Open Me (5 page)

When Mem goes back into her room to change, she finds her first set of blacks hanging by the molding around her bedroom doorway and forgets about the girls and the things they have said. She is finally getting her first real doole—black taffeta with a full, starched skirt—embroidered with tiny blue flowers around the collar and cuffs. Forget-me-nots, the mourner’s flower, the traditional emblem of her kind. There are also matching black Mary Janes, hard and glossy as ladybug’s wings, and a pair of white tights rolled up into a ball. They feel just like their name when she puts them on, a dry skin that doesn’t fit. They wrinkle at the ankles and knees.

Before breakfast, Mem’s mother brushes Mem’s fine dark hair and smiles. “On the morning of my First Funeral my mother wouldn’t even let me have breakfast,” she says. “She thought not eating might make me cranky so I would weep harder. Really, it just made me more nervous. Ayin wasn’t old enough to go to the job so she was allowed to eat. She had french toast and milk and chewed with her mouth open so that I could watch every bite.”

“That was mean,” says Mem.

Mem’s mother stops smiling. She puts the brush down and looks at her daughter.

“You wouldn’t have lasted two weeks with my mother,” she says.

Mem’s mother’s freshly painted false mouth suddenly makes the face look like someone else, a mask she has made and can’t take off. The someone-else says, “Go eat your breakfast,” as if the softness of Mem’s mother has hardened, dark along the edges like a cheese left out too long.

Hanging on the hallway wall across from Mem’s room is a framed photograph of Mem’s grandmother. In the picture she looks very small and tired, unlike the raging giantess Aunt Ayin and her mother are always describing. She seems surprised to be having her photograph taken, even though it is a studio shot with a smoky background, her astonished face a waterfall of shirred skin with two almond-shaped eyes peeking through. She has a puff of wig-like hair dyed shoe-polish black. The edges of the photograph are watercolor brown, as if they have been dipped in very weak tea.

Mem doesn’t like this picture. She never knew her grandmother, a nationally renowned apprentice-trainer who died in a mysterious fire when Mem’s mother was only seventeen years old. Sometimes, when it is dark after suppertime and Mem is walking alone through the hallway, she thinks the woman in the picture is watching, beady eyes shifting as Mem walks by.

You wouldn’t have lasted two weeks with my mother
.

Mem doesn’t doubt for a second that this is true.

Mem’s new shoes tap the linoleum floor in the kitchen with a delicious water-dripping, finger-snapping sound. The oatmeal in Mem’s bowl is full of raisins that have bloated from the hot milk into fat ticks. Mem pokes at them with her spoon. She remembers the story of Aunt Ayin’s First Funeral, how Ayin giggled from nerves as soon as the mourners arrived, the giggling getting louder and harder to control, even when she smothered her mouth with her handkerchief. When they had all come home from the funeral that day, Mem’s grandmother had dragged Aunt Ayin into the bathroom by the neck of her doole, pushed her head into the toilet, and flushed three times.

Mem swirls a lump of bright yellow margarine into her oatmeal as her mother comes in to join her. Mem’s mother is wearing her best blacks, her most expensive doole, a raw silk shift with carved black buttons all the way down the front. It is one of several dozen dooles Mem’s mother keeps hung neat and straight in her closet, with the hooks of the hangers all going in
the same direction. She usually decides in advance which she will wear depending on who has died, what religion they were, and how much money the survivors are willing to pay. Today, like most days, is a high-fee doole day.

“I’m talking to you, baby,” says Mem’s mother.

Mem is listening while she picks the ticks out of her oatmeal with her fingers and puts them on a napkin. Their little feet wriggle.

“You know how much I love you,” says Mem’s mother. “You know how proud I am of you. You are beautiful and strong.” But when Mem looks up she sees the someone-else’s meticulously painted mouth open and shriek, “
You lazy fucking pig!”

A bruise-colored monster mouth.

“Little lazy whore! I wish I never had you!”

