Open Me (20 page)

What she finds when she finally goes into the other bedroom is her once-beautiful mother wearing a full face of frightening makeup, crying without tears in the closet on top of her shoes. The front of her red silk nightgown is soaked through with snot. When she sees Mem standing in front of the closet she touches a battered pair of old-fashioned pumps that have fallen out of their box by her side.

“I wore these to my mother’s funeral,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

What can Mem say to this, to her huge and looming all-powerful mother, the strong and starlit mother, the mother who now crouches in her closet dripping clown-mouthed spit onto her best nightgown as she coughs and cries and doesn’t get up?

Mem says, “Everything will be okay.”

Mem says, “I love you.”

She puts her small arms around her mother and feels that her mother has shrunk, feels her sudden fragility, her trembling, smells her sweaty smell and says, “I’m sorry,” and begins to cry herself.

For a moment, Mem still needs her mother to be her mother. She lets her mother cradle her, and for a second it feels wrong, bad, like the other times she rocked Mem after making her cry. This feeling passes. Mem closes her eyes and lets herself be rocked. The toes of scrunched-up shoes poke her buttocks and the tops of her thighs in rhythm. Mem feels them and she doesn’t care because she already misses her mother. She realizes she has been missing her mother her whole life. She smells her mother’s smells and listens to the creak of her bones as they rock in their sockets.

Mem’s mother’s breathing has slowed now, a tide dragging back in over stones. “Mem,” she whispers, “I don’t have cancer.”

“What?” Mem asks, her voice muffled by the fabric of her mother’s gown. She looks up. “Are you cured?”

Mem’s mother shakes her head. There are blotches where the makeup
has smeared into bruise-shapes on her cheeks and chin. She clears her throat. “No, honey,” she says. “I never had cancer. I was never sick.”

Mem’s mouth drops open. “But the Sjogren’s… I went with you to the doctor…”

“The Sjogren’s is real, I didn’t know it was coming. I must have given myself a
kinaherah,”
her mother says, starting to cry again. “But the cancer…I love you so much, I couldn’t lose you. I knew you were talking to Raziel. I knew you wanted to leave. I had to do all of this, I did it for you, because I love you.”

Mem feels what seems like excitement rising up from her bowels, but by the time it reaches her heart, it has transformed itself into nausea. As she pulls away from her mother her movements seem jerky and convulsive. “How could you do this to me?” she asks, almost whispering. Her mother stops crying and pulls back.

“How could I do this? You made me do this,” she says, her voice getting louder. Mem stares at the shoes scattered around them on the closet floor. “If you loved me, Mem, if you really loved me, if you hadn’t been so selfish, thinking only about what you want—”

“But you did horrible things!” Mem yells, her voice high-pitched and erratic. “You did this to me! Your mouth did this to me!” She is about to stand up when she hears the phone ringing in the kitchen. In her confusion, Mem thinks that maybe it’s Raziel calling to say she knows what has happened, that she is coming right now to Mem’s house to get her. Mem breaks free from the tangle of her mother’s body and old shoes and races through the house. She answers the phone, out-of-breath, her bare feet icy against the linoleum. It is Aunt Ayin. Mem says hello. She listens. The plastic from the phone turns warm, it feels organic against her face.

“That’s not funny,” she says, then crumbles to the floor as if she has been kicked.

Aunt Ayin has told her: Aunt Raziel is dead from a stroke. In her makeshift will, written on a piece of stolen hotel stationery, Aunt Raziel has left Mem her television set.

I
n the back of the store where Mem has gone to buy a dress to wear to Raziel’s funeral, Mem looks at herself in the dressing room mirror and thinks,
This is ridiculous. She would hate this dress
. She lets her arms hang at her sides. The dressing room smells of feet and corn chips. She hears the people in the store laughing and shopping and checking price tags as if this is just any other ordinary day. As if everything is all right.

We are never supposed to attend the funeral of someone we love
, Aunt Ayin said when the girls were still learning.
You will become confused about where your true grief ends and your job begins, or—perhaps worse—lose control and make a spectacle of yourself for free. Instead, schedule yourself for as many jobs as possible and use what you are feeling to fuel your weeping. Genuine grief is a windfall for Wailers. Real tears are worth their weight in gold
.

In the city, the fashion is all-black. Everyone looks as if they are in mourning, even the teenagers slouching under streetlamps, taking moody drags off their cigarettes and mumbling half-bitten comments to their comrades with a clumsy dialect of sulky shrugs and sighs. Their faces are stuck with curls of metal, like shrapnel. They pluck at their brand-new tattoos with crusty fingernails and poke through wreaths of smoke to ask for spare change which Mem does not have.

Other people want her spare change, too. Almost-homeless vendors with their wares spread out on blankets, sidewalks covered in someone
else’s memories. Sad phantoms curling around steam grates. People pass them by or walk neat ellipses around them, as if they are stray dogs or their condition were catching.

