Open Me (4 page)

While she works, Mem’s mother watches the widows with a surgeon’s eye. She twists at her handkerchief with not-yet-old hands. She wonders, often, which unseen part of her own self will be the first to wither, then fail. This is why, every night, Mem’s mother pats cream onto the swollen crescents under her green eyes and onto the bridge of her Roman nose and peers at herself in the bathroom mirror as if she has already become someone she does not know, as if the person she does know has been lost or left behind.

But when she opens the medicine cabinet mirror half-way so that it slants against the mirror on the wall and then slides her head between the two mirrors and looks, she sees an endless tunnel of reflections curving out toward an unknown space. A million reflections of reflections of reflections of the person Mem’s mother is about to leave behind. Years later,
when her daughter asks her to explain the word
infinity
, this is what she will show her.

The bathroom door opens, releasing a flurry of steam and a honeysuckle smell. Through the wet fog Mem can see her mother wrapped in two towels, one on her head, one around her torso. She is slick and soft and gleams like a goddess. She wipes the steam away from the mirrors with the flat of her hand as Mem scrambles to sit on top of the toilet lid with its blue carpet cover. Mem’s favorite thing to do is to watch her mother stare at herself in a special face-painting mirror that is round and framed with glowing white bulbs the size of ping-pong balls. The mirror is so powerful you can see the pale down on Mem’s mother’s cheeks as she concentrates on her reflection, staring at it as if she is searching for something. The mirror has a built-in drawer filled with wondrous and exotic treasures. She finger-paints her face with colorful goo kept in vials and tubes, or buttery puddles of pudding in pots, using paintbrushes, combs, crayons, and sponges. She pats the top of a bottle onto a fresh white wedge and paints new skin on top of her old skin, covering the faint splatter-shaped birthmark on her forehead. She pulls her brow hairs out with one tool and then draws them back in with another, traces pretend lips on top of her real lips and fills them in with deep red.

Mem thinks that her mother is already the prettiest woman in the world but the pastes and flower-colors make her even more beautiful.
There
, says the satisfied look on the new face of Mem’s mother.
That’s who I’ve been looking for all along
.

Mem longs to use her mother’s magic paints and glosses, so that she, too, can start as herself, look into the mirror, and end up as someone-else. Sometimes her mother will tap a dot of lipstick onto each of Mem’s cheeks and rub it in, but Mem understands that the rest is forbidden, something she will one day be skilled enough to handle. These are things brought in from the outside world of the unprofessionals. They are mysterious, magic, something the regular little girls in her suburban development probably already know how to use. Someday she will master them, too.

Downstairs, on her way into the kitchen, Mem sees a large, square stuffed animal by the front door, leaning against the imitation wrought-iron banister, on top of the scrubbed but still stained linoleum floor. But as Mem comes closer to the animal, she sees the black plastic handles attached and knows it is not an animal at all. It is her mother’s packed suitcase, patterned in hairy green-and-red flannel.

If you can’t do it, I will have to leave you behind
.

“Come in the kitchen, baby,” her mother calls. Mem walks into the kitchen, and there is her mother’s smile, there is the smoky smell of her hair, there are all of her flushed open pores, and Mem’s insides flush in response, urgent, abundant, and too big for her small body to restrain. From that day on, Mem’s mother’s suitcase remains by the door. It is moved aside each week to clean underneath, but then it goes back in its place. Though Mem’s mother takes care to dust it, the bag does fade a bit over the years. The fur by the bottom turns brown and the black handles lose their shine. For twelve years the bag is still and silent but is the loudest thing in the house.

Mem does not want to know what might be inside. When she learns the word
hoary
she pictures the suitcase, though she never touches it. It is not a large bag but to Mem it is monstrous, it stays both on the floor and in Mem’s mind, next to the vision of an empty chair, an empty bed, doors permanently closed, all of the things she and her kind are taught to fear. Not the death of their mothers, but the disappearance.

