Open Me (8 page)

Sofie’s eyes look at Mem and say
Oh, no
.

Then there are mutters, moans, whimpers, wails. Achy, wet sounds kneaded from throats. Animal sounds. The real mourners are silent. Mem pulls her arm out of Derasha’s grip but it is too late now, the pangs are gone, the tears receding. She squints her eyes tight, hoping she can squeeze
the tears back out of them like juice from a lemon. She digs her thumbnail into her fingers. She has suddenly forgotten almost all of her Lessons and everything she has been told except
If you can’t do it I will have to leave you behind
.

Just then a huge sound erupts through the weeping chorus, the sound of someone choking, or falling. The sound of things breaking. It takes a second for Mem to realize what it is, and then she knows.

This is the sound of her mother.

Oh lord!
she chokes.
Oh Jesus why?

This isn’t fake crying. It is real, something is wrong. Someone is hurting her mother. The sobs are enormous, not even sobs but shapes of pain, magnificent, lush, bursting red bubbles. Mem wants to turn around to look but knows she can’t. She watches, instead, as teardrops drip from the end of Derasha’s elegant nose. The sounds behind the girls are coming to a crescendo, howls and sobs and quivering noises, but none as strong as Mem’s mother’s. Mem understands that eventually it is going to come to an end, if she doesn’t start crying soon her mother will have to leave her. She shuts her eyes so tight she sees sparks flash against the red curtain of her eyelids.
Come on, come on!
She bites her lip so hard she tastes blood but that’s all there is, just blood, no tears. No tears at all. Even her mouth is a waterless rubber. And suddenly it is too late.

The sounds around Mem are receding, dropping their moist notes, sliding away into sniffling noises.

There is some slight hyperventilation.

A throat clearing.

A little groan.

Soon the real mourners turn and, in a drowsy parade, begin to walk back down the hill, where the cars are waiting. Mem watches the high heels and loafers and cuffs and stockings move away, getting smaller and smaller as they go down the hill, attached to halting and slightly stooped bodies. The widow stays by the grave. She stares at the air, plucking at the material of her suit jacket over her chest as if her fingers might be able to break through the cloth, tear at the body, and grab at her heart, if only her
hands were strong enough.

A
heart attack
. She wants to attack her heart.

She doesn’t cry but she has lost all composure. She is decomposing.

One of the mourners puts a hand on the widow’s shoulder. He tilts his head to the side and says, “We’re so sorry you lost him.”

Lost:
as if the widow’s hand had slipped away from her husband’s fingers in a crowd at the mall and she can’t find him.
Lost:
temporarily missing, like a misplaced toy. Not the right word,
lost
, which implies that her cold, chickeny husband might someday be found again, alive and well but frazzled at the
lost-and-found
.

Mem knows that she will now be lost, on purpose, by her mother. This has been the test, and she has failed because of Derasha, who is proudly walking down the hill toward her mother’s station wagon. Mem knows she should say something, do something, feel something, but she can’t. Her feet are nightmarishly stuck in the grass. She pinches the embroidered flowers on her dry handkerchief and waits.

Inside of her head Mem hears Aunt Ayin reciting the Lesson of Emptiness:
You cannot be empty and cry at the same time. Remember the story of Nistar, whose name means something you can’t explain. There are hundreds of 15th-century paintings of Nistar hanging in the most prestigious museums in the world. In each of the paintings, Nistar stands removed, almost not-there, gently veiled, head bent forward but shoulders still proud. She was the first Wailer to train her daughters using images that made them sad. Like Nistar, you must fill yourself up with images to use but never reveal them. And if, god forbid, you should find yourself empty on the job and at a total loss, just watch the Master Wailer nearest to you and emulate
.

Mem finally turns to look at her mother, who is staring at the widow, and Mem feels what must be her own heart breaking. She wonders if this is the beginning of dying. She learned that the body dies slowly and unsystematically, like an old car, starting with the brain while the liver continues to pump bile, intestines still directing gasses from the meal before the last meal. Death, her mother has explained, is not so much a process as it is the sporadic shutting down of processes. Death does not happen, it is not a
happening, it is the draining of a happening, as cold is simply the absence of heat. It is a dropped plate, a switch turned off, a wire cut. The sound of things ceasing, not of things absent.

