Open Me (19 page)

“Is it some sort of fatigue or paralysis?” Mem’s mother asks, but the doctor simply shakes his head. Paralysis was a word suggesting that things might move again one day, that her glands might someday be useful. Fatigue implied that there would be a resurrection. But this nice, round, bespectacled doctor with the white tufts scattered across his crown was telling her the truth: no cure, no therapy, no magic. No wetness.

Mem watches the pamphlet become damp and limp in her mother’s perspiring hands.

Throughout Mem’s mother’s life, the word
Sjogren’s
was something you weren’t supposed to say out loud. It was forbidden, a bad word, a word powerful enough, once uttered in mixed company, to silence a room. Her own mother had pretended that the disease was a blessing, a sign that she should abandon Wailing and become a trainer, which she had claimed all along was her true calling.

Mem’s mother has always believed in callings but she has also always believed that as she aged, she would lose one seemingly indispensable feature after another. But never this. Now her celebrated eyes are waterproof. Now she is a desiccated well, worse than tainted or stagnant, nothing suspended or stifled or withdrawn, not even an emptiness that can be filled.

So this is it after all: the first need on the list of things she will never be able to have again. Now she will be nothing but a dry witness suffering a frustrating constipation. This is the someone-else face she has been fighting against for the past twenty years, the face of her own freeze-dried self in the coffin, cured with salt. Here it is, the beginning of uselessness and embalmment.

Even bad water is better than none at all
. This was one of the first lessons she had learned. She had memorized it dutifully almost a half-century ago, but she was very little then and didn’t know what bad water was. She had imagined a mischievous sludge sneaking out of a well to wreak havoc on the neighborhood. A glass of water being scolded by her mother.

Mem looks hard at her mother sitting on the bed after they return from the doctor’s office. Mem says, firmly, “It will come back.”

Mem’s mother’s face is blank but she radiates longing. She nods, uninspired, and stands up, unbuttoning the side of her doole. Her emanations are as blank as her face, a blanket of TV static loud as the static in Mem’s ears, to cover up the real noise beneath it. “You’re right,” she says. “It will come back.”

Mem twists her fingers together church-and-steeple style while she watches her mother undress. She knows what her radar is registering now. It is a make-believe signal, something designed to trick the receiver. It is a drowsy surrender with edges of rage. It is the apocalypse coming, insurrection, a plague. Growing up, Mem had heard several stories told about a Wailer in ancient China who was able to time her pattern of crying and stopping to match the rhythm of the mourning drums. In the one surviving drawing of her, now hanging in a museum in France, she is depicted sitting in a corner, lost in the folds of her white robe, surrounded by gifts of crimson eggs wrapped in red ribbon, pots of plum jellies, and platters of pork ovaries. She was loved not for her tears but for her control, the musical throb and halt, the breathless pauses, the true gift: not the crying, but the stopping. The sign of a Master. But the stopping is only considered a gift if, once stopped, the Wailer can start again. Stopping for good used to
mean banishment; in the old days Mem would have been expected to liquidate her mother’s assets and send her off, or pay to have her killed in a painless and honorable way.

“It will come back,” Mem says again, though she doesn’t believe this. Fearful and awed into a rare silence, Aunt Ayin tries to find a cure. She scatters handfuls of sacred salt from the
Via Salaria
in Rome across Mem’s mother’s patchy lawn and inside of the house, watching the grains bounce across the linoleum.
To absorb evil vapors
. She lights red candles and writes Mem’s mother’s name on the wall with invisible inks. She brings in a drum made of snakeskin to ward off all creeping things. She rubs Mem’s mother’s eyes with sapphires, chants and hangs suspensions, picks runes and burns smudge and cooks Secret Confections. She makes Mem’s mother eat dry host biscuits baked with salt and drink flower-essence elixirs. Aunt Ayin believes that all Mem’s mother needs is a healing balm, an anointment, something young and made of water. A matrix that can unclog Mem’s mother’s plumbing and begin the process of distillation. Mem’s mother does not resist. She has already resigned herself to this new fruitlessness and has stopped fighting. On the newly glossed refrigerator, next to the shopping list, is a paper covered in Aunt Ayin’s alchemical symbols: solution, sublimation, to rot, to anneal, to purify, quintessence, time, water, work complete.

