The Memory Palace (20 page)

“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.

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.