Free The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók

jump in the car and drive to Aunt Toda’s house. When my grandfather is drunk we swerve unsteadily along the roads while I hold on tight to my seat. Toda and I visit ailing pregnant women, sick old ladies, old men who smelllike cabbage and pee. Once, we visit a little boy with no hair. “Poison blood,” Toda says in my ear when we leave. “From the Evil Eye.” I place my hands on all of them, close my eyes, and wait.
    One day we go to visit a man named Mitchell, a relative on my grandfather’s side who suffers from multiple sclerosis. He’s in his forties but looks much older; the doctors say he is dying. Mitchell lies on a hospital bed in a dark room, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. A page from a newspaper is projected from a contraption someone has jerry-rigged so he can read what’s going on in the world. The room smells of urine and rosewater. The curtains are drawn, the windows shut tight. Like everyone else on that side of the family, Mitchell’s parents think that the wind carries evil and sickness into the home. Toda dribbles a foul-smelling tea down his throat, then motions for me to get started. I sit beside him like I sit beside the others Toda takes me to, and place my hands upon his arm. I close my eyes and imagine ivy springing from my fingertips, growing into Mitchell’s body, his lifeless arms and legs. Aunt Toda says my hands are magic. She makes me believe they contain rivers and clouds, valleys and colorful birds, someone else’s destiny. I sit in the silent room while Toda gossips and smokes in the kitchen with the family, drinks thick Turkish coffee from little gold cups. When we leave, Mitchell’s father hands Toda a slab of bloody lamb wrapped in brown paper and a fat envelope stuffed with dollars.
    Whenever we return to Mitchell’s, it’s the same routine. Toda forces tea down his throat, mutters a prayer, and leaves me alone in the room. Mitchell never looks at me, or talks, just stares at the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
illuminated above. Sometimes, after I’m done, Toda and I have baklava and sweet black tea in the kitchen with Mitchell’s parents. Toda shows me how to read signs from tea leaves and Turkish coffee grounds. I drain my sugary tea, tip the cup over like her, and spin it three times. I turn it back up, stare into the bottom. The patterns of tiny clumps look like a dancing man, a greenish black heart, a furry monster, and a bird. She predicts I’ll have five children, and a rich husband from the Old Country who won’t beat me. She says nothing about our father coming back or if our mother will get better again.

    It’smorning and my mother has been up all night pacing the floors. (When did the pacing start? Was it the day of Medusa? Was it the day I was born?) She gets ready for bed when the rest of the world is waking. Rachel is reading in our room, and I am in the bathroom watching my mother take a bubble bath. I’ve made a picture for her of a mother horse and its little brown colt. I hold on to it, a scroll rolled up and tied with ribbon, waiting for the right moment to give her the gift.
    She lowers her languid body one limb at a time into the steaming tub, luxuriating beneath the lime-green foam. I sit on the damp floor and listen to her hum. The night before, I could hear her conversing angrily with someone who wasn’t there while
Aida
played on the stereo. (Or was it
La Bohème
, the scene when Mimi dies in Rodolfo’s arms? For every memory about her there is a melody hidden inside my brain.) After her bath, the moment never quite comes to give her the picture, so I stick it in a drawer. Later, someone is reading to me from
Through the Looking Glass.
My mother? My sister? Alice is lost in a garden of talking flowers.
    “O Tiger-lily,” says Alice. “I wish you could talk!”
    “We can talk,” says the flower, “when there’s anybody worth talking to.”
    The radio is on low while my mother naps in her bed. It’s still summer vacation, so Rachel and I run