Open Me (7 page)

Hector calmly strolls back into the room, armed with two rolls of paper towels and a can of carpet cleaner. “It’s no problem, really,” he hums, handing a roll of paper towels to Aunt Ayin. “You can use the private bathroom to clean her up.” He cautiously bends onto one knee and begins tearing off several sheets of paper towels as Aunt Ayin hurries Sofie out of the room.

Sighing mildly, Hector chuckles to himself, one eye looking at the wall, the other eye looking up at Mem’s mother, who is about to apologize. He puts up his hand. His fingers are girlishly long and slender. “Don’t bother, my dear, it’s perfectly all right,” he says. “After all, you’re the best contractor I’ve ever had. This is all water under the bridge, so to speak.” He laughs at his own joke and shakes the can of carpet cleaner over the wet spot.

“So, that little Sofia,” he says. “She’s a wet one, isn’t she?”

M
em can still feel the chicken-skin of Frank’s dead face on her fingers as she walks through the cemetery. She studies the tombstones as she strides up the rolling green hills. Some of the stones are shaped like angels or spires or open books, though most just stick up out of the ground like dirty buck teeth. A few are as big as the shed on the side of Mem’s house, big dollhouses made of slick marble veined with white. She wishes she could touch the walls of one of the marble sheds, let her hand slide against the cool stone to erase the feeling in her fingertips.

Mem gazes at the beautiful green hills full of boxes of dead people decomposing. She is a little bothered by all of this burying, planting dead bodies like root bulbs in their Sunday best. What is going to happen when they run out of room? Soon there won’t be any place on earth where there isn’t someone buried under the dry crust of dirt. Children digging for China in their backyards will find teeth and navy blue suit jackets. Grazing deer will nip at the grass and pull up finger bones. The roads will rattle under cars like maracas. Mem can almost hear the sound: cadavers chattering under the tires of her mother’s car. Underground dancing bones. And dust. How long will it take for Frank to turn into dust? Is that what all dust is made of? Mem thinks about the lint in the pockets of her jeans at home, the way the dust motes dance in the late-day spears of light by her bedroom window.
D
for
Dancing Dust. D
for
Decompose. D
for
Dead
.

In the distance, Mem hears the circus-music rhythm of a car alarm going off. “How are we supposed to work under these conditions?” says Aunt Ayin, tossing her dimpled hands up in the air. “Tchaikovsky didn’t have to be concerned with the wailing of car alarms interfering with his composition.”

Mem’s mother points to another job in progress, ahead and to the left of the cemetery path, where the mourners are huddled around a canopied hole. Mem’s mother cranes her neck to see who is working it but it’s too far away to tell. They hear a few melodramatic wails pealing from the site. As they get closer Mem sees two older Wailers doing their best; one has ripped the bodice of her doole. The other one’s face is streaked with teary mascara, long black lines striping her face like war paint.

Mem’s mother scoffs. “Gypsy tricks,” she says. Aunt Ayin agrees. “It’s unprofessional,” she sniffs.

Mem’s mother has already explained to Mem how such women use low-rate (unprofessional, inauthentic) artifice, tearing their dooles in advance and then stitching them back together with weak thread, strategically placing the rents where the cloth will give easily. They wear extra layers of makeup that are not waterproof and rub their fingers with onion or soap so they can make themselves cry and their makeup will run. A low-rate Wailer will even collect clumps of her own hair from combs or brushes and use fake eyelash glue to stick the clumps to her scalp, so she can pretend to pull them out during the funeral.

“It’s a disgrace to the profession. Completely inauthentic. What would the ancestors say?” asks Mem’s mother, her lips screwed into the shape of
tsk
.

She looks down at Mem when they reach their job site. “Promise me you’ll never do any of those cheap tricks, ever. Promise me you’ll remember,” she says, and Mem nods. “Your tears are ancestral. They are uncommon and come with a certificate of pedigree. They’re exceptional. And they will never come cheap.”

Mem remembers the story about her great-great-great cousins in France who died in droves before the Revolution, accidentally poisoned
through the hands from clutching lead coffins as they wailed. Even then they used last breaths on death beds to whisper the Lessons so that once the Revolution finally arrived and all the lead coffins were dug up for bullets, the good daughters who remembered the whispers were prepared to profit from losses to come.

At the site, there are already two other Wailers standing among the cross-shaped garlands, a woman and a girl Mem has never seen before. Both have long hair colorless as corn silks and a scattering of freckles across the bridges of their noses. They wear full blacks, standing on the real grass next to a mound of earth covered by a blanket of fake grass. The girl delicately picks her nose when her mother looks away.

“Who’s that?” asks Sofie. She smells faintly of urine and Aunt Ayin’s tea rose perfume.

Mem’s mother smiles at the two Wailers, her smile saying,
I will be polite to you but do not forget who I am
. She tells Mem their secret names:
Aunt Binah, Derasha
. Mem stares at Derasha’s hair, her elegant ears shaped like teacup handles. Derasha stares back while the mothers talk shop. She is a full head taller than Mem.

Oh, I know who you’re talking about, she has amazing stamina
, Mem hears her mother say to Aunt Binah.
She had a strange bout of dry-eye there for a while in the seventies but she’s rolling in dough now
.

Mem politely asks Derasha if this is her First Funeral.

“No,” Derasha replies, tossing her pale hair over one shoulder. “I’m not a baby.”

“Oh,” says Mem. “How old are you?”

Derasha’s blue eyes consider Mem with contempt. She taps her own shiny Mary Janes impatiently against the grass.

