Open Me (12 page)

The trunk is plastic, a comic-book version of pirates’ buried treasure. Mem takes one look at the trunk and knows that any key she uses will work. Under the bright light from above the treasure chest Mem is able to get a better look at her waitress, and now she can see all of the makeup the waitress has used to look a little younger, the small ridges around her eyes and mouth where the foundation has caked. Her eyes don’t look as bright and cheery as her voice. They are snuffed out, like the dark end of an already-burned match. Washed out, as if the waitress’s face has been scrubbed too hard, left too long in bleach, and then tumble-dried on the highest setting.

“Go ahead, birthday girl!” chirps the waitress. Mem tries to smile at her and make a big show of trying to pick the right key, hemming and hawing over which one it might be. And, for just a second, as she slips the key into the lock, Mem hopes that the key won’t work at all, that the waitress won’t have to feel like a liar today.

But it does work.

Click!
goes the key in the lock. “Yay!” claps the waitress. Aunt Ayin and Mem’s mother clap in the background, too. Mem’s mother is smoking a cigarette, and the smoke veils her mouth so that Mem can’t tell if she’s smiling.

“Now go ahead and pick out one special treasure for yourself!”

The chest is full of small, depressing plastic toys. Water guns. Baby-doll
bottles. Spinning tops. Little rings with water-squirting pods. Mem picks out a pen shaped like a lollipop. She looks at the waitress and says, quietly, “Thank you,” and then “I’m sorry,” and hands the key ring back.

When they get up to leave the restaurant and no one is looking, Mem picks her mother’s smashed-down cigarette butt out of the ashtray and puts it in her pocket. The strong smell of smoke and ash clings to her fingers for hours. Later, alone in her room, Mem makes a thin hole through the filter with a sharp pencil and threads an old beaded keychain through it. She hides it in her closet, underneath a pair of Mary Janes.

That night, when Mem is supposed to be asleep, she quietly takes the keychain out of her closet and examines it. Just looking at the cigarette butt, just holding it in her hands, fills Mem with a longing she doesn’t understand. She thinks this feeling is the feeling of love, the feeling of being filled up. Years later Mem will learn that it is the other way around; it is the feeling of having too many holes, deep thrumming need-holes that can never be filled. Years later Mem will find the cigarette keychain and feel the same longing, but she will be better prepared for it then, she will understand everything there is to know about holes. She will know it is a waste of time to try to fill them.

For now, she looks at the keychain and loves her mother so much she doesn’t know what to do with all the love. But loving Mem’s mother means hopping from stone to stone, trying to cross treacherous and shark-infested waters. Mem never knows when she might lose her balance, or slip, or be too afraid to keep going. The words from her mother’s mouth stick to Mem and absorb into her skin. They get trapped between her teeth. They itch the soles of her feet. They lie in wait, preparing to be hatched.

The next morning Mem’s mother decides that Mem and Sofie should stay with one of the Aunts for a while, perhaps a week or two, until the attention from the article dies down. Mem’s mother decides to take advantage of the girls’ week or two away to do a little business in Connecticut. “Fuck that politician, DePaul,” she says. “It’s times like this I wish I could vote.”

While her mother packs, Mem sulks, following her mother from room
to room. “But
why
can’t I go with you?” she asks.

Her mother doesn’t look up from what she is doing. “Don’t whine,” she says. “Nobody likes a whiner.”

“Well why can’t I?” asks Mem, then, using a more grown-up voice. “I could help.”

“There’s nothing for you to do,” says her mother. She stops what she’s doing and looks at Mem. “Besides, if I take you, Ayin will insist on taking Sofie with and we can’t afford the four of us going. God knows how I’m going to afford feeding just Ayin. You’re safer here. And you’re going to love Aunt Raziel.” Mem isn’t sure how she is going to love someone she’s never even met. Although anything is better than staying with Aunt Ayin, who reads stories about poisons and antidotes and cooks slimy brussel sprouts that taste like farts and then fawns over Sofie’s drawings and says that Mem’s “could be better.”

When Aunt Ayin drops Mem and Sofie off at Aunt Raziel’s apartment, in a towering complex in the northeast part of the city, Mem notices that all of the shopping centers around the complex are flanked by lumpy, diseased trees and strangely lettered signs that Mem can’t understand.

“That’s Russian,” Aunt Ayin explains. “A lot of Russians live here now.”

“Is Aunt Raziel Russian?” asks Sofie.

“No,” says Aunt Ayin. “She’s from Poland. She survived the Holocaust.”

Mem’s mother has explained to her, a few times, how millions of people were gassed to death because they were Jewish. Mem didn’t realize before that there were people who had survived.
There have been holocausts like that all over the world for all different kinds of people since the beginning of time
, Mem’s mother had said.
There are even some holocausts happening now. But the Nazi Holocaust was run like a factory. They put millions of people in ovens
. Aunt Raziel must be bitter, Mem thinks, and tough as nails.
Raziel, angel of the sublime secrets and supreme mysteries
. Wise, but bitter, like cooked chicken hearts.

They ride the elevator up to the seventh floor. The hallway carpet is
black, with neon-colored geometrical shapes and dots on top. In front of each apartment door the shapes and colors look dirty and smushed down. Florescent lights flicker on the ceiling like long and irritated blinking eyes.

“Here we are,” says Aunt Ayin, stopping to knock on one of the doors.

Mem and Sofie glance nervously at each other. On the way over, Aunt Ayin told them that Aunt Raziel sports heart-shaped eyeglasses which she has specially made, that her thin hair is dyed jet black, and that she wears pink lipstick and will dance, alone, to any kind of music that happens to be playing, even if she is just having lunch in somebody’s house, even if people stare at her and point. Aunt Raziel is a fortune teller who gave up wailing long ago but is still considered an honorary Master Wailer. She has a deep accent and can speak six different languages.