Bigger than Mem’s whole face.

“I’m so ashamed of you I could vomit!”

Opening and closing, spitting, retching.

“You’ve been nothing but a goddamned waste!”

The ugliest thing Mem has ever seen.

Her mother’s small teeth and pink tongue work the air like a machine, rouged jowls squeezing the mouth, fleshy lips flapping, shape-making. Coming at her, getting bigger and bigger until she is a blur, pressing her own forehead against Mem’s forehead. Pushing.
“Look at yourself! No wonder your father left! You’re a fucking disgrace!”

Mem feels the oatmeal lumping up on the roof of her mouth. The skin tightening around her face. The sudden stickiness of all her creases. There is the smoky smell of her mother’s hair and there are all of her pores. Mem can’t tell where her skin ends and her mother’s begins because Mem’s mother is the size of the house. Bigger than the house. There is no end to her.

But then it stops. Mem’s mother pulls back, smiling. She smoothes a curl of hair with her fingers and takes a sip of coffee from a mug decorated with small, grinning cats. She looks at Mem, carefully. Her fingernails are the color of blood.

She asks, “How do you feel, honey?”

Mem can’t answer. She doesn’t know how she is supposed to feel. Has she not loved her mother enough? Has she been eating the oatmeal the wrong way? Is it something she said, or did, or didn’t say or do?

Her mother’s face looks suddenly sad and scared. In a little girl’s voice she says, “I don’t really believe that you love me. Do you? Do you love me?”

Mem nods earnestly, urgently, how can her mother not know this?

“Good!” says Mem’s mother brightly, smiling her normal pleased smile. “Now my beautiful girl is ready to prove she is a star. Now we can go to work.”

Mem’s mother puts the dishes in the sink. Hustle and bustle. Receipts, names, directions. Handkerchiefs. Lipstick, keys. Like everything is okay.

As they walk toward the door, Mem’s mother makes a sharp noise of delight and points at the ceiling. Dangling by the molding, just beneath a fracture in the wood, is a small brown spider, arduously weaving a single line downward.

Plumb straight.

Sparkling spun.

An old sign of money to come.

G
oing from the air-conditioned house to the warmth outside feels good at first. The summer heat drapes itself over Mem’s cool arms as she scrambles into the backseat of her mother’s big silver car. But once in the car, Mem feels a thick and sinuous worry creep its way through her veins like embalming fluid. Mem worries about her tights falling down, about not being able to cry, about the things she might have done to make her mother so angry.

This is the graveyard
, she remembers her mother saying,
colors come and go but the one that stays is gray. The unprofessionals are already half-corpses, the putrefaction began years ago when the bones stopped growing. They can smell it on themselves in the early mornings and late at night, they try to scrub it away or cover it up. Their bathrooms are full of products made to preserve skin, hair, teeth, nails, gums, bones, like bottles and pastes of embalming fluid, and someone is making a fortune off of their slow dying
.

Inside it is hot enough to smell the cracked seat cushions oozing their tufts of yellow stuffing. She picks at the stuffing and wonders what she will do if someone at the funeral asks for her name.

Mem. Mirabelle. Mem. Mirabelle
.

Filth. Whore. Lazy. Liar
.

Mem.

Aunt Ayin said that Mem was born under the perfect sign for a Master
Wailer—Aquarius—a water bearer with small feet. Alchemical symbol for multiplication and salt niter. With a 3-line trigram drawn by Aunt Ayin on the day of Mem’s birth and taped to the pink hearts and daisies of the newly wallpapered wall:

___ ___

___________

_______________

Meaning:
Sorceress, Joy, Reflections, Salt
.

As they pull from the driveway, Mem pokes at the flaked-off vinyl and hard piping ruptured like a half-done operation. Under her feet, one of the bald tires thumps a steady rhythm in its well.

