Open Me (24 page)

I
n the cemetery, it is dark and Mem’s doole blends into the darkness around her. From where she is standing, about two hundred yards away from the tent, she can just make out the candles and the flowers and the white blur of faces, the only things illuminated in the darkness. Some of the Aunts have arrived early, already weeping, staggering like drunks as they walk to the site. Mem watches as Hector distributes the red velvet pouches full of fees, calmly weaving through the parade of blacks, as if all the screaming and snotting and breast-beating were the most natural thing in the world. Behind the tent, the horizon line disappears between the deep blue of the night sky and the deep gray of the burial hills, all of it so close to black that it is almost impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

In the half-light, Mem’s bare arms look blue, although Mem knows now that even the idea of the blue is a trick. A program on Aunt Raziel’s television once taught her that our eyes only see reflections of light that are shot from object to eye to brain like a pinball. So maybe, Mem thinks, the color blue people see is just an illusion, the brain’s idea of blue. Maybe the true color of blue, if we could see it without our eyes, is a brilliant pink, brighter than our own eyes can articulate. Maybe any one color blue contains within it a thousand shades that blend and flash like the kaleidoscope
wings of a dragonfly. Perhaps the color blue that she sees depends on everything else around it: the temperature, the lighting, the age she is when she sees it, the music playing in the background, the color blue someone else tells her it is. Maybe, no matter how sophisticated we think the mechanism of our eyes might be, when it comes to the colors—like everything else—something is forever lost in translation.

From where Mem is standing, she can hear the Aunts already trying to outdo each other as they huddle by the flowers around her mother’s fresh grave. Across the field she hears fabric ripping, unfamiliar shrieks. Mem has never been to a circus but this is what she always imagined it would look like, clowns and performers standing around in a circle, under a tent, putting on a show.

Her mother’s voice plays in her ear.
In all that you do, you must honor your ancestors. Remember the privilege, the celebrity, the sacred distinction. Our black silks. The gold coins. Our shimmering tear-colored jewels. Remember the way the firelight made our tears shine when the torch-bearers bowed down as we passed, afraid to whisper or even breathe. With every breath of your own you should remember them, remember this, relive the grandeur and the glory no matter the era in which you live
.

It had taken over four hours to call them all but Mem had taken her time. She went through her mother’s list and called each one personally. She said
no veils or onion or soap, just blacks and handkerchiefs
, and none was able to refuse. It was an irresistible offer, the glory of their ancestry finally come to life again in a decadent orgy of crying. A million small deaths. A dark harvesting.

Mem wrote down the names of all of those who had confirmed that they would come and the dollar amount they agreed to be paid. When she finished licking the last fee envelope closed, when there was no money left in the salt cellar or the old man’s envelope, she put her mother’s locket around her neck and called the redheaded policeman. She tapped the edge of the locket and waited. She was still floating. She still could not believe that the locket hadn’t vanished in small puffs of smoke, that her mother’s things would still exist while she did not.

Other than Aunt Ayin and Sofie, there are no other surviving relatives by the grave. There is no man of the cloth. Instead, the paid Wailers sway around the hole, shaking and muttering like the audience of a television evangelist, a mass of zealots speaking in tongues. Now Mem understands why the mourners in Fiji knock their own teeth out. Why they cut their fingers off. Why they blacken their bodies with charcoal or plaster themselves in white pipe clay, cutting their scalps with shells and bleeding into the graves. Mem would do any of this if it would prolong her not having to feel anything.

Mem saw the outside of the casket and the burial hole before she hid herself, before the others came. The hole, she knows now, is important. She sees that everything about death has to do with the hole. Mouth holes, grave holes, eye holes. Holes where, physically, the person used to be.
The walking wounded
. This is a term Mem’s mother used to describe surviving loved ones who were not grieving well, the kind of people who you could just look at and see that they were full of holes, like the ghosts of shot soldiers, riddled with tubes of light. Now Mem is full of holes that cannot be filled. They are so big the word
hole
doesn’t suit them. Now the holes are
cavities, craters, gorges, voids. Chasms. Pits
.

Mem fills her hands with her face.

In her mind Mem hears her mother, the rhythm and pitch of her mother’s anguish as it used to sound behind her at the jobs. It was almost the sound of hysterical laughter, a ruined noise, the sound of things breaking. Hearing it makes Mem wish she could cry. The sound of the Wailers by the grave blends into a smooth all-pitch throb, like a soup whose individual spices have become indistinguishable. A deep-mouthed dragon’s breath, a chorus of sighs.

They wail, for their money, for their lives. They wail as if it will be the last time.

Only Mem knows that it is.

For the last time
. Mem already knows, she’s known forever: everything we do, we do for the last time. The first time. The one-and-only time. The almost-lost time, shaped into uniqueness by everything else
around it: the temperature, the lighting, the age you are when you do it. The music playing in the background. The act that someone else tells you it is.

And so for the first time, the last time, the one-and-only almost-lost time, Mem tries to wail, for her mother, for herself. She wants to be wailing, she wants true wailing, for it to sound like what it means, she wants to wail in the darkness so loud and so rich that she won’t be able to hear the sirens as the paddy-wagons pull up onto the grass by the hole. But nothing comes out.

And then Mem says, out loud, to no one, “My name is Mem.”

And then what happens?

Nothing happens.