Her mother begins to talk in her sleep. Even with her bedroom door closed, Mem can hear her mother asking in a clear, loud voice from her room
Where do you keep your glasses? I don’t trust a room without windows. I said that would be fine, didn’t I? Who painted these tables?

“We should have seen the signs,” Aunt Ayin says. She brings out a deteriorating leatherbound book.

“Here are the warnings,” she reads.

A white rose in autumn
.

Dropping a mirror in which you have seen your reflection
.

Ebbing tide
.

Spiked leaves
.

Fruit and flowers on the same tree
.

T
he look on her mother’s face as she says goodbye when Mem leaves for work one snowy Saturday morning makes a vibrating knot grow in Mem’s throat. It is the day before Mem’s seventeenth birthday and her mother will spend the day cooking and cleaning and baking Mem’s cake. She looks tired, yes, but that isn’t all. There is something else, but not the angry someone-else that sometimes inhabits Mem’s mother. This new look on her face is the lack of a look. At first, Mem tries to forget the look as she walks through the snow, a thick, clotted snow that covered the trees with pristine cottonballs overnight. But the image of her mother waving goodbye from the doorway, wearing her big, suddenly-too-heavy-looking black coat, the helpless, condemned smile, these gnaw at Mem, irritating and irresistible as the itch from a mosquito bite.

All of the noises in the cemetery are subdued by the snow. Mem hardly hears one of the oldest Aunts as she trudges forward to stand next to her. “We haven’t seen your mother in a while,” she says. “I hope she’s all right.”

The Aunt is hunchbacked and skeletal, her face covered in brown spots the size of jelly beans. She has covered her boots in clear produce bags. She smiles at Mem in a concerned, kindly way, but to Mem the sunken eyes seem sickeningly amused.

“She’s fine,” Mem says. “She’s taking a vacation.”

Mem has already begun to miss her mother. Her mother’s insides are
like a missing person, slightly moldering and honeycombed with a powdery desiccation, calcified rime on the brink of collapse. Some vital quintessence has been leached out of her, a cold seep that has left behind a beautiful but brittle cloth. Now Mem’s mother is a ruin on display like the relics of Rome Aunt Ayin always talks about, imposing and memorable and only good for looking at. She has begun the ghost-like shrinking, the erosion that she always expected and dreaded. Soon she will be almost transparent, thin and deprived as ice.

Mem sees her own cloaked body below her, stark in its draped black fabric against the snow, and it becomes clear to her that her mother was right, what she is seeing is just a shell, something that can be pried open or husked off by someone-else. She looks at her hand and sees its shellness, turns it over to examine the palm, expecting it to be calcified, or twisted into a nautilus. But it isn’t. It is just a hand, a small fleshy carcass that she wishes she could use to cover her face as the old Aunt shuffles back to her place in the rear. “Send her our best,” the Aunt calls, her ancient voice reedy and thin in the cold.

At the moment the mourners begin walking toward the gravesite, Mem realizes that soon people will forget that her mother has ever been a Master. The legend will fade out like the end of a TV drama, and all of the other Masters will be thrilled. It might even be cause for celebration, the dethroning of a Wailer who ruled for half a century. Mem wonders what they are already saying, who will take her place in the front, next to Mem.

Mem wailing without her mother.

Mem without her mother.

First there will be whispers, then rumors, then stories. Mem can already hear the unprofessional hags talking by the holes.
I always knew she would wear out some day. Maybe she’s been faking it all along. She’s damaged goods. She’s polluted. She’s contaminated. Sure, they say it’s Sjogren’s but that was her mother’s excuse, too
.

