Open Me (15 page)

Edgar’s widow calls to request that Mem come to her South Philly apartment to go over all the details. She explains that she once saw Mem work another funeral and was very impressed. Having no children of her own, she feels the need to hire a younger mourner, someone who will grieve for Edgar, she says, “Like a daughter would, if we’d had one.”

Mem gladly accepts the job because she has been thinking a great deal
about this kind of thing, which way she would like to die, and has decided that falling would be the best way to go. There must have been a moment for Edgar when the falling became flying. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: you fly for a while until you realize you are just falling. Aunt Ayin says that if you fall in a dream and actually hit bottom you will never wake up again. Mem has dreams where she’s falling, from cliffs or rooftops or the tips of mountains, and she always hits the ground, hard—so hard that once the shock subsides and Mem gets up from falling, she sees a body-shaped imprint in the soil and feels a twisting drop in her gut that lingers long after impact. But Mem knows that in real life, falling and flying are opposites. Edgar must have known it, too.

When Mem’s mother reads the clipping about Edgar, she
tsks
and shakes her head. Her roots are covered in blue-black wet. “Death by falling,” she says, disapproving, the slow trickles of dye dripping around her ears. “It’s a weakling’s way to die. You make a mess.”

And Edgar did make a mess. When he hit the ground his body did not leave a body-shaped smash in the cement, clear as the outlines of a cookie cutter. The cement stayed hard and smashed Edgar instead. In the bloody show-and-tell following his death, the sheets the policeman had been holding up brushed against the bone-shard stew that Edgar had become and then the sheets were not worth saving, but his wife saved them anyway, carefully washing and folding and putting them away. They were Egyptian cotton, two-hundred thread count, eggshell white with a cornflower blue trim at the top of the flat sheet.

Edgar’s wife explains all of these things to Mem as they sit in Edgar’s dark living room, listening to the pendulum of the grandfather clock swish back and forth. The oscillating fan shakes its head in a slow no, spreading the same trapped breeze across the room, warm and stale as someone-else’s used breath. It flutters and then drops the stray curlicues of hair around Mem’s face, tickling and itching the skin of her neck.

Edgar’s bloodstains came out easily with white bathroom soap and cold water, his wife explains. She is short and plump, with cropped brown hair, and wears orthopedic oxfords and a smock patterned with upside-down
fir trees. She recalls how carefully she scrubbed each blood-spot over the cracked pedestal sink in the bathroom, this last bit of housework for Edgar, who, she notes, never much cared for white linens.

“The sheets are in the antique linen cupboard now,” she says to Mem, adding that they had bought the cupboard on their third anniversary at a yard sale on the way to a dinner with friends Edgar had never much cared for. The sheets will probably stay there for a long time. She says she can’t use them, though the bits of Edgar that used to be there are just watery shadows now, barely visible cloud-shaped stains.

She walks over to the cupboard, which has been painted over so many times that its top layer of sage green is blistered and bubbled, revealing small fractures of past colors. The uneven floorboards creak under her sturdy shoes. She opens the glass cupboard doors and there are three crisp stacks of perfectly folded white bedclothes inside.

“Some of these sets are older than you,” she says to Mem. She runs her dry hands over the sheets on the top of the pile without really looking at them, the little dry peaks of skin on her palms catching like a cat’s tongue on the two hundred threads of Egyptian cotton, the trim she had thought might actually go well with the bedroom curtains.

She shakes her head. She says, as if to herself, “I don’t know,” and walks into the kitchen to make tea. Mem watches her walk away, listening to the sound of the floor.

Edgar’s wife may not know, but Mem does. She isn’t going to tell this lady what she knows. She isn’t going to say,
It is just easier, to not have to live. When you’re dead, it all just goes away
. Who knows what secrets Edgar had been carrying around with him over the past seven decades. When you’re dead, you don’t have to worry about secrets anymore. When you’re dead, there’s nothing left that you have to protect.

