The Memory Closet: A Novel (3 page)

I carried the phone into the studio and turned on the big overhead lights. The panels were lying just as I’d left them. The paint wasn’t even completely dry. I stared at them and at first I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then, I went suddenly cold, and it had nothing to do with standing in my nightgown barefoot on the tile floor. They were hidden better this time, back deeper in the foliage and the shadows. But the eyes were there.

“Anne can you hear me?” a small, distant voice in my hand called out. “Anne?”

I lifted the phone to my ear. “I see them Jack, the eyes, and I don’t know how they got there.”

“Oh, Anne. I’m so sorry.”

Jack was the only person in my life I’d ever told the whole story, well, most of it anyway. There was something about the little man that felt profoundly safe. We were in the Wheat Sheaf Tavern in a village outside London, celebrating my first book contract and swapping life stories—not one of my favorite activities. I’m not sure what loosened my tongue that day. Probably the wine. I had two glasses and I’m a cheap drunk. Whatever the reason, I found myself unloading on him. I told him I’d been in a car wreck when I was 11 years old that caused amnesia, and he’d smiled, patted my hand reassuringly and said he understood. Lots of people lost their memories of serious accidents, happened all the time. But his smile faded when I told him that I’d forgotten more than the wreck; I’d forgotten my whole childhood.

Then the rest of it just came tumbling out, too. I described my two-decade struggle with the fallout from post-traumatic stress syndrome, told him about the demons I’d wrestled and proclaimed that I had finally,
finally
banished them all. I told him I was fine. Just fine.

“Anne, are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“You need help. You know that don’t you?”

If Jack thought I was going to count the tiles on the ceiling in some shrink’s office, he had three or four more thinks coming, but I didn’t tell him that.

“Listen, you take as much time off as you need. I’ll cover for you. I’ll pull the book and tell them we’re putting it on hold right now because we’re thinking about a complete redesign. When you feel better, whenever you’re ready to get back into it, call me and we’ll resurrect Filbert like he was Lazarus.”

It wasn’t that simple, of course. You couldn’t turn reader interest and enthusiasm on and off like a faucet. Filbert was on top right now, not a best-seller, but tantalizingly close. We were even in the preliminary stage—just the first date, not even a goodnight kiss, yet—of negotiations for a video contract. My green friend’s future looked bright. But if Filbert was gone from the scene for very long, he wouldn’t roll the stone away and come strolling out of the tomb alive. He’d stay dead.

“Everything’s going to work out, Filbert’s going on a little amphibian sabbatical, that’s all. Just promise me you’ll get
professional
help this time.”

I’d forgotten I’d told him about my aversion to psychiatrists.

“Anne? Promise me.”

“OK, I promise.”

I think he knew I didn’t mean it.

Bobo shook the Chicago globe again and watched the snow fall.

“An amphibian sabbatical,” I said.

She turned and stared at me.

“Filbert, my tree frog. He’s on an
amphibian sabbatical.”

She put the globe down.

“I don’t have no idea what you just said.”

B
obo did indeed serve fried chicken for supper that night, whether store-bought or recently beheaded I couldn’t tell; she didn’t volunteer a description of its demise and I didn’t ask. The bird was sizzling and popping in a puddle of liquid Crisco in a black iron skillet when I came downstairs.

Beside it on the old gas stove were saucepans of vegetables: creamed corn, new potatoes and green beans. The bounty came from Bobo’s garden out back. Every fall, she canned her vegetable crop in Mason jars and stored them in the cellar. The rest of the world gave up canning for freezing two decades ago but Bobo never was one to follow the latest fad.

She looked up from stirring the green beans and gestured toward the kitchen window, where the back porch light illuminated a swirling cloud of brown.

“It’s still a’tearing up Jake out there. Appears to me the top three inches of the whole state of New Mexico done blew through here on its way to Oklahoma already.”

I hadn’t been out back yet and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I liked remembering the yard the way it used to be—a thick carpet of grass encircled by manicured flower gardens. I didn’t want to replace those images with reality. And reality was that the grass was gone; my 84-year-old grandmother had pulled it all up by the roots, one stem at a time, three years ago. It had taken her the whole summer. Mama told me all about it.

