Open Me (22 page)

T
he air moves around rows of wet, shimmering melons with transparent skins shivering like giant peeled grapes in the middle of a field. Next to the melons are huge husks bundled together like corn, shoots steeping in inky pools trimmed with sunlight. From where Mem is standing, she can watch the husks unstick themselves from each other and shake off the leaves. There are bright yellow puppies inside, frantically rolling around on the marshy field, bumping into crates full of just-plucked melons. The melons split open and inside the pods are small babies, sunblind and covered in slime.

One of the babies doesn’t look right. It is scrawny and gray, squirming in its slime pod without anyone to tend to it. It doesn’t cry. Mem wants to go to it and pull it out of the muck but she can’t, there are too many puppies in the way, wriggling like fat yellow worms. She would have to step on some of the puppies to save the baby, which is drowning inside of its own syrup.

It’s not done yet
, she says, and when she turns around she finds that she is on stage in the gallery, topless. She has only one breast but it is so exquisite that someone has framed it and there is a line of people waiting, tickets in hand, to see it. Mem doesn’t mind. She thinks the breast is so lovely it should be looked at. Her mother is sitting in the corner of the gallery, looking forlorn and abandoned. She takes a drag from someone else’s
cigarette and says
that’s not really her tit anyway
and when Mem looks down she sees that yes, the breast has been sewn on with thick and crooked black stitches.
Maybe you can sell it at the flea market
, her mother says, touching both sides of the breast and examining it.

But I like it
, Mem says. Her mother laughs and the other people in the gallery laugh along with her.
It doesn’t matter if you like it, it’s only business
, her mother says.
And it’s not even yours. Try to be more professional
. She begins to unbutton her own shirt.
Here
, she says,
let me show you how
.

Mem’s last funeral takes place in a cemetery which is located on the far corner of a busy intersection. There used to be lovely tall trees surrounding the graveyard, closing it off so no one driving by could see in, but the year before a woman trying to make a left turn slammed into another driver’s car. Both drivers claimed that the cemetery trees had blocked their view, so the district council decided the trees had to go. Now the cemetery is surrounded by stumps and gas stations and parked cars and exhaust fumes and a U-Store-It complex full of mausoleums for people’s things. Without the trees, Mem feels as naked as the cemetery.

I am a professional
, she tells herself as she stands behind the mourners, mostly men in business suits with impenetrable masks for faces and their dry mouths pinched closed. The client had requested that Mem wear anything but black and wait to perform until after the visiting mourners had gone. Mem said that would be fine; she has been honoring more and more of these requests from people who admire her work but are afraid of legal action.

The surviving daughter had called Mem the week before, begging her to come. “Please,” said the woman, her voice on the verge of cracking. “I didn’t know my father very well but it was in the will to hire you. He was a very prominent man, a politician. It was his last wish.”

Mem waits for the mourners to get into their cars. She begins to cry, chokes it back, watching the backs of the unprofessionals. She envies them their public lives. She envies that when they go home they will be able to take off their black suits and dresses, that, eventually, they will be allowed
to stop mourning. This all makes Mem cry harder. She cries so hard she feels rigid around her own edges, body-shaped tourniquet crushing her, squeezing tighter with each sob. Mem cries so hard her whole self comes out of her mouth and eyes, another self coming out, the little ghost-Mem, condensed and hardened, bullet-shaped, squatting and cursing inside of Mem’s head. Something inside of Mem bubbles, the bubbles break, she waits for the color to come up but it isn’t a color at all. This time it is a sound, a hot leaking like air escaping from a tire. Mem clamps her hand over her mouth to stop it, but she knows it will find its way out anyway.

The woman who hired Mem comes closer. She is thin, blond, about fifty years old. She quickly whispers something over her shoulder to a teenage boy who had been tapping his shoes, twisting his suit buttons, and flicking the hair out of his eyes since the service began. Mem has seen this behavior before and knows from her mother that sometimes boys have the hardest time at the burials of their fathers and grandfathers. There is always something they never got to say. Or something they needed to hear that was never said by someone else. Rough claps-on-the-back instead of
I love you
. Handshakes instead of hugs.

The boy lopes over to one of the cemetery’s sparse remaining trees and slouches next to it. There is a sudden light wind and the tree, still leafless but covered in a thousand green seed casings, drops a crackling storm of green helixes onto the boy.

Dabbing at her own swollen eyes, the woman walks over to Mem. The woman says, in a clear, strong voice, “Thank you, thank you so much, Mirabelle. You were very moving. You certainly have earned your reputation. I’d like to pay you now, if that’s okay. I must admit I’m somewhat relieved that it’s all over.”

Mem lowers her head in gratitude.

It will never be over
, thinks Mem.
No matter how much you pay, you will be losing him over and over and over again for the rest of your life. Every birthday. Every holiday. Your shellac won’t last long. It will wash right off
.

The woman’s hands shake only a little as they fumble through a brown briefcase for the fee. She pulls out a thick envelope and hands it to
Mem. The name
Mirabelle
is written across the top, spiky and uneven, the shape of a soap-opera heart attack on a hospital monitor. The moment the envelope touches Mem’s fingers she sees something in the shape of the woman’s carefully painted mauve mouth that reminds her of a character in a dream.

“I have something else for you, something I promised my father I would give to you if you came,” says the woman, pulling an overstuffed manila envelope out of her bag. “You know, he considered himself an expert on your people.”

