The Memory Palace (5 page)

I came across the chiffon scarf I had bought for her in New Orleans years ago. In the same box were many of my favorite books from childhood. I pulled out a collection of Jack London I’d read when I was about eleven. After reading
Call of the Wild
, I became obsessed with polar exploration. If a man could survive by boiling his boots, or walking out onto the glacial ice with nothing but a few sled dogs and a piece of seal blubber in his pocket, then certainly I could withstand whatever obstacles came my way.

At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifully
illustrated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed,
To Rachel, from Daddy.
The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off. Then it dawned on me—both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl. I had always remembered the books and our father’s dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, “The only paradise is paradise lost.”

As I paged through the Russian fairy tale book, a piece of paper fell out—a photocopied picture of a piano keyboard. Was this how my mother played music all these years? Did my homeless mother, once a child prodigy, play Bach inside her head, her hands fluttering over imaginary keys?

What I found next took my breath away. “Nat,” I said. “She saved my pony.”

I took out the old palomino horse I used to call Pony from a torn moldy box. The horse’s right foreleg was broken. My mother had tried to mend it with a piece of packing tape, then wrapped it in a red wool hat I had sent her for her birthday two years before. I put it in my bag to take back to the hotel. In the same box were all the letters I had written my mother over the last seventeen years. There were also photocopies she had made of her letters to me. Natalia glanced over to see what I was looking at. I wondered what she felt as she saw me sifting through the stack. We had barely spoken about our mother for years.

At the bottom of the box were thirteen pairs of scissors. Right after her divorce, when I was four, my mother tried to slit her wrists with a pair of cutting shears and was rushed to the hospital. I remember sitting at the foot of the stairs, my grandfather looming over me, puffing on a cigar. He handed me a rag and told me to wipe the blood off each and every stair. At the top of the staircase was the open door to our apartment; inside, a limp frilly blouse draped over an ironing board, on the floor a pair of scissors and a pool of blood. My sister remembers the incident too but neither of us recalls the other being there. Did it even happen? Before the age of ten, children have a
kind of childhood amnesia. We lack developed language skills and a cognitive sense of self, especially when we are very young. It’s hard to even know if our memories are real. Even though we feel they are, they might not be. And in family narratives, what if the person you learned your early autobiography from couldn’t tell the difference from reality and a dream?

In another box were all the museum date books I had sent my mother over the years. I found a little stuffed owl, a teddy bear, and a children’s book I once sent her called Owl Babies, about a mother owl who disappears but is reunited with her children in the end. There were nursing textbooks and lists of medical schools my mother planned to apply to. When she turned seventy-nine she wrote to tell me that although she was now legally blind she had decided to study medicine:
I am thinking of going to nursing school, maybe in a foreign country. That way, if I ever get sick or lose my sight completely, I’ll know what to do.
I found a set of her teeth stuck inside an old eyeglass case. I uncovered dozens of legal claims filed by her, accusing various moving companies, housing projects, the Chicago Transit Authority and the city of Cleveland of stealing her teeth, her glasses, her house, her hair, her children, her memory, and her youth. I pulled out stacks of drawings she had made of street scenes, family members, flowers, and fairies. One was titled
Rachel Has No Flowers in Her Hair,
a desolate stretch of gray land with nothing in it but one scraggly tree.

Our mother was expecting us and we had already been at U-Haul for over two hours. My hands were so cold I could barely feel my fingers anymore. I’d been about to suggest leaving when I found the box.

“Nattie,” I said. “You better take a look.”

We dragged the heavy box out into the hall. It was stuffed with diaries, seventeen years of secrets: typewritten journals in bulging three-ring binders, others pocket-sized and written by hand. I skimmed through them for half an hour or more, but had to stop. It reminded me of when I was a teenager and hid in our grandparents’ attic, digging through boxes, searching for a father who had disappeared, searching for a mother before she lost her mind. Then I saw several papers stapled together, stuck in between two journals. At the top of the page, my mother had written, “Life Story.” It began like this:

There was danger imparted to me at birth. The street was well kept and quiet during the day. You hardly saw anyone. In 1945 I suffered a childhood nervous breakdown. I was nineteen. My father and I were supposed to go to a party at my uncle’s, but instead, we went to a foreign film and as we returned home by bus on 148th Street, my father became angry and said something about not liking my uncle’s associates. Leaving the bus I dropped coins in the fare box. My father was angry that I paid for myself. He became more and more enraged and I became mildly hysterical. When we were in the house, he seized a lamp and said, “I’ll kill you” to parties unknown. My early childhood was deprived in some respects. I did not view television until 1963 and now I see that little bits of my life in distorted form have gotten into movie stories. I still have received no compensation for that. Ultimately, what I do know is this: I am a homemaker, my records have never been straightened out, and my need for privacy and house is greater than ever. I write this in a motel room looking out onto garbage bins.

I slumped down onto the floor and couldn’t move.
I write this in a motel room looking out onto garbage bins.
How much more did I really want to know about her life on the street? My brain was done for the day.

“Nattie,” I said. “Maybe we should go.” My sister didn’t hear me; she was lost in her own little world. She sprang up into a standing yoga posture, stretching her arms high above her head. Before my injury, I would have been just as resilient. After a few more stretches, Natalia went back in. I gathered my reserves and went back in too.

“Look at this!” she said. She pulled out something big, white, and fuzzy from deep within our mother’s den. It was a teddy bear the size of a toddler, dressed in a festive red dress. The red bow around its neck said 2000.

“It’s a millennium bear,” I said.

I tried to remember where I was on New Year’s Day 2000, but couldn’t. Where was my mother that day? Who gave her this bear? Would she still be here this coming January 1?

