Open Me (9 page)
Authors: SUNSHINE O'DONNELL
Mem looks at her hand, slowly turning it so that she can examine both sides. But there isn’t anything else there. It’s just a hand.
Aunt Ayin stands next to Sofie and watches. She tugs at the side seam of her doole and stretches her neck. She frowns and snorts, creasing her brow. She says, “Well, I guess Mem’s a natural after all.
Kinaherah.”
But she is not pleased.
A
RCHIVAL
E
XCERPT
Developments in Theory, Technique and Training:
A Handbook of Three Approaches to Wailing
English text by Sergio James.
Ungar-Weekes Publishing Company.
O
N
D
AILY
I
NSTRUCTION
Daily exercises
It is earnestly recommended that the following exercises be diligently studied every day, and with new transpositions. First slowly and with a firm touch, and then faster. These include Syncopation, The Hold or Pause, Cadence, The Trill, Modulation, Posture and Movement, and Use of Props.
Faulty Habits
For the appalling effects of early negligence and inattention in these matters is productive of much that is faulty and often very difficult to correct. On this ground might be mentioned the sticking out of the elbows, the employ of clownish facial expressions, and the lax positioning of the hands and fingers. Additional poor habits reinforced by the unmindful and therefore neglectful supervision of the trainer habitually include slurred notes or erratic jumps through the octaves, usually caused by slipshod comprehension of the Seven Primary Tones.
On the Importance of Perseverance
It is not without grave determination with which the young apprentice must adhere to lessons both physical and historical,
regardless of the onset of any physical or psychic exhaustion that may develop. To succumb to such trifles during apprenticeship would be to indulge the malignant natures of laziness and ignorance, two dispositions characteristic of the lowest caste of wailing women. One must thus advance natural traits while concurrently acquiring new attributes, disregarding or suppressing any indolent urges through the studious exercise and repetition of daily lessons.
“Is it true your mother tortured you to teach you how to cry?”
W
hile her mother cooks dinner to celebrate Mem’s First Funeral, Mem stands by the row of basil plants on the windowsill in the foyer and strokes the warty leaves of the smallest basil plant. She cups her hands around its pot, inhales its greenness, deeply. She whispers softly into its leaves, “Now your name is Frank.” The packed flannel-patterned luggage is still waiting by the door, sitting on the linoleum. The linoleum tile is all over the house, in the kitchen and all the bathrooms, the laundry room, the mud room; it had come newly laid with the newly built house, and Mem’s mother scrubs every inch of it on her knees once a week. Through the foyer window Mem sees a group of children walking home from the bus stop, each carrying a piece of brightly colored construction paper shaped like a bird, a flower, a shoe, with wadded-up tissue paper glued on for details. Mem hears them laugh loudly, the rubbery bounce of their footsteps against the pavement. In the kitchen, Mem’s mother sings to herself, clattering through the silverware drawer.
Mem and her mother have often used the great-grandmother’s silver for romantic Friday night dinners. On these nights, Mem’s mother cooks and plays a cassette of old jazz songs sung by women with grated voices. Sometimes Mem’s mother sings along while she cooks. Sometimes they dance together, spinning around the kitchen, Mem’s mother conducting an
invisible band with a sauce-stained wooden spoon.
Mem wanders into the kitchen and sees the silver gleaming next to the plates and glasses like coins. Her mother is singing
I know you’ll leave me someday soon
while she lights the candles. Mem makes flowers out of the thin paper napkins and places them gingerly inside the glasses. They take off their shoes and sit down to eat dinner barefooted, swinging their legs and laughing.
But there is a small, thin, hysterical wire vibrating inside of Mem that has never been there before. Mem wants to enjoy herself the way she usually does with her mother but now she isn’t sure she can trust the good time she is having. Everything she says, every movement she makes with her body is followed by a silent question:
Is this right? Are you angry? Do you still love me?
