The Memory Closet: A Novel (5 page)

Bobo was standing with the screen door half open, looking back over her shoulder at me when my eyes suddenly filled with tears.

“Somethin’ the matter? You all right?”

My throat felt so tight I could barely speak.

“I found one, Bobo,” I whispered softly. “I found one.”

O
utside in the chicken yard, Bobo tossed handfuls of chicken feed onto the bare dirt from the pile of it cupped in her apron, crooning, “Here chick-chick-chick, here chick.” I sat very still at the kitchen table. I was afraid if I moved, it would alert the Memory Gestapo and they’d roar up with lights flashing and sirens screaming, slap the cuffs on the unfolding scene in my head and drag it back into the closet.

Remembering was an odd sensation, like standing in a room with a light on a dimmer switch. Somebody turns the dial and the room gradually gets brighter and brighter, revealing more and more detail. When the light’s all the way up, you can see through doorways into other dim rooms. And in those rooms, there are other doors connected to more dim rooms, an infinite world out there in the shadows.

A much younger Bobo, her hair gray instead of white, her face round and tanned, smiles down at me when I hand her the egg. I beg her to let me feed the chickens. She tells me that the last time she let me, I tossed all the feed in one place “and them birds liked to pecked each other to death trying to get at it.”

I hear the screen door slam shut and turn toward the back porch.

A little girl runs down the steps, a strikingly beautiful child, like a life-sized china doll, with alabaster skin and huge dark eyes. Long, silky hair as black as the night sky hangs down to the middle of her back in a mass of curls. Her lips are red and full, but she isn’t smiling. She doesn’t come to the gate; she just runs to the chicken wire fence, sticks her fingers through the holes and leans her forehead against the wire.

“Bobo let me go in the chicken house for eggs,” I tell her. “In the chicken house! And I found one.”

She’s much smaller than I am, tiny and delicate. I know who she is. And though this is the first time I’ve ever “seen” Wendy, her face is suddenly as familiar as my own reflection in a mirror.

“Come on in. I’ll open the gate.”

“I can’t.” She looks back over her shoulder. “I’ll get in trouble.”

Suddenly, Mama is on the porch. So plump! Almost chubby. She shouts at Wendy.

“I didn’t say you could go out and play. You get back in here right now!”

Mama looks odd. I can’t put my finger on how, but something’s not right.

And that was it. Just the tattered scrap of a memory. It was a start, though, and I turned the images over and over in my head, wallowed them around in my mind like sucking all the flavor out of a piece of hard candy. There was little to focus on in the scene; nothing much happened. I thought of Mama standing on the porch shouting at Wendy, and it struck me that my mother had certainly mellowed with age. The woman who raised me always spoke in soft, modulated tones.

Mama’s parenting style was best described as “hovering.” Whatever Joel and I did, she hovered nearby. Did we want a sandwich? She’d be glad to fix us one. How about the temperature, was it warm enough? Too warm? My high school and Joel’s elementary were just a few blocks from our house but she drove us there every day. Joel was 12 years old before she’d let him go down the big slide in the park by himself; I wasn’t allowed to date until I was out of high school—which was fine with me. I was way more scared of that than she was.

Her constant state of anxiety probably wasn’t a particularly healthy mental environment to grow up in. But Joel turned out all right, a kind, loving man who never allowed the labels—dyslexic, learning disabled, developmentally delayed—to define who he was. And I doubt that Mama’s angst affected me one way or the other; I had bigger emotional fish to fry.

The woman on that porch looked like she had bigger fish to fry, too.

I tried to go forward in my memory to what happened after the chicken yard scene and backward to what happened before it, but I found only a hollow, echoing void. There were shadows in the void, though. Pale images. Wendy and I are chasing chickens with a bent coat hanger, trying to catch their legs with the crook. The two of us are under a tree on a blanket playing dolls. And one that’s disturbing: I’m somewhere with her that’s dark and smells like a sewer, and she’s crying. But those were ghosts of memories. If I concentrated, tried to see any one of them clearer, they faded away.

I didn’t push too hard at the edges of what I could recall. Memory felt like a fragile place, and I didn’t want to chance breaking anything there. But I
had
remembered. Not much, but enough. I had a childhood memory just like other people, one I didn’t appropriate from somebody else’s life. It felt grand.