“You are too beautiful for words,” her mother says, smiling as she stirs the oatmeal, though she has explained to Mem several times that while being pretty will always help her make money, crying prettily will not.
Professional crying should be like natural crying, ugly and hard to look at, a play of facial contortions that the crier cannot see, including the awkward posture and pose. Clients should find it unbearable to watch yet impossible to turn away, while the Wailer should find it equally as unbearable to be watched. This is the moment you must strive for. It will make you cry harder
.

Around Mem’s mother’s neck is the locket full of salt from Mem’s first baby tears. It’s Mem’s grandmother’s mezuzah, dented from where a
neighborhood dog bit it decades ago. Mem’s mother knows it’s bad luck to wear your children’s tears, it’s something she would never allow a client to do. But Mem’s mother does it anyway. “I love you so much,” she says to Mem. “And after today, the rest of the world will love you, too.”

She sends Mem out to the front yard to rinse apples, to keep her out of the kitchen. In the morning light the apples are beautiful, a perfect hard redness, and the lawn is dotted with the careless bursts of dandelions mutating into wishes. When Mem finds the hose behind the shrubs and turns it on, the water is hot from lying in its tubing for so long. It spurts out a thick arc that catches the low sun, splashing watery beads across the apples’ waxed peels.

Mem lets her eyes unfocus and rest on the soft lawn-wishes and is just deciding which one she will pick to blow when she looks up and sees, gliding down the street, a group of girls from a different court in her development.

But these are not just girls. These are beautiful girls, luscious girls, blond cakes iced from head to toe in glimmery frostings. Mem looks at them and thinks:
puff pastry, lily, foam, milk, moondust, silver, snow
. The tall girl is the shimmeriest, lips painted the color of the inside of an oyster shell, eyelids swirled in mother-of-pearl. Her cheeks are shiny soap bubbles. Even her spun-sugar hair is snowfeathered, puffed into swans wings and silvered at the tips. Her false lips wink and gleam like the rainbow in an oil slick.

The girls are wearing dancer costumes, pink leg-warmers and white jazz shoes, T-shirts artfully torn at the top to reveal glossy shoulders, golden skin spangled with sunlight. Pink and purple ribbons braided into barrettes with small purple beads dangle between stiff meringue peaks of hair. For months Mem has watched these girls sit on the sod-and-curb islands that bulge from the end of each court, carefully plaiting the sherbet-colored ribbons and beads onto plain silver barrettes. Some of them wear roller skates with wide pink laces. The smallest one carries a radio that is almost as big as she is. The iron-on kitten on her T-shirt has chipped and cracked from being washed too much, but it, too, twinkles in the sunlight.
As they pass the last island before Mem’s house, the tall girl spits a neon-pink wad of gum onto the street.

Even though Mem has never been to school, she knows about these kinds of girls. They always travel in groups of three or four, gliding seamlessly by her house like a parade of confections on a floating platter. At night they catch lightning bugs and dig the lightning part out with their nails while the bugs are still alive, smudging the still-glowing paste into rings around their fingers. Once they spent most of the afternoon singing a song they had made up, to the tune of
The Bridge Over the River Quai
, at the top of their lungs:

(Later Mem will remember this song with guilty satisfaction. Two of the girls in this group will become pregnant while they are still in high school. As a young teen Mem will watch them, both several pounds heavier, separately walking their babies around the neighborhood in strollers. Neither of the girls will glow anymore. They won’t talk to each other. They certainly won’t sing.)

Watching this strange bouquet of girls come closer, Mem envisions herself walking down the street with them, laughing their secret laugh, wrapped in pink tatters and floating over the blacktop with roller-skate feet. But when they notice Mem watching, the group stops twittering and hollering to each other, and Mem drops her stare, looking instead at her feet until the girls stop right in front of her. They are so close that when she looks back up she can see the milky grain of their skin and smell their smells: bubblegum, hairspray, nearly grown-up perspiration.

The tall one smiles at Mem, showing all her teeth. Her cheeks are sunrise pink and smooth as a goblet. Her eyes don’t flinch when the sun flashes in them.

“Hello!” she says brightly. “What’s your name?”