No Wonder

No Wonder

No Wonder Your Father Left

Mem’s mother’s anger is there in the car with them, damp, with coarse edges and pith, like drying cement. To distract herself from it, Mem twists around to watch the development shrink past. From the back window Mem’s neighborhood is a chain of paper dolls shaped like houses. The top halves of the houses are covered with siding in
Robin’s Egg, Summer Sand
, or
Lemon Mist
, and the bottom halves are made of dark maroon bricks, marrow-colored, the same shade women were wearing on their lips and nails when the houses were built. Mem’s mother’s house is yellow. When the wind blows against the siding at night, the metal strips vibrate, groaning like an old ship at sea.

Mem’s mother was able to buy the house in cash, just before Mem was born, using a lifetime of Master-level fees. When she first moved in, the dead-end court was buffeted at both ends by wraparound woods with a gurgling creek threaded through it. Daisies and Queen Anne’s lace and tall, languorous grasses grew at each mouth of the woods. Acres of corn fields surrounded the woods that surrounded the development. At night you could hear anxious courting grasshoppers, the flurry of birds, small four-legged things rustling the grass as they stalked.

That first year, as the months passed, the sounds around the house changed. The woods began to steadily disappear, as if a virus had blighted them out. Bulldozers ground their gears during the day and sat smug in their mounds of earth by night, slaughtered daisies and Queen Anne’s lace and tall onion grasses strewn across their fronts like exhausted protesters. New hand-in-hand houses went up, just as quickly as the woods had come down. Now at night Mem’s mother hears neighbors’ dishes clinking as they are washed, children hollering as they play, people arguing. Cars starting. Cars pulling up. Car doors opening and closing. And the vacant, half-expectant suburban sound of nothing at all.

They pull out of the development and drive down Mem’s favorite street, a single-lane road snake-shaped with rollercoaster humps. As the car drives up and then down the humps, Mem’s belly thrills with an electric caved-in feeling and the coils of her mother’s long hair bounce like springs. Mem taps her fingernails against the pistachio shells stuffed in the little backseat ashtrays from the previous owners. Once on the highway the car passes a cloud factory lit up with a thousand white lights, curds of noxious steam billowing from several stacks. “P.U.!” cries Mem’s mother, rolling up her window as fast as she can, but it is too late, the smell is already inside the car. “P.U.!” says Mem. They both laugh.

Then Mem’s mother stops laughing. Her voice gets hard.

“That’s the reason so many women here have breast cancer,” she says.

The sweaty backs of Mem’s knees mix with the plastic and turn gluey, making sucking noises when she moves. The hard cracks in the plastic pinch her skin. She sits up straight once they start down the Roosevelt Boulevard so she can watch all of the sad, static people waiting for buses, the skinny boys on the medians in between the lanes hawking newspapers, roses, stuffed animals, soft pretzels covered in small pellets of bright white salt. The boys are all tan and tired. The soft pretzels look wilted, but good, and Mem can almost taste their chewy saltiness, the tang of grainy brown mustard on top.

On one corner hazard lights flash. A SEPTA bus has broken down, full of hot and irritated people who will have to wait until another bus
comes to save them.

“Mommy look at all those people stuck on the bus,” says Mem.

Mem’s mother doesn’t look. She sighs, wiping her forehead with her wrist.

“At least we’re not those people,” she says.

As the car pulls into the parking lot next to Hector Paul’s funeral home, Mem’s mother sighs again. She says, as if to herself, “Thank god we can always count on Hector. Thank god he’s such a tit-man. At least I still have something.”

Mem opens her door and climbs out of the car. The tar running along the edge of the road is soft and malleable, like a huge black wad of already-chewed gum. Aunt Ayin and Sofie are waiting at the entrance of the funeral parlor, standing under an awning framed by two white pillars. In her new blacks, Sofie looks like a long-ago photograph of someone’s grandmother as a little girl, pale cheeks a just-kneaded dough. She is pallid and fidgety in an unyielding bell-shaped doole, looking smaller than usual as she stands next to her mother.