Mama!
For just a heartbeat, she was there, real, alive; I’d forgotten she was gone. 
Remembering sliced into me with a pain so raw and agonizing it was like losing her all over again. I think I gasped out loud.

It’s not true what they say about time, that it heals. The passage of time only blunts your grief so it doesn’t stab you anymore. It just hacks at you with a rusty Boy Scout hatchet.

Tears sprang instantly into my eyes and I struggled not to burst out sobbing, covering up my emotion with a sudden interest in the magnets on the door of Bobo’s refrigerator.

Phillips Rexall Pharmacy—We Deliver.

Oh, Mama, you left a huge hole in my life and I keep stumbling into the emptiness. I expect to see you standing in the doorway or hear you calling me. I miss you!

A pink piggy bank advertising Goshen Savings and Loan Association.

Who can I talk to now, Mama? Nobody else understands it all. Nobody else understands
me.
 

A two-inch beer mug capped in foam proclaiming Lone Star Road House and Saloon.

Where did Bobo get
that?
 

The miniature Big Ben I sent from—

Mama, I’d have come home sooner if I’d known you were sick! Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you—

“Can you get this open?” Bobo held out a Mason jar full of beets. “My arthritis"--pronounced arthur-itis--"has got so bad anymore I ain’t hardly got no strength at all in my hands.”

I took the jar and tried the lid; it held fast. “Where’s your silverware?” I opened a couple of drawers, looking.

“Right here,” she pulled out a drawer next to the sink. “But don’t you be messing with my good knife.”

I took a bread knife out of the drawer and shoved the tip of it between the lid and the glass, wiggled it around a little until it broke the pressurized seal and then the lid unscrewed easily.

“Where’d you learn that trick?”

“Mama taught me.” I managed a weak smile.

“If she knowed it, then I must have taught her.” An emotion I couldn’t identify skittered across Bobo’s face, and she turned abruptly and poured the whole jar of beets into a saucepan. “Last year’s crop of beets was puny.” Her voice was deep, almost ragged. “It takes good dirt to grow beets.”

You think maybe the topsoil would be in better shape if you hadn’t pulled all the grass up out of it by the roots?

For months, during our twice-a-week long-distance phone conversations—Sundays and Wednesdays, lunchtime in Texas, early evening in my stable cottage just outside Oxford—Mama bemoaned the demise of the backyard’s thick, green carpet. The herbal holocaust started with a small bare spot in the back corner by the garage and spread across the rest of the yard like a red tide.

Bobo worked in the cool of early morning. She sat on the ground with her plaid bonnet pulled low over her eyes like a settler hot off a wagon train, white cotton garden gloves on her hands and a basket beside her for the “goat heads” (her word for sticker weeds) she was pulling up. Bobo had just gotten back on her feet after the stroke that had summoned my mother from Louisville to care for her, and Mama hadn’t yet figured out how badly some of the old woman’s circuits had been fried. Every day, Mama would explain patiently that there weren’t any stickers in the yard. But in Bobo’s eyes, every blade of grass was a goat head, and she went after them with a rabid, single-minded vengeance.

Mama predicted that Bobo would “turn the backyard into a sandbox by Thanksgiving.” The job was complete by Labor Day.

Early the next spring, Bobo had gone outside and looked around as if she’d never seen the backyard before. She’d stood in the center of the expanse of bare dirt and turned slowly around, three hundred and sixty degrees, her hands on her hips, tapping her foot.

“Well, if this ain’t a fine mess. What we need’s a garden!”

She’d set about planting one with the same dogged determination she’d employed in pulling up all the grass in the yard the year before. Corn, okra, squash, pole beans by the chicken yard fence so they could climb up the posts, black-eyed peas, cantaloupe, watermelon, and, of course, tomatoes. She’d put the tomato plants by the back porch, Mama said, and every morning when she went out to feed the chickens, she’d pluck one off the vine and eat it like an apple. I smiled at the mental image.