“Let’s bring the bear,” said Natalia. “We better go back,” she added. “You look tired. Besides, she’s going to think we’re not going to come.”

Before we left, we made a stack of things our mother might want at the hospital. My sister placed The Brothers Karamazov on the pile and a torn
almanac from 1992. “Definitely this,” she said, holding up our mother’s Glenville High School yearbook from 1945. “She loved looking at pictures of her old friends.”

I flipped through the pages to find her maiden name,
Norma Kurap.
The portrait of her in a simple white blouse was sweet and demure. She was eighteen, and schizophrenia had yet to rear its ugly head. I read the list of activities below her smiling face:
Orchestra, Play Production, Choral Club, Accompanist, Student Council, Music Appreciation Club, National Honor Society,
the list went on. She was voted “Most Versatile” in the Popularity Poll. Her classmates wrote:
Good luck at Carnegie Hall! May your magic piano fingers charm all the hearts of the world
. One boy wrote,
To my dream girl, the sweetest and prettiest gal at Glenville. Another wrote, So when are you going to teach me how to rumba? And another, It will take more than a war to make me forget you
. The introduction to her yearbook, written by a boy named Marvin, is titled “War Baby.” He writes at the end:
We are the class of January, 1945—a war class. We leave Glenville, determined to finish the fight.

I never realized until then that my mother lost her mind the year we dropped the bomb. Seven months after she graduated, in August 1945, America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shortly afterward while on a bus coming home from a movie with her father, the voices inside my mother’s head arrived unannounced, in all their terrible glory.

Our mother was wide awake when we arrived. “Where were you? I thought you weren’t going to come. You girls need to help me. We have to get back to the house before it’s too late.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ve got everything under control.”

“But I’m so worried about everything.” My mother reached up and touched the back of my head. “And you. What about your little noggin? Does it still hurt?”

“My head’s okay,” I said. “Just some problems here and there, you know.”

“You should wear a helmet,” she said. “That way, they can’t get you again.”

When I injured my brain, I almost didn’t write her about it, but changed
my mind. It seemed like the kind of thing a mother should know, even if she was indigent and ill. When I wrote, I spared her the gory details, like I did with most things.

“They stole my memory too,” she whispered, as I straightened out her pillows. “They have their tricks.”

When the truck hit, I was in the passenger’s seat, leaning over, looking for a cassette. The man driving my car, who suffered whiplash in the accident, was a guy I was dating at the time. We were on our way home from my sister’s house in northern New York. The truck driver, who must have fallen asleep, swerved toward the right and tried to put on his brakes. The next thing I recall was a pair of white-gloved hands reaching in to pull me out of the car. I remember a blur of blinking lights, and the feeling of hot lava dripping down the back of my head.

When I eventually told my mother about the accident, I said that I suffered from memory loss, mostly short-term but some long-term memory as well, which isn’t that common with traumatic brain injury. I didn’t tell her about the strange sensations of lost time that one doctor thought might be temporal lobe seizures, or that I no longer could follow directions, that I didn’t know how to leave a tip, and had trouble reading, writing, and doing just about anything that required over ten minutes of concentration. Why tell a homeless woman who slept at the airport that it felt like it was raining inside my body and ants were crawling up and down my legs? My mother thought there were rats living inside her body, aliens in her head.

Natalia and I returned to the storage room before dinner. “We should have worn headlamps,” I said. “It’s like going down into a cave.”

“Let’s not stay long,” said my sister. “I want to go back tonight to see her. How are you doing, by the way? You look exhausted.”

Even though I usually appear fine to the outside world, when I do too many things, say, shop for food and have coffee with a friend on the same day, I might not be able to drive home or talk to anyone for two days after that. If I’m exhausted, I stutter or shut down. If I go to a noisy dinner party, I can easily press down on the accelerator instead of the brake on my way home. Because I didn’t learn how
to drive until I was almost forty, the act of putting my foot on the brake isn’t the same kind of habitual memory as tying my shoe. It’s frightening when the part of my brain that’s supposed to process all those stimuli being hurled at me won’t do its job anymore. I get terribly frustrated with myself and with friends who don’t understand. My judgment isn’t always the best either. I think I’m able to handle much more than I really can.

“You have to drive back, you know,” said Natalia. “We didn’t put me down on the rental. Maybe we should do that tomorrow.”

“I’m fine. Let’s keep going,” I said.

I was packing more journals to take back to the hotel when Natalia found a big black trunk with brass trim. We hauled it out and yanked the top open.

“Jesus,” I said. “I thought these were lost.”

Inside were family photos we thought we’d never see again: our mother at sixteen, smiling from a tenement window, our father’s black-and-white glossy for his first book, our grandfather standing with a menacing grin in the garden, holding a pair of pruning shears. And nestled in a pile of loose photos was my sister’s and my baby album. I skimmed through the pages till I came to a picture of my sister as a chubby toddler, sitting on top of a baby grand, looking at my mother, eyes closed, playing with abandon. My sister seemed frightened in the picture, as if she were about to fall. I imagined her during the fourteen months before I came into the world—an infant living with a gifted and beautiful mother who lived in an alternate universe, a brilliant father who drank himself to sleep each night. A bit like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, I thought. I put the book aside to bring back to the hotel.

Natalia and I continued mining. Inside the trunk, there were pictures I had drawn when I was small, report cards, my art and music awards. I picked up a small plastic grandfather clock to toss into the garbage pile. “Look at this crappy old thing,” I said. “I can’t believe the things she saved.”

“There’s too much here,” said my sister. “I can’t take it all in.”

“I can come back tomorrow by myself.”

“Don’t exclude me. Stop thinking that you have to do everything. It’s annoying.”