Open Me (6 page)

Aunt Ayin gave birth to Sofie exactly two days and three months before Mem was born, an event which transformed her overnight into an authority on motherhood and domesticity, though Ayin never cleans her flaking, almost-unfurnished one-bedroom apartment and keeps anything of value packed in stained cardboard boxes by the front door
in case of fire or other emergencies
. Unlike Mem, Sofie came into the world weeping, twitching with the effort of having been born, small and jaundiced. She came out crying and rarely stopped, calling out her lukewarm protests with her thin legs kicking, muttering weak cries even at the breast, even in her sleep. She wouldn’t go down for more than a few moments at a time and would wake and start at the slightest creak of the floorboards.

“Crying is food for you, it’s like medicine,” Aunt Ayin had said. “If you keep it bottled up you can get sick.”

Secretly Mem’s mother hoped that her own child wouldn’t be so sensitive, so nervous and lactose intolerant. She remembered how easily Aunt
Ayin had cried as a child. But Aunt Ayin didn’t mind Sofie’s crying. It meant, she said, that her daughter would become a star. She picked up the baby as often as she could, holding her close against her straining buttons and cooing at her daughter’s contorted face. She was careful not to squeeze too much, though; she remembered how as a toddler she had once hugged a kitten so hard she smothered it to death.

“You’d better teach her how to stop,” Mem’s mother warned when Sofie was just a few days old. “You know the trouble that comes from not being able to stop.”

“Oh,
shah
, she’s just testing out her pipes,” Aunt Ayin had said, jovially bouncing the weepy baby Sofie against her mammoth breasts.

In front of Hector Paul’s funeral home, Aunt Ayin smiles bovinely, her wide face crimson and shiny as egg-washed plaits of challah, and Mem has to control the desperate urge that possesses her every time she looks up at her aunt, a relentless yearning to stick her fingers into Ayin’s invitingly large, round nostrils. Aunt Ayin shifts her weight, her bulges straining against the buttons of her doole. She huffs and heaves and yanks at the taut fabric of her dress and touches her damp hair, which is curly brown like Mem’s mother’s but plain and coarse instead of shiny. When Aunt Ayin was a little girl her mother insisted she wear olive oil in her hair to make it soft. When they went to visit other Wailers’ houses Ayin was not allowed to sit on any of the good furniture. Now Aunt Ayin refuses to even cook with olive oil, she says the smell makes her sick, and when she has her hair cut she keeps the leftover locks in a box so that no one can cast a hex on her.

It’s easy to understand where Ayin’s superstitions come from: when she was just a plump girl of sixteen, she cried in the dark corners of her room and prayed for something terrible to happen and it did.

Her sister was beautiful, with thick dark hair that never needed oil. She performed brilliantly, heart-breakingly, at the drop of a hat. One day, when Aunt Ayin was pretending to cry and had started to wail, Ayin’s mother leaned over and spat right into Ayin’s open mouth. That night, after her sister had fallen asleep with slices of cold cucumber on her eyes
to help keep the swelling down, Ayin weaved her fingers together over her generous belly and, weeping for real, begged Aurora for something to happen to make her sister go away. Her tears dripped down her face and got caught in the fold between her two chins, and as she moved her hand to wipe them away, she smelled smoke.

Their mother died in the fire, suffocating in her sleep. As the two girls stood on the sidewalk, stunned into disbelief as the smell and the sirens and the heat engulfed them, Ayin knew that it had been her wish for catastrophe that had made it happen. She knew then that there were forces in the world much stronger than herself, and that she would always have to respect them. In this way, standing on the curb with her large bare feet growing colder and colder, Ayin submitted to the mysterious powers of the universe, vowing to honor and fear them for the rest of her life.

“Today,” Aunt Ayin says, “the morning is full of good signs—and what wonderful weather for the girls’ First Funeral!” Although, she notes, it’s better to work on colder days. “It’s more authentic.” She pictures long black cloaks billowing, portentous gray clouds, wet handkerchiefs trembling between bitter blue fingertips, raw, red noses. The other Wailers say that Aunt Ayin has an active imagination, but Mem’s mother thinks that her sister is just scatterbrained. In Yiddish she calls her
ugalust
.