The screen door banged shut behind Bobo when she came back into the house. She went to the refrigerator with the bucket she’d picked up off the porch and began to take eggs out of it and fit them into the open slots in the egg-shaped holes in the door. Those were Bobo’s eggs, the ones she used for cooking. She fit the rest into cardboard egg containers for her housekeeper, Julia. What the Mexican woman did with several dozen eggs a week, I didn’t know.

“Remember anything else?”

I’d described my egg-finding memory to her before she went out to feed the chickens.

“A little. I remembered Wendy.”

Bobo didn’t turn around to look at me, just asked, “What did you remember about Wendy?”

“Nothing much. We were playing, that’s all. It felt like she and I were close, though. Were we?”

“Oh my, yes.” She paused for a moment and I could hear a smile in her scratchy voice. “That child followed you 'round like you was a mama duck. I think she was your live play doll 'cause she was so tiny and pretty.”

She turned and studied my face.

“You don’t remember none of that, do you?”

“Nope, not a thing.”

“You never wanted her to leave. When Jericho’d say, ‘Let’s git,’ you’d tune up and bawl and beg Susan to let her stay. She’d a'cried, too, I think, 'cept she was wrapped tighter than you was, kept her feelings more to herself. But you could tell she didn’t want to go home.”

It felt odd to think of Wendy going “home” to anywhere other than this big old house and strange to consider her living a life separate from mine. Wendy was my stepfather Jericho’s little girl, but I’d never thought of her as my “stepsister,” never once called her that. I didn’t have the memories to explain why, but in my mind, she was every bit as much my little sister as Joel was my little brother. I couldn’t remember her after the accident, but I was devastated that she was gone. I didn’t even know what she looked like anymore, but I remember lying in bed night after night, sobbing into my pillow, a desolate, empty ache inside me.

I didn’t talk about it, though. Nobody else talked about it either. Grief was a private thing. Years later, I tried to talk to Mama about what happened, but I couldn’t stand her tears and the shattered look on her face. I never mentioned Wendy after that, never spoke her name out loud again.

Bobo’s raspy voice startled me.

“I seen what you done so don’t you think you got away with it!”

“What on earth are you talking about?” I had to stifle an urge to look over my shoulder to be sure she wasn’t addressing somebody behind me. She had closed the refrigerator door and stood in the middle of the kitchen with her arms folded over her flat chest.

You could do with a dose of beets yourself, you know.

She was glaring at me, had suddenly turned on me like a sack of hornets.

“What do you think I did?”

She picked up off the countertop a large knife with a dagger point and waggled the vicious-looking blade in my face. “You been messing with my good butcher knife! Ain’t ya?”

“I didn’t—”

“I told you to leave it be, and I mean for you to leave it be!”

“But I—”

“Don’t you even touch this knife; it’ll cut your thumb off.”

Or the BB gun; it’ll put your eye out.

“I finally got me a knife that’s sharp enough to cut up chickens, and it ain’t going to stay sharp if you’re all the time foolin’ with it, using it to cut the Lord only knows what all—”

I was spared the remainder of the it’ll-cut-your-thumb-off speech by the doorbell. It suddenly sang out ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong-ding, and then a voice called in a heavy Spanish accent.

“Mees Katherine, are jew here?”

Bobo looked at her wrist; there was no watch on it.

“That’s Julia and she’s late. I ain’t going to pay her for the whole day.” She finished putting eggs into the cardboard container and fastened it shut. “Julia cleans the house, everything 'cept my room, and I ain’t having nobody poking around in there. I got my stuff like I want it, all packed up and ready. I’m going home the end of the week.”

She went to the back door and set the metal bucket outside on the porch.

“Tell her what you want her to fix you for supper tonight 'cause I won’t be eating here. They’re all throwing me a birthday party.”

I didn’t know who “they” might be, but I did know it wasn’t Bobo’s birthday.

Julia appeared in the doorway that opened from the kitchen into the dining room. It was hard to tell her age because she was so obese, a stereotypical tortilla-fed Hispanic woman, the kind you see in the background of Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. Her face was broad, her cheeks round. A herd of chins marched down into her collar, and her large, pendulous breasts swayed in rhythm with her broad hips when she walked. Her black hair was pulled back in a neat bun at the back of her neck, and the bright smile she offered Bobo revealed teeth that were toothpaste-commercial white.

“You lookin’ good today, Abuela. Because tu nieta ees home, sí?”

