Open Me (17 page)

“You don’t like the pu-pu?” Aunt Raziel asks. “Eat more—you’re so thin I can see through you.”

What is Mem receiving? She can’t tell. The someone-else, the ghost-turned-to-armor squatting in her head, gets the messages and relays them:
they hate you ugly disgusting talking too much stupid worthless why aren’t you ashamed ashamed hide go hide coward look at yourself you can’t even cross a room to pee
.

Raziel bites into her slippery shrimp toast with relish. “Ah, this is the
best one,” she says.

At the end of the meal a shy Chinese waitress takes the pu-pu platter away and brings a plate of sliced oranges and cookies that look like hard dumplings. “These are fortune cookies,” Aunt Raziel explains. “Open it up—there’s a fortune inside.”

Aunt Raziel’s cookie has two fortunes inside. Mem uncrosses her legs to take some pressure off her bladder and carefully cracks her cookie open. Her fortune says:
Follow your dreams
, with a happy face instead of a period.

Mem is disappointed. She doesn’t want to follow her dreams. She wants to outrun them, trick them into thinking she is somewhere else, slip around a corner and watch them chase someone else by mistake. She can’t follow her dreams; they follow her. She can’t escape them.

“What does yours say?” asks Aunt Raziel and Mem hands it to her.

Look at yourself. Look at yourself
. All Mem can do is look at herself. All of the time, through the eyes of other people. Their faces are mirrors. Everything is a mirror. Floor-to-ceiling funhouse mirrors, framed with cackling faces.

“Ah, you got a good one,” says Aunt Raziel, nodding seriously, placing her two fortunes on the table.

“Are yours good?” asks Mem.

Aunt Raziel shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t really believe these fortunes.” She laughs, showing all of her yellow teeth.

She looks Mem in the eye and stops laughing.

“You’re going to have to make your own fortune, Mem,” she says. “You’ve been given a lot of challenge. No one is going to help you or save you. You’re going to have to do it yourself.”

Mem nods, picks up Aunt Raziel’s crumpled fortunes from the table-top, a glass square on top of a red-and-gold pattern of China moons.

Your secret desire to change your life will soon manifest
.

Let go of what is troubling you
.

She will not let herself cry in front of Aunt Raziel. She will not cry here, in public, in front of all of these people who are already watching and waiting for her to fuck up. “You have to get out of the business,” says Aunt
Raziel. She fishes through her imitation snakeskin purse for a cigarillo. One of her hair pieces comes loose and sweeps into the crumbs on the table.

“I don’t understand,” Mem says.

“You are not a stupid girl,” Raziel says, looking up. “You understand. It is enough, already, that such a little
maidella
like you is made to live the old life so hard. This world is not the same as it was. It is enough. You have mourned enough. That mama of yours was taught too hard herself, she is made to be hard, but inside her is like you. It is enough for her, too. For both of you. You have to get out of the business.” She pulls out a wrinkled bill and puts it on the table for the waitress. She readjusts her hair, snaps her purse closed. “If she won’t let you go you will stay with me. I teach you the other trade, then you never have to do this crying again.”

Mem is staring at her ragged cuticles, her short fingers lying crookedly in her lap. She cannot look up. This is what she has wanted to hear all along. She has been waiting her whole life to hear it, but she knows if she says anything she will start to cry.

It seems Raziel knows this, too. “You don’t have to say nothing,” she says quietly. “You might even be angry for me to say anything bad against your mama. I understand this. But I am watching you turning into a ghost more every year. You don’t have to be a ghost, Mem. You don’t even have to be a Wailer just because you can do it so good. You go home, you think about it. I will be always where you know I am, with the dogs waiting. If you don’t come, that is okay, too.

“But don’t cry now. Don’t cry at home. Don’t cry no more,” she says, patting her small dark hands on top of Mem’s small white ones.
“It’s genyck
already. It is enough.”

