a second,” she says. “There’s some belly dancer looking for a baby. You might want to check it out. She says the baby is sick.”

  “A baby? Sure. I’ll check it out.”

  “See you later,” the male fairy and gamine say in unison then walk out into the hall to mingle.

  I sit down at my drafting table. What’s this business about a baby? I don’t know anyone with children. What kind of person brings a baby to a party like this? Suddenly the phone rings. I lurch across the table to grab it. I know that it’s her, or it could be my grandma, calling me to say my grandpa is dead. His cancer has ravaged his body after four years. He is so frail that he sleeps most of the time, and never raises his voice. He doesn’t even complain when my mother makes long-distance calls throughout the day to check up on her girls.

  It’s my mother and she’s frantic. “Stop whatever you are doing right now,” she says. “This is a matter of life and death.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just got off the phone with your sister in Seattle,” my mother says. “She told me you are going out there in the spring to go on some camping trip. She said you bought... a backpack.”

  “I know. You gave me the money for it for my birthday.”

  “Listen. Do as I say. Very carefully, now, I want you to go to your room. Slowly place the backpack in its original box. No—wait. Better yet, is Bill there?”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “All right. Don’t panic. This is what you do. Call Bill and ask him to put the backpack in the box and close it up tight. Then he is to take it back to the store where you purchased it and return it right away. That contraption is dangerous.”

  “What’s dangerous?”

  “The backpack. The straps could strangle you. You could get killed on a deserted road. There’s no telling what could happen, wearing a thing like that.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “This is no joking matter. Is Bill there now? Put him on the phone.”

  “No, Mother, I told you he’s not.”

  “What’s all that noise in the background? Are there men over there? Who are your associates? What the hell is going on?”

  “I’m watching a show on TV. It’s late. Can we talk about this some other time?”

  “You better take care of this first thing in the morning. Promise me you won’t touch the pack. You’ll keep it in the box. Have Bill take it back. He’s a man. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Okay,” I say.
“I promise.”

  “And honey?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  “I know you do. I love you too.”

  I hang up and feel drained. For every hundred calls from her, there are only one or two that possess some semblance of normalcy, but a detached normalcy, as if she is acting a part in a play. When she isn’t interrogating me, she sounds small and very far away. And then there are rare moments when the wit and genius she was born with shine through, when she makes a brilliant remark about a piece of music or a book, or she tells me some dark and clever joke. It’s then that I forget she is terribly ill. I romanticize her illness; she is my Zelda Fitzgerald, my eccentric and capricious mother, my tormented, talented muse.

  What new terrors will she have tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that? The year before she bought me a heating pad, then made me send it back for fear I would burn to death in my sleep. Now she thinks a backpack will strangle me. I imagine an animated movie of a backpack coming alive, growing in size, and terrorizing a city. I remember what my grandmother always says, “You have to laugh to keep from crying.” I can’t wait to tell my sister about the Killer Backpack. She will most likely turn it into a funny scene in a play.

  At the party, a chubby guy in a pink ball gown and tiara comes into the room and asks in a loud slurred voice, “Hey, you got a baby in there? There’s some chick in a bikini looking for a baby,” then stumbles back out into the hall. Most of the people at the party are drunk or on the way to being there; I barely drink and don’t take drugs. Tonight I will sip one beer all night long and nothing more. You never know what can happen when you lose control—you might have to rescue someone in the middle of the night or, worse, Medusa might show up at your door.

  I should go look for that baby, but sometimes I get tired of being Florence Nightingale or Joan of Arc on a swift white horse. Let someone else save the day for once. What kind of mother loses a baby in someone else’s home, anyway? I wish everyone would leave so I could draw. It seems that every time I throw a party, halfway through I just want to disappear.

  On my wall behind my drafting table are sketches from my drawing class and a storyboard for a short film I am making at school. I love being in art school, love the freedom of working late at night in the editing room after most students have gone home. There’s no phone in the room; no one knows I’m even there.

  My film is a surreal tale about a woman locked up in an attic who believes she is at the North Pole. She imagines that her child has been kidnapped and a broken doll left in its place. For one of the scenes, I filled a room with shattered safety glass and hundreds of tiny white lights to make it look like glimmering ice. Everything in the film radiates—the actors have lights strapped to their bodies beneath gossamer robes; there are lights hidden inside flowers, furniture, and the corners of rooms. I am trying to capture the radiance of the lily I remember from childhood, and my grandfather’s church lit by candlelight at midnight mass.

  Across the wall from the storyboard hangs a painted scroll, a profile of a young girl. The signature at the bottom reads, Lee Godie, French Impressionist. I bought the canvas scroll a few months before from a homeless woman I met across the street from the art museum. The woman approached me and asked, “You want to buy a painting? I’m better than Cézanne.” It was warm outside, but she was wearing a big scruffy coat.

  She opened up her coat like a watch thief, revealing two pictures attached with safety pins: a woman with a rose between her teeth, and a man with a pencil-thin mustache. She held a bundle of paintings in the crook of her arm. I noticed that the woman had two big orange circles painted on each cheek, thick blue eye shadow, and very few teeth; above her real eyebrows she had painted two jet-black fake ones. “I’m Renoir’s daughter,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of me—Lee Godie, French Impressionist, a friend to Cézanne.”

