Open Me (18 page)

She has done this. She has made her mother sick by being the wrong kind of daughter. Ungrateful, selfish, piggish, disgusting. Mem has tried to be the right kind of daughter, she has tried harder and harder through the years to reach that elusive end but it is not possible, it keeps moving and jumping away from her like a butterfly she is trying to catch, or something attached to her mother’s fingers with string. She always knew that at some point this would have to stop. Why keep on doing it if she can never get it right? She only wants her mother to love her.

The static is in Mem’s ears, louder than before. It is spongy, heavy, and grows into a space beneath Mem’s rib-cage. She folds the papers back together and places them under the broken scissors and the pencil and closes the drawer.

Mem forces her voice to sound normal. “I can’t find any paper,” she calls. She walks into her bedroom, gets down on all fours by the bed, and pulls out the plastic bag. Chapstick, deodorant, underwear, these things come out in the opposite order of how they had gone in. She places them on the carpet, looks at them, looks at the carpet, the puppet-hair yellow carpet that she has known all of her life.
Mem without her mother
.

“Come kiss me goodbye,” her mother hollers from the living room.

Mem without her mother
.

She will never be able to leave.

M
em’s mother is cheerfully beating the sofa cushions and pillows to freshen them up. She has been freshening up the whole house since she came home from Nevada five days ago. All of the surfaces in the house gleam. Mem uses one of her mother’s handkerchiefs to polish the empty shelves. All of the things that were on the shelves are now on the floor, awaiting a frenzied buffing from Mem’s mother.

“You know what we need, baby? We need a vacation. That’s what I think,” her mother says between blows.

Mem has never even heard her mother use this word before. Mem looks up from her dusting. “I can’t take a vacation right now,” she says, speaking a little louder than usual so that she can be heard over the pounding. “Hector has me set up for jobs for weeks.”

Her mother tenderly places the pillow she has been beating onto the couch and stands back, as if to inspect it. “I know. But you deserve a vacation, you’ve been working so hard. Wouldn’t you like to go swimming in the ocean, just get away from this weather?” She picks the pillow up and starts smacking it again. “God knows we can afford it now.”

Mem is annoyed. Why is her mother disrespecting her work schedule, the expectations of her fans? She puts the handkerchief down and repeats, even louder, “I can’t take a vacation right now. It would be unprofessional for me to cancel.” She doesn’t even know how to swim.

Her mother stops what she is doing mid-punch and looks at Mem. She says, evenly, quietly, “Don’t you ever presume to tell me what’s professional and unprofessional. You might be making high fees but you’re still an apprentice. You better remember whose house you’re in, and who the Master is.” Then she softens. “If you disappeared to take a vacation, there would be some mystery to it. People would be curious about when you’d return. It’s free publicity. It would make you even more of a rare catch.”

“But I am a Master already,” Mem says. She straightens her posture but can’t look her mother in the eye. “All of the Aunts say so. Even Hector says so. That’s how we got the job wailing tonight for the famous writer.”

Mem looks down at the
chatchkas
by her feet, the perpetually smiling porcelain cat, the thimble from Kansas, a miniature shoe made out of crystal. Whose things are these? They can’t possibly be her mother’s. Mem has lived her whole life in silent symbiosis with the things on these shelves, but until today she has never really seen them before. They give off an aura of inert permanence. They will be be dug up ten thousand years from now by a team of historic researchers.
They obviously worshipped cats
, the head researcher will say with unquestionable authority.
And very, very tiny feet
.

Mem looks up and sees that her mother is staring at the
chatchkas
, too. Maybe she is wondering the same thing, how these objects might still be here years after both Mem and her mother are buried. That these objects are silly and unrepresentative of such an important and serious life. On the outside, her mother’s body looks the same to Mem, robust, fertile, multiple. An articulate and ambrosial body, still surrounded by a radiance eclipsing all others. But Mem knows what is growing underneath.

“I guess you’re right,” her mother says, absently replacing the pillow. “We should both get ready.” She turns and walks away into her room.

Mem continues her polishing. After a few minutes, Mem abandons the shelves and goes to her mother’s room. She finds her mother sitting primly on the edge of the bed, wearing her late-autumn doole, barefooted,
immobile as the porcelain cat. She isn’t sure if she should embrace her, or help her put on her shoes. She remains standing in the doorway, unable to move any closer.

“Finish dusting the shelves,” says Mem’s mother.

The popular novelist they have been hired to weep for was only forty-three when she died last week. She had fallen asleep at the wheel after a late dinner with her agent.

