The Memory Closet

by Ninie Hammon

  “Mama didn’t like Wendy much, did she?”

  Where did that come from?

  My heart was suddenly pounding, my mouth dry. I didn’t know why I’d asked the question or why it was so important. I just knew it was.

  “Oh Lord no, she couldn’t stand that child! Hated every minute she was here.”

  Though I should have been shocked by Bobo’s response, I wasn’t. Some part of me had known the answer before I asked. But her answer begged another question: if Mama hadn’t even liked the kid, why had she totally fallen apart the one time I tried to talk to her about Wendy?

  Bobo was quiet, concentrating on unwinding more thread off the ball. I forced myself to be patient, to rock back and forth, watching the dappled shadows beneath the willow tree dance like flickering flames on a burning log.

  “Wouldn’t even call her by her right name, her Indian name.” Bobo’s gnarled, lumpy fingers worked the hooks again, feeding the thin, crocheted strand into a growing pile on her lap. “Said she wasn’t having no child in her house called Laughs in the Wind, so she shortened it to Windy.”

  Windy! With an i. Not Wendy. My little sister was Laughs in the Wind.

  “Susan couldn’t stand the way Windy was with Jericho, kinda flirty like. I felt sorry for the poor little thing. Her life with her own mama was … well, I don’t know. It wasn’t right’s all I know. That child would come here all tore up, wettin’ her pants—and worse.”

  Bobo suddenly looked at her wrist. There was still no watch there but apparently she saw one because she gathered up her crochet materials and stuffed them down into a small canvas bag. Julia said Bobo never forgot Oprah and even without a watch she knew it was time.

  “So what did Windy do that was ‘worse?’”

  “Windy never done nothing bad. Now you … you was a handful, into everything. There wasn’t nothing you wouldn’t try. Windy just followed along after you like a puppy.”

  She stopped the swing by dragging her feet on the worn slat porch, then began to ease herself slowly out of the seat. I stood and took her elbow to steady her and help her balance, but she shook her arm free.

  “You’ll know I need help standing up when you see me fallin’ down. And you’ll know I’m ready for the bone yard when I fall down and then start looking ‘round for something to do while I’m down there.”

  Then she marched past me into the house and the big oak door swung shut behind her.

  Laughs in the Wind, but Mama called her Windy. And Mama didn’t like her. At least Bobo said Mama didn’t like her. I wondered how much of what the old woman said was true and how much of it emanated from the same cluster of damaged synapses that produced Edgar, Butch, Maria, and Bobo’s conversations with resurrected relatives.

  But like it or not—and I definitely didn’t like it—what she said about Mama and Windy had the ring of truth. It was just hard to imagine my sweet, gentle mother not liking any child.

  The image of the little china-doll girl flashed into my mind, standing with her forehead leaned against the chicken wire when Mama came out onto the porch. This time, when I examined the memory, I didn’t concentrate on Mama. I studied Windy. And there was no denying the look in her dark eyes. She was scared.

  I got up from the rocker, went upstairs to the soon-to-be-an-artstudio and looked through the kid pictures to see if I could make any sense of them before I gave the artwork to Dusty. I’d see him again tomorrow. The thought warmed me, planted a smile on my face.

  Danger! Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!

  I was 36 years old and I’d never had a serious relationship with a man. Ok, I’d never had a relationship of any kind, serious or otherwise, with a man. And no, I was not gay like Uncle Ben.

  It was just that there was nowhere in me that understood how people did that, did relationships. The thought of being emotionally intimate with another human being was absolutely terrifying because … well, because … I couldn’t come up with a reason. I didn’t know why. Why was I afraid of what the rest of the world considered perfectly normal behavior?

  I sat down on the floor next to Petey’s cage, flipped through the pile of pictures and considered the sense I had that things were coming loose inside me, things were wobbling that once were battened down, secure and immovable.

  I’d never questioned fear before. Fear just was. Like the dark ditch of midnight, or the bubbling green clouds of a hailstorm. It was just there, a force profoundly more powerful than I, a relentless predator that stalked the halls and alleyways of my mind. Now, I suddenly wondered why I was afraid, and why other people weren’t.