On the wall next to the kitchen there is a small wooden cross hanging from an old-fashioned cut nail. Mem is beginning to find all of these symbols stupid, so much superstition everywhere, in every home, at every grave, rituals and signs and incantations carried out ceremoniously, magic spells to save the dead. Although even Mem’s mother sometimes indulges
in reading signs when she sees them, she always tells Mem that it was superstition that killed her grandmother. Not Ayin’s absurd praying or Mem’s mother’s own secret wishes for laughter and pink dresses, but an old-fashioned suspension: a whole pig’s heart that had been stuck with white thorns and put in the chimney for luck. It was the heart, the grandmother’s homemade charm, that had caught fire, smoldering once the family went to bed, then falling and bouncing onto the not-at-all-fireproof living room floor. A heart stuck with thorns! Like something from a witch’s cupboard. Like something out of a fairytale, the old kind from Italy complete with enchanted beasts, hidden castles full of food, and gowns so fine they could be stored in small chestnuts and then pulled through the eye of a needle.

There is a tarnished silver tea service on a little shelf under the cross, a set that Edgar’s wife probably never uses. Mem can see part of the reflection of her face in the belly of the dull silver sugar bowl. Lately for Mem the color silver has been a secret rolling around inside of her like an anxious bead of mercury. The secret shines so bright she thinks it can be seen through the cracks of who she is. The secret is silver like a mirror so that when she looks at it she thinks she sees herself, her ring-shaped reflection warped over the outerspace curve of the secret. The reflection in the secret smiles, its mouth says
look at yourself you are so lovely aren’t you lovely?
and uses its invisible fingers to dig itself out of her. The fingers hurt where they press. They make the cold fear come but it is no-color. It comes in shapes of feeling instead. Corkscrew and lightening bolt. Thorny trees. Broken teeth. Glass shards. Spikes and forks.

While Edgar’s wife opens and closes drawers in the kitchen, Mem closes her eyes and tries to will the fingers away. She holds the secret in. She holds the secret down. She keeps it down like a bile that wants to come out. The bile tastes like chewed-up pancakes, squelchy-sweet. Sticky Ms that won’t stay down.

What is she not remembering? There is a message somewhere, its Morse code echo floats through her bloodstream. Mem listens to the teakettle boiling in Edgar’s wife’s kitchen. The screeching stops. There is
a clinking of cups. Mem opens her eyes and sees her half-reflection in the glass covering an old picture of Edgar.

When you’re dead, you never have to look at yourself again
.

On the day of Edgar’s funeral, Mem’s mother leaves for a death industry trade show in New York. It begins to snow during a funeral Mem works right before Edgar’s, and Mem tries to love the snow, tries to not think the other thoughts but they keep finding her anyway. Mem’s wails will have to compete with a tape-recording of Olivia Newton-John’s version of
Greensleeves
blaring from a portable boom box held high by the surviving son. After the song is over, the widow fights back tears as she reads a poem by Emily Dickinson, full of tombs and nerves and pain:

This is the Hour of Lead—

remembered, if outlived
,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow
,

First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

Let it out, let it go
. This is what they say to Mem now when she can’t stop, patting her on the back as if she has been choking instead of weeping. But there is no letting it go. There is no letting it out. It doesn’t ever come out. It is there all the time, shiny and sinuous as a tinsel garland.

Look at yourself. Aren’t you lovely?

Now the thoughts have a voice and it finds her, or finds itself inside of her. Mem tries to battle it but it does no good.
No, I’m not
, she tells herself, as she walks through the snow on her way to the next funeral. It is the loveliest snow she has ever seen, long, glass-white crystals brushed by the wind like fur. Across the street, a bundled-up little boy watches his father use an old shoe to scrape the snow away from his windshield. While he scrapes, the father turns to the son and says, “Once this melts we’ll see all the dog shit you forgot to get off the lawn.” The son wipes his nose on the sleeve of his puffy green coat.

The snow gathers fatly into little skirts around the bottom of Mem’s Death March boots. She watches her feet sink into the snow, listening to
the rubbery noise. She is a Russian heroine in Siberian exile. The little match-girl on the threshold of death. A lost survivor of some long-ago war. An Eskimo scouting out a new spot for her igloo.