“You just watch,” her mother says as they pull up to the site. “Now her latest novel will sell like crazy. Aside from war, nothing is better for business than death.” The only famous people Mem knows of are actors from the shows on Aunt Raziel’s TV, and other celebrity Wailers like her mother. Several Masters had been vying for this job, but Mem and her mother were offered the highest fees. It is a risk to work such a prominent job since so much attention and publicity could prompt a raid, but there is no way they can refuse. “This is what all the jobs used to be like in your great-grandmother’s day,” her mother explains as they walk. “Dignity, fashion, romance. And plenty of money.”

The cemetery looks like an ordinary cemetery, green and white and gray, but it is clear that it is not going to be an ordinary job site. Men in dark suits and sunglasses stand at each canopy pole, mumbling into walkie-talkies and jerking their heads curtly at each other. Dozens of pure white orchids artfully cascade around the hole in the ground. Mem recognizes four Wailers who step up to stand behind her. Mem offers them each a quick, assertive nod, just as her mother does. Although this is a funeral for a celebrity, Mem feels that she and her mother are the true celebrities, standing statue-stiff and framed by the gray, the whole world waiting for their rain. The arriving mourners look ordinary, too, walking embarrassedly up to the tent, although up close they seem thinner than most people, their edges more well-defined. Eventually the initial coughing and whispering subsides, and the walkie-talkie men step farther away from the crowd, tensely surveying the cemetery as if there are dozens of thieves camouflaged as tombstones, harbored between the cones of plastic flowers, lying in wait.

It is almost time to begin but Mem is feeling too steady, too cleanly spooled, to do the damage she needs to do in order to well up.
It is impossible to be empty and cry at the same time. Just watch the Master nearest to you and emulate
. Sighing, Mem looks up and sees that her mother’s face is still dry. Mem thinks this must be the new technique she has heard about,
meditative delay
, the latest way to captivate the mourners by holding back until the last possible moment. It is exactly the sort of dramatic skill her mother enjoys mastering.

But once the nondenominational clergywoman is finished speaking, it is already past the last possible moment. It is the end of the job, and her mother is still dry.

Mem’s mother chews at her lower lip, anxiously kneading her tear ducts with her fingertips. She drops her hands, her dry handkerchief fluttering to the Astroturf. She twitches her head toward Ayin and nods, softly. With a briskness Mem would never have suspected she was capable of, Ayin grabs her sister’s arm in one hand and Mem’s arm in the other and whisks them both past the other Wailers, vigorously, back to the car.

It must be the cancer, thinks Mem, but she knows she cannot say it out loud. She doesn’t even know if Ayin knows. The ride home is silent, leaden, all three staring dumbly out of windows at the endless stream of shopping centers and chain restaurants.

Mem remembers the story of the famous 15th-century Wailer from Yorkshire who was found guilty of treason and slain, her body tossed into a deep ravine on the outskirts of her village and then forgotten. Years later a beautiful tree grew where the Wailer’s body had been. It bore an unusual fruit concealed in layers of paper like an onion, and, like an onion, the fruit itself brought tears to one’s eyes but became very sweet when cooked. A century ago, the fruit stopped bearing but the tree itself survived. To this day, lovers who sit under the tree find that they cannot kiss, they can only cry. They spill their paper cups of coffee, their once-plump desire shrivels and dies. They cling and muddy the cuffs of their jeans while they whisper and weep and do not know why.

As a small child, whenever Mem heard someone say
over my dead
body
, this story was what she thought of. Now she pictures her mother’s dead body. But this time it does not glow. Its light has been choked out, drawn out, bled out like juice. What can Mem do? She digs her thumbnail into the skin around her cuticles.

Although Mem cannot remember a time when she wasn’t aware that she and everyone she knew would soon die, this illness is still a shock.
Over my dead body
. She has been conscious all her life of not only the idea of death itself, but the knowledge that this moment, any moment she might have in her hands right now, might be the last one before death, that this death will cause suffering first, that there is no afterlife, that this is it, each moment of juice-drinking or bored Sundays or picking dandelions in the backyard is therefore the one-and-only and last time. That every time she sees her mother’s mouth, be it smiling with love as it smothers her with kisses or shaping itself into a monster hole as it screams at her, will be the last time.

This funeral is the last time she and her mother will work together. Mem looks up at her mother’s hair coiling over the seat in front of her and wants to do the impossible, wants to latch onto the hair and make time stop. But there is no stopping it, nothing stops. The CVS drugstores and T.G.I. Fridays and Staples superstores whiz past the car, mocking Mem with their brightness and regularity.
Her dead body
.

It is not the body itself which makes Mem want to curl up in the backseat and weep. It is this endless glut of highways, these gruesome buildings, the fact that they will all still be here when Mem’s mother is gone.

“I
don’t know what else I can tell you. They just won’t produce,” the doctor says, handing Mem’s mother a pamphlet.