The parlor door opens. A thin man with a well-sprayed comb-over and a mustache skinny as a lady’s eyebrow invites them all to step inside, greeting Mem’s mother and Aunt Ayin with subdued enthusiasm. His voice is soft and soothing, a hum, more musical instrument than voice. He says hello to Mem and hello to Sofie and leads them down a long hallway toward the viewing room.

“I can’t thank you enough for this, Hector,” says Mem’s mother, smoothing her curls with her fingers.

Hector tilts his head and smiles gently. “Think nothing of it,” he says. “I understand how important it is to get the girls accustomed.” He glances down at Mem, smiling benevolently. “Perhaps we can look forward to the debut of another Master today, no?”

Mem tries to look at him and return the smile, but Hector’s pale green eyes seem to be focused in two different directions, as if one might be broken, and Mem isn’t sure which eye to look at so instead she looks down, watches her new shoes march across the soft teal runners. The runners muffle her footsteps so that she can’t even hear herself walking. Brushed brass sconces cast timid yellow halos on the floors and walls. Mem has never been in such a silent place, it is as if the air is made of pillows. She is afraid that if she says anything at all, even if she whispers, it will sound like yelling. She uses every drop of her energy to keep her mouth closed.

Hector opens a large white door with brass handles and leads them into a small room. There are a few teal sofa-chairs and a polished wooden casket that has brass handles, too. Seeing this, Sofie’s face grows like a picture on a balloon that is being blown up.

A glass bowl on one of the low tables is filled with candies in wrappers that say
Testamints
, with the capital “T” shaped like a cross. Mem’s mother pushes one of the sofa-chairs up against the side of the coffin and motions for Mem to come closer. “This is a corpse, Mem,” she says. “This is the deceased. You remember we talked about the deceased? I need you to look at him, get a good look, before they go to bury him.”

Mem looks at her mother. Soft mouth. Soft face. Love radiates from her. Everything is okay now.

Her mother swoops down, picking Mem up by the waist, and stands her on the sofa-chair. Looking down, Mem sees an old, not-breathing man in a dark suit lying in a crib of baby blue satin. He is wearing more makeup than her mother.

“I see you’re using the new extremities arranger,” Mem’s mother says to Hector, looking very impressed. To Mem she says, “His name was Frank. He was seventy years old. He had a heart attack.”

Heart attack
. Did he love someone too much until his heart exploded? Did no one love him, so his heart stopped? Mem puts her hand over her own heart, she feels it thump against her ribs like a small animal that wants to get out.
Heart attack
. It seems to Mem like a perfectly plausible way to die.

“Did the heart attack hurt?” asks Mem.

Her mother nods absently. She says, “It always hurts to die.”

Mem looks again at the thick skin dotted with dense whiskers trying to come up from underneath, the bulbous nose and wide, flat eyebrows coarse as toothbrush bristles. She hasn’t seen too many men this close up. She has heard some Aunts say that all men are monsters. Mem’s mother believes instead that all grown men are little boys who do not know what they want or how to give a woman what she needs.
Although you may lay down with men so as to take their seed and provide yourself with daughters
, she has explained,
that is all that men are good for and therefore all you should ever do with them. Men are always lost, they are confused and afraid, thus they are more trouble than they’re worth
.

Also, they are stupid and cannot truly feel. They can pay for tears but cannot manufacture them. Because they have learned as small boys how to feel nothing but humor and anger, the only way men of any age can get away with crying in public is to look like they are trying not to. Their public tears make them claustrophobic, but in private, men try to seek out small places to enjoy their grief: closets, bathrooms, corners, bingeing and purging their sobs where no one else will see. Because of this, men can never be professionals and therefore tend to not take Wailers as seriously as they should
.

Frank’s eyes will never cry again, although they will soon liquefy and drip out. His lips have been sewn together with thin black stitches, and Mem knows that his face has been roughly massaged and re-shaped to look serene because rigor mortis causes muscle contractions that distort all of the features. Mem wishes she could have seen that face instead of this one.

“They took out his insides, his
kishkas
, and filled him up with chemicals so he won’t decompose,” Mem’s mother explains. It’s easy to see that she’s pleased Mem isn’t squeamish. “His cheeks are filled with stuffing, like a pillow, to make his face look more natural.”

“Did
that
hurt, too?” asks Mem.