  Who was that little girl who stuck a water hose down into a ground squirrel hole, who actually touched a tarantula?

  I shuddered uncontrollably at the memory, because I could even remember how the hairy spider had felt in my hand! I wasn’t just hearing somebody tell a story, I remembered. And I remembered how I felt, too, seeing that thing crawling up on Windy, hearing her scream. I wasn’t the slightest bit frightened. I was mad. I was furious!

  How could that little girl have grown up to be me?

  “I’m leaving now,” Julia said from the doorway. “Miss Katherine’s tray is on the floor in the hall.” She gestured toward Bobo’s bedroom door. “And I think there’s something, well, something smells funny in her room. I’ll sneak in tomorrow when she’s downstairs and see what the problem is.”

  When I passed Bobo’s room a few minutes later, the tray was gone. I paused and stepped closer to the door. I could hear voices, an audience laughing. And Julia was right! Something stunk in there, so bad I could smell it through the closed door.

  I was about to knock when I heard Bobo’s voice above the others.

  “It ain’t yours, it’s mine!”

  I turned the knob slowly, opened the door a crack and peeked inside. Even through that small opening, the stench was nauseating.

  A 20-inch television set rested on top of a chest of drawers by the door, on the opposite wall from the bed. But Bobo wasn’t looking at the television set. She had her back to it, and to me, and she was talking to the wall by the window. There was no one there, just a low dresser with a tall mirror.

  “It belongs to me; Julia made it for me.” She was whining like a little kid.

  I pushed the door open an inch farther and could see that Bobo was holding the tray of food Julia had left outside her door.

  “You hadn’t ought to take it; I want it.” She walked slowly toward the wall, toward the dresser, and suddenly I could see what she was looking at, who she was talking to. It was her own reflection in the mirror!

  “Why should you have what belongs to me?” she said to her own image. She set the tray on the dresser in front of the mirror. “Oh, all right, here.” She picked up the sandwich and cookies and held them out to the reflection. “Here it is. Go on, take it, take it all.”

  Then she began to get angry. “I hope you choke, you ugly old witch—all dried up, all shriveled up. Wouldn’t no man want you, homely as you are. I got me a beaux and I’m going to tell my Edgar what you done. You’ll be sorry then. You’ll be sorry!”

  She turned away from the mirror in a huff and set the empty tray on the foot of the bed. I pulled the door closed quickly before she saw me peeking.

  Bobo stayed in her room for the rest of the afternoon, as the sky darkened and the wind picked up and rattled the tree limbs. When she finally went downstairs to start supper, which consisted of heating up the casserole Julia had left for us, I slipped into her room.

  A fetid, cloying reek assaulted me as soon as I opened the door. How could Bobo stand such a stench? There was only one possible explanation, of course. Somewhere along the line, she’d lost her sense of smell.

  I pulled back the curtains and opened the window to let in some air, then went to the mirrored dresser, grabbed one end and pulled it out from the wall.

  The reek of rotted food was so foul I gagged, turned away and swallowed hard to keep from vomiting. Decaying goo was
smeared down the wall behind the dresser, milk had puddled and soured on the floor beneath it. Today’s sandwich and cookies were still recognizable and I could definitely distinguish the olfactory delight of yesterday’s tuna, but the other mold-covered piles of gunk were impossible to identify.

  There was no way to determine how long Bobo had been shoving sandwiches and cookies and cupcakes—whatever was on her Oprah tray—into the three-inch space between the mirror and the dresser, giving her afternoon snack to the “ugly witch” of her own reflection.

  When I went down to the kitchen to get cleaning supplies from the closet opposite the cellar door, Bobo was busy at the sink.

  “I’m making dessert tonight. You like lemon meringue pie?”

  The thought of eating anything made the bile rise in the back of my throat again, but I coughed out a “Yeah, I love it!” and then took two bottles of spray cleaner, rubber gloves, wash cloths, a scrub brush and a small garbage can liner up to her room.

