The Memory Palace (13 page)

This could have happened: I run to my mother and she hugs me, says,
I’m so sorry, sweetheart
. She tells me she tried to go back to the Spanish Room but they had already closed up shop. She’ll never leave me again. She says, “Let’s go get some food, how about that cafeteria downtown? You can get a nice grilled cheese.”

But memory is impossible to ensnare, even if you build a palace to contain it. This could have happened too: I run to her but she doesn’t know I’m there. She’s yelling at someone only she can see and he’s going to be with her
for a very long time, at least forty more years. He will be telling her what to do, what to think, when to write a letter to the police, when to put a knife inside her purse, when to hide a gun for when the Nazis come knocking. He will be there till the day she dies.

“Who were you talking to?” I say.

“No one.”

“But I heard you,” I say. “You were talking to someone.”

“Who were those men?” she asks.

“What?”

“Those men. What did they want? What did they say to you?”

“I didn’t talk to those men. Who were you talking to?”

“You’re imagining things. It wasn’t me.”

“I heard you. Who is it you always talk to? Tell me.”

“No one.”

My mother will always say
no one.

This could be the first day I pay close attention to how we get home so I can remember which streets to cross, which trains to take, and where to make our connections. This could be when I become a navigator in a turbulent city, a master of subway systems and bus routes, when I learn to carry coins in my coat, a hidden dollar in my shoe. Just in case. Later, when I’m ten, traveling by myself on the bus to the museum, I will watch two men smashing all the windows of a store. Another day I’ll witness a man getting mugged in an alleyway; another time, a crowd of people with signs marching toward a police blockade. Cleveland is burning all around us in the sixties; the world is on fire—the river, the dying lake, my mother’s beautiful brain.

And this could have happened—something more mundane: a misheard word said in passing, a misremembered place. A mother loses track of time. She waits on one side of a building while her daughter waits on the other. There is no group of men, no woman laughing, just two people, a mother and child, humming a tune to keep themselves from falling further in the dark.

Movies
I Wish I Had
Never Seen

Awoke hearing my curses, echo of a life under thieves. Dreamed that Myra tells me she works taking care of a boy. I tell her the “boy” is 56, a pedophile on the lam. I ask if the other daughter is in a whorehouse but she remains silent. Later, I walked to Fairview Hospital for dollar coffee; stopped at U-Haul for red thread. Spent night sleeping at the Rapid Transit station on hard bench. $3.70 supper, 50 cents tea. $3 for one pack of cigarettes! B is for Bastards! Think of all words beginning with B to control rage:
Breezy, Bestial, Bewitched.
The
Bactrian
camel has two humps. The Arabian dromedary has only one.
Baron
: In Britain, lowest grade of nobility; a cut of mutton or lamb, two loins and hind-legs, as in “a baron of beef.”
Baron
: an air-cooled gas operated machine gun that uses 303 caliber ammo, fired from the shoulder. I can think of a few men I’d like to use that baby on. B is for
Babies
: where did my little girls go? Sometimes I watch movies to forget. Tonight, highlight of evening at the Manor Motel: Gloria Swanson and William Holden in
Sunset Boulevard
. Made me think of all the movies I wish I had never seen: Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Hts, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Kramer vs. Kramer, One Million Years B.C. and all Tennessee Williams plays put on screen.

But we little know until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in us, urging us across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights....

John Muir,
The Mountains of California

In my mother’s storage unit, I found a box of my favorite books from childhood:
The Call of the Wild, Robinson Crusoe, The Jungle Book
. She had kept all my adventure books and the ones about Arctic exploration, ancient civilizations, and prehistoric worlds. At the bottom was a tattered red book on dinosaurs that she had covered to protect against further decline. Inside, tucked between two pages, was a picture of piano keys, like the one I found inside the book of Russian fairy tales. How many had she made, and why? In another section of the book, marking a chapter on glyptodons, was a note torn from one of her diaries:
February 28th, 2001. Awake to usual Gauguin dawn. No need to read mysteries. Life is a mystery. I am still the stepchild of the universe. I miss Rachel very much. She lives on a ship and plans to return home in the spring. When I think of Myra, I think of Mozart and his early sonatas.

Why did she choose that book and not another? Did she, like me, dream of exploring ancient lands? In her letters, she said that she time-traveled but often against her will. When she took me to the Museum of
Natural History in Cleveland a lifetime ago, did she stare at the dioramas and wish she could climb inside? I wanted to crawl through the glass and enter the timeless world of Inuit hunters searching for seals or creep beneath the shade of an African baobab tree. I longed to enter the den of stuffed wolves, curl up beside them, and sleep for a while.

I made my first diorama when I was ten. I built all of Africa in a day: tiny plastic babies arranged in a circle, snapdragons for lions, and small animals made from clay. I filled up shoe boxes with the Amazon, the Ice Age, and the Pyramids at Giza. Once I built the Mesozoic Era—180 million years in a box—moss, ferns, pebbles, and chicken bones for fossilized remains. A lifetime later I am building a world inside my head: I run down narrow staircases, dark halls and passageways, chased by the fear of forgetting. Inside a room is a diorama from deep time, when dinosaurs ruled the earth.

In 1969, the year our mother’s younger cousin, Philip, shipped out for Vietnam, and our father stopped sending us child support, I turned ten years old. I wondered if we would ever see Philip or our father again, and if, when the astronauts finally landed on the moon, they would find dinosaur bones buried beneath the rocks. How fast does light travel? I wondered. Where does our father sleep? How far is the nearest star?