Shut up fucking pig
.

The loveliness is gone, wiped aside. Now it is just cold, coming over Mem’s fingertips and toes, frightening the blood away like embalming fluid. By the time she is standing behind Edgar’s wife, Mem feels like she has no blood left anywhere in her body; even the red crust around her edges feels scraped off like burnt toast. Mem can’t help but feel envious of Edgar in his casket. Peaceful. Sewn up. Full of sawdust and nothing. How easy, to just not have to exist anymore. How easy to have other people weeping for you.

Mem herself is tired because of the nightmares. “Everything will be okay,” she hears one of the mourners tell Edgar’s wife. Everything will be okay, she tells herself, knowing that it is a lie, that she will never be okay. She will never find the magic key. She is worthless. Worse than worthless.

Mem’s mother’s coffin is being lowered into a hole. Ashes to ashes. Her mother’s stitched mouth doesn’t say I love you. The mourners are receding now, leaving Mem alone with the casket, the hole, the wind warping the stained canopy
.

But something is wrong. The tears won’t come. There are whispers and murmurings that slither from beneath handkerchiefs and shawled heads. Mem tries to picture her mother dead but it does nothing.

Mem without her mother
.

Nothing comes. She cannot feel like a lost floating thing, a dandelion puff adrift before a storm.

Mem without her mother
.

Nothing keeps coming.

Mem without her mother
.

The whispers grow fangs.

Edgar’s wife turns around, her blanched face imploring.

Mem looks into her mother’s coffin but she doesn’t see her mother. Instead she sees herself, serene, sewn-up, hands propped across her chest. Mem sees herself
in the casket and she pulls backward in her mind, away from the casket, to see who has come to attend her funeral. But there’s no one there
.

Now that Mem can see the site better she notices that her casket is made of flimsy chipboard, the cheap kind that undertakers keep in the basement instead of the showroom. Her makeup is smeared on, the face of a child playing dress-up. The stitches in between her lips are black and jagged. Small welts pout up around each stitch
.

Something is under Mem’s ribs, trying to push its way up. She covers her mouth with her handkerchief and doubles over. It falls back down, pushes and falls, pushes and falls again. She drops the handkerchief and falls down herself, onto her knees. She holds both hands over her mouth but that doesn’t work; that only covers the spit and snot, not the sound.

Yes, yes, that’s it
. She is in it now, swept up in the sticky waves of it, it has her, it throws her down and beats her.
All your fault, all your fault
, it says, and she knows it is true.

Edgar’s wife smiles.

It rolls over Mem. It rolls Mem over, around and around, a morsel on its forked tongue. Something new has come over her. Something else. She can’t tell what it is; she is overcome.

I’m sorry!
she sobs.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!

She sobs, she falls, she sob, she falls, and she knows that something is wrong. She won’t be able to make it out again this time. She won’t be able to get it out. She has to find a way to stop it. She can’t live like this another day, another moment. She presses her hands against her chest, and her lungs stop seizing, her mouth, still open, grows silent. There is a short breeze and the loose leaves on the hedge lining the cemetery clap wildly, their applause the only noise at the site besides the sound of mourners watching, the sound of Mem trying to breathe.

M
em is fifteen years old when she realizes that she will never be able to live a normal life. She begins to covet other children’s ordinariness, their primary-colored and uncluttered lives, their deathless existences. The children in her neighborhood seem burnished with the grime of outdoor activity. When their mothers call them they run home over the islands of concrete and grass, forsaking treasures of rocks encrusted with mica and onion grass bombs and things rescued from gutter grates. They scatter without the fear of falling or the fear of getting lost, without knowing anything about death except the temporary swooning and falling involved in their war games.
Bang! You’re dead!
When they hear their mothers’ voices calling, they get up from being dead and run or skate or pedal faster before the court island lights turn on. Playing cards snap in the spokes of their wheels. Abandoned balls bounce on the blacktop.