“You just going to stand there a’grinning your gums dry or was you planning on eating supper?”

I pulled out a chair at the table, sat down and picked up my drink.

“Ain’t you going to say grace?”

I stopped with my jelly glass full of orange cola an inch from my mouth. Bobo was staring at me sternly.

“You know better than that, Miss Anne Mitchell. Now, you say us a prayer!”

“Me?”

“You got a mouse in your pocket?”

“Bobo, I stopped saying grace a long time ago.”

“In this house, we bless the food 'fore we eat it.” She leaned toward me and whispered low, so God wouldn’t hear. “Eating unblessed food’ll give you the squirts.”

Well, when you put it that way.

I bowed my head. “God, thank you for this food. Amen. Uh … and for the hands that prepared it. Amen.”

Bobo picked up a red crockery bowl and began to ladle Southern-style green beans, seasoned with at least half a pound of bacon, onto my plate beside the small drumstick I’d already speared from the chicken platter.

“You like fried green tomatoes?” she asked. “There’s some biguns on them plants right now that ain’t ripe yet.”

“Whoa!” I held up my hand. “You’re not feeding a field hand, Bobo. I can’t eat half of that.”

She kept piling on the beans like she hadn’t heard a word I said. Maybe she hadn’t, though Mama never said anything about Bobo going deaf. In fact, her hearing was probably better than mine.

I suffered from tinnitus, ringing in the ears. I hadn’t had a single moment of complete silence my whole life, at least not in the part of it I could remember. My audiologist said there were lots of causes, most likely a blow to the head when I was a child. But he wasn’t nearly as concerned about the cause as the result. He warned me ominously that tinnitus drove some people crazy, that they couldn’t live with the never-ending buzz went nuts listening to the hum and squeal in their heads. I didn’t need an additional reason for insanity; I had plenty already. So I decided the omnipresent sound wasn’t ringing at all. It was applause!

The need for around-the-clock affirmation is likely a sign of severe mental illness.

“I cut them up real thin, makes ‘em crisp, and dip them in a whipped egg. You coat yours in cornmeal or cracker crumbs?”

“I don’t—”

“Cornmeal sticks better, but I think cracker crumbs got a lot more taste. What do you think?”

“Well, I guess cracker crumbs—”

“Cracker crumbs? Honey, you can’t fry green tomatoes in cracker crumbs! Them crumbs won’t stick hardly a’tall. You got to use cornmeal.”

She set the red bowl down, picked up the bowl of beets and plopped a big one down on my plate next to the mound of green beans.

“The truth is, I’ve never fried green—”

“I make a casserole where you layer green tomatoes, fried in cornmeal, with slices of mozzarella cheese.” She deposited another beet on my plate and dipped back into the bowl to fetch me a third.

“That’s enough, Bobo, really.”

She looked me up and down like she was measuring me for a coffin.

“You need to eat them beets, Sugar. My family runs to skinny women, but you’re thin as a fried egg. Flat-chested as one, too.”

I steeled myself for an infomercial on the merits of beets as a breast enlarger, but she gave me neither a sermon nor another beet, just stabbed a thigh off the platter of fried chicken and snuggled it up next to the drumstick on my plate.

“Mozzarella on the bottom, a layer of green tomatoes, more mozzarella, stack it up like that until you fill up the pan. Then you pour tomato sauce over it and sprinkle parmesan cheese on the top.”

She smiled. “Ben don’t like mozzarella, though. Threw it up once when he was little. It come out his nose all stringy-like. You know how it gets sometimes, all stretched out and rubbery?”

I am going to assume that’s a rhetorical question.

“He got choked on them stringy things and he ain’t liked it since.” She chuckled at the memory. “So, I fix up a special little pan for him, all his own, with cheddar cheese 'stead of mozzarella. It don’t taste the same but he don’t care. He’s always so tickled when he sees … “

She stopped suddenly. Her smile slowly drained away and she looked momentarily confused.

Ben was alive, too. For those few seconds, he was alive. Just like Mama.

