Read Online The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók - Free Book Online Page A

Severence Hall so the three of us can get in for free. She doesn’t talk about the music, but there is something unspoken between us—the way she squeezes my hand when George Szell lifts his baton before the symphony begins. We almost always leave before the concert is over, though, because something inexplicable has happened that makes her whisper obscenities in the aisle.
    In the summer the three of us go to the Impett Park swimming pool, rub zinc oxide on our noses, and nap in the hot sun, our mother’s little transistor radio always tuned to the classical music station. She places the radio right next to her ear, between her head and mine. Rachel and I do handstands in the water; we call out, “Look at me, Mommy! Look at me!” We swim, then play cards, the sound of someone else’s tinny radio bleating nearby, more voices invading my mother’s delicate brain—“Going to a Go-Go,” “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat,” Gary Lewis and the Playboys crooning “This Diamond Ring.” Sometimes all that sound is just too much for her to bear. Within each song is the enemy’s menacing threat. We want to stay but she gets up abruptly, stubs out her cigarette, lights another, and hurries us into the blazing afternoon.
    One summer day, Rachel and I are on our hands and knees in the grass behind our grandparents’ red brick house. We call out to our turtle, who is lost, “Henry, Henry, come back!” We search beneath stones, behind bushes. “Henry, please come home!” The phone inside is ringing. Grandpa shouts from the back door. Rachel and I snap to attention; we run as fast as we canto see what he wants. We can never run fast enough. “You, not her,” he says to me. “Smarties spoil the party.”
    My grandfather and I climb into the shiny white new Chevy and drive east. I can smell the sun-warmed seats and my grandfather’s Old Spice aftershave cologne.
    “Where are we going?” I ask.
    “Girls should be seen and not heard. Just do as you’re told.”
    We stop at a package store to pick up a case of beer. The black guys hanging out in front joke around and slap him on the back. He is everyone’s pal. He goes inside and is gone for a long time. It’s hot and humid in the car. The windows are all rolled up but I sit, hands folded in my lap, and don’t roll them down. When he returns, he totters back to the car, his face red and damp with sweat.
    “Just look at those niggers doing nothin’ all day,” he says.
    Grandpa lights up a big cigar, then starts the engine. “You want ice cream?” he asks. “Ice scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” He tickles me hard in the gut until it hurts, singsonging, “Eenie meenie meiny mo, catch a nigger by the toe!” He buys a mint chocolate chip cone for me down the street, golden vanilla for himself.
    “Who loves you most?” he asks.
    “You do,” I say, ever obedient.
    Grandpa smiles and lays his clammy hand on my little knee. He keeps it there all the way to his sister’s house.
    When we arrive, Aunt Toda is slicing lemons. She makes lemonade just like Grandpa—lots of sugar, a squeeze of orange, and sprig of fresh mint. Toda is a wide woman in wide black skirts, with swollen feet and ankles; she keeps her coarse gray hair piled beneath a black net and a bright red babushka. My grandma says she’s a backward but well-meaning quack. My mother says never trust anyone who believes in saints.
    We sit in her stifling kitchen, windows shut, bundles of herbs hanging above our heads. Toda, like my grandfather, believes the wind carries disease and destruction. Does he think that was how our mother got so sick?Grandpa pops opens a beer. He says something in Bulgarian and goes out back to take a look at her garden. Toda pours me a glass of lemonade and offers me
komat
, the same cheese pie made with feta and buttery filo dough my grandfather bakes on Sundays.
    “Eat,” she says, pushing the plate toward me. “You want a little yogurt? You like the