When Mem’s mother accidentally knocks the antique white porcelain salt cellar off the counter with her elbow, Mem flinches. It’s a one-of-a-kind collector’s item, hand-thrown in France, and as it falls it smashes quickly and completely, blasting a soft white halo of
fleur de sel
around the floor. Mem’s mother bends breathlessly down to fish out the porcelain fragments and withdraws her hand, abruptly, as if burned. A little blood drops into the circle of salt on the floor. Her mother laughs and runs cold water over her fingers, then wraps her thumb in a kitchen towel patterned with strawberries. She shakes her hips and sings.
If you have to leave, I’ll try not to mind, but please don’t leave my heart behind…
The blood does not bother Mem. It means that her mother’s body is alive, beating, with blood still in it. They leave the salt, light the candles, and drink apple juice out of large wine glasses so big that most of Mem’s face can fit past the rim. They make toasts to Aurora and toasts to Billie Holiday and finally a toast for Mem’s First Funeral. “To my beautiful girl,” Mem’s mother says, leaning over the plates of pasta. They make their glasses kiss by touching them together.
“Do you know what we’re celebrating?” asks her mother in between bites. The pasta twirls around their heavy forks like yarn.
“My First Funeral?” says Mem, unsure. The candlelight dazzles her
eyes, making everything glossy and watery. Mem’s mother is haloed with energy and light. Suddenly, Mem’s love for her mother assaults her small body, without warning and immense, opening its many arms like flowers, filling up the room and bursting through the glass of the windows, its vines and fruits warm and thick as blood and older than Mem’s mother will ever be. Mem knows she will never be strong enough for this love that now fills and overfills her like an ocean unfurling its waves into a thimble.
Her mother looks up from her pasta wearing her smiling someone-else face and says, “What are you staring at, you piece of shit.”
All of the blood in Mem’s body rushes up under the surface of her skin as her stomach drops. Her mother takes a sip from the big glass. She leans over the table toward Mem and gently strokes Mem’s chin with her fingertips. “Well,” she says, “you’ve wasted the last six years of my life, that’s for sure.” She leans in closer, her hair almost in Mem’s plate, and whispers, “You didn’t even try, you lazy fucking whore.”
“I’m sorry,” says Mem, but her voice doesn’t sound at all like her own voice. It sounds like a mouse, if a mouse could talk.
Mem’s mother says, quietly, “You have humiliated me and insulted all of the women of our line.”
“I’m sorry,” Mem squeaks again.
“You’re sorry? You’re sorry!” screams Mem’s mother. “I’m sorry I ever had you!”
Mem’s mother’s body jolts around the table so that it’s directly in front of Mem. She is so close that Mem can see all the pores on her nose, she can smell the smoky smell of her mother’s hair.
“You’re lazy, Mem.”
Mem looks down at her feet.
“I did try,” she says, sounding like a mouse again.
“You’re lazy and now you’re a liar, too.”
Mem shakes her head.
“I’m not lying,” squeaks Mem, but it sounds like a lie. It feels like a lie. Her whole self is a lie. “I did try.”
“‘I’m not lying,’” squeaks Mem’s mother, pulling a false-sad face. “‘I
did try.’”
Here comes the red.
Blood red.
Pomegranate red.
Not-the-color-of-love red.
Mem’s mother opens her mouth and screams at Mem
liar liar liar lazy filthy fucking liar
so loud that little pieces of spit fly out of her mouth and onto Mem’s surprised and flinching face.
You always fuck everything up, you dirty whore. I wish I never had you. Stupid little shit
.
Then something comes out of Mem.
It starts in her bowels and rushes up, up, up, out of her eyes and nose and mouth all at once, big and wet and red, and she can’t stop it. It makes her lungs jerk and sounds even worse than the squeaking. She can’t breathe in or close her mouth, but somehow this is worse than the weeping at the funeral. Later in life Mem will remember these episodes with her mother as the moments when saliva thickens and tear ducts bleed, the salt and the water pouring from their secret source. The source of her own mouth opening, the hole of her mouth, the bare mouth growing to let something out. She will remember what can’t be released. She will remember the color red.
