Open Me (13 page)

Aunt Raziel looks slightly stricken. “You don’t want to come back to Aunt Raziel’s apartment?” she asks.

“Oh, no, I’m sorry,” Mem says, quickly. “I mean, I don’t want to come back, anywhere, after I die.”

Aunt Raziel looks deep into Mem’s eyes. Her own eyes are long. Sad. Crinkle-edged. She tells Mem that few people live such fulfilled lives that they never return. But there are some things Mem could do, she adds, things that could help: Be honest. Do good deeds for others. Use all talents as often as possible. Never be lazy.

Mem’s heart sinks.

Lazyfilthyliar
.

She is trapped.

She will have to come back and do this all over again, forever and ever, because she will never be able to get it right.
A million keys, none of them right
. What if Mem is so bad in this life that she’s sent back as a cockroach, or a flea? Is the life of a flea equal to the life of a person? How many fleas does it take to equal a person? Who makes these decisions?

“Don’t think about it too much, sweetheart,” says Aunt Raziel. “We all have the body of animals and the souls of angels.”

After finishing their coffees, Mem and Sofie each take a bath in Aunt Raziel’s peach-colored bathroom, spraying themselves luxuriously with a hand-held shower head. They rummage through Raziel’s old junk drawers and discover powder puffs on wands, ancient lipsticks that smell like crayons, and silver tiaras with some of the rhinestones missing. They put all of these things on and run outside onto the balcony, even though Aunt Raziel warns them that their still-wet hair might freeze.

Aunt Raziel’s bathroom is small and crammed with dozens of tiny perfume bottles. The bottles are delicate and dust-laden and full of liquids the same color as the brandy Aunt Raziel keeps in the kitchen in a crystal
decanter. Next to the toilet is a wicker wastebasket full of old
Reader’s Digests
, water-warped covers yelling article titles like “Trapped!” or “How I Survived.” Mem loves these magazines. Every story features good people and bad people. In the end, the bad people get what they deserve and the good people are rescued. Even the sad stories have happy endings, like
Trapped!
, a story about a family on vacation that suffered severe frostbite when an avalanche covered their cabin. While Aunt Raziel walks the dogs or goes shopping or reads cards for clients over the phone, Mem and Sofie page through the
Reader’s Digests
, or lounge on the couch in their borrowed finery, watching the television for hours on end.

They have never seen anything like it and are reluctant to leave the television, even to pee, even during commercials. It’s like a window into the world of the unprofessionals.

There are talk shows with people who are dressed up but damaged, like shiny but bruised apples.
My father used to electrocute me
, cries the four-hundred-pound woman who can barely fit on the two chairs the show has set out for her. Next to her, on the table, the box of tissues has its own spotlight.

There seem to be awful things happening to women all over the world. Cut tongues, ribs removed, girl babies suffocated at birth. Mem watches flickers of people with exotic colors for skin walking toward borders, area rugs wrapped around their shoulders. Some of these had other people put their children and grandmothers on trucks going toward the border and now cannot find them. Then a woman with a bicycle helmet of hair reads the daily horoscope. Through shellacked mauve lips the woman says,
Aquarius. Listen to your inner self. Make and return calls. Tonight, be happy at home
.

Mem struggles with this word,
self
, which is used a good deal by people on the television.
Tell me about your self
. She knows what it means but is not sure of what it means for her, although she thinks she knows who she
is
. She is her mother’s daughter, a Wailer, a pretty child, someone who loves, a star, a lady, a talented girl. But she is also an embarrassment, a disgusting soul, a waste of flesh, short and strange and somewhat grotesque,
stupid, sorry, sad, a person whose life is not quite worth the air she breathes or the physical space she takes. Is all of this her self? Does all of this manage to coexist, shifting, scrambling and separating, inside of her? Maybe none of these are true. Maybe beneath the fitful clash of these discordant ideas exists an unimaginable void where her self is supposed to be.

Mem feels gratified when, late in the evenings, she sees reviews for films called
tearjerkers
, where actors make money by pretending to cry. Then there are shows about near-death experiences
(fools
, says Aunt Raziel from the balcony,
all of life is a near-death experience)
, science shows, painting shows, cooking shows. People on television seem to cry for any old reason, not just for the dead. They even cry when they’re happy, or relieved. Mem is shocked to discover how much the followers of Christ value tears, how their TV preachers are able to cry and stop crying like Wailers.

But Mem doesn’t understand the way that death is portrayed on television. Soap opera widows fall in love with someone new after just a few days of grieving. On action shows, the
bad guy
kills one person while the
good guy
kills thirty just to find the bad guy. Mem is surprised—and saddened—that they hardly ever show the funerals for these dead people. And why, she wonders, don’t cartoon characters really die? They get steamrollered and dropped from caldrons and smashed by anvils and squashed into accordion shapes but are always able to pop up or puff themselves back to their original shapes. Then there are the old black-and-white movies about zombies and vampires and monsters, all of whom supposedly rise from the dead. Sofie can barely watch these movies, but none of them frighten Mem, who has seen the deceased close up and knows that there is no rising from the dead, that these zombies wouldn’t be able to see because their eyes would have rotted out years ago.