Then Bobo sat very still while her face rearranged itself into cold, hard lines. In a moment, she turned lifeless eyes on me.

“What?” she asked, her voice empty and distant. "What’re you staring at, Missy? Can’t an old woman eat in peace 'thout you staring a hole through her?”

“I’m sorry, Bobo, I—”

“Ain’t nothing to be sorry about. Just quit gawking at me like I’s a bug on a pin and eat your supper.”

We finished the meal in awkward silence. At least, I felt awkward. I knew she was hurting, and I didn’t know how to deal with my own pain, let alone somebody else’s. I just sat there, as stiff in the chair as a piano teacher, trying to make some dent in the beans, chicken and beets on my plate. I wanted to offer comfort, put my arms around her, maybe, and say something, you know, something, well …
comforting.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I’d always marveled at people who were effortlessly relational, the huggers-who-mean-it kind of people who embraced the hurting with compassion and the whole world with open hearts and giving spirits. They bonded with others on some level I couldn’t begin to understand. I had a comfort zone the size of a gum wrapper— Dentyne—and I guarded it like a fortress. Ask me for more human connection than, “pass the salt,” and I’d pull up the drawbridge, bolt the door, put a bar across it and stand with my back against it, panting.

It’s a safe bet that’s a sign of severe mental illness, too.

Ben had been Bobo’s final surviving son. He’d been the only one of my uncles I knew. If I could remember my childhood, I might have remembered Uncle Joel, too. He’d been killed in a car wreck when I was four. He and Mama had been very close. When my little brother was born five years later, Mama had named the baby Joel. Bobo lost three other sons before I was born.

Katherine and Cecil Wilson had six children between 1941 and 1952. Mama called her father the “original hippie.” While his friends were dodging bullets on the beaches of Iwo Jima and Normandy, Granddaddy was making love, not war. When he’d tried to enlist, the Army doctor had told him he had a weak heart, but it had been strong enough to father five boys in six years. They’d tumbled like puppies around the big old house their father bought and renovated for his ever-expanding brood with the fortune he was rapidly amassing. He owned the only gin in a county that raised cotton by the square mile, and the sudden need for hundreds of thousands of military uniforms kept it running day and night.

But Granddaddy Cecil’s bid to round out his herd of sons at an even half dozen had been spoiled when the sixth child turned out to be a girl, Susan, my mother.

All her life, Mama had heard tales about what rascals her big brothers had been and the shenanigans they’d pulled. When the oldest, Sam, was two, he bit the tail off a neighbor’s Chihuahua. Joel jammed one of his father’s cuff links so far up Richard’s nose, they had to take the child all the way to a hospital in Amarillo to get it removed. Ben and Bob, identical twins, constantly traded identities. They took each other’s tests in elementary school and swapped dates, and sometimes girlfriends, in high school. When one got sick, the other ran a fever. Joel liked fast cars and fast women, but none of the boys ever married. They died young. Or had different inclinations altogether.

Tragedy first struck the family in 1952 right after Mama was born. Sam was 11 and he’d sneaked off with some friends to go fishing in a farm pond. Four-year-old Richard tagged along behind him. When his little brother fell into the murky water, Sam went in after him, even though he didn’t know how to swim. They both drowned. A neighbor told Mama years later that “Katherine come back from the cemetery after burying her boys that day a different woman. No softness in her no more, nothing left but sharp edges.”

Bob was listed as missing in action when his plane was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967. It was six years before he was confirmed dead and his remains sent home to rest with his brothers in the little prairie cemetery. Granddaddy Cecil died that year, and folks always said it wasn’t a heart attack but a broken heart that killed him. After Joel’s car wreck in early 1974, Mama moved back to Goshen with me to live with Bobo. She figured her mother needed her after burying two sons and a husband in less than 12 months. Mama was single. My father had bailed on us to go play bump and tickle with one of the ticket sellers at Churchill Downs when I was just a baby. It was in Goshen that my mother was swept off her feet by the dashing Jericho Johnson, a man as colorful as his name implied.