Mem’s mother loosens her face so that it is smooth again, Mem’s mother’s real face, open and level and calm, a deep pond on a windless day. She wraps her arms around Mem and holds her tight.
She coos, “Good girl. Good girl. That’s my good girl. Oh, I’m so proud of you.” She bundles Mem up against her breasts and rocks her back and forth and strokes her hair. Mem tries to breathe but the jerking won’t go away. She tries to pretend she is being loved by her mother.
“See? You are a natural.”
The weeping is fading, but only on the outside. It slithers back down inside of her with its teeth clenched around
lazyfilthyliar
. Mem is sticky, her nose huge and bulbous as Frank’s. She can feel every crease on her body.
“Shh, my good girl. I love you so much. You have perfect pitch, you sound like a dream.”
Mem can hardly hear anything but her heart attacking, her own blood pounding against her cranium, and the creak of her mother’s shoulders turning in their sockets as she rocks Mem back and forth, back and forth.
“It is all that honey I put in your formula when you were an infant,” she whispers into Mem’s hair. “You wouldn’t take any formula, so I had to sweeten it. Now you’re too sweet.”
Mem closes her eyes and the salt from her tears turn into crystals that grow legs, like mites.
Her mother whispers, “I should have used salt.”
The mites cover Mem’s whole face, moving down her body, nibbling till there is nothing left but a white pile of bone-dust and a white pile of salt and with one good gust they are both blown away by the wind.
“I’m so proud of you,” Mem’s mother whispers. “So proud. Do you know your eyes are a thousand times more beautiful when you’re crying?”
Mem’s feet dangle beneath the table while her hot, smothered breath spreads itself against her mother’s arms.
Mem hears her mother’s mouth say,
I love you
.
Plain mouth. Easy mouth.
You are the greatest thing I have ever done
.
I am so proud of you
.
I love you
.
“I love you,” says her mother’s mouth, covering Mem’s forehead with kisses. “I love you.”
She gently turns Mem’s face up toward her own and this time what Mem sees is an anxious pleading. Her mother whispers, “Do you love me?” And Mem nods, furiously, unable to answer out loud. Mem knows her mother is her only link to the rest of the world, a channel through which Mem must perceive and receive all things. Mem’s mother is an irresistible force, massive and compact, a spoonful of dead star that no one can lift. She is like this because she loves Mem. It is this love which occupies Mem’s mother’s self so enormously, dense and magnetic and purring with
heat. It is the love which makes the molecules collapse in her wake, burning around her a halo of friction. This is why people so often need to open the windows when Mem’s mother is in the room, even on days when it snows. It is because she loves Mem.
“Mem, do you love me? I don’t believe that you really love me.”
Of course Mem loves her mother. But Mem’s love is different. It is not so huge. It is long and coiled instead, sprung tight through each vessel, edged with a million small teeth and anchored in the bones. Mem’s love is incessant, corkscrewed, metallic. It won’t stretch or soften. It aches when she moves.
Leah Kang, Arcadia University
A Violation of Decency and Good Taste:
Approaches to the Anthropological Study of Weeping Women
She hade a charming colour, eies bryt, all flowring mouthe, and so wet with pane, but howe depraved the tratoress, against god and naiture… the slatterne is an insirection, a vyle difeilment of all things desent and divein… Repente! Repente! Repente!
—Sir Richard J. Lorrie, 1554 Reformer of British legislation
concerning wailing women
While this thesis strives to catalogue and connect the scant available evidence of the history of an endangered culture, we must remember that most of our limited sources were once little more than objects of art or decoration. Because so much of what we can use may have only served as fanciful invention, our interpretations are largely dependent upon the ways artists and writers perceived, interpreted, and represented wailing women of their time and country. Heightening our challenge, weeping women throughout the centuries have been taught to deliberately “leave no trace,” and—under pain of exclusion and the disgrace of their entire matriarchal blood-line—were forbidden to reveal details of apprenticeship, career, or ancestral history to any individuals unaffiliated with the trade.
