The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók Read Free Book Online Page B

see the entire picture, you would notice me on my mother’s lap looking up at her, smiling. What you can’t tell from the photo is that not long after it was taken, my mother tried to fly out of a second-story window.
    The other picture, hanging across from my mother’s photograph, is Caravaggio’s painting of the Gorgon Medusa, right after Perseus cut off her head. I remember someone reading Medusa’s story to me when I was a child, about how men turned to stone when they looked at her and how the hero, Perseus, with his helmet of invisibility, his winged sandals, and sword, slayed the terrible Gorgon. Medusa’s children were born from her spilled blood; one of them was Pegasus. For years I dreamed I was a winged horse, watching, from the sky, my mother’s serpentine head float away from her body.

    In 1964 I am five and my sister is six. We live in a second-floor flat on the west side of Cleveland, next to a church with a small crabapple orchard out back. Most of the tenants in our building are transplants from Appalachia. At dinnertime I can hear the sound of fiddle music and TV drifting through the walls. In our own apartment our mother keeps the classical radio station turned up loud. Triskett Road in the early 1960s is full of fast cars and chattering shoppers, families walking to church, the movie theater, Pick ’n Pay, or Kresge’s five and dime. Off Triskett, on West 148th Street where our grandparents live, and Rainbow, Gramatan, and Tuckahoe, a quiet hush shrouds the side streets after the fathers leave in the morning and the children are hurried off to school.
    Our own father, Paul Herr, had disappeared shortly after our mother divorced him in 1963, a few months after I turned four. Once in a while he sends money but has no permanent home or steady job. My mother says he’s living in a South American jungle, eating snake meat and writing his second book. Sometimes she tells me he is painting pictures in Mexico; sometimes she says he is dead. His first book was called Journey Not to End. Does that mean my father can’t find his way home?
    At school, in my kindergarten class at Riverside Elementary, I run and hide in the cloakroom whenever someone asks me to play house. I don’t know how to play; how would I? Mrs. Bemis comes inside to coax me out. I tell her I am a cat. I curl my hands into claws in front of my face. I’m an invisible cat. Mrs. Bemis is kind and gently leads me to the art table. She gives me paper and crayons, or fat wooden beads to string and count. “You don’t have to play if you don’t want to,” she says. Mrs. Bemis teaches me how to plant seedlings in small pots, how to make butter from a cup of cream.
    There is a boy at school who lives in our building on Triskett Road. He’s not in my class at Riverside but I watch him at recess sometimes, running in wild circles by himself. When the other kids see him, they call out, “Retard!” then run away fast. One day, I am looking for my mother but can’t find her anywhere inside our place. I am on the stairs leading down to the basement when the boy plunges a long pole into my face, not because I call him Retard or some other name; I am just standing in his path. I wake up in the hospital, my face covered in gauze.
    For the rest of the year I wear a black patch over my left eye. It isn’t easy to see. I run into furniture and trip over my feet. At home, in our apartment, I pretend I am blind. I close my good eye and walk with my arms stretched out in front of me, circumnavigating the rooms by sound and touch. I pick up random objects on the floor near my mother’s bed and try to guess what they are: Cracked coffee cup. Empty perfume bottle. Cigarette lighter. Scattered pills. “You’re my little Helen Keller!” she says when my fingers find her soft, cool face. She pulls the black patch up; kisses the spot above my big ugly swollen eye.
    I’m in my sister’s and my bedroom when I hear it one day—a low guttural sound