Walking down the street Mem hears a man on a stoop about half a block ahead of her having an animated debate, yelling into his cell phone about the role of American Chinese in institutionalized racism against blacks. He gesticulates, pauses for dramatic effect, even nods, laughing good-naturedly, while allowing his opponent to respond. “Well,” he says into the phone as Mem gets closer, “I think you’re sorely mistaken,” and it is then that Mem realizes he is not speaking into a cell phone at all, but a crushed beer can held against the side of his face. “Listen to what I’m trying to tell you,” he articulates into the can as she passes. “I know what I’m talking about.” For a second Mem feels sad for him but she quickly realizes that the conversation he thinks he is having is a thousand times more interesting and meaningful than anything she could possibly have to say.

It is strange to be in the city without her mother. Soon, when she can afford it, she will leave her mother forever.

Mem without her mother.

Mem without her.

Mem without.

Mem.

There are throngs of business-suited people standing outside of the skyscrapers, pressed against the walls, appraising their reflections in the windows, smoking cigarettes as if their lives depend on it. Most of these people are wearing doole-black suits, the burly shoulder pads and pouf skirts gone, ripped jeans and dirty thermals nowhere to be found. Now the women look smooth, polished, sleek in their streamlined black jackets and short skirts and artfully upswept hair. They look angry and important. They don’t know, Mem thinks, how temporary they really are. None of these women are smiling in their austere black costumes. None of them are wearing patterns. They stare at their own reflections and watch the smoke fan out from between their slippery lips. Their mouths are the only bright things about them, stained the red, orange, or pink of summer flowers,
glistening with false lubrication.

As she hurries through the fixed fog of smoke, Mem thinks that maybe these women know what she knows, that patterns are tricks, what you put on top of cheap fabric so you can’t see its flimsy grade, like covering rotten meat with spices. Mem is sure now that all patterns are unreliable. If she lets her eyes unfocus for a second she can always find faces on the linoleum pattern in her bathroom at home, maybe a silhouette of bleeding lines, maybe an eye or a smile. But if she looks away and then looks back, the face always disappears.

Birth-death-decay
. This is the one pattern Mem knows she can trust. The rest are man-made, an attempt to find—what? Truth? A divine thumbprint? The one pattern that goes on forever? But all patterns break. There is no hidden message. There is only something once forgotten. You only find what you already know.

At the corner, Mem looks up at the traffic light, the red cyclops eye and gaping mouth, the black-clad swarms rushing past her to cross the street. She feels all the movement of the city streaming around her. She covers her mouth and begins to cry.

M
em dreams of stars pouring themselves vigorously against the sky like a cosmic soda. She dreams her teeth are falling out. She dreams of her mother, sitting alone in a gallery, topless and smoking a cigarette.
What are you doing?
Mem asks. Her mother looks away.
I’ve only borrowed these tits anyway
, she says, bright white smoke fanning out from between her lips like the cloud-factory smokestacks on I-95. She hands Mem the cigarette and Mem tries to smoke it but every time she breathes in, the fire in the tip goes out. She tells her mother,
I have to get out of here before they find out I don’t have a ticket
and her mother answers,
You’re the one who was supposed to print the tickets last night, where are they?
Mem remembers that this is true, she was supposed to print the tickets and now everyone will try to get into the gallery without one. She runs out of the gallery and gets into her car, a one-seater that just about fits onto the single-lane luge-rail of the rollercoaster highway. At the top of the highway she realizes that she will either have to drop her car into the river below and then swim out or leave the car there and take the elevator underground to the airport. She only has a few minutes left to go home, print the tickets, and then come back but she has to wait for the ferry to pass before she can do anything. She looks into the rearview mirror and is horrified by how white and plain her face is. She cannot look like this in public. There are hundreds of people coming to this event! She finds her mother’s makeup case in the glove
compartment, sealed with plastic that she has to rip off with her fingernails. Mem tries to draw lips on top of her real lips with the liner but it smears, and when she tries to fix it the whole point breaks off and dangles from the corner of her mouth. She wipes it all off with a receipt from the ashtray and tries again, this time without the liner, but when she looks into her mirror she doesn’t see someone prettier. She sees a small, white face with clown-lips and bright pink doll-blotches on each cheek. Mem tries to take it off with a receipt but the lipstick is waxy and only smears. She rubs her mouth, hard, and when she licks her lips she can feel little shreds of skin. She uses her tongue and teeth to bite and pull and pull them off while she puts the makeup back into the bag, but it won’t all fit in and the plastic wrap has disappeared. The ferry has moved away and traffic is backing up behind her; where did the airport elevator go? It was there a second ago, and now it is dark out, and the people are probably at the gallery. The dead parts of her lip-shreds don’t hurt when she bites them, but each pull yanks at the spot where the skin is still attached and alive. It hurts but she pulls anyway. The car tips forward. The shreds taste like metal and nothing.