“I ain’t your grandmother,” Bobo barked. “And speak English; you’re in America, at least until the Border Patrol shows up and hauls you and all your wetback friends—”

Bobo!

“—back home to Juárez" (pronounced War-eze).

My face went instantly scarlet; I could feel the heat flood into my cheeks. And having a face suddenly transformed into a neon strawberry was humiliating, which made the color deepen.

Ahh embarrassment—the gift that keeps on giving.

But Julia’s smile never wavered. She turned to me and put out her plump hand.

“My name ees Julia García,” she said. “Bienvenido a casa.” Welcome home.

“She ain’t going to be so welcome when you see what she’s got upstairs in the playroom.” Bobo leaned so close to Julia it was a wonder the woman didn’t swoon from the Mentholatum stink. “A big, green parrot—that’s what! And you’re the one’s going to have to clean up after it.”

“It’s not a parrot, it’s a—”

“Un pájaro? Bien! Muy bien. I love pájaros!”

Bobo rolled her eyes and started for the stairs.

“We’ll see how much you love pa-haros when you’re scrubbing bird dookey off the floor. And don’t you be running that sweeper. It’s too loud.”

“Bueno. Later the sweeper, sí?”

Bobo stopped in her tracks, turned slowly and looked at Julia.

“If I’d a meant
later
, chances are I’d a said
later.
Not later. Not now. Not at all. I don’t want you runnin’ no sweeper, period. That thing makes so much noise it feels like somebody’s cuttin’ my ears off with a cheese grater.”

Bobo turned and marched out of the room. Julia watched her go, smiled and shook her head.

“In a little while, she’ll forget she told me not to vacuum,” she said quietly. “I’ll clean the rugs upstairs first so there’s no noise to disturb her
Oprah
this afternoon.”

“Bobo watches
Oprah
?”

“Every day at four o’clock. She forgets a lot of things but she never forgets that. She likes to have something to eat while she watches it, so I fix her a sandwich, cookies or chips and set it on a tray on the floor outside her door. She does
not
want to be disturbed. I think sometimes she has her ‘friends’ over to see the show with her. I hear her talking in there all the time.”

Speaking of talking, Julia’s English was perfect.

“Is it my imagination or did you just lose your Spanish accent?”

She chuckled.

“It’s easier to manage Miss Katherine if she thinks I don’t understand what she’s saying, that I’m a dumb illegal. I can get her to do things like take a bath or wash her hair or put a slip on under her dress, and she doesn’t even bother to argue.”

Her smile broadened.

“She’s always talking about the Immigration Service hauling me back to Juárez. I’ve never been to Juárez, or anywhere else in Mexico for that matter. I’ve never even been to El Paso. My parents were born in Lubbock. I learned Spanish in high school.”

“Still, I’m sorry for what she said.”

“Your grandmother always says exactly what she thinks. I
like
that. I hope I’ve got half her spunk when I’m her age.”

“She mentioned something to me earlier about not paying you, if that’s a problem, I can—”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Your mother set up my salary as an automatic draw from your grandmother’s account.” She paused. “Your mother was a lovely lady, Miss Anne, so beautiful and kind. You must miss her very much.”

It was a sucker punch. Tears sprang to my eyes so quickly I couldn’t keep them from pouring down my cheeks. Julia reached out and patted my shoulder.

“I’m so sorry.”

I struggled for composure, tried to breathe around the hard lump in my belly, the ashy sadness.

“Your pay … “ I stammered. “You were saying Mama set up a bank draw?”

“Almost two years ago. But Miss Katherine still thinks she gives me money. Threatening to dock my pay gives her a sense of control over her life, I think, and she needs that. So I don’t disagree with her; I just try to look properly sorry for whatever she says I did. Some weeks, she actually gives me a check. I just tear it up.”

Mama was right; Julia’s a saint.

The big woman set her purse on the dining room table, ready to get busy.

“I usually start in the bathrooms.”

She waddled into the kitchen for cleaning supplies while she talked and I followed after her. “When you’ve got laundry you want done, just pile it outside your room in the hall.”

The door to the cellar was located under the back staircase that opened out into the far corner of the kitchen. There was a small closet across from the cellar door where furniture polish, paper towels, toilet bowl cleaner and bathtub bubble scrub were stored on shelves; mops and brooms rested on the floor. When Julia opened the closet door, an image appeared in front of my eyes with a flash, like a camera had just captured it.