The Earth does not open to suck her in. Mem’s mother does not rise from the dead to scold her. Things keep on going. They keep on happening. Nothing happens and everything is still happening, no matter what Mem says or does or reveals, just as nothing happens and everything keeps happening no matter who has died. Mem was the secret. And now she is revealed, her papery layers undressed, blinking in the warm moonlight, even as it streams through the sky. She reaches out to touch the light and it splits over her fingers like warm wax so that for a moment, she forgets where she is, where she is going, even where she has been.

“Mem,” she says.

It once came from a secret upside-down tree with roots reaching to the sky like a head of old fingers stirring up the cosmos like soup. Now it comes from her, from her mouth. She watches the policemen close in from all around the site, ushering the women into the wagons. Mem unwraps her hair from its tight bun, shaking it out with her fingers. The strands are bent into a bun-shape, sore, feeling as if they are going to snap right off her head when she moves them. There are small, waxy buttercups by Mem’s feet and she understands about the flowers now, why people keep partnering them with dead or dying things. Mem knows there was a time when the flowers were necessary to cover the smell of rotted corpses, but she never understood why you would want to honor the dead with more
dead things, garish plant genitals posed childishly, stupid whorls of dead color, healthless and stooped as the mourners who paid for them. Now she sees that it is very simple:
without corpses there would be no flowers
. It is the basis for all life on Earth, an exchange so fleeting our primitive eyes never get to see it. Small, small, small, we fall apart, we disperse, our parts reorganizing themselves to become something else. There is no such thing as unfinished business.

Beneath Mem’s feet there is a purring in the grass, the sound of things eating, copulating, dying. It is almost as loud as the dark swarm of Japanese beetles that invaded the summer before, covering all of the new leaves with their metallic machinery. They were unlike any insect Mem had ever seen before, like shiny beads of mercury with wings or little flying clocks. People set caged traps in their backyards to catch them and all summer you could smell the lure. But the beetles settled on the leaves anyway and left delicate lattice patterns where green used to be, silvery filigree where sunlight seamed through, casting honey-bright patterns onto the ground, more delicate than humans could ever embroider. At the end of each day all of the neighbors had poured the cages full of beetles into trash bags or sacks. It was easy to tell they were still alive because they swarmed in currents under the plastic.

Above Mem’s head the three-quarter moon broods. Her mother used to sweep a Q-tip dipped in peroxide under the pale half-moons of her nails to clean them and keep them white. She’d say,
It’s the nails and hair that keep growing after you’re buried
. Mem tries to imagine her mother’s spectacular hair and strong nails growing at fast-forward speed, like those three-minute-long nature films of plants budding over weeks.

Tonight the moon is translucent as a fingernail, but Mem no longer believes the moon is shame-faced. She thinks that maybe the moon likes to be dull, glad for shadows and relieved to be left in her powdery bedclothes, a saucer of salt for nobody’s wound. After all, it takes her a month just to get out of bed. Maybe she smokes when no one is looking. Maybe these stories, poems, and songs make her restless, she can’t be bothered. She doesn’t like riddles, she is not an enchantress folding delicately into her
papery crags. She is nobody’s halo or mistress or sister, and the stars are just crumbs in her sheets. Every night she sets her paltry light like a bored eye, she chants with each revolution,
It’s not my fault
.

Mem shifts to better position herself to watch the last of the police cars pull away. She can smell the earthy scent of herself wafting up through the doole. Her own unstirred broth. It is the smell of a fisted salt bud breaking the soil. A seed pearl of salt plucked up from the muck. An unwashed salt truffle just sniffed out, dusty with restless loam and dew.

Mem, unpeeled and blinking in the moonlight.

Mem knows that this summer the beetles will not come with their machine-metal clicks and whirs, those voluptuous bags of humming jewelry that enter nightmares, under sacks of potatoes. The pristine green leaves will stay ripe. They will only crinkle a little, at the edges. Like parched tongues. Like water.

A
cross the city from where her own funeral is taking place, Celeste stands in the small foyer in Aunt Raziel’s old apartment, holding her bags and facing the door.

Celeste is leaving. She is tired. It doesn’t even make sense for her to be carrying any bags at all. Why pack and carry a lifetime around with you when you don’t really have that long to go? But it’s not the bags that are weighing her down, it’s the room, the air, the light, her consciousness.

She tells herself, for the thousandth time,
It is the only way
.

This way her daughter will only have to mourn once, instead of the thousand times she’d mourn Celeste each moment they stayed together. Yes, for her daughter this will be a hard mourning, but it will only be once. And it will be the last.

Hector has taken care of everything. Hector of the calm and soothing voice and broken eyes, Hector who has been a little bit in love with Celeste since the first time he hired her more than two decades ago. He helped to choose the plot, the time, the perpetual care, the
schiva
platters, even the headstone, which, once unveiled, will simply say in Hebrew:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter
.

As always there must be flowers. When Celeste was little there were such enormous blooms. Their wide-mouth stink invisibly rose and spread like the transparent fingers of steam that rise from pots about to boil. The
bright petals annoyed her even then, no matter how lovely. Her first dresses were trimmed in flowers, too, small and blue but she didn’t mind because they spun into blurs when she twirled.

Celeste puts the fingertips of her right hand around the hollow brass doorknob and at first the touch is so cold her fingers jerk back a little in surprise. She relaxes her fingers but they still just rest there, they will not turn. She cannot open the door. Why doesn’t she open the door?