The Memory Palace (21 page)

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 should 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?”

The woman and her scarves float out of the room. So it was true. A baby has gone missing, or maybe it was stolen, like the old Celtic stories about changelings. How could someone leave a baby and not remember where she put it? Someone taps my shoulder. I turn around. It’s the gamine again.

“So I’ve been thinking about that baby,” she says. “You should check the room with the coats. I thought I heard something in there, like a little cry.”

Amy’s bed is stacked high with coats, hats, and scarves, all sorts of winter things. I start tossing stuff off the bed: jackets, purses, backpacks, portfolios, sketchbooks, socks and shoes. My mother left me at the museum, at the grocery store, at the movies. I could have easily been taken and lost forever. But at least my mother had an excuse—she was sick. What’s wrong with this belly-dancing fool?

From somewhere on the bed, I hear a small muffled sound. I claw wildly at the coats. Where is she? She. How do I know it’s a girl? I just do. And then I see her little face, deep down in the pile, peacefully wedged between two leather coats. She yawns and opens her eyes, smiles up at me, and says—
ga
. Somehow, miraculously, no one had tossed a coat over her head, or a heavy bag. There is just a light wool scarf across her soft sleeping body. I lift her up and hold her to my chest. Her tiny fingers grasp a strand of my hair. She spits goo onto my Holly Golightly dress. The baby gurgles with delight.

“Hello,” I say. “Welcome back.”

I walk through the crowd of masked dancers in search of her mother, my fugitive birds forgotten, the small infant warm against my chest.

“I found her,” I announce to anyone within earshot. “I found the baby.”

A couple friends from school give me a thumbs-up.

Amy and St. Francis are dancing to James Brown, their electric cords dangling behind them like black monkey tails. The gamine is French-kissing an unmasked female gorilla on the love seat. Bill has gone home without saying goodbye. I hold the infant close, her sleepy face nestled against my beating heart. She seems a little feverish but doesn’t cry.

“The baby was buried under a pile of coats,” I explain to Darth Vader and a couple vampires smoking in the hallway. “I’m looking for her mother. Have you seen her? I think she was going this way.”

I Am Still Waiting

I once had a little brick house. Inside was a piano and my mother’s collection: Royal Doulton figurines, white porcelain ladies without faces, a blue boy and pink girl kissing beneath an umbrella, a rabbit with a broken ear. All those teacups from China. Where are they now? Must make an inventory of what I have lost. I’m now staying in a shelter run by Jesus People. There are crucifixes in every room but there is nothing expected of you otherwise. They did ask me recently if I believed in Jesus Christ and I said no, I have a goal instead. To end the persecution I’ve had to restore my home. On the bright side, Myra sent me a letter with a museum calendar of Matisse. The calendar is full of red houses, blue flowers and green ladies. If I had had another life as the person I was supposed to become, I’d go to France and sit at a red table and look out the window at blue and green waves. Someone who wasn’t in hiding would serve me cheese Danishes and coffee without arsenic. About what happened in 1990, my daughter writes to say that I was diagnosed with schizophrenia and that I sold the house myself. I then projected a thought to her that went something like this: “There was someone in the family who was diagnosed schizophrenic, but it was a mistake. This was mother’s nephew and I believe that the diagnosis was to cover up the fact that he was interned in a prisoner of war camp as a young man.” I also projected a thought about my leg embolism and the persistent problem of vision loss, and that I wanted her to come home. I am still waiting.

Every collection is a theater of memories, a dramatization and a mise-en-scéne of personal and collective pasts, of a remembered childhood and of remembrance after death.

Philipp Blom,
To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting

Up a set of stairs and down a dark hall, I hurry to a small locked room. I turn the key; the door swings opens. In the corner of the room sits an old oak cabinet, shelves lined with fossils, minerals, and stones. The cabinet is the illusion of order, the capture of pandemonium and time: drawers of bird bones and speckled eggs, a shaman’s mask, the jawbone of an ancient horse, each neatly placed and labeled. In the bottom drawer is a symmetrical arrangement of specimens—red coral and butterflies, insects, seashells, and snakes. In the center, among the dead things, my grandmother’s most treasured antique: a delicate pink teacup from China, a crack running down its thin gold rim.

After our grandfather died in 1980, Grandma loaded up the white Chevy with all of his guns, drove to Lake Erie, and tossed them all in. Then she drove to the carpet store. She bought wall-to-wall white shag carpeting, like the pictures she envied in
House Beautiful,
and had it installed right up to the toilet on the second-floor bathroom. For chairs, several colonial knockoffs
followed, then a big garish couch and color TV. Why not add to her little porcelain collection too? An antique plate or two, a turn-of-the-century teacup, a slender white deer. It’s been years since she’s bought a thing for herself. “Someday, I’ll give these all to you,” she says. My mother says:
You
are my most precious possession.
Neither of them told my sister or me about our grandfather’s death, or the death of my old dog, Ginger, that swiftly followed, until two weeks after the fact. They never explained why we weren’t invited to the funeral at Saint Theodosius, or his memorial steak lunch at Ponderosa that Grandpa, in his will, insisted should happen in his honor. I was heartbroken when they told me about Ginger, but as for my grandfather, I felt relieved. He had made everyone miserable for so many years, and now that he wasn’t around, Rachel and I could finally talk to our grandma about what to do with our mother. Should we try to get her into a group home? We’d have to get her on a waiting list, since there were so few around. Since Reagan’s massive cuts to social services, many mental health programs had closed down. Rumor had it that my mother’s recovery center was next. Where, then, was my mother supposed to go?