  Holding my breath, I scooped up handfuls of rotted food and dumped them into the garbage bag and then scrubbed scum, mold and clabbered milk off the back of the dresser, the wall and the floor. It took half an hour to clean the mess and Bobo was still working in the kitchen when I finished and went out to the garage.

  The building doubled as a woodshop and the smell of sawdust still lingered in the air even though nobody had sawed a board in there in a quarter of a century. I flipped the light switch. The dusty florescent bulb high in the ceiling sputtered and flickered before it caught. The yellow glow from it revealed two brown plastic garbage cans and a spare tire on one side of the door and an aluminum extension ladder propped against a huge, old-style chest freezer, waist high and probably five feet long, on the other.

  A wheelbarrow leaned against the far wall. Yard implements—a spade, a grubbing hoe, a small shovel, an old iron rake and a multi-tined leaf rake—hung from a rack next to a set of metal shelves lined with cardboard boxes. At the end of the workbench spanning the full length of the back wall, there was a large cabinet with shelves and drawers. Each drawer contained a different size nail, screw or bolt, but the shelves were empty except for a dusty can of hinge lubricant, WD-40.

  All manner of hand tools hung from hooks on the wall above the workbench where their shapes had been outlined in black Magic Marker. A hammer, saws, screw drivers, small wrenches, pipe wrenches, C-clamps, a plumb line, a level, a T-square, a sledge hammer. I found what I was looking for easily enough—an adjustable wrench.

  The mirror where Bobo’s witch lived was attached to the dresser by two brackets, one on each side, resting on a two-inch-thick board that stretched all the way across the back of the dresser. Each bracket was attached to the dresser with four bolts, and to the mirror with two.

  After I removed the nuts, I eased the four dresser bolts out of the holes carefully, and lowered the mirror, with the brackets still attached, to the floor. Then I turned it on its side facing the wall, shoved the dresser against it to pin it in place, and stepped back to survey my work. The mirror-less dresser looked perfectly normal.

  Still, I couldn’t imagine that Bobo wouldn’t notice, oh by the way, that the dresser that had been in her bedroom for half a century was suddenly missing its mirror.

  By the time we finished supper, the storm had struck. Rain smacked the windows; wind assaulted the trees.

  “You ain’t never in your life had nothing tastes like this!” Bobo said triumphantly as she deposited roughly a third of a lemon meringue pie on my plate.

  And she was right; I’d never tasted anything like it in my life.

  I didn’t know the ingredients of lemon meringue pie, but it was a safe bet that one of them was some form of sugar. There was none in the piece of make-your-eyes-water sour lemon filling that resided under the puffy halo of meringue on my plate.

  “This is … amazing,” I gasped, and somehow managed to swallow the bite without spewing it back out onto the tablecloth.

  “I knowed it.” She cackled. “I knowed you’d like it!”

  How did Mama do it? How did she live for three years in this lunatic asylum?

  And how much longer could Bobo live here before she did something dangerous-crazy? Like getting ptomaine poisoning from eating bad food. Mama said Bobo left the milk sitting out on the counter so often it was always in some stage of going bad, from slightly “blinky” to coagulated. And unless it was as solid as Sakrete in the bottom of the jug, Bobo drank it anyway.

  At what point did you throw in the towel and say she just couldn’t take care of herself anymore? And what did you do about it when you did?

  Chapter 8

  Bobo and I stood in the back yard surveying the damage caused by the storm the night before. The wind had toppled trees and shut off electricity and phone service all over town. We’d gotten off light. The two lines that connected our house to the world drooped in a pendulous smile between a pole on the street and our attic, but somehow they’d survived. The cedar tree hedge that encircled our back and side yards, as thick and sturdy as the Great Wall of China, was undamaged. The tall, skinny Juniper trees in the front yard had swayed like palm trees through decades of West Texas wind.

  “Julia said a twister took the roof off a house over by the railroad track,” Bobo said.

  The hump osteoporosis had planted between her shoulders made it difficult for her to look up, but she leaned back and peered at our roof. “And rolled them trailer houses up like they was gum wrappers. Don’t know why folks live in them things. God don’t like trailer houses.”