My sister Rachel thinks about the moon all the time. She’d fly to other galaxies if she could. She is eleven and a half going on twenty and wants to travel as far away from our mother as she can. She and her friends spray Lemon Go Lightly on their hair to make it look kissed by the sun, as if they’ve all just come back from Hawaii. They write secret messages to boys they like, nasty notes to ones they find distasteful and rude. They gather in small groups and discuss which boys are cute, which ones are ugly and dumb. Rachel, who doesn’t have to try hard to be pretty, primps and preens, tying little bows in her thick auburn hair. She knows the words to all the new songs—“Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies, “Build Me up Buttercup” by the Foundations, “Time of the Season” by the Zombies. My favorite records are a 1959 Folkways recording of the Bulgarian Women’s Choir and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf—but I keep that information to myself.

Inside our apartment on Triskett Road the air feels tropical. It’s a cold morning in late February, but you’d never know it with the heat blasting from the radiators. My mother walks into my sister’s and my bedroom wearing only a bra and panties, a wet washcloth stuck in her cleavage to cool her down. I am getting ready for school.

“We’re going to a movie today, just you and me,” she says. “You’ll like it. It’s about dinosaurs—
One Million Years B.C. starring
Raquel Welch. I called the school and told them you were sick. Happy birthday, Baby!”

The year before, on my ninth birthday, my grandfather took me to the pound to pick out a puppy. I chose a tan and white collie-terrier mutt and named her Ginger. Pets are forbidden in our apartment so whenever she barks I lecture her on the benefits of being silent and invisible.

I follow my mother into the living room, Ginger close at my heels. My mother flips on the record player and the sound of trumpets fills the air, music of glory and pronouncement. It’s her favorite Spanish bullfight album. She is in her Latin phase. After the bullfight songs she will probably put on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, or some steamy Brazilian jazz.

“Maybe we should go on a day I don’t have school.”

“You sound just like Grandma. Now get ready and don’t dress like a bum.”

My mother sometimes takes me out of school to see James Bond films with sexy lady spies and masked men in speedboats shooting guns. There are signs embedded in the Bond films—symbols laden with meaning, clues that can unlock a code she’ll decipher later on. Will she find messages in the dinosaur movie too?

My mother wants to take me to a beauty salon to get my first real haircut and manicure before the matinee. My grandfather usually cuts my hair. He makes me wash it with soap and icy cold water in the basement sink to save on money. In the summer he sets up a chair on his front lawn, places a bowl on my head, and trims around it. Neighbors come out of their houses to watch the spectacle. After he cuts my hair I look like Moe from the Three Stooges. Patty from across the street runs over to console me; tells me it isn’t so bad and offers me her half-eaten Fudgsicle.

In the fancy salon, the hairdresser sculpts my hair into a stylish flip with a mini-rat’s-nest teased up the back of my head. I poke the nest with my finger; it feels like the wad of steel wool Grandma uses to clean her pots. My mother gets her hair done too, reads a magazine while she sits under a giant silver dome. Meanwhile, the manicurist dips my fingers into soapy green water. She massages my palms, the tops of my hands, pushes back my cuticles, and trims my dirty jagged nails. My mother, who has been on welfare since our father stopped sending money, pays the lady out of what’s left from her monthly check. Sometimes she spends all of it by the middle of the month, buys a fancy fountain pen for herself, several pounds of frozen shrimp, some T-bone steaks, or takes the three of us to see a play. When my mother and I leave the salon, I hold my hands and arms in front of me, fingers fanned out so I don’t smear my newly painted nails. I keep my head stiff so my hairdo stays in place.

“Put your hands down,” my mother says. “You look like a zombie. Did I ever tell you how your grandpa rubbed bacon fat on my hair to make it shine when I was your age? A pack of dogs used to follow me all the way to school.”

We laugh; my mother takes my hand in hers and we walk like that, all the way to the show. We arrive just before the rain. The theater is almost empty. We sit down in front of a middle-aged bald man just as the lights dim and the big red curtains part.

The narrator of the movie tells us that this is a story of a harsh and unfriendly world, early in the morning of time. He says that there are creatures that sit and wait, beasts who must kill to survive. Clouds swirl across the screen, something explodes, and lava pours down a mountain into a river of fire. But after the lava scene, a scruffy dark-haired caveman appears, wrestling with a warthog. Another man, his father, pulls an animal horn from his loincloth and hands it to the warthog-wrestling son. The son blows the horn, pounds his fake fur-covered chest, then the shaggy tribe squats in a circle, rips the warthog wide open with their hands and teeth, and begins to gorge. The men remind me of my grandfather, how he shovels down a plate of greasy lamb.

A giant iguana comes on the screen, then a fake brontosaurus and a live tarantula blown up as big as a ten-story building. Other creatures come and go, chomping off heads and knocking each other off cliffs and sand dunes. Suddenly, from the primordial mist, a nubile, bronzed Raquel Welch appears, scanning the horizon for mega beasts.

“Goyishe whore,” my mother says. “She’s a bigger slut than Liz Taylor.”

We get a glimpse of silky thigh beneath the cave girl’s animal-skin skirt and a bird’s-eye view of Raquel’s cleavage bursting out from her top. Her unblemished body and luxurious hair remind me of Barbie and the teenage girls in my Archie comic books. “Having fun?” asks my mother, a bit too loudly. “Like the movie?”