Open Me (10 page)

T
he day after her First Funeral, Mem spends the afternoon in the backyard, watching the inconsolable wasps stumble around the sticky spots on the wood picnic table. The wasps are tired, shriveled up like old grapes in the soupy late-August haze. They know they are going to die soon. They mistake bottles for flowers and sputter like cars out of tune. The sky is lidded by a solid drape of cloud as sultry as the seamy skin that floats to the top of boiling milk. Mem can smell the backs of her knees as she and Sofie sit on their haunches, using spoons to dig through the dehydrated patchwork quilt of grass and dirt. Her hands sweat brownly.

In a few days Mem will work her second job. Mem is relieved to have been left at home, and happy to be digging with spoons in the backyard, despite the heat, despite the fact that the inside of the house is shivery and brisk with central air-conditioning. She prefers to be outside and likes the smell of the dirt, the muffled buzz of conditioning compressors vibrating the summer air, the sound of the spoons sifting small stones and soil.

The spoon ends are shaped like flat roses, black from age along the edges, part of a set their Uncle Irv stole from the Ritz Carlton when he was a young bellhop, just two months before he was shot by a sniper on the beach during the war. Those were days when people still died of vague-sounding things like
consumption
and
squalor
. When people
perished
, instead of passing away. Irv’s sister Bella, Mem and Sofie’s great-aunt, had
been a suffragette working in a cigar factory for extra money at the time. The day young Irv came home with his pockets full of spoons he found that his sister had been taken to a hospital to have her reproductive organs removed—to cure her of
questionable
and
promiscuous
behavior. From that day on Bella could do nothing but cry. No more wrapping big leaves into cigars. No more rallying with shouts and signs. Soon after, she became the most talented Wailer in the state. This was a sad story with a good ending, told over and over again to remind Mem and Sofie that although bad things happening might not make you stronger, they can always make you money.

Every time Mem looks at the spoons with
Ritz Carlton
engraved in cursive on the back she pictures her great-aunt having a grand old time in the factory, smiling and laughing and swinging her high-heeled feet as she makes cigars and puts them into neat wooden boxes. In Mem’s imagination her great-aunt has tumbling dark hair and straight, white teeth, the best smile in the factory. But the word
suffragette
contradicts this image. It sounds like a fancy title for a professional mourner, the name of a girl who likes to suffer.

Mem has just learned that her mother’s secret name,
Celeste
, came from the Celestial Waters, the enduring and the saving waters, the sun and moon dissolved and united like water and salt. When Mem was very little, her mother had a small side business using salt for clients requesting more “mystical” services. She would drop a pinch of sacred salt (from Shoprite) onto a scroll of hallowed bark (from the backyard) and read the scatterings like tea leaves. She would hunch over the bark, scratching her chin and staring at the sprinkling of crystals like an astronomer studying constellation maps, a miniature galaxy done to scale.
A prosperous year. Sudden illness. Good domestic luck
. Cynicism laced her voice as she said these things, believing them and not believing them, happy to take the money from those who would rather believe.
The salt is wise. Where are you broken? It cures. It heals. It preserves
.

It makes everything okay
.

Sofie
is named for
Ein Soph
, a hidden place of forgetting and oblivion.
A place not on Earth, not in the world of limited things.
Ayin
, for the wisdom of nothingness, anything sealed and concealed. By the rest of the world they are called Isabella and Anne, names that mean nothing.

Isabella
. Mem looks at Sofie sweating and knows this is the wrong name for her.

They work industriously, not saying much to one another, planting as many rows of salt as possible in the small yard. Soon Sofie’s round face is sheened with sweat and grit, her secondhand Mickey Mouse baseball shirt soaking through. Mem can see where perspiration is collecting, dripping from between Sofie’s small rolls.

Mem is sweating, too. The parched clots of earth are hard to scoop out. Some spots are full of pebbles. But Mem doesn’t care. She knows the salt garden will take some time.
It will be worth it in the end
, Mem reminds herself as she pushes her sweaty palms against the flat roses. Soon there will be fields of frosted pebbles of salt blooming in glowing and white buds like kernels of corn. Salt clustered on vines. Brittle icicle leaves shining like slices of mica. On one side there will be a row of salt trees, and when these blossom Mem will beat the trees with sticks and get showered with salt instead of olives, catching it in buckets like snow that will never melt. When the wind blows the salt fields will chime like good crystal rubbed with wet fingers and when the rain rattles the trees the salt garden will sparkle like raindrops on a spider web. The vines will twinkle in the moonlight and Mem will pretend she is playing in a playground of stars.

Maybe Aurora will get confused and think Mem’s salt fields are the heavens. Maybe Mem will find her there, luminous as the ringing salt rows, lost between the bulging salt bulbs and white flowers. Maybe Mem’s mother will be proud when she sees the garden, happy for the chance to meet Aurora. They can sell the salt and be rich and never have to weep again. No more looking at Mem as if she is something her mother has picked out from between her teeth to inspect. No more people watching. No more pretend.

“Let’s pretend we’re dead,” Sofie says, putting her spoon down. Her hair sticks to her sweaty forehead and when she pushes it away her fingers
leave a smear of dirt. “Let’s play Funeral.”

Mem looks down at the hole she is digging and pokes her spoon at it. There is dirt and salt under her fingernails. She shrugs.

Sofie instantly brightens. “Okay,” she says, hurriedly. “Then you can be the deceased.” Mem shrugs again and settles down in the yellow grass. It crisps and crunches against her back, scratching her scalp.