(At Your Disposal
, Alfreds and Troll 1994) Because of this, while we have discovered a few historical fragments related to wailing, no one has encountered a complete first-hand account as of yet.
1
Available secondhand accounts are less than kind, unfavorably characterizing wailing women as lawless hysterics, depraved criminals, and women of easy virtue.
2
These accounts, many discovered by Dr. Holly P. Gentile (author of
Decay and Decadence: Essays on the Necrotic Arts and the Anatomy of Wailing
1987), make up the bulk of our paltry anthropological canon. The
most significant of these are excerpts from a group of thirty-seven letters written by turn-of-the-century male British explorers, almost all rife with vivid reports of having witnessed exotic acts of native professional mourning.
3
These included vividly detailed accounts of indigenous wailing women who, the authors claimed, were considered “worse than whores” by their own cultures. This particular assessment appears to have been a common comparison held throughout the ages. In fact, the very European royals who had hired thousands of professional mourners to attend aristocratic family funerals were the same sophisticated elements in society who regularly referred to Wailers as “slatternly thieves and common whores of the most degrading kind,” and “the most disgusting kind of woman to be likened only…to a whore.” (Gentile 1983)
In
The Sin Against Water
, Louise Casey (1976) maintains that this judgment (leaking from the eyes in public being a greater sin than exposing one’s genitals to a stranger in private) was so often implied because, like “whores,” wailing women performed physical, submissive, and degrading acts for money and were required to create lives that were both noble and shameful in order to provide a secret service relegated to their sex. Casey also argues that, historically, males have felt a general sense of unease about the existence of any clan of women who—by “virtue” of their unmarried status—have never had to submit to traditional male/female domestic politics. Scottish sociologist Kira Mathews, however, suggests that weeping women have been reviled in response to an enduring male
paranoia about women exerting political influence from behind the scenes. Classically, Mathews asserts, the role of the woman as witness and emotional translator of grief has been mostly universal, and thus often interpreted as a perpetual threat to ruling patriarchal authorities. Mourning was one of the only forms of acceptable public expression and power available to women in ancient Greece. Beginning in the 6th century BC, a series of laws was passed limiting public lamentation and condemning the purchase of wailing women in order to suppress the possible insubordinate power of women’s mourning and limit ostentatious displays by the state’s wealthier citizens.
4
(Hamilton 1955) These forms of prohibition resurface throughout the century (note Sophocles’ Greek heroine Antigone’s death during her imprisonment for mourning in public) and can still be found in modern American legislation. (Mathews 1997)
However, Mathews is careful not to relate why such unsparing slander and defamation have managed to follow wailing women across the globe and throughout generations. The training techniques used by mothers to coach young would-be wailing women (including the fondling of corpses, extreme physical and emotional abuse, illegal home-schooling, the fanatical worship of Roman goddesses) have been cited as the primary cause for centuries of legislative attention and persecution. (Gentile 1983) The constant threat of abandonment is key here, since a novice must be “sent away or left behind” if she cannot perform by age seven. Paradoxically, a daughter is obliged to abandon her mother if she (the mother) becomes permanently unable to perform before the age of 60, an intriguing reversal of which we have no account. (Mathews 1997)
Little attention has been paid to the obvious difficulties such cultural estrangement must present for any young girls still training in the United States, as it is also forbidden for Wailers of any age to enjoy modern entertainments
(such as television or pop music), or indulge in outside intellectual pursuits (Jeffreys and Marc 1998); much like the anachronistic lives of Pennsylvania Dutch youth or a first American-born Asian child raised with a foreign value system in the home, an apprenticing weeping woman must learn to manage living within two extremely different cultures. Unlike most traditional customs which demand that participants either celebrate, renounce, or endure, the young wailing woman has little recourse but to cooperate; no matter how persuasive the pull of modern culture may be, it lacks the one dominant element which works to keep a Wailer “in her place”: her omnipotent mother. The mother-loyalty cultivated through weeping women’s rearing is apparently so pervasive that we have yet to find an artifact or modern tale describing a daughter’s defection from the sect
(ibid)
. In
Aurora’s Pose
, J. Mitchell suggests that young weeping women are keenly aware of the ways in which their upbringing has ensured that they will simply not be capable of surviving in the “unprofessional world.” (1999) They possess no legal names, have no human contacts outside of the industry, are not lawfully educated, and have not developed any professional skills with which to make a legitimate living.
