Open Me (3 page)

A professional
.

A lady
.

If Mem’s mother stared at the numbers long enough, the churning sensation, the sudden drop and burn in her belly that the questions had provoked, would start to fade, diminishing into a small stain of feeling that was easy to brush into some abandoned corner of herself.

A professional. A lady. A legend. A star
. Mem’s mother would say these things to herself over and over again, remembering who she was.

  The night before her First Funeral, Mem repeats the same words to herself.
A professional. A lady. A legend. A star
. All of the things she would finally be allowed to become. Cool slices of moonlight seam through the gold metal slats of her blinds and she remembers the story Aunt Ayin told them about how the moon was once as bright as the sun. Too bright, according to God, who got irritated and sent the moon a message:
Go and diminish thyself
.

God, said Aunt Ayin, was pissed off. Why was the moon acting this way? Didn’t she know that when he created the sun it was supposed to be the most luminous, the most powerful beacon in the heavens? Didn’t she know that the Earth needed to have only half a day of light, then half a day of dark?

The moon wouldn’t listen. She was stubborn. She lit all her wicks and let them burn.
Diminish thyself? Diminish this!
But God wasn’t playing. He sent an army of tempests to put her out. One by one they extinguished her fluted edges of light, leaving behind a complexion of hard pockets and pores. She tried to resist but it was no good, the tempests were too strong. She could feel her flesh callus as they snuffed her out, leaving her chalky and itchy with ash. And what did her sister moons and stars say?

It’s better this way. You have to let go. So sorry for your loss
.

Mem knows that tomorrow she will prove herself to be a better daughter than the moon was, she will begin her own legend, standing at the grave as her legacy comes up out of her mouth, a beautiful thing growing open and flooding outward, an arching deluge and then the hiss of drips rushing into momentary chandelier crystals from her eyes that will thaw
and melt before they hit the ground. She will be like Aurora. She will be like her mother. She will be like all of the women who have come before her, and her mother will not have to leave her.

Mem can’t see much out of the window through the slats but she knows that once morning comes, Aurora’s legend will take over where the moon’s will leave off, her dramatic dew-beads soon swelling and running together, rushing to the tips of leaves and low petals, sulky waters dangling like glass fruits from the loose lips of flowers. They will frost strange shapes on the aluminum siding, make the matted grass stiffen and glisten. Even the scratched Plexiglas 7-Eleven windows around the corner will soon be spangled and slick. When Mem envisions the sadness of the moon, this is what she thinks of: waterlogged windows without anything to shutter them. Eyes wet with someone-else’s tears. A borrowed grief. An outside leak.

In bed Mem closes her own eyes and sees spirals of no-color in hot curls of wire, not-red, not-white, not-green, not-brown. The color blue is Aurora in the mornings with vapors falling soft like feathers from her eyes. The color blue is the word
weep
weeping from her lips.

Mem keeps her eyes closed and she sees blue. She sees Aurora wreathed in blue. She sees Aurora tearing at her hair. She sees her plucking at her flesh. She hears her secrets. She hears her sobs.

She hears her waters weeping over Mem’s bones.

U
nlike her mother, Mem never cared about the money. All she wanted was to be loved. When she became older, anyone who ever watched her work fell a little bit in love with her, at least momentarily, but none of these people really knew anything about her. They never even knew her real name.

“Never disclose your real name to the unprofessionals, no matter how much they might beg you,” Mem’s mother had said. “Your secret name is powerful and, like all powerful things, can be easily misused. The crude names of the unprofessionals are not hidden because these names are words with no meaning. A Wailer’s name is her link to her line, her mother, her value, her trade. To know someone’s true name is to know her lineage. To know someone’s true name is to know her destiny.”

Mem
was the secret name, an ancient word that came from an upside-down tree with roots reaching up to the sky, a head of old fingers stirring the cosmos like soup. The twenty-two paths of a secret alphabet formed this tree and were engraved, like tombstones, into the breath of God.
Mem
was one of the important letters, meaning
of water, of above, of the belly, of salt
.

But the salt Mem’s kind spoke of was not the same kind of salt the unprofessionals used to season their taupe, bland food. The salt of Mem’s heritage had meaning the same way that all of their secret names had meaning, because without salt there would be no tears. Mem’s family line
went back to the
Via Salaria
, the Salt Road in Italy, when salt was the greatest commodity of all, and Mem’s mother owned several antique salt cellars full
of fleur de sel
, the cream of all salts, a glinting gray snow of salt kept for good luck.

