Free The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók Page B

PTA meetings and open houses at school but never RSVPs. She is just the signature, sometimes neat, sometimes wobbly, at the bottom of my report cards from school. My mother is the mother no one sees—at least not yet.
    Behind the house on West 148th, we each have our favorite things. Grandpa fusses over his tea roses, especially the red ones. He gently plucks Japanese beetles off their leaves each morning and drowns them in a jar of soapy water. He is proud of his fruit trees and has one of each: apple, plum, peach, and pear. Grandpa wears a sleeveless tee and baggy tan pants when he’s working in the garden, his belt loose around his waist. He clenches a cigarette between his teeth as he bends over the bed with his clippers and trowel. I watch and learn. “Dead heads no good,” he says, and shows me how to clip off brown leaves and dying blooms. How to pinch back the parsley, prune a rose’s long thorny stems.
    In spring I help Grandpa clean the beds and plant tiny seeds in rows. When shoots start pushing up through the soil, I weed the beds for hours. I am a good girl; Rachel doesn’t like to weed, she is bad. It’s as simple as that. In the summer, Grandpa takes us to pick yellow peppers on a farm somewhere in the hot sun. I like driving out of the city, the way the factories disappear and turn to rolling hills and fields of waving corn. I love the scent of earth when I’m pulling peppers off tough green stems. I stack the peppers in a basket and count them at the end of the day while Grandpa supervises, a can of Budweiser in one hand, cigarette in the other. He iswaiting for my sister to make a mistake. I want him to think she is good. Things would be easier if he did. She planted a sunflower seed in the hard rocky yard out back of our apartment and it grew six feet tall but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that she teaches our new friend Stephanie, and Patty and me how to write poems in the basement at the house on West 148th. She writes one about seasons on a cracked blackboard on the wood-paneled wall: “Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall / These are seasons count them all / One, two, three, four.” We recite the poem together, then write it down. Rachel checks for our mistakes. My grandfather yells down into the basement, “What you girls doing down there? Smarties spoil the party!”
    Rachel starts a secret club and we meet each week under the magnolia tree, and even though she’s the only one allowed to be president we don’t care because none of us wants the job. Grandpa calls her a little cunt, bitch, whore, words we don’t know the meaning of yet. But she gives us new words—poems and stories, and a phrase no one else can know except the members of our club: “Red snake over the green grass.”
    My sister and I make things in the garden—pictures, stories, garlands of flowers for our hair. We write secret comic books together, a series called
Grumps
. I draw pictures of our grandfather leaning over the table, slurping up food with his hands. I draw him belching, farting, guzzling whiskey and beer, throwing chairs at us with expletives shooting from his mouth. I feel bad about the comics, but they make my sister and grandmother laugh.
    Grandma only loves the garden when our grandfather isn’t there. She waters the lawn to get out of the house. She smokes Benson & Hedges beneath the magnolia tree after Grandpa whips her across the face with his belt for looking at him the wrong way. She smokes outside when he’s inside doing shots while rolling out filo dough and making his thick Bulgarian yogurt. She’d love for him to disappear so she could sit among the flowers, quiet and alone, with a tall glass of lemonade, a cigarette, and a slice of pecan pie.
    “Hey, did ya watch today? I can’t believe she’d go marry that son-of-a-bitch,” my grandma shouts across the bed of roses to Mrs. Bente. Grandma and Edna Bente love thesoaps—
As the World Turns, General Hospital, Days of Our Lives.
    “You