  “Bobo!”

  “Well, he don’t, else he’d stop blowing them away ever few months.” She shaded her eyes and squinted up into the sun. “Look there by that back window. The one above the trellis.” She pointed with an arthritis-gnarled finger. “Is that shingle up there next to it loose?”

  I followed her gaze. “If it is, I don’t see it.”

  “Limb from the Peterson’s tree hit the roof and messed up that window years ago. Jericho climbed up the trellis and fixed it, but it won’t open no more from the inside.”

  If she can remember a tree limb hitting the roof 30 years ago, why can’t she remember where she put my diary?

  Julia stepped out on the back porch and called, “Mees Annie, somebody ees here to see jew.”

  Dusty! I never dreamed he’d come before lunch.

  Bobo eyed me, up and down. “So that’s why you got that stuff all over your face.”

  “That ‘stuff’ is makeup, Bobo. If I don’t wear it, I look like a crash dummy.” I started toward the porch.

  “And your hair all neat in a bun, wearing that lacey blouse and them tight jeans.”

  My jeans are not tight!

  She stopped the teasing tone and grew serious. “You do know, don’t you, that wearing jeans tight like that makes you look like you ain’t got no butt whatsoever.”

  I didn’t dignify the remark with a response.

  “Well, you don’t have to be a puddle-glum ‘bout it. How you goin’ to know what your backside looks like if don’t nobody ever tell you?”

  Dusty stood in the parlor, his black Stetson in his hands, looking at the family pictures that marched up the wall with the staircase. His brown Sheriff’s Department uniform was starched crisp; you could have sliced bread with the crease in his pants. He seemed taller than he did yesterday and when he turned toward me, I could feel color begin to rise up my neck and into my cheeks.

  Danger! Danger! Danger, Will—oh shut up, you stupid robot.

  “Hello there,” I said as I emerged from the dining room.”I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.” He flashed a wide enough-to-dry-your-gums-out smile. “I was on my way back to the office from the trailer park on the other side of the tracks. Wind tore it up pretty bad last night.”

  “Nobody got hurt, right? That’s what Julia said.” I came into the parlor, but stopped too short, not close enough to him. There’s a distance apart that people stand when they talk and I wa
s too far away.

  How can I mess up something as simple as when to stop walking?

  But it was too late to fix it and I felt terribly awkward. My face bloomed full-blown rose but Dusty didn’t appear to notice a thing.

  “You look at those trailers and it’s hard to believe anybody got out alive.” He casually took a couple of steps toward me. “Wind blew one of them fifty yards off its base, and—”

  Bobo burst into the room, the Mentholatum stench a step behind her, and rushed past me to grab Dusty’s hand.

  “You ain’t goin’ to take her away, are you?”

  “Take who—?”

  “You come to get her, I know you come to get her, but I don’t know what we’d do ‘thout her.” There was desperation in her voice, but it was calculated, a bid for sympathy.

  Now she’s going to play the poor-little-old-lady card.

  “I’m just a poor old woman, and it’s real hard for me to get around, what with the arthritis and my bad joints and all. She looks after me. I need her.”

  I knew what was going on; Dusty was completely clueless.

  “She thinks you’re the Border Patrol and you’ve come to take Julia back to Mexico.”

  “She ain’t done nothing wrong here. She ain’t broke no law ‘cept being a wet-back.”

  I cringed at the racial slur.

  Dusty, I’d like you to meet my grandmother. She’s a bigot, she stinks and she’s named after a clown.

  “Ma’am, I’m the sheriff and I didn’t come here to take anybody back to Mexico,” Dusty said. “I came here to see Anne.”

  Bobo looked at me questioningly.

  “Don’t you remember me?” he continued. “I lived across the street, at the end of the block, when I was a little boy, used to play here, sat in the porch swing.” He leaned close and stage whispered into her ear, “Even sneaked into your chicken house once, but don’t let on you know or I’ll get in trouble.”

  Bobo cocked her head to one side, studying him.