Sofie clears her throat, puts her spoon down, bends over, and covers her face with her hands.

“Oh Mirabelle! Why did you die!” she moans. “Why oh why oh why Mirabelle!”

Mem opens one eye and sees Sofie pretending to pull at her hair and clothes as she wails.

“Hey!” says Mem. “You’re not even weeping!”

Sofie rolls her eyes like Derasha. “I’m just practicing, silly. Doesn’t your mother practice before the funerals?”

“No,” said Mem. “It’s unprofessional…it’s not authentic.”

“That’s not true. Your mother doesn’t know anything.”

“You don’t even know what authentic means, do you?” Mem teases. “And why do you keep calling me Mirabelle? That’s stupid. You know my name.”

Sofie rolls her eyes again and sighs impatiently.

“Because,” she explains crossly. “This is
a job. In public
. I can’t call you Mem in public, you know.”

“But if this is a funeral, it means I’m dead and all that doesn’t matter anymore,” says Mem.

“It will matter even more because when you die you take your secret name with you so God knows who you are and lets you into heaven,” said Sofie, adding, “Stupid.”

Mem looks disgustedly at Sofie. “Don’t call me stupid,” she says, but she is suddenly too hot to argue.

Sofie’s voice changes. “If I died for real,” she asks, “would you be sad?”

Mem nods solemnly. She says, “I would be so sad they wouldn’t even have to pay me to cry.”

They play Funeral until the sun sets, with Mem as the deceased every time. With her eyes closed she sees white. Arctic white. The alien white of the Mansion of the Moon Aunt Ayin is always talking about. Mem sees the white of this mansion, a place the sun forgot, howling echoes grinding their way against voluptuous drifts and peaks of dry snow. The wind drags its colossal fingers across a pyramid of ice, sculpting milk-glass windows and mansion doors, alabaster columns and a backyard fence. There Mem sits under a parasol of pure white leaves while the shadows cast heavenly designs on the powdery ground like candle-lit lace.

But she can hear the fathers back on Earth opening screen doors and storm doors and patio doors, their barbecue tools clanging dully together like cowbells. She knows that in a minute she will hear the sound of fires starting. She will smell briquettes and coal and overdoses of lighter fluid. In a minute she will have to come back from her mansion and go inside the house where her own father isn’t.

With her eyes closed, Mem imagines, in slow and painstaking detail, how she has died. In the first death Mem has accidentally shot herself with her own arrow. The sensation of the arrow striking her chest feels like a massive bee sting. Next Mem is murdered by an angry mob brandishing the necessary pitchforks and torches and an indecipherable orchestra of shouts. Then Mem’s heart simply stops while she is eating breakfast. It takes her until she has scraped up the last spoonful of cereal into her mouth to realize she is dead. Later she is slain by a spurned lover and dies of a broken heart, clutching a handkerchief to her forehead for dramatic pause.

In the final death, Mem is at a wedding where she dances so well and so fast that her bare feet catch fire, burning her alive.

When the coroner comes to make his report he writes,
death by dancing
.

That night, when she returns from work, Mem’s mother stacks several packed suitcases where the one suitcase used to sit alone. She stands by the luggage and leans against the wall. “If you don’t do it right the next time I’ll have to go,” she says, peeling flakes of dark polish off her nails. “If you say you can do it and then you don’t, you’ll be a liar, and I don’t like liars,
so I’ll leave.” She walks slowly into the kitchen to begin cooking dinner.

Mem sneaks out back to check her salt holes. The night sky is fisheye-curved, round and violet. Feeble points of light shine through the purple dome like holes in a sieve.
You know the stars are made of secrets, that’s why they shine like that
, Aunt Ayin once said.
They’re God’s secrets peeking through his old dark garments. If he took off his cloak we would all be blinded, like Solomon
.

Isn’t Solomon the one who was blinded by his own tears?
Mem had asked.

No, that was St. Francis of Assisi
, said Aunt Ayin.
He cried till he went blind. But that’s impossible, you know
.

The grass is thirsty, yellow-crisped, it crunches under her bare feet, spiking between her toes. Mem can make out the perimeter of her salt garden, the carefully dug rows of holes with plenty of space in between so the salt plants have room to grow. She bends down to take a closer look and for a second something around the holes sparkles. A quick glitter, then it is gone.

In the morning, Mem looks again and sees the morning dew in her backyard. She sees that Aurora’s tears are not shaped like tears, they are too round, clustering clear pearls suspended from grass blades and awnings. There is an unreal perfection in her tears, a glimmering spectacle displayed like a jeweler’s window and curtained by a pretty cowl of mist in exactly the right shade of white. Mem realizes that Aurora is just another Wailer with a job to do, and like all those who mourn for a living, her tears are false, masquerading as grief.

But, unlike the rest who mourn for a living, Aurora is immortal. She has had ten thousand lifetimes to rehearse her weeping, to adjust her damp skirt-hems so they barely brush against the tops of trees, to practice the tilt of her head so the tears run in perfect paths down her face like snowmelt. She has clarified the image of her son dying so it is sharp and three-dimensional and almost crystal-bright. She pulls at her cords till the curtain is drawn and the sun opens (the smell of him, his favorite food) and the little clouds roll against the sky like lost marbles (his smile, his hands, the dandelion bouquets) and then there it is big and wet and red, coming out of her
eyes and nose and mouth and all at once (the small dirt, his cough, the tattered baby blanket he would not relinquish) and it is awful, awful but she rides it, and when the time is right Aurora knows how to stop it, too.