Open Me (16 page)

Mem tries to imagine the soft pink mouths of the other mothers shrieking awful things, sounds shaped like her mother’s mouth, the wide eyes and bursting face. The terrible words.
You’re a selfish fucking pig
. It doesn’t fit, these words coming out of those salmon-shaded lips, that noise coming from the mothers that Mem watches as they call for their children or bring in the groceries or water their squat, ugly shrubs.

These other mothers aren’t pretty. They have paunches and short hair the color of dirt or sand. They wear khaki shorts that reveal sunken knees
and purple veins, button-down tops that conceal breasts and all hint of breast. Mem imagines them making dinner, soft mothers who check their daughters’ homework after the dishes are done. Mothers who tuck them in at night. Mothers who don’t scream.

(Later in life Mem will learn other people’s houses are never what they seem. Mem will realize that there are no safe homes. She will watch daughters at gravesides, holding tight to their mother-pain like old women clutching handbags. She will remember imagining the rosy mouths of other mothers screaming and wonder, watching the grieving daughters still waiting for forgiveness,
What did she do to you?)

When Mem walks to the sites the other young Wailers and their mothers whisper and defer to her, the way they used to do for her mother. They all want to shake her hand or ask for advice. She never knows what to tell them. She smiles and shrugs, twists her handkerchief, wishing they would all leave her alone.

At one job, a mausoleum site featuring Mexican
osario-style
encryptment, an over-eager novice asks her, “What do you do when you feel like it’s not going to come that day?” She is snub-nosed and freckled, with squinty eyes and a secondhand doole.

“I don’t know,” says Mem. “I guess, just like everybody else. I improvise.” She doesn’t tell them the truth. She doesn’t say,
I picture myself dead. I wish I was dead. I see myself dead with a mouthful of dirt
. But these thoughts are less opaque than usual, and Mem finds another, new thought hiding behind them. It says,
A Master knows how to spend her self, drop by drop, creating a moment that cannot be kept or repeated. My fees are among the highest, my dooles are the finest, and there isn’t a woman among you who can approach me. I’m the legend you’ll never be
. She turns to look at her mother.
Never
. It occurs to her that this is true. It could be true. She will make it true so that her mother’s talent will be seen as mediocre compared to her own. Her mother looks slightly soft now, the flag of black hair less vibrant. How easy it would be to edge her right out of the top position. Mem decides she will do this. She will eclipse her mother with her tears and then
leave her behind.

But then her mother’s new softnesses and dullnesses send pangs of guilt shooting through Mem’s gut. She knows she can never leave. She will never escape. How could she leave her mother? Her mother would never survive such a betrayal. What kind of daughter is she to even think such things? Selfish, shameful, cruel.

Just before the burial, the surviving daughter hands Mem her dead mother’s handkerchief to use. When it is the right time to cry Mem presses the faded pink cloth to her face and to her it smells of mothballs and perfume, not like childhood, not like the cookies after school or the anger or the limp bosom or the drunk Sundays after church, or any of the memories this daughter might have of her mother. The perfume is strong and musky. It reminds Mem of nothing.

“D
on’t worry, it’ll blow over,” Mem’s mother says, waving her hand at the air as if that might help it blow over faster. “We just need a few more mushy Democrats in the Senate. We went through this in the eighties when that DePaul schmuck was first elected, and people paid more than ever. They didn’t even bother showing up at the sites for the burials, they just sent money orders and let us be. I’m telling you, listen to me. Don’t worry. Don’t worry!”

At first, business is barely affected. Although the freshly widowed are never good negotiators, they seem willing to pay even more for Mem’s services.
How dare they take our grieving rights away from us?
they fume, channeling genuine survivor’s anger and sorrow into their new scofflaw angst.
In fact, I’ll pay double for your risk. Screw them
. A few months later, there seems to be less and less money available to hire mourners, or at least this is what the funeral directors say. Even Hector is having trouble finding jobs for Mem or her mother. Mem and Sofie overhear their mothers discussing
the recession
, something so bad that Derasha and her mother have had to move to California, to try their hand at the trade there. So far they haven’t had much luck. Mem hears her mother telling Aunt Ayin that the mourners there are
in touch
with their feelings and would rather do the job themselves. Binah has to work as a waitress and a cleaning lady, since she has no skills besides wailing, and Derasha has realized that the chicken
and steak that she eats are made of dead bodies like the dead bodies in the caskets. Now she won’t eat any meat, she keeps getting thinner and thinner and has developed large black circles under her eyes. One night Binah finds Derasha alone in her bedroom, stuffing wads of paper into her mouth.

Mem wants to feel sorry for them but she can’t.

When she is in the city with her mother, Mem notices how poverty-stricken, almost homeless, everybody looks now in their dirty and torn clothes. Even the people wearing new shoes or getting out of nice cars are wearing soiled thermal underwear that you can see through the unraveling moth-holes of their sweaters. Knees poke through ripped jeans or shredded stockings. Boys let their tufty, unkempt beards grow in, as if they can’t afford to shave. Their hair is greasy and stringy as dirty girls’ hair. They say strange things, their words obscured by deep fogs of smoke.
No, dude, aren’t you listening? It’s the
archetypal
sugar packet
.

The girls look as filthy and impoverished as the boys, except for their flawlessly blackened eyes and carefully lined lips. Their hair isn’t feathered into swans’ wings or puffed up into some crème-filled dessert. Instead it is flat, shiny, with blunt-cut bangs and raggedy bottoms. The girls poke their fingers through the holes in the cuffs of their sweaters and smoke, languorously. Their fingernails are painted black. But instead of being ashamed for looking so poor, they all seem very comfortable with—even proud of—their rags and tatters. None of these girls look as if they might die of their
squalor
. They are flaunting their squalor, their stained and pilled sweaters, their untied bootlaces, their mysterious half-peeled layers. Even their hungry boniness looks chic to Mem, whose own clothes are even and clean and hole-free. She looks at the neatly pressed cuff of her blouse and wishes she could stick her fingers through it like a fingerless glove.

