Read Online Open Me by SUNSHINE O'DONNELL - Free Book Online

“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 poisonedthrough 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.