“No, no, sweetheart, you don’t feel anything after you’re dead, remember? It’s just a body, with nothing inside of it anymore. The person he was isn’t inside of him anymore. Now it’s nothing. A shell. Go ahead and touch,” Mem’s mother instructs, briefly running her own fingers over
the dead man’s cheek. “So you can see he’s not a living thing anymore, just a shell. I want you to feel it so that you won’t be scared.”

Mem bends over and gently places her hand against the dead man’s made-up forehead. She is surprised by how cool the skin feels. It doesn’t feel like a shell. It feels like an uncooked chicken—hard, with spongy skin.

“Soon it will be all bones,” says Mem’s mother. “And then dust.”

Mem takes her hand away and her mother smiles, kisses her twice. She whispers, “You’re so beautiful. You’re already a professional, not afraid at all.”

Mem and Sofie had learned just that week about the horrible fears of the unprofessionals. Fear of a Painful and Lonely Death, Fear of a Humiliating Death, Fear of Posthumous Exposure & Embarrassment, Fear of Premature Burial, Fear of Bodily Putrefaction, Fear of Being Forgotten. The unprofessionals were so riddled with these fears that they became obsessed, but they were so afraid to even think about dying that they never managed to plan things out or practice
ars moriendi
, the art of dying well.

“What happens after you die?” Mem had asked her mother after the Lesson was finished. Mem’s mother had been standing with her back to Mem, chopping onions for the kugel on the counter. “No one knows,” she said. “What’s important is what happens while you’re alive. Don’t waste time thinking about those things. It’s not important.”

But to Mem it is very important. Extremely important. Especially because Mem understands that if there aren’t any horrible car accidents or wars, her mother is probably going to die before she does. Mem without her mother would be a lost and floating balloon. A puppet without a puppeteer.

Sometimes Mem thinks she should ask Aunt Ayin about what happens after you die, since Ayin is so keen to tell stories and ancestors’ tales. But Mem is sure that Ayin would not really know the answer herself, and would instead invent some flowery fiction. It also might be true that Aunt Ayin simply doesn’t like Mem, and wouldn’t tell her anyway. Taken out of context, Aunt Ayin’s stories, always spring-loaded with old-world lessons, seem to be the kind of stories an aunt should tell a niece she loves.
Charming fables. Mystical myths. Sweet parables lovingly told, saved up and doled out on special occasions, like silver dollars.

But Mem knows better. When Aunt Ayin tells Mem Wailers’ tales there is an urgency, a sweaty self-absorption that has nothing to do with Mem or her quiet attention. Aunt Ayin speaks as if rehearsing lines for a play, her animated hands and face at an angle titling just a little bit away from Mem, her eyes fixed on something else, a table leg, a calendar on the wall, shrubs in front of the window. Although Mem is the only niece she knows it does not mean that she is the favorite niece, or even a niece who is loved. Still, Mem listens to Aunt Ayin during the Lessons and watches her flabby silhouette as she speaks, and sometimes Mem smiles, believing the stories, and is full of questions she knows she will never be able to ask.

“Okay, Sofie,” Mem’s mother says firmly, helping Mem off the sofa-chair in front of Frank’s casket. “Now it’s your turn.”

Mem tries to send a message to Sofie without using her mouth.
It’s okay
, she says to Sofie with her eyes.
Don’t be scared
. But Sofie isn’t listening. She is sucking her thumb and staring at her mother and twirling a piece of dark hair around her finger. Her face is whiter than the walls in the room.

“You know she’s going to ruin her teeth doing that,” says Mem’s mother to Aunt Ayin.

“Go on,” murmurs Aunt Ayin, giving Sofie a little shove. But Sofie won’t move. Mem hears a sizzling, a low hiss coming from Sofie’s ankles as Aunt Ayin cries, “Oh no, Sofie!”

But there is already a dark teal puddle on the carpet around Sofie’s wet Mary Janes. Hector is already running on tiptoe to fetch some paper towels. Sofie is already crying, her open mouth gasping, wailing. Poor Sofie. This is not the first time, Mem knows. Every day she hears Sofie’s plastic underwear crackling under her dress. She smells the accidents, strong and yellow and chemical. But she never says anything. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” snorts Mem’s mother. “Ayin, get control of your daughter, would you?” She stands there, not helping, and shakes her head. Mem is
relived that her mother’s disgust is not for her. She feels bad for Sofie but secretly she is grateful that this has happened, that the order of things has been restored. Mem is again the good one, her dryness a virtue instead of a curse.