  This woman could be my mother in the future—she could even be me if I didn’t watch out. What would it take for that to happen, to transform into a woman with layers of coats? The loss of friends, my job? Dropping out of school to take care of my mother? Somewhere, long ago, this woman might have had a mother who sang her to sleep, a father who lifted her into the air.

  The woman set her bundle down and unrolled one of the paintings she had been holding, a portrait of a woman and a bird. “Here’s one for you,” she said. “She’s a beauty queen, a Gibson Girl. Fifteen dollars. I call her The Queen of the Night.”

  The party outside my room is getting louder. Someone has put on a Talking Heads tape and turned up the volume. I’m about to go dance when the phone rings yet again.

  “Myra, is that you?”

  “Mother—it’s too late to call.”

  “What are you doing up?”

  “I’m trying to sleep.”

  “What’s all that commotion? Is that really the TV or do you have men over there? Have you talked to Bill about the situation?”

  “What situation?”

  “The backpack. I dozed off and had a dream that you were strangled to death by the straps. You have to do something about this right away. It can’t wait till tomorrow.”

  “Please let me go to sleep.”

  “Promise you’ll take care of it right away.”

  “I promise. I’ll get Bill to return the pack, just let me sleep.”

  “Don’t touch anything. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Good night, Mother. I’m hanging up now.”

  “Wait a minute. Don’t brush me off. We need to talk.”

  “We’ll talk in the morning. Good night.”

  “I have to come see you. We need to discuss some things. I don’t want to talk about them over the phone. It could be tapped.”

  “I really need to sleep now.”

  “What are you hiding from me?”

  “Nothing. Please. We’ll talk first thing in the morning.”

  “Maybe I should come there now. I could take the night bus and be there in the morning. We could go to IHOP and get pancakes and eggs.”

  “I have school on Monday. We’ll talk in the morning. We’ll figure out a time for you to come.”

  “I need to know one thing. Are you and Bill having sex?”

  “Mother!”

  “Do you know about birth control? Have you ever seen a condom?”

  “I’m hanging up right now.”

  “I’m your mother. I have a right to know.”

  “Good night.”

  “Honey, please don’t be mad. We just have things to discuss. I’ll call you tomorrow. Promise you’ll tell Bill about the pack.”

  “I promise. Now good night.”

  After I hang up the phone, a shroud of dread slips over me. Is she heading downhill again? Today it’s a strangling backpack and a disappearing womb—what will tomorrow bring?

  Years later, my mother will carry a backpack of her own. On a park bench, somewhere in the city, she will wake up at dawn, pull her dirty blue blanket over her shoulders, and take out her journal to write:

  Happy Mother’s Day. Wish I were home, or other. Early a.m. lapse of memory for Baby Norma, sleeping on hard bench. More heavy rain. Need to find a better place to snooze. I am feeling very calm today, despite my desperation. My enemies must have sprayed me with something. In the future, I’d like to obtain a bacteria resistant Batman type mask to prevent further infection. Last night in my dream I saw another person I identified as from another planet. They were trying to replace me with someone else. At times like this, I think it would be a good thing to learn, memorize and draw all of the state birds of North America.

  In my studio, I contemplate whether or not to unplug the phone. There’s always the chance of my mother calling the local police if I do. She’s done it before. She could tell them that I was being raped. I decide to leave it plugged in. I get up to join the party and notice the gamine, standing near the door.

  “Some guy just let all your birds out of the cage. I thought you s
hould know.”

  “Oh, crap,” I say. “I better go get them.”

  “Have you found that lost baby yet?”

  “I’m not really looking that hard,” I say. “I think someone made the story up.”

  “Well, good luck. With your birds, I mean. And the baby.”

  I’d like to have a baby someday, maybe even two, but after my art career is doing well. The last time we talked on the phone my sister said she wanted to get her tubes tied. She’s afraid if she has a child it will become schizophrenic. I suppose I should be worried too, but for some reason I’m not. I know some families can be happy. The Armstrongs across the street from my grandparents were. Cathy’s family was. Jerry’s too, or so it seemed. But then, there is always my mother. How safe would that be, to have a child whose grandma hears voices and carries a knife?

  A baby, I think. Lost. Here in our strange cavernous loft. There must be some mistake. And all those birds flying around, hiding in the corners of rooms, ready to swoop down on unsuspecting guests, and the monsters, the fairies, the gorillas in jumpsuits, that would terrify anyone, especially a child.

  In the kitchen, I search for the lost birds. I spy one of them perched on top of our red refrigerator. I reach up slowly to grab it, my hands formed into a cup.

  Behind me, someone says, “Has anyone seen my baby?” The woman pronounces the word baby like beh-BAY. “My ba-bay,” she says again. “I’m looking for my ba-bay. Have you seen it, oui or non?”

  The woman is beautiful, but looks as if she is sleepwalking. She wears a shimmering bikini top, a G-string, red stilettos, and a skirt of translucent scarves. It’s a Moroccan friend of a friend of Amy’s who I heard was coming. The belly dancer is extremely high.

  “Where did you leave it?” I ask.

  “If I knew that, I’d know where my ba-bay was, wouldn’t I?”