On the day of Mem’s First Funeral, she awakes knowing that she will be given a sealed locket full of sacred salt from the
Via Salaria
to wear for good fortune. She will be anointed with olive oil on her temples and finally given her first real doole. She is six years old, and as she waits in the hallway for her mother to finish in the bathroom, Mem pulls at the wooly pills of her footy pajamas, shaking her foot so that she can hear the mysterious crumbs trapped in the toe of the plastic sole. She whispers the word
deceased
. She can hear her mother on the other side, opening and closing jars and sighing to herself,
This is the youngest I will ever be
.

Mem whispers the word
death
, her lips almost touching the bathroom door. She can feel the air from her breath hit the wood veneer and fan out. It doesn’t sound like anything, really, a weak, nothing word. A little girl’s name. For years Mem has seen scores of the almost-dead in the retirement homes where the mothers do business, urine-scented buildings where people go to become almost nothing, wrinkly dehydrated children or fleshy rubber balloons with hair. While Mem’s mother writes receipts and asks questions of surviving spouses, Mem steals glances at the mummified, husk-and-fingernail people and puts them into categories:
Open-mouth breathers. Oozers. Smilers. Cripples. Tubers with inside parts on the outside
. And
Screamers
.

No matter how high-end, the retirement homes the mothers use for contracts smell of unwashed wrinkles, the clinical white corridors lined with robot parts and people in nightclothes and wheelchairs, staring at walls. Whenever Mem steps inside of these places, the old people make great efforts to notice her as she walks by, as if someone has brought them a present, except for the Screamers, who ignore her and shriek unusual things. There was one Screamer, a frail little woman with pink patches of scalp showing through her scant hair, who sat in the courtyard and shrieked, “Help me! Help me!” over and over. The sound was so awful
that it did make Mem want to help her. But help her do what? The woman was clean and fully dressed, her spindly legs covered in a homemade afghan, with a male nurse standing right next to her.

“Help me! Oh, help me!” screamed the woman.

Please be quiet
, thought Mem.

“Help me!” screamed the woman, her voice cracking.

As if someone was hurting her. As if she was trapped somewhere and couldn’t get out.

This is the youngest I will ever be
.

On the other side of the bathroom door, Mem is frightened by the sound of her mother’s voice. It is unlike her mother to sound so sad and submissive. Mem looks at the photo of her mother on the hallway wall, a studio picture taken before Mem was born, during her mother’s professional heyday, with the bold blue backdrop and stiff bubble hairdo that were so stylish then. In the picture Mem’s mother is not weeping but she holds a hand-stitched handkerchief like a wilted and decadent flower just beneath a bright red but calm, closed mouth. This is before the brassieres sculpted strap-shaped dips into her olive shoulders and the veins in her hands pushed their way up to the surface like eroded roots. Before things began to ferment, dimpling the smoothness of Mem’s mother’s legs.

Once, before she was Mem’s mother, Mem’s mother’s charms stuck out like flags sailing the wind and capturing innocent passers-by. As she walked to gravesites, swinging the bones of herself into spaces that did not belong to her, invisible moist bells opened and unfurled in her wake, making the mourners suddenly catch their breaths. She was still-new, which meant that she was not-old. With oiled fairytale tresses. Breasts that were covered but would not be contained. High eyebrows that arched over tight lids as she worked, as she watched the widows shift their eyes beneath hoods of flesh, Mem’s mother thinking, almost gloating,
Not me! Not me!

As Mem got older and grew, the
Not me!
had grown, too. Now,
Not me!
possessed a different, more frantic tone. Papery fans had already begun folding into moon-shapes around a mouth sandwiched between two
full parentheses of cheeks, saying, incredulously,
this is the youngest I will ever be
, as if it were a spell that could save her. As if words could stop her flesh from falling from the bone like a chicken cooked long in soup.

Every morning, as Mem’s mother applies her daily doses of creams and salves, she peers into the medicine cabinet mirror and gently touches the skin of her face as if it is the face of someone she does not know. She is sure that soon the widows will begin to conspiratorially confide in her or invite her over to tea because they will see, tracking the lines of her face as if it is a map, that she has something in common with them. And once this new kind of attention begins to drift into her life, soft and smug as a consoling pat on the back, the men at gas stations and supermarkets and sidewalks will just as easily stop noticing, stop smiling, stop lending a hand. Withdrawing to notice some brighter, tighter produce.

This is how Mem’s mother imagines it will happen: one day she will catch a glimpse of her hurried reflection in a store window, a thumbed-over collage of body parts and smells moving toward an uncontrolled loosening. She’ll see her own face withering in its baggy skin, a colorless fruit on the verge of rot, her legendary hair mummified into a beached bed of seaweed pods rattling in the wind. She’ll quickly look away. She’ll tell herself,
Not me!
and wonder why her hands feel so dry.