That night, at home, Aunt Ayin sits at the kitchen table and pores through her big musty books. “At least everyone will remember you as a Master,” she says to Mem’s mother. But Mem knows this isn’t true. It is the
opposite of the truth. For a while they will remember her mother as a fallen woman, a Wailer too big for her britches and knocked down by fate, but eventually they will not remember her at all. There will be no Lessons with her mother’s name in them for future generations to memorize. There will be no legend of Celeste. Mem without her mother is one thing, a temporary peculiarity, while the profession without her mother’s legend is something else. Someday Mem will die, too, and her grief will go with her. But for Wailing to go on, for the hags to dishonor and forget her mother, this will be a permanent condition. Her legend is a story that will stop being told.

A permanent condition
. Even Mem knows that, except for death, there is no such thing.

“You know the Romans took Palestine because they needed to harvest salt from the Dead Sea,” her mother says as she ignores Ayin and rubs the refrigerator handles with rags. “If the Romans hadn’t been so desperate for salt, the whole Jesus thing would have turned out totally different.”

Mem’s mother doesn’t care about Aunt Ayin’s signs. She seems to Mem like she is tired of fighting, tired of thinking about her body, which has now betrayed her twice. Mem knows her mother does not want to live too long, does not want Mem to have to monitor all the solids and liquids that will have to go into her mother’s body and all the solids and liquids that will have to come out, to look after bedsores and live with the smell of her flesh slowly going bad, like forgotten leftovers. Perhaps if Mem’s grandmother were there, forcing treatment tubes into her arms and down her throat, whacking her in the head with a wooden spoon or flushing her head in the toilet whenever Mem’s mother started to drift off, it would be different.

But Mem’s grandmother isn’t there. There is only Mem, and Aunt Ayin, and a beady-eyed photograph scowling its disapproval from the mantel.

Scouring the stovetop, circling her arm so furiously that the rubbery flesh between her elbow and armpit swings from side to side, Mem’s mother says, “It’s no surprise that the soldiers were paid in salt. That’s where the
word salary comes from. Plenty of our ancestors were paid in salt and spices instead of gold, and they didn’t mind.”

What would the ancestors say?

They’d say:
Accept it, Celeste. Your number is up
.

Go find the list. Who shall we hire?

Curled up in bed, trying to sleep, Mem hears a low-pitched sound come from her mother’s room. Mem shifts a little to hear better and the clean sheets rustle under her with a dryness that makes all her hairs stick up.

When Mem was much younger, she had been confused whenever she heard someone say,
so sorry for your loss
. It didn’t make sense to her, these two ideas, death and loss paired together. Losing or being lost was an action, a state of being, and death, her mother had told her, was nonaction, no state at all.

But now, as she listens to her mother moaning in the other room, Mem begins to see that going from young to not-young to dying to dead is mostly about loss after all. Hair, teeth, blood, elasticity, strength, all go missing, or evaporate, never to be found again. One by one the organs lose power, the body becomes a shut-down factory with smashed window panes. Then you are just lost. Then your survivors are lost, and lost behind, struggling to find out where they are in a world where their loved one no longer exists. This, Mem realizes, is why she is hired to cry. She is wailing not for the dead but for the people who are still alive, for the loss, the loss, the loss that will never be found.

This sound sliding its way through the hallway from her mother’s room is her mother’s real crying, sobs popping out like reluctant corks from a bottle, one-two-three-four-five-six and then a breath. It is the breath of someone caught up from drowning, the breath of someone who does not want to be crying. This is not the sound of Mem’s mother weeping at funerals. This is unorchestrated, beyond control.

Mem does not want to hear it. She stays in the same position on the bed so that she can hear it, on her side, one leg bent on top of the other, one arm under her head, the other by her face. It is hard to stay in one spot.
The sound coming from her mother makes her want to cry, too, but she won’t, she has to stay stiff. “Make it stop,” she whispers, but there is no one there to hear and she isn’t sure that she really wants it to stop.