“And,” Aunt Ayin added with a flourish, “Raziel looks like a real gypsy.”

Mem stares up at the peephole, wondering who is on the other side, when the door is opened by a small, shawl-covered lady wearing bright purple lipstick and red high heels, smiling and calling out, “Well, my pretty little ladies, don’t just stand there! Come in! Come in!”

After some fuss once Aunt Ayin says she must go, and thank you so much, and hope they won’t be any bother, Mem and Sofie are steered inside the apartment. Mem sees a crystal ball, a set of tarot cards laid out on top of a picnic table, three old, sleepy dogs, and a tiny balcony overlooking the back of a Russian kosher fish store. There is also a big television set, which makes Mem catch her breath. The girls have heard about television but have never been allowed to see one before.

Aunt Raziel tells them to put their bags down and relax on the love seat, a threadbare couch covered in several layers of dog hair. Mem and Sofie sit down, slowly, their eyes darting around the room. The crystal ball seems to be the only clean thing in the apartment.

Aunt Raziel settles herself into a folding chair and smiles. Her teeth are yellow, some of them cracked. “Are you hungry?” she asks. They both shake their heads no. “You like the crystal ball, yes?” she asks. They nod
their heads yes. “Don’t you talk?” she asks, and starts to laugh. Mem and Sofie laugh, too.

“Why haven’t we ever seen you at any jobs?” asks Mem. “Did your eyes dry up?”

Aunt Raziel lights what looks like a thin brown cigarette (it’s actually a miniature cigar, she tells them later, a
cigarillo)
and the room is infused with a sweet blue smoke. She shrugs. “I had to mourn for a long time,” she says. “I don’t want to mourn anymore.”

How wonderful
, Mem thinks, to just decide that you’re done, that you don’t want to do it anymore. How wonderful to be allowed to stop.

“Now I tell fortunes instead,” says Aunt Raziel, the skin around her almond-shaped eyes crinkling as she smiles. “People in this country pays a lot of money to find out what happens in their past lives, or what happen in the future. Even though they can’t change none of it.”

She purses her lips around the cigarillo and explains that her special powers came to her when she was a little girl starving in Belsen. Looking up at a watchtower one day she saw the ghost of her dead brother standing where an SS soldier should have been and took this as a sign that the end was near. She was right; a few days later, the Allies liberated her camp. By some miracle, Aunt Raziel and both her parents survived, although six months later, her parents were stabbed to death during a pogrom in Poland. Aunt Raziel was stabbed in the chest four times, and lived.

Although Aunt Raziel is named for the angel of the secret regions, she doesn’t seem to have any secrets anymore. Whatever secrets she might have had were burned out of her, tortured out of her with sticks and knives and guns. Starved out of her like tapeworms. Her true story is so severe that it has left nothing but the truth. And psychic powers that she uses to see into people’s past lives.

“One of my cousins was in the death march,” she says. “Almost all the other girls died but she survives. You know why?”

Mem and Sofie shake their heads.

“She was wearing her winter boots when they first take her away, big black boots, even though it is summertime. Somehow, she knows she
should be wearing those boots. During the march in the snow, my cousin is the one who keeps walking. She was fifteen years old. When the Americans finds her she weighs sixty pounds.”

Mem doesn’t know what to say to this. A
death march:
a march to your own death, or someone else’s? She remembers her big snowboots, black with heavy tread and a dozen hooks for the laces.

“Do you want me to read your cards?” Aunt Raziel asks Mem.

Mem looks at the cards on the coffee table, their frighteningly expressionless cartoon faces, and says, “No thank you.” Sofie shakes her head no, too.

The living room is thick with flies and the earthy stench of Aunt Raziel’s three old dogs. In the apartment above Aunt Raziel someone clomps angrily from room to room. The only food in the kitchen is a collection of complimentary bits Aunt Raziel has stolen from restaurants, airports, and offices—tiny parcels of sugar, salt and pepper, small breadsticks in cellophane, instant coffee and little creamers, packets of half-crushed crackers. But, surveying all of the detritus, Mem knows, by instinct, that she is protected. She will never have a nightmare here.

E
very morning, no matter what the weather, Aunt Raziel prepares a cup of stolen instant coffee, drags her mother’s ratty mouton coat over her nightgown, lights a cigarillo, and stands on her dilapidated balcony, smoking and sipping coffee and feeling the sun on her face. When she comes back in she opens two little plastic creamers and adds a few drops of coffee to each one, one for Mem and one for Sofie. They sit on her dog-hair-covered couch in their pajamas and dip breadsticks and giggle while Aunt Raziel tells them about their past lives.

Mem, she says, has an old soul, which gives her an innate sense of right and wrong. Mem was often a man and once drowned while swimming frantically to a ship. She was a happy little girl playing by the side of a lake. She was once in a war, which was why she always jumps whenever she hears a loud noise. Mem wants to believe these things. She feels in her bones that they are true. She imagines herself in the body of a large man, gasping for air as the waves slap against her face, forcing lungfuls of saltwater into her mouth.

Aunt Raziel says that she, herself, has left her body many times. She sees accidents happening countries away. When she touches a pregnant woman, she can feel the flicker of life moving inside her own womb. Mem listens, petting one of the wretched old dogs, the blind, shaggy brown one who seems to like her. Aunt Raziel is convinced that dogs are noble creatures
and that her hound has taken a liking to Mem because she is special. Mem wants her to think this. She strokes the dog’s nappy fur and looks soulfully into his eyes and asks Aunt Raziel what she can do to make sure that she doesn’t have to come back ever again.