The Memory Closet

by Ninie Hammon

  Then she froze, her eyes got wide.

  I had time to think: Well, I guess she found it, before she bleated, “I don’t know!” again, but this time she sounded like I’d poked her with a cattle prod.

  “I wasn’t there! Jericho took you with him ‘cause somebody had to stay home with the baby.”

  I thought Mama was here. Why’d Bobo have to stay home with Joel?

  “I didn’t see what happened; I don’t know nothing ‘bout it!”

  She scooted her chair back in a rush and started to stand, like she intended to bolt out of the room.

  “Wait!” I was losing her. “I know you weren’t in the car with us. I didn’t mean that, I just wondered—”

  “I’m done. If I’d a’knowed that’s what you wanted to talk about, I could have saved you and me both a whole lot a trouble ‘cause I don’t know nothing.”

  “If you don’t want to talk about the wreck, we won’t talk about it, Ok? We’re not going to talk about the wreck.”

  I reached out and patted her gnarled hand. She relaxed a little, but I had to re-engage her quick. I scrambled to find a safe subject.

  “So … tell me about that morning then, before the wreck.”

  I thought that was an innocuous question but Bobo went off like a bottle rocket.

  “Nothing happened that morning, nothing a’tall!” She stood and grabbed her teeth. “I got me a boatload of work to do and I ain’t goin’ to waste no more time—”

  In another few seconds she’d be gone.

  “My sixth birthday, did Mama bake me a cake?”

  It was like I’d thrown cold water in her face.

  “A cake?”

  “Yeah, a birthday cake. Do you remember? Was it a white cake or chocolate?”

  She looked at me with disdain.

  “Why, I don’t know what kind of birthday cake your mama made you when you was 6. You think I can remember a thing like that after all these years?”

  She hadn’t moved yet. If I could just get her to sit back down.

  “Do you remember any of my birthdays, Bobo? I don’t. Other people remember having parties and getting presents when they were little kids. Maybe Grandpa turned them over his knee and gave them six swats on the butt and ‘one more to grow on.’ I want to remember, too. Please, help me.”

  She didn’t sit down, but she did relax. She looked drained, though. That little snippet of conversation about the accident had worn her out.

  “You let me think on it and I’ll see what I can recall.”

  She dropped her teeth into her apron pocket and reached for the breakfast cereal bowls.

  “Birthdays, huh,” she murmured, stacked my bowl in hers and carried them to the sink. “I mostly remember Christmases. We made over Christmas more, what with the tree and decorations and such. There’s likely something ‘bout your birthdays in that little book, but Christmas—”

  “What book?”

  “Your diary. Now, the Christmas when you was 7, no, it was when you was 8—”

  “I had a diary?”

  “Diary?”

  My heart struggled to bound out of my chest again.

  “Bobo, you said I had a diary.”

  She set the cereal bowls in the sink. “Oh, yeah, that brown book. You must have wrote down all sorts of stuff in that book. It was a inch thick. I bet it tells all ‘bout your birthdays.”

  The world stopped on its axis and sat perfectly still. The only movement in the universe was me shaking.

  “This book, the brown book—what makes you think it was my diary?”

  She turned and gave me a withering look. “My first clue was how it said ‘My Diary’ on the front. I figured that pretty much ruled out it being The Farmers’ Almanac or the Sears and Roebuck Catalogue.” She reached under the sink for the bottle of liquid dish washing detergent. “And the second clue was I found it in your room.”

  She squirted the gold liquid on the dishes and turned on the water. “It was when the third floor toilet sprung a leak. I forget how long ago—four, five years maybe. It was before your Mama came back home to live.”

  She washed the dishes as she described the two inches of standing water in the bathroom, how it had run out into the hall and drained down through the floor into the ceiling of my bedroom below. When the plaster got soaked, it let go and water poured through the hole onto my mirrored dressing table. She’d had to take the drawers out to let them dry so the wood wouldn’t warp. And there it was, a book taped to the bottom of the middle drawer.

  I listened in rapt attention, but my mind was multi-tasking. It was throwing confetti and shooting off fireworks, too! A book with all the answers. Could it really be that easy?

  Would I remember them when I read about the events on the pages? Or would it just be basic information—like I knew I had a blue dress with lace around the collar when I was a little girl because I was wearing it in one of the old snapshots. But I couldn’t remember the dress. Could I know all the things that happened, but still have no memories of them? Would it all come back at once?

  “I liked to never got nobody in here to re-plaster that ceiling where the water come through. And when I asked the fella what it was going to cost, he just shook his head and said, ‘Oh, it’ll run ya!’ I knowed right then he was goin’ to charge—”

  “Bobo, where’s the book?”

  “What b—?”

  “The diary! Where’s the diary?”

  “Oh, I don’t have no idea.”

  This can’t be happening.

  “Bobo, please try to remember. Where did you put the book?”

  “Somewhere safe,” she said with conviction, then took her teeth out of her pocket and rinsed them in the cold tap water. “I remember I looked around for a long time ‘fore I found me a place I thought was safe enough, where wouldn’t nothing happen to it.”

  She put her teeth back in, flinched when they connected with her sore gums, then tried to talk without moving her mouth. “I idn’t ont oo ose it ike …”

  “Bobo, I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “I didn’t want to lose it,” she repeated with a grimace of pain, “like that red scarf Barbara lost the day I found the book.”

  “Who’s Barbara?”

  Who’s on first?

  “Edgar’s wife.” The look on her face became positively coquettish. “Barbara don’t know nothing a’tall’s going on; she ain’t figured out the two of us is sweet on each other.” She giggled like a teenager and continued in a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s a secret. Don’t you tell nobody, hear? You promise?”

  “I promise I won’t tell a soul.” I put my head in my hands and struggled not to cry.

  Bobo went to the back door, lifted her faded prairie-settler bonnet off the hook beside the porch light switch, set it on her thin white hair and tied the strings in a bow under her chin. “I got to go feed the chickens.”

  She pushed open the screen door, leaned over and lifted a metal bucket out of the clutter of junk on the porch—an old, hand-crank ice cream freezer, two large washtubs, an open barbecue grill with a bag of charcoal briquettes, a can of starter fluid and a long-nose lighter lying inside, and hand tools she used in the garden.

  Then she stopped and looked back at me, her eyes barely visible in the black tunnel of bonnet.

  “You used to like to help me gather the eggs when you was a little girl.”

  The image formed in my head between one heartbeat and the next.

  The hot, close feel of the small building. The dim interior. The glow of sunlight from the open door. The smell of dirty straw, bird crap, feathers and chicken feed. Fat birds, fluttering off the nests, squawking in protest in the shadows. My hand reaching out toward an empty nest, fingers curling around a small, warm ball down deep in the straw.

  “I found one, Bobo!” I squeal in delight. “I found one!”

  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.”

  Chapter 5

  Outside 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, 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, 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, dingdong-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 wet-back 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.