Then her cousin put that poor little boy in a doole and brought him to the McCrary funeral in Cherry Hill. As if no one would notice!

“I’m nine. I can whistle and I can blow bubbles with gum,” Derasha says finally. “Can you?”

Mem shakes her head. She isn’t allowed to chew gum.

Drunk
, Mem hears Aunt Binah say.
I can’t stand working with her. Her
sister actually brings a harmonica to the jobs to make sure they’re both wailing at C-sharp pitch. You can smell the Jack Daniels from the other side of the hole
.

Derasha flicks her head to the other side and her hair flows like an underwater creature, tails made of sunlight. “I’m going to be a famous actress,” she says.

They did such a shoddy embalming job that those awful phorid flies were everywhere
.

“Wow,” says Mem, very impressed.

It was six, no, seven before they changed the law last month
, says Aunt Ayin.
Now it’s only three at a time, not including children, thank god. But who’s checking?

“And my family’s from the House of Marcella in Rome where St. Jerome visited all the widows and taught them Hebrew,” says Derasha. “We’re a legend.”

At least we can get health insurance this year
, replied Aunt Binah.
My youngest just had chicken pox. Now they’re all going to get it
.

Mem is about to tell Derasha that her family is a legend, too, when she sees a polished gray hearse leading a slow caravan of cars into the cemetery. All the cars have neon orange stickers on the windows. They slowly snake around the hill at the bottom, and then stop. Mem’s mother moves behind the girls, nodding quickly to Mem as she passes. Doors open, doors shut, there are some murmurs, loud breathing. About a dozen whispering mourners make their way up the hills, all in black, shrugged together like stooped shoulders. Some of the women are wearing short skirts and pointy high heels that sink into the ground as they walk. They try to look serene and sad while they teeter and wobble up the hill. Mem gets nervous all over again and tries to make her face look somber. Mournful. She frowns and sighs and knits her brows.

“Stop making faces,” her mother says.

What happens next goes by very quickly, a gathering and a rustling, like fallen leaves settling. “That’s the widow,” whispers Derasha, nodding toward a woman wearing a stern black suit and black heels with buckles.
The widow’s arms sag against other people’s arms, her hair straggling away from its bun. The other mourners follow, everyone wearing their serious faces, heads bent, hands clasped awkwardly.

Mem is able to make out the priest as he walks by because of his robe and the book he holds beneath his crossed arms. Although he might be a vicar or a minister, Mem doesn’t know the difference yet.
Don’t worry about it, they’re professionals, like us
, her mother has explained.
They’re at the jobs to make money, too. They’ll completely ignore you. Just ignore them back
.

The mourners arrange themselves around the hole, barely noticing that Wailers are there. Mem can’t see anything but legs and black shoes. Polished patent leather. Old loafers. Careful cuffs and stockings the color of smoke. When the priest begins to talk, he uses Hector’s humming voice. Mem can’t quite make out what he is saying. She strains to listen but all she hears clearly is the word
God
, over and over again. Her doole begins to soak up heat from the sun, trapping it between the starched layers. Her mother—all three of the mothers—is standing right behind them, in back of everyone else. They don’t say a word. Soft dandelion wishes pirouette past Mem, riding a breeze only they can feel. She wants to reach out and catch one, let its furriness collapse between her fingers, make her wish, let it go. She would wish to never inherit her grandmother’s curse, the horrible Sjogren’s syndrome that squeezes a Wailer’s lachrymal glands into hard, dry pits that cannot cry. What if, instead of leaking prosperity, Mem’s tear ducts block themselves up and only dribble, disappointingly, like a broken faucet?

“What are we supposed to do?” whispers Sofie, wide-eyed, panicked. Mem listens for some signal from the mothers—a sniffle, a sob, a blown nose—but all she hears are the birds chirping, cars passing, the sound of people’s shoes shifting on the grass.

“Now?”
Mem asks Derasha, who is staring straight ahead.

“No, not now,” she says.

Across the street is a billboard that reads:
If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home
. Mem knows what is waiting for her at home. Empty bags
waiting to be packed full. A big house where her mother won’t be living anymore. How will Mem feed herself if she can’t even reach the cupboards in the kitchen? How will she do the laundry, pay the bills, run a bath?

She won’t have to. Once her mother is gone, first Mem’s bones will become flimsy, then her whole self will turn sheer, then transparent, then shadow, then vapor. She will become foggy air and then disperse, there will be no stopping it. She can already feel herself becoming less substantial, less thing-like, every second. She looks at her hand, expecting it to be partly translucent as a pair of dark stockings. But it isn’t. It’s just a hand, three-dimensional and opaque.

Then it comes, the sound they have been waiting for—a trio of sighs. Little puffs, snorts, and gasps begin to grow, like music at the beginning of a song when the voices haven’t started. Mem looks down at the grass, the legs, the black shoes. She knows it is there, she can feel it.

Little lazy whore
.

The skin under her skin grows thick, her eyes prickle around the edges.

No wonder your father left
.

Her nose fills and swells. The wet in her mouth turns viscous. A tornado-shaped hunger pang burns behind her ribs. She doesn’t notice that Derasha is watching her. She can’t see anything beyond the luminous blur of almost-shed tears. She feels it coming, a symphony cresting—

Then the voices start. First Mem’s mother.

Aunt Ayin.

Aunt Binah.

And then Derasha, who suddenly has the skin of Mem’s upper arm twisted like taffy between her fingers. The pain jolts Mem out of her reverie. She turns to face Derasha who gracefully holds a black handkerchief to her mouth and begins, decorously, to sob.