Mem doesn’t answer. She has never been asked this before and does
not know what to say.

“Don’t be scared,” the tall girl purrs. “We just want to know your name.”

“We’ve seen you around here,” says another. “You don’t go to school, right?”

Mem shakes her head
no
.

The tall girl juts out a hip, twirls a piece of golden hair between her fingers. “That’s cool. I wish I didn’t have to go to school. School sucks. It’s like, I don’t need to know this stuff. It’s
so
stupid. It’s
so
gross. You are
so
lucky.”

Mem tries to smile.
Cool, sucks, gross
. She doesn’t know what any of these words mean. They sound like a secret code.

“You look just like this doll I have,” says the big one. “She’s supposed to like cry after you give her a bottle and squeeze her belly but she doesn’t really like work anymore but that’s cool we don’t really play with dolls anymore do you have any dolls?”

Mem shakes her head again. She isn’t allowed to play with dolls. And she isn’t allowed to tell these girls that she isn’t allowed to play with dolls. A hot flush opens across her forehead and burns its way down. Maybe this is a test. Maybe her mother is watching from the window, monitoring, making sure that Mem doesn’t say the wrong things. But she wants to talk. She wants to tell them how pretty she thinks they are, that they look like dolls, too. She pokes her toes into the grass.

“So, do you want to be our friend?” asks the tall girl, and Mem
nods yes
.

“What’s your name?” asks the girl.

Mem has no idea what to say. Before she can answer, the small girl starts to laugh. She smiles gently at Mem, asking in a kind voice, “Are you a
retard?”

“My name is Mirabelle,” Mem answers quickly, and even as she says it she knows it sounds like a lie. Behind her the spigot hisses.

“Oh,” says the tall one.
“Mirabelle.”

She cocks her pretty head to the side and smiles so hard her gums show.

“Well, Mirabelle,” she says, “you smell. Do you know that?”

“She does, she smells,” says the tall girl to the rest, who nod seriously
in agreement. “It’s her ugly, pukey, gypsy feet that smell. I guess she doesn’t know how to shower.”

As the girls walk around Mem like creatures picking over carrion, Mem looks down at her feet, the dancing-feet-of-joy that had sent her spinning around the kitchen the night before. And then she sees that what they say is true. Her toes are small and dirty and shaped like grubs. They are horrible feet! Terrible feet, the skin white as salt cod. Mem can see the map of veins under the pallid flesh. She tries to cover one foot with the other, burying her toes into the dirt.

The big one calls Mem
Crybaby
.

“Make her cry,” says the one carrying the radio. “Go ahead. I bet she loves to cry.”

Mem wishes her mother were here. Her mother would know what to do. She would say something funny and smart, something that would get their respect. Something that would make them want to be her friend.

But Mem’s mother is not there.

“Here,” Mem says as she bends over. She hands the big girl a clean, new apple, still damp and ruby red.

They take the apples and smile, kindly. Real smiles
.

They ask Mem to join their group
.

“Mirabelle,” they say, “what a beautiful name.”

But they only bare their teeth, like any animal saying to its prey,
You are food
.

The tall one wrinkles her small nose at the apple in her hand and pretends to sniff it.

“Did she touch this?” she asks her friends, not looking at Mem. “Did that smelly freak touch this? Yeah, I bet she touched these apples. Because they smell like shit.”

She drops her apple as if it is hot and has burned her and the others follow suit, pulling apples up from the lawn and then dropping them, plop plop plop. The little one throws hers at the side of Mem’s house. Then they start to whisper their secret whispers and giggle their secret giggles and they draw themselves together and float away like cream.

Mem chews on her lip and tries to wash the pulp off the ground without looking at her awful feet or inhaling her shitty smell. She feels like the scummy
schmutz
on the top of soup. She feels like the part of the deceased they vacuum out and throw away.

But she is also going to be a star. She will make millions of dollars before any of these girls even figure out what they want to do with their silly lives. She will be a legend someday. She will be a Master. She will attend the funerals of each of these girls and make a fortune off of their demise. Maybe she will spit on their graves.