It is impossible to be empty and cry at the same time. Just watch the Master Wailer nearest to you and emulate. Look at your mother
.

Mem looks at her mother. Even with her swollen eyes and nose she is so beautiful she is like a bright light that hurts to look at. Mem looks at her anyway. She looks at her standing to the side of the grave canopy, in front of the other mothers who seem too pale, too dim, their features too small. Mem’s mother glows, super-bright against the stiff blacks. The other mothers defer to her, heads bent just a little as they wait to listen to her deep voice.

Look at her again
.

These other mothers know that Mem’s mother is the Master. That she is special, chosen, a legend, a star. That her blacks are the best blacks and her wails are the best wails and her handkerchiefs are hand-embroidered with forget-me-not patterns handed down for hundreds of generations from ancient Rome. They know this and so does Mem. Mem looks at her mother and her love for her comes out and goes forward like a beacon that connects them, even though her mother seems far away and isn’t looking at Mem at all.

Mem without her mother
.

Mem feels her chest shudder and her face begin to cry.

She loves her mother so much it hurts, it is a hole that can never be filled. Her mother is as big as the air around them; Mem gasps the air in, pulls at her hem, pulls everything in through her mouth, turns it into sound and lets it purge out.
You cannot be empty and cry at the same time
. This isn’t true, can’t be true, Mem’s emptiness is as large as her mother. If she could only have all of her mother. If she could only be enough for her mother to love. If only there were such thing as enough.

Mem looks at her mother but she is engrossed in conversation with the other mothers; she starts to step toward Mem but her head is turned while she finishes a sentence.

Your mother loves you
. Mem’s mother tells her this all the time, and Mem knows it is true. But she suspects what lies beneath this love: an unlove, just as strong. She sees it. She hears it. She feels it trying to get in.

Lazyfilthyliar

The idea of this unlove makes Mem panic, makes Mem sad, makes her wonder what horrible things she has done to deserve it. She looks down at the grass fringing the edges of her Mary Janes like a decorative border and knows with the everyday certainty and solidity of the grass and shoes that her mother’s unlove will always be there. She shifts her shoes in the green fur of the grass.

Lazyfilthyliar

Her mother suddenly looks at Mem and Mem feels it. She raises her head in time to see her mother smile and mouth
I love you baby
. Mem’s insides roil in a swamp of redness and humiliation.
Filthy liar. Lazy whore. Piece of shit
.

No wonder

No wonder

No wonder your father left
.

Mem’s mother smiles again and the swamp inside Mem gets hotter and surges. Irrepressible mudflows bring the red up to Mem eyes, nose, and mouth, her face becoming a ripe fruit bursting with acidy juice that can no longer be contained. Suddenly, without any of the pomp and prelude she has always imagined, Mem’s whole self is split open and weeping.

At the moment when the mourners stop walking and turn to look at where the sound is coming from, Mem forgets how to breathe. She can only cry out. Nothing goes in. Where is her mother? She looks around, sobbing. The tears are made of boiled water and vinegar. They are too hot. They burn. They score Mem’s cheeks with sickle-shaped scars.

There is no such thing as Mem without her mother.

They’re going to bury Mem’s mother, but not yet. Mem reaches out to touch the cool face bright with stardust but her fingers don’t reach; they’re already lowering the coffin. In the middle of this pinwheel of mourners, in the strange light on her slack face in the coffin, Mem’s mother’s corpse is suddenly beautiful, even
her mouth beautiful, though Mem knows it is stitched closed and stuffed. The lips seem kissed by petals of moonlight, skin dusted with a fine, glowing powder, like the dust from moths’ wings
.

“Don’t go!” shrieks Mem.

Her mother’s coiled hair shines even brighter than the pink satin it rests upon. Her hands are folded over the belly. Mem sobs. Mem wails. Snot runs into her mouth
.

“Don’t go!”

It feels good to say it. It makes her cry harder. She says it again.

And again.

And again, rocking back and forth, the cloth of her doole stuffed between her pulling fingers.

“No!”

