Open Me (21 page)

In the morning, Mem is too tired to change from her pajamas into her day clothes. Her mother is not home, so it doesn’t matter anyway. She doesn’t have to work until later in the afternoon. In the four months since Raziel’s death, Mem has developed the dishonorable bad habit of not being able to stop crying. During burials, she has a hard time fighting it off until the right moment, and then as she works she forgets that anyone else is there, that she is there. Sometimes she can’t keep up with it. It floods up and boils over, the froth running down the sides of Mem in seething tributaries. The drips are bitter and eat away at the rest of her, leaving runners and burns and invisible bruises. When the tears come they don’t need to be coaxed into being anymore. Bitter fingers are already whispering through her head all day long like the half-memory of a very old nightmare. Now when the tears come she cannot rein them. They rattle the inside of her head and buck from her eyes, sloppy, delinquent, and not at all professional.
But at least she can still work. Now she saves her money in an old shoe box, instead of handing it over to her mother. Soon she should have enough to leave, although she has no idea where she will go.

At home, the crying is different. It comes cloaked, it stalks her, seething beneath the cloth like a bad molar. It is full of pinholes and miniature petulant mouths, an opus of cavities and ulcers. She hears its chronic shuffle in the hallway, tired and cold and missing her. She can’t help herself. Now she wants it. Now she is addicted to it, the taste of salt, the swollen lips, the loss of her own self as it comes gasping into puddles of saltwarm and opened mouths watering. The escape from the attack of one pain into the chrysalis of another. The splintering.

Come
, she whispers through the keyhole.

Come
, she murmurs through the cracks in the wall. It sheds its bastard fur in the hallway, mouthlike pores dilating for the nipple. There is honeysuckle at the door. There are bowls of meat at the door. There are strings playing and bread baking at the door.

She sits in the corner and crouches to the floor and calls again and calls.

Come
, she croons.

Come
, she says.

Come
, she calls.

And it does.

Mem is so hungry. Her body feels as if it is eating itself alive from the inside out. There is plenty of food in the house but Mem can’t be bothered to prepare it. She opens the refrigerator door, sees the carton of milk, and knows that making herself a bowl of cereal will require a gargantuan effort. Just imagining this laborious and many-stepped process is exhausting. It will be easier to not eat at all.

Mem also suspects there is a good chance that she will start crying while she is eating. She knows from experience that crying while eating is an almost impossible thing to do. The two activities are at extreme cross-purposes, one focusing on something going inside and the other on something coming out, and the risk of this happening today is too great because
the weeping doesn’t go away anymore, not even while she goes to the bathroom or tries to eat.

Mem returns to her room and curls up in bed, knowing that unlike most anywhere else in the house, under the sheets is a safe place to be. She locks her body together like a jaw but finds she can’t sleep this time. She sits up and the corner of her contour sheet pops off and creeps down the plastic mattress cover. Mem looks at it and gets out of bed, pulling a sweater on over her pajamas, which are beginning to smell sweetish, the smell of Mem asleep.

Filthy. Smelly. Lazy
.

The voice inside Mem slurs as she tries to wash her face, slowly rolling the bar of soap between her heavy hands. It whispers from behind the shower curtain, from inside the closet, from under the dust-ruffles. The voice is full of bile and pus. It is not Mirabelle. It doesn’t sound like Mem. It sounds like Mem’s mother, the mouth of Mem’s mother, trapped inside of Mem.

“Shut up,” Mem says, weakly.

But it will not shut up. It prowls around inside of her, softening and sickening and split, oozing like old tomatoes while she tries to tie her shoelaces. Outside the front window she sees that the snow is melting, rushing into the sewers by the islands, dragging cigarette butts and potato-chip bags and plastic six-pack rings into the gutter grates. Little rocks suckle at the dirty water line. Pebbles caught under the rivulets reflect and spread, mysterious pried-open oysters rippling and beautiful.

It feels like someone else, someone much larger, has borrowed Mem’s body and now she has to put it back on again, bone for bone. She is so tired she just wants to lie down in the turd-brown handfuls of cold mud and get colder and wetter and melt away, too. Mem is so tired she can’t even breathe, can’t remember how to make her lungs work. She just wants to go home but she doesn’t even know what that means anymore, she is already home.

She hates that she is so upset for no reason. She is not a refugee in an occupied country, forced to walk days to the nearest border. She is not a
three-hundred-pound woman who was electrocuted by her father. She was never “Trapped!” in a cabin during an avalanche, forced to cut off her own frostbitten toes in order to survive. She didn’t have to walk in a death march. No one ever pushed her head into the toilet, flushing three times.

She remembers a show she saw on Aunt Raziel’s TV, a science program about how the sound of snow falling is deafening to fish. When a snowflake lands in water, microscopic air bubbles trapped in its crystals squeak as they pop. The squeaking is as loud to the fish as a jackhammer would be for a human. All day when it snows, as people happily romp, the poor fish are bombarded with blaring squeals and screeches.

This is how Mem feels. No matter where she goes, no matter how quiet it seems to the rest of the world, inside her head it is deafening. She is bombarded by the noise of her own thoughts.

Earlier that morning, before Mem’s mother left to go food shopping, she had made breakfast. She didn’t really cook anything, she just poured milk into an open miniature box of brown cereal covered in sugar, the kind that Mem was never allowed to eat before her mother stopped working. Her mother didn’t open a box for herself. She busied herself with tidying up the kitchen and hummed, a crisp white apron smoothed over her most expensive doole. She has taken to wearing her blacks day and night.

Mem understands. For a Wailer, the color black is not death, not black as blood or even black-and-blue-bruise-on-the-body black. It is not an absence of color. Black is loud, all of the colors playing at once and obliterating themselves out, an orchestra of sound so loud that nothing can be heard.

In Mem’s house, instead of noise, there is a quiet that fills up all the empty space in the rooms, spreading the way smoke spreads, and shooing the ghosts away like flies. Watching her mother, Mem learns that loving someone means that you will inevitably grieve for them, that love is an engraved invitation for grief. But for grief there is no language, which makes no sense to Mem, since grief, like love, never really goes away. Life is just one long day separated into sections by sleep. Life never stops happening until you are dead. So whatever happens—love, grief, hate, shame—
never disappears. It just gets easier to live with. It just scabs over, waiting for something else significant to happen. And when that something else happens—another death, another love, another shameful episode—the scabs drop off and there are the original wounds, septic and drippy as ever.

Of course, it gets worse when there are more wounds, or when the original wound goes deeper, when it becomes a
puncture wound
. Mem imagines herself full of puncture wounds, deep as her whole self, starting at the skin where the welts blossom like flowering mold on the surface of bread. People usually just scrape mold off the top and eat the bread anyway, but Mem knows from the science shows she has watched that mold has invisible roots, flourishing their translucent threads through the body of the bread, unsuspected and unseen.

Mem knows you can get used to anything. Even the welts. Even the taste of see-through mold. Even the color black.

The color black is being alone. The color black is the fear of being alone, the cold flat fact that you will be alone for all of your life, even when you are around other people. Mem looks up at the black melting trees that line the street, gnarled fingers clutching at nothing. One tree has managed to split its whole upper self in two, growing into a semicircle of branches around power lines that run straight through the center. Both halves are fused together at the trunk, the part of the tree that grew as one thing before it was tall as the wires, then cleaved as if the wires were poisonous, as if the high voltage might kill it. As if it is just safer to disconnect.

What a shame to waste those tears, crying them for free
, the ancestors would say to Mem, if they could see her then.

But Mem, sobbing, knows better.

Someone is always paying for tears.