While watching the television, Mem and Sofie learn that there are other girls, in equally questionable professions, who are double-named, too—whores, dancers, circus freaks, gypsies, and superheroes. These characters have distinct double-names that don’t seem to be attached to each other. They are each attached, instead, to very different identities. If
the whore on the street (wearing scratched thigh-high boots held up by rubber bands with legs lumping out like rum-raisin ice cream packed into two pink pleather cones) is named
Candy
, there is a complete someone-else underneath, waiting to come up with the sun, maybe someone named
Sarah
(who wears sensible shoes and reading glasses while she studies in the library). For girls like these, the double-names switch and shift and have different hues to them. It seems they can change their identities as easily as taking off one outfit called
Candy
and putting on another called
Sarah
. Even the superheroes, who look pretty much the same in or out of costume, can make this transformation by just taking off a suit jacket or letting down their hair.

But once Mem has time to think about it, seriously sipping her creamer-with-coffee, she begins to see it differently. Maybe the real identity of these double-named girls, she thinks, the secret identity, is actually underneath both of the names, like a fan dancer hidden beneath her two moving fans. With grace and deft maneuvering, the double-named girl can conceal her secret self behind one name, then the other, without ever revealing what was underneath.
Candy
(flap, rustle, whoosh)…
Sarah
(whisk, swoosh) …
Candy
(flicker, flash, sweep)…

Mem’s double-naming, however, is not graceful. Her names don’t stroke across her like elegant white plumes. Her double-naming is, instead, a pair of Siamese twins stuck at the chest and sharing the same heart, double mouths moving no matter which one is speaking. The two names
Mem
and
Mirabelle
hum out at the lips all at once. They dissolve into one another like salt and water that can never be boiled apart. Mem and Mirabelle share the same old black dooles. The same old black shoes. The same hair. Neither wears glasses.

Mem knows that if she had to do a fan dance she would never be able to manage two sumptuous, Mem-sized sprays of quills. She would be clumsy. She would drop one fan and, concealing herself behind the other fan, bend over to retrieve the first fan and drop the second one in its place. The hollow spines of the fan would clatter against the wooden stage and snap off under her toes. Loose fan fibers would float, making Mem sneeze.
She would sweat. The fans would be too heavy to keep lifting. The men in the audience would start to stir.
Is this what we paid for?
they’d call out.
I want my money back
. Smiling nervously, Mem would try to whisk the fans in front of one another but her arms would be too small, the fans would only jerk into each other like cymbals, over and over again until they knocked themselves right out of her hands, falling in a heap like giant, just-shot geese.

Then Mem would be naked on the stage, trying to hide her feet under her fans, and someone would cry out
Look at yourself! Look at yourself!

And, peering downward, Mem would look at herself.

And all the men would laugh and point.

But this is not how Aunt Raziel sees her. She tells Mem, “You are gorgeous, Mem, you are gifted. You are a special girl, I see this.” When the visit is over and it’s time for the girls to go home, the goodbye is teary. Mem cannot bear to leave Raziel, the balcony, the dogs and all of their fur. But by the time Aunt Ayin drops Mem off at home, Mem is almost giddy, unable to wait to tell her mother about all of the things she has seen. She swings the storm door open and bounds into the foyer. The storm door’s pneumatic hinge closes behind her with its familiar hiss, but beneath it is another sound, the sound of someone else in the house.

Mem can tell by the voice that it’s a man. Mem drops her sack and stands behind the foyer doorway, peeking out into the dining room from behind the woodwork, and sees that it is an old man, obediently stooped, hat in hand, nodding at whatever Mem’s mother has just said.

“Thank you so much for making this appointment so quickly,” he says, running the damp rim of his hat through his hands. “When I saw the article I knew I had to contact you.”

And then Mem sees them: a salt-and-pepper mustache under big, crusty nostrils, meaty fingers like sausages wrapped in dry leaves.

“I’m sorry, I look such a mess,” he adds apologetically, laughing a little, brushing the white cat hairs from the lap of his coffee-colored tweed. “I have three cats, you know.” Waves of scalp-smell waft over to where Mem is standing. Oily, warm, sweetish.

The man sees Mem standing behind the woodwork and squints his watery eyes. “Ah!” he says, grinning. “The lady of the hour.”

“Would you care for something to drink?” asks Mem’s mother, leading him further into the house, deeper into the place where Mem lives. She pulls out a living room chair and motions for him to sit down. Mem doesn’t move from behind the woodwork. She holds onto the doorframe and watches.

“No, nothing for me, thank you,” says the man, waving his hat a little. It takes him a while to sit down. Mem’s mother finds Mem clinging to the woodwork and gets down onto one knee. She touches Mem’s elbows. She is so beautiful to look at that Mem has to hold her breath.

“Listen, baby,” she whispers. “This man has come a long way and is willing to pay a lot of money for you to wail for him. He just wants a few minutes. I’ve seen you do ten minutes without even trying.”

Mem shakes her head. Her mother clucks her tongue and smiles.

“Come on, sweetheart. Go put on your blacks. It’ll be easy.”

“But I don’t feel sad now,” Mem answers.

Mem’s mother stands up, laughing, and grabs Mem’s hand.

“Don’t be silly,” she says.