O
ne morning, after an extremely lucrative funeral in New Jersey, a woman with dry clots of purple lipstick scattered around her mouth follows Mem out of the cemetery, saying that Mem is worse than a stripper, more dangerous than a whore. “A woman being paid to cry in public is the opposite of a celebration of femininity. Do you actually think this is natural?” she asks, verging on shrieking. “Do you think that this is art?” Mem is stunned and doesn’t know what to say. Unlike her mother, Mem doesn’t think of her work as art. She just thinks it is her job.

But Mem understands why the woman is upset. She is not the first one to accost Mem in this way. Mem knows what these women see when they look at her crying: decades of corseted ladies mixing batter or martinis, girl babies being pulled out of mothers and smashed against rocks. Bound feet, double-veils, iron masks, the Rule of Thumb. Breast implants, high heels, vaginas sewn up like Thanksgiving turkeys.

The 1900s, her mother tells her, have been a bad century to work in the funeral arts because it is simply not in fashion anymore. Maybe it would have been easier if they had only been born a hundred years or so earlier, when scores of Sin-Eaters and Mimes and doole-makers ran businesses in the industry, too, when there were so many other paid theatrical performers hired to work at memorial services and parades. The Mimes were the wealthiest, paid to wear wax portrait masks of the deceased as
they mocked the beloved’s walk and gestures so that it would look as if the soul of the dead had magically rematerialized for the affair. Then there were the low-end jobs, like the Sin-Eater, an impoverished pariah paid to ingest the sins of the corpse by eating a loaf of bread and a bowl of beer over the dead body. It was a degrading job, because no matter what kind of person the Sin-Eater really was, the rest of the world could only see him as a depraved but necessary social evil, a man so low on the hierarchy that he was willing to doom himself to hell for a living. But what if, Mem wonders, the Sin-Eater didn’t believe in sins, or hell, or eternity? What if he was just a secretly wise man who had figured out a way to get paid to eat free food by profiting from other people’s fears?

Either way, everyone considered the Sin-Eater unclean. He was so disgusting that even the bowls he used were destroyed after he left the house. This is how Mem feels the week she begins to make her plans to leave. Unclean, disgusting, depraved, and perhaps doomed. But she also feels, for the first time in many years, a thin flicker of hope. The day before her mother leaves for the 1995 death industry trade show in Nevada, Mem watches her mother pack and plans her own escape. She has already put a few things into a plastic shopping bag and hidden it under her bed, although she has no clear idea of what she should take. Underwear, deodorant, a tube of cherry-flavored Chapstick, these things made sense when she put them in the bag, but she doesn’t know how many dresses she should take. She had thought she should leave them all behind since she won’t be needing them anymore, but what else will she have to wear besides a few button-down shirts and the one pair of jeans?

“I’ll be back Thursday. Don’t forget to keep at least one light on in the house when you go out to fool the thief,” Mem’s mother says. Mem looks down at the neatly lined stacks of black dresses. Her mother has been keeping lights burning in the house when she leaves for as long as Mem can remember, always to
fool the thief
. As if there is only one thief, robbing every dark house in the neighborhood, year after year. Mem pictures the thief: short, a cartoon wearing all black, a ski mask, gloves, hunched over in the half-light, listening for noises. Mem sighs, flopping onto the couch
with a dramatic flourish. “Whatever,” she says.

In the half-second it takes for her mother to whip around, Mem hears the
whatever
echoing in her mind and is suddenly aware of how the bones in her body have draped themselves in an inappropriately blasé pose against the coffee-colored faux-suede cushions. She scrambles to right herself, to make her body more compact.

“Whatever,” her mother repeats. She makes
oink oink
noises, scrunching her face up into a snout. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? I’m working myself sick trying to scrape up enough money to feed your ungrateful ugly mouth.”

Mem feels her own face scrunch up, snout-shaped, and un-called tears come out of her. Mem’s mother watches Mem cry for a minute, not softening. Then she turns her back and waves a distracted hand at her daughter.