Mem is supposed to meet Aunt Raziel later that week for dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and now she’s sorry she accepted the invitation. She has never eaten Chinese food before and doesn’t know what to wear; almost everything she owns is black. She no longer yearns for a pink dress. Now she wants some scuffed black boots, a thermal T-shirt, a checker-board
flannel, and black eyeliner.

Because of the recession, Mem won’t be getting any of these things. Mem’s mother is already working twice as hard for half her regular fees to make ends meet. This means that there are lots of trips away. It also means that Aunt Ayin has to come along on those trips, since there is twice as much work and Aunt Ayin has no other way to make money during the recession.

While her mother is gone, Mem works several sites alone. The pumpkins displayed around the neighborhoods near the cemeteries have started to soften from the unseasonable heat, toothy jack-o-lantern smiles sagging as flies flit in and out of clumsily cut eye sockets. The trees fringing the cemetery Mem works one Thursday are stubborn and still green, not yet inking their leaves into luscious colors or dropping melon-crimson-amber shawls onto the ground. Some of the leaves have just started to rust and fall from the drought. Once on the ground they shrink up and dry into crunchy brown curls on the side of the road, a thousand boxes worth of cornflakes without milk.

Mem looks at the leaves and tries to hear the sermon given for a man who died while dressed in his wife’s best cocktail gown. She learns, listening to the gravelly voice of the preacher under the tent, that even holy men wandering into the Divine Orchard of Paradise in search of secrets go blind, go mad, cut themselves into ribbons, or die. She has also learned that the things people say at funerals have little to do with the true story of the deceased’s life and more to do with the parts the survivors can remember, the parts they want to remember, a patchwork quilt of carefully selected memories sewn on top of a life, pieces of stories on top of a whole truth.
He was the best father in the whole world. He lived each day with grace and dignity. He had great taste in clothes
.

On the way to meet Aunt Raziel for dinner, Mem stops at the curb to wait for the red light to change. Across the street, a large group of people her own age are silently staring and laughing at her. All of their eyes are trained on her, fixed and determined. Mem stares right back but they
won’t look away, they just keep smiling their sarcastic smiles and gaping at her as if she were a sideshow freak. She doesn’t know what to do. What is wrong with her? Why is she so weird, so disgusting? She is humiliated. She is furious. She wants to shout across the street,
What are you looking at? Do you know who I am? I’m a legend!

It isn’t until Mem hears a loud
click
! to her left and watches the group dissolve into hearty chatter that she realizes the teenagers have been posing, smiling at someone who is standing right next to her, holding a camera.

Mem walks through the electric orange archway of the China Moon and darts quick looks at all of the well-dressed people sitting in the booths. She can sense the other customers whispering and nudging one another and laughing at her. Many of them are wearing black, too, but Mem knows that her doole is the wrong kind of black dress. She sees Aunt Raziel sitting in one of the booths at the back of the restaurant. She is wearing a long black leather skirt and a purple top, her heart-shaped sunglasses and high heels, a few clip-on lengths of fake jet-black hair pinned in place to hide her bald spots. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks or says. Why can’t Mem be like that? Why does she care if everyone stares and points? Why are people still staring at her now, as she sits down onto the shiny maroon booth cushion? What is she doing wrong?

The restaurant is decorated with happy, squinting half-moons, hanging paper lanterns, and huge watercolors of mountainsides and rivers. “They have the best pu-pu platter around,” says Aunt Raziel. The menu is bright red, laminated, and filled with exotic things Mem has never heard of.
Spare ribs. Egg roll. Shrimp toast
. She hopes that none of these things look the way they sound.

When Mem starts to feel the corrosive rays of someone looking at her, she peers above her menu for a second. She can tell that as soon as she averts her eyes, the someone will start staring at her again. People are always looking at her, but they don’t see her the way you would normally see someone. They see her close up and magnified, like the reflection in her mother’s mirror with the ping-pong ball bulbs, and they can do more
than just see her; they can reach out and touch her close-upness, her too-white skin, the loose thread dangling from the bottom of her skirt.

“So what looks good?” asks Aunt Raziel.

This close up they can see that under the skin Mem is grotesque, deformed, like the children of beggars whose limbs have been wrenched off on purpose. When Mem walks through store aisles she becomes magnified and at the mercy of strange mental pokes and fingerings from other customers and the workers behind the counters. They are all digging for something.

The pu-pu platter turns out to be a miniature tabletop barbecue surrounded by wooden skewers speared through all different kinds of food. Everything has a slice of canned pineapple and an artificially red colored cherry speared at the top. In an almost-whisper, Aunt Raziel tells Mem that all of this food is already cooked through. “But it’s the fun of it,” she says, smiling.

Mem has to pee, but she knows she can’t walk across this room. She won’t be able to take it, the eyes will peel her away from herself. Her features will begin to swell, their edges dissolving till she becomes mouthless and featureless, the face of a statue covered in snow. As she sits she feels the air touching her skin and knows there is almost nothing between herself and the rest of the world, she can’t tell where she begins or ends. She is an inside-out and boundless body of gelatin, her own veins for tentacles, nerve endings flat, pulsating bouquets sucking at the air. Little black holes. Satellite dishes receiving and receiving. Too much. Too loud. Receiving and receiving.