5
Additionally, as explained by Donall O’Roberts in
Studies in the Theory of Lachrymal Response
(1992), while the current trends in entertainment have blurred the lines between private and public, our culture has continued to support an institutionalized sense of shame surrounding public displays of almost any demonstrative emotion.
6
In his ground-breaking essay,
What Remains: The Case of the Last Professional Mourner
(1996), Philip A. David holds that almost all of the wailing families still in existence in the United States arrived during a
Wailer’s Purge in 1903; wailing women from Italy, Spain, and Greece had been run out of Europe and soon settled in a new land where mourning was considered “a private and oft embarrassing affair.” Like all cultures that employ ancestry as a method of caste system, there is still much debate addressing the issue of lineage. Although most wailing women will, quite vehemently, declare that their ancestors hail from either Rome or Greece beginning around 1200 B.C., recently recovered artifacts reveal that Wailers were usually a mixed, bilingual breed perpetually vacillating between the two empires, depending upon legislative fashion, cultural trends, and wealth of the area. Their shared reverence and idolization of the Roman goddess Aurora support this finding. (Mitchell 1999) Cheri Elphmenn
(Perspectives of Public Mourning Throughout the Ages
, 1988) maintains that while death laws and fashions seem to change as rapidly as societies transform, the one aspect of human nature which has managed to remain constant since ancient Greco-Roman times is simply that we like to watch. This, Elphmenn suggests, is perhaps why history’s weeping women often come across more like today’s actresses than yesterday’s “whores.”
7,
8
In her landmark article,
In Defense of Wailers
(1968), Ella Dylan reports that when the necrotic arts were still in vogue in England (up until the 1820s), popular customs of the time included engraved funeral invitations, the wearing of corpses’ hair as clothes—often referred to as weeds or blacks—and the distribution of dozens of mourning gowns, scarves, or cloaks to people unknown to the dead so as to make it appear that the deceased was popular with the masses. Dylan explains that these garments were known as “doole,” (derived from the Latin doleo, meaning
I grieve)
.
An unprecedented 900 black gowns were distributed at the funeral of the Earl of Oxford—200 given to weeping women along with their fees. Many aristocrats kept well-preserved collections of their dooles as souvenirs. When the funeral processions had come to an end, however, it was not unusual to see wailing women by the dozens “rounded up” by local authorities, while cautionary tracts condemning the “wretched souls” were distributed, declaring that the women in question were appalling, prideful, and impure
(ibid)
.
There were exceptions; in a letter written June 6,1401, Marquis Jean S. Cainlon, a high-ranking Parisian judicial official, pleaded with a “weeping maid” to admit and then disown her heritage so that he might be able to legally absolve her: “It is because I love you earnestly for your integrity and kindness, I have urged you to remedy your apparent oversight, or excessive determination which has emerged in you, a weeping maid passionate in this issue, out of conjecture or pride…I plead, instruct and demand you…please put right, withdraw and rectify your aforesaid error… acknowledge your mistake, and we will have mercy, and will offer you favorable reparations.” (Hamilton 1955)