“You’re such a fucking crybaby,” she says. “I’m just trying to save our lives here. I love you.”

It is enough
, Mem tells herself, but her own voice saying it in her head is awful. The vibrations coming out of her mouth are ugly. Mem doesn’t want to move from the couch, she is frozen, though her mother doesn’t seem to be noticing her at all. Mem hears her mother’s steps going back and forth from the suitcase to the stacks on the table and the bare flesh of her arms bristles.

When she leaves, Mem thinks, it will destroy her mother, make her mother sad and sorry, Mem will never come back or speak to her mother again. Her mother will find out from someone else when Mem has children, her mother will eat herself alive with guilt, but Mem will never return. She will wake every morning and put on a coat and step out onto the fire escape with a cup of coffee while the dogs beg to be walked. She sees herself on the balcony, the cup of coffee steaming beautifully, her face calm and poised with a radiation of beatific presence. But with this image comes a second one, the image of the moment after, Mem’s sun-lit glow suddenly snuffed out, leaving her small and strange on a filthy fire escape, pretentiously holding a cup of coffee she doesn’t even like to drink. She will still be living a lie. She will still be trapped inside of who she is. She could leave her mother but she will never be able to leave herself behind.
She will never be able to escape.

At that moment Mem cannot escape from the couch. She keeps her body tight, still, wishing she could be more shadow than skin. Something is wrong with her ears. She can hear her mother walking from room to room, opening and closing drawers, but there is a high humming static layered over this, like the noise from a refrigerator or a radio between stations, a frantic secret whispered too loudly.

It is enough. It is enough. Isn’t it enough?

Mem’s mother calls out from her bedroom, “Bring some scrap paper from the kitchen, will you?” Mem heaves herself up from the couch, searches the top kitchen drawer, slowly, sifting through the rubber bands and stray coupons for a pen. She finds paperclips, several packs of almost-used-up matches, and a set of bright yellow plastic corncob holders. She finds a stack of folded scrap paper underneath a pair of broken scissors and a pencil without an eraser. The metal tube that used to hold the eraser is chewed closed and part of a National Organization for Women sticker is wrapped around the other end.

When Mem opens the folded paper she sees that it is not scrap paper at all. It is a pile of computer-printed pages from Jefferson Hospital with her mother’s false name on the top, and a pamphlet full of pictures. At first the pictures look like pressed flowers with crushed petals and yawning holes where the centers should be.

The sheets of paper from the hospital are about
cancer
. Above the pictures are descriptions of different kinds of cancer, but they don’t look anything like crabs. They are watery lilac sacs and domes. Mangled purple pinwheels. Pretty blisters of paint from an accidental splatter. If Mem didn’t know better she’d have thought that this was art.

Mem knows about cancer. She’s mourned for its victims. She’s seen stories about it on the TV, bald children, emaciated men. Women with various pieces of themselves cut out and sewn up, their bodies becoming clumsily-stitched pillows or poorly altered garments, the slow, draining death.
D
for
Death. Death Rattle. Death Bed. Death Watch. Death Throes. Dying Breath. At Death’s Door. Dying Day
. None of these things could
possibly refer to her mother, who is still boundless and huge and impenetrable. On the other side of the pamphlet, under the title Normal Cell Division, the cells are stacked in even, orderly rows, like loaves of bread in the supermarket. Not like willy-nilly sprockets and flat stars. Not like deflated lather and bruised flowers. Not like the other picture, which is what the inside of part of Mem’s mother might look like now. A magnified cross-section of her mother, dipped in ink and put on display.

All this time, wondering why her mother has been so angry, Mem had thought it was because of the recession. But it is because of this secret cancer, clots of haywire cells spiraling out with no thought of Mem’s mother, growing their mirrored selves over and over like pulpy and rootless weeds.

And Mem knows that it is her fault.