A handful of mourners clamber back up the hill and rush over to Mem, dropping things, falling onto knees to comfort her, to make her stop. They offer her handkerchiefs, candy, hugs. She twists away from them, turning around.

“No!”

And there is her mother. Smiling. Arms crossed. Watching, mouthing,
You are a good girl
.

Now Mem wants to stop but she doesn’t know how. She’s supposed to stop by making herself feel something else, by remembering something happy or funny or nice. Mem tries to feel something else but she can’t. There is nothing else. There is only this. Small body crooked down, white ghost wrapped in black, warped spine contracting, pores flared, nostrils streaming. Mouth in the shape of pain.

This is the shape pain makes.

This is the prologue to heaving and screaming.

This is a picture of Mem weeping.

In her mind Mem hears Aunt Ayin reciting,
The desire of the weeping body is not to stand but to sit, not to sit but to lie, not to lie but to curl and contract, puckering like a sour mouth. The weeping body wants to recoil, withdraw
,
retreat. Don’t do any of these things. Remember Adrastia, jailed in Rome in the 6
^th
century B.C. for breaking Solon’s law by crying in public. Remember how she refused to stop and wept so lavishly behind her bars that even the guards threw coins at her feet
.

Mem tries to straighten her body, to breathe normally again and let it all sink back down. She knows she is supposed to do it quickly, like her mother, in one brisk flick, the kind you use to check the undersides of leaves or the bottoms of bricks where beetles grow. The widow has covered her own mouth with her hand as she stares at Mem, and Mem is instantly overcome with embarrassment, as if she were standing here naked in front of all these people.

One of the mourners stands off to the side, waiting. He is an older man with white hair and a white mustache, wearing a tweed suit. A thin man with fat hands. Mem takes one look at him and knows he is the kind she’s been warned about. There is usually at least one at every job, her mother explained, an older man who cranes his neck so he can watch the Wailers drip and snot, the smeared mascara, the opened mouths. The kind of man who makes
psst psst
noises at women and says rude things in languages that they do not understand. When Mem’s mother was a teenager she had one man who followed her from job to job. Finally she called the police to complain. The policeman who answered the phone listened to Mem’s mother explain and then interrupted. “Come on, lady, what do you expect?” he had asked. “I mean, look at what you do for a living, for Chrissakes.”

Eventually, the man stopped showing up. But Mem’s mother still keeps a watchful eye upon her audiences, looking for voyeuristic old men who are all too fascinated with what is going on behind them. Too often, she has noted, the most ardent observers are men of the cloth, straining over their hymn books during pauses to behold the moaning, the submission, the rare dripping of womanly fluids. A few times Mem’s mother has caught the eye of some salivating minister and wagged her tongue at him, mid-sob.

The letchy-looking man in tweed walks over to Mem, smiling broadly. He claps his meaty hands.

“Bravo,” he says. “What a wonderful job you did! Talented and lovely, too, what a combination!”

Mem is embarrassed but she smiles, a small smile. When the man walks closer Mem sees that his skin is mottled with pocks and scars, the inside of his lopsided nostrils lined with a hard yellow crust. His eyes are moist, but not from crying.

“How much for you to cry for just me?” he asks, his rheumy eyes pink, cigar-shaped fingers stuttering over the wallet swelling out of his breast pocket.
Tap, tap, tap
.

“I’m not allowed,” Mem says softly. “I’m sorry.”

She smiles politely again. She doesn’t want to offend him. She tries to fix her eyes on something else, the trash lining the street by the cemetery like unwanted food pushed to the side of a plate, the man’s loose shirt button dangling like a teddy bear’s floppy eye. The man looks disappointed, but not defeated. He nods his head, tapping his wallet. “Okay, lovely,” he says. “I understand.” He takes Mem’s hand and kisses the top of it and walks away.

After he is gone Mem can still feel his spit on her hand. She rubs it against the back of her doole. His fingers felt just the way they looked, fat sausages wrapped in dry leaves. Mem bends down and pulls up a handful of grass, using all of her fingers. She sprinkles the grass onto a nearby headstone, so that anyone looking might just think she is paying her respects in the traditional Jewish way. But that isn’t why she does it. She just needs to get the feeling of the man off of her fingers, to touch something else.