Mem accepts the heavy envelope but has no idea what to say. She stares at the mouth. “Well,” says the mouth, “I have company expecting me. Thank you again.” She smiles uncomfortably and walks toward the parking lot where the twitchy young man is waiting.

Mem examines the envelope. It has a computer-printed label on the front that says
Rep. Anthony J. DePaul, Jr
.

Mem knows this name. DePaul. She hears her mother’s voice in her mind,
Fuck DePaul
. Now she remembers; DePaul is the man who started the Wailing Prohibition. He’s the one who’s been shutting them all down. Mem peels the sticky flap of the envelope back and pulls out a pile of not very pristine paper. Some of the pages have been typed with an old-fashioned typewriter, some are covered in different kinds of handwriting, and there are several sheets of photocopied pages from books, as well as pages of poetry, excerpts from research papers, newspaper articles, and penciled research notes, all about Wailers. Mem opens the pay envelope. The inside is full of so many bills that they are compressed together into bundles bound by strips of paper from the bank. When Mem pulls the bills out she sees that the one on top is a thousand-dollar bill, and when she flips through the stacks they are all the same as the one on top. She counts two hundred of them. And then she knows.

She has just mourned for the old man, the man with the meaty fingers, the man whose ghostness has haunted her for so long.

And now she can leave her mother.

T
he walk home from the old man’s funeral is so dreamy that Mem forgets about her body altogether. Balloons, balloons, this is what she is made of, the world is made of, the air is soft as bathwater. In her hands she carries the magic thing she had always known would come, a magic key to save her. Her steps gently rock her inside body in waves. There will be no more business, no more wailing, no more searching for something that cannot be found. She has found it, it has found her, it is in her hands and she is only steps away from delivering herself into a new life.

Standing still and silent for a moment in front of the screen door, Mem lets her breath catch up with her. There are thin cobwebs across the top of the shrubs under the window. The air smells of fabric softener from all of the drier vents blowing from the houses. She wants to wait to find out what happens next. She understands that this is it, one of those moments before the moment when everything changes. Usually one is not as aware, such moments being for most people rare and unpredictable. But Mem’s life has groomed her to accept this unpredictability, to expect it. In fact, it is perhaps the only consistent thing she has ever known. For once she welcomes it. She cannot wait.

In spite of this, Mem is totally unprepared when Sofie opens the storm door from the inside, convulsively sobbing, and says through the screen that Mem’s mother is dead.

In a hysterical rush, Sofie tells Mem that her mother died while visiting one of the Aunts. She put down her coffee cup, collapsed onto the floor, and never got back up again. All-of-a-sudden, although Mem knows that there is no such thing. Had Aunt Ayin been there, breasts hovering over her mother like impending doom? With Aunt Ayin attached to the breasts, sweating, her hair sticking out like a child’s drawing of sun beams? Weeping genuinely as she lit candles and applied balms, knowing that it was too late?

No, says Sofie, no one was there but one of the old Aunts neither of them knows. “My mother sent me here to tell you,” she says. She is here to tell Mem. Her mother is dead.

“But there’s more,” Sofie wails. “Someone called the police to report us and now they’re coming here! They’re coming to all our houses! My mother doesn’t know what to do.”

Mem doesn’t know what to do. She is confused. “Didn’t you call an ambulance?” she asks. “Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe she’s just sick. Why are the police coming?”

“No! She’s dead!” Sofie screams. Her face is mottled pink, red, white, the colors of a tight fist. “She’s dead and now the police are coming! My mother said to find all of the evidence and get rid of it! My mother said to get rid of it!” Mem is suddenly very light again, her joints pleasantly disconnected in a weightless space. She rests a hand softly on top of her cousin’s hysterically jerking shoulder. The hair at the crown of Sofie’s head is wet. She smells like the inside of a deli.

“You better get a hold of yourself before they get here. Go into the kitchen and wait,” says Mem. She can almost see the shape of the words drifting out of her mouth and into the air. They come out like buds, they flower and float. She pats Sofie’s moist shoulder. “You have to let it go now. It’s better this way.

“Everything will be okay.”

In the basement, where she was never allowed to go, this is what Mem finds:

None of these things seem like evidence. Behind the paper shredder, Mem discovers two baby food jars full of small teeth with long, pronged roots. It takes her a moment to realize that these are her teeth, her baby teeth, collected and kept from so many years ago. Mem picks up one of the jars and the teeth tinkle against each other like shells.

The dust itches her nose and inside of her ears, she can feel the little key getting hot in her palm. She looks through the stark basement, hunting for the thing which can be unlocked by the key. Under the table, there is something square-shaped tethered to the underside of the table with masking tape. Mem works the tape edges with her left hand, prying off as much of it as she can until she feels the thing give way.

It is an antique salt cellar on its side, a redwood box with a hinged lid and a small lock, the kind they used in France during the three hundred years of the
gabelle
tax. A place to store the most precious of commodities.
Countless wars were fought for salt. So many people died. They died in battle. They died in the mines. They lived in cities built in blocks of salt underground but they were not safe there, even though salt houses don’t burn
. Whole generations were born underground and then died in the salt digging galleries. At Aunt Ayin’s house years ago Mem had seen pictures of these underground cities, with chapels, houses, center squares, and stables carved out of salt, looking almost like the Moon Mansion she once dreamed of, a sheltered cave of pure whiteness of the salt garden, a true salt cellar, a city of salt.