The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók

Author:Mira Bartók
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

Cleveland is bitterly cold when Rachel and I arrive with Agostino and my sister’s boyfriend Michael in late January 1990. Agostino and I had broken up the year before but were still good friends. I had recently started seeing someone else, a Polish medical student named Robert, but the relationship was too new and I didn’t want him involved.

My sister’s boyfriend and Agostino can’t be more different from one another—blue-eyed Michael, sweet and blond and clean-cut, and Agostino, intimidating with his long dark hair, black leather jacket, brooding dark eyes. The men can play good cop, bad cop, if we need them to.

Outside the house on West 148th the bushes have grown wild. What had been my beloved garden is now a wilderness of brambles and frozen weeds. The ivy my grandfather planted more than fifty years before coils thickly around the house like an icy dark-green shroud.

When the four of us pull into the driveway, our mother runs out to meet us barefoot, wearing a thin dirty nightgown covered with cigarette burns. There’s a flurry of fat wet snowflakes in the chill air but she shows no sign of feeling cold. She’s not wearing her dentures and her face is pinched into the face of someone much older than sixty-four. She bobs back and forth, her tongue darting in and out like it did that day in the courtroom. I feel a stab in my chest. This is my mother, this wild creature before me.

“Who the hell is that?” she says, pointing at Michael, whom she has never met.

“His name is Jim,” Rachel lies. “He’s from Chicago.”

My mother turns to Agostino. “What’s he doing here?”

“Hello, Norma,” says Agostino. “Nice to see you too.”

Agostino flashes his warm Abruzzese smile but it doesn’t work any magic; it never has on my mother anyway. She looks like she wants to shoot him. “Go back to Chicago,” she says. “Boys are not welcome here. You two get out!”

Rachel and I had talked this through beforehand and were prepared. We decided that our mother might trust us more at first if we were alone with her.

“That’s fine,” I say. “They can go out for a while.”

We send Michael and Agostino out to shop for food and cleaning supplies. Rachel whispers, “Call us in an hour,” and they leave.

Inside the house, the smell of shit, cigarettes, and rotten meat hovers in the air. It is obvious that she has been living in total squalor for months. She has been drinking coffee from a filthy pot, eating spoiled food. Her hair is unwashed and it looks like she hasn’t clipped her toenails in months. They look like brittle yellow claws.

As soon as they are out of sight, our mother rips the kitchen phone from the wall. It’s an old-fashioned rotary-dial phone and heavy. Rachel and I back away, not knowing if she’s going to throw it at us. But our mother grabs a bottle instead, smashes it against the table, and comes after me, chasing me into the living room.

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